RAVE ON

Completely unrelated to St. Patrick's day, I went with friends to see the Raveonettes on Monday.



It was my third time catching them and I was definitely surprised by their new line-up. Previously they played with Sune Wagner on vocals/guitar, Sharin Foo on vocals/bass, this insane lead guitarist and a very bald drummer, plus lots of backing tracks. It always felt a little strange to have a full drummer playing along with so many backing tracks, and the Raveonettes fixed that by scaling back their line-up. Sune and Sharin both played guitar, accompanied only by a new girl on a very minimal drum kit of floor tom, snare, and ride cymbal.

Even if the drummer was a bit superfluous, it worked brilliantly. The songs came across as much more instinctive and visceral. And it was great to see/hear Sharin get into the feedback game with Sune on guitar. Nice to see that this band survived the garage-band craze of the early 00's intact and as virile as ever.



The only problem was NO "BEAT CITY"! That's the perfect set closer. Next time?

EYES OF LIGHT

Awesome Color have an awesome band name. And a new album, Electric Aborigines, coming out April 29 on Ecstatic Peace. You can download the first track "Eyes of Light" from the label's site now.

THE SAME THING AGAIN

I BECAME VERY VICIOUS

WHAT'S THE SAGA?

I am a huge fan of Queens of the Stone Age, if you didn't already know from reading the site. Like a lot of people, their third LP, 2002's Songs for the Deaf, was when I really started to pay attention to the band. However, I always sort of hated the radio "theme" that ran through the album, in the form of a number of interludes and between-song banter from fake radio DJs. I often wondered what the album would sound like without the radio stuff, and recently I realized it wouldn't be hard to just take it out using Live. So that's what I did.

Here are the edited versions of the 8 tracks that contained radio "banter". I edited it out, cutting out the DJs and using a little bit of reverb on the end of tracks that got cut off by radio static. I also tried to make sure that song lengths, like the drum intro the begins the album, and the extended silence before the "hidden" track at the end, were kept the same.



Songs for the Deaf [No-Radio Version]

To listen to it correctly, unzip the tracks, put the album in an iTunes playlist with these "No-Radio" songs, and delete the duplicates from the original album. Sort by track number.

I haven't listened to it more than once, so I don't know the full effect yet, but my first impression is that it makes the album go down almost a little too easy. But part of me thinks that's just because I'm so used to the radio breaks that I expect to hear them as part of the album. So I don't know how I feel yet. I do know that I almost kept in the Russian sounding lady near the end of the album because that was the only DJ I actually liked... but for consistency's sake, she's gone too. Let me know what you think.