Arts

This must be one of the best records I have bought in years. It is so good, I'm even listening to it while writing this post! Ween - Live in Toronto Canada. The feel good record of the spring so to say.

When Ween in 1995 recorded their country-flavoured album 12 Golden Country Greats in Nashville (featuring 10 awesome country songs) they knew taking this release on tour would be hard because they couldn't take all the great country players with them who contributed to this record. They did however manage to get together enough folks to do one gig in New York in mid '96. That gig was supposedly so much fun that Ween and the Shit Creek Boys decided to take this on a 3 week tour.

It turned out to be the most rewarding experience of our musical career. I don't think we played a bad show the whole tour - The 8 piece band sounded like a 747 landing on your house.
[...]
This concert was recorded on cassette by our longtime soundman Kirk Miller and pretty much captures the drunken essence of what this band sounded like on a good night.

This record was on limited release in 2001 and has been reprinted now (again limited). The double LP only comes on vinyl - high quality, heavy, white-marbled vinyl that is. Sound quality is great as expected and it comes with a glow-in-the-dark Boognish sticker!!!

This record is as brown as it gets, so grab it while it's hot and cheap. You can get it on UK and German Amazon, your favourite record dealer, ebay or directly from Ween's very own chocodog label. Get it now.. in a year it will cost you a fortune on ebay!

In other news: After a year of sessions in an old rented farmhouse Ween have collected about 50 songs for their new studio album. Twenty of which have been selected for the new album and are being recorded right now. If you can't wait go and grab some recent live concerts (maybe featuring new stuff?) from the browntracker.

Cheers
Matthias

I just saw a gameplay demo of Spore, the next big hit being produced by Maxis and published by EA. I haven't been a big gamer for years but this looks really promising. Basically they wrap up all game concepts you ever heard of in one huge game (except maybe car racing and kung fu). The video is a cut-out of a presentation held at the Game Developers Conference 2006. See the links below for a link the the whole presentation and a nice flash presentation of Spore.

Will Wright on Spore at GDC 2006
Spore Homepage

taken from cover-art

The idea is to keep the green alien landing-craft from taking your humans from the ground and changing them into mutants. A mutant... is very dangerous to you.. because he flies faster than you do - and shoots at you!
Such advice and more is given to us on the Beastie Boys' first official studio release since 'Hello Nasty', which was about 6 years ago (and received two Grammys)

Fortunately I already got a chance to look at 'To The Five Boroughs' (due to be released June 15th). I must admit I'm not into Hip-Hop too much, but have always been a B-Boys fan kinda'. So when I first listened to this I thought this almost sounds like their early stuff, even though the beats supposedly completely come out of the computer. This stuff really sounds old-school. My second thought was 'I must have grown out of Old-School.' Their new album is said to be their most political. Okay.. what do we have here. Some obligatory bush-administration-bashing. That's about all politics I could find. The rest is a long (concerned) ode to NYC. Still some cool tracks on this one so ch-check it out.
BTW, something funny happened behind the scenes, when the Boys where at MTV for the premier of their new clip 'Ch-check it out'. They accidentally dissed Eminem. Everyone knows what that means ;-)

While I'm at it. This months absolute favourite is definitely Sonic Youth's nineteenth (!) longplayer 'Sonic Nurse' released today (June 7th). This record rocks. I'd file it together with 'Murray Street' if it weren't louder, more disturbing and distorted. This is what Indie has to sound like these days. Most worth mentioning is maybe that Kim Gordon is back on the mic with fabulous songwriting. In fact all I can say on this album would be praise so I'll rather let you enjoy it without any further influencing words.

indie-rock on
Matthias