Worth Your Consideration 003 - A GF5 Linkdump

• The latest Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, which is available as a free download will also now be available as a physical CD. However, The NIN Hotline reports that only 200,000 copies will be released in the United States. The physical release will include, among other things, “a DVD of NIN performing live tracks from The Slip at rehearsals,” and I am ready to beat down anybody who stands in the way of me getting a copy.
• William Katt, the star of the most awesome television program of all-time, The Greatest American Hero, will be guest-starring on NBC’s Heroes next season. Newsarama reports that Katt will play a “really, really wonderful, seedy, smarmy-mouthed reporter.” Me, I haven’t seen any of the second season of Heroes, but I’m definitely going to have to catch up, now that I know about this upcoming guest appearance.

Comment on this article here.

Geek Force FiveCast - SomerVaudeville Edition (Video)

Last week, I had the immense pleasure of attending SomerVaudeville, a 21st century vaudeville performance featuring my friend Andy Hicks (The Pluto Tapes), among others. It was put on my Theatre@First, a Somerville-based drama troupe, and I had a grand old time.

For the past week, I’ve struggled to put together a movie of the footage I shot at Johnny D’s that night. I’m not sure if this video quite captures the awesomeness of that evening, but when it features banjos, musical saws, and covers of both Paula Abdul and Kermit the Frog, how can you not watch?

Comment on this article here.

NIN Oeuvre Blog: Only

Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 26, 2007.

It was at some point during the summer of 2005 that I asked my brother, the man responsible for introducing me to Nine Inch Nails in the first place, what he thought of the band’s new single, “Only.”

“It sounds like gay disco,” he told me.*

And you know what? He was right. I’ve come to think of it as something more like a gay square dance myself—try singing “Now bow to your partner! Now, do-si-do!” over the intro, and you’ll see what I mean—but the simple fact is that I agree with my brother. There’s something queer about “Only”. Where my brother and I part ways on this matter is in the fact that I see gay disco/square dance as a viable musical genre, and he does not.

“Only” is certainly the closest to a straight new-wave/dance song that Trent’s gotten since Pretty Hate Machine, and I, for one, welcomed the return when I first heard it. From the callback to “Down In It”—so that’s what happened after the tiniest little dot caught his eye—to the shouted chorus (which I imagined turning into two different narrative voices—Person A: “There is no you” and Person B: “There is only me”—in a remix I was envisioning after Trent released the GarageBand file to the song), there isn’t much I don’t like about “Only”. As I’ve stated before, I am huge fan of PHM-era NIN. But therein lies the problem with “Only.” I think this is a song that would be more at home on PHM than it is on the somewhat disjointed (although mostly satisfying) With Teeth.

Listen: I think my brother’s opinion of “Only” (and of “The Hand That Feeds,” which we wasn’t fond of either) is well-founded. There was something jarring about “THTF” and “Only” leading the charge for the new NIN after two albums worth of more sonically layered and lyrically deeper songs (The Downward Spiral and The Fragile). I think that, eventually, in looking back on the NIN catalog, “THTF” and “Only” may be viewed with same sense of scorn with which fans like my NIN-ouevreblogging colleague at This Machine is Obsolete view “Sanctified.” I can see a day when Trent refuses to play either track live—he’s certainly got enough other songs to play by this point—just as he appears to be patently against playing “Sanctified.” But I think that’ll be a shame, because both songs are good songs. They’re just songs out of time, and out of place.

* My brother had gay friends in high school, when that simply was not cool, and several of my best friends in college were gay. So please don’t get on me about this being a homophobic post. As Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire might say, if keeping a client depended on it, “I love gay people!” And that means I’m allowed to call things “gay.” Seriously. Go call PETA, and ask them. They’ll tell you so.

Or is that GLAAD you’re supposed to call? Damn, dude. I’m such a homo for not remembering.

Comment on this article here.

SomerVaudeville, featuring The Pluto Tapes

Just after he finishes playing the first verse of Paula Abdul’s seminal 1988 hit “Straight Up,” Pluto Tapes guitarist Andy Hicks pauses and asks the audience at Johnny D’s in Somerville, Massachusetts, “Really?” The crowd responds with boisterous cheer, and Hicks obliges them with an absolutely fantastic cover. It’s both amusing (how could a Paula Abdul song on guitar not be?) and surprisingly compelling. Stripped of synths and slick 80s production, “Straight Up” is the perfect capper for Hicks’s set of suburban alt-rock/powerpop. It’s the sort of song that you can imagine the disaffected narrator of Hicks’s songs identifying with, much to his surprise, on some drunken post-breakup evening. “You tell him, Paula,” says the narrator in my imagined scenario, a bottle of Sam Adams in hand. “A buh-buh-buh-bye, buh-buh-buh-bye!”

******

Under the moniker of The Pluto Tapes, my friend Andy Hicks (along with his guitar and his iPod) closed out the first act of last night’s inaugural SomerVaudeville show, put on by Theatre@First, a Davis Square-based drama troupe. His three-song set (plus the “Straight Up” encore) was the highlight of the evening for me, but the rest of the show was amazing as well. From banjo-playing Uncle Shoe to storyteller Justin Werfel to the sheer awesomeness of Can-Can Revolution, I was entertained all night long, and the memories of last night are sure to be what will power me through my tiredness today (I got home at quarter past midnight and left the house again at 5:25 a.m.).

Oh, and I may or may not have had my Flip Video camera on me, and I may or may not have filmed portions of the show, and I may or may not be posting the resulting video at some point in the next week.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to listen to and you don’t already own it, buy a copy of Dead Planets Tell No Tales, the first album by The Pluto Tapes, on iTunes.

Comment on this article here.

NIN Oeuvre Blog: The Big Come Down

Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 24, 2007.

In comparing 1999’s The Fragile to 1994’s The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor said, of The Fragile, “This album starts at the end, then attempts to create order from chaos, but never reaches the goal. It’s probably a bleaker album because it arrives back where it starts—[with] the same emotion.” I would argue that the song that exemplifies this theme best is a song that appears near the end of The Fragile’s second disc: “The Big Come Down”.

“The Big Come Down” is a song about the debilitating anger and self-hate that builds inside of a person when life gets so out of control that any attempts to course-correct only make matters worse.  The narrator of The Fragile wants desperately to get back to “where [he’s] from,” but, as he tells us in this song, “the closer [he gets] the worse it becomes.”

Does he even really know where he’s from? Or does he have only the slimmest of ideas about his origins? Assuming that this is the same narrator who navigated the treacherous terrain of The Downward Spiral (Trent seems to suggest that he is), did he peel away too many layers of himself to ever get back? Is the breaking down of the self that occurred on the previous record what’s keeping our narrator from reaching his goal on this one? I think that might be part of it. I think this idea that “it keeps coming from the inside” is important. In his quest to “create order from chaos,” his own worst enemy is himself. He can never get back to where he’s from, because he doesn’t want to let himself.

In terms of orchestration, “The Big Come Down” both begins and ends with a relatively distortion-free guitar. On an album that utilizes so much guitar, much of it distorted and manipulated beyond recognition, I think the choice to use such a clean tone here is telling. Given it’s placement near the end of the record, and the fact that it is followed by two songs which are ultimately concessions of defeat ("Underneath It All” and “Ripe (With Decay)"), “The Big Come Down” represents our narrator’s final failed attempt to bring order to his life. The simple refrain of that clean guitar is something he’s trying to latch onto, but it is ultimately lost in the noise of the outro and the driving instrumentation of the next track.

Trent would find a way to put his life together off record, of course, getting clean and sober during the span of time between the end of touring for The Fragile and the beginning of recording for With Teeth. But the narrator we followed through TDS and The Fragile is, I think, lost forever.

Comment on this article here.