Overall, last night’s radio show didn’t really come together as well as I would have liked, but, at the least, I was able to play a lot of music that I was really excited to spin. New stuff from The Lawrence Arms–seriously Buttsweat and Tears is such a great 7″–, Cheap Girls, Flight Of The Conchords, Coconut Records, Frank Turner, and They Might Be Giants. Along with Monsters of Folk and some of the other stuff I’ve been playing over the past few weeks, there is a lot going on right now from some more well known, at least in the indie scene, bands. It’d be awesome if every week could be like this.

So musically, I really loved last night’s show and I think I had my mic breaks mostly where I wanted them, but I slipped up a bit on my segues between songs. I guess it happens. Oh well.

Source: 90.3 The Core

Also, I wanted to post Frank Turner’s new video for Poetry of the Dead because he looks kind of like a cleaned up Brian Graber and I support that. Not the cleaned up part, but the Brian Graber part.

Here are a few new shirts I’ve picked up in the last couple of weeks. The first one, I got at the Threadless store in Chicago. You can’t really tell much in the picture, but it’s a guy on top of a car surrounded by zombies. I don’t even know how many zombie related shirts I have at this point. And the third one, I got at the Lawrence Arms 10th anniversary show.

We tried to have our cat wear a fake bloody finger around her neck for our Halloween party, but it didn’t really pan out so well.

I had another great show last night and I had a lot of fun doing it. Nice mix of music and a bit more diverse than usual. I’ve been saying that a lot recently, but it’s true!

I’ve been listening to the new albums by Frank Turner and World’s Greatest Ghosts a bit and I have to go ahead and recommend both of them. Frank Turner is becoming one of my favorite British acts and World’s Greatest Ghosts sounds a lot like a mix of The Paper Chase and Jukebox The Ghost. Check them out.

Source: 90.3 The Core

I wanted to get something up about the show sooner, but I haven’t had a chance. I’m going to completely ignore the openers and get to the point, The Lawrence Arms are one of the best bands playing right now. An hour and forty-five minutes was a long time for a punk band to play, but I’m going to be honest, I could have done a lot more. A LOT MORE. Hell, they could have played the set twice and I would have been giddy as hell about it.

The band came out on stage with a nice rockstarry entrance, but after that, it was clear that they were just three dudes having one of the best nights of their collective life. You could tell that they couldn’t take themselves too seriously if they tried. They tore through thirty songs with enough talking to break it up a bit and engage the audience, but never enough for you to want them to shut up. I’ve never seen a band get through that many songs that quickly. They were on a mission.

They played songs from all over their catalog, just like they promised they would. They kept things slightly more to the last couple records, but I’m not complaining about that. They played some stuff that they don’t play often, like A Wishful Puppeteer–they had only played this once before–and left out only a couple other songs I would have liked to hear. I’m starting to accept that I’ll never get to see them play Drunk Mouth Kitchen Smile.

They even had Neil sing a song. According to Brendan, Turnstiles is the best Lawrence Arms song “for your money” and I have to agree, in recent months, it has shot right up to the top of my list.

This was a fun set and seeing this band in Chicago was amazing. I love these guys. This was show number 1000 for them and I swear, the next 1000 better be made up of at least 1001 on the East Coast.

Here’s a list of the songs they played. It’s not in order, but you get the idea…

• An Evening of Extraordinary Circumstance
• The North Side of the L&L and Any Number of Crappy Apartments
• Uptown Free Radio
• Smokestacks
• 16 Hours
• Turnstiles
• Light Breathing
• 106 South
• Nebraska
• Quincentuple Your Money
• 100 Resolutions
• Hey, What Time is “Pensacola: Wings of Gold” On, Anyway?
• Your Gravest Words
• Boatless Booze Cruise
• Brickwall Views
• Presenting: The Dancing Machine
• Necrotism: Decanting the Insalubrious
• Intransit
• Raw and Searing Flesh
• On With The Show
• Alert The Audience
• Chapter 13: The Hero Appears
• The Ramblin’ Boys of Pleasure
• A Wishful Puppeteer
• The Disaster March
• Cut it Up
• Great Lakes/Great Escapes
  
• Recovering the Opposable Thumb
• Are You There, Margaret? It’s Me, God
• Lose Your Illusion 1
• Like a Record Player

PS: Chicago really is the best city ever. Every time I go there, I love it more and more. Friendly people, amazing food, awesome vibe, tons of great music.

I went to see The Gaslight Anthem, Murder By Death, and The Loved Ones in Philly last night at the Trocadero. It was an all around great show.

The Loved Ones played what was probably the best set I’ve ever seen them play. I can’t really describe why it was so great, but they just felt really on and didn’t talk too much compared to other times that I’ve seen them. Their set list was well chosen and leaning way more to the Keep Your Heart side of things than Build & Burn, which works out great for me since I think Keep Your Heart is a much better record.

Murder By Death was slightly worse than the last time I saw them, but that was also about five years ago. They played well and sounded good, but I think I miss them being a five piece. Having a dedicated keyboardist made them able to keep more of their recorded sound when playing live. Sarah did a great job switching between cello and keyboards, but it wasn’t quite the same. The last time I saw them was before their last two albums came out so they had fewer songs to play. This gave them time to rock out and jam a little more. I’m not into jam bands, but I love when bands that I like just jam out for a little bit during some of the instrumental parts of songs. It adds something extra to the live set that you don’t get from a record. This is something that they seemed to do a lot in the past and it was one of my favorite things about seeing them, but now with all the extra songs that they have, there is a lot less time to do it. Still, they sounded great and picked a good selection of songs to play. I think they covered everything that I wanted to hear.

And then there was Gaslight Anthem. They sounded amazing and were tight as hell with a great stage presence. It may have been the tightest that I’ve ever seen them play out of the six or seven times that I’ve seen them. But the selection of songs that they played was a bit disappointing. The ‘59 Sound is a really great record, one of the best to come out in 2008. However, it lost a lot over the last year for me. Most of my interest in it waned. Sink Or Swim has stuck with me though. That’s what I wanted to hear. I didn’t expect a lot, but the entire first half of their set was from The ‘59 Sound. By the end, we only got a couple Sink Or Swim songs in total. I guess normally it would be expected to hear only a few songs from a band’s first album…if they have more than two, but with only two of them, it’d be nice it at least a third of the set was from the first album. Oh well. At least everything they played sounded great.

Even accepting the fact that I’ll never get to hear them play much from Sink Or Swim again, I don’t know that I’ll ever want to see them live again. I’m not sure how to describe it, but they felt very rock starry last night. It was a little too much. They stopped feeling like this band from New Brunswick that used to play basement shows and the Court Tavern to small crowds and more like a band that has their eyes set on stages set in front of thousands and thousands of people. It wasn’t to the point where it was terribly upsetting and bothersome and a lot of it was subtle, but it was enough that I feel as though my love for them will start to decline if I keep on seeing them.

Last night was also the first time that I’ve been to the Troc in about seven years. I’ve generally avoided it as I was never a fan of the place and I was reminded 100% of this last night. The sound is terrible. It might be the worst sounding venue I’ve ever been to. Ugh.

Last night was another fantastic show. Almost perfect all around. Great music, great segues, and the phone was ringing off the hook. Not even just the phone, but the instant messages too. So much so that it was almost stressful trying to keep up. I was actually sweating because of it.

I found out last night that our station streams perfectly fine over an iPhone just by going to www.thecore.fm and clicking to listen. I’m assuming this will work on any other smartphone too, I guess I never thought about it before.

Apparently, we’re supposed to get a Nor’easter this weekend so that’s going to put a damper on my Field of Terror plans, but I’m still excited to see Gaslight Anthem, Murder By Death, and The Loved Ones on Sunday in Philly. And it seems that there are still tickets for the Monday night show as well. You may want to check that out. Either way, expect a full report next week.

Anyway, here’s what I played…

Source: 90.3 The Core

Last night’s show got off to a bit of a late start, but I still managed to fit in most of what I wanted. Other than that, it was was a relatively average show. Nothing of note to mention.

Source: 90.3 The Core

I think everyone liked Whip It more than I did. I mean, I liked it a lot, but everyone that I’ve heard talk about it loved it. The movie was entertaining and I actually didn’t find Jimmy Fallon to be annoying which was unexpected, but there wasn’t really anything about it that grabbed me like I wanted it to. I feel like for a movie about roller derby with Ellen Page and all the other people that are in this, I want a little more.

Ellen Page is awesome and I love her, but I feel like sometimes that innocent little girl, deer in the headlights look she normally pulls off so well doesn’t always fit. In Whip It, it only felt appropriate about half the time. The look felt overused and Bliss (Ellen Page) seemed like she was more confident than her face was showing in a lot of scenes. I don’t think the problem was Ellen Page so much as it was Drew Barrymore’s directing. Okay fine, I just don’t want to fault Ellen Page. Deal with it.

I don’t know, I really don’t have much else to say about this one.

Rating: B

PS: Andrew Wilson should change his name to Beef Surpreme in real life because that’s all I see when I see him.

You know, if you had asked me a year ago, before I had even heard of Zombieland, if I would have said “yeah, I think Woody Harrelson could wreck some zombies.” Now, ask me this after seeing Zombieland and the answer becomes something more along the line of “why the hell isn’t Woody Harrelson in every zombie movie?” Seriously, it’s a no-brainer. Dude knows how to kill some zombies.

Zombieland is one of those movies where you get so hyped up for and so obsessed with it before seeing it that the day before it comes out, you start to worry that it can’t live up to your expectations. Don’t worry. You will not be disappointed. Zombieland does everything right. It really does. Zombieland actually delivered more than I could have hoped for.

The obvious thing to do here would be to draw comparisons to Shaun Of The Dead. And while that’s not the most inaccurate statement ever, Zombieland isn’t just a U.S. version of Shaun Of The Dead. While both are more romantic comedy than zombie-focused, Zombieland stands on its own without needing a comparison.

Zombieland gives us a lot of great zombie kills, but keeps it light on the flesh eating. In fact, there are actually very few human kills to be seen in the movie. The ones we get are excellent, but like I said, the movie doesn’t focus as much on the zombies, it sticks with good old-fashioned romantic-comedy. This keeps the gore down a bit, but it’s not missed either. It just goes to show, that you don’t need gore for a good zombie flick…and you also don’t need to actually kill any of the characters either.

Bill Murray’s cameo was absolutely wonderful and Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, and Abigail Breslin were all wonderful too, but the start of Zombieland is Woody Harrelson. This dude was born for this role.

Rating: A+

Last night’s radio show was another great one. I’m really starting to like the 9pm slot…maybe even better than 10pm. I have more energy and it feels like less of a drag towards the end of the show.

There was a lot of good new stuff to play this week which made it easy to get a nice flow from song to song and from genre to genre. I was able to cover a lot of musical ground and also get in some bigger named bands, something that has been missing for a few weeks. Bands like Yo La Tengo, Echo & The Bunnymen, and Lou Barlow.

The Monsters Of Folk album is pretty awesome if you’re into those guys (M. Ward, Conor Oberst, Jim James, Mike Mogis). It sounds exactly the way I was expecting it to, but in the best of ways. And I think prior to last night, I had never actually heard Imogen Heap before, but they’ve got a new album out and I decided to play a song for my girlfriend who is into them. I kind of always thought I’d hate them, but it wasn’t too bad. I’m not in love with it, but I’d play them again.

Here’s what I played…

Source: 90.3 The Core

Last Friday, I took a trip down to Philly to see forgetters play their fourth show ever at the Barbary. Forgetters is the new band from Blake Schwartzenbach (Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil) and Kevin Malone (the original drummer of Against Me!). Blake used to front my favorite band of all time so when he starts up something new, it’s without a doubt going to be interesting to me. His last band, Thorns Of Life, didn’t last long at all. They broke up a few months ago, having never officially recorded anything. A couple of live bootlegs are all the remain of the band. Anyway, this was the first of Blake’s bands that I’ve seen live. I wasn’t old enough when Jawbreaker broke up to even appreciate good music, let alone go to the shows–okay, I was thirteen, if I was on top of my shit, I might have been there, but I wasn’t. And I didn’t actually start caring about Jets to Brazil until it was too late.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from forgetters. I had heard that they were playing some Thorns Of Life songs, but I wasn’t really sure what that meant in terms of what to expect. They came out and started with a Thorns Of Life song…but it sounded better than what I had heard from the bootlegs. They played two other Thorns Of Life songs throughout the set including a one that was heavily re-worked as their last song. The rest of the songs seemed to be all forgetters original. Think something a little more along the lines of Orange Rhyming Dictionary with some Hum influence.

I was a little surprised to find that I held the unpopular opinion among my friends of loving it. I think it is a very positive step from where Thorns Of Life was. Thorns Of Life was pretty good, but this is a lot more interesting to me.

Good stuff. Here are a few videos from a couple of the shows. They sound horrible, but I’m hoping someone made a decent bootleg that will turn up soon.

Last night was my second show in my new 9pm time slot on Wednesdays. As skeptical as I was at first about moving my show to a new time after being at 10pm for six years, I have to say, it’s going really well. I find that I have a little more energy to do it and I don’t start fading in the second half of the show the way I did at 10pm. And getting home earlier, leaving me with time to watch Glee before bed, is a pretty nice bonus.

I felt on again last night. Everything came together really well with some of the best segues from one song into another that I’ve ever put together. The only flaw in the show was playing a band called The Sexy Accident. I needed something with a poppy-ish indie-rock sound (almost older Weezerish) and it fit in perfectly, but the lyrics are pretty terrible and the name is even worse. I like the singer’s voice a lot though and musically, they sound alright, but I can’t get past the lyrics.

Source: 90.3 The Core

So I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past couple of days. It’s not the first time, not by a long shot, but yesterday involved a seriously in-depth conversation about the topic, putting it firmly into my consciousness.

Let’s think about this, what exactly would a zombie vampire be? And we need to make the distinction between a zombie vampire and a vampire zombie. The former being first and foremost a vampire that became zombified and the latter being a zombie that got turned into a vampire. I’m going to say that while the second scenario would work out quite well for the zombie, this is rather unlikely.

It’s also important to note that the relationship between zombies and vampires must be a bit awkward. They have no direct reason to interact with each other. Neither is any good to the other. Zombies need the flesh of the living and vampires need the blood of the living. Since both are technically dead, a vampire is no good to a zombie and a zombie is no good to a vampire. However, since they both seek out the living as a food source, they are in competition. Once either of them get a hold of a living human, that’s about it. There is no sharing.

But this isn’t about zombies vs. vampires and their relationship with one another, this is about a hybrid.

Let’s say that a human were to get bit by a zombie and thus become infected. But let’s say that this human wasn’t killed right away and was living for a while still. Now at this point, he/she is still perfectly alive and therefore still a potential vampire target. If a vampire were to take a delicius little sip of this human’s blood and decide to turn the human, then the human would become a vampire that is still infected with the zombie virus. And the first vampire would have sucked infected blood. We could have two zombie vampires here!

Well, maybe not so fast. If a zombie is a re-animated corpse, that would require the vampire to die to become a zombie. This isn’t too likely, seeing as how a vampire is the living dead. So how would the vampire be affected by the zombie virus? Would it be infected at all? Would the vampire take on some of the zombie’s qualities? There are a lot of questions here.

What qualities could a zombie vampire have? One of a zombie’s biggest weaknesses is that its flesh is rotting and it therefore won’t be around forever before it simply falls apart. But it is pretty reasonable to say that a zombie vampire’s flesh would not rot at all. A vampire is not living and has no trouble with rotting flesh, there is no reason to believe that a zombie vampire would be any different. Now, we have a zombie that has no expiration date.

One of the zombie’s biggest weaknesses after the rotting is the fact that rigor mortis has set in. This is possibly the main reason why zombies are traditionally so slow. But in our case, with the zombie vampire, rigor mortis may not be an issue. There is no dying here and that means there is no rigor mortis. This zombie isn’t going to be a stiffy. Vampires are known for their incredible speed so now we may have a zombie that retains it’s full speed. Even in a worst case scenario, a zombie vampire would be faster than a human.

What if the vampire is of the bat-turning-into variety? Does the zombified version of this vampire retain this ability? If so, a flying zombie is second in scariness only to a shark that can walk on land.

What kind of brain power does a zombie vampire have? If there is no death process and no rotting, it is likely that a zombie vampire retains a fully functioning brain as opposed to just the brain-stem.

What does a zombie vampire need to survive? Suddenly, both blood and flesh are consumables. A living human is now both a meal and a beverage. Much less of the human is wasted. Now you’ve got a green zombie!

How is a zombie vampire killed or at least neutralized? Is destroying the brain or removing the head enough? Does the brain need to be destroyed with a silver bullet?

There are a lot of important questions here and not a lot of answers. Clearly, a lot more (scientific) research will need to be done. At this point, it seems as though a zombie vampire may either not even be possible at all or take on very few zombie traits.

Stay tuned for a followup post.

Take a look at the center of these two pictures. That’s a rainbow that was peering down through a hole in the clouds this morning. I was pulling into the work parking lot when I saw it so I could only snap a picture with my phone, but it was so beautiful. No rain or anything, just a hole in the clouds with a rainbow shining through.

These three are from Woot’s random deal last week. The first and third ones are pretty awesome, but I’m not really sure how I feel about the second one.

Last night was my first show at my new 9pm slot on Wednesdays. For the last six years, I’ve been at 10pm, but alas it was time to make a move. It was a little hard to remember to say the right times while I was talking on the mic and I actually signed in at the wrong time at first, but other than that, this was one of my best shows in the past few months. I was really happy with everything about it and I think I picked up a few new listeners who were tuning in expecting to hear Now Airing Dirty Laundry with Miss Lisa, the show that had been at 9 for the past couple years.

Source: 90.3 The Core

Just a heads up that, starting tonight, The Playlist will now be airing at 9pm instead of 10! This will be the first time in six years that I’ll be broadcasting from a different time, but I look forward to the change. Maybe I’ll even be able to pick up some new listeners.

Listen live at 90.3 FM or www.thecore.fm!

Take Meet The Robinsons, The Matrix, Tim Burton’s entire filmography, and everything Steampunk and you get 9. It’s a visually awesome film, no doubt. It’s as beautiful and stunning as the trailers will have you believe. But the story is melded together from so many other ideas in other films that you feel like you’ve seen it all before. Twice. No, three times. No, more.

For as entertained as I was, I feel like I should have walked out of the theater with more. I’m not sure what exactly, but there’s something missing here. 9 is creative, yet at the same time, full of stolen ideas and this isn’t hidden at all. I felt myself going back and forth between loving it and saying to myself “hey…wait…”

Rating: B-

Last night ended up being a pretty decent show. I wasn’t really feeling it much beforehand and I got to the station late because I was watching Obama’s speech, but I pulled it together nicely. There’s been somewhat of a lack of bigger names on the Playlist lately, but I don’t think the show has suffered from it. I hope I’m not the only one that feels that way.

I think the highlight of last night was getting a call from an angry listener after saying that I thought Obama nailed his speech to Congress about healthcare. The caller did not agree at all. He even went so far as to suggest that maybe I just liked the sound of his voice. Oh well.

Source: 90.3 The Core