new turntable soul

Turntable Soul January/February PODCAST by TurntableSoul

The new "Turntable Soul" is out.

Like I have said before, if you aren't listening to these, you are about as cool as wearing a Radiohead t-shirt to a Radiohead concert.

For the uninitiated, turntable soul is a podcast that comes out every 2 or 3 months, where some genius mixes awesome Motown songs with awesome rap songs, in a way that makes you bob ya head.

Listen and groove,
Hunter

murphy's kids (plays all your favorite songs)

Disclaimer: most of what's below is a recollection of events that occurred before yesterday,

so the details will be entirely made up fuzzy.

 

 Kind of like Motown and AC/DC had a baby. With horns.

Murphy's Kids was the coolest band in my high school when I was growing up. I remember seeing them get the plug pulled at a high school talent show because of their excellent (and mostly true) song, "Everyone's an Asshole" (I still hear it in my head when I'm sitting in meetings). And getting the plug pulled on you at a high school talent show is actually cooler than playing a high school talent show. That band went from being high school heroes to one of my legit favorite bands.

Well, being a wannabe musician myself, I had a band in high school --- I was the guitar player for an 8 piece funk band.

 

I'm in yellow, using most of my brainpower to count to 4.

The band that I was in, the embarrassingly named "Graham Funk Railroad," (we were pandering to Mrs. Graham, the judge for talent show auditions), had a bass player and saxophone player that were in Murphy's Kids. In this small world, I got to know the other fellas from Murphy's Kids a little bit, but not really.


Fast forward to college. The aforementioned bass player, who had become one of my best friends, is writing music with me all the time, spending long hours in my basement with a crappy stolen microphone and whatever guitars we had. He was still playing bass in Murphy's Kids, and they were coming up to do a gig, but didn't have anywhere to practice, or stay for that matter.


I told them they could practice in our basement. Again, after this the details get fuzzy, so be warned that most some of this could be entirely made-up inaccurate.


A short while after I told them they could come practice in our basement, my roommate Dan came home with a keg and said, well, "KEG!"


This, my friends, is what we call the perfect storm for A GREAT MOMENT IN PARTY HISTORY.


Predictably, we ended up having a full-on rock show in our basement, featuring Murphy's Kids and as many people as would fit into our basement.

That PA speaker remained in the basement of that house literally until the day we moved out.

Since then, I have been the biggest of MK fans, and do my best to keep in touch with the band, who are now long-time brohams of mine.The current lineup no longer includes the aforementioned bass playing buddy, but rest easy - his riffs live on, and he was replaced with a long-time friend and musician extraordinaire. Long-time. Betcha didn't think I could get three in there.

Their latest album is "Departures," an album that's a perfect soundtrack for your house party / beach trip / BBQ needs.


The album is strong from start to finish with an obvious focus on rock songwriting, adding to their already fun ska sound. I Still Miss You (Alex Levine) has a Pink Floyd vibe at the beginning, and is one of the few songs you'll hear in modern music that has DYNAMICS, our long forgotten friend. This song has a clear buildup and climax, a very well composed song.

Hands On is a perfect driving-with-the-windows-down or grilling-a-burger song, a positive mood-changer for sure. Whenever I hear it, I want to do that high-knees, side-to-side rasta walk that you see white people do at festivals.

Me toil part-time at jah Cold Stone Creamery!

Plans is a good representative of the change in style, the "departure" if you will, from Murphy's Kids' long-time (that's 4!!!) ska sound. I hear jazzy chord voicings in here that give me the same thoughts I get when I hear any of my favorite guitarists: "How in the hell did he come up with that? And why didn't I?"


To me, this album is definitely "rock with horns," not "ska with rock," although the integration of ska and rock throughout the album is seamless. I am impressed with how much the horn section is brought into the riffing as well --- the horns aren't just there for accents, they absolutely drive the band. You'll hear what I mean.


I won't review the rest for you because I have work to do spoil the first listen - but I will say that I bet you'll enjoy it.


I would be remiss in describing the band if I didn't tell you that their live show is bad-ass. Nothing against their album, but their album compared to their live show is kind of like...a globe compared to THE PLANET EARTH.

This was 2 or 3 years and bandmates ago

Also, MK hosts an annual holiday charity event called SKALIDAYS that supports a charity that is "helping victims of domestic violence through advocacy, support and empowerment. Simply put, their goal is to help people with no other place to turn get the counseling, support (even housing in some cases!), and knowledge they need to become healthy and self sufficient."  This past year was the event's 10th. Ain't a damn thing wrong with that.

Are you with me?

-Hunter

He dead!

I'm back.

 Ctrl + Click this image to play the music that accompanies my triumphant return to a blog that 3 people read!

I used to do a lot of set-it-and-forget-it type of stuff at work. You know --- waiting for models to run, waiting for data to load, sending interns to find a basement that doesn't exist, etc., and I could drift away into writing about music and why I rule at everything. These days, all the work I'm doing requires my full attention, which makes the government run more smoothly day fly by, but it's killed my blog.

I'm not getting dumber, I just haven't had any free time.

Anyhow, let's get back to what TLA is about: music reviews. And my two cents. Dot com.

 

Deadwing was recorded entirely while brooding, on the banks of a lake, 100 years ago.

At Christmas, my brother-in-law gave me the Porcupine Tree album "Deadwing." I first found out about Porcupine Tree on guitar nerd forums, where my fellow guitar nerds were dissecting the band's guitar tone. So I YouTube'd some stuff and got really interested, because their riffs were tight. Not a euphemism.

The album is progressive rock, which, for the uninitiated, is best explained by this excellent article by Cracked, which states:

There is no clear definition of progressive rock, as it is not bounded by convention, structure, tradition or common sense. Progressive rock is like the anti-socialite of music; there are no rules or restrictions.
However, progressive rock bands have typically featured:

• Extremely skilled guitarists, drummers, bassists and keyboardists
• Okay singers
• Huge egos
• Tons of drugspiration
• No sense of when to stop a song

Be sure to click through to that Cracked article. They even have a chart that plots prog rock album covers on a scale from "Dongs" to "Butts."

Porcupine Tree is smack-dab in the middle of Pink Floyd and Tool on the progressive rock continuum. I have to stop writing about prog rock now, because I would be repeating the Cracked article, which had me LMFAO.


On Deadwing, the first thing that stands out is the riffage. We are talking really bad ass riffs, the kind that play in your head when you get home from work before your wife and you imagine your house is a scene from an action thriller and you work your way through the house pwning imaginary henchman with various made up karate moves.

 

This has nothing to do with prog rock, Porcupine Tree, or house karate. I just felt like I needed a picture here.

The next thing I noticed was that it's not so far out there that non-music-nerds won't run from it. It's accessible, because Porcupine Tree don't get any of their progressiveness© from gimmick. Everything they do that pulls you in is just straight up good --- no zoo animal noises, no screaming, no playing guitar with power drills - just good ass music.

After my embarrassing gush over a band that was ALL gimmick (which I won't delete, because it's as funny as it is embarrassing), it's refreshing to get excited about a band that gives you the "holy shit!" with zero gimmick.

It's good to listen to all in one shot, as with most prog rock albums. Next time you have to go on a road trip or drive a ways alone, download this album and prepare to be a big Porcupine Tree fan.


I will be dropping more blog science on you TOMORROW!
-Hunter

N#

Disclaimer: I could write all day about Naturally Sharp memories, but this post is mostly showing off how good N# 2009 is.

OK, so I was in a pop a cappella group in college. The kind that sings stuff you'd hear on the radio.


Our retarded very original name was "Naturally Sharp." We were founded by our buddy Anthony in 2003ish, who, in retrospect, probably threw the group together for no other reason than to gain a competitive edge in the world of hooking up.

You know, now that I think about it, forget "probably," that's definitely why Anthony started it.

 Naturally Sharp, 2006ish

Anyhow, we threw together 2 or 3 standards and 2 or 3 radio hits, and hit the all-female dorms.

We all liked to sing and have fun, but none of us, regrettably, were real standout singers. So we decided to just be really inappropriate fun, and we were.

I stand firmly against the overuse of words or phrases that have a distinct meaning, but are misused / overused so frequently that the original meaning is lost, so believe me when I say we had no shame. I won't go into embarrassing details, but believe me, we were really committed to building a following.

Throughout our university years, we, the founding group, went from a loose group of beer-drinking buddies to singing the biggest venue at Virginia Tech, getting paid gigs all over the place, and hosting our own concerts.

Well, after the founding members all graduated, we were sort of worried that the soul of the group would die out.

It didn't. And the singing got way better.

Listen to the 2009 concert here:








-Hunter

Jeans vs. Music, Over Time

Click image for larger version

-Hunter

Turntable Soul

New "Turntable Soul" out today --- if you aren't listening to these, you are about as cool as bringing Zima to poker night.

They're a mix of "Northern Soul, Roots, and Modern Love."

I can't describe it any better than that, but I can tell you that when you play it, whatever you're doing - and I mean anything, you will feel cooler.


Driving in the car? Smoov.

 Loading flood plain data into a geodatabase? Chill.

Trying to get the goddamn garbage disposal to work right for the third goddamn time this week? Fresh.

A genre built from failures,
-Hunter

new to me, volume 1

OK, so we're in a bit of a dry spell for new music releases. I have it on fictitious good authority that after the John Mayer album came out, everyone else who was going to release an album in 2009 stared wistfully out the window, said "what's the point?" and trashed it.

That doesn't mean we can't still find new music. Having never owned a car newer than the 1996 model year, my recent-ish purchase of a 2004 model year car, although it wasn't "new" on an absolute scale, felt like a spaceship from the future when I got in it. Dig?

First up in our "new-to-me" series is a 2007 release from "The Junior Varsity," a now-defunct band I found on Purevolume in college (remember Purevolume?! AIM?! Snood?! College?!). It's called "Cinematographic," and it's good.

This band captured me in about 2004 with a song that had such a non-conventional rhythm, unusual and pleasing chord voices, and an overall hyper-distinct "sound" that I, in my broke-ass college state, actually went out and bought the album, "Wide Eyed." The whole album was solid, and I spun it for at least 2 years in heavy rotation.



Fast forward 3 years, I'm out of college and working, listening to Pandora at work to pass the time, and I hear something familiar --- it sounds like The Junior Varsity, but I don't recognize the song. To my surprise, they had come out with a new album, so I instantly bought it on good faith, based on how much I loved the previous album.

It was more mature, better written, better performed, better produced.

Instant standouts included the warm, jazzy, horn-supported "Cinematographic," the powerful, riffy "The SKY," and the "do WHAT?!" inducing "Memory Made Easy." (Ed. note: not a lot of these are available on YouTube, so you have to lift a finger to get to them. LMGTFY.)

Listening to it now instantly reminds me of driving my mom's old Accord around the DC suburbs, wishing I had a Les Paul to get the beautiful, woody, warm tones that take this album from "just another indie release" to "gonna be up in my iPod when I'm 40."

Lafawnduh the Hawnduh

It's one of those albums that just has an inexplicable staying power --- whenever I have my iPod on "all songs shuffle" and I get something from Cinematographic, I never change it.

For the playas: The Les Paul / humbucker tones on this album are so good that I decided I had to get a Les Paul style guitar after I got this album. My Les Paul search led me to my now-beloved 335 Dot. I literally would not have that guitar if not for this album. Powerful.

There's nothing better than buying a guitar to get a specific sound you're looking for. Besides sausage balls.

Now, I had a rather pleasant Thanksgiving holiday. My wife and I went to Bedford, VA, where my family has "done" Thanksgiving for nigh on 20 years now. After eating sausage balls and fried apple pies until I was genuinely worried about my immediate health, I stepped out to the yard for the annual two-hand-touch football game, where I learned that my dad has still got skillz on the football field, Doc Martens are terrible for football, and teaching a young first-cousin-once-removed to run a play and subtly letting them get a touchdown without being obvious is a great feeling.

The next day we returned to central Virginia, where both her and my parents live, and had the distinct pleasure of picking her parents' two black labs up from the kennel. If you ever want to feel like the hero at the end of a movie, go pick a dog up from the kennel.

Also of note, for the first time ever, a band is actually sending me a copy of their album along with a press kit, so I'll review their album --- tortally allsome. Look for it next week.

All you jealous punks can't stop my dunks,
Hunter

TLA Has a New Look

After literally minutes of ripping off editing features I wanted into this blog's template, we have a new look.

You'll notice that there are a lot of new bullshit features on the right hand side.

First up is a search box. This thing only searches TLA, so when you search "dan mangan" it's only going to show you my post about the guy, and best of all, it stays here on TLA so you don't get booted off into the cold, dark internet like with most search bars.

Still going strong is the album release calendar. Email me if you know about new stuff coming up that a) I'd like and b) I don't have on there. There's a few releases lingering in the distance, but none that I'd buy, so they don't make the list.

 

Next up is a view of stuff that I've shared recently on Google Reader. I get a kick out of stuff that I see floating around the web, so why not drop it in here, even if it's not relevant to music? It'll give you a better idea of what I like and who I am, for enhanced context. If you don't use Google Reader, you are a caveman. If you don't know about Google Reader, find out, and thank me later.

I put a facebook "badge" up so you can stalk me and look at all my pictures of me putting new pickups in guitars, and pictures of the thermometer in my car to show everyone how cold or hot it is here.

I wasn't kidding.

 I also added buttons so you can share TLA on Facebook or Twitter with one click.Whenever I read a good blog post that I think is cool or that I get a kick out of, I post it on Facebook and/or Twitter so my friends can read it too. If you do that, now you can do it with one click.

Anyways, that's the new setup, just a heads up that this is still the right site.

-Hunter

Serious Post

What do we have to be thankful for?

Art.

Family.

Music.

Have a safe and memorable holiday.

-Hunter

So sick, bro

What the hell, let's just call it unofficial John Mayer week here on TLA.

I have been too busy doing real work to write much this week, besides my gigantastic Not A Battle Studies Review. I have had the chance to come across a lot of good web content this week, most of which I'll tell you about when I can gather the momentum to write about it in a way that does it justice. A YouTube here and there will get you by, though.

Check out this video of Mayer with Alicia Keys, doing "Ain't No Sunshine" live at Black Ball 2009.

As one of my friends on TGP said, and I paraphrase:

"That was so sick it made me throw up"






Also, a big shoutout to my big sis. She has a blog too. It's written almost exactly like mine, only she writes about girl stuff.

Today's my birthday, and this video is better than cake,
Hunter