The Daytrotter Index
Andrew Bird live review
Andrew Bird: Part Music, Part Architecture
30 November 06
Live at the Logan Square Auditorium, Chicago
Words by The Mono Lake Salty Bath Company//Illustration by Elliot Kurtz
As with any multi-instrumentalist, Andrew Bird faces a peculiar problem in live shows: how to recreate the layered, symphonic sound of the album… in real time. The problem is compounded by the fact that Bird himself plays most of the instruments on the studio recording. But Bird and drummer Martin Dosh tackle the problem head-on – if you need more Andrew Birds, duplicate them.
A Week With Jay-Z's "Kingdom Come": Day 3
30 November 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
Jay-Z was featured on Dateline last night. Of course, as these television magazines work, he was interviewed by a rigid older man, reciting lyrics back in a robotic standard and asking the hard news questions: Does he think he’s God since he calls himself Hova? Is he sure he doesn’t think he’s God? Aren’t some of his lyrics degrading to women? What does he think about one professor’s claim that hip-hop and rap don’t add anything to the world but misogynistic bullshit — that it’s vapid garbage?
A Week With Jay-Z's "Kingdom Come": Day 2
28 November 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
The prelude – aptly called “The Prelude” – is more like the refrain in so many different ways on Kingdom Come. All of the thoughts summed up so succinctly in that 2-minutes, 43-seconds crops back up time and time again on this comeback album by a man who should never have left. Comebacks are embarrassing, by nature. They’re usually ill-advised, but in Jay-Z’s case, it was the sojourn into the corporate world that was ill-advised.
Stranger Than Fiction review
Stranger Than Fiction: A Wristwatch Can Be Meaningful, So Can A Plate Of Cookies
28 November 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Josh Frankel
Will Ferrell could go on playing Ron Burgandys and Chazz Reinholds, incorrectly historicizing the origins of the city of San Diego, scoring desperate ladies for breakfast and shouting down his unseen mother for some meatloaf for he and his guest, for the rest of his career, but it’s probably better that he’s not going to do that. He’ll probably play another elf and he’ll probably line up a few more roles portraying the same kinds of characters that the late Chris Farley used to play, but he’s stretching his legs in “Stranger Than Fiction.” It’s a start.
The Watson Twins lasso'd
The Watson Twins (Leigh and Chandra) Get Lasso'd
27 November 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Derek Ballard
There’s a pattern to the songs that make up Chandra and Leigh Watson’s first short-playing record of their own material—Southern Manners. It’s one that cuts through the surroundings with the ease of...
Elf Power
Elf Power: A Lesson In Daydreaming For Those Incapable Many
26 November 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!)
Come all ye daydreamers, amateur dreamers and 40-hours-a-week dreamers and feast at this very table. Sit all ye hind ends down at the benches lining them, careful not to disturb the tablecloths and place settings as you pull yeselves close. If ye think to do it, arrive with ye PJs already on ye bodies, comfortable and soft – capable of yanking the winks out of you like the farmer pulls the milk from a full dairy cow. You might be in for a short meal and a long night that feels short because you’re nodding it away, dreamily living for hours on the other sides of your eyelids. Elf Power can be the tour guide you never knew you needed until you could sense yourself getting bogged down by the petty episodes in life, catching yourself stuck in a drab existence and seeing permanence in the drudgery that has enveloped your tattered excuse for spontaneity. It’s become similitude. All of it. Most of the dreaming you do now is done under a death glow of purplish-white fluorescent light, during your supposed productive hours, as the professor’s performing his droning white noise or the copy machine’s incessantly duplicating what needs to be duplicated. It’s being done in the center of the beehive, where the activeness shouldn’t be in doubt. This is how you get paid, drifting into thoughts of happy hour margaritas and bottomless tortilla chips and salsa. It’s about as far as your defeated imagination let’s you embark – tequilaed up drinks and hand foods. This needs to stop. It needs to be easier for you to take yourself someplace other than where you are and there shouldn’t be an obstacle in getting there. Lead singer Andrew Rieger conducts himself – on every one of the Elf Power albums – as if he knows the precarious importance of mind-body separation. It could just be that there’s little room in his life for situational comedies or dramas on television or the silver screen to make up for the adventures that he’s not having in his daily lives. It’s not his preferred method of escapism to tune in to what’s happening on “Two and a Half Men” or sinking into a sofa to absorb four quarters of the Patriots-Bears game. The way to do it is to be sucked into a ground portal, taken to a land of imaginary peoples and left to your own freedoms, not unlike the way Wonderland operated for Alice.
A Week With Jay-Z's "Kingdom Come": Day 1
24 November 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
To have believed in the lasting retirement of Shawn Carter would be to believe in the retirements of Evander Holyfield and George Foreman. It would have been to believe that a unicorn developed a workable solution to eliminate this country’s dependence on foreign oil one afternoon and written the great American novel over the course of a month’s worth of evenings—something that would make A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man read like a bound ream of toilet paper stains—and not said a word.
A Week With Swan Lake's "Beast Moans": Day 5
22 November 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Abigail Bruley
Seek what you will with Beast Moans. It’s all on your heads after today, that’s if you’ve even been following me this far. What five days of listening have taught us about this record is that we still don’t know a thing about it. There’s a reason that they make whiskey barrels out of certain kinds of wood—to coax vanilla and caramel flavors out of them. And there’s a reason that everything in those barrels is stored in a humongous barn for years. It’s because the barrel’s contents would taste like skid marks and Sharpie markers if tested too early.
Paleo
Paleo: The Man That Makes The Songs Gave Himself No Other Option
21 November 06
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Erica Parrott
Ryan Adams is a coach potato next to Paleo’s David Strackany. No joke. He’s a deliberate over-analyzer, murderously uninspired, a lazybones who’s written a couple of songs. So the man at the helm of the new Willie Nelson record released somewhere in the ballpark of 25 albums in 2005. So he just popped 36 new rap-type, less than a minute long songs up on his website the other week. So what. He’s never had the sack to do what Strackany has been doing since April 16 of this year. As Paleo, he’s written and recorded a new song, every day since that day in Lutz, Fla., when he was struck with the crazy idea to do that very same thing every day for a full calendar year. No matter where he finds himself out on the roads to everywhere, Strackany records to his laptop and uploads these warm, still crying songs – ghosts and bumps in bellies just seconds earlier—onto his website.
Justin Timberlake
Justin Timberlake: Portentous Records From The Best Mouse
21 November 06
Words by Jasper Hitchen//Illustration by Erica Parrott
Walt Disney has launched many a successful career. Donald Duck was a rising entrepreneur before they found his underground meth lab at Uncle Scrooge’s mansion in Duckburg. Mickey’s career as an orchestral conductor was prematurely ended by a magician…or something like that. Cartoon references aside, how can we take someone who was on the Mickey Mouse Club seriously? And how the fuck did that show launch a trio of 00’s ultra-sexed pop symbols?
Britney’s nude pregnancy magazine photos killed any boner-factor that still existed, while Christina drops a new album every now and then, receives lukewarm reviews, and is forgotten again. Despite the hardships of his compatriots, Mr. Justin Timberlake has somehow managed to stay afloat in this world of unrelenting criticism of Top 40 music.
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