Day 17 - Fall Leaf & Flip Flop

polaroid macro filters attached to the end of my nikkor 55-200 telephoto lens.  Fully manual mode!  Chromatic aberration and vignetting removed in Aperture.

70mm, ISO 6400, f/10, 1/50, +10 and +4 macro filters stacked

80mm, ISO12800, f/16, 1/25, +10, +4 and +2 macro filters stacked; slight cropping, devignetting and chromatic aberration correction in aperture

Day 16 - Nude trees

Day 15 - Newcastle

Polaroid Macro filters on my Nikkor 35mm prime lens.  f/1.8 on the first f/8 on the second to get a deeper depth of field.  iso 3200

'Vintage' color added via aperture

Day 14 - struggles

Singing is hard.  I guess it's easier to tell when something is really terribly sung than when a picture isn't very good, which perhaps hides how hard photography is.

This shot was close range; Nikon D3100, 35mm, f/1.8, ISO1600, 1/30; slightly cropped and converted to sepia in Aperture.

Day 13 - Piedmont Park and playing with HDR

Here I played around with HDR some.  It's essentially faked HDR, which is faked photography, but who really cares?  It's all about the image.  Now, the problem with the image is the loss of fidelity.  I used a pretty cheap HDR program, and I got the exposures by using Aperture's 'quick fix' settings to increase the exposure one stop, exported that image, then increased the exposure two stops, exported that image, then decreased the exposure one stop from the original, then exported that image.  Then I took those four images (the original, +1, +2 and -1 exposures) and used HDR studio, a cheap program for macs to create the final image.  All this processing in the JPEG format led to some noticeable degradation of the image.  But overall, I was pretty happy with the final image and the colors that came out.

Day 12 - Architecture

I really want to get into architectural photography.  However, I really haven't had the time to scope out buildings where I'd have access to a lot of good shots.  However, I was relatively happy with this shot.  I just kind of snapped it off while walking back to work from starbucks.  It's the front of the building I work in, The Biltmore Hotel.  It's obviously not actually a hotel any longer, but has some upscale apartments and office space.  It's got a very classical/colonial vibe to the architecture.

Day 11 - color splash

So, this technique gets overused a lot.  I especially can't stand when someone actually uses it to take attention away from the subject.  Like a picture of a kid, where some random color on his shirt is highlighted.

Here I used it because I liked the framing in this picture, but Brice's color is more or less the same as the color of the background, making him not stand out as much.  So, I put the background and the foreground in black and white, but left him colored.  I'd rather have him against a nice, natural contrasting background, but with what I had to work with, I think this really saved the picture.

Day 10 - New 35 mm prime lens!

f1.8 is an amazing thing.  Love the bokeh (oh damn, dropping photography jargon on ya, bokeh simply means blurry background).  Love the sharpness.  So far I'm loving this lens.  It's also encouraging me to play around a lot more with aperture priority mode on the camera to control depth of field.

Day 9 - messing with fake out of focus

So, I didn't get to take a lot of photos today, but I did get a good one of my dog.  Problem was, with the lens I had on, the depth of field was too great, so the sort of tacky neighbors yard ruined to the picture somewhat.  My 35mm f1.8 lens was on the way, or the shot would have been nearly perfect.

So, I used fake blur.  Yeah, it's sort of noticeable, but I think the shot's better because of it, it's better than having the neighbor's house distract.  Not my finest moment, and it definitely won't make any future 'portfolio' I'd put out.

Other than the fake blur, the shot was cropped, but not otherwise altered.

Day 8 - Missed My Dog

While I went to visit my parents for the weekend, my older dog stayed home with his mom.  I missed him.

Day 7 - Small Acoustic Gig

A friend of mine, Will McCranie, came down from NYC for the weekends and played an intimate acoustic show, complete with two acoustic guitars and an upright bass.

I'm slowly learning how to properly utilize a flash.  In most cases, I hate the artificial 'feel' the flash gives most photos, but in dark settings you need it if you want a really sharp image.  Good post-processing software can really help with this.

Day 6 - Bread

My aunt wanted me to take some pictures of her homemade bread.  A little too centered for me to love it, but it was a practical picture as opposed to a 'artsy' 'follow the rules' type photograph.  And there wasn't a good object near by to use as a balance for the rule of thirds.

Day 5 - Blues and Rock

Went to see my uncle's band play at the Hotel Aiken.  Then to Metro in downtown Augusta to see some friends play.  Here are what I thought were my best from each (click on the pictures for an enlarged view):

Jim Marshall has always been one of my heroes.  So I guess that makes my default way of thinking about shooting live music in black and white.  The thing people may not realize about shooting live music is that while the music may be extremely dynamic,  if you just steadily shot, 95% of the pictures would be indiscernable from one another.  I think the variance in the music makes us think that visually more is going on than actually is.  But really, there's only so much you can do while playing an instrument without it seeming kitschy.  So, you have to get sort of 'creative' with angles and lighting and so on if you're going to make the pictures interesting.

I grew up with my aunt and uncle and I bought him the guitar he's playing in the above picture, so it has sentimental value for me anyway.  But I like the sort of reverse silhouette (no idea if that's a real term) this picture has going on.

I like the Egnater Amps advertisement vibe this picture gives off.  My long time best friend Michael is on the left of the picture with his R9 Gibson Les Paul.

10/21 Day 4 Photos of the Day - Rust

So, taking some photographs around my parents house I realized that all of the things I found interesting to photograph where rusted.  I guess I find rust inherently interesting.  Knowing that at one time it was a shiny metal object and now it has decayed to something, though perhaps less useful, is more interesting to me.  

Both pictures were taken with my Nikon D3100 with the 18-55 mm kit lens and a UV filter.  I did some very mild light adjustments in Aperture.  I don't like doing too much post production on my pictures, but I am kind of feeling my way through Aperture. 

I found the lock particularly interesting.  I'm not sure exactly what I think it symbolizes, but I found the idea of a device that was buried in the ground, still locked, but slowly being unlocked not with a key, but with time.  

My nephew Blake actually dug it up in my parents back yard.  

This well pump is actually in my parents side yard and no longer works.

Somewhat new direction for this blog

So, after being extremely busy for the last couple of months, I decided that I need to start blogging again. However, I just haven't been able to listen to enough music to really have a whole lot to say about anything new. I like the new Wilco and Ryan Adams albums, though I'm not head over heels crazy about either of them either. They're very good, very solid albums. But neither would come close to my top 200 albums of all-time type list.

I've been getting into photography recently. By recently I mean within the last couple of days. It's always been something I've been really interested in. I've always wanted to express myself with art. However, I can't draw particularly well, and I'm not really into abstract art enough for that not to be an issue. I'm not talented enough to make music that I really love, though from time to time I might write part of a song I sort of like. However, the great thing about photography is that it's almost a pure art of the mind. Other than having a somewhat steady hand, you needn't have physical abilities to create your art. You just need to have a clear vision of what you want, learn principles and how the aspects of photography work together and have good enough gear. Whereas I don't think I could ever be a truly great guitarist due to mediocre left and right hand coordination, and I could never remotely become a great painter, I think it's at least theoretically possible, no matter how unlikely, that I could create photographs that I'm really, really happy with.

So, that's going to become a part of this blog. I will also, from time to time, discuss music that has really grabbed me. And philosophical things, and musings. Basically this blog is just going to be me. My thoughts and my art, such as it is. Though I'll probably still just post my sports thoughts on another blog. One thing I want to do is post one photo every day for a year. I actually started this a couple of days ago, but just now decided to do this in blog format. This will allow me to share a daily sort of experience with everybody, but also to track my progress in my 'art'.

 So, here are what I thought the best photographs I took from the last 3 days (all images can be clicked for a larger version):

Day 1:

This was taken with an iPhone 4S in HDR mode. It was taken from several feet away and then cropped for the zoom. You can see a little bit of noise in the extreme white and extreme black. But in a very low light situation and cropped heavily, i think the image quality is outstanding for a camera phone. I like the picture a lot, because it's my baby girl Emmie, but I was pretty happy with the composition of it as well. She's a wild dog, but is actually quite docile early in the mornings, as she likes to watch the sun rise out of the window. I liked the way the light from outside came in to illuminate her eyes.

 Day 2:

This was taken in pretty low light with a Nikon D3100 with the 18-55mm kit lens on a mini tripod, I gave it a two second delay, because with the length of the exposure I didn't want any shake from pressing the shutter button. I love the Gran Habano Corojo #5 cigar box (the cigar is also one, if not my absolute, favorites). I really like the warmth that a low light, long exposure photo gives some time.

 Day 3:

This was me playing around with my macro filter. It was shot in overcast lighting with a D3100, 18-55mm kit lins, with a macro filter. The macro filter actually was half of a wide angle lens add-on that I got for $10 on amazon. Pretty great deal. It's not perfect, but it's a good way to figure out how interested I am in macro (that is extreme close up) photography. I like the way it almost seems like the fly has a personality here. Like he's asking me "why the hell are you intruding upon my existence here?"

Favorite Albums From the Past 18(ish) months

Presented in no particular order and without comment, mostly because I'm lazy. Feel free to ask any questions though. Also, I fucking hate Facebook. I tried to post this there, but it just kept getting deleted, without telling me why, or even that it wasn't going to post.

Good Old War - Good Old War
Dawes - Nothing Is Wrong
Anna Calvi - Anna Calvi
Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues
Foo Fighters - Wasting Light
Fucked Up - David Comes To Life
My Morning Jacket - Circuital
American Bang - American Bang
The Band Perry - The Band Perry
Black Mountain - Wilderness Heart
Delta Spirit - History From Below
Elizabeth Cook - Welder
Mavis Staples - You Are Not Alone
Middle Brother - Middle Brother
Neon Trees - Habits
The Whigs - In The Dark
Zac Brown Band - You Get What You Give
The National - High Violet
British Sea Power - Valhalla Dancehall
The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang
The Cave Singers - No Witch
The Civil Wars - Barton Hollow
The Decemberists - The King is Dead

On The Killing of John Lennon

John Lennon was murdered by on December 8th 1980 by Mark David Chapman. This is not about that. This is about a killing that in a way is metaphorical, but really more real for those who never actually met John Lennon, which is to say, for all intents and purposes, all of us. So, since it's really the real killing of John Lennon for almost everybody who is alive, I guess you can call the metaphorical killing of John Lennon, in fact, the real killing of John Lennon.

If you run across any random person on the street and play a sample of Imagine, and then play a sample of Happiness Is A Warm Gun, a TON will immediately recognize Imagine, and have no idea what Happiness Is a Warm Gun is. Everybody who knows the latter however will also know Imagine. This infuriates me. It's kind of silly that it does infuriate me, but this is sort of about why it infuriates me.

John Lennon was an interesting person. As already stated, and obvious, none of us ever met John Lennon. We all just have an idea of John Lennon. That idea lives on. So in a way, you could say that John Lennon might still be an interesting person, since the idea of him, which is all we ever had in the first place, still exists. But that would be a lie. Not because he is dead, but because the memory that pervades our society of John Lennon is no longer interesting. John Lennon of today is really no more interesting than Santa Claus. He's a one dimensional figure of goodness to be admired in some sort of abstract way. This bores me and infuriates me, if such a duality is possible in the first place.

John Lennon was at times homophobic and something of an anti-semite. As the kids today might say "he was just doing it for the lulz", but he nearly drove Brian Epstein to nervous breakdowns many, many times, by relentlessly making fun of him for being a gay Jewish man (this despite, and maybe because of, the fact that John openly enjoyed the fact that Epstein was highly attracted to John, even going on a vacation with Epstein, and when he wasn't relentlessly making fun of him, he and Epstein were often close friends. Yes, it was very complex, that's the point). Nobody knows that John would ever say something so reprehensible about somebody who he knew, and knew it hurt his feelings like that. People will get angry at you for pointing it out, despite the fact that there are several recordings of him singing "baby you're a rich man too" as "baby you're a rich fag Jew." "Nope, didn't happen" according to our collective memory of John Lennon. John was obviously an imperfect man, with human imperfections and some vile things that were actually true about him. But that's precisely what was interesting about him, and precisely why he has been murdered in a real sense, in our memories. Because we are forgetting that.

The Beatles were a fascinating band. This is just objectively true. No musical act in history has had even 1/10th of the words written about them as has been written about The Beatles. They were many things, to many people. They were a never ending riddle in a lot of ways. Just when you think you had The Beatles figured out, you find something else out about them that was interesting, fascinating and surprising (or in the case of people who listened to The Beatles in the 60's they actually did something that surprised you). The Beatles were masters of having multiple layers both musically and personality wise. On one level, they were a bubble gum pop act that made several albums before they ever had a single song that didn't include the word Love in it at some point. Yet, even in the early days they were doing things musically, on a sort of below the surface level, that were very complex. Be they interesting melodies, harmonies or harmonic structures. Even their love songs were more complex than the typical "you're beautiful, I love you" fare that was being put out by other bubble gum pop acts of the time.

None of The Beatles fascinated people more than John Lennon. He was acerbic, he was brash, but he could also be gentle and write very humble little sweet songs. His stated goal was to "rock the face off of the world." Yet, many remember him for Imagine. Many remember him as the ultimate symbol for the idea of "Peace, Love, Dope."

At some point, John Lennon became a Hero. A legend. The thing about legends is that we don't like flawed legends. When we call someone our hero, we don't like the idea that this person was flawed, and not really a better person than you or I are, really. When it comes to legends, we like them black or white, not gray. We like our heroes as platonic ideals. And just like you can hear freshman philosophy majors argue whether or not Plato had a platonic place in the platonic world for mud, or if mud was just a weird combination that only existed in reality, as John Lennon became a platonic ideal, we had to get rid of the complicated stuff. John Lennon was mud, beautiful, interesting mud. But we had to turn him into either dirt or water, because those are proper platonic ideals, while mud isn't. That is, we had to get rid of the things that made him interesting and fascinating in the first place. We had to hyper inflate the importance of such a saccharine sweet, completely average song like Imagine, into some canonical masterpiece, while simultaneously forgetting or at least lessening the importance of his much better, much more complex songwriting.

People often think of John Lennon as being a gentle rocker. Nobody listens to the actual Plastic Ono Band album, which still sounds acerbic, and quite frankly, difficult to listen to even today. It's an inconvenient truth that he wasn't actually very gentle, or even kinder than average, as a person, and especially not as a musician.

Another mis-memory of Lennon is that he was pure artistic integrity. That he was completely true to some higher calling of artistic vision, and the money was only accidental. This was completely opposite from the truth. Lennon once remarked in the early days "I'll wear a balloon if people are going to pay me." Yet, this gets ignored, typed over with things about his artistic integrity.

Also, most people forget everything about Cynthia Lennon. People forget that John openly courted her when she was engaged, and that he intimated her husband with repeated threats of physical violence. People forget that Lennon admitted to actually physically abusing nearly every woman (including Cynthia) he had ever had any sort of relationship with, with the exception of Ono.

So, who cares if we misremember John Lennon? Isn't it no more harmful than our idea of Santa Claus as a perfect jolly fat man that brings joy to little kids? In fact, might it even be a good thing that we forget that he was at the very least a woman hitter, among many other flaws? Doesn't this misremembering give us something better to aspire to? Even if these purely white, pristine heroes don't actually exist, might it not be a good thing that we at least pretend that they do?

No, I don't think so. First of all, I think it makes us lessen ourselves. We are mostly intimately aware of just how fucked up we are. I know at times I'm a pretty shitty person, that sometimes does pretty shitty things. I can't not do shitty things occasionally. It's one thing to strive for perfection, but it's quite another thing to think it can be achieved. Beatifying John Lennon into a saint, in a lot of ways, makes us all downgrade ourselves. And there's no surer path to doing more shitty things than downgrading ourselves. By creating this perfect person, we actually push ourselves further away from what we desire to be, instead of helping us get closer.

Secondly, maybe this is just me, but perfect people, even in theory, are boring. They're predictable, they always do exactly what you expect them to do, because they do just the right thing. Fuck that. Those people, even though they don't exist, suck. While some might view the platonic world as a sort of heaven, to me, it'd be a sort of hell, albeit without suffering. Nothing interesting would ever happen. The John Lennon of our collective memories could never have written Happiness Is a Warm Gun, it's too complex for a perfect person to write. A novel about the John Lennon, as we collectively remember him, wouldn't sell any copies at all. It'd be kind of cool for like 5 pages, then you'd realize nothing remotely unpredictable is going to happen, because all he ever would do, according to how we remember him, would be kind and nice and peaceful.

John Lennon was just as fucked up as we all are, just as bad of a person as we all are. He may have been better at expressing that through music than any of us, but that's both the point and besides the point. We do nobody favors, with perhaps the exception of Yoko Ono, when we remember John Lennon as a mythological monolithic figure of pure goodness, love and peace.

Sure, there were many great things about John Lennon, we all remember those, so I didn't feel the need to point them out. And don't think that pointing out all his flaws is a small person's way of belittling a great man. John Lennon was a great man, precisely because he was a man, with all the inherent flaws any man has. When we look at John Lennon and his music, it's far greater to see ourselves than some pure non-entity.

So I'll fight a likely pointless battle against this death of John Lennon, because he can still be saved. Because we live in the information age, a lot of this information is out there. It's impossible to completely rewrite history at this point in an Orwellian sense. But we have to make sure that people know this information. We have to make sure that if people have any idea of John Lennon at all, that they know he was just a person, not a platonic ideal. Because it matters. Because The Beatles still matter, because people still matter. Because imperfections not only matter, but because moments of imperfection are what makes life worth living. Because if I hear another person talk about Imagine being one of the greatest songs ever, I might just do something really shitty to them, and John wouldn't want that.

John Lennon was a dude, who could write great songs and sing relatively well. He both promoted peace and beat women. I think it's important that we remember this.

Album Review: The Strokes - Angles

When it comes to The Strokes, really one thing separates their great material from their merely good material: Melody.

You pretty much know you're going to get the same dead on the beat drumming and lyrical/riff-y bass parts. Julian's voice is always going to have pretty much the same new york/brit/euro faux soul style. There aren't going to be any harmonies. Albert Hammond Jr. is going to have some decent chordal solos and comping and Nick Valensi is going to have some pretty good leads.

All of that is here on Angles. What is very uneven is the quality of the melodies, which is why the album is pretty uneven. This is perhaps the band's best album performance wise, ever. Julian's voice is just as good, if not better than ever, and Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi have solidly progressed as guitarists. Two Kinds of Happiness and You're So Right contain, by far, the best guitar work on any Strokes songs and the guitar work is excellent throughout the entire album.

But listen to the lead single, Under Cover of Darkness, and then listen to any of the other songs on the album. The rest fall flat, because Under Cover of Darkness is the only truly great melody on the album.

What made Is This It so great wasn't particularly the sound or the image of the band, and it definitely wasn't the technical skill of the band, but that they had the melodies pouring out of them. That album isn't the best performed album you'll find, but brilliant pop rock melodies carried it.

Angles has a lot of the "well, Julian doesn't really have a good melody to sing, so he's just going to kind of randomly ramble in a slightly interesting way" that is the hallmark of The Strokes more mediocre material.

That's not to say Angles is a terrible album, or even a mediocre album, it's just good, and that's it. The musicianship holds a lot of otherwise boring songs up and keeps you listening. It's a very good "sounding" album, extremely well produced. There are some decent melodies on a few songs, like Taken For a Fool, not a great melody, but okay. Overall though, the album just doesn't captivate, it's merely pleasant and enjoyable. Which isn't so bad after all.

79/100

Album Review: The Cave Singers - No Witch

It's always a really exciting time when a band makes The Quantum Leap Forward. It seems these days few bands actually do it. The trend seems to be an amazing debut followed by a long string of the same or worse (think The Strokes). The Cave Singers seem to have just made the largest Quantum Leap Forward of any band in the last couple of years.

I won't spend a ton of time talking about The Cave Singers' past output. Suffice it to say it was generic soft folk rock that got really same-y in a hurry. It wasn't bad, per se, but it just wasn't much of anything to get excited about. They were kind of like an inferior version of early Iron and Wine mixed with Band of Horses at their most lethargic. The thing was that it seemed they had settled on their core sound. Something that a lot of bands these days seem to be in a real hurry to do. I more or less expected them to churn out the same album for the next 4 years and then dissolve into other random bands.

So No Witch came as something of a shock. I honestly can't even recall why I downloaded it in the first place. It was recommended by Amazon and I just kind of thought "oh yeah those guys, guess I'll give it a listen, I'm kinda bored with everything else that has come out this year, why not?"

Right off the bat, things sounded better than previous efforts. The first two songs, Gifts and the Raft and Swim Club, were more or less similar in nature to what they had been putting out, but better structured. Even though the first couple of songs were the same type fare, it was already obvious that they were doing their standard sound substantially better than before.

Then the third song, Black Leaf, dropped and it was obvious that this really was a different band. The driving riff behind the song is a very nasty dirty electric guitar riff that was about as far away from their previous vibe as you could find. The song reminds me a lot of a mix of Dead Confederate and the more driving moments of The Black Angels.

By this time we kind of see that the band's compositional ethos is pretty locked into place. Most every song is based around a guitar riff that's very droning and driving, and the band gradually layers more parts on top of it, keeping the riff driving the song throughout. They rarely stray from this formula, but they add enough flourishes that it works without getting boring. And this formula is versatile enough to support everything from soft acoustic folk numbers to driving rockers and everything in between.

The only major criticism of the album is that it never really, truly soars, it just smolders a lot. The band went more for atmosphere instead of having anything that's remotely single like. It's hard to criticize an artistic choice like that too much, but I do personally think the album would be a little better off with at least one big chorus.

As for other stand out tracks, Haller Lake is a fantastic song, and the album closes exceptionally strongly with the blues rocker No Prosecution If We Bail. Perhaps the best overall song (though the worst named song I can recall) is All Land Crabs and Divinity Ghosts. Haller Lake almost sounds something like if you blended up The Black Angels, Band of Horses and Bruce Springsteen's vocals and threw in a Melodica for good measure. All Land Crabs and Divinity Ghosts pretty much is the album in a nutshell. A driving rhythmic riff that slowly builds into a nice crescendo. No Prosecution If We Bail is just a stomp and holler blues rock driving classic ender. It reminds me a lot of Dead Confederate when they were in the process of transitioning from their days as a jamband named Redbelly. Which is my favorite period of Dead Confederate.

Overall, I think this may be the best album put out thus far this year. Along with Ana Calvi and British Sea Power.

Rating: 88/100

If I gambled I might try out this theory

First, a quick note about how gambling works. There are basically three types of gamblers: The everyday guys, the big fish and the sophisticated gamblers.

The everyday guy bets his gut and falls prey to all sorts of cognitive biases like confirmation bias. This guy is basically the cash cow that the books make their money on. They don't bet a lot of money, but there are a lot of them. Their bets are no better than guessing, and any time the books get you to that point, they will make their money. The everyday guy will bet on "his team". The bet is usually about a show of loyalty and maybe some sort of misguided belief that they know things that nobody else does, because they read an article that's freely available to the public.

The big fish is more sophisticated, he knows more about which team is likely to cover (or win, depending on the type of bet), but his problem is that he likes huge bets on single outcomes. He does better than guessing, by a little bit. However, he falls prey because if he wins big on one bet he'll just bet more on a subsequent win, until eventually he gets wiped out and has to start from scratch. You can only make money in gambling if you eventually remove money from your "gambling pot" and stop putting it back in the form larger bets. Because everybody loses at some point. For the big fish, it's not so much about making money, it's about the thrill of gambling. Sure, they love to win, but they love the adrenaline rush of the risk more than anything else. And to keep getting that adrenaline rush, you have to keep betting more and more. Also, for some reason they tend to get a bigger rush when they're betting for something instead of against something, so they tend to focus on things they think are undervalued and bet for them. This is a subtle, yet often important point we'll come back to later.

The sophisticated gamblers are those that pick and choose their moments carefully and always spread their risk by betting smaller sums on a LOT of games. They use a lot of statistics and will occasionally bet on games they know nothing about, if the statistics tell them so. These guys can actually make a living betting on sports, as long as there are enough common guys and big fish out there that the books still have to set the lines around them, and not the sophisticated gamblers. The sophisticated gamblers look at gambling as a science and tackle it in a very cold sophisticated way. Many don't even enjoy gambling, in fact they wouldn't be as good at it if they did. For them it's purely a job, they're no different than a market analyst. In fact many of them are former wall street quants.

So to make money gambling, you have to understand a few things:

1) lines aren't set so that the books equal the probability for each team to win. Lines are set to have equal money coming in as much as possible. Because this equals out their risk.
2) You need to find occasions where you think that big fish and regular guys will have some reason to overvalue one side or another and bet against that. You aren't betting against the teams, you're betting against the other gamblers.
3) Regular guys bet with their heart and common information. You can get a good idea of where they will bet based on which team has the larger betting fanbase and by reading popular ESPN articles.
4) Big Fish tend to be a little more sophisticated, mostly betting on things that they think are undervalued. For instance, in baseball they tend to bet on the team with the higher OBP.
5) Sophisticated guys tend to bet against things they think are overvalued.
6) Unless you bet for the joy of it, you want to be the sophisticated guy.

How do you find something that is overvalued? Usually you have to find some statistic that is highly correlated with a team's success, yet also highly unstable, that is not an easily repeatable skill and very much a product of luck.

Some examples:

MLB: batting average with runners in scoring position. For a long time you could make a killing in baseball by getting AGAINST the team with the higher batting average with runners in scoring position. It's been more or less statistically proven that hitting with runners in scoring position isn't really a repeatable skill. Teams almost always regress to what their overall batting average is, plus a couple of points (for reasons too numerous and complicated to go into here, most hitters are going to hit slightly better with runners in scoring position, not because of skill, but because of systematic differences in the situation). Yet hitting with runners in scoring position is highly correlated with success. You can still make SOME money with this approach, but not nearly as much as the good old days when the first thing that made someone like a player or team was clutch hitting.

NFL: Red Zone Offense and Defense. Unlike hitting with runners in scoring position, this is a valuable skill that some teams are going to be systematically better or worse at. However, it's still overvalued. This area is again highly correlated with a team's success, but it's also at least partially, if not primarily based on luck. You're isolating just a few moments in a game and giving them enormous importance in the outcome of the game. Any time this happens, it's often the case that the "skill" becomes overvalued. You can win a lot of games very simply by taking a team's redzone offense and defense rankings, adding them and then betting AGAINST the one with the better composite ranking. Hypothetical Example: Indianapolis v. Jacksonville (Indy 3.5 point favorite) Indianapolis is ranked 12th in red zone offense and 22nd in redzone defense. Jacksonville is ranked 23rd in redzone offense, but 3rd in redzone defense. Indianapolis' composite score is 34 v. Jacksonville's composite score is 25. Bet on Indianapolis. This may seem highly counterintuitive, betting on the statistically worse team, but remember, its not that you are betting on a team, its that you're betting against things that are overvalued. Red Zone offense and defense, being highly important to game outcome, yet largely based on luck, tend to be overvalued.

NBA: 3 point FG % defense. Again, this is a valuable skill, and skill has a lot to do with it, but again, luck has a lot to do with it as well, and it tends to be slightly overvalued when it comes to game outcomes because of how important it is to game outcomes, yet how relatively small the sample size is.

Early in the season, bet against teams with more rabid fanbases. Early in the season the big fish tend to lay low. There isn't yet a lot of information out there on which teams are better, making large single bets especially dangerous. Yet, there is some money to be made if you know how to bet against the regular guys, who are just as likely to bet early in the season as late in the season (excluding playoffs, where everybody bets more). Remember, regular guys bet with their heart, so it's often a good strategy to roughly gauge the rabidity and size of the fanbases and bet against teams whose fanbases vastly outpace their opponents. Early in a season, it's a pretty good idea to bet against the Cowboys in a matchup against the Jaguars. Whtever that line is, you can almost assure it will be slightly too high in favor of the Cowboys to bring in money for the Jaguars, but won't ever quite get "right" because of the Cowboys perpetually large, optimistic and rabid fanbase.

The major key here to being a sophisticated sports gambler is realizing what you're gambling against. You're gambling against the other gamblers. Thus you must focus not on which team you think is better, you must gamble against what you think is overvalued by the other gamblers. Especially the regular guys and the big fish. You also have to realize that this only wins on average, and that your best bet is to find quality strategies and bet small sums on a LOT of games, rather than large sums on a few games. Statistics work best over large samples.

Of course the best strategy is not to gamble and invest your money in bonds and stable stocks with good fundamentals. But I digress.

Two Roomates Discussing Radiohead's The King of Limbs

Occam's Razor, as applied to dinosaur extinction

Wikipedia's page on theories of dino extinction is several thousand words long.

or we could consider:

I think Occam's answer is clear.

Album Review: Radiohead - The King of Limbs

Radiohead's latest offering is something akin to those days when you have a lot of things you are supposed to do, but you get caught up in a couple of things, do an amazing job on them and then kind of half ass the rest.

King of Limbs is short, 37 minutes total playing time. This is exacerbated by the fact that really this is a 4 song EP, with 4 generic ambient trance* beat tracks they slapped on the beginning to create a full album.

But boy, what a 4 song EP. To be clear, this is a continuation of Radiohead's general trend as these four songs could easily have been fit onto In Rainbows. They would have been amongst the better tracks on that album, which is impressive, since it was a very good album.

Putting 4 complete snorers to open the album would be risky for any band out there besides Radiohead, as I don't even think that Animal Collective would get people to listen to that 5th track if they had put those 4 to start. Yet, with Radiohead it's almost like a sort of joke where Thom is saying "you thought that was going to be what the album was like for a second, didn't you? And you were really worried about how you were going to justify liking this, nah dawg, I'm just playin' here is the real album."

When the actual physical album is released, it's supposed to go on two 10" vinyls, and I'm guessing the songs will be divided up 4 and 4**, which will mean that this really is a 2 EP album, where one EP is terrible and the other is brilliant.

I'd call the last 4 songs a mix of the better parts of Amnesiac and In Rainbows. Give Up The Ghost is ethereal in the best sense. Some breathtakingly beautiful stuff going on here. Because of how short the EP is (yes, I am going to obnoxiously refer to this as an EP), it's not a big deal that the thing is somewhat same-y, as it's hard to get tired of it in 16 minutes. Especially when it's that great.

*Apologies if I used the descriptive terms for that genre incorrectly, its not one that I am familiar with, never having been addicted to ecstasy and all.

** Or, alternatively we may have only heard half the album thus far, as the internet speculation is running. Until we receive something other than these 8 tracks I am going to treat what has been released as the entirety.

1st 4 songs: 58/100
last 4 songs 90/100

Album Review - Anna Calvi - Anna Calvi

It took me about three weeks, but I really warmed up to this seductive self titled debut.

When I first started to get into the album, one of the first things I did was try to find out who the guitarist was, as the guitar playing was brilliant, perfect for the song, yet distinctive. To my astonishment, Anna Calvi is the guitarist. There is perhaps nothing sexier in the world than a great female guitarist and Anna Calvi backs that up, and then some.

Everything about this album screams sultriness. From her voice, to her John Barry like compositions, to her sultry guitar tone (Fender Telecaster through a Vox AC30) to her lyrics. This album isn't sex. This album is seducing you from across a room, dancing late into the night in a smoky jazz club, bringing you back to her place, making passionate love and then having you walk home at 4 AM confused about what just happened.

The music tends toward a combination of latin/flamenco-ish rhythm, jazzy guitar lines and very Shirley Bassey meets Nina Simone vocals.

84/100

The Black Keys: A brief history and a mini-review of Brothers (why is it so great again?)

I've been following The Black Keys for quite a while now. My uncle, who I grew up with, is pretty tapped into the blues scene, they owned and operated a blues club for several years. They had heard tell of this duo of young guys doing a sort of Junior Kimbrough tribute type thing. Shortly thereafter we actually received an advance copy of The Big Come Up.

In these early years The Black Keys were copying a long tradition in blues music, the guitar/drums duo. This wasn't some new idea, like many seemed to think due to The White Stripes recent popularity. These older blues musicians had been doing this for nearly a century, not to accomplish some sort of "sound" but to split the small pot as few ways as possible. Typically the drummer was paid less than the guitarist/vocalist in such setups as well.

Not only were The Black Keys copying a traditional blues format, but Auerbachs guitar style was a watered down version of Junior Kimbrough (who the band has covered numerous times on several albums and released a tribute album to).

It was very good for a slightly fresh take on a traditional blues duo. However, white kids have been trying to play more or less traditionalist blues for a really long time. They were perhaps noticeable because the blues artists they were copying were relatively obscure blues artists, and most noticeably not Stevie Ray Vaughn, who most of the young white blues guys were (and still are) copying at the time. That being said, they were outright rejected by some of the more knowledgeable indie crowd because they were producing really straightforward blues rock. They were rejected by the blues traditionalist crowd because of their strict adherence to North Mississippi style blues, which wasn't particularly en vogue with the older white guys who controlled the blues traditionalist scene at the time (Chicago blues were and are the dominant style in that scene).

Thickfreakness saw them take large leaps forward as a duo. Patrick Carney became a substantially better drummer, Dan Auerbach became a much better guitarist and singer. Most noticeably their songwriting drastically improved and they stopped leaning on covers as much. They were still producing the same raw blues retrofits, but at a much higher level at this point. Auerbach finally revealed himself as a great crafter of simplistic, yet catchy guitar riffs. And his guitar tone was brutal in a good way. The downside was that The Black Keys didn't have very much sonic diversity up their sleeves and the songs could get "same-y" really quick. Any song off the album could sound great in isolation, but listened to as a whole and you found yourself eventually letting the album become background music, as everything quickly turned quite predictable.

Then they dropped their bombshell. I can still remember the first time I heard Rubber Factory. It was everything The Black Keys had been, but tighter, more catchy and more sonically diversified. Instead of just being neo-blues standard bearers, they were a real Rock and Roll force to be reckoned with. Auerbach had grown to incorporate several different guitar styles and tones throughout the album, and even played fiddle and lap steel at times. Carney had perfected his brutal at times, but often very syncopated drumming style. The biggest leap forward was they had learned to write more than one song. A prior criticism of the band was something along the lines of "that one song they wrote was great, they just rewrote it 13 more times." Here they ventured from the stark, hypnotic When The Lights Go Out to the catchy, funky Girl Is On My Mind, to the sweet Lengths. Instead of being a weak shadow of their influences the band had transcended their influences to be something that while derivative, was great in its own right. The album was generally critically acclaimed, except by Rolling Stone, who gave it a mixed review. The album put the band out there in the indie scene solely by its undeniable brilliance. But it didn't get them all the way out there. A lot of indie hipsters still didn't really like them. They were far too traditionalist and sounded sort of like a lot of the music their parents liked.

The duo then tooled around for a couple of years, releasing a tribute album to Junior Kimbrough called Chulahoma and another album called Magic Potion, which was good, but certainly not of the level of Rubber Factory. The band was treading water at this point and was losing a lot of the momentum that they had built up with their steady ascendancy with their first three albums. Then they got their big break.

If one man could be called The Coolest Person In The World in 2008, it was probably Danger Mouse. He had built incredible amounts of credibility in both the popular music world and the indie rock world. His most revered work was a never released mashup album he compiled of The Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album, called (oddly enough) The Grey Album. In fact not that many people have ever heard this album, but the idea sounded like perhaps the coolest thing in the history of the world to many, and the fact that evil record companies had suppressed the album only further built Danger Mouse's legend. So in 2007, when a collaboration with Ike Turner fell through due to Turner's unfortunate death (it's a tragedy that Ike Turner will be forever remembered as just the guy who beat Tina Turner. With all his flaws he was a truly great musician.), Danger Mouse agreed to produce the band's next album. All the stars were lined up for The Black Keys to burst upon the scene and conquer the world.

The unfortunate problem was that the album was not very good. Attack and Release screams of being forced. You might call it the equivalent of a 16th century arranged royal wedding, in theory its a great idea bringing together two giants from different worlds, it makes a lot of people happy, but in actuality the two don't really work together. It received near universal mixed reviews, mostly by publications that desperately wanted it to be a great rock record and save rock and roll music. And it just wasn't. Danger Mouse didn't understand The Black Keys and The Black Keys didn't really get what Danger Mouse was after either. It came off as an aimless record devoid of the brutal, "we're taking over the world" mentality that permeated Rubber Factory so effectively. Most notably Carney's take no prisoners drumming style seemed to be neutered. The album had its moments, but as a whole it fell really flat.

However, what the album did was get their name out there. If indie kids love anything, it's the idea of an unusual collaboration. You'll often read Kanye West reviews by indie blogs where the only thing they ever seem to mention was who he collaborated with or sampled. The sign that they worked with Danger Mouse, and that Danger Mouse was willing to work with them, was an affirmation to many, in and of itself. Even if the resulting album wasn't all that great.

So you now had a band that were indie darlings, yet their current album wasn't really good enough to quite earn them fame yet. A band with a reputation, with a few good/great albums out there, that just needed to give the indie world something to like.

Enter Brothers. A very good album, with great packaging. An album that was introduced right as both the indie world was primed to like the band and popular culture had began to be inundated with 15 second clips of the band's past hits. (this reaffirms two points about The Black Keys, they sound fantastic in 15 second clips and they are sellouts that somehow get a pass for it, not that there's anything wrong with selling your music, but why do they get a pass while Moby was skewered? Also of note was that almost all the songs on those commercials and movie trailers were from Rubber Factory) Somehow the confluence of all these factors led to the album being massively overrated. It was a good album, to be sure, but it wasn't their best album, by a long shot. It certainly wasn't as good as other albums in 2010. Yet many outlets pegged it as their album of the year and it won a Grammy for Alternative Album of the Year.

The album was simply a mixing of the less inspired moments of Thickfreakness and Rubber Factory. I defy anyone to listen to Brothers back to back with Rubber Factory and tell me that Brothers even remotely holds a candle. The album lacks the rawness that the best moments on Rubber Factory had. It lacks the tenderness of The Lengths. Auerbach seems much less inclined to just go for big moments, vocally or with his guitar. His tone seems more subdued, less raw. And the songs aren't as well structured, catchy or compelling. There are certainly moments, again, but none of the highs are as high and the album runs into that "same-y" rut that their first two albums did. But yet it's by far their best selling album and most critically acclaimed.

What we can see here is that the confluence of so many factors: the packaging of the album, the band's exposure on commercials, movies, The Colbert Report, indie blogs, etc and their traditionalist mass appeal combined with their recently found indie cred. These all combined to create an unstoppable tour de force, regardless of whether or not the album is actually great instead of just good.

Rating for Brothers: 79/100

10 Books That Changed The Way I Think About Things

These 10 books aren't necessarily my 10 favorite books of all time, though some of them would be on that list. These are the 10 books that most fundamentally altered the way I think.

10) Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck

I got this as a 13th birthday present from an aunt. The book was paired up with Of Mice And Men, which is much better known. I can only guess that this was done to make the book thicker, because the publisher did some study on the optimal thickness for book sales, and the relatively short Of Mice and Men couldn't be stretched into that thickness. I found Of Mice and Men to be kind of trite and not all that interesting. Tortilla Flat was another story entirely though. The book has a lot to say about how we fit in our friend groups,our motivations in life and more than anything else it really illustrates the humanity of us all. You come away from the novel caring deeply for relatively unremarkable characters that you wouldn't think twice about in real life. This book probably made me a more compassionate person.

9) The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

Read this at 17 and it probably shaped my views on war more than any other book. Namely that it's stupid and usually isn't necessary.

8) The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson

I read this last year. A lot of different themes are covered here, very little of which actually has to do with science fiction. The book is mostly about relationships in all their myriad forms. The relationships we have with our friends, relatives, those in power, those "below" us, with society and with ourselves.

7) The Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis

Like a lot of kids I read them when I was 12. I don't think I can really say exactly how they influenced my thinking, just that they have.

6) The Man Who Knew Too Much: Steven Turing and the Invention of the Computer - David Leavitt

I don't think this book is particularly well written, but the story of Turing is enough to drive just about any biography. Alan Turing did more to defeat Hitler and save his country (Britain) than any other single person in the whole world. More than Eisenhower, more than anybody in Band of Brothers. Turing nearly singlehandedly broke the Enigma coding machine that the Germans used to send coded messages. Of course this wasn't going to beat Hitler all by itself, but in so doing, Turing probably saved more lives than can be fathomed. Yet, after the war he was condemned for being unashamedly homosexual. Threatened with chemical castration, he took his own life. He also invented the computer, more or less. How this changed me was to further cement the idea that societally/religiously received ethics are often pure evil. Because one man's happiness disgusted some, he was condemned. The very man that had basically saved the whole country was condemned by that country.

5) The Great Transformation - Karen Armstrong

This book can probably be credited with me not being a militant atheist, while at the same time cementing a lot of disdain I have for the way a lot of religion is practiced and invoked.

4) The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker

Really shaped my thinking on the human mind, and how it works. Which is kind of a big deal.

3) Complexity - Mitchell Waldrop

To me, this book is about what makes things interesting. Things that don't change much are too boring, things that change too rapidly are just static. Things that ride the thin line of complexity is where all the magic happens. Profoundly shaped my views on intelligence, humanity, aesthetics and just about anything else you can think of.

2) Freedom Evolves - Daniel Dennett

This book was almost like a clarification of things I already thought. It really focused what I feel about free will and what we are.


1) The Christian Bible - Various (or God, depending on your views)

Living in a Western culture, even when The Bible isn't directly influencing your thought, you're usually thinking in reaction to it. For any person brought up in a Western Culture, to say that The Bible isn't their single largest influence is probably folly. You cannot help but be influenced by it. Regardless of if you are an Atheist, the most devout of Christians, Jewish or an agnostic.

Quick review - Two albums not to buy: Adele - 21 & James Blake - Self Titled

Seemingly, you couldn't get more different than James Blake's self titled debut and the new Adele album, 21. But in fact they have a lot in common. They're thoroughly mediocre albums covered up by "gimmicks".

In Blake's case, its the stark voice with odd phrasing and eclectic instrumentation. The album is very weird, but somehow not interesting. A lot of people will mistake this for profundity. It's not, it's just weird, yet boring music. A rare feat indeed, but rare for good reason, nobody wants to make music like this, and perhaps nobody should.

55/100

Adele covers over an album of thoroughly boring songs with an amazing voice. Call it Whitney Houston syndrome, an all world vocal talent that can outright stop you flat on your feet with the right song, that is unfortunately condemned to singing songs that a singer with a lesser voice would recognize as near awful. I give her credit for trying to write her own songs, but just give it up dear. Find a really brilliant songwriter and write maybe 1-2 of your own songs. 19 showed promise that she may one day become a good songwriter, 21 showed that she probably doesn't have it in her. Chin up though darling, neither did Aretha Franklin, she just had the good sense not to try.

60/100

Album Review - Good Old War - Good Old War

Good Old War - Good Old War

Recommended if you like: Dr. Dog, The Beatles, syncopated pop drumming, extensive use of vocal harmony, acoustic guitar riff based songs

Good Old War are a difficult band to understand why they're not more popular in the indie pop scene. They seem to be reviewed overwhelmingly positively whenever they are reviewed. They seem to run in the right sorts of circles. However, they don't get the publicity that similar type acts do. Part of it may stem from their seeming lack of deference to the conventions of the indie pop aesthetic or the indie scene's ethos in general. The problem being they seem to very earnestly want to make good music. If there is one major no-no for indie cred, it's seeming like you're actually trying to make good music. You're supposed to seem like some super genius that rolls out of bed, has a mic setup and just sings some parts and then plays some guitar.

Good Old War don't fit this mold, which is perhaps why they're an odd mix for the indie pop scene, despite looking the part and having all the correct superficial affectations of a proper indie pop band. The good thing is that the music is all the better for it. Good Old War craft their songs in a way that most indie bands are too lazy, unable, or unwilling to do. They have a keen ear for arrangements and how parts fit together and don't like imperfection for imperfection's sake. Playing you music well? What a refreshing and novel idea!

In a description of Good Old War, you obviously must begin with their vocals. Keith Goodwin is the principal singer. Goodwin has a more or less unremarkable voice tone wise. That's not to say it's not a great voice, it's just not remarkable in the sense of a Bon Iver, for example. He could be any indie pop singer tonally. However, he is an excellent technical singer, with a solid if not excellent tenor range. His vibrato is very subtle to the point of almost not being there, which requires him to sing dead on pitch every time (wide vibrato allows you to miss your pitch by a good margin), which he does. In fact, I don't believe that a more distinctive voice would work with Good Old War's songs. Because of the vanilla nature of his tone, it allows him to layer his vocals effortlessly upon the other vocalists of the group.

Tim Arnold and Dan Schwartz could likely be amongst the better front men of any other group, as both have excellent vocal ranges themselves and strong, but again, tonally unremarkable voices. As all three singers have rather unremarkable voices, tonally, where does the spark come from? The spark comes from the vocal melodies, counterpoint lines and harmonies. It's a somewhat remarkable thing these days to actually have a band write great parts, and not just try to cover up rather boring melodies with remarkable vocal tone. Amos Lee, for example, has an incredible voice, but sings over some of the most boring melodies you'll find. Good Old War, by virtue of not being able to just wow you with their voices must write great melodies and parts for their vocals. That's why their music is so refreshing and why people always immediately think of The Beatles, another band with unremarkable tonal voices, but a fantastic feel for vocal harmony and melody.

Instrumentally, they have a tendency to sparse, but fully formed instrumentation. In an overwhelming majority of their songs, you'll find acoustic guitar. All three members play acoustic guitar at times, but Dan Schwartz is the principal guitarist. If the primary element to Good Old War's sound is the vocal parts, Dan Schwartz's understated, yet perfect for the song guitar parts are the secondary ingredient. One could perhaps mistake Schwartz for a guitarist without major chops if you're not listening carefully. While his parts are understated and he seems to disdain the "look at this badass guitar solo" mentality, his parts, when examined more closely, reveal an incredible complexity and understanding of how music works and fits together. And when the song requires it, he can absolutely rip, as evidenced by the riff he plays in Get Some around the 1:32 mark. Even though this is an incredibly difficult technical guitar line, it fits right in the song and doesn't scream of virtuosity for the sake of virtuosity. The more you listen to Good Old War's albums, the more you appreciate the subtle brilliance of the guitar work.

The third major element to Good Old War's sound is Tim Arnold's drumming/percussion. In a band, a drummer serves two purposes: to keep the band in time and to create a rhythmic drive. Arnold's drumming tends towards the latter role, far more than the former. This isn't to mean that the band is out of time, as they're always on beat, it's that because the instrumentation is so comparatively sparse, there aren't a lot of instruments that the drummer needs to keep in time. And the musicians are good enough to stay on time without a steady hit the 1 and 3 beat from the drummer anyway. His style therefore tends toward heavy syncopation and subtle use of polyrhythm. His drumming is as much of a lead instrument at times as Schwarts's guitar, and in fact, at times the two reverse traditional roles, with Schwartz's guitar being mostly a time keeping instrument and Arnold's drumming playing lead lines. This gives their a music a rhythmic feel very different from traditional pop music. Arnold will also play accordion at times, to broaden up the tonal palette of the band. It's not a significant part of the band's overall sound, but does add significantly the feel of certain songs.

If you'll notice, Good Old War doesn't have a dedicated bass guitarist. Some songs eschew the bass entirely, some have its duties filled by the acoustic guitar or keyboards. Some have a very straight forward "play the root note on the beat" type bass. When there, the bass is usually so "root note, straight on the beat" and subtle that it's actually hard to pick up that it's there at all. Live, the band usually doesn't have a bassist. Sneaky Louise is one of the few songs on the album with an identifiable, strong bass line. Which perhaps is one of the reasons why it sounds so different from other songs on the album, despite being structurally similar.

Arrangement wise, the band tends towards making heavy, heavy use of counterpoint and harmony, to extents that very few current bands do. This leads to their songs often being heard as more of a successful piling of parts on top of one another than anything else. Each instrument often has its own story to tell. When listening to Good Old War's songs, it's often fun to listen to the same song several times back to back, trying to isolate a different instrument or voice each time, listening for the distinct flavor each piece adds, and then listen to the whole song together as an overall piece of music. You'll often be left with an awe inspiring sense of how the song was put together.

If the band has one weakness, its that at times they may be too subtle for their own good. Many times the most interesting parts are covered up a bit, which can make some songs seem a bit less interesting than they actually are. For instance, on the ninth track, While I'm Away, the primary melody line is perhaps the most boring part of the song, yet you have to listen very hard to pick up on the acoustic guitar work and percussion, which is where the real magic happens in the song. The band's greatest strength is their reliance on melody, but it is may well be their only major weakness as well, as when the melody doesn't soar the song can come away uninspired, despite the fact that there are a lot of interesting parts that, if put more upfront, could carry the song.

As an album, maybe the only thing left seriously wanting on this effort is a truly catchy song like Coney Island from the band's debut effort, Only Way To Be Alone. That isn't to say that the album is devoid of spectacularly great songs, because it's not. Those songs just aren't catchy in the same sense. I feel the album could have benefited from one song with a more identifiably catchy "big" hook. Even if that's not their thing. It's a minor squabble and on another album I may not have mentioned it at all, but I almost felt like I had to pick something out that keeps this from being an absolutely perfect record and that's about all I could find.

As to those aforementioned standout tracks, I'd label That's Some Dream, My Own Sinking Ship, I Should Go, Here Are The Problems and Get Some as the standouts, in roughly that order.

The album begins with "Good", an instrumental piece that takes it's name from the first part of the band's name, which in turn takes it's name from putting together the three band members last names (GOODwin, arnOLD, schWARtz). In this short little piece you get a sense of their compositional ethos. This is VERY heavy counterpoint and syncopation. Then they throw some pretty vocal harmonies on top. Even though this isn't a particularly noteworthy piece, in and of itself, it is notable in what a departure it is from the band's previous effort, Only Way to Be Alone. There the first track was perhaps the albums' strongest track, Coney Island. I believe this is one of many indicators of a shift in the band's confidence. On their debut, the band was a bit unsure of themselves and their abilities at times, or at least with how they would be received. So they felt they needed to start the album with their best material, because they weren't sure that a potential listener would get to track two if track one wasn't stellar. Here the band seems confident in their music and craft to the point of saying "wait for it, because we know you will, because it's that good."

This segues right into one of the better tracks on the album, Here Are the Problems, so they didn't make you wait that long. The song features a very heavy drum beat and a lot of pauses. The verses are sang in three part harmony at times and at times with an underlying vocal "ah" line. The structure is verse, prechorus, verse, prechorus, bridge, prechorus, chorus, instrumental verse outro. The chorus isn't repeated and only stands out as the chorus by way of its soaring faux key shift. It's not repeated and you have to wait until the end, and even then a brief pause before it hits, but when it does, its near magical, despite being a pretty simple melody. The trick here is in the payoff and the song's structure, if the chorus had come in earlier, or been repeated, it perhaps wouldn't stand out as much. Lyrically, the overall very sad lyrics are contrasted starkly by the very upbeat major tonality. If the lyrics are just read on their own you would come away with a feeling of a relationship that has fallen apart. However, the music leads you to believe that the subject still feels that there is hope that these are only problems to be worked through, not the death knell of the relationship, like the lyrics on their own account indicate. Which one is the true account? Is the relationship doomed or is there a sliver of hope? The listener is left with a sort of delicious ambiguity.

The next song, My Own Sinking Ship, seems to answer this ambiguity. This is perhaps the most single-esque song on the album. It's somewhat telling that the band has the song that is most like a single be a response to another song. It seems to indicate they view themslves as an "album oriented band" that may have a few singles, but are mostly about the whole picture the album paints. The song seems to be an answer to the previous, in that the two lovers seem to be in the process of reconciling. Problems still obviously exist, and there is an underying tone of sadness in parts. However, the chorus is one of resolution in the relationship and forgiveness of the transgressor. The chorus says "oh it's the last time we'll fall in love / it's the last try to break apart / you are not to blame." Ambiguity still exists though, because the author could just as easily be saying "this is the last time I'll go through this, if it doesn't work this time, we're done." The song also has one of the most simple, yet new and refreshing takes on a love lyric I've heard in "Can't remember your last smile / I think I made it happen though / Then I took you off to work once more / But I just want you, I just want you / I just want you here." Such a simple lyric, but I can't recall another that sums up this exact sentiment in such a starkly beautiful way. Musically the song mirrors this ambiguity, with sad sounding verses and sweet sounding choruses. In the first song the ambiguity was accomplished with music that conflicted with the lyrical content. Here the ambiguity is achieved by having the music match the lyrical content, but having two competing sentiments in both.

Next, on Making My Life, apparently our star crossed lovers have again fallen apart and again we have our author begging for a reconciliation. This song stands out in a number of ways. It's the first song that is completely unambiguous, the couple has broken apart and the author desperately wants his love back, though he seems to probably realize it won't happen. Musically, it has a substantially stronger driving African type polyrhythm with a lot of rolling guitar riffs that underlie the melody. It makes good, though not particularly notable, use of the band's trademarked vocal harmonies. The track is good, not great. The chorus is kind of catchy, but not quite catchy enough. The parts are pretty, but not quite pretty enough. The rhythm is interesting, but not quite interesting enough. That isn't to say that I find fault with the song, not every song can be, or perhaps even should be, a standout. For filler, it's excellent and it helps push along the narrative that the album opens with.

Next up with Old, we get another short instrumental type break song. It's kind of a weird delta blues influenced guitar riff, mixed with African polyrythms and Poppy vocal harmonies saying "we're fine" on top. It serves to set up the resolution to the narrative portion of the album with the next song...

On That's Some Dream, we have our author finally fully getting the picture that he needs to move on. Musically, the song is one of the more conventional songs on the album, yet stands out with a great sing along chorus. The song maintains both musical and lyrical ambiguity, because the song quickly alternates major and minor chords throughout the verses and the lyrics can be taken two opposite ways. They can be taken to be that the author realizes that he will eventually be okay and that's a dream he can look forward to, or they can be taken as being totally for the benefit of others, and that the author is actually completely 100% broken and that being okay is "some dream." Lyrically, it reminds me very much of Pearl Jam's Alive, where I think fans will often just hear the chorus and take them in a very happy way, whereas the actual meaning is much different. On the last chorus, one of the harmonies jumps to an even higher harmony, to great payoff effect.

Sneaky Louise is kind of a simple, in some ways silly little song about a transgressing daughter/sister, sang from the point of view of the brother. The song features a really pretty, big chorus melody with great harmonies and counterpoint background vocals at the end. It's not a very serious song, yet its very fun, despite its rather dire actual lyrical content.

Get Some is perhaps the only proper rock song on the album, with a heavy backbeat that drives the song throughout, which sits in stark contrast to Tim Arnold's normal drumming style. Additionally, two complementary acoustic guitars playing more riffs than straight rhythm, panned hard right and left, drive the verses. At 1:32, a very rhythmic, very technically difficult guitar riff just explodes. It's not a solo per se, because its too directly related to the rhythmic structure of the song, but its fantastic, without sounding show off-y. Lyrically, the song is also a departure from the typical formula thus far, in that these lyrics don't seem to be firmly about anything in particular, just there to create a feeling. The feeling they seem to be trying to convey is "get some", which although that's the album title, the actual words don't appear in the song at all. It's great to see a songwriter (or songwriters) be able to write in the two predominant styles of our time, the storytelling style and the purely emotive style. This portends well to the band's future.

While I'm away goes into fun poppy mode, with a really interesting melody. Rhythmically it has almost a four on the floor, disco, driving feel at times, but with a lot of stops and percussive flourishes to keep things interesting. The band again slips effortlessly from counterpoint to direct harmonies. The band tends to approach harmonies with an eye towards moving the voices to follow the chord changes and suggest harmonic ideas that wouldn't be there without the vocals. This is much more complex than most bands who sing in harmony, those bands seem to think in terms of "lead, high and higher harmony", here Good Old War think in terms of how the voices play over the chord changes and shifting them around for different effect, that takes a lot of talent to pull off as effortlessly as these guys do. Lyrically the song is of the "I'm on the road away from you and I miss you and you're awesome and I'll be home to see you soon" vein that is really overdone in music. It's inevitable that this type of song is overdone, as it is perhaps the defining aspect of the touring musician, they can't help but write this type of song. As Chris Robinson said in Wiser Time "ask me "why another road song?" / funny, but I bet you never left home." At least we can forgive this lyrical retread here a bit easier, when it's done with this much skill.

Woody's Hood Boogie Woogie is a fun, silly little boogie song. That is, rhythmically it uses a boogie rhythm, as Good Old War's tour of all the different ways you can syncopate a beat continues. There's not a whole lot to the song, it's fun but relatively unremarkable, outside of some exceedingly fine percussion work and a few very subtly great guitar parts. Lyrically, the song seems to be about someone hearing of a tragedy (losing his lover and his child in the same day) and the realizations it brings on the otherwise unaffected author. The author seems to realize that we need to live lives our way, because we'll all get burned some day. Nothing particularly revelatory here, but its still a solid little song.

My Name's Sorrow is a hauntingly beautiful song. Lyrically the theme is analogizing proverbs, music and the seasons to three aspects of life, bad things happening, feeling out of place and constant change, respectively. Instrumentally, its one of the more simple songs, but yet still very good in that regard. The haunting nature comes from the interplay between the vocal melody and the acoustic guitar. There is a very subtle, almost difficult to hear accordion in the background to help ground the harmonic structure. It's the only song on the album that makes no use of vocal harmony at any point.

World Watching is a solid track, but is perhaps the weakest track on the album. It has a pretty melody, but not much else to help carry it. It has some of the most straightforward guitar playing and percussion on the album and the harmonies are good, but not good enough to carry it to the heights of the rest of the album. That isn't to say its bad by any means, just that it's filler, but filler of the highest quality.

To finish off the album, there is a two track suite, comprised of I Should Go and Thinking of You. While these are technically two separate tracks, they are typically played together when the band plays live and stand together musically to the point of sounding like different parts of the same song. I Should Go is an extraordinarily beautiful song, sung in harmony over the entirety of the song. The vocal melody is laid over a riffy rhythm guitar type figure and syncopated percussion and a bass drum that hits the 1 of every bar only. Thinking of you is more or less a textbook example of counterpoint vocal to end the song, even though, again, its technically listed as a separate track.

War is the final piece and is a gentle acoustic guitar track that puts a nice little bow on things.

On a whole, this album presents a step forward for the band, without losing their way. The opening suite of songs that detail an expansive relationship narrative is far grander than anything they have attempted in the past lyrically. Musically they exhibit an understanding of musical structure that is unparalleled in the indie pop world. They're a much more musically confident band in their abilities. The fact that they self produced this gem is mind boggling. They're a band with the ability to do just about whatever they like, but yet maintain a clear vision of what it is they want to accomplish. There could be a better single type song on the album, but the album stands up well without an obvious single anyway.

I really look forward to their next album, which, by the way, they just announced they have began work on via their Facebook page today. In my estimation this is the best pop band going today, and you'd be well advised to get on the train.

90/100



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