Astronomer

Thanks Zer0! I'm going to check those out now. I'll let you know how I go

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Mojo

This is a great, informative journal Zer0. I really enjoyed reading through it.

I actually just looked up Belle & Sebastian yesterday on Spotify and downloaded what will be my first album of theirs onto my phone. Not that I haven't heard them before, I've heard them quite a few times now, but always just odd tracks here and there. They always seemed dreadfully boring to me, and it's not like I just have a dislike of slow, gloomy or depressing music. Not at all. Anyway, these past couple of days I again heard a few odd tracks and for some reason was at least intrigued.

I also remember when Girls Not Grey came out. I didn't think it was too bad but didn't really get into AFI. I did once go and see them at a Leeds festival though...instead of Blur. Yeah, kinda regret that one now. Although they didn't have Graham in the band at that time so who the **** cares? :-P

Anyway, great stuff. You're around my age arent you? I think we used to listen to a lot of similar music when we were in our teens.

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Last.FM | Echoes and Dust

Zer0

Cheers, I try to do my best.

I think Belle and Sebastian are one of those love them or hate them bands. They seem to attract a particular type of listener, maybe slightly bookish and nerdy, but that's probably just a stereotype. Definitely their first three albums and their early EPs are worth checking out, after that they were a bit hit or miss. But even on the strength of their earlier stuff Stuart Murdoch is one of my favourite lyricists ever.

AFI have never played a gig in Ireland (at least not to my knowledge) but I would have loved to have seem them back in the day when I was a big fan, I wouldn't bother much nowadays though. I don't think I'm too far off your age, I'm 26 at the moment. Apart from some of the usual suspects I used to listen to in my teens like Nirvana, Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth etc, I used to listen to bands like Funeral For a Friend, Finch, Hundred Reasons, InMe, Lostprophets and some other bands I'm too embarrassed to mention. Speaking of FFAF I was quite a big fan when their debut was released, which was almost ten years ago as well. In retrospect I can't help think how awful their vocalist was.

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Zer0

Antenna is an album that has been lurking in my CD collection for ten years now, quite often forgotten about. I don't even have any other albums by this band, just this one. I know the band started off as a metalcore band on Hydra-Head Records but there is little evidence of that kind of sound here on this album. From what I've read (not sure if it’s completely true or not) is that they broke edge and started smoking weed. It was a wise idea I think, everyone should try weed at least once in their lifetime. It puts things into a different perspective. I got this album quite a few months after it was released on the strength of seeing the promo video for the single 'Inspire'. I didn't remember much about the video itself but I thought the song was damn cool. And if the song was damn cool I must have thought "hey, what the hell, the album must be damn cool too".

Well, kind of. I thought the album was okay at the time but never really got into in a big way. Something about the album seemed slightly off to me at the time, like the guitars sounding too weird or some pure stupid shit that seventeen year old Zero would think. I guess I wasn't used to listening to slightly spaced-out alternative rock back then. I wanted stuff with loud distorted guitars and a greater sense of energy, which was something that was somewhat evident here in songs like 'Inspire' and 'Penny Racer'. Antenna is one of those albums that I grew to appreciate more over the years, even if I don’t listen to it as much as I probably should. And I probably should listen to it more because it's actually damn good. I think that my exploration of the more outer reaches of indie rock and alternative rock over the past five years or so, far out places like space-rock and the more obscure depths of shoegaze, has somewhat made me appreciate this album a lot more. Not that there’s anything really experimental going on here, as I said it's alternative rock with a reasonably spaced-out feel, but I definitely have a greater understanding of the album today and where it’s coming from that I did ten years ago.

Even at its most experimental point, the glacial and spacious sounds of 'Seafrost', it still has a pop familiarity lurking in its shadows and underpinning the song. Songs like 'Stained Silver', 'Youth Overrided' and 'Lost in the Air' have an obvious pop sensibility at their core with soaring choruses and some memorable vocal melodies. The type of songs that their earlier metalcore fans would probably have sheepishly shouted out "sell outs!" upon hearing for the first time. There's better music out there than this and the band probably even have better albums than this. In fact you're probably better off listening to a Failure album. But I just found it fascinating how an album that you only thought was okay about ten years ago sounds so much better when you listen to it today, so fascinating that I decided to write about it and bore you guys. Fun fact #467647762: they named themselves 'Cave In' after the Codeine song of the same name. Bet you didn't know that.

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Zer0

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Janszoon

Ah, Cave In. They're from my home city. My deskmate at my first job after college was friends with one of them.

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A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Engine

...

Interesting take on the album. I also bought the CD when it came out even though I was already expecting to be disappointed (the fact that they had left Hydra Head for a major label was definitely worrisome) and, indeed I was. I only bought it b/c I saw it at a record store on sale for 8.99 or something and I liked the cover art. I also bought their next CD, Perfect Pitch Black which sounds similar and maybe a little bit better. I don't think either of those albums are terrible but I never listen to them, and I haven't heard anything they've released since.

For their weeded out sound, Jupiter was their best effort and it was really popular back in the day. People compared it to ISIS a lot but I don't think that's a particularly good comparison.

For me, the band's best album is Until Your Heart Stops, which I suppose was metalcore but without eyeliner and other stupid shit that is now associated with that word.

And, no, I didn't know about how they picked their name. Cool fact!

This is probably my favorite Cave In song:

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Zer0

When I was 14 I went to my local music place to buy Infest by Papa Roach, because I thought they were cool at the time. However, the guy working there refused to sell it to me because of the 'Parental Advisory Explicit Content' sticker.

I'd like to use this journal post to formally thank that man for not selling it to me, my life could have turned out so much shittier.

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Zer0

They actually covered the song as well.

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Zer0

I love my smartphone. I can use it to browse the internet. I can use it to download files. I can use it to listen to music. I can use it to post crap on Musicbanter, I can use it to watch videos. I can use it to check my emails. I can use it to take photos. But wait, hold on a second, I can also use it to make phone calls. Neat. Making phone calls is actually something I don’t use my phone for as much as the other things I’ve mentioned, quite strange considering that it’s meant to be a phone! Compared to a number of years ago this would have been unthinkable for me. It begs the question as to why we still call these things ‘phones’.

The rise of 4G really puts this into perspective. 3G still uses a circuit switching network, which has been used for telephone networks for a long, long time. 3G also uses a data network in parallel to the circuit switching network to easily allow for all those internet activities such as browsing, streaming uber cool music and of course viewing horse porn. 4G dropped circuit switching altogether and as a result dropped what has been the backbone of telecommunications since the last Ice Age. Being based purely on data, a 4G-enabled smartphone works in pretty much the same way as it would when it is connected to WiFi, bar some differences in download speeds. 4G was developed with the focus on all those other communication things you do with your phone that don’t involve dialling someone’s phone number and waiting for them to answer the fucking thing. But don’t worry you can do that too using Skype or being automatically switched back to the 3G network while you make a phone call in the normal way. Since the main use of smartphones is for Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, internet browsing, streaming and various apps geared at all walks of life, the general idea of what a mobile phone is has become distorted. Today, voice calls don’t even take up a quarter of mobile network traffic, more than likely a lot less depending on how recent a source you can find for this information. They are of course literally handheld computers with the added feature of being able to make phone calls occasionally.

So what should we start calling smartphones since they’re no longer phones in the traditional sense? Palmtops perhaps? Baby computers? What should Apple call the next iPhone since it will be even further away from the basic concept of a mobile phone?

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