I have a shameful confession: I’ve been watching this season of American Idol.

I think it’s affecting my sanity, because Randy Jackson’s unique, contentless cadence bounces around through my brain at all times, like, you know, dawg, like, you’re really here, you know, like here, dawg and you’re, like, writing what is maybe the best blog post in the history of blogs, dawg. You’re bringing it.

It’s not the format or the performers that I can’t stand about AI. It’s the judges. Always the judges. That hasn’t changed and, if next season the producers can the current judges completely and repopulate the table with three different musicians, they will still be awful. I suspect that ‘awful’ is the exact space the producers want the judges to occupy, though: listening to Steven Tyler tell your favorite performer that he or she “was like a rainbow caterpillar that became a sonic skullfucking butterfly of a monster truck that gave birth to the planet Hoth zabidyogalailalado” is a motivating factor to vote early and often, if only because you’re not sure exactly what the fuck he’s talking about and it might be bad. The judges will always suck, because good, sensical judges won’t make you feel like you need to text/call/vote online/share on Facebook/rob a bank/tweet about it.

But there are things to fix.

• Replace Ryan Seacrest with an adorable animal, for instance. The only time Seacrest is entertaining or engaging is when he’s nonplussed (as seen earlier this season when Kelly Clarkson stalled him with a quickfire and emasculating comeback to one of his smarmy comments), but Seacrest is so rarely nonplussed because he is actually a lizard person. Just let those freedom fighters from V put him down and bring on that cat who plays Lord Tubbington on Glee.
• Make contestants sing their songs while eluding a swarm of killer bees. To further sweeten the pot, drop money randomly from the ceiling while they do so. And randomly-timed gouts of flame.
• Cross-promote with other FOX shows. Why can’t a topless Cloris Leachman burst onto the stage while Scotty croons into his weirdly-held microphone? Why can’t a peacoat-clad Joshua Jackson start shooting random audience members as the performers belt out ‘alternate universe’ versions of popular songs. Reveal that Delroy Lindo’s big bad from The Chicago Code has been fixing the results for years.
• A feature-laden re-release of From Justin to Kelly on Blu-Ray.
• Live bears in the audience.

It is easy to write a song about being in pain. It’s equally easy to write a song about vapid joy. It takes some serious work and probably a lot of trauma, too, to write a song that seems to at times vacillate between the two, as is the case with “Estate Sale Sign,” a track on The Mountain Goats’ new album that deals with the selling off of the accumulated detritus of a broken relationship. Near the end of the bitter, driven song the band changes keys and punctuates the earlier verses with a strummy, open, almost cheerful sounding bridge before diving back into the chorus a final time. It evokes a kind of defiant joy that seems asynchronus but really isn’t. It’s a difficult emotion to articulate, but it’s that razor’s edge where most of John Darnielle’s most powerful songs are perched. For proof of how difficult this is, watch any YouTube cover of “Damn These Vampires.”

All Eternals Deck sounds quite a bit like the Goats’ Heretic Pride in terms of the character of its energy, its dark tinges, its occasional electric guitars and the manic high-pitched rasp of Darnielle’s voice and it is definitely more rock-inspired than the album’s predecessor The Life of the World To Come. After only three days with it, I’m close to proclaiming it my favorite of the band’s albums since The Sunset Tree.

Buy the album on Amazon. It’s $5.00. (disclosure: affiliate link)

It’s a new Ben Folds album with lyrics by Nick Hornby. Of course I’ve listened to it obsessively over the past week.

What do I think of it? Let’s find out, track by track:

A Working Day: The first time I listened, I thought it was too short. Now I know it’s just long enough.  Any creator, especially any creator with Internet access, swings wildly back and forth in their assessment of their own ability, and not only do the lyrics vacillate, there are two distinct musical movements within the song, bridged by the chorus “Some guy on the ‘net thinks I suck/And he should know/He’s got his own blog.”

Picture Window: Over dinner a few months ago, Matt told me that you don’t really get some songs until you’re a parent and I think that this is one of them. I think it’s lovely but it doesn’t get its hooks into me. Still, it rewards listening, as the story in the song unfolds more and more with each little detail you pick up on repeat listens.

Levi Johnston’s Blues: I’ve heard Folds lament before that he’s incapable of writing catchy pop hooks. This hook is incredibly catchy and poppy and it’s in a foul-mouthed novelty song. Said chorus’s lyrics come from Johnston’s Facebook, leaving me incredulous that people still say things like “kill some moose” in real life.

Doc Pomus: The background singers’ “Bop! Bop! Bop!” in the second verse is what makes this for me. Concise, breezy pop. If there are songs on “Lonely Avenue” that sound like Hornby trying vainly to write a Ben Folds song, this is one of them, kind of reminiscent of “Boxing.”

Your Dogs: In the liner notes, Hornby says that this channels Elvis Costello around the time of his “Armed Forces” album, which is the last in the trilogy of EC’s angry, snarling punk albums.  The sound is occasionally there, musically speaking, but the lyrics are more reminiscent of the suburban skewering that Costello delivers in “Brutal Youth,” just without a lot of the bite.

Practical Amanda: This is a sweet little song and I like it, but again I feel like there’s a bit too much of Hornby trying to write like Folds.

Claire’s Ninth: More than any other song on the album, I’m not sure what to do with this one. Folds holds up his end of the bargain pretty well, but Hornby’s adapting an old short story and it comes off a bit twee and a bit kludgy.

From Above:This. This is the synergy between the two creators that I’ve kind of been craving throughout the rest of the album. Both Folds and Hornby are on here and it’s no mistake this is the single off of the album.

Saskia Hamilton: Love this song. So much. Like “Practical Amanda” is, I’d guess this is another one where Hornby had something in mind and Folds completely counterprogrammed it with this big, sprawling, loud rock tune about a geeky teen in love with semi-famous poet.

Belinda: I wonder if Hornby was working on this album while he was writing Juliet, Naked? The speaker sounds a lot like that novel’s Tucker Crowe.  This is probably one of Folds’ best arrangements and he actually manages to make a song about a song evoke the song it’s supposed to sound like without giving the song away, but not in a jokey, Tenacious D’s “Tribute” kind of way. That’s pretty damn expert.

“Lonely Avenue” is a good Folds album. I don’t think it has the power that “Songs for Silverman” does, but it’s definitely on par with “Way To Normal” and any of the Ben Folds Five discography. It has a handful of hidden gems, some fun and one or two clunkers. I find it ironic that, after working with co-writers who are so good at chameleoning themselves and making their lyrics sound like Ben (and I’m thinking of Anna Goodman, here, because who would ever guess that “Smoke” isn’t Ben’s lyrics really?) that it’s the novelist who can’t quite pull it off flawlessly.

I guess when you’re in a thriving, functional relationship, it distracts you from thinking about their inverse.  Last week was the second anniversary of my decision to take the reins of my life back and I completely failed to remember that the date had significance. That is what moving on looks like – the failure to ascribe undue significance to the ephemera of past mistakes.

I didn’t really realize it until I re-watched the pilot episode of Lone Star, the Texan con-man drama that is critically lauded and therefore soon to be canceled in favor of a show about sexy lawyers solving murders using cutting-edge medical procedures.  But back to Lone Star - it was that scene in the gas station, and if you’ve seen the episode, you know it’s a pivotal scene. “Kettering” by The Antlers is playing in the background and it hits the point where the guitars kick it up just as Bob sits in his car and completely loses his shit. I don’t know who picks the music for Lone Star, but he or she is a master at it.

“Kettering” is an absolutely haunting song that hits lots of emotional buttons for me. It, like the rest of the band’s  Hospice album, is about the relationship between a nurse and a dying patient, but the whole thing is really a metaphor for an emotionally abusive, dying relationship. Had Hospice come out a few years earlier than it did, it would likely have the same kind of anthemic quality for me that The Mountain Goats’ Tallahassee did.

I think there’s an official video for “Kettering,” but I’m just posting the lyrics because they are good lyrics and tough to discern in Silberman’s reedy whisper of a vocal track.

Have you ever been at a bar, and there’s a band playing, but they’re really terrible?

Well, I guess not really truly terrible. Because when a band is really terrible, they know it. I mean, they have to. As a musician, I’m able to hold onto few erroneous notions about the quality of my own playing.  Like, I know that my C melody – like a majority of antique C melody horns -  is notoriously pitchy, that my tenor has a very small phantom air leak that I couldn’t even completely correct by changing all of the pads.  These things come from just knowing my instruments and from having the sort of basic critical sense that even people who get quoted on movie posters have evolved. I can listen to myself and think I need to work on my articulation.

Apparently, there are musicians who lack that kind of critical sense, because I’ve seen them play at plenty of bars and most recently saw one play at the Steamtown Original Music Showcase amid a few other bands, all of whom were better than this band. This band was from Philadelphia and you would think that a band from such a major metropolitan area would be a little better because it’s a competitive market where there are like a million bands – I mean, everybody has a band; heck, I could start a band right now (let me know if you play bass in the comments because we need a bass player) – and significantly fewer venues than there are bands. I don’t work in the industry, but I drink alcohol and listen to music, so I know maybe a little about bands playing in bars, maybe. I’m just saying it seems to me like the ratio should suggest that low-quality bands start self-selecting out at a certain point due to lack of gigs or angry drunks hurling barstools at you because that Papa Roach cover was really abhorrent.

These guys were maybe proof that my theory on the bar band ecosystem is flawed.

You’ve seen that YouTube video, right? The one where the band is playing Europe’s “The Final Countdown” outdoors at like a fair or whatever and it’s really awful, to the point where you make bets on how long someone can watch it like those kids in Rings.  You watch that video and those kids get it, you can tell they do even from the distance they’re at. They’re up there and they’re playing, but they are completely aware that every sound they make is like a cat on fire. When you’re bad and you get that you’re bad, you’re a little less intolerable. In my mind, I’ve found consensus with the band and we’ve kind of said “we’re cool” to each other when they have that look in their eyes.

The band that I saw Sunday night they didn’t get how not good they were. They had lots of energy: the lead singer was jumping all over the place and launching himself off of the dais the drum kit sits up on and the lead guitarist was rock-cocking all over the place and the bass player occasionally did something that made his hair fly around because his hair was carefully cultivated to what I tend to think of as ‘bass player length’ as opposed to my hair, which is maybe around ‘frontman length’ right now. And then the lead singer was frolicking around the stage dry humping the rest of the band and they were all really into it and the music was just so incredibly mediocre and unintelligible and you realize that there are these guys in their thirties up there in costumes, basically, because they were all aggressively dressed as rocker stereotypes, jumping around and touching each other and screaming and they thought it was absolutely aces and it’s all really kind of sad. The more you try to become rock apotheosis by rote, the easier it is for rock apotheosis to elude you.

They had lots of energy, but they didn’t transfer it to the audience. The audience is as important to live music as the band – some bands realize that and they are good live bands.  Other bands don’t and they end up opening for a polka band at a sausage festival or end up playing Christmas music at the mall or recording jingles. The audience wasn’t drunk enough to blindly shout and dance and so the band was faced with their withering scrutiny.  I’ve seen other, better bands respond to this sort of pressure by admitting that they were bombing and attempting to come back and once, at a festival, I saw a band just bail mid-set with a mumbled “Sorry” into the mic and then nothing.

During part of the accepted band/audience call and response ritual, the singer will ask the audience to do something or ask them if they’re having a good time or ready to rock or whatever and the audience usually goes “YEAAAAAAHHHHH!” and then the band is like ‘that sucks’ and then they’ll do it again and there will be a larger cheer. During “Desperately Wanting” on Better Than Ezra’s live album, Kevin Griffin kind of tongue-in-cheekly talks about the economics of kicking it up and breaking it down when performing a rock song and, though it’s a little different, this kind of audience engagement is exactly what he’s talking about. The horrible band from Philly tried to get this to work, but when the audience’s genuinely unenthused response was met with a ‘You guys are terrible’ from the band’s frontman, it was followed by an equally unenthused response from the crowd. Not abrasive or negative, just eternally blase’.  It was as if we were Sir Robin’s retinue. I almost shouted back “So are you!” but I try not to heckle.

On the plus side, I got to see Underground Saints for the first time and they were pretty much the opposite of the guys who were on before them – they weren’t playing parts, they were just out there playing some rock. The lead singer sounds very Morrissey-like, which creates a weird Muse meets The Smiths aesthetic that is strange, but good strange.

Adam Lambert, who Natasha assures me was on American Idol once, kicks off his US tour tonight in Wilkes-Barre at the FM Kirby Center, and apparently some people believe that it’s kind of a big deal.

I have to tell you that I don’t know much about Lambert’s music, though I fiercely support his right to make out with as many guys on stage at major awards shows as he wants.  Here’s Adam Lambert performing a cover of “Mad World,” a beautiful song that is often known as “the Donnie Darko theme” or “that song from the Gears of War commercial.”

Adam Lambert – Mad World (Tears For Fears cover)

In my post about last Friday’s Josh Ritter concert, I teased that I’d be posting this gem – with vocals by the Royal City Band’s Zack Hickman with Josh Ritter and Austin Nevins on backing vocals.  Well, here it is. Unfortunately, it’s a .wav file, because I don’t have anything handy to convert it with.  But still, enjoy.

Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band – Wicked Game

Last Friday, Josh Ritter kicked off his tour in support of So Runs the World Away – his new album that dropped last Tuesday – at the Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. Ritter’s wife Dawn Landes opened for him with her backing band, The Hounds. Sticking mostly to tracks from Landes’s latest disc Sweet Heart Rodeo, Dawn and the Hounds played a set of high-energy folk rock before Ritter and his Royal City Band took the stage, flanked by giant lightbulbs that flickered on and off throughout the show.

Ritter played 9 songs from So Runs the World Away, including the first single “Change of Time” and “The Curse,” a story about a mummy who falls in love with a museum curator. The remainder of the setlist was peppered with older material, with “Harrisburg” and “Me and Jiggs” stretching as far back as 2002′s Golden Age of Radio.

After “Lark,” Ritter performed a solo acoustic set including “In the Dark” (which Ritter played with all lights save for the venue’s chandeliers extinguished), a slowed-down version of “The Temptation of Adam,” “Girl in the War,” and finally “Me and Jiggs,” which saw the Royal City Band return to the stage for the second verse.

Following the guitar solo in Harrisburg, the band segued into a cover of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” with bassist Zachariah Hickman delivering bombastic vocals while Ritter and guitarist Austin Nevins sang backup (Look for audio of “Wicked Game” on Friday as part of this week’s Friday Cover Songs post).

Ritter’s enthusiasm for playing live was obvious and infectious and the crowd quickly overcame its initial reluctance and began singing along. By the time the band closed with The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter‘s “To the Dogs or Whoever,” the crowd was belting out the words.

The band closed with a 3-song encore – Ritter and Nevins delivering an acoustic cover of “Moon River,” the full band on “Snow is Gone”  from Ritter’s 2003 album Hello Starling, and Ritter performed a solo acoustic rendition of Conquests’ “Wait for Love” joined part of the way through by his backing band, Dawn Landes and the Hounds providing backup vocals.

SETLIST:

Southern Pacifica

Change of Time

Rumors

Folk Bloodbath

Right Moves

Good Man

Rattling Locks

The Curse

Open Doors

Lark

In the Dark

The Temptation of Adam

Girl in the War

Me and Jiggs

Monster Ballads

Another New World

Harrisburg/Wicked Game

The Remnant

Lantern

To the Dogs or Whoever

ENCORE:

Moon River

Snow is Gone

Wait For Love

Aziz Ansari, in his RAAAAAAAANDY persona from the movie Funny People, is making a mixtape with TV On the Radio’s Dave Sitek. Their first track? A cover of Justin Bieber’s “Baby”.

Aziz Ansari featuring DJ Ol’ Youngin’ – Baby Baby (Justin Bieber cover)

I believe if you say Justin Bieber’s name three times, he comes out of the closest mirror and kills you.

The AV Club – the most worthwhile part of The Onion – is a few weeks into its’ Starbucks-sponsored Under Cover.  The premise – a setlist of 25 songs that each week’s guest artist must choose one song to cover from ranging from megapopular to obscure, from easy to cover to M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” which someone is eventually going to have to do.  The series has been a lot of fun so far, with appearances from Justin Townes Earle, Alkaline Trio and perennial Friday Cover Songs favorite Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.  Check out the current episodes and keep coming back each week for more.