meandthestereo

Artist: We Were Promised Jetpacks
Album: These Four Walls
Label: Fat Cat Records
Release Date: June 15, 2009
Decision: 3/5 Promising If Uneven Debut
Influences I Notice:  U2, Explosions in the Sky,
Favorite Tunes: “Quiet Little Voices”, “Moving Clocks Run Slow”

1.  The Album

We Were Promised Jetpacks is a band from Edinburgh, Scotland.  These Four Walls is their debut album and it is quite impressive.  Like most indie label debuts it has a very simple production but it is hidden by a very complex sound from the band.

From the very first track, “It’s Thunder and Lightning”, you can hear the repetitive beats of post-rock bands like Explosions in the Sky. Combine this with vocal stylings that remind me of Bono from U2 and you have a promising debut from a young band. Read the rest of this entry →

Singer/songwriter and musician Jeanna Murphy often mentions how music was a part of her life since childhood even though she had little training until she reached college and changed her major to music.  She stored music she heard from Disney films away in her mind to be able to deconstruct them and use what she learned later in her work.  You can hear these early influences on her debut album Magic which she is self-publishing.  In this interview, I ask about her start in music, her current album, and how her training affects her enjoyment of music.

On your website bio you tell about how you got into music as a child, but had no training in it.  You talk about listening to Disney records, mentally recording the sounds you heard only to use them later when you changed your major to music in 2000.  My question is, what was your major before and what was the inspiration behind switching to music?

In high school I was really into drama and choir.  I got into assistant directing and all that backstage stuff for a ton of our drama productions.  So, because I had no other ideas, I became a TV Production Technology major when I entered college in the fall of ‘99.  I thought it was going to be a bunch of directing and stage blocking…it was not.  It was a whole lot of info on cables and wires and lighting…it was very technical and not at all what I was interested in.  Read the rest of this entry →

Between Failures is an up and coming webcomic about a group of retail employees.  It’s filled with references to movies, music and video games and is reminiscent of movies like Clerks and Empire Records.  It’s writer and artist J.T. is a talented artist who puts a lot of work into the webcomic.  I asked him some questions about his experience working retail, his success as a webcomic artist and the music and art that inspires him.

Between Failures is based in a retail store.  What has your experience been in the retail industry?

I worked retail for many years.  My assumption is that my experience was typical.  Whether it was or not I really can’t say.  They tell me I have a unique reaction to the world, so maybe my experience was atypical, and I’ve been operating under a false pretense this whole time.  I guess it doesn’t matter either way really.  The long and the short of it was that people were angry all the time over what amounts to nothing.  The companies I worked for were controlled by faceless people who govern in a way that seems arbitrary.  It made me sick of humanity.  Eventually I came to a point where I couldn’t tolerate it anymore, so I walked away.  It all must have tainted me in some way though, since I’ve spent so much time essentially working through how I felt about all of it; through various forms of creative expression. Read the rest of this entry →

Artist: Mos Def
Album: The Ecstatic
Label: Downtown
Release Date: June 9, 2009
Decision: 4/5 A Great Listen
Favorite Tunes: “Life In Marvelous Times”, ”Supermagic”, “No Hay Nada Mas”

1. Background

Speaking as a person with little experience listening to rap music, I can say that this is an album that can be heard by those who would not consider themselves fans of hip hop so that they can remember what hip hop is when one isn’t listening to the radio.  Mos Def has crafted an album that is complex and listenable.

I never really listened to much hip hop music other than what was played on the radio and what I picked up from friends who did.  While I have knowledge of some of the history of hip hop (Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, Public Enemy), current radio hip hop, like most anything on the radio, is more likely to make my eyes glaze over in boredom than to invite me to explore the genre.  So, it is with this non-background in hip hop that I decided to dive in on the deep side of the pool and review Mos Def’s new album The Ecstatic, an album I figured would be like the hip hop I associate with positive things, like skate tapes and Spike Lee films. Read the rest of this entry →

I was really taken aback by the previous two articles on this site about Pop music. When meandthestereo suggested this article, I thought I was going to have to be Pop music’s sole defender. But since everyone else has been so lenient on pop music, I get to play devil’s advocate and point out the many legitimate problems with the Pop music genre and the effect it has had on the music industry as a whole.

In the previous paragraph, I used the term “music industry” on purpose. While I look up to the ideal of music being judged solely on its merits and being a creative process completely free from the constraints of capitalism, we cannot ignore that music as an industry affects what we get to listen to and, on a long enough timeline, affects the kind of music put out. You can’t deny that many people who went into punk bands may not have done so had someone not put the music of The Ramones or The Sex Pistols on vinyl and sold it to aspiring musicians everywhere. In my opinion, this is where most of the problems with Pop music come from. In a perfect capitalist world, the top musical talent should float to the top, but if you believe in capitalism, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you. Read the rest of this entry →