It’s been a little while since I did one of these. Of course, it’s november, so there’s very little blogging going on at all, thanks to the whole novel-writing experiments and general life stuff. Of course, I’m still doing the up and back to DC thing for work, and last week, coming home took me like five hours. I had some time to listen to a lot of music which I shall now talk about. For those keeping score, with this entry, we’re up to 92 records riffed on. I’m really rather chuffed that I’m nearing one hundred records, and am still having fun, even if no one else bothers to read these.

♦- Queensryche – Empire: This one, for whatever reason, reminds me of Sunday afternoons in high school. I spent a lot of weekends at my dad’s place through those years, and Sunday afternoons usually meant getting immersed in some sort of activity – a board game, attempting to repair something, or cooking a meal. For some reason, in these memories, MTV is on in the background going through the top 20 video countdown, and there’s usually a Queensryche video on. I forgot how many of these songs became “singles” (though not necessarily singles that ended up on the radio). More than half of these songs – the title track, “Jet City Woman,” “Best I Can,” “Anybody Listening?” and of course, “Silent Lucidity,” which broke all over radio and one of the better Pink Floyd pastiches out there – had videos made, and they all charted. This one’s not quite as much of a “concept” record as “Operation: Mindcrime,” but it’s one of those that hangs together well as a big, fancy progressive metal song cycle rather than a collection of unrelated tracks.

♦- The Clarks – Love Gone Sour, Suspicion and Bad Debt: I’ve talked the Clarks before – this is one of those early records that my friends who did college (the band formed at IUP out in Western PA) in Iron City country talk about as being so much better than the later major/semi-major label records. They make a good case, because there’s some great stuff on here, including “Now and Then,” “I’m The Only,” “Madeline” (pre-saging the other two “girl songs” on Someday Maybe), and live show sing-along-staple “Cigarette,” all featuring Scott Blasey’s distinctive vocal inflection, and Rob James’ ringing overdriven guitar tone. It’s all great bar-band rock stuff, equally good for dancing, singing along, or just hanging back with a beverage and letting it wash over you. I first encountered the Clarks supporting the previously mentioned SM, the record that comes after this one, but the live set included a bunch of these tunes. If you’ve never encountered these guys before, they’re worth looking into – it’s great stuff.

♦- Sarah Jarosz – Song Up In Her Head: I first heard Sarah Jarosz on A Prairie Home Companion a few years ago, where she played a bunch of great folk-bluegrass tunes and managed to survive several awkwardly flirtatious chat sessions with Garrison Keillor. I eventually downloaded this record, and enjoyed the heck out of it. This record was put together while she as still in high school, but is really amazingly polished for someone so young, in part due to appearances by heavy acoustic bluegrass hitters like Chris Thile. She’s got a great a great, smoky sort of singing voice, well displayed on tracks like Tom Waits’ “Come on Up To The House” and the title track. She also totally shreds on the mandolin and banjo, as demonstrated on some of the instrumental tracks like the Grammy nominated “Mansinneedof.” I’m kind of in love, even if I have occasionally confused her with another teenage folk americana prodigy, Laura Cortese, who I saw play a mean fiddle at the Birchmere a while back, once or twice.

♦- Molly Lewis- I Made You A CD, but I Eated It: That last comment about being “kind of in love” really applies here more than the last review, I’m only a little ashamed to admit. I’ve been following Molly’s career for years now, enjoying her adorable and self-deprecating YouTube performance and feeling a bit like a dirty old man. She is, however, probably one of the better examples of “internet stardom” out there, from humble beginnings in ukulele covers of Britney Spears, System of a Down, and Jonathan Coulton tunes shot on video from a bedroom closet to getting noticed by Coulton and playing regularly with him on the west coast and in international waters, to winning songwriting contests with excellently crafted songs like “Our American Cousin”, a humourous and touching three movement piece about the Lincoln assassination (in 3 minutes forty-one seconds), and releasing this disc, which includes most of her original output to date, including “MyHope,” a paean to a certain withering social networking service, and the excellent “Road Trip” inspired by the Lisa Nowak astronaut love triangle episode a few years back. She also, more than anyone else, inspired me to go buy a ukulele and pretend I know how to play it.

♦- Aimee Mann – Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse: I think I’ve always wanted to be an Aimee Mann fan more than I’ve actually been one, though I’ve always enjoyed her distinctive breathy voice since she sang lead in ‘Til Tuesday way back when. Her solo stuff has always been interesting and sort of mellow, which I quite like. Equal parts folk and rock, not afraid to take risks and drop the occasional F bomb if the song warrants it. This live disc came packaged with a concert film DVD, which is really quite excellent. I can’t remember where I got it, but I do remember not realizing there was a DVD in there as well – it was a pretty good cutout rack deal. Most of the bigger hits are here – including much of the soundtrack to Magnolia, including “Wise Up” and “Save Me,” though I’m pretty sure my favorite track is “Pavlov’s Bell” which was featured when she did a guest shot on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in season seven, before making a crack about how she hates “playing vampire towns.”

♦- The Refreshments – Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big & Buzzy: A high school friend who moved west turned me on to these guys when the were still playing bars in Arizona. They later came to prominence as, among other things, the band that played the theme song for King of the Hill. This is the band’s first major label record, and only one of any consequence, as they fell victim to the great record label purges of the late 90s like so many other promising bands. This one did feature the relatively big hit “Banditos” about a very strange bank robbery. Besides that one, though, there are lots of solid tracks here, including “Down Together” (which wikipedia tells me was single #2), “Suckerpunch” and “Mexico” a last-call sing-a-long that I inadvisably did at a couple of open mic sets sometime in 1997-98.