In this case, that was Two Door Cinema Club. They were new to me, so I went to YouTube to check them out. (As an aside, I seem to be listening/discovering more music via YouTube these days.) They had the indie rock/pop sound that I particularly like and, over the past month, I just can’t stop listening to them. I’ve downloaded their album [iTunes link] and also grabbed a few remixes off RCRD LBL.

The Lonely Forest were the first opening act. They were decent, especially their single ‘We Sing in Time‘ but overall a litte too power-pop for me and a little green — ‘Turn Off This Song and Go Outside‘ is a good example of that.

Next up was Bombay Bicycle Club and I enjoyed their set. They played a number of tracks I was familiar with but, as I tweeted at the show, Kool Haus is a bigger venue then my ideal. According to Wikipedia, it has a capacity of about 2,500. I would have said that Bombay Bicycle Club would have killed at Richard’s on Richards but standing at the back of the show it was a bit hard to get into their more intimate sound. If you’re not familiar with them, they have an almost chilled out Vampire Weekend-like sound, some indie pop with folk and a bit of African beats mixed in. Very Paul Simon-esque, in the best ways possible — check out ‘Always Like This‘ (Moj’s selection from PDP9.5). I also think they’d be good at a festival show.

When Two Door Cinema Club finally hit the stage, I was kinda of mixed feelings. I was enjoying the music at the show but was attending solo, as there was a last minute cancellation and I still don’t know many people in Toronto. (I generally buy tickets in pairs as I’ve been the most frequent concert-goer of my friends and then just figure out who would most like to see any particular show.) So I was enjoying the music but feeling just a wee bit homesick for Vancouver. But Two Door Cinema Club didn’t disappoint, getting the crowd right into things from the opening chords of ‘Cigarettes in the Theatre‘, the opening track from Tourist History.

They played most of their album, as they don’t have a huge catalogue at this time. My favourite tracks included ‘What You Know‘, ‘I Can Talk‘, ‘Something Good Can Work‘ — even some of their weaker tracks like ‘You’re Not Stubborn’. They also played a few new tracks, stating that they plan to record a new album once they’re done the current tour. I’m interested to see how/if they progress, as for some they may too closely tread the line of having a definite “sound” and being monotonous — obviously I’m in the former camp. If you get the chance to check out this band from Northern Ireland, I’d highly recommend it.

Still on the slate for this fall is Portishead, a band I’ve never seen live but have loved since Dummy came out in 1994 and I’m trying to decide if I should check out Rural Alberta Advantage, who were awesome when I caught them in April at Venue. If only I could catch a show by the Futureheads, whom are still my favourite band that I’ve never seen live.

Perhaps because I had such low expectations — especially after the initial teaser — I didn’t actually think it was all bad. Jason Momoa did a decent job in the titular role as the Cimmerian barbarian. I wasn’t the biggest fan of him in A Game of Thrones as Khal Drogo, even though I’m a big fan of the show (and books!). But with a little more dialogue and less eye khol, he did an alright job. Moma’s certainly more athletic than Arnie and the fight/actual scenes do okay.

This movie is supposed to be a little more true to the Robert E. Howard originals than the Schwarzenegger efforts, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. I thought it was definitely better then Destroyer and wasn’t quite at the level original — mostly because Stephan Lang is no James Earl Jones. Ron Perlman did his standard fantasy/action adventure portrayal as Conan’s father, Corin. I thought Rose McGowan was a bit much as the female antagonist and Rachel Nichols was just meh as Conan’s love  interest. But really, no one has much to work with.

While not a strict remake of John Milius’ effort, it was an origins story that trod much of the same material. Darkhorizons lists its budget at $100m and with a $10m opening weekend, I think it unlikely to have a sequel greenlit. Production values were actually not too bad — lack of marquee names and shooting in Bulgaria have benefits — but I wish they’d gone with something more original in attempting to re-boot this series. Maybe that’s because I want to see Milius bring Conan back to the screen and show how, “In time he became king by his own hand…” The 3D was alright I guess; I’m not really a fan of the technology and don’t think I’ve ever really enjoyed it outside of an IMAX space documentary.

Overall, not a film I wanted to see or a DVD I’d purchase but it did a decent job of killing a few hours on a summer afternoon, so mission accomplished. That said, to cleanse my film palate I watched the elegant Audrey Tautou in Coco avant Chanel this evening — a movie I’d highly recommend if you’ve never seen it.

My main goal with mixes has always been to make the listening experience better and as effortless as possible. I’ve refined the production process and continued to tinker until I have a system that I think works pretty well. With an eye to the future, where PDP exchanges are likely to be all digital affairs, I thought I’d share my steps.

A couple caveats. I use iTunes on a Mac. I’m assuming that the steps work the same on PC versions but may need some adjustment if you make CDs using other audio software.

One.
Create a playlist that I obsessively tweak for weeks/months, trying to balance accessibility, exclusivity and an enjoyable music experience.

Two.
I generally shoot to make a playlist the full 80 minutes of a standard play CD. My PDP schtick is to include a hidden track, which with the exception of PDP1, is a cover song. (For PDP1, it was a Lewis Black comedy track about Starbucks, since both Dan and Carmen worked there.) I’ve always enjoyed good covers and I love when bands play a cover as part of their fake “encore”.

Once I’ve got my playlist set, I’ll use Audacity to combine the final listed track and my chosen cover song. It’s pretty straight forward. Import the tracks; add some silence at the end of the song; copy and paste the cover song; export. Then import into iTunes and Bob’s your uncle. I’d suggest making sure the total playlist isn’t more then 79:53. Even when burning with no  gaps between tracks, cutting it too close to 80:00 and iTunes says it won’t all fit.

I’ve also used Audacity to adjust the volume level of an mp3, along with trimming some time off tracks that have too much silence at the end. It probably does a bunch of other things but this is all I’ve ever used it for.

Three.
Burn the playlist to CD.

I always use the slowest speed possible to try and get the best quality. Which probably doesn’t make that much of a difference, since my mixes are often made up of a motley collection of digital tracks and imported CDs of various bit rates.

Four.
Once the CD is burned, I fix up the tracklisting. Alex Walker in PDP7 was the first PDPer who’s CD auto-loaded track names when inserting into iTunes. I’d previously tried it unsuccessfully  — obviously — but after I knew it could be done, I kept experimenting until I figured it out.

One of the things I liked about Alex’s system, other than the fact it fetched names automatically, was that he’d included the album the song came from. He put that information in the artist field though, something I didn’t care for because it would create another artist when using the browser function. Instead, I decided to add the album to the song title field.

So, first step is to select track one and open the ‘Get Info’ (⌘ – I) dialogue box. Go into the ‘Info’ tab and copy the current album title and paste it into the song field. I usually separate the two with a hyphen. Go to the next track and repeat process. You could manually type in titles but that seems like too much work to me.

Five.
Once you’ve got the song titles with album names, you’re ready to select all the files on the CD for disc wide changes. Year is an obvious one, along with album title. I set the composer field to my name, the same way that I do when importing other peeps’ PDP albums. Sometimes I like to listen to all albums by a specific person, whether I’m working my way through the back catalogue or I just feel like listening to that person. (Currently, I’ve got Ben’s stuff on my iPhone — mostly because I wanted to listen to Twenty Aught Six, a non-PDP mix.)

I also check of a lot of other fields like album artist and comments but don’t add any content, instead looking to strip any data that remains in iTunes from the original file.

I then set the genre to soundtrack. Once I import albums, I change the genre to the PDP exchange. It’s an easy way to use the search function to find all the PDP3 albums at once. But you can’t upload tracklistings to the database with custom genres. I could probably leave it blank but I figure soundtrack is the most accurate option of the the default settings.

The last item is to select the actual CD on the devices menu on the left of iTunes so you can set the CD as a compilation. This is an optional piece (as, I guess, are most of these steps) but I’ve found that it makes it easier to find albums on my iPhone’s iTunes, since I can quickly click on the compilations browsing button.

Six.
Double check all the individual tracks to make sure they’ve got the correct information and no extra fields populated.

Seven.
Under the ‘Advanced’ menu, select ‘Submit CD Track Names…’.

Eight.
Burn another copy of the CD and then under the ‘Advanced’ menu, select ‘Get Track Names’. This allows me to double check that things worked well. Actually, I usually pop the CD into my MacBook Pro to make uber-sure that things worked out okay. Then I’ll rip that CD and, once imported, change the genre to the appropriate PDP.

Bonus Step.
I’ve primarily used iTunes Mosaic print function — modified, of course — to print playlists. But it’d look horrible with album names. Hell, it looks bad sometimes with long song titles or band names. But if you have it just in the data, you’re fine. So I’ll usually print the tracklisting from the iTunes playlist that I used to burn the CD. Just change the view options so there’s only the artist and song title field showing.

The synopsis offered by Apple Trailers:

Set in the Old West territory of New Mexico, “Appaloosa” revolves around a pair of hired guns (Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris) who come to clean up a dangerous town run by a ruthless, powerful rancher (Jeremy Irons) and his band of outlaws. While boldly bringing new order to the town, the two fearless lawmen meet a provocative outsider (Renee Zellweger) whose unconventional ways threaten to destroy their decade-old bond.

Overall, I enjoyed the film. I like Ed Harris and I’m fond of Viggo Mortensen’s work, such as I noted when writing about The Road. Is this blog turning into a Viggo fanclub?!? Ed and Viggo also starred in A History of Violence, David Cronenberg’s excellent 2005 effort. Warning: Spoilers below.

The dynamic of Harris and Mortensen works pretty well for me. As the elder, Harris plays Virgil Cole, the leader of the outfit. The iron grip Cole possesses on his moral compass allows him to dispatch frontier justice in a lawless land. The wicked are punished but always according to the law and Cole is that law, a rather harsh law.

Mortensen plays Everett Hitch, Cole’s faithful deputy. Hitch is less of the philosopher-king than Cole is. Hitch knows he’s a good in a fight and has steady nerves; he’s a gunman, and being a lawman is just a way of making it legal. It is telling that through the course of the movie we learn Cole has never killed a man outside the law but Hitch has. Revealed in context, it humanizes Hitch in the same way Cole’s claim bolsters his own moral righteousness.

Zellweger does an alright job as Mrs. Allison French, a recent widow who is ready to attach herself to the alpha male of the group — whatever group that happens to be. Mostly that’s City Marshal Cole but not always and it challenges the partnership of Cole and Hitch, though never the utter trust that tie the men together.

Jeremy Irons is solid as Randall Bragg, primary antagonist. Not great but solid, which is nice to see after seeming to descend into a kind of growling, two-dimensional rehash of the same character in a bunch of B movies. I’m looking at you, Dungeons and Dragons and Eragon.

Overall, I have to say it makes a nice addition to the Western section of my movie collection. I still think Seraphim Falls, written and directed by David Von Ancken, is my favourite Western though.

As Apple tells it,

A taut psychological action film, an epic chase and primal battle set in the breathtaking landscape of the West. The civil war has ended but Colonel Morsman Carver (Liam Neeson) is on one final mission: to kill Gideon (Pierce Brosnan) no matter what it takes. Launched by a gunshot and propelled by rage, the relentless pursuit takes them both far from civilization.

Brosnan and Neeson are relentless and unstopping, driven to the ends of the earth by demons and their shared past. If you haven’t seen Seraphim Falls, I highly recommend it. It has the quiet, forlorn dignity that Unforgiven does. That’s another great film, one that I have to add to my collection.

I do have The Man with No Name trilogy by Sergio Leone sitting on my shelf that I need to get to. I’ve seen most of the movies individually, I think, but I’m sure I haven’t seen them all and never in context of each other. Maybe a fun thing to do over the holdiays.

I ended up looking up We Have Band, a London-based band I originally heard about on the Hipster Runoff blog. Their song ‘Oh!’ was definitely catchy and I added it onto my PDP10 playlist — careful listeners would have noticed their cover of the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’ as the hidden track on that mix. When I went to look for an album to hear what else they had done, I couldn’t really find anything else though I also managed to grab a remix of ‘Oh!’ off of RCRD LBL — checking the site I see there a bunch of new remixes to have a listen!

On my first listen WHB, the debut LP from We Have Band, I was thrown for a bit of a curve. Truth be told, I was expecting something a little more one dimensional, with tracks sounding somewhat derivative. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing. I found Transparent Things by Fujiya & Miyagi to be of this mono-sonic nature and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

While there’s no denying that We Have Band has a distinct sound, I think there’s a range from tracks like ‘Divisive’ to ‘Hear In the Cans’ to ‘Oh!’. ‘You Came Out’ even manages to employ some whistling that makes you think ‘Young Folks’. The rotating singing duties between husband and wife Dede and Thomas WP along with percussionist Darren Bancroft certainly help. I sometimes find bands that have female lead singers to seem almost like they’re “token” additions — even when clearly very talented, like Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. We Have Band manage to avoid this issue, as Dede contributes effectively to songs with her vocals while seldom being the focal point.

Anyways, I’ve been listening to this album like crazy over the past few days and will be adding the below song to my PDP11 mix. If I had more time, I might have tried to put more effort into rearranging the playlist to make this track 8 — the track generally reserved on my mixes for my favourite individual track.

We Have Band – Divisive from We Have Band on Vimeo.

ps. WHB was released back in April but since I’m just listening to it now, it can be my Album of the Fall. If I was still doing Best of Year lists, I’m sure it would be on that as well.

I honestly can’t remember if I’d ever seen the Walkmen before — I think I saw them open or maybe in a festival but maybe I’m just remember wrong?! I’d have to go through my boxes of ticket stubs and various social media postings to confirm but regardless I was glad for a chance to see them (again?). 2004′s Bows + Arrows was one of my favourite albums from that year and I loved ‘The Rat’ and ‘Little House of Savages’, which made it on my PDP1 playlist for track 8 — generally the slot of my favourite track for a mix. I either missed those tracks (we were grabbing a quick pint Stanley’s Bar & Grill) or they were playing more of their later items. It was a fairly mellow playing but pretty strong for all of that.

Up next were The National, I band that I quite enjoy but don’t I’ve ever felt as visceral as about other loves. In fact, maybe I’m just a hanger on with them. I have their seminal Boxer but don’t have any other albums and don’t think I gave it a lot of plays until 3 people put them on their PDP9 mixes. While they did show up earlier in PDP6 and PDP7, for some reason it just didn’t click. The outdoor venue with the threat of rain (but never actually doing so) was a great stage for the band’s style, with more than a hint of melancholy and dollop of glum in their music. Matt Berninger had a pretty good stage presence and I always love when rock bands have live brass on stage, in this case a trombone and a trumpet. They finished the set with ‘Fake Empire’, as the Vancouver Sun notes, a clear crowd favourite — though the Canadian paper says, “favorite”.

I don’t have any other tickets to see anything coming up — haven’t even recently checked out Pollstar lately to see if there’s anything upcoming I want to see. With Admiral Radley back in July, it’s been a pretty lean year for live music. I really should make an effort to get out an see some more live shows.

Set in an always present post-apocalyptic event, humanity is scrambling to survive. Although the specifics of the disaster aren’t discussed, it’s appears that nuclear winter has covered the land. The film uses a monotone colour palette to lull your senses to sleep and ash seems to cover the land. The drabness serves as a great counterpoint to the burst of activity, usually a frightening encounter with less moral survivors than our protagonists.

Viggo Mortensen turns in a great performance as ‘Man’ (none of the characters have names) but I must admit that I want him to stretch a little more. A History of Violence, Eastern Promises and The Road all seem to have Mortensen playing a character that is solitary even when with surrounded by others — separate but with a quiet reservoir of strength. I have Appaloosa sitting on my DVD shelf that I still haven’t gotten around to watching and I’m assuming that it’ll be a similar role.

Complaints aside, Mortensen does an effective job of conveying the constant weariness, fear and hunger that a parent would struggle through in just such an environment. Leading his young son south to some hoped for refuge and land more hospitable then their former home, Mortensen struggles between trying to retain his humanity and teaching his son how to survive by constantly moving and being hyper-cautious of strangers. Memories of his wife, played by Charlize Theron, tear at Mortensen.

As Man and Boy travel the land attempting to avoid contact with those who have turned to cannibalism, Man replays the days before the disaster with Woman in his head. Slowly we are shown glimpses and pieces of their lives as Boy is born into a world falling apart and no good prospects or hope for the future. We learn of the arguments and desperate pleas when Woman decides to leave the family.

The movie attempts to document the hard choices that everyone must face in order to survive. There is no judgment offered or overtly moral tale, just an effort to frame the reality of these characters. It’s certainly not a light or easy viewing but well worth the toll.

It was a little strange that more than half our group didn’t know who Arrested Development were (you don’t want to know how they remembered the early 90s) and others only after a few bars of Tennessee. I can’t believe the group wasn’t/isn’t regulated to Pop Up Video — does that show even exist anymore? It feels like I haven’t watched Much Music since about the time Mr. Wendal was a hit. Arrested Development certainly weren’t ‘folk’ but their Afro-centric, socially conscious brand of hip hop fit well into the vibe and made for a good night of trying to see the International Space Station.

Sitting under the landing flight path didn’t make things any easier.

As a music festival, I’m not a big fan of VFF. Need to get my ass down to Sasquatch next year or, better yet, Austin for SXSW. I need to get out to more live shows.

As Carl Wilson notes,

But for all its internal conformism it’s still a mode of flamboyant aesthetic display and that still makes a lot of people uncomfortable and resentful in itself. At its best the hipster is the new Dandy, the semi-subversive who overloads the system by over-subscribing to it (conspicuously consuming) and yet undermines it by seeming as if the real source of their cooperation is that they can’t take the system seriously enough to bother to oppose it.

Is it this supposed apathy that is the reason hipsters are facing the backlash that Russell Smith talks about in this Globe & Mail article!? ‘Cause let’s face it, lambasting the “youth of today” for not being sufficiently engaged in mainstream culture and politics is not exactly revolutionary. Wilson in critiquing the argument — though he is unconcerned with defending “hipsters” — points to the blog Boredom is Always Counter-Revolutionary that highlights, “The revelation that young people dress similarly and seem apathetic and politically or morally vacuous is both outmoded and bogus.” According to Sam, the pushback against “hipsters” specifically can be seen to go back to at least 1957 but, c’mon, criticism of youth culture probably goes back as far as youth culture can be said to exist.

Further, as several critics of hipster-critics like to mention, a focus on the overtly hedonistic behaviours or the visual asthetic of the nebulous hipster subculture seems to miss many of the social realities. Sam notes, “despite the supposed political apathy of the hipster, neither article investigates American Apparel’s seemingly successful project of combining ethical manufacturing and mass production.” While Dov Charney’s company might not be in the strongest position currently, people are looking to make choices that better align with their beliefs. Corporate social responsibility cover or hyper-hypocrite company? Is there a difference? Does it even matter?

“The real novelty of the hipster identity is self-referentiality and irony.” Meh…