AlexHopmann.com

Cool site with focus on Seattle music happenings….

This year Kat and I skipped Coachella- I think we were feeling a bit over busy, and the Coachella lineup looked a bit disappointing. But the Washington state based Sasquatch festival had expanded to three days and had a great line up, so we planned another long weekend with rafting in the morning and shows at night.

Saturday we got there in time for the New Pornographers. Actually we had a few minutes to spare and stopped by the Xbox / Rockband tent where they were running a competition. Unfortunately you needed 4 people to enter and we failed to put together a team that could get decent scores.

Finally we ran off to see the New Pornographers. The show was great, although speaking of Rockband it was too bad they didn’t play Electric Version which is in the game.

Modest Mouse was great, but unfortunately they scheduled it at the same time as the Breeders which was a pretty painful conflict for me. We left Modest Mouse only to stand around for 15 minutes as the Breeders were late to get their set going. I was also a bit apprehensive since the new Breeders album is not that great. Luckily it was worth the wait- the Breeders show was awesome and everything had a great energy.

Finally we went back to the main stage to see R.E.M. Of all the bands that I’ve followed so much, R.E.M. is pretty much the only one that I had never seen live. The set was very good and it was really fun for me to see them finally. I loved that they did some good obscure stuff off of “Fables/Reconstruction of the” and Harborcoat. On the other hand they didn’t play anything from Life’s Rich Pageant or
Murmer which was a bit disappointing. Still, it was great to see them and I enjoyed it a ton.

On Sunday we got there just in time to see Mates of State. The set was pretty good but I really didn’t recognize anything. Before festivals like this I often try to use them as an excuse to check out new music and try to listen to the bands ahead of time. I had been listening to Mates of State a bunch but still didn’t recognize anything.

After Mates of State we got our spot and I went back to the second stage to see the Kooks. They were VERY late. Crazy late. At least 45 minutes and maybe more. At a club that may be fine, but at a festival where you have to make difficult choices being that late is just unprofessional and rude since people are skipping other shows to sit in front of your stage and wait for you to play. Sometimes there are big equipment failures and I understand that, but this just seemed like a normal lazy setup. In the end I only saw 15 minutes of the Kooks who are a decent Kaiser Chiefs/Strokes style band.

Death Cab for Cutie was good, although as Pitchfork mentioned it feels like it would be much cooler to see them in a club- they have a hard time translating to the huge stage. Of course they are so popular now that is probably difficult- it was packed for them and many people started leaving before the Cure I think.

Finally I thought that the Cure were great. I was prepared to not be that into it- there are really only a couple of songs that I like that they have done post-Disintegration. They played a bunch of post-Disintegration stuff (including both of the songs that I do like) but they also played a TON of stuff off Disintegration that worked really well, and the second encore that was more than half of their first album was great. Doing it as just a 4-piece band helped them stick to a more focused sound and I think was pretty key to it being a good show.

Finally we skipped the third day- we were pretty tired and were not excited about the thought of driving back late at night in Memorial Day traffic. I can see some of the good thoughts about expanding to three days but for me its just too much and I’d rather they stick to just the Saturday/Sunday and give everyone Monday off to relax without missing any great shows.

The Gorge is as always a beautiful venue, Late May is a bit early for this area of the country since the weather is often sketchy. It rained a bit this year but at least no hail and it wasn’t freezing like last year. I also noticed what felt to me like a bunch more obnoxiously drunken people around. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention but I saw more staggering, puking, people doing wacky drunken things than at previous shows, and finally some jerk started yelling at Kat during the Cure because she was “in his way” and threw a beer and pretty much ruined the show for her. Very disappointing that people were getting that out of control.

Exciting day on the new music front. Two of the releases I’ve been waiting for the most both came out on the same day. The new Breeders album “Mountain Battles” was apparently started while Kim and Kelley Deal were out on the big Pixies 2004 reunion tour (there are bits of the song-writing on the new documentary LOUDquietLOUD).

Meanwhile Tapes ‘n Tapes have their 2nd album out after the brilliant “The Loon”. I’ve included an Amazon link but I got it from eMusic where its a lot less. Charging the full $9.99 for download albums seems way high when you can have them mail you a physical CD for the exact same price.

One funny note- The Breeder’s album has a song called “Walk It Off’. No song called “Mountain Battles” on the Tapes n’ Tapes album…

The Coachella Festival 2008 line up is out. My first reaction is that the overall list of bands playing is by far the weakest that I have ever seen. This is not to say that there aren’t some acts that I’m really eager to see- The Breeders and Fatboy Slim are two on the top of my list. But overall there is a ton of stuff I don’t care about and a ton more that I’ve never heard of.

Which brings me back to my thoughts at the end of last year’s show. Over years of going to this festival most of the best aspects were bands I didn’t know I’d love. For me this is ideally about discovering the great new stuff for the next year. So I’m keeping an open mind and I’ll dig into the full list and check out the whole list ahead of time.

Rock Band was the big arrival in our house this Christmas eve and its now been enough time to share some real thoughts on it.

Overall Rock Band is way better than Guitar Hero III. Lots of small things are better- more customization of the look of your avatar, more variety of songs. The big thing is that it moves things into a very social arena. Given the addition of voice, Rock Band has the potential to become the new karaoke, but rather than just signing along with your friends, you can do the guitar, drums or bass parts along with someone singing. The New Years after most folks had left a couple of friends stayed and we had great fun messing around with various songs.

They have also done a great job with the downloadable songs. Every Tuesday since their launch there have been 3 to 5 more songs, and they have done a decent balance of classics and newer stuff. There have been so many downloads that this already shows up some really big weaknesses in the XBox Live marketplace- it is becoming a real pain to browse through them, the description box is so small you need to wait for it to scroll to really see what the song is, and they don’t have the ability to do audio previews in the marketplace. Still, this is in serious danger of costing me $100-$250 a year if they can keep it up, and in an industry seeking ways to generate real revenue for music and artists, that should be gold.

There are two places where Guitar Hero III is still better. First, the overall feel of the guitar playing seems slightly better there- maybe its just that I got used to Guitar Hero first, but I feel like I get more places where Rock Band is just showing me missing notes for no reason. Also (go figure) the “solo play” for Guitar Hero is somewhat better, with the cool “boss battle” sequences, while the Rock Band solo play is just a list of songs.

Early production of the Rock Band guitar controllers apparently had lots of issues with the strum bar. Mine broke after just a few days but the EA return policy could not have been better. I just went to an online site, gave them a credit card # (just for a deposit) and they sent me a replacement in two days. I put the old one in the box and sent it back to them. No cost to me, very low hassle. Stuff breaks, but EA should be commended for having such a great approach to fixing it, and especially for letting me deal with it all on the web without having to talk to a support person.

Rock Band has the potential to be really huge. Its a bit expensive to get into it ($170), but the potential to be the karaoke “party game” replacement is huge, both in terms of being really fun and in terms of their potential market for the download songs. My advice would be to make sure they keep this scenario in mind as they produce new downloadable songs and game updates- make sure there are good modes in the game where its all about fun performing together, fun stuff to sing along with, etc. It would be great if they could do an update where you could have two microphones so people can sing along together, a better marketplace, better ways to browse the list of songs you own, etc.

I got Guitar Hero a week ago and I have to admit that its very addictive. I play a real guitar, but while the game can be frustrating when the rhythm is off or too artificial, its still very fun to crank through the songs. I’ve found that its also good exercise for my hands- I probably get really lazy playing the real guitar, especial with my little finger and it forces me to work them all pretty hard.

The one other complaint is the controller seems flaky and cuts out when you try to hold longer notes, especially on the middle (yellow) button.

In any case the other similar game, RockBand looks awesome too. Guess I’m going to have to put that one on order. The catch is its very expensive since it includes a controller, drums and a microphone.

Very funny, from the Onion of course.

Got the link in my email this morning. The download went flawlessly, all the concerns about Radiohead being able to deal with the infrastructure seemed unfounded. To be honest, it went more smoothly than my Amazon mp3 download experience since Radiohead just sent out customized links and didn’t try to do some wacky “you can only download once and you are screwed if the download fails” sort of thing. Its amazing how people can just make things more complicated for themselves (and their customers!) in unnecessary ways… I wonder if Amazon should try to block TCP-level retransmits to make sure you receive each packet only once?

Two things that could have been better- I wish the files were encoded at more than 160kbps. Its better than 128kbps but I’d rather see 256-320kbps to get much closer to lossless quality. I would have expected that with the band managing the process they would have cared about making sure their “product” was at the best quality possible, but then again most people won’t notice or care and I suppose it does preserve some value for people who buy the physical CD.

I also wish they had included some album-art files. Its nice to have them in Explorer / the Media Library and too bad they didn’t just include a few of the correctly named JPG files.

The music? Its almost beside the point right? Listening to it now. In any case the last few Radiohead albums took me a few play-throughs to get into so I’ll wait a week or so before making up my mind.

Radiohead just blew everyones minds and I suspect almost no one has actually heard their new album yet. The specifics around how they are releasing it are going to eclipse the album itself…

So this weekend they announced the new album In Rainbows. And in an unprecidented move its available in 10 days, not 4 months. Because you don’t have to wait for it to be pressed onto CDs and for the big marketing rollout. Its a download.

Not only that, but you get to set the price that you think is fair for it. I’d kill to see statistics on what people choose to pay. Heck, given how screwed mosts artists get by their labels, I bet Radiohead could get more cash selling the market research than the typical band gets for the album (not that this would be consistent with their style).

Apparently after the last album their contract with their label expired and they just decided to not renew. So far it seems like the new approach is going well for them- their blog says that the site has been experiencing difficulties from extreme load.

For what its worth I’ll share what I decided to pay for it. 3.99 pounds. Which comes out to a bit more than $8 US, or about the same price as downloading any of their other albums from Amazon. Except of course this way the band presumably gets most of the money, no middlemen.

So, a big round of applause for Radiohead, and if anyone still thinks the music industry in 5 years is going to look remotely like what it used to look like 5 years ago, I’ve got a quality bridge to sell you in New York…

I just noticed they had an older Radiohead Knives Out Download (3 songs) for $1.87. For a single where you aren’t going to see them lower than $5.97 in physical format this is extra-great.

or Radiohead Knives Out Download ($1.87)