To see it with my own eyes

Seeing this amazingly talented band tonight at Bowery Ballroom. Gorilla Manor is one of about 5 albums that I listen to pretty much every day. It’s flawless. Brooklyn’s Suckers open and go on around 10.

I will sing your life

The new Deftones record, Diamond Eyes, was released this week and it's the first new record from Sacto's finest since 2006's Saturday Night Wrist. I've been listening to the album for a while now and it's amazing, like Adrenaline and White Pony had a baby, amazing. I'm particularly partial to the raw emotion and intensity in the song "Rocket Skates" and (like many times before) have completely fallen in love with Chino's vocals on "Sextape." Seriously, he has one of the best voices I have ever heard.

This fall, the band will embark on a tour with Alice In Chains and Atlanta's Mastadon, with a stop at Madison Square Garden September 24th. I'm hoping that they'll do their own headlining tour as well, since I'm not sure I'd enjoy a Deftones show unless I was practically on stage with them.

From everything I've read so far about Diamond Eyes, most people seem to think it's classic Deftones and it will probably be looked back on as one of their best. And it IS a great record. However, it's impossible for me to listen to the new album, or any Deftones record at all, and not think about Chi.

I wrote about Chi and his accident a while back and though he's made great progress, he's still got a ways to go. Gina at One Love for Chi updates the site with news about Chi's condition. Recently she posted about Dr. DeFina, a doctor who the family has brought on to help Chi get better. Dr. DeFina was featured on this week's episode of True Life, which followed three young men whose lives have been turned upside down after suffering serious brain injuries. We certainly take for granted the fact that we can hold objects or walk or speak or even remember something that happened 2 minutes ago, because our brains work in a way that makes these things absolutely effortless. But after a serious brain injury, these "effortless" motions and thought processes can become significantly impaired, making once simple actions extremely difficult, and in turn making life more difficult. My heart went out to these guys, particularly because they're all so young (19, 20 and 26). You can view the episode of True Life here.

While Chi has come far since his accident and has a great team around him, it's still very important to remember that he needs our continued prayers and support. You can also still donate to help with Chi's medical bills. I recently came across this post from Chi's ex-wife Adrienne about why help is so very needed:

For those of you that wonder why fundraising is necessary to a Grammy award winning musician I can tell you first hand there was a time when Chi was bringing in so little capital that the courts wanted ME to pay HIM child support during the long time between albums. Bear in mind I am a hairstylist and the money I bring in does not exactly put me on any top earner lists. Even during these hard times Chi would do whatever it took to make sure that Gabriel was provided for, including selling several of his personal possessions. The stories posted on this site from fans all over the world about Chi’s generosity don’t even touch what he has done for Gabriel, myself and my family. He was generous to a fault sometimes and often put his needs last to make sure everyone was happy.

After Chi's accident, listening to Deftones was a little hard. Just thinking about what happened made me feel so sad for him and his family. But I know that his fans, friends and family continue pulling for him to get better and I know that Chi would definitely want the rest of his band out there, playing music for the people who have enjoyed Deftones over these last several years.

When I first listened to Diamond Eyes, I misheard a lyric in the song "Risk." I thought Chino said, "I will sing your life," probably because I'm also a huge Morrissey fan and one of his best songs is Sing Your Life. As all Deftones fans know, the band is fond of Moz and even recorded a masterful cover of The Smiths classic Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want. In the song "Sing Your Life," Morrissey doles out these wise words:

Others sang your life
But now is a chance to shine
And have the pleasure of saying what you mean
Have the pleasure of meaning what you sing
Oh, make no mistake my friend
All of this will end so sing it now

Melina and I used to always joke about how we weren't quite sure what the word we were hearing was in certain Deftones songs and we got into some pretty humorous debates about Chino's lyrics on several occasions. However, I think "I will sing your life," is just as good of a sentiment. You never know what could happen to you in life, so you have to make the most of the time you have to do all that you are able to do.

I know that Chino, Abe, Steph and Frank will continue to sing Chi's life, as will his friends and family. And hopefully one day, he'll be able to sing his life for himself again.

Radio DJ, play my song. All day long, I wanna sing along.

Loving this song at the moment. Think About Life played Mercury Lounge and I totally spaced on it, so I hope they make it back to New York soonish.

Seek & Destroy

One of my friends posted a link to a Craigslist ad on Facebook this afternoon and it's too awesome not to share (screen shot above).

I will destroy your band for $300 (Columbus)

Date: 2010-04-27, 2:02PM EDT

Are you in a band that's not going anywhere? Is there a particular member of your band that you want to be rid of but he's your best friend from grade school and you don't want to hurt his feelings? Did the bassist and your lead singer break up recently and now practice is three hours of awkward? Then I'm your guy.

Here's how it works. You bring me in. I play guitar. Doesn't matter if you need one, just bring me in.

Within 6 weeks, major changes will happen with your band. The drummer will accept a job offer out of state. The keyboardist will announce that he's getting married and the fiancee isn't into the whole band thing. The singer will be offered a better gig. One way or another, the band will fall apart. For my part, I won't say much or talk about anyone or complain. I'll just learn the songs, show up early for practice, and basically do whatever's required of me.

But we will never play out. The band will dissolve before that ever happens.

In some cases, just firing me will be enough to get your band moving in the right direction, but to be honest that doesn't happen very often. Usually it's something innocuous and it causes the band to break up.

Here's the deal, though. Some of the remnants will re-form a new band and they will thrive.

I'm asking for $300 up front. It's up front because, face it, we're not going to make any money gigging.

• Location: Columbus
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

I wanna be this dude's friend. He's probably hilarious.

And my heart goes....

I checked out Ebony Bones at Mercury Lounge earlier this week and the show was unbelievable. Opening act The Fire and the Reason started off the early show (doors were at 7:00). They have a bit of a electro/rock thing going on and remind me of theStart. The NY duo is made up of guitarist/beats generator Steve Narvaez and singer Bella Saona. It's difficult being an opening band, especially when most of the crowd is unfamiliar with your music. However, The Fire and Reason played a pretty lively set that got the crowd warmed up for Ebony. And while Bella announced that the song "Do It Again" would be the song to make them rich (or at least she hopes so), it was a slower song of theirs that impressed me. Of course I don't remember the name and it's not on their MySpace page so I couldn't tell you what it is. But if I ever heard it again, I'd know it for sure.





Ebony was next and she and her crew made quite the entrance. I couldn't wait to see what fantastic outfit she'd have on and when she came out in this leopard print number, I was not disappointed.


Ebony opened with "We Know All About You" and also danced and wailed her way through "Warrior," "Story of St. Ockwell", "The Muzik," "In G.O.D. We Trust," "Guess We'll Always Have NY," and "Bone of My Bones." They even did a pretty kick ass cover of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall."

I've never seen an audience more into a performance than the audience at this show. Someone passed out whistles and masks before the show, so a good number of the crowd wore the masks and blew their whistles throughout the show. EVERYONE was taking photos (a guy behind me was practically spooning me to get some good shots) and the outfits some of the people there were wearing were pretty outrageous. There was a amazingly dressed boy standing in front of me wearing a shiny waist length jacket with the hugest shoulders I've ever seen. And his hair looked like Prince's in Purple Rain. Fabulous! I even think I say Lady Miss Kier of Dee-lite in the crowd, so that was pretty cool too.

Ebony ended the show with "Don't Fart On My Heart" and said that she would see us soon. Soon for me means February 13th at Southpaw. I'll be there for sure, with my whistle on.

More pictures here.

Do YOU have a moment for gay rights?

I don't think I've ever purchased a comedy album before last week. It's kind of hard for me to pay attention to something unless I can sing along to it or I'm being graded on it (which hopefully will never happen again since school and I amicably parted ways a few years ago). However, last week when I saw on @amazonmp3's twitter that Aziz Ansari's new comedy album, Intimate Moments For A Sensual Evening, was available for a devastatingly affordable $3.99, I couldn't help but buy it. After all. I once heard him tell a pretty hilarious joke about meeting M.I.A. and trying to speak Tamil to her.

Anyway, I downloaded Aziz's album and filed it away on my iPod for later listening. Later happened today.

Mondays are bullshit of course and it's always hard to get motivated when your brain has had a few days off. So I decided to listen to Intimate Moments For A Sensual Evening while trudging through the 98 emails laying about in my inbox. And guess what? Aziz Ansari is funny as hell!

From harassing his little cousin Harris on Facebook to his rant about 600 thread-count sheets that are actually 296 ("Are you shitting me man?! I almost slept on that shit!"), Aziz's anecdotes are sure to crack you the fuck up. He tells jokes that we can all relate to like crazy ass roommates and the ridiculousness that is Cold Stone Creamery ("Five people are singing and dancing for a dollar! That's 20 cents a person!")

He even takes cracks at R Kelly ("R Kelly is a BRILLIANT R&B singer/crazy person") and KANYE WEST ("Yo! Shut the fuck up! Homie's over here trying to tell some jokes!")

I especially love Aziz's jokes on race which is something most of the population a) still doesn't understand or b) is just too nervous to talk about. So it's always good when people can poke fun at it.

"Jason looks over at me and goes, 'Hey Aziz. Me and you are the only two white people at this concert.' And I was like, 'First of all Jason, I'm not white. Second of all, you're the only white guy at this concert. We might kill you Jason!' "

The Slumdog reference is great to me too, ("You must be pretty psyched about all this Slumdog Millionaire stuff") especially since two of my aunts married Indian men giving me a rather large extended Indian family. People can't stop congratulating them on a movie they had nothing to do with.

All in all, Intimate Moments For A Sensual Evening is a fantastically funny album that you will certainly quote with your friends for years and years to come. It's also probably the best $3.99 I've ever spent. Go and get your copy immediately.

Last but not least, be careful what you write about Aziz, 'cause chances are, he'll find it. Think he's too busy to read your little blog that nobody visits? Well, guess again 'cause according to the man himself, "I don't do anything! I take naps all day!" Aziz has plenty of time to Google himself. So Aziz, since I know you'll find this eventually, if you're into half Indian/half Black girls, I've got a shitload of cousins that my aunties want to marry off. You can have your pick!

You're just a weatherman, we make the wind blow

A band that got a lot of buzz towards the end of last year is the duo Sleigh Bells. Fuzzy, synthy, loud guitary goodness with a bad ass vocalist in Alexis Krauss. They're set to play Coachella this year, were a break out band at CMJ, have been written about in the New York Times and their song "Crown on the Ground" was even chosen as one of the best tracks of 2009 by Pitchfork. 2010 will certainly be very good to them. Besides the fact that they write pretty infectious songs, I love that guitarist Derek Miller is the same Derek Miller (formally) from Poison the Well.

I think it's pretty normal for most music addicts like myself to go through different music phases in our lives. That's generally how our overall music taste develops. Grunge, punk, metal, goth, hardcore, whatever. In college, my friend Melina was big into hardcore when we met and she introduced me to bands like Braid, Vision of Disorder and Zao. (We were also dressing in boys clothes and wore chucks and Pumas all the time but that's a story for another time). When Napster was getting hot on our campus, Poison the Well was one of the bands she discovered while doing her daily music searches. We fell in love with them immediately.

We went to their shows whenever we could, including one at Under the Couch on Tech's campus where some kid got naked at their end of their set and started moshing (naked, skinny hardcore dude = not so good). We even drove the four hours to North Carolina to see them once too, although I can't remember the name of the venue. I used to check their tour diary on the Trustkill site regularly (did they really meet Tom Cruise in Olive Garden and give him their record? I'll never really know) and even pre-ordered Tear From the Red so that I could get the free poster that came along with it. Seriously, I loved them.

Then a few months later, I discovered "indie rock" (meaning bands that I actually had to do research to find out about, which was kind of a completely new and interesting idea to me) and thus began a new music phase in my life. While I stopped following them, it seems as though Poison the Well is still doing very well so it may seem crazy that someone from a pretty successful band would leave. But that's what Derek did. The music he made with PTW was great, but the stuff he's doing with Sleigh Bells is refreshing.

I love musicians that make music you don't expect them to make or listen to bands that you think they'd never listen to. It's hard to do something different these days. As Metric's Emily Haines sang in Dead Disco, "Everything has been done." So it's nice when you hear a song that catches you off guard and that's what Sleigh Bells has done for me. Also, kudos to Alexis for once being a school teacher in the Bronx. I know it's super far away from all the cool shit, but there are some cool people here :) Check out a video of "Infinity Guitars" below.

Oscar + Bebe

"Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones." - Oscar Wilde

I love this shirt. Know where I can can get one?

We Know All About You, Yes We Do

I was so thrilled when I heard that Ebony Bones is going on tour and playing TWO shows in New York. The first at Mercury Lounge on the 26th (ticket already purchased) and another at Southpaw on February 13th. Ebony is one of the artists that blew my mind last year at SXSW and her live show is phenomenal. Yes, she and her band wear outrageous outfits but her music is amazing. And she even got a Bowery Ballroom crowd to dance from one side of the room to the other, which I consider an amazing accomplishment for anyone. Definitely check out Ebony if she comes to your town. Dates are as follows.

1/26 - Mercury Lounge - New York, NY
2/4 - San Francisco, CA
2/5 - Los Angeles, CA
2/6 - Green Dolphin - Chicago, IL
2/7 - Wrong Bar - Toronto, ON
2/8 - Belmont - Montreal, QB
2/9 - Middle East Downstairs - Boston, MA
2/10 - Hudson Hotel (Fashion Week) - New York, NY
2/11 - Marbar - Philadelphia, PA
2/12 - DC9 - Washington, DC
2/13 - Southpaw - Brooklyn, NY

Ebony @ Scoot Inn

Speaking of other peeps from across the pond, I recently came across this video of Russell Brand interviewing Morrissey. Russell is a MASSIVE Smiths/Morrissey fan so I can only imagine how cool it was for him to talk with him about Years of Refusal

Morrissey Years of Refusal

Morrissey | MySpace Music Videos

New machinary

I've recently become the proud owner of a brand new MacBook Pro! I wasn't planning on getting a new laptop but my G4 finally lost its shit about two weeks ago. Never one to back up my incredibly amazing music collection (external hard drive huh?) I was pretty scared that I was going to lose all my tunes. So I placed an order for a new laptop friend. My MacBook has extra memory and a much bigger hard drive (the old only had 80 GB, which is the same size as my ipod). I'm excited that I don't have to delete photos as soon as I upload them to my flickr or delete songs that I haven't listened to much in the last 6 months to make more space or to make the thing run faster. And thank goodness for Senuti which allowed me take all of my music, movies and TV shows off of my iPod and put them on my new laptop. Trying to pull stuff off of the old laptop was just frustrating because it would freeze every five seconds.

Now that I have a machine that isn't slow as hell, I will certainly update this blog more often, which I'm definitely looking forward to. It kind of broke my bank, but it was also totally worth it.

R.I.P. Jay Reatard

This afternoon around 5 or so, one of my co-workers turned to me and asked if I knew who Jay Reatard was. I said yes and told him that he was a awesome musician. And then he told me that he had died. I didn't believe it though because 2010 has just started and seriously, another musician death already? But then I saw posts popping up on Brooklyn Vegan, Rolling Stone and Paste and RIP Jay Reatard tags on Twitter, as well as statements from Goner Records and Jay's current lable, Matador.

It sucks when anyone dies. It also sucks when young people die (He was only 29). And it really sucks when young people who are incredibly talented die.

One of the few magazines I have a subscription to is Death & Taxes and Jay graces the cover of their current issue. When I got the magazine in the mail a while back and I saw Jay standing in his underwear with a red cape blowing in the wind, I couldn't wait to read the article. And it didn't disappoint.


Brooklyn Vegan posted a short documentary about Jay called "Waiting for Something." In addition to being a kick ass musician, it seems like he was also a pretty cool guy.

Waiting For Something - a short documentary about Jay Reatard

Jay Reatard | MySpace Music Videos

Cool my brains and soothe my head

Mike Mitchell created this great picture of the incomparable Conan O'Brien. I feel really bad for Conan with all of the late night show drama that's going on right now. It's pretty awful that his family and staff picked up and moved to the other side of the country only to have everything get screwed up 7 months later. However, considering the circumstances, I'd say he's handling everything like a sport. Of course he's upset and who knows what's going to happen when this whole thing is finally resolved. But one thing that's certain. This situation needs to be made right some how. If you haven't read Conan's open letter, read it below:

People of Earth:

In the last few days, I’ve been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I’ve been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I’ve been absurdly lucky. That said, I’ve been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.

Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over “The Tonight Show” in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004, I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.

But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my “Tonight Show” in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.

Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move the “Tonight Show” to 12:05 to accommodate the “Jay Leno Show” at 11:35. For 60 years, the “Tonight Show” has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the “Tonight Show” into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The “Tonight Show” at 12:05 simply isn’t the “Tonight Show.” Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the “Late Night” show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.

So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard, and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of “The Tonight Show.” But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet, a time slot doesn’t matter. But with the “Tonight Show,” I believe nothing could matter more.

There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next. My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.

Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it’s always been that way.

Yours,

Conan

You've got light in your eyes

At work today, I had the urge to listen to Naive Melody by Talking Heads. Since I don't have that song on my iTunes at work, I decided to look it up on YouTube. I came across a video of a young(er) MGMT performing a cover of the song and I think it sounds pretty awesome.



It's probably going to snow tonight which I'm not too happy about. That's gonna be like four times since December. This winter is gonna be a tough one for sure. Georgia is supposed to get snow today and I know everyone is crossing their fingers that it's enough to close down school and work. Yay for three day weekends!