carldr.com

# You're The Shit And I'm Knee-Deep In it

Today, I revived Justwatchthesky from the internet graveyard/landfill of “coming soon” pages. The scope is narrow: An exercise in documenting words in the music I listen to with color and type. The constraints are simple: (1) Only use Georgia (serif) or Helvetica (sans) and (2) try to post as often as possible.

Ryan Sims, justwatchthesky.com

Another idea I wish I had come up with, although I doubt I would have executed it half as well.

Also, I know a good number of the songs he’s quoted so far, so they have been particularly interesting – I hope it remains that way.

# Big Ideas : Don't Get Any

Radiohead held an online contest to remix “Nude” from their album – “In Rainbows” ... I decided to take the piss a bit, as the contest seemed to be in that spirit.

James Houston

Awesome for two reasons : 1) Radiohead, and 2) Old hardware. Watch and listen.

# Music Of The Week, Part 3

So the salesman said he got one for himself / A charmed life with some kids and some stainless steel knives / Paid in full as of 2029, I’ll need to scrape all my change and give up all my toys but / Really, who needs more than this thing?

“Zero To Love” by Say Hi, off “The Wishes And The Glitch”

Perhaps Zero To Love isn’t the stand-out track of the album, but definitely the most infectious.

The Wishes And The Glitch is definitely more experimental in its sound than Konk and Lucky – The vocals on the first track aren’t a million miles away from Sigur Rós, although the music is undisputedly more guitary.

The album’s other highlights include the chunky electronic sound of Toil and Trouble, the poppy and happy Magic Beans And The Truth Machine, and the building last track We Lost The Albatross. Bluetime strongly reminds me of another song, but I can’t recall which. Either way, you can’t knock a song about Pac-Man.

I don’t think the album will appeal to everyone, but if you like indie rock, I don’t think you could go too far wrong by giving The Wishes And The Glitch a listen.

# Music Of The Week, Part 2

Be whoever you have to be / I won’t judge you / And sing whenever you have to sing / To get it out and not become / a recluse about your house, come out

“Sway” by The Kooks, off “Konk”

I love the guitar at the end of the verses, and the chorus and the bridge are brilliant. It’s probably my favourite track of the moment, I kept repeating it in the car on the way home last night. Which means in about 3 weeks I’m going to be bored of it, and not want to hear it any more.

Pretty much the whole of Konk is excellent, so much so I’ve pre-ordered it – Something I very rarely do. I read a review last week sometime saying that the first track, See The Sun, is the best first track to an album they’d heard for a while. I’m not sure I agree with that (See These Bones), but there is no doubting it hooks you into the album immediately.

Fans of The Fratellis will like Mr. Maker (And probably the whole album, now I mention it), and Gap, Stormy Weather, Sway (of course) and Down To The Market keep the middle of the album sounding strong. I’m not too keen on Do You Wanna though.

I absolutely love the opening lyrics of the melancholic One Last Time :

Can I hold you one last time / To fight the fear that’s growing in my mind / I know I did us both all so wrong / I know I’m not always all that strong

“One Last Time” by The Kooks, off “Konk”

Listening to it again now, when I get bored of Sway this will probably be the next track I overplay.

Overall, it’s a more mature sound than Inside In/Inside Out, but still unmistakably The Kooks – Which is just fine, in my book.

# Music Of The Week, Part 1

I feel rain in the movies and the talk before the screen lights / I hear strings in the park / I don’t like to call her right / Except when its too late at night / I mostly just think in the dark

“See These Bones” by Nada Surf, off “Lucky”

The song slowly builds from a pretty indifferent first verse, but by the time you hit the first chorus you’re beginning to be sucked in, and upon reaching “Do you remember …” before the final chorus you’re completely sold on how great the song is.

I wasn’t a massive fan of Let Go, the only other album I’ve heard by Nada Surf, so listening to Lucky was a surprise – It’s a very, very good album. If you like Teenage Fanclub or Death Cab For Cutie and you’ve never heard Nada Surf, you’ll love this album.

Whose Authority and I Like What You Say are probably the two other immediate attention grabbers, you can’t help but start toe-tapping and singing along to the chorus of the latter, while the former, probably because the guitar at the beginning of the song reminds me of the Lightning Seeds, makes me want to go and dig out all the great Britpop music I’ve got and forgotten about.

Thinking about it, the whole album puts me in that mood – It takes me back to a time where the biggest problem I had was working out which black t-shirt to wear and which indie club to go to.

# Missing songs in iTunes

This week, I was moving my iTunes library off an external HDD to a network share and somehow managed to completely badger it up. All the songs were still showing in iTunes and they were all on disk in their original places, but something had happened to their location in the iTunes database and were showing with an exclamation, indicating iTunes couldn’t find them.

After fixing these by trying to play the songs and manually locating them on disk, I was still finding songs which weren’t indicated by iTunes as missing, but actually were. So, I quickly wrote the below script to list all the broken tracks in my library. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem a way to set the location automatically.

So yeah, I don’t know if this will be useful to anyone else, but here is the code …

require "rubygems" 
require "rbosa" 
library_playlist = OSA.app( "iTunes" ).sources.find{ |s| s.name == "Library" }.library_playlists.first
#  Songs which are broken have a location of 'nil', but still have the
#  rest of the information.
library_playlist.file_tracks.reject{ |t| t.location }.each do |track|
  puts '"%s" by %s, off "%s"' % [ track.name, track.artist, track.album ]
end

# Summer Skin

squeaky swings and tall grass / the longest shadows ever cast / the water’s warm and children swim / and we frolicked about in our summer skin.

VERY much, this is song of the week. “Summer Skin” by Death Cab For Cutie.

no-one’s going to take me alive / the time has come to make things right / you and i must fight for our rights / you and i must fight to survive

I’ve only really listened to this song recently and has quickly become Song Of The Week. I love the SIDesque start to the song, and the last couple of minutes is guitartastic. Would definitely figure on a “Best Closing Tracks To An Album … Ever” compilation.

# pretty last.fm graphs

Have you seen Lastgraph or Lee Byron’s work? Like it? Upset you can’t see the source code and play with it? Well, this might be what you’re after.

Utilising the scrobbler gem, I’ve written some Ruby which does something similar, and here’s the code so you can play with it yourself.

Just change the username on line 100, and run it. The script will download your data from last.fm, and produce a nice .svg for you (Warning: quite large.) To be friendly to last.fm, it caches the data on disk, so subsequent runs are generated a little quicker than your first run.

If you want to hack around with it, then I warn you that the second half of the source code is nasty, but subsequent versions will be tidier. It should be fairly easy to work out and modify. The code is released into the public domain, do as you please with it.

I’m sure some of the calculations in the code are inadvertently tailored to accounts with a similar amount of data as mine, so I’d be interested to hear if anyone does have any success with it. Email me via the link at the bottom of the page.

stay out super late tonight picking apples, making pies / put a little something in our lemonade and take it with us / we’re half-awake in a fake empire.

Off their recent album “Boxer”, this song is definitely laying a claim to being my song of 2007. It’s fantastic. Listen below and join in the love :

(I’ve ripped the above player from The Pelican’s Perch, I hope he doesn’t mind.)

# scrobble

ruby -rrubygems -e 'require "scrobbler"; puts Scrobbler::User.new( "carldr" ).recent_tracks.map{ |t| "\"" + t.name + "\" by " + t.artist  }'

For last.fm. The gem can be found here.