Great picture of a bridge. 

Tarbox Ramblers

Tarbox Ramblers are great. More bluesy and less jazzy than Morphine, but kinda in a similar vein. Check 'em out.

Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.

My last year in high school and first year at uni, I ran into a lot of music that was ....well, obviously not just for me, but I was the only one that I knew that liked it or cared about it. Stuff like Soul Coughing, G. Love and Special Sauce and Jeff Buckley. I forget how I got "Grace" -- Jeff's only real album, since he died while recording the second one -- but everything about it was gorgeous. Complex guitars that I couldn't figure out, rocking really hard one moment, swooning vocals like angels singing just for the hell of it; the melancholy and the air of romance of "Lilac Wine" and "Hallelujah", the two most perfect covers I've heard (originals by Nina Simone and Leonard Cohen, in case you were wondering). Maybe I was just in or just out of love with this one girl, but everything about this one album struck all the right chords with me. "Grace" has recently been reissued with a bonus disc of a _ton_ of great stuff and a DVD of Jeff's vids. The second disc is worth it by itself, if only for the cover of Big Star's "kanga-roo" and the remix of "Dream Brother" -- also included is the one song that I could not believe wasn't on "Grace" when I finally ran across it on a bootleg, "Forget Her". Something about the mournful "I walk the streets to stop my weeping" gets me every time. His estate (viz, his mom,) and record company have been releasing and re-releasing pretty much everything he's ever done but bigger and better, e.g., "Grace" as detailed above, the "Live at the Sin-e" EP that used to be 5 songs and maybe 20 minutes long is now two discs long. Despite what seems like a record company milking what they can out of it, the packages have been done with care and (with the exception of the boxed singles,) don't seem to be made just to milk money out of consumer's wallets, but a real effort to get some of this beautiful music to people who want to hear it.

The video below is from the official site, http://www.jeffbuckley.com and the two mp3s are yousendit.com links and will expire after a week, so get 'em while the getting is good.

Forget Her video
Lilac Wine (Grace Version)
Hallelujah (Grace Version)

Gorillaz "Feel Good, Inc."

this is such a great video and song that I just had to post it. Yeah, windows streaming media -- when you absolutely want to watch it in poor quality.

[music] The Legendary Pink Dots

The Legendary Pink Dots started as a synth-poppy kinda goth-y band in the early 80's in England; a few years later, the LPD's de-facto leader Edward Ka-Spel, got sick and tired of Thatcher's conservative England and packed up and went to the Netherlands, where they are still based. Despite having been Dutch residents (as well as having some Dutch natives in the band for a while) for well over 20 years, the tone of the lyrics and vocals are still very English. Whenever I am asked to describe them, I try to dumb it down to "a jazzy Pink Floyd", but really, they've covered a lot of ground. Their early stuff is very synth-poppy (the best of which is "The Tower", a concept album about Thatcher's conservatism going to it's extreme and England reopening the Tower of London as a prison; check out the wonderful song "Astrid") as mentioned above, their middle stuff is like a bit darker and somewhat more experimental (e.g., "Asylum"), and their latter stuff goes in a more psychedelic/jazzy direction ("9 Lives to Wonder"). They've collaborated often with Skinny Puppy (c.f. The Tear Garden, whose albums are great on their own,) smoothing out some of SP's edges and getting harder themselves. I have seen them live once, and their live shows are a great great thing. If they come near you, make an effort: it'll be cheap and good entertainment.

from Epitonic.com here are some mp3s:
Hellsville '98
Belladona
Spike

and one of my personal favorites, "Siren" from "9 lives to wonder":
Yousendit.com link

Relevant webpages:
legendarypinkdots.org
the live archive, live recordings from all periods of the bands existance
WikiPedia article

Rockin' in Yoda's Dojo

I love this picture. The idea of a storm trooper doing that just makes me giggle like a maniac.

talking about pop music

what I've been listening to recently as reported by my audioscrobbler plugins installed both at home and work. Man, I've been listening to radiohead a lot lately.

first post from the bunker

So let's see how this works out.