Urban Outfitters Rant and Recent Music

I realized this morning that I would make a terrible "professional music critic." For that matter, I would make a terrible hipster; I don't like listening to an indie playlist or radio station just for the sake of the trend. The label "indie" does not automatically equal appealing. In fact, many of the big name indie bands sound pretty drab and boring to me, so actually having to listen to new releases and critiquing them for a publication would be difficult for me. I'd either say, "This one was pretty good," or "Nope."

It's easy for me to immediately relate the indie genre to Urban Outfitters. The store's name, in turn, has become my new favorite adjective. I feel like it's the easiest way to describe the subculture that wears $90 thrift store crap that I could find in my grandma's garage, and follows every self-proclaimed indie band that the store releases a vinyl LP for.

I don't hate Urban Outfitters. Every Christmas I generally order about $200 worth of stuff for my family, (and I can't deny a nice pair of clearance t-strap shoes or a fantastic deal on a vintage-style purse,) but I really dislike the fads that have been bred by its sales and endorsements. I don't like having to see those trends screaming at me when I go to a show in my tragically un-hip southwestern town, because most people have no idea what they're doing. They don't know how to adopt the look and make it work for them, (but maybe in general, few do.) Perhaps in a bigger city, I would be more accepting, but it would most likely be because I would have exposure to individuals who modify the style and add creativity to it--maybe a piece or two from UO, but also a vintage necklace, a thrift store sweatshirt, a handmade skirt.

I digress. It's hard to put a finger on my musical tastes. Rhapsody classifies me as a fan of Electropop, Indie Pop, Alt Dance, Post-Punk, and Brit Rock. Sometimes I'd like to expand my horizons, if only to not sound so dense and uncultured around people that have one or two bands in common, but if I don't like the first 10 seconds of any song on the album, I'm not going to go out of my way to become intimate with the band. Anyway, I suppose everyone can be a critic these days thanks to the internets!

The whole purpose of this post was to list the music I've been digging on recently because it's fun for me to come back to it months later and say, "Hey, I remember that song!" So in no particular order, here are a few songs off of albums that I dig in their entirety:

Grimes - Circumambient (album: Visions)
The Antlers - Parantheses (album: Burst Apart)
Flo & the Machine - Spectrum (album: Ceremonials)
Austra - The Noise (album: Feel it Break)
School of Seven Bells - The Night (album: Ghostory)
The Rapture - In the Grace of your Love (album: same title)
Youth Lagoon - Posters (album: The Year of Hibernation)
M83 - Midnight City (album: Hurry Up We're Dreaming)

Other songs:

Of Monsters and Men - Little Talks
Of Monsters and Men - Six Weeks
Phantogram - Turning into Stone
Zola Jesus - Animal
Zola Jesus - Vessel
Digitalism - Reeperbahn
Glasser - Apply
Hooray for Earth - True Loves
Gotye - Somebody That I Used to Know, (the new "Pumped up Kicks"? Nooo!)
Gotye - State of the Art
Bell X1 - Nightwatchmen

The Undiscovered Bedrooms of Manhattan

I stumbled upon a fantastic blog entry today that appealed to my dreamy, whimsical side. Here's a snippet:

"A friend of mine once told me about the "typical dream of a New Yorker," as he described it, wherein a homeowner pushes aside some coats and sweaters in the upstairs closet... only to reveal a door, and, behind that, another room, and, beyond that, perhaps even a whole new wing secretly attached to the back of the house..."

I found the entry very inspiring. Read the rest here.

Lori Nix

So much cool:












For more, visit her website here.

Rarities

I hear the reverberations of a distant self, shouting back at me, telling me to follow the questions that form the stem of a trail into nothingness.

M83 - Midnight City

M83 | Midnight City from DIVISION on Vimeo.

Kilian Eng

Kind of a comic book/Heavy Metal/Tron vibe, but I'm diggin' it. See more here.

Cowboys

After watching modern Westerns, I've come to the conclusion that I am a sucker for tight-fitting cowboy clothing. In "Cowboys and Aliens," Daniel Craig wears his well:

Michael Fassbender

Dear Young Magneto,
You are so attractive! (Pun intended.) I thought you were pretty decent looking in "Inglorious Basterds," but at the time, I was hard up for Sgt. Donny Donowitz, so I didn't fully appreciate your sexiness. But in "X-Men First Class"? Dear Lord, you're stunning...I'm trying to figure out if it's your private evil theme music, your black turtlenecks, your gorgeous eyes, or your reckless abandon due to the violent, traumatic events of your childhood. Either way, I want to be your heavy metal lover.

Truly, (I'm really not kidding),
Angeline

Dream Coincidence

Two nights ago, I had an elaborate dream about a brutal Aztec or Mayan Warrior Lord. I remember watching him in a shallow pool of water, perhaps a swampy, river runoff area, and the tribe he was up against sent its men, one by one, to battle him. Each one that approached him did so in terror, and he basically hacked them to pieces with his weapon, leaving body parts and so forth in the water. (I watched this as if I were there, but nobody knew I was there...almost like watching a movie play out.) After all of this, he somehow approached me and confided in me what route he was was planning on taking in order to conquer other lands and tribes. When I found out where his "path of terror" would lead him next, I plotted it out on a map, and while the map didn't resemble any I've ever seen of the world, it was apparent to me in the dream that it was South America. My dreams are sometimes vague feelings, rather than definite shapes and symbols, and so when I tried to recall his name the next morning, the only thing I could piece together was "Nozca."

Today, I was working on a Geology lab involving plate tectonics, and I had to look at a plate boundary map of the world. All along the west coast of South America, (in almost the exact same S-shaped pattern that I plotted out for the path mentioned above,) there is a plate called the "Nazca Plate." I'm trying to remember if I looked at this map earlier in the week, but I know that if I did, it wasn't for more than a few seconds. So, it's odd to me either way that 1) If I didn't see the map at all, then wtf? 2) If I did see the map, it's pretty incredible that my brain can store something that insignificant and trivial and bring it back up in such a strange format.

the performance