Modest Mouse; Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Well so I suck and I forgot to write my first blog. So here's this weeks blog, on Monday, so I won't forget. This album is very unique. It has some echos of Radiohead but the voices remind me alot of The Stokes. I really love the chrous numbers. Well I don't know if it's all the band members or just one singers layered. But it sounds like a bunch of people are singing. Overall the melodic material isn't very complicated, but combined with raw guitars and ambiant sounds, it makes for an interesting listen. My favorite track is probably Ocean Breathes Salty. Bukowski is also very lovely. A cello solo throughout adds an interesting and ironic texture to the lyrics "God who'd wanna be such an ass hole." The next track titled "This Devil's Workday" combines a howling brass section, bari sax and banjo together to create an exciting and daunting track. Overall, this album is great. Everytime I've listened to it this week (about 4 times) I've discovered something new. Whether it's a new melodic motive, or a lyric with strong political sentiments, there's always something hiding waiting to be discovered. I recomended it to anyone who's looking for a musical adventure.

Blog 1/6/06

First of all, I would like to thank the AT&T company for their wonderful billboard on south 465 advertising blogging...this event would not have been possible without your generous support. While driving back from Michigan, I explored Jessi’s wonderful plethora of CDs. The one I decided to listen to for this blog was, as she described, pop music with “a guy named Joshua Kadison who sings about a different girl in each song.” Intrigued, I listened to it and sure enough, she was correct. As much pop music does, the lyrics typically told of relationships with women and surrounding events. The harmonies were very typical of popular music. At times, harmonic regression was utilized which is often the case in popular music although rarely in classical music. There are nine tracks in all, so the form of each piece is slightly different. I am going to focus on the song entitled Jessie simply because Jessi really enjoyed hearing her name in the song and therefore we listened to it numerous times. The piece starts off with a piano introduction and is followed by the first verse. After that, the refrain is sung followed by a verse-refrain pattern two more times. It ends in a terminative section in a similar style to that of the introduction; that is, the piano slowly fades out. The instrumentation for most of the pieces included piano, bass, percussion (usually set) and solo voice. We had a good time listening to roughly nine hours of music in the car over the weekend, not the least of which was the wonderful music of Joshua Kadison.