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  • Random downloading…

    Random downloading…

    I have found some great stuff via random downloading. I have also found some terrible stuff that way…

    If you are a regular reader of Pop Rock Nation, you know that I am a music lover and enjoy a broad spectrum of musical styles. I often discover music by stumbling across it. If I hear something I like in a bar, for instance, I’ll use Shazam to find out the name of the song and the artist. A lot of times, I’ll then purchase the song. Sometimes I’ll download free songs on Amazon or iTunes. I’ll even pay to download something if the mood strikes me and have quite a few albums in my iTunes library that I bought on a whim.

    Now that I think about it, I’ve actually bought a lot of music that way. Back in the days before the Internet, I used to buy albums without hearing them first. There was a time when there weren’t any “listening posts” in music stores. You basically took a risk whenever you forked over your hard earned money for a new album. Sure, you might have heard a song or two on the radio if the album had a hit or two. But the rest of the album might very well have been a mystery. I had a friend about twenty years ago who often refused to buy albums for that very reason. She only wanted the songs she knew and liked, so she’d buy singles or tape stuff off the radio.

    A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded a couple of albums off of Amazon.com that consisted of Spanish guitar music. I was inspired by our recent trip to Spain and Portugal and wanted something nice in my collection for times when I wanted to make a mental escape back abroad. I kind of knew what I liked and listened to a couple of samples, but otherwise knew nothing about the artists other than what I heard on the short clips Amazon provided. I bought one album by a fellow names Armik because he’s Armenian-Iranian and I used to live in Armenia. From what I heard on Amazon, he plays a hell of a good Spanish style guitar. I bought another by Johannes Linstead because his album got a lot of great reviews. So far, I’m pretty pleased with both purchases.


    “Andalucia” by Johannes Linstead.


    “Flames of Love” by Armik.

    The flip side of this is that sometimes I have ended up with some less impressive purchases. I bought an album by Argentine pianist Raul Di Blasio based on a beautiful acoustic piece I heard on a YouTube video. I could only get the piece by buying the whole album. I did, and it turned out I liked the rest of the album much less than that one beautiful piano piece I’d heard on YouTube. The rest of the album was very new age and kind of bored me.


    Raul Di Blasio’s “Solo”, piano version.

    As much as I love music and engage in random downloading, I also love books. I will even read self-published books if the subject matter interests me. Today’s post was actually inspired by a terrible book I downloaded last night. It was kind of my fault. I didn’t read the description or check up on the author. I thought I was getting a non-fiction book and it turned out I got a very shoddily written novel. I read the thing and was a little annoyed at the end. It wasn’t a total waste, since I was able to write a rather scathing review of the book on one of my other blogs. But it did remind me that I need to be more careful about random downloading.

    Here’s a little something I recently found while random downloading…

  • #45 album of 2013 – Love from London by Robyn Hitchcock

    #45 album of 2013 – Love from London by Robyn Hitchcock

    Artist: Robyn Hitchcock

    Album: Love from London

    As I wrote to introduce my review of Robyn Hitchcock‘s 1999 masterpiece Jewels for Sophia (which is a more impassioned, therefore better, review than this one will be), “Robyn Hitchcock sings with an educated, amused English voice, and he’s Love_from_Londonuniformly regarded as quirky”. For his fans who’ve kept up-to-date, my review of Love from London can be very short: it’s in the same style, and of the same quality, as Goodnight Oslo and Tromso, Kaptein immediately before it. This means, notably, that it’s *not* particularly quirky: as he’s approached old age, he’s begun to describe scenes, people, and feelings directly rather than chattering evasively around them. His voice is also much rougher than it was even a few years ago, which can make it sound tireder or more longing or sultrier (though, if we’re honest, “tired” wins out most often).

    Nonetheless, he is clearly the same singer and songwriter. By my standards Love from London is a middling-quality Hitchcock album, which equates to a very good album in general: tuneful, well-sung, tastefully-arranged songs carrying forward a standard of pop music from the era of the Byrds, Beatles, Hollies, and Zombies, unconcerned that pop music today has gone elsewhere. (A couple songs are weirder, which I’ll get back to.)

    Harry’s Song, sung over circling, echoey minor-key piano, sets a solemn mood from the start. The lyrics aren’t online, so I’ll transcribe a couple verses to get you a feel for how he puts ideas together: “Nothing answers like the ocean, to the albatross that punctuates the sky. Pterodactyls used to hang there, silhouetted high above the broken sea. Nothing wants you like tomorrow; only me./ Click on me to find my footsteps, till they vanish in the ever-loving green. Nothing tortures you like how it could have been./ But I don’t know anything about you, anymore./ She’s in solitary confinement. You’re just lonely, but you know your way around.” Be Still, pushed along by strums and a simple drumbeat, later joined by eighth-note cello and other bowed strings, is also about trying to know the mind of another: “I wonder what she’s thinking as she’s sitting next to me, although her eyes are open and she’s staring at the sea. She’s lost in contemplation as her hair hangs to the ground. I wonder is she praying, is she making any sound?/ What is swimming through her mind, as she sits alone? As beautiful as silence and as quiet as a stone. I wonder where she’s heading when she goes back into town. Who does she relate to, when she puts her money down?/ Be still. Let the darkness fall upon you.”

    Stupefied, a slow-to-midtempo song that feels a bit jauntier from its quick tabla-like percussion, nods towards a whimsical opening (“Ain’t no money on the ceiling/ ain’t no ceiling on the floor”) before immediately rhyming it with “Got that terrifying feeling you don’t love me anymore”. The waltz-time My Rain, with almost Middle Eastern electric guitar and violin, and haunting, sighing backup vocals, Robyn_Hitchcockhas his singing voice in low shredded wreckage as he asks “My rain it falls through dark mossy walls. Do you know where it’s been? My rain it comes through dark and purple lungs. Do you know what I’m in?” The pattern I’m seeing is that Love from London‘s songs are driven by the impossible challenge of truly understanding another human being, even one you see and care for every day. Arguably, these are not topics best served by Robyn Hitchcock‘s old strategy of strewing deep feelings and thoughts in a distracting mass of references to Mongol conquerers, Dirty Harry sequels, and obscure types of cheese. Which I respect — although my strategy has been to surround myself with friends who are preposterously blunt and outspoken about everything, thus allowing me to understand them fine. And then, after giving them regular reinforcements of whatever they need, I go think about microscopic camel superheroes fighting evil in bloodstreams across America, instead.

    While none of Love from London is goofy, only 70% of it is tasteful and pretty. I Love You is a wild card, arrangement-wise: an intense and danceable assemblage of drones and sonic wobbles and half-rapped singing and slow firm drums and shiny glinting shards of guitar that reminds me of Stone Roses or Happy Mondays, or a sexier, giddier rewrite of Tomorrow Never Knows. Devil on a String is like the dirty rock’n’roll of ZZ Top or George Thorogood & the Destroyers, processed into psychedelic semi-abstraction and placed over fast, suspiciously foreign percussion elements like maracas. And the riff-heavy, tremolo-riddled Fix You, while just as personal (“Now that you’re broke, who’s gonna fix you up?”) lets in a broader world: “They make you redundant, then blame you for being a slacker/ while the financial backer is taking a call with a strawberry mousse”.

    “They let you fall in the marketplace”, Fix You announces angrily, and one recourse for that (as Hitchcock would agree) is government. But the other is personal connection. Both can be tricky to get right. And obviously we don’t want to just let people hang around being broken. I can see, then, why Robyn Hitchcock decided to focus his words more sharply on task.

    – Brian Block

    To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2013 page!

  • Why the Sochi Winter Olympics reminds me of Eurovision…

    Why the Sochi Winter Olympics reminds me of Eurovision…

    Today’s post is all about why the Sochi Winter Olympics reminds me of Eurovision…

    My friend Dave is now living in Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev. I met Dave in 1995, when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Armenia and he was a newly returned Peace Corps Volunteer who had served in Russia. Dave had a job at a non-profit aid organization and, since there were few Americans in Armenia in the 90s, we ended up meeting. Years later, Facebook has brought us together again and I have been watching him post many disturbing articles, photos, and videos of the current political unrest going on in Ukraine. Much of what he’s posted has been scary and sobering, but Dave is not above showing off his generous sense of humor. Yesterday, he posted an article from The New Yorker that said people were being “grossed out” because they were being forced to look at half naked photos of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in their hotel rooms.

    Many people actually believed the article instead of recognizing it as satire. Vladimir Putin is not known for his humility and cuddly personality, after all. The author of the article, Andy Borowitz, cleverly noted in a “quote” supposedly by Putin, “These people who are complaining about what is on their walls should be grateful… At least they got one of the rooms with walls.” Not long after I read this article from The New Yorker, I found a very funny and telling gallery of photos that supposedly show what conditions are like in Sochi right now.

    Having once lived not too far from Sochi, I can attest that these photos are probably pretty accurate.

    Reading about Putin supposedly forcing hapless hotel guests to look at his topless photos in their rooms made me think of an incident that occurred just before the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest. At the time, my husband Bill and I were living in Germany and we made a point of watching Eurovision when it came on television in May. Months before the 2009 contest, there was a controversy involving the song entered by the Republic of Georgia. At the time, the Republic of Georgia was reeling from a political incident that occurred in August 2008 known as the Russia-Georgia war. Georgia was also dealing with political pressure from Putin, who was concerned about Georgia’s desire to join the European Union and increase its dealings with the United States. Bill actually went to Georgia just after the brief war and told me stories of how the Georgians seemed to like Americans a lot more than Russians.

    The Eurovision Song Contest is supposed to be about fostering goodwill among nations in Europe. In that regard, it’s not unlike the Olympic Games. Song entries are not supposed to be political in nature. But I’m guessing that Georgia’s Stephane and 3G couldn’t resist the urge to write a song that really said something. They wrote and performed a song called “We Don’t Want To Put In”. Though the song was eventually deemed too political, Georgia elected to withdraw from the Eurovision Song Contest rather than change the lyrics or replace the song.


    The very catchy disco styled song, “We Don’t Want To Put In” by Stephane and 3G. I can’t help but think it sounds a lot like Disco Inferno by The Trampps.

    When Dave posted that hilarious satirical article about Putin’s shirtless photos, I was immediately reminded of this hilarious and very ballsy entry by the Georgians for the Eurovision Song Contest in 2009. I’m sure as the Winter Olympic Games continue and more things come to light about the state of things in Sochi, the Winter Olympics may remind me even more of Eurovision. On another note, I’ve checked out more of Stephane and 3G’s music and I like it. I even went on iTunes and downloaded the many different versions of “We Don’t Want To Put In”. I guess in a way, the Sochi Winter Olympics is promoting something besides good sportsmanship and goodwill.