When I started up this site a couple years ago, my “gimmick” was gonna be that I would like to share my musical tastes via song-to-song comparisons. Hence I have a section of this website called “Harmonies” that hasn’t been updated in eons. But I have maintained a list of songs to write about, and that list has become extraordinarily lengthy. Here in 2008 I think I’ll try to cut into my backlog. Tonight I am in a strange mood, wide awake for no obvious reason at 12:30 a.m. after little sleep the...

When I was teaching English, I would occasionally bring in some music for my students to listen to and discuss. 1 One time at the end of October, I was flipping through my CD collection, wondering what I had that was somewhat Halloween-ish. I am not really into gimmicky Halloween music, and a lot of music that could be appropriate is just not really very spooky. I had a little goth music (Type O Negative?), some metal (Tool?), some friggin’-weird indie music (Xiu Xiu?), but none of that stuff wa...

I want to spend a few weeks introducing some of my favorite Polish bands. I lived in Poland from the middle of 2002 until the middle of 2004, and I spent a lot of time trying to find good rock bands there. It was a struggle. Polish radio consisted mainly of boring Anglo-American pop and R & B and mainstream American hip hop, with a smattering of weak Polish variations on the same kind of music. (You can listen for yourself .) After years of struggle, though (during which I learned almost to like...

So last year when the new U2 single “Vertigo” came out, am I the only one who thought it was awfully similar to Blonde Redhead’s “Equus”? I mean, obviously U2 is a lot bigger of a band, but BR are not the most obscure band out there. And in fact, the two have a lot in common. Both bands are pretty talented, attention-hungry (you could also call them “sell-outs” I guess), fashionable, and I think both of them are really pretentious. But I also like them both: I have a surprising loyalty to Blonde...

Although these two songs are not that similar, Fugazi and Mogwai are a lot more alike than they ought to be. I pay pretty close attention to both of these bands; I would consider myself to be a fan of both, and I have never heard of any of the members of either band ever discussing the other band. Maybe they have, but they seem to live in totally different worlds. Mogwai are a bunch of Scottish louts who drink secret pints and probably get into bar fights and call people “pansies.” They’ve been ...

Last week I spent a lot of time listening to Minus the Bear. I’ve only ever had a burned copy of their CD Highly Refined Pirates , and listening it to work was very amusing because the song titles pop up automatically, and I hadn’t known what they were before. But I spent some time thinking about “Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse” and mentally comparing it to other songs on similar themes, and how they relate to my life. So today I am gonna chart out a review and comparison of three fab...