Wee-ow!

Shockingly, our friends over at the Hampshire College Alternative Music Collective have been updating their myspace page recently! And rejoice, for there are actually some shows on board for the coming months. Check it out for yourselves!

It's taking me some time to completely warm up to the new Magnetic Fields album, Distortion. Maybe I'm just not ready for Stephin Merritt & company to go all shoegaze on me. Regardless, if you haven't done so already, you might want to get your shit together & attempt to acquire tickets for their shows at the Iron Horse on February 11th & 12th. According to the Iron Horse website, they're not sold out, although the degree of reliability there is highly debatable. I know the two Somerville shows sold out incredibly quickly, so do what you need to do in order to make it to one of the Northampton shows & get massively depressed right before Valentine's Day.

Blast from the past: The Magnetic Fields' "Born On A Train"

T. Rex is Always Good

Place this article in the pile of Reasons to Detest All Things Smiths/Morrissey Related. Regards to the lemmingtrailer nm, it was making the blog rounds way before surfacing there.

I Was Morrissey's Roadie

It's Art, Stupid

Did anyone else know Anton Corbijn directed 2 videos for songs off Mercury Rev's classic Deserter's Songs? I didn't.

"Goddess on a Hiway"


"Opus 40"

Another Chance To Help the Flywheel.

It's well established that we love the Flywheel & you should too. There's another benefit show happening this weekend on their behalf & I encourage all of you to go, in hopes that the Flywheel will re-open soon & this live music drought we're currently experiencing will finally come to an end.

Apologies.

Okay, so I kind of stretched the truth a few days ago when I said that WMUA blog mainstay Eric was MIA. He's really just buried in academia right now, so he can be forgiven for abandoning far less important tasks, like posting videos of Tom Waits here every Wednesday. I was going to post something really encouraging here for you, Eric, but this was the best that the internet afforded me:

I was hoping for something with a little more of a viking angle, although this gentleman does bear a striking resemblance to Thor, the heavy-metal god who will perform feats of strength in the form of inflating hot water bottles with his lungs & bending metal rods between his teeth.

Anyway, godspeed, Eric & we all hope that you will perodically grace the WMUA with your snark while you're on sabbatical.

Kool Thing.

I'm sure most of you have seen the film Juno by now, if I'm to believe that the population of horn-rim wearing McSweeney's readers referenced in the dialogue is likely to overlap with those sorts of individuals who would read a college radio station's smart-ass blog. I don't want to get into a heated discussion about the movie here, although it seems to be ripe for picking apart. To get it out of the way, I enjoyed the film well enough for what it is, although I was definitely hyper-aware (almost to the point of being completely turned off from the movie) of the fact that the music/cultural references so carefully utilized in the script were very much intended to pander directly to me, the sort of person who writes for a college radio station's smart-ass blog. Nevermind the fact that I saw the movie with my middle-aged schoolteacher mother (her choice) & had to explain to her later why I almost gagged on my popcorn at the first of MANY truly weird references to the Melvins. Definitely wasn't expecting King Buzzo & Company to be so prominently name-dropped in a cloyingly cute indie comedy about teenage pregnancy. Anyway, maybe this just illustrates what a nerd I am, but I experienced some hardcore disruption to any suspension of disbelief during the film when Juno points out that two of her favorite bands are The Stooges & Patti Smith, only to express an apparent lack of awareness about Sonic Youth (although she seemed to know who the Melvins were? Huh?). Y'know, the whole "I bought another Sonic Youth CD & it was just a bunch of noise!" thing. I'd just like to go on record & say that as I was once a sixteen year old girl myself who listened to Iggy & The Stooges, there's no way that any girl who cites 1977 as the best year ever for music would be completely unaware of Sonic Youth (hello, the Year Punk Broke?). Maybe my view is slanted because I came of age during the hey-day of grunge, but it seems inplausible that some high schooler would stumble upon a copy of Raw Power without Daydream Nation or Dirty having popped up on their radar at some point. And say what you will, but as far as I know, the Melvins haven't turned up as guest stars on an episode of Gilmore Girls yet.



WHAT WOULD THE MELVINS SAY?!

Winter Hibernation.

Apologies to any of you faithful readers (ha!) who have been left with a tremendous void in your lives the past few weeks due to your inability to get your daily dose of snobbery & bickering on the WMUA blog. Eric's been MIA for awhile (perhaps preoccupied with listening to MIA) & I was on a self-imposed hiatus for two weeks, hoping to give someone else a turn to monopolize the blog. That plan kind of backfired on me though, so it's now 2008 & it looks like this lady is going to be flying solo here for awhile. Maybe Eric will come out of hiding long enough for us to finish squaring off the victims of our Best of 2007 Brackets, considering we're halfway to February now.

It's been all too easy for me to slack off on my blog duties, as winter generally means that Western Massachusetts becomes a ghost town in terms of live music & the avalanche of new recorded jams has considerably slowed down at the station. However, on the subject of the latter, I'm pretty keen on the new Bonnie "Prince" Billy EP, Ask Forgiveness, brought to you by Drag City. I don't know if Will Oldham covering Danzig's "Am I Demon?" is more awesome than Aerial M's cover of "Last Caress" by the Misfits, but it's pretty close. I'm kind of disappointed that in terms of R. Kelly covers, Bonny Billy opted for "The World's Greatest", given that one of my favorite show-going experiences was seeing him cover "Ingition" in Houston wearing nothing but short shorts & talking about how he was messed up on lean (if you don't know what lean is, you're probably not from the South; big ups of authenticity to Mister Oldham for namedropping H-Town's drug of choice the way hair metal bands would yell "Hello Cleveland, are you ready to rock?!"). To compensate for the recent lull in posts, I'm going to raise the hipster factor up a little bit here: Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "No More Workhorse Blues" video, directed by Harmony Korine (thanks for inspiring pretentious would-be cinephiles to extoll the virtues of Julien Donkey-Boy to me ad infinitum, dude).



I'm hardly a Harmony Korine fan, but I have been finding myself lately wishing that I hadn't passed up on so many copies of the Kids soundtrack in various dollar bins, because all of the sudden I really, really want to listen to "Natural One" by Folk Implosion (see: many posts about '90s indie rock nostalgia).