It’s a couple months late for any "Best of Last Year" type stuff, I know.  But anyway, my favorite album of 2005 was Lions Write History by In Pieces.  I posted about their first album, Learning to Accept Silence, three years ago; as you can tell from my post, I really loved that album too.

The band had kind of fallen off the map for a year or two after that first album, which made me really sad because they were so good.  I didn’t hear about the new album until a few weeks after it came out, which was also the first time I heard that the band even still existed, so I was psyched.  But I also learned that they had gotten a new vocalist, and since the vocals were one of the best parts of the old album/band, this had me worried.

But my fears were laid to rest as soon as I heard the new album.  The vocalist was different, yes, but somehow similar to the old one, and at the same time he was much better.  The entire album is like that, in fact.  And to use a cliche, Lions Write History is obviously more mature than the first album -- but in a good way.  It’s like how Brand New’s first album Your Favorite Weapon was really good, but then their second album Deja Entendu was so much different, so much more mature, and just so good, even though you still loved the first album.

One of the things I really like about Lions Write History is that most of the songs have little to no formal structure.  They sometimes have a repeating part that’s sort of a chorus, but the music and/or tempo on the "verses" is often totally different for each verse.  And the songs are really long, so in these various non-standard song sections they do a lot of neat exploratory musical stuff.

Of course you can read a thousand words about a song and have no idea what it sounds like, so here are a couple songs you can listen to.  One more thing before we get to that, though: the lyrics on Lions Write History are really good and deep but also mostly very abstract, so I emailed the vocalist Dan Barrett to ask if he’d be willing to explain them to me.  He wrote me a long response and I don’t want to just publicly post all his comments here, but I’ll include the gist of his responses for these two songs.

In Pieces

Genre: rock, modern rock, indie rock, progressive rock

Juarez, Mexico: This song is about the out-of-control crime situation (specifically murder and rape in this case) in Mexico.

Lyrics: One of the warmest countries, and the coldest spot on this cold, gray earth that you call a planet.  And suddenly all of this makes sense.  Way too much sense.  And your American money didn’t buy me a sense of safety.  We watched the ground crack open, and you’re seeing all of their bodies.  We see it every day.  They’re open to the air.  But all we want now is to be happy.  Black cross.  Oh, we know it.  So take this desert sky, and ask me if I’ve ever had sex.  Put your hands around my neck and twist.  Was that good for you?  But all we want now is to be happy.  March 14th, two days before my birthday.  Oh, we don’t expect her back anytime soon.  There’s no such thing as justice in Juarez, Mexico.

Completely Inevitable: This song is about being in love with someone who is long gone, someone who doesn’t care whether you love them or not; it’s arguing against their apathy, trying to make that person feel something beneath their oh-so-cool exterior.

Lyrics: I hate this, this is all I can be.  I hate this, this is all I am.  And I saw you on the battlefield, and I saw you.  Too many second chances, we both know that.  So go ahead, smoke your cigarettes, and I don’t care, and I dare you.  From the way that you walked in the room, yeah we knew, an angel of death.  Oh, so don’t scream like that.  This is impassable terrain.  Shrug it off, and move on.  Because if you’re not dead now, you will be soon, like childhood friends and memories.  Everything is forgotten, nothing is redressed.  You have more to do with all my insecurities than I want to admit.  I can’t, it’s too much, make it stop now.  I don’t usually do this kind of thing.  That’s why I hate myself.  I’m dead.

You can listen to a few more In Pieces songs on their MySpace page, albeit in typical sucky MySpace quality.

Coheed & Cambria

Genre: rock, modern rock, indie rock, progressive rock, sci-fi rock

Each of Coheed & Cambria’s three albums to date is pretty much a masterpiece I’d say.  The music is amazing and the lyrics are very interesting.  The albums are all telling a single story, the details of which are not entirely clear, but the short form of what is known is that Coheed & Cambria are the parents of Claudio (the vocalist), and they have had their memories erased and have been tricked into believing that they must kill their children to save humanity.  Claudio is the only one of his siblings to escape this fate, and he is now trying to defeat the forces that did this to his family, and save the world in the process.

Because of the nature of the story, the albums/lyrics are somewhat violent and there’s lots of talk of death.  There are also parallels to Christianity and (real) humanity, as the wikipedia page shows.  It’s a complex story but I don’t think you necessarily need to know or care about the story to enjoy the music.

And of course, Coheed & Cambria are not a new-for-2005 band, but the tracks here are from their 2005 album Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through The Eyes of Madness.

Ten Speed (Of God’s Blood & Burial): I’m not entirely sure what this song is about, though the wikipedia page gives some details.  The title seems to be an allusion to Christ since I don’t know any other religion whose God was bloodied and buried; but the lyrics don’t really seem related to the title.

Wake Up: this one is a love song, and it’s uncharacteristically slow and pretty for a Coheed song.  There’s only one reference to death in the whole track!

Copeland

Genre: rock, modern rock, indie rock

Copeland makes catchy rock music.  Their album In Motion is pretty much great end-to-end, and the two tracks below are from it.  You can hear a few more of their songs on their Purevolume page.

No One Really Wins Love Is A Fast Song

I Can Make A Mess Like Nobody’s Business

Genre: rock, modern rock, indie rock, semi/mostly-acoustic

I Can Make A Mess Like Nobody’s Business is a mostly-acoustic side-project of the vocalist from The Early November.  They have released just one album, a self-titled one; it’s actually from 2004, but I didn’t get it until 2005.  Whatever, but it’s really good.  This is one of those albums where every song is a gem and it’s really hard to pick just 2.  You can hear a few more of their songs on their Purevolume page.

Timshel: starts out slow, but listen to the whole thing.

The Best Happiness Money Can Buy: catchy like gangbusters and way too short.

June

Genre: rock, modern rock, indie rock

June is an incredibly catchy band.  Their album If You Speak Any Faster is awesome.  You can hear a few more of their songs on their Purevolume page.

OK Corral Elevators Are Matchmakers

ST

Genre: techno (not really), IDM (not really), electronic (sorta)

ST (Stefan Ternemar) makes sweet electronic music.  Note that it’s NOT dance music: dance music sucks, ST rocks.  You can download both of his EPs for free: Emotions In A Box and I’ll Meet You There.  Here are the 2 title tracks.  I’m pretty sure these are not from 2005 but that’s when I first heard them.

Emotions In A Box: this song sorta sounds like a Nintendo game.  Actually it could be straight out of Mega Man.  It’s awesome.

I’ll Meet You There: the vocals on this track are great.

The New Amsterdams

Genre: rock, modern rock, indie rock, mostly-acoustic rock

The New Amsterdams are of course a Get Up Kids side-project, just like Reggie and the Full Effect.  And also like RATFE, they are amazing.  You can download the whole album Killed Or Cured from their website, and you should.  Here are a couple tracks from it.  (The New Ams have also released an even newer album called Story Like A Scar that’s available to buy, as opposed to being downloadable from their site.  I don’t have this album yet but it’s sure to be great.)

Heaven Sent Strangled By The Thought

Until Next Time...

There are a few more new bands / bands with new albums from 2005 that I want to post about, but that’ll have to wait for another day.

If you live in or around a big city, then Google Maps provides you with high-resolution satellite imagery of your area.  But in more rural areas, the available satellite imagery is much lower resolution.

Terraserver on the other hand has always seemed to have high-res photos of nearly everywhere in the US.  They may be a little older and in black & white, but it’s better than having no high-res imagery at all.  But the problem is that after being introduced to the joy of the Google Maps interface, Terraserver’s boring old interface is such a pain to use.

Enter mapper.acme.com.  This site combines Google Maps with the imagery database from Terraserver.  Just use the "DOQ" link in the upper right-hand corner.

Check out this German Coast Guard Video.  Fantastic.

(Note: you might have to right-click the link and choose Save As or Save Target.)

If a website (like let’s say "nodivisions.com") looks totally messed up in your browser, it may be because the developer did some updates, but your browser is still using old versions of the updated files.

A simple fix that you can always try (it never hurts anything) is to do a control+refresh.  That is, hold the Ctrl key on your keyboard, then click the Refresh/Reload button in your browser’s toolbar.

I’ve just posted my first photo set in quite a while: Windmills from back in September of last year.  I’ve been meaning to post these for a few months now.

I’ve also just updated my photo section to include a photo-selling feature.  This feature was primarily created for Caleb Foster, though it’s something I’ve been meaning to add for some time.

Caleb is selling both prints and the original full-resolution image files for some of his select shots; I’m selling just the image files, and for now I’ve done a blanket-enable of the sale feature for all of my photos, rather than picking certain ones.  I’ll probably go through and select some of them to not sell, or I may just do like Caleb and only pick certain ones for sale.  For now it’s all of them though.

The other day, Kim bought these felt pads for some of our furniture:

But apparently they slipped a little something extra into the package:

(show full-size image viewer)

As usual, I’m late with the news but wanted to give everyone a heads-up on a lesser repeat next year in May.  Reading yesterdays newspaper today I saw the report on the sequence of numbers that occurred yesterday in the a.m. and again in the afternoon.  I missed both :(

01:02:03 04/05/06

I love these things.

Is is just me or does Jack look like a turtle? I mean, if the camera shows just his face, his serious face, he kinda looks like a mud-slider( my teacher has one, and they look alike).