Andy Gapin

I’ve been posting a damn lot lately. I’m not sure what gives, but I’ve got a few more brewing before I get back to the once a week deal.

Anyway, this shirt is what happens when you go random at TeeFury. Not too shabby.

And I have three random Woot shirts coming after today’s random deal. We’ll see how that works out.

Robert Smith of The Cure is an idiot. He had this to say about Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.

The Radiohead experiment of paying what you want – I disagreed violently with that. You can’t allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don’t consider what you do to have any value at all and that’s nonsense.

If I put a value on my music and no one’s prepared to pay that, then more fool me, but the idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan, it can’t work.

I look at it as the polar opposite of that. I think bands that deliver music like that are saying they have that much faith in their music that it creates its own worth without someone needing to dictate what that worth is. And it also says they’re trying to get to ears and not just wallets.

I love The Cure, but Robert Smith, stop talking. Please. You’re just not relevant anymore.

In other news, supposedly, The Jealous Sound are working on a new full length. Anyone else skeptical about this? I don’t think there’s any other band in the world that takes longer to put out new stuff than this band. And that sucks.

Also, The Gaslight Anthem have a new video…

And after all that, here’s the playlist for The Playlist last night. It was a relatively average show last night which is why I spent most of this post talking about all of the above instead. That M. Ward track features backing vocals by Zooey Deschanel, but it isn’t really much. It’s no She And Him.

Source: 90.3 The Core

This is another one from Threadless. Not too much to say about it, but it’s pretty cool. It was hard to snap a good picture of it though and I was too lazy to go find it on their site.

Ok, the first one isn’t entirely just an overheard conversation, but still good!

Coworker #1: What are you talking about?
Me: I’m telling them how my parents almost aborted me. 
Coworker #2 walks in: What are you guys talking about?
Coworker #1: It’s a survival story!

Coworker: They say Micheal Phelps is a good swimmer, but I say screw that, we’re all great swimmers! Do you know how far we all had to swim? And then you get there and you have to bust through a zygote head first! That takes stamina!

Generally when a band does a tour where they play an older album in its entirety, it makes me feel like they know their best stuff was years ago and that they have finally realized their last couple of records have turned off their original fanbase. So playing the record that was responsible for most of their original fanbase always seems like nothing more than an attempt to get those fans back.

I really think that this is what Jimmy Eat World is doing with the Clarity x 10 Tour, but it was surprisingly awesome. I was pretty much expecting to be disappointed. So much so that I actually wrote half of a review yesterday before the show. You’ll never get to read it, but it did exist as a draft for a few hours. My biggest concern was that they were going to keep playing for an hour or so after Clarity, like Alkaline Trio did on the Godammit tour. They did not. They walked off stage right after Goodbye Sky Harbor and then came back to do a five or six song encore of mostly post-Clarity hits. They knew exactly when to call it a night and it never felt long at all. I would have like to have heard some stuff from Static Prevails, maybe some Call It In The Air, but I think the length of the set ended up being absolutely perfect.

The most shocking part of the night was that they played No Sensitivity, easily my favorite song by them. I couldn’t believe it. It’s not like it’s on an album or anything anyone would expect them to play these days. I don’t even think half the crowd had ever even heard it before. And the nailed it. It was amazing and it made my night.

As for Clarity, they pretty much played the entire thing perfectly. I was very impressed. And it didn’t get boring at any point either. The only complaint that I have is that they didn’t play all sixteen minutes of Goodbye Sky Harbor. They cut it down to about seven. Though, they did make up for it was some cool ass live looping. The shortened version was expected though since they had posted online that they weren’t going to.

Overall, I really liked the show a lot. It was done perfectly…except that they played The Middle. I hate that song, but it is arguably their biggest hit ever. And I could have done without the dude standing next to me singing louder than the Jim and Tom, but that’s not Jimmy Eat World’s fault. Speaking of singing though, I realized last night that of all the bands I like that have two singers and one of which is named Tom, Jimmy Eat World is the only one where I like Tom’s voice better. I wish he sang more.

I haven’t really done this on here, but I feel like I should so I’m going to start posting, or trying to remember to post, my top artists list from last.fm every week. We’ll see how long I keep up with this.

Though, I did notice that it seems like some of the songs from my iPod get scrobbled twice and some don’t get scrobbled at all. I’m going to have to look into that. And I don’t like the way the embedding works for this so I’m just going to copy and paste a list instead.

• Cheap Girls  -  120
• Radiohead  -  77
• The Replacements  -  45
• Thorns of Life  -  39
• The Magnetic Fields  -  28
• Minor Threat  -  26
• Andrew Bird  -  26
• Amanda Palmer  -  22
• The Beatles  -  20
• Band of Horses  -  20
• Hello Seahorse!  -  18
• Murder by Death  -  17
• Sonic Youth  -  13
• Laura Veirs  -  12
• Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele  -  12
• Idlewild  -  12
• Let Me Run  -  12
• Mates of State  -  9
• Green Day  -  6
• The Lawrence Arms  -  5
• Electric Six  -  4
• Everyone Everywhere  -  2
• The Bronx  -  2
• Challenger  -  1

I had really been starting to fall behind with keeping up with movies lately, so I took some time this weekend to watch a whole bunch of them. Rather than make individual posts for each of them, I’m just going to do a bunch of short little blurbs here about each one.

Step Brothers

I can’t believe how long it took me to get around to seeing this one. I also can’t believe it was as good as it was. I watched it by myself at home and was in stitches laughing alone in my living room the entire time. It was great. There were multiple quotable lines before the title was even shown. I need to watch it again just to remember all of the things that prompted me to say “I need to remember that line” to myself. I actually texted a friend during the movie and told her that she needed to see it because I needed her to be able to get the quotes.

I was pretty right on with how stupid it was, but I did not expect it to be this level of hilarious. It slightly redeemed Will Ferrell for me. Not that I was really down on him, but just that I usually feel that he is better when the movie doesn’t revolve around him. It was also a great performance by John C. Reilly who I normally consider to be the less funny of the two John Cs–the other being John C. McGinley.

Rating: A-

The Rocker

Rainn Wilson is one of the best things about The Office, but The Rocker kind of confirms for me that he is extremely one dimensional. His character in this movie is about 50% Dwight. It’s not a horrible thing, his ability to really pull off the whole dopey asshole thing makes him perfect for this kind of role, but I wouldn’t expect much else from him.

The Rocker is good for a few laughs, has a cute girl (Emma Stone who is currently filming Zombieland), and has some great cameos (Will Arnett and Jane Krakowski to name a couple), but it is a complete cookie cutter Hollywood comedy that follows a storyline that you know without even watching. I’d watch again, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t spend half the movie playing around with my phone.

Rating: C+

Confessions Of A Shopaholic

Yes, I went to go see this. On my own. My sexuality may never recover, but I, for some odd reason, really wanted to see this as soon as I first saw the trailer. I don’t know why, I don’t like shopping or fashion and I’m not big on materialism at all, but I guess I like romantic comedies…and Isla Fisher. So I went to see this…by myself. There were three other dudes in the theater. One was a father with his daughter and the other two were there with their girlfriends.

All that being said, any movie with John Goodman and/or John Lithgow in it is worth seeing. ANY MOVIE. Even if either of them are only in it for ten seconds. Seriously though, I actually liked this movie a lot. I laughed quite a bit and realized that Krysten Ritter is really cute in an odd kind of way.

I’m going to save myself a little humiliation by stopping there.

Rating: B

The Wrestler

I don’t like wrestling at all, but this was really, really good. I did not expect it to be as bloody as it was, but I think it all fit pretty well. Out of all of the movies that I watched this weekend, this was the only one that made me feel kind of depressed. I really felt for him and kept wanting him to just say the right things to his daughter and not risk his life anymore. I wanted things to work out for him and even though it was obvious that they never were going to, it was still a big disappointment every time his life got even worse.

And despite the fact that this falls into the whole thing of being a movie that takes place in Jersey, but only shows the really crappy parts of the state, I think it was probably the best story of any of the movies I saw this weekend.

Rating: A-

Coraline

I was a little afraid that this was going to end up being a little too Nightmare Before Christmasy, but it really wasn’t at all. It had a similar feel, but definitely didn’t just try to adapt a different story to the same film.

I think the thing that I really like about stop-motion these days is that it isn’t overdone at all. It’s really only used every once in a while for full length movies and when it is used, it’s awesome and the visuals are always great.

Everything about this film was awesome. Even Dakota Fanning, who I sometimes just want to punch in the face, was great.

Definitely go check this one about as soon as possible.

Rating: A

Slumdog Millionaire

This was far from bad, but I think it was extremely overrated. It’s a great story that is really interesting, but I don’t think it lives up to all of the hype. This isn’t to say that I don’t think it’s worth seeing, it definitely is, but I just don’t feel that it is worthy of getting a nomination for best picture.

I guess the whole reason why this story even happens is because of love, but I feel the love story kind of took away from the film. That just sort of made it just like every other movie ever made.

Rating: B+

I got this one from Threadless. It has Dracula riding a T-Rex, zombies, and aliens…what more could you ask for from a t-shirt?

This rules…

Last night was an interesting show. I think I forgot how to use all of the equipment in the studio for a few minutes in the beginning, but I pulled it together after that. Definitely not one of the better shows that I’ve done, but I guess it was acceptable.

I played a song by this cute sounding pop band called Hello Seahorse! It was pretty great and incited some serious bopping around the studio. I gave the whole album a listen at work this morning and really fell in love with it. Unfortunately, I’m not feeling the same way about the Let Me Run album. I like it, but the more I listen to it, the more I feel like it would have been something that I would have been in love with in 1999. So really, it just reminds me of the stuff I used to listen to in high school and early college, I guess. Still worth checking out though if you’re into the whole New Brunswick sound or bands that sound like Hot Water Music.

I wish that I could have played something from this Cheap Girls album that I just downloaded a few days ago. It’s called Find Me A Drink home and is pretty much awesome from beginning to end. It sounds a lot like the Smoking Popes, only more consistently rocking. This along with the Thorns Of Life stuff is probably the best stuff I’ve gotten in a few months. I’m really all about both of these bands right now. Anyway, it’s available for free from Quote Unquote Records. Check it out!

And here’s the playlist from last night’s show…

Source: 90.3 The Core