On the way to work today I heard a great segment on NPR about the band “The Hold Steady” (link takes you to interview, but there’s other cool content on them on the NPR site if you do a search).

The Hold Steady
Tuesday, March 16th, 8pm - with EZ-T and Left is West. THS are members of the great Lifter Puller and EZ-T has a member of Bonnie Prince Billy
- $5 day of show.

But if you’re reading this, you’re not here. But you should be. I got the impression that Left is West plays around here entirely too much from an offhand bartender comment, and they ain’t doin’ nothin’ the Spent Poets hadn’t already done a decade and a half ago. Didn’t come to see them though.

I’m all over EZ-T. I plan to write a disc review soonish of “Goodbye Little Doll.” Needless to say, this has been burning itself into the flash memory of my iPod. Just hit Amazon and noticed that Bonnie “Prince” Billy gets compared to 16 Horsepower (which right after Nick Cave and the Tindersticks is my favorite band).

Something so wrong about stealing wireless, charging drinks, and posting live while you watch a show. By the way, the Mews is a smokefree bar.

The Vaudeville Mews

All bars in DM are now smoke free. I got tired of waiting for a follow up to EZ-T disc, and I still think the The Hold Steady rules. Great semi-spoken word stuff. Just the other day I pointed out to my girlfriend I wish I could do stuff like this. You know, if I had a band. I’m unsure if the The Hold Steady guy can actually sing, but I don’t care. NPR compares them to Bruce Springsteen, I think a better comparison is Jim Carroll.

I asked if their singer if he’d ever been compared to Carroll. He said “No, never,” but in that tone of voice that said he was sick of that question. They opened for EZ-T. At the end of the show there was me and some underage kid. A freaking private concert. I doubt if The Hold Steady will be playing any tiny bars with no audience again any time soon.

Oh, and I don’t remember if I ever wrote a review of “Goodbye Little Doll.”

So I didn’t even know this was coming out until an advanced copy of the disc fell into my grubby little hands: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! (Amazon link).

You can grab the single now, and the full disc is available for preorder. This link will take you to the single. Their calling it an EP, but since it’s only 2 songs and a video, I’m calling a single a single.

This disc has been getting heavy play in my iTunes library. Makes me smile. It’s old school Cave. Hard hitting stuff harkening back to “Big Jesus Trash Can” or “The Six Strings That Drew Blood.” This sounds more like a followup Grinderman project than a new Cave and Bad Seeds album, but I don’t mind at all. This isn’t going to displace my favorite Cave discs (“Murder Ballads”
ties with “The Good Son”), but any new Cave can only be a good thing.

“Hold Onto Yourself” is the only song that comes close to being anything like a ballad. But it would seem out of place on “Boatman’s Call” or any other previous disc with perhaps the exception being “No More Shall We Part,” but even there it would come off as b-side material.

My favorite song on the disc is “We Call Upon the Author” (no link yet). I’ve felt this way when reading may a book. The chorus is “We call upon the author to explain.” Yes, often I want ask many a writer, “What were you thinking here?”

Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!
He wrote like wet papiermache, went the Hemingway weirdly on wings and with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain

Yeah, well, down in my bolthole I see they’ve published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“The waves, the waves were soldiers moving”. Well, thank you, thank you, thank you
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain

Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is not overthought or overproduced, it’s got an honesty and rawness that few artists can achieve. This is the usual literary and image packed disc you’d expect from Cave.

Track Listing:

1. Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
2. Today’s Lesson
3. Moonland
4. Night Of The Lotus Eaters
5. Albert Goes West
6. We Call Upon The Author
7. Hold On To Yourself
8. Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)
9. Jesus On The Moon
10. Midnight Man
11. More News From Nowhere

This post may come and go as bandwidth allows. And before you waste your time (and my bandwidth), these are all instrumental tracks. If you do download it, please leave a comment. Thanks.

Some of you out there in radio land may or may not know that Trent Reznor has decided to put his latest 36 track opus “Ghosts I-IV” out in various formats under this Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, which allows me to share it in the Apple Lossless format here: nin_ghosts_I-IV_apple (control click and “Save File As”). If your sorry ass uses something other than a mac, well go buy it your own damn self, since I think these files won’t do you for ——! You can for sure get the first 9 tracks off the nin.com website in mp3 format for fee as well, but you know you really wish you had a mac.

Someday I will be cool enough to have my own wikipedia entry, but until then I’ll be watching my bandwidth carefully, since I do not mind you grabbing this from me (if you can use them), but I refuse to pay for you to have it, you cheapskate. And in case you’re out there, upset that I am costing Reznor some hard earned cash, let me remind you, he’s not hurting, he chose to release it this way. If you’re really truly concerned, go buy it or leave me some hate comments below, but remember they are moderated. Or if you’re cool, grab the zip file, put it on your site, leave your URL in the comments, and once I’ve seen you have indeed done this I will link to you. And in the probably event that I do exceed my bandwidth, I’ll turn this post into a link farm until I get my new quota.

Creative Commons is cool. The RIAA and artists they represent are fucknuts, and should be told so. You can call the RIAA at 1-800-BAD-BEAT to tell them “You and the artists you represent are fucknuts.” Tell ‘em I sent you.

Oh, by the way, my girlfriend doesn’t think this is music at all, which means she won’t be downloading it. I’m sure she thinks there is no accounting for tastes.