This wasn’t one of those albums that grabbed me right away, but I knew that there was something I liked about it. I think he’s finally, in my mind, moved out of novelty act territory. He’s no longer “that Hasidic jewish guy” who raps and sings reggae, this is actual good music. Like much of the reggae genre the themes of hope and fun permeate the album. There’s just something about this music that makes me happy. It’s the kind of music that makes you want to get out there and do something positive in the world.

The first track, “Smash Lies”, starts the album with a crowd pleasing energy and tempo and is one of my favorite tracks. The rest of the album is less reggae and moves into more reggae-influenced rock and pop, but it’s the peaceful attitude that ties it all together. The third track and possibly the radio single, “One Day”, is so hopeful for the future it almost crosses into cheesy. There are some songs that I might skip through if they came on by themselves, but they’re so much in the flow on the album that I don’t notice till they’re over. I know it’s just music and it wont “really” change anything, but it makes you think it’s possible, in a Michael Franti^W sort of way. The whole sound of the album is a bit like a jumble of Franti, MGMT^W, and SOJA^W

Schu-Review : 4/5 Schus

Back in high school when I was a rebel rollerblader I loved punk music. But my friends were not the well versed music hipsters that you see today. So I didn’t know where to find new music. So I bought all of those Fat Wreck Chords compilations from Hot Topic … Fat Music for Fat People^W, Survival of the Fattest^W, Physical Fatness^W, Life in the Fat Lane^W, Short Music for Short People^W. That was back when Hot Topic was a scary place to go into and was dedicated to music, not to nerdy goth japanese import t-shirts.

Later I really loved the Punk goes^W series of CDs where each album would have a genre of music covered by punk bands. As I’ve grown up and my taste in music has evolved I find myself listening to punk and punk covers less often. My teen angst must be getting replaced by late 20′s fattness. A while back I posted a link to cover of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”, but I didn’t do any research beyond that. Today I found a link on Boing Boing to a folk cover of NWA straight outta compton, but sadly the link was down.

But what I did find in that post was solid gold… Coverlaydown.com. Which is a blog dedicated to Folk covers of songs. It’s fantastic! Maybe these make such good covers to me because, just like the punk covers, they are so different from the original style of the songs. I just can’t say enough how much I love this site and the music. It’s like they took all the pop songs and ran them through some kind or emotion amplifier and they came out the other side even better. A lot of them are so different that you might not even realize what song they were originally. I really like the way the site is run, giving credit to the original poster while providing links to the covering artist for purchase of new music.

Here are a few that I really like.

• Dr. Fox’s Old Timey String Band: Kids (orig. MGMT)
  (from MySpace)
• Sara Watkins, Sean Watkins, and Glen Phillips cover Elliot Smith’s Between the Bars live in some parking lot way back in 2004.
• Butch Ross: Eleanor Rigby (orig. The Beatles)
  (from A Long Way From Shady Grove, 2009)
• Whip: White Wedding (orig. Billy Idol)
  (from Bridging the Distance, 2007; more Whip)
• Ingrid Michaelson: Can’t Help Falling In Love (orig. Elvis Presley)

YouTube – Buckethead – I Like It Raw (ODB Tribute).

I love Buckethead. He never ceases to impress me. His music is one long guitar solo. When people started break dancing they just took the break beats from rap songs and looped them over and over. Because they thought that was the best part of the song. It’s like he got tired of playing rhythm and choruses and just said “Fuck it, I’ll just play a 7 minute solo, deal with it”

This mashup with ODB is killer.

IT’S LIKE PSYCHO KILLER NORMAN BATES!

So I thought this was really mind blowing, but Laurel wasn’t that impressed.

Last year we camped with random people at All Good. So random that if we had been walking around 10 minutes later Matt may not have been walking around outside his camp and wouldn’t have invited us to camp with him and his group. So we, total strangers, camped with them at All Good 12 and had an awesome time.

Now move on to All Good 13 and we’re camped at the top of a hill overlooking the entire camp. A photographer walks close to us and takes a picture of the sunset. Being good All Gooders we invite him to sit with us for a minute. I think we might have explained that we were looking for our friends from last year, but I’m not sure.

So now move on to yesterday when I find his card under some papers in the living room and give him an email about getting a copy of those pictures. First thing he sees on my flickr page is that we were hanging out with his friends from Blacksburg …Matt, Becca, and Liz … and the same people we camped with the year before!

Maybe the All good community is smaller than I think and everyone knows each other? But I think that randomly meeting 2 people out of 30,000 on 2 seperate years that know each other is INCREDIBLE!

Next year we’re not leaving it up to chance. I’m fiends with Becca on Facebook and we’re making plans ahead of time.

It’s probably because I love animation and with Artomatic right around the corner I’ve been getting in a more artistic mood. This video really just captures a spirit and has a strong style. That’s what I’ve come to realize in my own work. It’s not about mechanical talent, it’s about the style!

later!

It’s amazing what kind of music I like now… well not really amazing, just interesting. It’s just like food tastes, I used to only like french dressing on salads, now I can’t get enough vinagrette. In high school I hated country music, but now I still don’t like it… so that hasn’t totally changed. But I do like the fringes of country. (bluegrass, alt-country, cowpunk, etc.) Country music is like tomatoes, I don’t like them by themselves, but I like everything made out of them (salsa, pasta sauce, etc). I just got an album from The Beat Farmers^W and it’s totally awesome. I’m a little behind the times because it came out 13 years ago and 2 of the band members have died since then. But it’s just really good music, just enough country, just enough rock.

I’ve been on a very alt-country kick recently.