Andy Gapin

The Playlist last night felt like it was packed with new stuff by known bands. As much as I love finding out about new bands, it’s awesome to have a ton of stuff to play by bands that I already love; it’s easier to get excited about what I’m playing because it’s something I know. This is definitely something that came out last night for me, I felt really into it. And I feel like this is going to be a recurring theme for the year too with everything that’s going to be coming out, it seems like every single day I see another band I love announce an album for this year.

She & Him have a new album coming out next month–you can hear their new single “Thieves” on Stereogum, it rules. The Hold Steady and Murder By Death both have records coming out on May 4th and Gaslight Anthem, Minus the Bear, and a ton more bands have records coming out as well. Oh, and The Thermals posted a new single called “Canada” on their MySpace page. It’s sweet and catchy with more “woah-oh-oh-ohs” than an entire Less Than Jake album. It’s going to be a crazy year.

In the last week, I found some time to check out the new stuff by Eels, Magnetic Fields, The Watson Twins, and Hey Young Believer. All awesome. The Hey Young Believer album reminds me a lot of a band called Del Cielo that played the ZEN House a few times when I used to do shows in college, and I’m down with that. I just wish the album wasn’t 64 minutes long. It’s a bit too long.

Anyway, I went way out on a tangent, but here’s the playlist for last night’s show. I actually ended up playing the new Alkaline Trio. I wasn’t planning on it, but I had the song stuck in my head so I figured I’d just go for it. If you’re reading on Facebook, you know the drill, head on over to the original or you’ll just see a jumbled mess below.

Source: 90.3 The Core

I went to see The Gaslight Anthem, Murder By Death, and The Loved Ones in Philly last night at the Trocadero. It was an all around great show.

The Loved Ones played what was probably the best set I’ve ever seen them play. I can’t really describe why it was so great, but they just felt really on and didn’t talk too much compared to other times that I’ve seen them. Their set list was well chosen and leaning way more to the Keep Your Heart side of things than Build & Burn, which works out great for me since I think Keep Your Heart is a much better record.

Murder By Death was slightly worse than the last time I saw them, but that was also about five years ago. They played well and sounded good, but I think I miss them being a five piece. Having a dedicated keyboardist made them able to keep more of their recorded sound when playing live. Sarah did a great job switching between cello and keyboards, but it wasn’t quite the same. The last time I saw them was before their last two albums came out so they had fewer songs to play. This gave them time to rock out and jam a little more. I’m not into jam bands, but I love when bands that I like just jam out for a little bit during some of the instrumental parts of songs. It adds something extra to the live set that you don’t get from a record. This is something that they seemed to do a lot in the past and it was one of my favorite things about seeing them, but now with all the extra songs that they have, there is a lot less time to do it. Still, they sounded great and picked a good selection of songs to play. I think they covered everything that I wanted to hear.

And then there was Gaslight Anthem. They sounded amazing and were tight as hell with a great stage presence. It may have been the tightest that I’ve ever seen them play out of the six or seven times that I’ve seen them. But the selection of songs that they played was a bit disappointing. The ’59 Sound is a really great record, one of the best to come out in 2008. However, it lost a lot over the last year for me. Most of my interest in it waned. Sink Or Swim has stuck with me though. That’s what I wanted to hear. I didn’t expect a lot, but the entire first half of their set was from The ’59 Sound. By the end, we only got a couple Sink Or Swim songs in total. I guess normally it would be expected to hear only a few songs from a band’s first album…if they have more than two, but with only two of them, it’d be nice it at least a third of the set was from the first album. Oh well. At least everything they played sounded great.

Even accepting the fact that I’ll never get to hear them play much from Sink Or Swim again, I don’t know that I’ll ever want to see them live again. I’m not sure how to describe it, but they felt very rock starry last night. It was a little too much. They stopped feeling like this band from New Brunswick that used to play basement shows and the Court Tavern to small crowds and more like a band that has their eyes set on stages set in front of thousands and thousands of people. It wasn’t to the point where it was terribly upsetting and bothersome and a lot of it was subtle, but it was enough that I feel as though my love for them will start to decline if I keep on seeing them.

Last night was also the first time that I’ve been to the Troc in about seven years. I’ve generally avoided it as I was never a fan of the place and I was reminded 100% of this last night. The sound is terrible. It might be the worst sounding venue I’ve ever been to. Ugh.

Last night was another fantastic show. Almost perfect all around. Great music, great segues, and the phone was ringing off the hook. Not even just the phone, but the instant messages too. So much so that it was almost stressful trying to keep up. I was actually sweating because of it.

I found out last night that our station streams perfectly fine over an iPhone just by going to www.thecore.fm and clicking to listen. I’m assuming this will work on any other smartphone too, I guess I never thought about it before.

Apparently, we’re supposed to get a Nor’easter this weekend so that’s going to put a damper on my Field of Terror plans, but I’m still excited to see Gaslight Anthem, Murder By Death, and The Loved Ones on Sunday in Philly. And it seems that there are still tickets for the Monday night show as well. You may want to check that out. Either way, expect a full report next week.

Anyway, here’s what I played…

Source: 90.3 The Core

Last night’s show had a lot of flow, but there was a big period of slowness in the middle while starting and ending much more upbeat. I think it worked though. The show was done in the production studio since there was some training going on in the normal air studio. Even though the studio has been rebuilt from the ground up over the past two years, it’s still a little different of an experience and can throw you off a bit because of the lack of space in front of you. Other than the added minor stress of that, it was a very good show. Here’s the playlist…

Source: 90.3 The Core

And here is a video of The Gaslight Anthem covering “Left of The Dial” by The Replacements…and not butchering it at all. As much as I generally hate hearing my favorite bands covered, I can’t complain about this one and having it done by another of my favorite bands makes it even better.

And this…is…awesome. It’s the audio of the Watchmen trailer mashed up with the WALL-E trailor. So good.

I really didn’t think that I listened to the Sundowner that much this past week, but I guess I did. Last.fm wouldn’t lie…or would it? I also listened to a recording of The Playlist from last week while I was running yesterday and I stand by my statement that it was one of the best radio shows that I’ve ever done.

I think my music collection has officially hit the status of being a burden. I wanted to add four new albums to my iPod last night and ended up spending a half hour trying to figure out what music I wanted to take off to make room. And in that process I found like twenty albums that I’m going to force myself to listen to this week just so that I can justify keeping them on there. I guess it’s time to upgrade my 60GB iPod to a 120GB one. Though it’s hard to want to spend money on a new iPod when mine physically works fine and even the biggest ones that Apple currently makes (why did they stop making 160GB ones?) will only hold a little less than half my music collection. Sure, I don’t need to have 260GB of music on me at all times, but how am I supposed to know what I’m going to want to listen to later on?!? 

Anyway, here at the 25 bands that I listened to the most last week…

• Sundowner – 43
• M. Ward – 27
• The Jealous Sound – 22
• Husker Du – 21
• Morrissey – 20
• Okkervil River – 17
• Cheap Girls – 17
• Radiohead – 16
• Andrew Bird – 14
• Drive-By Truckers – 14
• Thorns Of Life – 14
• Mclusky – 12
• Steve Burns – 12
• Hello Seahorse! – 11
• Ben Folds – 11
• Anathallo – 10
• Brenden Canning – 10
• Let Me Run – 10
• Minor Threat – 9
• The Loved Ones 9
• Jimmy Eat World – 7
• Challenger – 7
• Jets To Brazil – 5
• Fucked Up – 4
• The Gaslight Anthem – 4

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

Apparently, a bunch of my favorite bands covered Springsteen recently. These links have been sitting in my Google Reader waiting to be listened to for a while and I finally got around to it just now. Awesome.

• The Hold Steady – Atlantic City
• Tom Gabel (Against Me!) – Reason To Believe
• Ted Leo – Dancing In The Dark
• Brian Fallon (The Gaslight Anthem) – Backstreets

And on an unrelated note, a friend of mine, Mr. Brian Graber has recently started up a great podcast over at his blog, http://graber29.blogspot.com. The premise is basically that he is just documenting his first 100 days out of office since the economic meltdown hit him personally and he lost his early morning radio production gig. I think it’s an awesome idea and a hilarious way to keep himself busy while also paralleling (reverse paralleling?) current events. When I first saw he was doing it, I actually thought he was just doing something about the first 100 days in office for Obama which confused me since he’s not the most political dude in the world. Then I listened to it.

For pretty much no reason, I felt like making a few little lists and posting them. Maybe it’s just because I want to update this thing more often. I don’t know.

Current pluses:

• snowboarding
• How I Met Your Mother
• iPhone (more on this coming later)
• 2009
• being in the best physical shape that I’ve been in in almost ten years
• high level of productivity and busyness in my life over the past month and a half
• cat

Current minuses:

• the current lineup posted so far for South By Southwest

Horror remakes that I actually like a lot:

• The Amityville Horror
• The Hills Have Eyes
• My Bloody Valentine
• Halloween
• Dawn Of The Dead

Only bands I’ve been listening to recently (actually this is pretty standard):

• The Replacements
• Minus The Bear
• Gaslight Anthem
• Sundowner
• The Lawrence Arms
• Challenger

I just got in from the Brian Fallon show at The Court Tavern in New Brunswick. As should be expected from any show at The Court, it started more than two hours late and didn’t end until around 1:30am. It’s kind of annoying when you were already sleepy before you even left you house to go out, but it was well worth it.

To be honest, I was really hoping that he was just going to play his own stuff (some of which is on his MySpace page) instead of a ton of Gaslight Anthem songs. This hope was not fulfilled, but I think I’m okay with that. The set was almost entirely all Gaslight Anthem songs played acoustically, most of which were newer songs from The ’59 Sound. However, the songs sounded absolutely amazing. They are still just great songs to listen to. It doesn’t matter if they are live or recorded,  with a full band or just acoustic. They are great. I can really appreciate that.

The only real negative thing that I have to say about Brian’s set tonight was his storytelling. I generally think that he is a really great storyteller through his songs, but in between when he is just bantering with the crowd, the stories are awful and aren’t even told well. At one point he was trying to tell some story about Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen that made very little sense. All I got from it was that The Boss has had sex with most 35-45 year old women from the Jersey Shore. He did tell one interesting story though about how after they played on Conan a few weeks ago a lot of their friends came up to him and said that he looked really nervous, to which he flat out replied that he looked nervous because he was flipping out about the fact that he had never been on TV before. I’d say that’s pretty understandable.

The two opening bands were half decent. The Royal Sons actually opened the Gaslight Anthem show a few weeks ago at The Court as well. They sounded slightly better this time around. I think that last show may have actually been their first. They have some good stuff going on, but they sound really sloppy still. Look out for these guys in about six months though after they play some more shows and tighten up a bit. I wish I had taken a picture of the guitarist’s beard to put up here, but I was too far to get a good shot with my phone. The thing was amazing. I completely have beard envy over it. The other opener was a band called Minnesotas Calling. I think they are just starting out as well. A little boring, but could have some potential.

Anyway, here are a few really crappy camera phone pictures…

While the word was going around that this was a secret show, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that it didn’t stay very much a secret. As with most shows at the Court Tavern in New Brunswick, it was late to start and late to end, but since I only had a half day of work the next day, I won’t complain too much. In most ways, this was your typical New Brunswick show. A crowded, sweaty basement with all kinds of assholery and great music. There was a time in my life when I was used to this, but I find that the older I get, the less I feel like dealing with it. Kids crowdsurfing in a bar basement with a ceiling that is about eight feet high–that subsequently was partially pulled down–is not really that amusing to me anymore. Call me a dork, but I really just like to go and enjoy the bands without all the pushing around and roughness.

Still, Gaslight Anthem was amazing…as always. They just aren’t a band that is going to let you down. Whether it’s recorded or live, this band brings it every time. They play music that is just tons of fun live. There are plenty of singalongs and parts to get your finger pointing in and somehow, they always play all of the songs that you want to hear. In the end, I’d say that this show as a whole was barely worth it because of the New Brunswick factor, but I did kind of expect that, so I shouldn’t complain about that.

I guess I should also mention Let Me Run who were, as usual, very excellent.