It’s been over two months since my last review, so I’ve got a whole bunch for you today. Let’s split it up a bit, shall we?
Warning: some of the sites I’ve linked to will auto-play music from the band in question. It’s pretty obnoxious, but whatchagonnado? Turn down your speakers before clicking, mmkay?
Albums
The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (Indie Pop)
I have mixed feelings about this one. Mass Romantic and Electric Version are both fantastic - it’s fun, upbeat music, and that’s why I love these guys. Twin Cinema is a lot darker - more minor chords - and just sounds more depressive. That being said, I love Use It and The Bleeding Heart Show. Twin Cinema and Sing Me Spanish Techno are pretty good too, but I’m kind of disappointed in the rest. It’s definitely got the New Pornographers’ sound, and taken on its own, it’s a good album. However, listening to Twin Cinema requires a different state of mind than their first two albums.
Nickel Creek - Reasons Why: The Very Best (Contemporary Folk, Bluegrass)
I had never listened to Nickel Creek much, and they’re going on indefinite hiatus next year, so I’m glad they put out a Best Of. With the exception of two or three songs, it’s a fantastic disc. I especially like Helena, When You Come Back Down, and the biting Somebody More Like You (my favorite line: “I hope you meet someone your height / So you can see eye-to-eye / With someone as small as you”).
Scotch Greens - Professional (Rockabilly Punk)
These guys opened for Flogging Molly when I saw them back in February, and I finally got the album. Good gym music. I don’t have much to say about them, they’re just fun to listen to.
Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers - Pandelirium (Hillbilly Rock)
One of the guys at work introduced me to these guys. They’ve been in DC at least twice since I got this disc and I’ve had to miss them both times, but I’ll get them next time - listen to Ichabod and tell me they won’t put on a ridiculous show (you can hear that and No Such Thing on their website). I can’t even really describe them - psychobilly, maybe? - but it’s definitely not for everybody.
Against Me! - Americans Abroad!!! Against Me!!! Live in London!!! (Anarcho Punk)
I’ve loved these guys ever since Fonny kept playing Sink, Florida, Sink a few years ago. There’s nothing new on this album, but it’s the second best thing to seeing them live.
Singles
Beck - Nausea
Who hasn’t been listening to this for the past two weeks?
Tenacious D - POD
This has been stuck in my head, on and off, for weeks. I still need to see the movie.
Placebo - Every You, Every Me
I finally saw Cruel Intentions last week. It was awful, but I liked this song.
Blue Man Group - Time to Start, Rods and Cones
I can’t believe I never got into these guys. I love percussion-heavy music, and I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to find stuff like them, but more drum-centric.
Teddybears - Yours to Keep
This was one of the iTunes free singles back in September. It’s just a catchy, fun, mellow tune.
Teddybears - Cobrastyle
I list this one separate from Yours to Keep because they’re so different. Both fun, both catchy, but this one sounds more like an iPod commercial song (probably because it’s been used in a few commercials). It makes me do that stupid-looking chair dance at work.
The Dandy Warhols - The Last High
Bohemian Like You comes up in shuffle every now and again, but somehow, I didn’t hear this song until a couple months ago, and it’s been in near-repeat ever since.
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Tamacun
This is currently the iTunes free single - go get it before Tuesday. I bought the rest of the album, which is good, but I haven’t listened to it much yet. The things that these two can do with guitars are obscene. Watch the video - seriously, you need to see these two.
Snow Patrol - Chasing Cars
I kind of hate admitting that I like stuff like this, but I love the way the song slowly builds into a crescendo of noise. That makes me happy.
I’m From Barcelona - We’re From Barcelona
There’s really nothing quite like a band of 29 Swedish hipsters calling themselves I’m From Barcelona. Just watch the video.
LiveJournal Comments
Monday, November 27th, 2006LiveJournal can handle RSS/Atom feeds pretty much the same way it handles any other user or community: if someone creates a syndicated account for a feed, users can “friend” it and comment on posts there. This is convenient for people who already use LJ and want easy access to a couple site feeds (I don’t think it would be usable as a full-fledged newsreader, but I guess it depends on how many and what types of blogs).
As of this writing, 44 people read this blog via it’s syndicated account (wave!). It’s not a lot of people, but my readership is pretty low, so that probably accounts for most of my audience. Since the account acts like any other friend, these people see my posts smack in the middle of their friends page, and thus, can easily comment on posts there.
And people do, a lot more than they comment here. This is great, except for the fact that it’s on LJ. As far as I can tell, they list the most recent 15 posts there, but don’t give you any way to go further back. Unless you bookmark the post itself, there’s no way to see old comments (and that’s assuming that the pages don’t go away, too).
Much earlier this year, JR suggested that I write a script to import comments from LiveJournal into Movable Type. I’ve started looking into it at least three times, but keep getting discouraged. There doesn’t seem to be any easy way to get those comments - no RSS feed or API that I’ve found - so I’m going to have to screen scrape them. I keep putting it off because it’s going to be a pain in the ass and while I really want to pull in those comments, I also really want to not deal with regular expressions.
So, to the LJ and MT hackers out there (if there are any): have you ever seen a plugin that does this, or even an LJ data source that would make it easier? I’ve looked around and come up empty, but since it’s going to be at least another month before I really feel like dealing with it on my own, I figured I’d ask around.
Tags: comments, livejournal, lj, movabletype, mt
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