From the Screen to your Stereo

In a manner almost identical to MxPx, New Found Glory has embraced the "cover album." The difference for New Found Glory is that the covers on both editions of From the Screen to Your Stereo (2000 & 2007)are (obviously)songs made famous by movies, which I always found to be clever.

	New Found Glory - (Everything I Do) I Do It For
	Found at skreemr.com

	New Found Glory - Love Fool
	Found at skreemr.com

Dan Yemin

Now meet Dan Yemin, Philadelphia's most prolific punk musician. He's been the guitarist or vocalist for several punk and hardcore bands from Philly, all of which have grown to have national followings. Those bands: Lifetime, Kid Dynamite, Paint It Black, and Armalite (a Yemin/Adam Goren creation). I consider him, along with Goren and Jason Shevchuk (Bound/Kid Dynamite/None More Black/LaGrecia) as part the holy trinity of the Philadelphia punk scene.

More importantly than the music, Yemin has a doctorate in psychology from Widener University and is a practicing child and teen psychologist in the Ardmore/Paoli section of the Philadelphia suburbs.

	Lifetime - Airport Monday Morning
	Found at skreemr.com

Atom and his Package

Meet Philadelphia's own Adam Goren, better known as "Atom and his Package." Atom performed a unique brand of synth-punk from 1998 to 2003, the likes of which the scene had never really heard before. The "band" consisted of himself, a B.C. Rich guitar, and his QY700 music sequencer, also known as "the Package," on which he'd write and produce synthesizer loop-based songs about random observations of life's minutiae. I remember Atom's music getting a bum rap when I was in middle school, mostly because of how dorky the lyrics were (maybe more nerdy than dorky).But when I finally had a chance to see him perform at the First Unitarian Church in Philly circa 2000 all the kids pretty much "got it." Song titles included "Atari Track and Field / New Controller Conspiracy," "(Lord It's Hard to be Happy When You're Not) Using the Metric System," and "The Palestinians Are Not The Same Thing As the Rebel Alliance, Jackass." You can think of Atom as a punkified cross between Weird Al and Dead Milkmen, if that helps.

Since "disbanding," Adam Goren (with a Masters in education from UPenn)began teaching chemistry and biology at William Penn Charter in the East Falls section of Philadelphia.

Here's his best song:

	Atom and His Package - I Am Downright Amazed at What I Can Destroy Wit
	Found at skreemr.com

The Network

Back in 2003 a band of masked New Wave revivalists emerged out of nowhere. Almost immediately speculation began that the band consisted of the members of both Green Day and Devo, if only because the band, who we found to be named "The Network," sounded like a perfect mixture of both. Members of The Network call themselves Fink, Van Gogh, The Snoo, Z, Balducci, and Captain Underpants. With a keyboardist and keytarist adding a new-wave synthish sound, and other musicians providing both the Green Day-ish punk element and unmistakable vocals of Billie Joe Armstrong, you couldn't argue with the idea that maybe it was all true. Green Day has maintained to this day, albeit tongue-in-cheek, that they were not members of The Network, and have even gone so far as to cultivate a running feud between the two bands. Fans of Green Day have willfully played along. The Network's debut LP, Money Money 2020, was put out by Armstrong's label Adeline, and The Network was also able to mysteriously put aside its feud with Green Day to open for them during a tour in 2005.

Anyone familiar with Green Day can tell quite clearly that the above picture shows at least Billie Joe as Fink(in the black/white mask) and Green Day drummer Tre' Cool (luchadore mask)as The Snoo. It has also been confirmed that Green Day's bassist Mike Dirnt (Van Gogh) and Green Day's "fourth member," Jason White (Balducci), are also members of the band. What has never been confirmed, however, even 6 years later, is the identity of the keyboard players, which, aside from the overall sound, is another reason why members of Devo have had their names kicked around. Wikipedia suggests that those roles might be filled by unknown musicians Reto Peter and Chris Dugan, but speculating about non-famous people isn't really any fun. Adding to the question of whether or not Devo are actual members or just an influence is that The Network claim to be members of the Church of Lushotology, which believes in "total intoxication." This is thought to be a parody of The Church of the SubGenius (which is the religion of Devo).



Video for Supermodel Robots

Batman's Logo

HERE, is a cool video that shows the transformation of the Batman logo over the years by morphing it. I think I counted 16 iterations of the logo. How many did you find?

Me First and the Gimme Gimmes

Staying on the topic of cover songs, I thought I'd share Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, a punk rock "super group" that only puts out cover records. The band consists of:

Spike Slawson (of Swingin' Utters and Re-Volts)- vocals
"Fat" Mike Burkett (of NOFX)- bass
Chris Shiflett (of Foo Fighters)- guitar
Joey Cape (of Lagwagon)- guitar
Dave Raun (of Lagwagon)- drums

A typical Gimmes album has a theme like Love Their Country or Have a Drag which include country songs and showtunes, respectively. At their live shows they typically dress in costumes that relate to the theme.

	Me First And The Gimme Gimmes - Wild World
	Found at skreemr.com

Too Soon

Now two weeks into his first season as host of the Late Night, I can say with a clearer mind that Jimmy Fallon is not a great host, though I can't quite put my finger on exactly why that is. It may simply be that he's just not funny enough. Sure if you give him a few days and a pen he can probably write a laugh inducing sketch, but he's not good at being ad-hoc funny or even ad-hoc charming, which were two of Conan O'Brien's strengths. He also rushes his lines a lot and speed reads the cue cards. Nothing he does on the show seems natural, but instead horrendously forced. He seems like he wants to succeed, and he's trying really hard, but maybe that's the problem? Maybe he's trying too hard? I think he might be better served as a writer or a "digital shorts" kind of comedic actor. He's too awkard live.

I'm still rooting for him to figure it out. I'm sure peforming live every night has a certain relaxation learning curve, and I'm hoping that Jimmy can find his niche.

Here's a particularly awful bit: The Wheel of Carpet Samples Part 1
and Part 2

and let's contrast that with an example of where Fallon shows potential: The Gadsden Purchase

On the Cover

As part of the marketing campaign for On the Cover II, MxPx is recreating famous photographs of the bands they'll be cover on the album. With only 3 band members they had to be creative with the photoshop to get them to work, and they all turned out with varying degrees of success. Here they take on the Go-Gos. I must again say that they could have tried just a bit harder for accuracy. See most of the rest, HERE.

On the Cover

I never "got" cover albums. To me they seem like a cheap ploy to make money. I am, however, a sucker for cover songs. Luckily, my established favorite band of all time put out a cover album in 1995 that has satisfied my punk cover needs until now. Luckily, the band is putting out another one. I really like their idea for the cover of the cover songs album. See what they did there? That's 14 years of difference. They could have tried a little harder with the recreation, though. Mike (middle) could have found the same shirt, am I right? The years have been roughest on Tom (left), while Yuri (right) has found a way to de-uglify himself at least somewhat. Good work, guys.

iPod Troubles

I haven't been updating too often in the past week or so. I've been much busier at work, which is probably a good thing. But also, I've been using any free time at home or work trying to figure out what has gone wrong with my iPods. They both simultaneously began displaying odd behavior, and I've been scouring message boards and making phone calls to figure out why. Here's my post on Apple's discussions website which details my plight. I don't think the iPods are broken, I just think I've accidentally corrupted all of the files and...well...I delete things:

I have a 2 month old 120gb Classic. I use it with a Mac. To save space, I delete most of my audio files from the mac after they are uploaded to the iPod (i trust it too much).

Anyway, over the weekend I updated iTunes AND I was using a program called "ipoddisk" to pull files from the iPod and put them back on the laptop. Either the iTunes update or using "ipoddisk" seems to have corrupted most of the mp3s on my iPod. I'm leaning towards the iTunes update. The iPod still connects perfectly to iTunes, but when I try to play the files they are unrecognized (marked with a little exclamation point.)If I try to play them on the iPod itself they are still recognized and accounted for by the memory, and the artwork and song information (song length, genre, etc.) is still there, they just simply won't play. They stop at 0:00 and never advance. This seems to have happened to MOST of the files. Suspiciously enough, a lot of the music by artists with names lower in the alphabet (AFI, Academy Is, Blink 182) still work, but after D or so, nothing works except random songs.

Nothing has actually said "corrupt" to me, but I can't figure out why the songs won't play anywhere. When the iPod is connected to iTunes and I try to play the non-working songs, I can literally feel my iPod "try" to load the song (the disk spins a bit), but nothing happens and the files still have an exclamation point. I also tried to maybe change ID3 tags, but apparently I can't.

I'm holding out hope that there are others experiencing something like this, because I really don't want to have to go through re-ripping all of 4,000 non-working songs. I did, however, confirm that deleting the "corrupt" songs from my iPod and then reloading them from the iTunes library fixes the problem. In my particular case, however, since I delete most files, this is not a solution for me.

Edit: I found out this also happened to my iPod nano, which confirms the good news that this can't possibly be a hardware malfunction and that the devices themselves are just fine. It's the files inside which I now believe were corrupted by "ipoddisk" (which is a dubious program) or possibly the iTunes 8.0.2 update or even an iPod firmware update that might have caused the issue. At any rate I'm getting a backup hard drive before I attempt to download the 3500 lost songs. I'm also glad at this point that it was ONLY 3500 rather than the 20,000 I hope to have a year from now.

Oh well, I can still listen to the Clash.

Observe and Report

In case you weren't paying attention, this now makes two movies about mall cops in the past two months.

Trailer for Observe and Report

For comparison: Paul Blart.

Post 101

So Far, So Good

Two shows into his stint as the new host of Late Night, Jimmy Fallon has shown himself to be a decent host. Like Conan O'Brien before him, you have to "get" the brand of humor, but if you liked any of his SNL work, that shouldn't be too hard. He's a little awkward, but it's the kind of awkward you've come to expect from him, except now it comes with a bit more professionalism and quieter hair. You get the feeling that he really wants to succeed, and although I was only 11 when Conan debuted, I get the distinct feeling that Jimmy's first two shows have shown more promise than Conan's first few.

One thing I've enjoyed thoroughly is Fallon's approach to connecting with viewers. He's had countless video blogs leading up to the debut where he's answered questions from fans and taken suggestions. He also utilizes popular social sites like facebook. And most important, his choice of The Roots as house band has proven brilliant so far. They are phenomenal as a backup band, and even helped with a bit on night number 1. Click on that picture above to see Jimmy Fallon and the Roots, "slow jam the news."

Cover Songs: Green Day

Somehow Green Day managed to slip an album of b-sides and cover songs by me a few years ago which I am just discovering now. The album, Shenanigans, includes two great covers. "Outsider," by the Ramones, and "Tired of Waiting for You," by The Kinks. Both are fantastic as far as cover songs go, but then Green Day has always been smart about choosing which cover songs to actually record. Here for your listening pleasure are all of Green Day's cover songs.

Also, a great website to check out is COVERSPROJECT, which lets you choose any band you'd like to find out if they've covered or been covered. Don't bother looking at the Ramones page or Bob Dylan's page unless you have all day.

SeeqPod - Playable Search

*The final track is "Don't Want to Know if You Are Lonely," by Hüsker Dü.