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Review: Rock*A*Teens, Sixth House
Sixth House is a layered, engaging addition to one of indie-rock's most slept-on songbooks.3.5
The Rock*A*Teens's first full-length album in 18 years, Sixth House, is a welcome reintroduction to a band that has always been a weedy fringe-dweller among the indie heavyweights of the Merge Records roster. But while the Rock*A*Teens may have never graduated beyond cult status, the band's handful of rough-hewn albums have held up remarkably well over the years, coursing with anxious, dark-hearted thrills. Like those efforts, Sixth House is generous with lived-in detail, but it turns out to be subtler than anything else in the group's catalog. Though singer-guitarist Chris Lopez still lays claim to plenty of wobbly, voice-cracked yearning, he's toned down much of the loopy, winking wordplay that peaked with 2000's Sweet Bird of Youth.
Sixth House also relies less on the bristling, shadowy cloak of reverb that's long been the Rock*A*Teens's signature. While the cleaner, streamlined sound on display throughout the album might surprise longtime fans, it valuably shifts the spotlight to the band's slouching, sparkling melodies and low-flying catchiness. Reuniting with guitarist Justin Hughes, bassist William R. Joiner, and drummer Ballard Lesemann, Lopez once again conveys a nagging sense of uncertainty through his music, as evidenced by the stop-start jerkiness of "Lady Macbeth" and the sloshing chorus of lead single "Go Tell Everybody." Yet for all that nerve-wracked volatility, many of the album's tracks are more mannered than mussed: "Listen, Sonny Boy" brandishes an especially pretty hook that sounds gleaned from the British Invasion, while "Count in Odd Numbers" nudges the band's chiming jangle into Byrds territory.
Despite those sweeter touches, the Rock*A*Teens still relish the kind of scuffed, frayed tangents that culminate in a feeling of hard-earned catharsis for Lopez. After echoing the descending piano intro of the Kinks's "Sunny Afternoon," "Closest to Heaven" builds to perhaps the biggest emotional release of the album, foreshadowed by the wish-fulfilling mantra: "Take a deep breath and blow the cobwebs away." The Rock*A*Teens may have smoothed over some of their roughest edges, but Lopez's singing and songwriting is just as bracing and committed as ever. Even if Sixth House doesn't mint a career-changing tide of new Rock*A*Teens fans, it's a layered, engaging addition to one of indie-rock's most slept-on songbooks.
Label: Merge Release Date: June 29, 2018 Buy: Amazon
Review: The Chicks's Gaslighter Is a Defiant Act of Rebranding
The band's first album in 14 years is steeped in personal and political rage.4
There's compelling data, generated largely by the work of Dr. Jada Watson of the University of Ottowa, that draws a clear correlation between the blacklisting of the Dixie Chicks from country radio and the immediate and striking downturn in airplay for all women on that format. The statistics are dire and indefensible. Though program directors and radio consultants will deny, deny, deny, there's evidence that the industry made a purposeful choice to punish all female artists for the Dixie Chicks's perceived crimes.
So, in 2020, country music really and truly needs a comeback from the Dixie Chicks, an album that will allow one of the genre's all-time greatest acts to stage a triumphant return and redress the industry's injustices over the last decade. But Gaslighter, the band's first album in 14 years, isn't it. Instead, it's a defiant act of rebranding: The Dixie Chicks are now known simply as the Chicks—a not-insignificant change that speaks to both the social power of language and to the trio's stated intent to "meet this moment" in our nation's history.
Sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer figure even less prominently on Gaslighter than they did on the band's last album, 2006's Taking the Long Way, and that's also a not-insignificant development. By teaming up with producer Jack Antonoff, the group has made a decisive transition into a pop act. It's easy to mourn the sound that defined the band, but to reject the album out of hand for its pop aesthetics is to deny them their own agency as artists.
Gaslighter emerges as a fascinating, messy album that's steeped in personal and political rage. Divorce is hardly unusual subject matter in pop and country music, but artists who record "divorce albums" often struggle with the notion that they should aspire to making their story universally accessible to listeners. Natalie Maines makes no such mistake in her songwriting here. What elevates Gaslighter above thematically similar albums is the specificity of her unflinching detail as she recounts her ongoing legal battles with ex-husband Adrian Pasdar.
On "Sleep at Night," Maines retells the story of how Pasdar brought his mistress backstage at a concert to introduce her as a fan of the band. Maines is fully in control of her narrative voice when she sings on the track: "My husband's girlfriend's husband just called me/How messed up is that?/It's so insane that I have to laugh/But then I think about our two boys trying to become men/There's nothing funny about that." Later, on "Set You Free," the soaring ballad that closes Gaslighter, she pleads, "Decency would be to sign and release me," referencing the still-festering terms of a contract dispute.
On the tracks that explicitly relate to her divorce, which is a full three-quarters of the album, Maines dispenses with the idea of a narrative remove. She sings in first person, and the details she's chosen to share are autobiographical, albeit presenting only her perspective. At times, that makes standout songs like "Hope It's Something Good" and "My Best Friend's Wedding" feel, at the very least, like voyeurism. While it's always a critical dead-end to assume that first-person narrators are stand-ins for a singer, Maines actually invites that reading: On "Gaslighter," when she sings, "Boy, you know exactly what you did on my boat," it's a marvel of bitterness. That the album later includes a song with the title "Tights on My Boat," though, lessens the mystique or possibility for interpretation or engagement.
That would be more of an issue if the songs weren't so well-constructed and engagingly performed. But that's exactly what makes Gaslighter superior to its predecessor. As part of my clinical work, I've testified as a witness in some truly nasty divorce cases, and I've never once thought to set court transcripts to a percussive four-four stomp or some Lorde-style EDM, but damned if it doesn't work for the Chicks here. "Gaslighter" and the extraordinary "March March" boast distinctive lyrical hooks, while "For Her" and "Julianna Calm Down" feature real dynamic ranges that give the tracks a sense of movement and depth. Antonoff's production choices truly draw into sharp relief Rick Rubin's conservativism at the helm of Taking the Long Way.
While the album sounds current for 2020, there are a handful of moments that suggest how much more strongly Antonoff could have leaned into the Chicks's previous style. On "For Her," Antonoff layers one of Strayer's finger-plucked banjo figures into an arrangement that explodes into a sing-along gospel chorus, while Maguire's fiddle adds a jarring, ominous tone to the instrumental outro of "March March." When working with a vocalist as powerful as Maines, the impulse to foreground her performances makes sense—and it's worth noting that "For Her," "Julianna Calm Down," and "Set Me Free" are among the finest performances of her career. But the album gives the impression that Antonoff wasn't sure how to engage fully with Maguire and Strayer's exemplary skills with traditional acoustic instruments.
By incorporating country signifiers into what is otherwise a terrific, of-the-moment pop album, Antonoff and the Chicks could have come up with a style that's even more progressive, akin to the production on Kacey Musgraves's Golden Hour. If nothing else, that highlights how the Chicks still have room to grow, either with or without Antonoff, as they move into this new phase of their career. Gaslighter may not have been the album that country music needed, but it's clearly the one that the Chicks needed to make.
Label: Columbia Release Date: July 17, 2020 Buy: Amazon
Review: Lianne La Havas's Eponymous Third Album Embraces the Catharsis of Loss
On her third album, the British singer-songwriter settles into a sense of immediacy.4
British singer-songwriter Lianne La Havas is an adept storyteller, capable of both capturing who we are at our most alone and making us feel closer to one another. Her love songs conjure a striking intimacy, even when she's backed by the sumptuous BBC Symphony Orchestra in the storied Barbican Hall, and take on a degree of universality, even when she's singing directly to a video camera in her living room. But it's the latter method, when her sound is at its most stripped down, that best conveys the evocative immediacy that caught the attention of Prince, who mentored La Havas in the years before his death.
On her third album, La Havas settles into that immediacy, positioning her guitar as the beating heart of the music. The eponymous album finds her again chronicling the course of a romance, but this time she quite intentionally does away with the glossy fuss of 2015's blindingly polished Blood, subsisting throughout on her hard-earned wisdom. The album instantly feels more purposeful than its predecessor: Where Blood can feel labored over, perhaps too hungry for hits, Lianne La Havas isn't seemingly beholden to such expectations.
As she recounts the fate of a relationship from its onset to its demise, La Havas often prioritizes the passion of the moment over the logic of hindsight bias. On "Read My Mind," you can practically hear her smile as she sings, "The pure joy/When a girl meets a boy/Pure chemistry." She never loses sight of her needs, however distressing they might be. She's quick to provide counsel to herself and outright plead with her lover on "Paper Thin." Her vocal floats, at times on the verge of cracking from emotion, atop harp-like fingerpicking: "Baby, you gotta run free/Please don't forget about me." La Havas leans into the heartrending grief of prematurely losing a relationship.
A cover of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes" appears at the climax of Lianne La Havas as a fretful turning point in the album's central relationship. La Havas's version of the In Rainbows track is slower and earthier than Radiohead's more cerebral original, yet it retains all of its fragility. Radiohead articulates the unspoken fears and doubts that occupy a night spent overthinking, and La Havas is seized by the same impulse to verbalize her grievances, gingerly handling the painful edges of rejection and abandonment, albeit with more self-compassion.
Sonically, the warbly synth of "Courage" and frantic drumming of "Seven Times" don't feel too far removed from In Rainbows's sonic palette. But La Havas's style remains tricky to pin down, existing somewhere in the nexus of the soulful warmth of Corinne Bailey Rae, the confessional lyricism of Amy Winehouse, and the folky melodicism of Joni Mitchell. To call it soul music would be reductive; too many black artists have hastily been assigned the label just for the color of their skin, a restrictive tendency that La Havas herself has railed against. But without a doubt, La Havas makes soul music insofar as it originates from the soul.
The album's twinkling denouement, "Sour Flower," depicts the metamorphosis that can occur after overcoming a breakup. La Havas's voice is rich and robust as she belts, "I'm not crying over you/When I cry/Now I'm free." She attains catharsis by providing herself refuge and realizing that she can heal herself. She leaves us with an empowering moral: that we possess the ability to revive our spirits after loss, and that it may well be boundless.
Label: Nonesuch Release Date: July 17, 2020 Buy: Amazon
Review: Julianna Barwick's Healing Is a Miracle Is Music as Spiritual Renewal
The album overcomes its slightness thanks to its willingness to dabble in different textures.3.5
As a singer, composer, and producer, Julianna Barwick uses her vocals as a foundation, stacking multi-tracks of her voice with strings and piano, and blending it all beneath layers of reverb. Save for the occasional poetic repetitions and formed thoughts, she doesn't sing actual words, fusing emotions and imagined spaces through a collage of vocables and human noise. Upon first listen, her songs can feel monotonous, but tiny modulations give them dynamism. They don't drone so much as pleasantly sustain a pace and mood.
Barwick's fourth album, Healing Is a Miracle, is a tale of spiritual renewal that's both striking and, even at 34 minutes, patience-testing. As its title indicates, the album takes on the abstract subject of systems of regeneration, both natural and otherwise. The opening track, "Inspirit," comes on like a wall of sound, Barwick's ecstatic vocals giving the impression of finding wonder in the mundane, the vocal parts joined together in a powerful cluster, barely distinguishable as she sings, "Open your heart/It's in your head."
While Barwick's style can be wondrous, it isn't fanciful, acknowledging the ebb and flow of life and death. On "Flowers," a harsh, buzzy synth nearly overwhelms the choral arrangement in a way that grounds Barwick's breathy vocals, while the percussion on "In Light," featuring guest vocals from Jónsi, galumphs steadily like a heartbeat before tapering off, evoking the fragility of human life. Healing Is a Miracle is well sequenced, and its songs' emphasis on direction achieves a circuitousness that plays nicely with album's chosen theme of life cycles.
A longing for connection to a higher power—a notion of singing to the heavens—is a thread that runs throughout Barwick's work. While her vocals on Healing Is a Miracle are less celestial than those on her 2011 breakout, The Magic Place, these songs similarly show an interest in the directionality of sound. The trajectory of "Safe" is one of gradual elevation and an ever-approaching proximity, employing distancing techniques for something more terrestrial rather than otherworldly. Likewise, "Wishing Well" seems to find Barwick pining for earthly connection, the vocals reaching outward as opposed to heavenward.
Considered though it is, though, Healing Is a Miracle can sometimes be so delicate as to be weightless, and the music's accumulation of details and small shifts in tone makes it more interesting in theory than practice. Even still, the album overcomes its slightness thanks to its willingness to dabble in different textures, from the electronic flourishes featured throughout to the influence of hip-hop beatsmith Nosaj Thing on the closing track, "Nod." Healing Is a Miracle is music as balm, with the human voice a vehicle for rejuvenation.
Label: Ninja Tune Release Date: July 10, 2020 Buy: Amazon
Review: Pop Smoke's Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon Is a Half-Baked Epitaph
The album has the feel of a B-sides collection culled together as a cash-in on the rapper's death.2
Pop Smoke, born Bashar Jackson, emerged as part of a crop of young rappers who took the morbid bluntness of drill, a subgenre of trap music that originated in Chicago's South Side in the early 2010s, and adapted it to the ethos of New York City street life. In the Brooklyn rapper's case, the translation was shrewd, utilizing the help of East London producer 808Melo, who, along with Rico Beats, oversaw the entirety of Pop Smoke's 2019 mixtape Meet the Woo, creating a sound that was lively, booming, and faithful to Jackson's origins while cloaking his gang-life testimonials in a new stylistic mode.
When Jackson was shot and murdered in Los Angeles in a home invasion earlier this year, he'd just released his second mixtape, Meet the Woo 2, and was in the process of recording his studio debut, now posthumously released under the title Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon. Unfortunately, yet all too predictably, the album has the feel of a B-sides collection culled together as a cash-in on his death. It attempts to expand Pop Smoke's sound and ambitions, but without him around to shape and hone the work, his collaborators struggle to assemble something more than a pale reflection of what might have been.
Where Pop Smoke's mixtape raps were notable for their conviction of delivery and tightly wound compression, here he sounds fainter and less engaged. His verses on "Aim for the Moon" and "Creature" don't have the same punchy impact. In his best moments, Pop Smoke was able to channel his untamed aggression into repetitive, elemental lyrics that were colored by his force of personality (such as "Dior," which has been tacked on to all three of his releases, including this one). Though not as adept at complex wordplay, his appeal was akin to the tough-talking, chest-puffing brio of DaBaby, who's featured on "For the Night."
Along with a live-wire masculinity, the album also contains the ill-advised forays into R&B found on DaBaby's Blame It on Baby. Ladled with plenty of Auto-Tune, neither rapper has a compelling singing voice, and yet multiple songs on this album attempt to position Pop Smoke as a softer-spoken purveyor of love songs. "Something Special" and "What You Know Bout Love" sample Fabolous and Tamia's "Into You" and Ginuwine's "Differences," respectively, marking the farthest the rapper has strayed from his patented drill and trap origins, but they're dreary and tepid rather than exciting sonic departures. When he ad-libs, "Oh, you ain't know I could sing?," at the beginning of "Mood Swings," it comes across as empty boast.
Even the tracks that stick to Pop Smoke's established drill mode don't have the inventiveness and coiled energy of his mixtape highlights. Half of what makes a song like "Welcome to the Party" so enjoyable is its menacing yet gleeful production, all warped violin loops and careening, demented bass. Comparable tracks on Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon, such as "Gangstas" and "West Coast Shit," trade these inspired choices for a minimalist piano and snare combination. The production feels mournful rather than charged, which makes sense given the turn of events but doesn't square with the late artist's strengths.
A handful of moments here make good on Pop Smoke's promise. "Got It on Me" and "44 BullDog" find him doggedly racing against their beats, and there are brief instances where the rapper's glib sense of humor and confidence invest lines like "I need your number and that's that" and "I ain't with the talk or the chit chat" with a hoarse individuality. But on the whole, in broadening his music's scope, those responsible for piecing together Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon have lost sight of the local specificity, quirky charisma, and energy that made a name for Pop Smoke in the first place.
Label: Republic Release Date: July 3, 2020 Buy: Amazon
Review: On Jump Rope Gazers, the Beths Cloak Heartbreak in Bright Pop Hooks
Every element of the album is so richly defined that these songs can't help but pop.3.5
Though indie pop seems to be having a particularly dour year, with albums like Soccer Mommy's Color Theory and Perfume Genius's Set My Heart on Fire Immediately focusing on heavier-hearted subjects and exploring denser, more brooding sonic palettes, the Beths's sophomore effort, Jump Rope Gazers, relies mostly on upbeat pop-rock. That's not to say that the New Zealand band is anxiety-free, but they're so canny at cloaking heartbreak and dread in bright, warm hooks that their music never sounds too dire.
The album's opening track, "I'm Not Getting Excited," is a charged-up rocker that's so spirited that it's easy to miss the song's passing references to death. Lead singer Elizabeth Stokes eagerly bursts into a brilliant falsetto to deliver the song's caffeinated chorus. Songs like "Dying to Believe" and "Out of Sight" keep this energy going, with drummer Tristan Deck and bassist Benjamin Sinclair maintaining a brisk rhythm section as Stokes and Jonathan Pearce's guitars shimmer, groove, and ignite in equal measure.
But the Beths are, perhaps, at their best when they're at their breeziest. The languid verses of the album's midtempo title track are set against a backdrop of sun-soaked harmonies, as Stokes describes a crumbling relationship: "If I don't see your face tonight, well, I guess I'll be fine." The song's chorus is more melancholic, with Stokes delivering lines like "I think I love you/And I think I loved you the whole time" with a wistful nostalgia.
The album's closer, "Just Shy of Sure," is lush and mellow, tinged with more sadness than its laidback demeanor might suggest. Here, the Beths approach a relationship from a pained angle: "Love in memory is a plague that consumed me," Stokes sings matter-of-factly. The song finds the singer grateful for the experience even if it didn't end the way she might have hoped: "Hey, you can't win without entering/Do you care to lose everything?" These songs display the Beths's penchant and skill for making the bittersweet sound so good.
Jump Rope Gazers was written while the Beths toured the world in support of their 2018 debut, Future Me Hates Me, and songs like "You are a Beam of Light," a bleary ode to a loved one, reflect the feeling of being far away from the people and the places you know best. Besides the band's pitch-perfect songwriting, though, one of the things that makes the album so endlessly infectious is Pearce's crisp and spacious production. From the acoustic and electric guitars that gently intertwine on "Do You Want Me Now" to each layer of the band's crystalline harmonies on "Acrid," every element of the album is so richly defined that these songs can't help but pop.
Label: Carpark Release Date: July 10, 2020 Buy: Amazon
The Best Albums of 2020 (So Far)
These 20 albums reflect a reckoning with ourselves, the patriarchy, systemic racism, and our connection to the planet.
It's been a very long year—and we're only at the halfway mark. So it seemed like a good time to take stock of the human experiment circa 2020 with our first-ever mid-year albums list. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed who we are at our cores, both good and bad, the best albums of the year so far—almost all of them created prior to the crisis—reflect the simmering tensions that have been roiling beneath the surface of American life for years, if not decades. These 20 albums reflect a reckoning with ourselves (Arca's kinetic Kick I), the patriarchy (Fiona Apple's prismatic Fetch the Bolt Cutters), systemic racism (Run the Jewels's electrifying RTJ4), and our (dis)connection to the planet itself (Grimes's boundless Miss Anthropocene). As we grapple with what it means to shut down and rise up, music can give us an outlet, a voice, or—in the case of Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia and Jessie Ware's What's Your Pleasure?—an escape. Sal Cinquemani
Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Like fellow singer-songwriter Scott Walker, Fiona Apple achieved fame at a young age by making music that was more sophisticated and adventurous than that of her peers. Now, with Fetch the Bolt Cutters, she's made an album not unlike Walker's The Drift—that is, unmistakably in the pop idiom but aggressively unconventional. But if Walker's late-career music was alienating and difficult, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is compulsively listenable, full of catchy melodic hooks and turns of phrase that linger with you long after the album is over. Released in the midst of a global economic and health crisis that could have been largely prevented if not for the disastrous mismanagement of a ruling class for whom mediocrity is an unattainable level of functionality, the album is prismatic for all that it reflects. On a purely musical level, it's a bold experiment in pop craft, a collection of songs on which Apple stretches her talents in adventurous new directions. It can be read biographically, as a self-conscious act of narrative-building that continues to define Apple's legacy as an artist. Most importantly, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a vituperative catalog of the failures and pointless cruelties of a society propped up by fragile, nihilistic, patriarchal ideology. Seth Wilson
Arca, Kick I
Where Arca's past efforts sought to express states of dissociation, rendering a consciousness flitting in and out of reality, the songs on Kick I are noticeably present and tuned-in. Arca's gender identity is infused in the playfulness of her lyrics and compositions. Despite the addition of actual pop hooks throughout the album, Arca's beats continue to emphasize destabilization and change. Her songs are all bridge—stretches of evolution from one idea or mindset to the next. Just when you've grown accustomed to a sound or riff, the floor drops out, shifting to another mode and vibe altogether. The production oscillates wildly between harsh and smooth, as in the way the kinetic, abrasive "Riquiquí" segues into the graceful ballad "Calor"; strings and clanking percussion mix, squaring off in striking juxtaposition. By far the bounciest, most ecstatic song cycle of Arca's career, Kick I is a celebration of actualization, whether that's spurned by finding harmony internally or in communion with another. Charles Lyons-Burt
Bad Bunny, YHLQMDLG
With his inclination for pairing heartbroken lyrics with fiery dembow beats, Bad Bunny has finetuned the art of crying in the club. On his second solo album, YHLQMDLG, the Puerto Rican reggaeton star offers dance floor-ready sentimentality that feels familiar, but he breaks out of his reliable formula with the most blistering production of his career to date, courtesy of Tainy and Subelo NEO. The viral "Safaera" is the best example of this audacious streak: Over an episodic five minutes, the track pivots between eight exhilarating beat changes, simulating the head-spinning pyrotechnics of a DJ club mix. With collaborations from today's hottest Latin-trap heavyweights and legendary reggaetoneros like Daddy Yankee, the album solidifies Bad Bunny's rightful place in the Urbano canon. Sophia Ordaz
Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
Throughout her sophomore effort, Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers is often transfixed by a feeling of stasis. Songs like "Chinese Satellite" and "I See You" evoke the sensation of being frozen, exacerbated by the perpetual anticipation of doom. "I've been running in circles trying to be myself," she sings on the former. Again and again over the course of the album, the singer-songwriter laments her inability to find solid ground, her voice low but certain. These songs simmer beautifully and quietly, eventually boiling over in intermittent moments of sonic boisterousness, and the results are often stunning. Punisher's closing track, "I Know the End," is a travelogue at the end of the world, explicitly illustrating the cloud of uneasiness that hangs over the album. It ends with blood-curdling screams, until all the sound fades out and Bridgers's voice is hoarse. The end of the world is a central detail on Punisher, an influence over the uncertainty that falls over these dark but gorgeous songs. Jordan Walsh
Dogleg, Melee
Dogleg's Melee is a bristling, relentlessly cathartic collection of pop-punk. From the moment that the opening track, "Kawasaki Backflip," bursts into its full-band glory, the album never slows down or backs off from the Detroit group's loud, crunchy, anthemic style. Lead singer Alex Stoitsiadis shouts every word with dire conviction, his voice shredding and straining to deliver some of the best shout-along hooks of the year so far. "Any moment now, I will disintegrate," he frantically yells at the explosive climax of "Fox." Melee is the sound of a band pushing off self-destruction through sheer force of will. This isn't to say that these songs aren't complex, or that their loudness is a cover for a lack of imagination. The guitars on "Cannonball" splash loudly, creating violent ripples over the rest of the track, while "Ender" closes the album in a six-minute punk odyssey wherein Dogleg ups the stakes at every turn. Melee is exhausting in the best possible way, a cleansing release of tension in a howling, desperate rage. Walsh
Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways
Sharp and precise in its references, descriptions, and personal confessions, Bob Dylan's Rough and Rowdy Ways is thematically universal and powerfully prescient, in many ways acting as the culminating expression of the apocalyptic spirituality that's preoccupied Dylan since his earliest recordings. It's also a masterpiece of mood as much as lyrical poetry, and as stunningly and surprisingly atmospheric as many of the major musical achievements in a career more associated with monumental songwriting than sonic mastery. This is an album that showcases a similar comprehensive spectrum of ideas, attitudes, citations, perspectives, stories, and jokes as Dylan's greatest recordings. True, many of these are grave, but the few hopeful spots—like "I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You" and "Key West (Pirate Philosopher)"—are well-earned and, quite simply, beautiful. Latter-day Dylan is the man behind "To Make You Feel My Love" as well as "Not Dark Yet," and along with dispensing fire and brimstone, Rough and Rowdy Ways keeps romantic and spiritual faith alive, through both the fervor of unshaken convictions concerning the high stakes of the soul as well a basic yearning for love, companionship, and peace. As with his best work, the album encompasses the infinite potential for grace and disaster that can be clearly discerned but rarely summarized in the most turbulent of ages. Michael Joshua Rowin
Grimes, Miss Anthropocene
Claire Boucher has said that the process of writing Miss Anthropocene was an isolating experience, and that much of the material came from a dark, personal place. Even the album's most apparently apocalyptic lyrics, like the reverb-drenched "This is the sound of the end of the world" on "Before the Fever," seem to do more to elucidate the kind of headspace Boucher was in at the time of writing than any grand message about the world's climate woes. But while this overarching concept might seem flimsy, Boucher's broad-strokes approach to lyricism and confident, cinematic production allows her to explore concerns that feel at once both deeply personal and fundamentally communal. The latter in particular is bolstered by the way she dissolves the limits of genre, splicing together ethereal electronics with nü-metal guitars on "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth." On "Darkseid," deep bass and doom-laden beats grind beneath a brittle performance by Taiwanese rapper 潘PAN, and a Bollywood sample butts up against drum n' bass on "4ÆM." On an album as sonically diverse as Miss Anthropocene, the most significant thread that holds it all together is Boucher's wild imagination and commitment to experimenting with her sound. And the result is a challenging exploration of the conflicting boundaries and boundlessness of personhood, technology, and society. Anna Richmond
HAIM, Women in Music Pt. III
While there's plenty of genre-hopping on Women in Music Pt. III—hip-hop, reggae, folk, heartland rock, and dance—HAIM has created an album that's defined not just by exploration, but by their strong sense of individuality. Unlike the sparkling, thoroughly modern production of 2017's Something to Tell You, this album's scratchy drums, murky vocals, and subtle blending of acoustic and electronic elements sound ripped straight from an old vinyl. It's darker, heavier fare for HAIM, for sure—a summer party record for a troubled summer. HAIM's instincts to veer a little more left of the dial result in an album that strikes a deft balance between the experimental and the commercial, the moody and the uplifting. You're unlikely to hear these songs on Kroger's in-store playlist—on which 2017's "Little of Your Love" seems to have become a permanent staple alongside the likes of "Eye of the Tiger" and "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)"—but these songs are riskier, and ultimately that much more rewarding. Jeremy Winograd
Lilly Hiatt, Walking Proof
Lilly Hiatt's songs are disarmingly personal and immensely endearing, even when she's singing about fucking up—which is pretty often. There's an almost parasocial element to Hiatt's songwriting: Her voice is like that of an old friend who's perpetually in various stages of getting her shit together. Hiatt's fourth album, Walking Proof, forms something of a thematic trilogy with her last two albums: 2015's Royal Blue, a portrait of a relationship in its death throes, and 2017's harder, darker Trinity Lane, which depicted its immediate aftermath. Hiatt spent both albums seeking solace and guidance for her troubles everywhere she could, from family to her favorite records. On Walking Proof, she's emerged wiser and more confident, ready even to dispense advice of her own. She also finds herself in full command of her broad stylistic palette, melding influences as disparate as backwoods country and garage punk into a cohesive signature sound. There are a couple of lingering references to Hiatt's past relationship problems. But when, in the hauntingly stark closer "Scream," she claims, "I swear to God I'm done with him," it's convincing this time. Winograd
Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated Side B
A defining feature of last year's Dedicated was Carly Rae Jepsen's embrace of her sexuality—a topic the singer had, for the most part, previously sidestepped in favor of more chaste subject matter. The dozen songs that comprise Dedicated Side B, all leftovers from the original recording sessions, double down on pillow talk, lending the album a uniformity that its predecessor lacked. That songs as strong as the sublime "Heartbeat" and the anthemic "Solo" were left off Dedicated speaks to not just the wealth of treasures she had to choose from, but her ability to craft a cohesive narrative. "I'm at a war with myself/We go back to my place/Take my makeup off/Show you my best disguise," Jepsen offers wistfully on the meditative "Comeback," demonstrating the tangled multi-dimensionality of both her own psyche and the act of sex itself. Alexa Camp
Review: Arca's Kick I Is a Kinetic Celebration of Self-Actualization
The album is a statement of exuberance from an artist who's known to deal in gloom.4
Pop music, it seems, has finally caught up with Arca, née Alejandra Ghersi. The Venezuelan artist has helped shape the sound of hip-hop, indie-pop, and R&B over the last decade, making sizable contributions to projects by Kanye West, Björk, and Kelela, while toiling away at her solo work in a separate, more challenging lane. After three albums of apocalyptic, ambient tone poems, Arca's pop and avant-garde interests converge on Kick I. It's an anti-pop pop album, a distillation of the producer-singer-arranger extraordinaire's ambitions and a statement of exuberance from an artist who's known to deal in gloom.
Where Arca's past efforts sought to express states of dissociation, rendering a consciousness flitting in and out of reality, the songs on Kick I are noticeably present and tuned-in. This mood is reportedly due to newfound romance and reaching a comfort with her hybrid identity as both non-binary and a trans woman, and Kick I feels buoyed and fueled by these personal landmarks. In the past, Arca opined about the discomforts of being who she is, but on the album's opening track, "Nonbinary," she practically gloats: "I'm special, you can't tell me otherwise…What a treat/Is is to be/non-binary." This confident swagger abounds across the album, and Arca's spirit of self-affirmation is well-earned.
Arca's gender identity is infused in the playfulness of her lyrics and compositions. Despite the addition of actual pop hooks throughout Kick I, Arca's beats continue to emphasize destabilization and change. Her songs are all bridge—stretches of evolution from one idea or mindset to the next. Just when you've grown accustomed to a sound or riff, the floor drops out, shifting to another mode and vibe altogether. The production oscillates wildly between harsh and smooth, as in the way the kinetic, abrasive "Riquiquí" segues into the graceful ballad "Calor"; strings and clanking percussion mix, squaring off in striking juxtaposition.
The album's lyrics, sung in equal parts Spanish and English, toy with and complicate notions of gender and desire. On "La Chiqui" (which roughly translates to "babydoll"), fellow electro-industrial popsmith Sophie has anarchic fun with pronouns, knowingly upending binaries: "She is my boyfriend/Flowers of my love/He is my best friend/Roots blowing up…the schism it shifts, it rips…" "Machote" and "Mequetrefe" express Arca's yearning for a hyper-masculine man who's an accomplished lover and, of course, "knows how to shake it." The latter song's title is Venezuelan slang for a type of cocksure man, often used derogatorily, but for whom Arca makes no apologies for wanting, even delightfully asserting that she "deserves" him.
Arca's always been amusing—after all, she once titled a song "Front Load"—but Kick I is a new high water-mark for her leftfield one-liners and absurd metaphors, all tied to her assurance and strength. "Rip the Slit" winds its way through a series of tongue-twisting phrases and fragments that speak frankly of anatomical mutation, delivered in lurching, pitched-up vocals. And on "Riquiquí," she vividly, hilariously invokes both mangos and mayonnaise.
"Riquiquí" includes a repeated description of "a white metal rose," whose paradoxical mix of materials perfectly encapsulates the joining of the natural and the mechanical across Arca's music. Her beats move and operate based on collisions of one element crashing into another or the cacophony emitted by many noises firing off at once. And true to her habit of straddling binaries, the sonics on Kick I have a real dimensionality and tangibility—as in what sounds like wood splintering on "La Chiqui"—even though they also have a kind of wispy, cyber-weightlessness, as if they could self-destruct at any given moment.
On the off chance that the forces colliding are both bodies, Arca can be tender. She croons about the unity of becoming one with a lover on "No Queda Nada," the album's beautifully patient closing track. "Nothing left in me that you haven't touched," she lilts, "Not even a corner left/Into which your warmth hasn't seeped." The "you" could be a paramour, but it's also possible Arca is talking about coming into her own. Thus, Kick I is a sometimes quite bawdy love letter, both to the self and a potential partner. By far the bounciest, most ecstatic song cycle of Arca's career, the album is a celebration of actualization, whether that's spurned by finding harmony internally or in communion with another.
Label: XL Release Date: June 26, 2020 Buy: Amazon
Review: Jessie Ware's What's Your Pleasure? Is a Transportive Disco Trip
An album that, just a few months ago, might have felt like a nostalgia trip or a guilty pleasure now feels like manna for the soul.4
The art and media released immediately following a crisis or disaster often exist in a strange sort of vacuum—paradoxically oblivious to the bleak realities of the world into which they've been dropped and inextricably bound to it. The digital age allows for a more immediate reaction to world events—Charli XCX's How I'm Feeling Now was created as a real-time response to the COVID-19 shutdown—but the vast majority of the albums released so far this year were recorded prior to the pandemic. They serve as relics preserved in time, reminders of the simple pleasures we took for granted just a few months ago.
Some, like Lady Gaga's recent Chromatica and Jessie Ware's What's Your Pleasure?, were created specifically for clubs, most of which have been temporarily shuttered. To add irony to injury, both albums find their creators returning to their dance roots after years-long sabbaticals from the genre. Ware, in particular, has with each album moved further away from the experimental electronic music of her early collaborations with the likes of SBTRKT and Sampha, and 2017's Glasshouse eschewed dance music altogether.
More than a dance album, though, the U.K. singer's beat-driven What's Your Pleasure? is a truly immersive experience, transporting listeners not just to pre-COVID days, but to a time and place much further back. The opening track, "Spotlight," is a sultry, understated throwback to Four Seasons of Love-era Moroder and Bellotte, with Ware's recollections of a fleeting romance floating atop a plush arrangement of disco strings, chirpy guitar licks, and wobbly bass. As the song climbs to its blissed-out climax, you can almost feel the polyester on your skin and smell the Paco Rabanne in the air.
Ware's devotedly crafted escapism isn't limited to one narrowly defined period or genre: The title track's rollicking bass and squelchy synths nod to Italo disco, while the cheeky "Ooh La La" dips into expansive funk-pop, with Ware playing Teena Marie to producer James Ford's Rick James. And that's just the album's opening stretch. Ford, one half of British electronic duo Simian Mobile Disco, is at the helm of most of What's Your Pleasure?, striking a deft balance between vintage and modern, between organic and synthetic, on tracks like "Save a Kiss," whose live orchestral swells wash over sleek programming and driving house beats.
The album doesn't completely abandon the smooth R&B that Ware has honed over the last several years, and there's plenty of downstairs music to groove to here. The slow-burning "In Your Eyes" glides along an oscillating bassline that allows Ware's mesmerizing vocal to take center stage: "It feels like we've been dancing to this song all of our lives," she sings, her voice mimicking the track's sweeping strings and brass. "The Kill" is another smoldering slow jam, an undercurrent of orchestral and gospel flourishes bolstering its tenuous hook.
Lyrically, the songs stick to common, if not completely frivolous, tropes like love, lust, and longing. "Tell me when I'll get more than a dream of you," Ware implores on "Spotlight." But these themes take on even deeper meaning in a time where physical connection and communal experiences are few and far between. Depending on your level of caution fatigue, the album's explicit invitation to indulge might seem sadistic. The thought of bumping up against a stranger on a dance floor these days feels forbidden, even dangerous. But when Ware croons, "Last night we danced and I thought you were saving my life," on the rapturous "Mirage (Don't Stop)," it's a reminder that music and dancing remain universal forms of salvation. What's Your Pleasure? is an album that, just a few months ago, might have felt like a nostalgia trip or a guilty pleasure, but now feels like manna for the soul.
Label: Interscope Release Date: June 26, 2020 Buy: Amazon
Review: Khruangbin's Mordechai Confronts the Present with Open Arms
An effort to appreciate the present before it slips away into the recesses of memory forms the album's foundation.4
A live act at heart, Khruangbin performs at the leisurely pace of experienced improvisational musicians, while their songs are judiciously pared down to playlist-friendly lengths ideal for your local Starbucks. But the Houston rock trio's output can hardly be categorized as "easy listening." Khruangbin's homage to eclectic musical traditions from around the world demands close attention. The band's third album, Mordechai, coalesces the balmy Southeast Asian-influenced rock of 2015's The Universe Smiles Upon You and the baroque Iranian psychedelia of 2018's Con Todo El Mundo, injecting it all with a generous helping of funk. All the while, the ornamental, unhurried grooves maintain Khruangbin's signature air of reverence and abundance, ensuring that each song unfolds organically.
The album's opening track, "First Class," launches the album into a dreamy stratosphere, as the band—whose name means "airplane" in Thai—details the opulence of a first-class flight over shimmering guitars. This euphoric yet playful tone permeates much of the rest of the album, which unlike the group's past efforts, incorporates vocals into all but one of the tracks. Lead single "Time (You and I)" offers an Edenic proposition, smokily sung by bassist Laura Lee: "We can play like children play/We can say like children say." She beckons us to shed the concerns and judgments of adulthood and rediscover the world through the eyes of a child.
Having gained renown primarily as an instrumental band, Khruangbin mastered the dimensions of their sonic blueprint early on. Propelled by drummer Donald "DJ" Johnson's tumbling backbeats, Lee's meandering bass often provided the heartbeat of each of the band's songs, while Speer's guitar, laden with brambly hammer-on passages that evoke Middle Eastern rock, served as a lush accent. This interplay spared little breathing room for vocals; the rare mantra-like chant would be a word or phrase sung by the trio and sustained, as if the vocal were itself another instrument adding to the mix.
By contrast, there's only one true instrumental on Mordechai, the pensive "Father Bird, Mother Bird," and half of the album's tracks boast entire verses and choruses. What was once implied is now overtly articulated. Lee's ruminations on memory surface on "Connaissais de Face," a Thai surf-rock jam interspersed with a conversation between two old friends. One remarks to the other, "Time changes everything," a truism that seems hackneyed until it's put into relief with the friends' struggle to reconcile the old and new versions of themselves.
On the tender "Dearest Alfred," Lee gives thanks to a loved one after receiving a letter that transports her to their shared past: "Can you imagine the joy/When I received your wonderful letter?/Your letter is the best gift." For Khruangbin, the act of recollection entails articulating past emotions. Language, be it a bittersweet heart-to-heart or the scribbled thoughts of a letter, enables us to historicize the past—the closest we can ever come to reliving it.
Armed with this special regard for memory, the band confronts the impetus of the present with open eyes and arms. The Spanish-language "Pelota" is a playful jaunt situated at the intersection of Iranian rock and Afro-Colombian cumbia. Lee compares herself to a ball of soot traversing life's peaks and valleys, at once acknowledging her smallness and the immensity of the chaos surrounding her. Still, she adopts a stance of acceptance: "Pero quiero amar el desastre/El desastre que es mío" ("But I want to love the disaster/The disaster that is mine").
This effort to appreciate the present before it slips away into the recesses of memory forms the album's foundation. While past Khruangbin albums risked coming off merely as studied tributes to the microcosms of Thai and Iranian rock, Mordechai finds Khruangbin coming into their own, thanks to the band's lyrical development and the honing of their fusion of intercontinental influences. As the adage goes, there's nothing new under the sun, but Mordechai makes a case that maybe there just might be.
Label: Dead Oceans Release Date: June 26, 2020 Buy: Amazon
Review: HAIM's Women in Music Pt. III Is Defined by a Strong Sense of Self
The album strikes a deft balance between experimental and commercial, moody and uplifting.4
HAIM's third album, Women in Music Pt. III, opens with "Los Angeles," an off-the-wall mishmash of jazzy horns, light funk guitars, and dub rhythms that attempts to transpose Vampire Weekend's distinct sound to the West Coast. It is, perhaps, an unsurprising development given that the album was co-produced by VW cohort Ariel Rechtshaid and former member Rostam Batmanglij, and that Rechtshaid's girlfriend, Danielle Haim, is featured prominently throughout the band's 2019 album Father of the Bride.
But while there's plenty of genre-hopping on Women in Music Pt. III—hip-hop, reggae, folk, heartland rock, and dance—Danielle and sisters Este and Alana have created an album that's defined not just by exploration, but by their strong sense of individuality. Unlike the sparkling, thoroughly modern production of 2017's Something to Tell You, on which both Rechtshaid and Batmanglij also served as producers, this album's scratchy drums, murky vocals, and subtle blending of acoustic and electronic elements sound ripped straight from an old vinyl. It's darker, heavier fare for HAIM, for sure—a summer party record for a troubled summer.
The album's title is tongue-in-cheek: Danielle, Este, and Alana aren't known for singing about gender politics so much as hook-ups, breakups, and all of the points in between ("3 AM," for one, finds Danielle contemplating her response to a wee-hours booty call). But the same could be said of a feminist icon like Joni Mitchell, whose influence looms large—perhaps too large—over back-to-back cuts "I've Been Down" and "Man from the Magazine." A stripped-down acoustic missive, the latter recounts an experience Este had with a skeevy reporter who asked her if the exaggerated faces she makes on stage are the same ones she makes in bed. "What do really want me to say back?" Danielle scoffs. "Is this what you think making a pass is?"
HAIM's brand of feminism is otherwise less explicit, manifesting in their unapologetically unfiltered, fiercely independent persona. "The Steps" is the album's most cathartic moment: "I can't understand why you don't understand me," sings Danielle, who isn't one to mince words. "And every day I wake up and make money for myself/And though we share a bed you know that I don't need your help," she bellows. With its ecstatic octave-jumping hook and braying guitar licks, "The Steps" is a nearly perfect pop-rock song. So, for that matter, is the sleepily chugging "Up from a Dream," while the infectious "Now I'm in It" and "Don't Wanna" blend synths and guitars so deftly that the line between pop and rock remains blurred. (Anyone still skeptical of HAIM's rock n' roll bona fides is likely to be won over by Danielle and Alana shredding dueling acid-drenched guitar solos at the end of "FUBT").
While only one of its songs exceeds four minutes, Women in Music Pt. III runs a bit long at 16 tracks, including a trio of singles that were released last year and are sequenced unceremoniously at the end of the album. While "Now I'm In It" meshes well with the rest of the material, the folksy "Hallelujah" and the generic groove track "Summer Girl"—which borrows heavily enough from "Walk on the Wild Side" that Lou Reed receives a writing credit—stick out on an album that otherwise flows sublimely. And with such thorough melding of influences to be found elsewhere, the more bald-faced genre exercises—hip-hop on "3 AM," reggae on "Another Try"—come across as a bit lazy.
Yet, HAIM's instincts to veer a little more left of the dial on Women in Music Pt. III result in an album that strikes a deft balance between the experimental and the commercial, the moody and the uplifting. You're unlikely to hear these songs on Kroger's in-store playlist—on which 2017's "Little of Your Love" seems to have become a permanent staple alongside the likes of "Eye of the Tiger" and "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)"—but these songs are riskier, and ultimately that much more rewarding.
Label: Columbia Release Date: June 26, 2020 Buy: Amazon
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Floodwaters swamp midtown parking garage
A newly arrived Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, man got a rude welcome to Houston on Friday morning after heavy downpours swamped the lower floor of a parking garage at his mid-town apartment complex.
David Marra, 23, woke up with other residents at the Calais at Courtlandt Square apartments at 3210 Louisiana to find their cars nearly submerged in about 4 feet of water in the below-ground level parking area.
Marra and the others stared in disbelief as the floodwaters in the garage settled around and inside the cars parked there.
"This is one of the worst things that could happen," Marra said. He had just moved to Houston three weeks ago from Pittsburg to start a new job in sales. His car, a Nissan Altima, was brand new. Now, he said, water covers it up to the headlights.
"This is not how I wanted to start my career in Houston," Marra said.
According to the National Weather Service, thunderstorms rumbled through the Houston region overnight, dumping up to 7 inches of rain in some spots. Most areas inside the 610 Loop recorded between about 2 inches and 6 inches.
The heavy rain was only part of what led to street flooding in the area, said Brian Kyle, a meteorologist with the Weather Service. Kyle said the downpours fell so fast that drainage systems likely were overwhelmed. Some spots, he said, recorded about 4 inches of rain an hour.
"It was extememly high rainfall rates," Kyle said.
Kyle said no residential flooding had been reported, but street flooding was common when the storms moved through area. Areas between the Hardy Toll Road and the Eastex Freeway near Aldine-Westfield recorded about 6.5 inches of rainfall during the storms.
Drew Harrison, 24, lost some of his wedding shower gifts in the flooded apartment complex parking garage. He said they were in his car that sat in about 4 feet of water. His wedding is scheduled for early Septmember and he planned to move out of the complex when his lease expires in a few weeks. He expects to pick up the keys today for his new apartment in the Heights where he'll begin his married life.
Harrison looked on the bright side of his ruined wedding shower gifts, which he hoped to salvage, and his water-logged car, a 10-year-old Mazada.
"I needed a new car," he said.
Other residents were stunned but accepted the situation philosophically.
"It's crazy," said 26-year-old Logan Theriot, who moved into the complex three weeks ago. "It's one of those freak accidents."
Staff at the complex declined to comment about the flooding.
The below-ground level parking garage at Pearl Midtown, an apartment complex at 3101 Louisiana near the Calais at Courtlandt Square was also flooded. The complex had recently opened, however, and no cars appeared to be parked in that part of the garage.
Officials with Pearl Midtown could not be reached for comment.
Landscaping mulch washed from flower beds littered sidewalks and curbs. But other buisnesses in the area appeared to have escaped flood damage. One building had some debris in its courtyard, but no water.
Back at the Calais at Courtlandt Square apartments, new-Houston resident Marra said he was uncertain what his next step would be.
"I'm at a loss right now," he said.

subset: commoncrawl


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Placerville, CO101 Buckskin Lane
Est. Mortgage: $/month
MLS Number 34808
- Land
- Acreage 1,500
A truly exceptional opportunity to own a 1,500 acre ranch. One of the finest recreational properties in the Rocky Mountains. Located just 13 miles on year-round roads from the legendary resort town of Telluride, this ranch retreat offers its owners miles of trails for hiking, biking & snowmobiling; a contemporary main home; an intimate log-and-stone Guest Cabin; a world-class sporting clay/shooting course; 32,000 sq ft Equestrian Barn, featuring 21 stalls, with veterinary facility, game room, stocked trout ponds, flowing waters of Fall Creek & rolling meadows, towering trees & verdant green pastures offer staggering views of the surrounding 14,000 ft peaks of the Wilson Range.
Listed by Bill Fandel of Compass- Telluride


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Posts Tagged "2017 new jokes"
Do you know what I think?
Fred and Mary get married but can't afford a honeymoon, so they go back to mom and dads for the night. In the morning, little Johnny gets up and has his breakfast.
As he is going out of the door to go to school, he asks his mum if Fred and Mary are up yet.
She replies, "No".
Johnny asks, "Do you know what I think?"
His mom replies, "Never mind what you think! Just go to school."
Johnny comes home for lunch and asks his mom, "Is Fred and Mary up yet?"
She replies, "No."
Johnny says, "Do you know what I think?"
His mom replies, "Never mind what you think! Eat your lunch and go back to school."
After school, he comes home and asks, "Is Fred and Mary up yet?"
His mom says, "No."
Johnny asks, "Do you know what I think?"
His mom replies, "OK! What do you think?"
He says, "Well, last night Fred came in for Vaseline and I think I gave him my airplane glue."
Oh God,I'm coming!
The nun teaching Sunday School was speaking to her class one morning and she asked the question, "When you die and go to Heaven… which part of your body goes first?"
Suzy raised her hand and said, "I think it's your hands."
Why do you think it's your hands, Suzy?"
Suzy replied, "Because when you pray, you hold your hands together in front of you and God just takes your hands first."
"What a wonderful answer!" the nun said.
Little Johnny raised his hand and said, "Sister, I think it's your legs."
The nun looked at him with the strangest look on her face.
"Now, Little Johnny, why do you think it would be your legs?"
Little Johnny said, "Well, I walked into Mommy and Daddy's bedroom the other night. Mommy had her legs straight up in the air and she was saying, "Oh God,I'm coming!"
If Dad hadn't pinned her down, we'd have lost her."
The nun fainted.
Hold on, let me get my hat
A guy is walking down the street with some chicken wire under his arm. His neighbor sees him and asks what he has.
The guy replies, "It's chicken wire and I'm going to catch some chickens." His neighbor says, "You fool, you can't catch chickens with chicken wire."
Later that night, he sees the guy walking down the street dragging 12 chickens.
The next day he sees him walking down the street with some duct tape under his arm. Once again he asks what the guy is up to.
The guy says he has some duct tape and he is going to catch some ducks. He replies, "You fool, you can't catch ducks with duct tape."
Sure enough later that night, he sees the guy walking down the street dragging 12 ducks behind him.
The next day, he sees the guy walking with something else under his arm. He asks what it is.
The guy replies, "It's pussy willow."
He says, "Hold on, let me get my hat."
You got a heart murmur
A 92-year-old man went to the doctor to get a physical. A few days later the doctor saw the man walking down the street with a gorgeous young lady on his arm. At his follow up visit the doctor talked to the man and said, "You're really doing great, aren't you?" The man replied, "Just doing what you said Doctor, 'Get a hot mamma and be cheerful'.
" The Doctor said, "I didn't say that. I said you got a heart murmur. Be careful."
Such a nice house!
An office manager arrives at his department and sees an employee sitting behind his desk totally stressed out. He gives him the advice: "I went home every afternoon for two weeks and had myself pampered by my wife. It was fantastic and it really helped, you should try it too!". Two weeks later when the manager arrives at his department he sees the man happy and full of energy at his desk. The faxes are piling up and the computer is running at full speed. "I see you followed my advice?".
"I did", answers the employee, "It was great! By the way, I didn't know you had such a nice house!".
Because you got an F
A Mom is driving a little girl to her friend's house for a play date. "Mommy," the little girl asks, "how old are you?" The mother looks over at the little girl, "Honey, you are not supposed to ask a lady her age, it isn't polite." the mother warns. "Ok," the little girl says, "How much do you weigh?"
"Now really," the mother says, "these are personal questions and are really none of your business." Undaunted, the little girl asks, "Why did you and daddy get a divorce?"
"That is enough questions, honestly!" The exasperated mother walks away as the two friends begin to play.
"My Mom wouldn't tell me anything," the little girl says to her friend. "Well," said the friend, "all you need to do is look at her driver's license. It is like a report card, it has everything on it." Later that night the little girl says to her mother, "I know how old you are, you are 32." The mother is surprised and asks, "How did you find that out?"
"I also know that you weigh 140 pounds." The mother is past surprise and shock now. "How in heavens name did you find that out?" The little girl continues on triumphantly, "And… I know why you and daddy got a divorce."
"Oh really?", the mother asks, "Why is that?" To which the girl replies, "Because you got an F in sex."
Fred was wearing a snowmobile suit
Three guys are fishing when Fred gets up to get a beer, loses his balance and falls out of the boat.
Ed says " What should we do?"
Bill says, "You better jump in after him, he's been under water for a while, he might need some help."
So Ed jumps in, and after some time, he surfaces. He says, "Help me get him in the boat."
They wrestle Fred back into the boat.
Ed says, "What do we do now, it doesn't look like he's breathing."
Bill says, "Give him mouth to mouth."
Ed starts to blow air into Fred's mouth and says,
"Whoa, I don't remember Fred having such bad breath."
Bill says, "Come to think of it, I don't think Fred was wearing a snowmobile suit, either."
Hickory dickory dock
A flat-chested young lady went to Dr. Smith for advice about breast enlargements.
He told her, "Every day when you get out of the shower, rub the top of your nipples and say, 'Scooby dooby dooby, I want bigger boobies.' "
She did this every day faithfully. After several months, it worked! She grew great boobs! One morning she was running late, and in her rush to leave for work, she realized she had forgotten her morning ritual. At this point she loved her boobs and didn't want to lose them, so she got up in the middle of the bus and said, "Scooby dooby dooby, I want bigger boobies."
A guy sitting nearby asked her, "Do you go to Dr. Smith by any chance?"
"Why yes, I do. How did you know?"
The man stood up and cupped his balls and said, "Hickory dickory dock…"
What they want and what they get
What women want
What women want in a relationship: A handsome, loving professional man who will just love them for who they are.
What they get
What women get: A fat, balding fart machine who stays with them only because no other woman wants him.
What men want
What men want in a woman: A combination of Carol Brady and Pamela Lee Anderson; Wonderful Mom with big hooters and can suck the chrome off a flag pole.
What men get
What men get: Someone who immediately begins to gain those 80 extra lbs. the moment after she says "I Do", beginning with the wedding cake!
I'll have it enlarged
The leading couple of this joke consists of a husband and a wife. The wife has just taken a shower and comes out wrapped in a towel, still shy being newly wed.
"Well, I've seen you naked. You don't need that towel," says the husband.
"I just feel more comfortable this way," the wife responds.
"But I want to take a picture of you in a natural state," continues the husband.
The wife gets suspicious and asks what the husband would do with the photo. "I'll put in in my wallet and keep it close to my heart all the time," he responds and gets his picture then heading for a shower himself. He returns clean but also wrapped in a towel.
"Why are you wearing that towel now – I want a photo of you in return," demands the wife. The Husband does as he's told, the photo's taken and they check the result in their digital camera.
"What will you do with this photo of me, then?" asks the husband.
The wife takes a good look at her husband, then the photo, then husband again. "I'll have it enlarged," she finally responds.


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Karaoke allows you to sing along with your favorite songs! All karaoke tracks include background vocals and instrumentals. Perfect for practice, performance, or just plain fun, most can be used with a standard CD player.More about karaoke formats
Karaoke Formats
Karaoke discs allow you to sing along to your favorite songs. The lead vocals are removed or lowered in volume, depending on the disc format, thus giving you the chance to be the star of the show. When most karaoke discs are played in a karaoke machine, the lyrics are displayed for easy sing along fun. Many karaoke disc formats are available, and each includes its own special features. Learn more about common formats below:


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Dropbox today announced a new synchronization API for iOS and Android-powered devices that it said will offer developers a new code library to help them better focus on creating mobile apps.
The new API is available today on Dropbox's developer's site.
The API takes care of all the complexity around caching, syncing, and working offline so that apps just work - allowing developers to focus on creating the best mobile apps, according to Dropbox.
According to the blog by Dropbox software developer Brian Smith, key features of the Sync API include the Dropbox "built-in" feature, a "write locally, sync globally" tool and the ability to develop offline and have apps sync up when an app comes online.
The new "built-in" feature is a synchronization API that allows an application to work with Dropbox as if it were a local file system on the mobile device. It enables developers to incorporate one of Dropbox's most popular features - syncing -- into their apps, and takes care of caching. The feature makes it easier for developers to deliver a seamless user experience across different devices and platforms, Dropbox said.
The ability to write locally and sync globally allows developers to quickly list the contents of a folder, or move, delete and create files and folders locally and see the results immediately. The Sync API handles caching, retrying uploads and downloads, and quickly discovering changes, leaving the developer with a simple view of files and folders, according to Dropbox.
According to Smith's blog, a few developers have already been building with the new API, including Chris Cox, the developer of Squarespace Note, "who found that it cut his Dropbox code in half."
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com.
See more by Lucas Mearian on Computerworld.com.


text: Chronometrage report for Inspector General From Chapter 1: Meyerhold-Dapertutto: Framing the Grotesque Chronometrage report (n.d.) for Inspector General, based on the play by Nikolai Gogol, adapted by Vsevolod Meyerhold and Mikhail Korenev, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, Meyerhold Theatre (GosTIM), Moscow (premiere: December 9, 1926). Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, f. 963, op. 1, ed. khr. 513: 6.


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September 14, 2004
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CBS is leaking like a pierced heart and it's going to get worse-- see esp. Latest from CBS and ABC, CBS Affiliates upset, and No More Benefit of the Doubt.
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They move through the congested streets of every Vietnamese city: scooters and small motorcycles loaded with everything from potted plants to live pigs to families of four with joyful toddlers and sleeping babies who droop dangerously from the arms of mothers. Oh, how I wanted to be among them. But, standing on a street corner on my first day in the mega-city of Ho Chi Minh City, mesmerized by the graceful flow and the constant buzzing that sent waves of joy through my body, I doubted I could survive the anarchy.
In my hotel room that night, I read from a novel set in HCMC by John Shors called The Dragon House. Reading stories about the place I am visiting often gives me an understanding of what goes on behind the closed doors I pass, what goes on in the minds of the people who serve my meals or run the shops. But after one day in HCMC, I knew this author hadn't got it right. The novel was about an American woman who sets up a home for street children. In one chapter, the woman, who has never ridden a scooter in her life, gets on one for the first time and drives through the streets of the city with total ease. I envied her excitement but didn't believe it. Although I hadn't seen a single fender bender — and never did in my month in Vietnam — I knew that traffic fatalities are the leading cause of injury death and the government has made devising traffic laws and means to enforce them a national priority.
I love riding my scooter on the orderly streets of Toronto, but after one day in HCMC I already knew that the madness of the dark but still buzzing streets below me were something altogether different, something too dangerous for the uninitiated. I decided the pleasure I might experience wasn't worth the risk. I had made it past fifty, traveled to some harrowing countries, without so much as a broken bone. I didn't want to change that.
Eye Contact Not Optional
In the following days, despite myself, I found myself studying the patterns of scooter traffic wherever I went. I would focus in on one rider and watch how she negotiated the intersections and the turns. When there are no traffic lights, which is often the case, riders flow around each other and around pedestrians, and, when they want to make a left turn at a busy corner, they simply turn close to the curb on the wrong side of the street and cross the oncoming traffic when they can. Like I said: madness.
The key to all this is eye contact. It's easy to learn this lesson first as a pedestrian. You simply stare at the rider coming at you and keep walking at a steady pace. Riders do much the same. At any given second they are gauging the intention of the riders to their left and to their right and the speed of pedestrians and vehicles in front of them. It is only through this individual awareness and collective consideration that riders arrive at their destination unscathed. An apt mindfulness exercise in a city of Buddhist temples. But maybe my Buddhist lesson would be one about attachment, letting go of an unreal idea.
So, as we set out for a month-long trip through the rest of the country, I decided I would concentrate on learning more about the culture of scooters and motorcycles in Vietnam and leave the riding to the locals.
From Pedals to Motors in a Heartbeat
In Hanoi, I picked up a postcard from the "old days," way back in the 1980s. On the front, rusted bicycles flowed through dusty streets. Behind me, in 2012, the bicycles were few and far between. Scooters blocked the sidewalk on each side of the shop I was in; scooters and small motorcycles bounced around the tourists in the old city. Later that night, online, I found the facts: there are about 30-million two-wheeled motorized vehicles in Vietnam and they make up more than 90 per cent of all the country's vehicles.
That dramatic growth is perhaps the most visible sign, at least to the Western eye, of the changes in Vietnam since the government opened the doors to economic reform with a policy introduced in 1986 called doi moi, or renovation. In Vietnam Rising, journalist Bill Hayton describes the bumpy road of economic growth in a country still clinging to central Communist rule while encouraging private enterprise and foreign investment. He says the motorcycle (including the scooter or "automatic motorcycle") became not only a symbol of freedom for young people after growing up in a dreary, confining Communist environment but also a way to leave their villages behind to make money in the new businesses of the cities.
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We wake up in a hotel room built from squares, in a village with no discernible past, future or villagers. Some 20 miles outside the festival site, what we would later learn was Bitterfeld is truly one of the strangest places we've ever visited – a Saturday ride through the town centre betrays no signs of life, no youth, no nothing. Just endless houses, recent-built, sat isolated in plots of land like they're trying their hardest to ignore and deny the presence of neighbouring borders. We hang around 'til mid-afternoon, tiring of passing cyclists, before giving in and making the return to Ferropolis.
Familiar gone eerie, comes again with the day's first band and the watching of things. Shout Out Louds are typical Scandinavians, penning as they do bouts of sound that fall between innocuous nonsense and pleasant pop. But as 'Please, Please, Please' rumbles into 'Tonight I Have To Leave It' a pattern emerges. Every single song sounds like The Cure reimagined as a car advert. 'Plastic Passion', 'Without You', 'Close To Me'. The band shoot for Smith but take-out Oberst. We drift.
On one of last night's dizzy treks we stumbled across a 'hidden' stage, tucked neatly away between three walls at the back of the site and almost spectacularly empty. Dirk Rumpff is battling manfully; against the empty space in front of him, against the house martins dive-bombing the intruder from their nests under the guttering of those three walls. The most intrepid get a couple of feet into his booth before rebounding off the growl of bass and the whine of ailing glitch; the most unnecessary use of dry ice cloaking nothing but clear, evening air.
Attentions flit to jerk-merchants Erase Errata. As the deformed bassline to 'Cruising' opens, the sheen that overly-polished Nightlife is washed off, spiralling riffs handled by sweaty palms lose their shape and gain a reckless authority. Rampant throughout, Jenny Hoyston's careless contribution is performed with sullen, Kim Deal brilliance. Mark E Smith may have pulled his billed appearance with Von Sudenfed this weekend but the relentless spirit of the Prestwich noisenik remains.
On, to Lo-Fi-Fnk, beneath the disco ball dangling above the dance stage. They're beset by technical problems from the first song – which is also the second, the third. Tapping feet get itchy with the restarts and when we leave they don't feel like a big miss. They're young enough to be seen again, at any rate.
By this point we'd seen a host of Germans wrapped in Tocotronic Ts – a host of hostages, on hearing, taken captive by some movement of native sympathies. The most interesting thing about the A-Z indie that's somehow made it onto the main stage at this hour was thinking about my Tocotronics – the bands in the UK, or England, or London that the heart takes to heart for the spec of their passport. As far as we could tell there was nothing more here – Yank radio rock rebranded in tricolour.
Something numerically less on the Gemini stage, but Düsseldorf duo Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma shrug off E. Smith's absence as Mouse On Mars. An awkward drone holds the set together as material from Idiology provides the backbone of something that lurches and bounds before a backdrop of shotgun politik. By now everyone's blottko and their awkward skrunk seeps like emerald blottings down the grooves on a knuckle. We burst out of the tent into the fresher air, looking for eyes awake again.
What do we have here? Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, despite all the Ginsberg-citing and JAMC affiliations, failing to provide any of the masked poignancy of either influence. Relying heavily upon early material, their sonic snore is exposed as being little more than a sub-Verve dirge. Whilst 'Berlin' provides BRMC's ode to a nearby wall's fall, with fatigue setting and salt in the eyes it's us that feel like rubble.
And so, with such retrospective posing on one stage, another provides The Horrors. Heads down, clad in black, drenched in distortion, the parallels are there; but for the artschool pretence and the polite reception that greets them. When compared to the trite BRMC they provide a fiercely gothic psychedelic mess, and though Farris Badwan lurches over onlookers with a somewhat flimsy menace the set provides their staple dose of noise-mongering. Find Horrors wading the same swamp as The Birthday Party once wade, albeit with a beetle-legged meticulosity.
The main stage is running late, so a chance is taken and we steal our way onto one of the hospitality tours running up the legs of the excavators. Sit and wait, camera in hand, we head across the tarmac, up stairs and up the tin machiney. It's dark and dank in here, predictably, and the skeletons are given flimsy new skin by an empire of busy spiders. We climb up, but are told to stop – the gangway we're on can't be more than 20 ft into the air and the brakes are put on. Frustrated, we sit and wait for the late-running main stage to get back into gear, but get bored and go looking for the Dutch, our heads clouding. We get word – he's climbed the biggest machine in the park, and wants us to bring drinks. Later, later.
When The Neptunes provide the bulk of the brilliance in your set it should be left in its brazenly bare glory. Whereas Alex Smoke had the sense the evening prior to trust the stark minimalism that often underpins his output, Kelis employs the age-old festival tactic of tailoring herself for the festival circuit. This means a full band, the pretence of sophisticat-ing rock and - resultant - the whiff of intense smuggery. So, where 'Millionaire' should provide a bona fide pop piece it drowns behind the band and the careful detail Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams applied to 'Milkshake' and 'Good Stuff' is wrecked by some meddling six-string berk. We leave her jiggling without her underwear to resume our search for Mammut.
We imagine a good place as any to be the Big Wheel stage, Melt!'s primary dancefloor. That floor is shaking with the stomp of feet, faces contort. We catch just the end of Michael Mayer, but it's a brilliant end, the shifting chords of Gui Boratto's 'Beautiful Life' lifting moods up to the glitterball above. In the melee, we locate Mammut and from here on in things go stellar.
Melt!'s golden period starts now, in the heat and swipe of Digitalism. It's a struggle to put words to dance music – 'cause a) minds are usually fuzzy by now; and b) it's the thinnest line between something euphoric, uniting, dirty, genius; and not quite cutting it. This does cut, hard – go to the medley at the link above to pull together some kind of idea of quite how sharp this set was. Easily the musical highlight of the weekend so far, and with Simian Mobile Disco to follow.
Except we wouldn't see SMD – we'd hear them, definitely, but from the sort of distance where 'I Believe' and 'Hustler' came from behind closed doors – memories flood of occupying stairs in superclubs, fire exits at school discos, bedrooms at house parties. Anywhere sound's dulled and chat can flow.
Up we went, lead by Mammut, jumping the security fence. Stole in and bounded all stealthy over to the machine, the biggest machine in the park, over by the lake. We clamber over the gate and start our ascent, buoyed on dust and clatter up through its rippling, rusty guts like monkeys in a metal thicket; 'til we're right up, legs dangling 100 tingling feet off the ground, grinning and half-gurning in the canopy. The Mobile Disco lights up beneath us, throwing out gooey green light and bass that rumbles up the aching struts of the excavator and shakes the webs of lonely spiders. There's a spotlight from below that hovers at us, but it passes on and we're left in the relative dark with Mammut, the sunsetting over the toxic lake, over our shoulders, looking down through the lasers on the city of iron.
Second photograph shot by Bastian Langguth; all others by Sam Strang


text:
The first hard frost of fall has come. I think it happened here on October 24. I can't say for sure because I was in Ohio visiting family. I knew the seasons would be changing in the eight days I would be gone. In preparation for leaving I was busy cleaning up the garden, which goes hand in hand with building compost piles, and planting cover crops. When I returned on October 30 the leaves on the trees had changed colors and the newly planted cover crop seeds had sprouted.
When the first hard frost comes in the fall, everything changes in the garden. The pepper plants that were so lush the day before are now wilted, along with so many other warm weather crops. That doesn't mean your garden is finished for the season, however. This is the time for the cold weather crops to take center stage. I look forward to the frost bringing out the sweetness in the carrots and greens. In fact, I don't worry about growing carrots to harvest in the summer anymore because we are so spoiled with the ones we have in the cold months. For the next six months we will have sweet carrots fresh from the garden. I've previously written about how I grow my winter carrots.
Other fall and winter crops that we eat fresh from the garden are beets, Jerusalem artichokes, collards, kale, chard, and parsley. There are more root crops that I could add to the list, if I had grown them this year. Those crops are turnips, Daikon radish, and kohlrabi. No doubt, some of my readers could add more choices. With onions and garlic, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cowpeas, and peanuts from stored harvests, there is a wealth of food one can eat without further preservation. Our winters here in Zone 7 are not so mild that we don't need protection for the greens if we want to have a continual harvest. Even at that, picking once a week is what to expect, and less frequently during the weeks of the least daylight, so more area needs to be planted for winter harvest than needed for a spring planting.
I don't cover the carrots and beets with anything so as not to encourage voles to move in. They are planted early enough to be mature now, so only need to be held in cold storage in the soil. For protection from harsh winter weather for the greens I use low tunnels made from plastic pipe and old greenhouse plastic. This type of cover is easy to erect. The ½" plastic pipe can be inserted into larger size plastic pipe stuck in the ground or put over pieces of rebar. The rebar and larger plastic pipe is cut to 2' lengths and put half in and half out of the ground. If you leave rebar in the ground without a hoop over it, be sure to cover it with a plastic bottle, piece of plastic pipe, or an old tennis ball. You don't want anyone to get hurt if they stumble upon it. You can find rebar precut to various lengths in the building supply stores near the cement blocks. Plastic pipe comes in 10' lengths. I cut it to 8' to form a hoop over a 4' wide bed. These pipe structures also have a pipe across the top and a cord (anchored to the bottom of the hoops) that goes over the plastic cover to keep it in place. More details about that are at my blog post Managing a Cold Frame, Low Tunnel, or Mini-greenhouse. The plastic is held to the end hoops with clips made especially for that purpose. They are nice to have.
Having this bounty of food available in my garden all winter is the result of careful planning done sometimes a year in advance. To have the cabbage family greens at a good size now is sometimes a challenge, since they would have been started during hot weather. I have to keep a vigilant watch to pick off cabbage worms and harlequin bugs during those weeks. The seeds are started in the coldframe, not because they need protection, but because the coldframes are my seed starting areas. I do, however, sometimes cover the coldframe with a shadecloth if the weather is too hot and sunny. Once established, the best plants are transplanted to the garden beds. The winter covers don't go on until cold weather hits. I'm just now bringing the covers out. A big advantage of using this type of low cover, rather than a greenhouse, is that the covers are easily added, removed, or vented, allowing the plants to get the full benefit of the natural climate, including the rain.
If you don't have this variety of food available in your garden after the frost, and would like to, start making notes now and work on your garden plan to make it happen next year. Go ahead and prepare a bed and put a cover on it now, or at least put up the hoops and be ready for a cover. In late winter you can use it to get off to an early start. Put the cover on two weeks before your planting time to warm the soil. When my community college students planned a season extension structure for their projects, many of them constructed their designs, but put in transplants and seeds too late for a fall or winter harvest. However, often they found they had a very early spring harvest from those plants, especially with things like spinach. If you have the time and inclination to prepare now, it will put you one step ahead for early planting next spring.


text:
Is Cy Waits making an honest woman out of Paris Hilton?
The couple was reportedly spotted shopping for engagement rings in the Big Apple, according to the New York Post.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: The Bling Is The Thing! Hottest Celebrity Engagement Rings
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
The socialite and her club-promoter boyfriend, who are nearing their one-year dating anniversary, reportedly perused sparklers at luxury jeweler Jacob & Co. on Friday and admired several rocks including a rare 30-carat blue diamond.
Though Paris left the store sans an engagement ring, she didn't leave empty handed. The reality star reportedly left with a $25,000 black diamond-encrusted ring for her 30th birthday.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Paris Hilton's Journey From 'Simple' To Superstar!
The blond heiress has been opening up about her plans to marry Cy recently, telling the NY Post, "We've talked about [an engagement]," at her 30th birthday party at Lavo on Thursday.
"This is once in a lifetime," she added. "I want to be with him forever."
Additionally, Paris gushed over her man in a recent in an interview with Ryan Seacrest, telling the host, she's "sure" Cy will pop the question soon and that she's "never been happier."
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Hollywood's Smokin' Hot Couples
"[Cy] is such an incredible person," she told Ryan on Thursday, in an interview for his KIIS FM radio show. "Things have never been better in my life."
As previously reported on AccessHollywood.com, Paris' life will soon be on display once again in a new Oxygen TV reality series, "The World According to Paris," slated to premiere this spring.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: They Dated? Surprising Former Couples!
Copyright 2011 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Related Content from AccessHollywood.com:
PLAY IT NOW: Paris Hilton Gets 'Real' On Oxygen's 'The World According To Paris'
PLAY IT NOW: Paris Hilton & Brooke Mueller Team Up For New Reality TV Show, 'The World According To Paris'
More from Access: [ Paris Hilton Engagements Dating ]


text:
Actually, DTK should run on 2000/NT, if you have perl, Fred Cohen tried to make it portable, but I didn't check it.Originally posted by Mikey2K
Yea I agree to that.
Anyway Voum is there a version of the Kit for 2000/XP to?
Anyway, if it doesn't u should try windog (HTTP://188.8.131.52/cgi-bin/search/...earchvalue=DTK) and if you have some money to spend, buy ManTrap or another NOT freeware...


text:
Home >> Course Descriptions >> College of Arts and Sciences
Ballet Folklorico I.
Three semester hours.
Mexican Folkloric Dance. Instruction and participation in the foot work and fundamental folk dance techniques of the different regions of Mexico. This course is designed to prepare students for dance as a performing art. Directed experiences in dance concerts and lecture demonstrations; performances and practices required.
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