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