nothing like Country Caravan which is one of my favorite songs by them. this album is a far cry from Wild Mountain Nation. it's a lot more in the vein of Crosby, Stills, and Nash or other similar harmony driven early 70's folk/rock acts. it's terrific really.

it's also funny that Grail Marcus can be revered as the greatest rock critic ever for writing about the archetypes of rock and the threads that connect artists and imagery, but bands that actually plumb those archetypes and seams get shrugged off as derivative, lazy and unoriginal.

"But the music itself is the stuff of any cover bar band. The vocals sound like a cross between Paul Westerberg and Joe Strummer to me. But it's all been done forever now. And it will done forever more."

agreed on the Gaslight Anthem reminding me of Lucero. the opening riff on American Slang sounds like it came straight from a Lucero album (who knows, judging by the posts on here, maybe it did!). there's definitely something about each band that maybe makes them better than the sum of their parts. Lucero's pretty…

well, I read an interview with them a month or so ago where they claimed that they had been listening to a shitload of Motown and Stax and old soul and had tried to emulate some of what they were hearing on those records so it's definitely no surprise that this album is varied and pop-oriented.

I wouldn't necessarily even call them derivative. I think they've developed a pretty unique sound. It blends elements of bands like Alkaline Trio and Bouncing Souls with elements of Bruce Springsteen and other "heartland" rock stuff. I can't really think of any other bands doing that. At first, I wasn't sold on…

I had Delia's Gone picked out too. I named my dog Delia after that song. I don't plan on killing her though and she's pretty awesome, not low down and trifling.

Wall-E is amazing. The balls to have the first third of a children's movie be completely dialogue free is awesome.

Fight Club is brilliant. Even the way it's filmed with the film break, the single spliced frames of Brad Pitt before he appears, the IKEA catalog scene…it mirrors a scizophrenic, fucked up mind.

ah gotta love the hypocrisy of a group calling themselves Coalition Against Religious Bigotry denying everyone else the right to free expression of their own religious ideas. these people love freedom of religion until they're confronted with someone who doesn't unfailingly do what these idiots say. i guess we…

Mcsweeneys
Oh Mcsweeneys, you are terrific. The list book is hilarious, but so is Created In the Dark By Troubled Americans which is all short comedy writings such as On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor, Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Lord…

i go to a festival each summer in southern New York where we camp out for the weekend and watch bands. it's mostly small bands…the biggest bands that play are usually Donna The Buffalo, Rusted Root or the Avett Brothers, but it's pretty much all jam-type bands. it's generally awful. we go just because it's fun to…

yah i was also a bit underwhelmed by this. To Willie is actually probably my favorite because it works as a loose, shambling, neo-hippie sort of album. his original stuff comes off too much like sub-Will Oldham to me. either that or it comes off as sub-country music. i like the guy, but i'm not blown away by him…

i'll have to give it another shot then. it's definitely not as bad as say The Corpse Vanishes or The Dead Talk Back or Hamlet, so i'll have to netflix it i guess.

i always like when they laugh at each other. if one of them says something really funny and the others just giggle. that always cracks me up.

So professor, you built this car entirely out of bamboo?

"Any given weekend in Canada"

the movie is maybe my favorite single "episode" ever.

oh my God, House of the Dead. i was convinced that movie was a brilliant riff on b-movie trash until i found out it was Uwe Boll and was therefore genuinely b-movie trash. it's still awesome though. again, i don't generally go for "so bad it's good" stuff, but i worked in a theater when this came out and i ducked…

The Room is one of the few things I've ever seen that is genuinely "so bad it's good", because as Joe notes, it's very sincere. There's a lovable Charlie Brown loser quality to it. You know this guy poured his heart into making this film, even though he had absolutely no clue how to actually put a film together. It…