Five-Iron-Frenzy

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“403” caption=“Ron Effing Swanson (Picture courtesy andyrama)”] [/caption] Parks and Recreation is back, everyone! Ron Swanson approves. Movies Paul - I’d heard very conflicting things about this movie. My feelings on it remain conflicted. I like Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Kristen Wiig, but this movie, while good, was not the best showcase of their various talents. I don’t regret watching it, but I’d say it’s pretty middling. ...

Farewell, Rx Bandits. We were introduced with The Resignation 2003 as a Christmas gift from my ex-girlfriend. I loved “Mastering the List” and I liked the album then, but I didn’t really LOVE RxB. Love started in 2006 with …And The Battle Begun. So many great songs on that disc, but tops must always go to “Only for the Night”, which became (and remains) my favorite track. In 2009 I explored your past with Halfway Between Here and There and Progress, enjoying the strides you’d made and how far you’d come. The seeds were always there and it all gelled with Mandala. Your crowning achievement of all that you wanted to do and all that you wanted to say and, despite my love for your horns, it was the end of that era. You’d grown up and so had I. ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“A performance from Tremé”] [/caption] Tomorrow night’s the All-Star Game, but my coverage might be a little different than usual. I plan on watching it with friends, so there may not be a liveblog, but I will cover it in the morning. In the meanwhile, here’s what I’ve been up to. ...

It’s really been tough coming up with the music that has most resonated with me in the 2000s. Wanting to represent the entire decade is tough, since I don’t really find the music that I used to listen to before I went to college all that good. Once I had more money and exposure beyond the mainstream acts I was familiar with in high school, I feel my tastes really changed up some. This list is definitely not representative of the actual best bands of the decade, they’re just bands that had a strong effect on me and my musical development. ...

Last Friday I went out to Towson to see one of my favorite bands, Streetlight Manifesto. The last (and only) ska show I’d ever been to was back in 2003 for Five Iron Frenzy’s farewell tour, which primarily means that I didn’t really go to a ska show. You see, FIF skewed mostly to a Christian audience and so at their shows they mostly discouraged the shoving and pushing endemic of most ska concerts. Naturally, SLM had no such qualms about the shoving, so I got firsthand knowledge of just how hard it is to jump/dance, sing, try and stay on two feet in all the shoving, and, most importantly, breathe. Other than all the unnecessary shoving (I get why, it’s all the energy, but it just seems kind of pointless…maybe I’m just old?), the venue was my kind of place. The last show I went to was at the DAR Constitution Hall (that’s Daughters of the American Revolution for the uninformed), which was a huge venue that meant that we had assigned seats that we were mostly confined to. Now, I was mostly turned off by Ben Folds’ all-new stuff set that night, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to be out in a crowd for it too. The Recher Theatre, on the other hand, was a tiny venue, with capacity for maybe 1000 people, if you stretched the limits of the place and maybe ignored a fire code or two. Perfect for a rock show, although I do also like the setup they had at school for Slope Day for the same kind of show. ...

So I was wandering through Best Buy last week, as I am want to do, and I noticed that Fall Out Boy released a new album: Live in Phoenix. Back in the day I used to hate live albums. The sound quality was always a bit diminished and the songs were slightly different, musically, with different tempos, lyrics, and sometimes flourishes. They lacked the studio polish and effects and just sounded raw. Then I started going to concerts. My first real one was Five Iron Frenzy’s Winners Never Quit tour, which was just amazing. I remember hearing “The Medley of Power Ballads and Bad Taste” live and being just totally blown away. If this type of thing could happen at a concert, then it’s possible that other live CDs could have more than just songs that were on studio albums. Live album love was born for me and, to this day, I treasure my live albums by Ben Folds, FIF, and other odd live recordings here or there. ...