Back when people still had to pay for music, money served to limit and define consumption. You could only afford so many records, so you bought what you could, listened to the radio or watched MTV, and ignored everything else. Those select few who did manage to hear everything—record store clerks, DJs, nerds with personal warehouses—could use this rare knowledge to terrorize their social or sexual betters, as in the pre-internet-era film High Fidelity. Napster made all of that obsolete. Today, almost every person I know has more music on his computer than he could ever know what to do with. You don’t need to care about music to end up like this—the accumulation occurs naturally and unconsciously. My iTunes library, for example, contains forty-seven days of music. According to the column that counts the number of times I’ve played each song, roughly a sixth of that music has never been listened to at all. In the 21st century, we are all record store clerks.

I’ve still got some stuff on the NAS in my office that dates back to the glory days of Napster (Comsat Angels and Teardrop Explodes compilations, I’m looking at you…). The “free” part sure didn’t hurt, but I think a lot of it was the sudden accessibility of all this music I’d never heard before.

In St. Paul, MN, an aging Garrison Keillor is sucked from his deathbed into one of these tears. When he wakes up, it is 1970, and he is a young man sitting in a bus station in California. He buys a bottle of bourbon, checks into a hotel, and starts writing songs under the name “Tom Waits”.

Discuss.

Sometime in 2004, I finally threw out the milk crate full of cassettes that had been riding around in the back seat of my car for 10+ years, dating back to my first year in college. In general, I hated tapes, but man! There were some great ones in there that would stay in my tape deck for days on end, courtesy of auto-reverse.

Some of my favorites (Side A / Side B):

• Fugazi, 13 Songs / KMFDM, Naive (the original version, not the re-released remix version)
• Beastie Boys, Paul’s Boutique / Anthrax, Attack Of the Killer B’s
• Pantera, Cowboys From Hell / Prong, Beg To Differ
• Ministry The Mind is a Terrible Thing To Taste / Jane’s Addiction, Nothing Shocking
• Testament, Souls Of Black / Faith No More, The Real Thing

I occasionally hear talk of tapes making a comeback among the hipster crowd. I can sort of understand it from a nostalgia perspective—a pack of TDK 100-minute tapes and various friends’ CD collections meant I could have a lot more music than I could afford to buy on my own. Then there is the whole Cult of the Mix-Tape.

Still, I find stuff like this 2009 article from the Telegraph to be pretty ridiculous:

Demand for blank audio cassettes has soared as music fans return to the analogue sound of the C60 and C90 tape for listening to tracks.

Nostalgia for the richer sound of cassette tapes could see a revival similar to that enjoyed by vinyl records that were once displaced by the CD.

“The richer sound”? Seriously? They go on to quote some clown from an audiophile magazine saying “It is about the quality of sound with an analogue recording which is so much richer than the very flat digital sound you get in an iPod.” Yeah, please—tell me next how it will sound even better if I buy some $150/centimeter speaker cable and headphones made out of platinum-dusted moon rocks.

I suppose if by “richer sound”, he means that distinctive warble from where the tape got stretched out, or the muffled, backwards-masking sound that meant your tape player was 3 seconds away from eating the tape, or the hollow tinniness that came from leaving your tapes for more than an hour in a hot or cold car, then I can definitely see what he’s talking about.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Esparta under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.

My initial reaction is that this album would have been really good in 1998. As it is, it’s decent stuff, but nothing to write home about. It would fit in perfectly alongside the Delerium albums of the late 1990s, when they started bringing in Kristy Thirsk, Sarah McLachlan, and other breathy female vocalists.

Which brings me to my second reaction. I’m rather confused as to why Reznor went to the trouble of announcing that Nine Inch Nails was breaking up/being retired/whatever, instead of just saying “Hey guys, my wife is in the band now!”

The six tracks on the EP are not fundamentally different from any of the Nine Inch Nails material that has come out over the course of the last five years, other than the addition of the aforementioned breathy female vocals. Generally speaking, if you liked that stuff, you’ll probably like this EP. Still, I have yet to find anything on this record that makes for particularly compelling listening.

Unbeknownst to me until relatively recently, they’ve also got a Windows version:

I’ve been using Clementine on my work laptop for a few days now, and so far, it almost exactly fits a need I’ve had a for a long time: a simple, low-overhead music player that runs on Windows, has a clean interface, and still supports a media library. These sorts of apps seem to be a dime a dozen on the Linux side of the fence. For Windows, not so much, and the few that *are* out there tend to be fairly ancient and crusty.

I say “almost” because Clementine does have one glaring ommission—any sort of support of mobile devices. There is no synching and no playing of tracks from a smartphone or iPod connected via USB. At home, that’s not a big deal, as all my music is stored on a NAS and accessible via Samba. Sadly, when I’m at the office and behind the corporate firewall, it means I’m still stuck with MediaMonkey to play the iPod through my laptop.

Maybe Banshee will get their Windows version working someday…

The focus of the article is WRPI, the radio station of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. “Great,” I think as I read the article, “I’ll check it out!” Sadly, when I go to the stations website and click the “Listen Now” link, I’m greeted with a 16kbps RealAudio stream and a 64kbps Windows Media stream.

Seriously?

I realize we’re talking about a college station with limited resources, but these are the sort of offerings I expect from a commercial station. If you’ve only got so much to spend on your online stream, how about going with a format to which everyone will be able to listen?

Directions to See a Ghost will be available digitally on April 15th with the physical release following on May 13th. Rumor has it, The Black Angels may be joining forces with The Warlocks this Summer for a tour of mind-melting proportions.

This is awesome. 2006′s Passover remains one of my favorite albums of the last several years, and if the sample track “You On the Run” is any indication, the new one should rock pretty hard too.

Holy crap does this sound like an uninspired record.

It’s a shame, as Broken Boy Soldiers was quite good. This one, though, sounds like Jack White and friends spent a week or two listening to 80′s AOR rock and then phoned in the album.

Maybe Amazon just picked the crappy section of every single song for their previews, but unless someone trustworty recommends otherwise, I’m passing on this album.

2007′s Year Zero was surprisingly good, coming as it did after a long dry-spell. Throughout the late Nineties and early 2000′s, Reznor seemed tired and devoid of new ideas. Year Zero, while not a huge change in direction musically, had an energy that had been largely absent from his work since The Downward Spiral. More importantly, it broke his long streak of writing songs based solely on his own emotional turmoil.

Ghosts I-IV is similarly energetic and makes for an engaging listen.

Reznor’s other double-album, 1999′s The Fragile, sounded as though he had thrown a bunch of stuff against a wall to see what stuck. As with many double-albums, much of that stuff fell to the floor. So far, this one doesn’t seem to suffer from that problem. I’m still trying to put my finger on exactly why not—the ablum’s 36 tracks span a ton of different styles, from quiet piano to sample-based industrial, and there’s no lyrical theme to tie them together. Nonetheless, it still comes off sounding like an album, rather than a collection of individual tracks.

It’s also worth noting that, rather than going through a label, Reznor is offering Ghosts I-IV in multiple formats and versions on his website (http://ghosts.nin.com). For five bucks, you can download the whole thing in DRM-free MP3, FLAC, or Apple Lossless format. At the upper end, $300 gets you the “Ultra Deluxe Limited Edition Package”, and there are a range of choices in between.

With Radiohead and now Nine Inch Nails going direct to fans/customers, one can only hope that more artists will follow.

A week later, I can safely declare that the new Vampire Weekend album is pretty good and pretty bad.

Tracks like “Mansard Roof”, “Oxford Comma”, “Walcott”, and the “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” are some of the more inspired indie-pop I’ve heard in recent years. At the other end of the spectrum, “A-Punk” is an entirely unnecessary exercise in warmed-over 2-Tone ska, while “M79″‘s early-80′s Casio keyboard is enough to send me lunging for the skip button.

In between are a handful of generally forgettable songs, most sounding like attempts to recreate various aspects of Paul Simon’s Graceland.

If this review is sounds harsh, it is due to the expectations created by the the album’s high points. The good songs I listed above really are quite good. In the end, these tracks make Vampire Weekend worth purchasing. However, I find myself wondering if perhaps the band would have been better off going with an EP rather than a full-length release.