el que quiera ACOSTArse...

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Monday, March 28, 2011

this is why we fight

This is Why We Fight: Maximum Performance Exclusive Performance @ Yahoo! Video

Thursday, February 03, 2011

the decemberists on yo gabba gabba! the great outdoors

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The Decemberists: Live at OPB

The entire new album, performed live for the first time from start to finish. :)

Friday, January 07, 2011

wildwood

Out in September!

Amplify’d from shelf-life.ew.com

After all those nautically themed ballads, Colin Meloy, the lead singer and songwriter of the band The Decemberists, has written a novel. His literary debut, Wildwood, is a middle-grade fantasy (middle-grade is publisher-speak for Young Young Adult) set in an alternate-reality version of Meloy’s hometown, Portland, Ore., in which adventure and magic have replaced flannel and independent coffee houses. Take a look at the exclusive cover reveal below.

It’s got a cool, Wes Anderson-y feel to it that make me think it’d be perfect for any twelve-year-old with an ironic mustache.
Read more at shelf-life.ew.com

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Tuesday, January 04, 2011

the king is here!

Amplify’d from www.npr.org

First Listen: The Decemberists, 'The King Is Dead

Hear 'The King Is Dead' In Its Entirety

Hear Individual Tracks From The Album

The Decemberists' new album, The King is Dead, comes out Jan. 18.

When we last left Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy, he'd steered his band and his songs to new levels of theater, creating the sprawling rock opera The Hazards of Love. In that project, the sound was as rich as the story, exhibiting justifiable excess. (If you've written the role of a jealous, rebuking royal, why not let Shara Worden belt it out?)

On The King Is Dead, Meloy prepares listeners for change in his opening line: "Here we come to a turning of the season." It not only signals different lyrical themes, but also provides an introduction to a new musical lightness for The Decemberists. The new record opts to tame the band's indulgences, and also reroutes its musical focus: Instead of pointing solely to the British folk that has long inspired him, Meloy digs deep into the American roots-music lexicon, even merging the two in the sea shanty/mining tune "Rox in the Box."

From the R.E.M. nod in "Calamity Song" (which features Peter Buck) to the mountainized "Honky-Tonk Woman" intro of "All Arise!," this is a sort of tribute album with no cover songs, as well as a rock record with roots. And who better to serve as co-pilot on that journey than Gillian Welch, who appears on a majority of The King Is Dead's 10 tracks?

Although her role is more backup singer than duet partner, Welch's tone provides a grounding counterpoint to Meloy, as well as a perfect symbol of the songs' surprising lyrical restraint. This is where much of the lightness comes in: Some of the references are literal, as burdens are shared in "Don't Carry It All" and snow is cleared to "green the ground below" in the chilled beauty of "January Hymn." But, unlike the winter season, stripping away layers has a warming effect here. Whether the stories are personal or not, they feel like they are as a result of the sparse and direct arrangements.

During a recent interview at WFUV, Meloy describes this shift as an entirely intentional contrast to Hazards, but he also discovered in making The King Is Dead that "no music is easy — even the simple songs can be really hard." Making them sound effortless and timeless, however, is an art.
The King Is Dead will be available for streaming in its entirety here until its release on Jan. 18.
Read more at www.npr.org

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

David Sedaris always makes me laugh to tears, and even though this book did not exactly have that effect on me, I still enjoyed reading his "fables" (he prefers to call them animal tales because he says that fables have morals and he doesn't) and discovering what Sedaris can do when he ventures into the fiction territory. The format of the book was very appealing, enriched with illustrations by Ian Falconer, author and illustrator of Olivia (one of my favorite children's books), which provided a kind of creepy contrast to some of the darker tales.
My favorite stories were the one about the squirrel and the chipmunk and the one about the owl and the hippopotamus. In the fist one, a squirrel and a chipmunk go on a date and the chipmunk, who doesn't know what jazz is, tells the squirrel that she enjoys it too for fear of sounding ignorant but is then terrified by the possibility that jazz is something horrible: "The chipmunk lay awake that night, imagining the unpleasantness that was bound to take place the following morning. What if jazz was squirrel slang for something terrible, like anal intercourse? 'Oh, I like it too,' she'd said -and so eagerly! Then again, if could just be mildly terrible, something along the lines of Communism or fortune-telling, subjects that were talked about but hardly ever practiced. Just as she thought she had calmed herself down, a new possibility would enter her mind, each one more terrible than the last. Jazz was the maggot-infested flesh of a dead body, the crust on an infected eye, another word for ritual suicide. And she had claimed to like it!"
The last story of the book is about a grieving owl, whose thirst for knowledge, love for awkwardness, and acceptance of unlikely friendships "so far-fetched they simply had to be true" reminded me a lot of myself and made me smile long after I finished reading the book.

View all my reviews

Monday, December 27, 2010

the house on fortune street

The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was the first book I've read by Margot Livesey and I was not disappointed. The novel is divided in four parts, each one told in the first person from the perspective of a different main character. There is a secret, a tragedy, and a failed relationship. I found it interesting to read what their theories were about each other's situations and how they all thought they knew the others better than they really did.
In a way, this is also a novel about people looking for the truth and coming to terms with their own reality. I also liked that each character had a "literary godfather", as Livesey puts it, and I enjoyed learning more about these artists along the way. My favorite was the second section, told by Cameron, Dara's father.
This novel made me feel like I was reading a thriller, even though the book has a different feel to it. Because you get to hear a different version of the truth in each of the sections, you don't know what really happened until the very end; this keeps the story suspenseful and keeps the reader interested in the story, which is impressive since the secret, the tragedy, and the failed relationship are revealed early in the book.

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eva moves the furniture

Eva Moves the Furniture: A Novel by Margot Livesey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a sad, lonely, lovely novel. It is a story about family, loss, ghosts, the past, and all of those elements intertwined in a complex way. Eva's mom dies when she is a day old, she grows up to stories of her mother told by her father and aunt. Her life is also determined by the presence/absence of two "companions", who are only visible to her.
This is a short, quiet novel, but one I highly recommend because of its acceptance of the line between reality and imagination, dreams and the ordinary, fantasy and fact. The whole novel reads like a long poem, it has a dreamy, soothing quality to it. I am usually attracted to books that are set in or tell stories of backgrounds I know nothing about, and this story set in the Scottish countryside in the early 19th century definitely painted a beautiful picture in my mind.

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Friday, November 19, 2010

happy birthday, scott!

down by the water live on conan

Thursday, November 11, 2010

the king is dead!

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

can.not.wait.

The Decemberists Announce 'The King Is Dead'

November 1, 2010 10:13 p.m. by Susannah Young

For those who weren't on board with 2009's lavish rock opera The Hazards of Love, Colin Meloy and company are giving you another variation on their brand of theatrical, literate indie pop. Direct Current Music and a handful of other sources report that on Jan. 11, The Decemberists will release The King Is Dead. It's the band's sixth full-length album, their third for Capitol Records, and most likely not their first Morrissey bon mot.

Possibly attributable to the influence of special guest Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Meloy promises listeners a more straightforward, folk-rock approach on The King Is Dead — and it shows in "Down By the Water" and some of other new tunes the band has been playing live. You should still probably keep a thesaurus handy and the Wikipedia entry on the 19th century bookmarked.

Check out the track list below:

01 Don’t Carry It All
02 Calamity Song
03 Rise to Me
04 Rox in the Box
05 January Hymn
06 Down By the Water
07 All Arise!
08 June Hymn
09 This Is Why We Fight
10 Dear Avery

Original post here