J Ship’s A – Z (with Jonathan Shipley)

AHHH! Zzz…No, don’t fall asleep. This is a new semi-regular column where I talk about music and all its wondrousness from A to Z. Perhaps I’ll discuss Digable Planets, Duran Duran and Claude Debussy for the Ds, or Pete Zorn, U2’s Zooropa album, and ZZ Top’s beards for the Zs.  There’s a wonderful world of music out there. No better place to start than at the beginning…

 A

Ace of Base
In 2000 they released a greatest hits album. Huh?! How many “great” hits did they have? Honestly, I don’t want to hear “The Sign” thirteen different times on one album. Sorry Jenny, Linn, and Jonas Berggren.  Sorry Ulf Ekberg, Swede or no, you, Ace of Base collective, are not great. And, no, I’m not racist towards Swedes. I like many of them (Ingrid Bergman, Alfred Nobel, the one, the only Dag Hammarskjöld), and several pieces in my house are from IKEA. And meatballs. I like meatballs. And that Muppet who said, “Bork! Bork! Bork!” and threw kitchen implements around. The sound of that alone, the clatter of kitchen implements in a Swedish Muppet’s kitchen, I would rather hear than “The Sign.” Anything but “The Sign.”

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White Whale WWI [Merge]

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Similar to The Decemberists’ work on The Crane Wife, the Kansas quintet White Whale dives into the past for their debut album WWI. It is a world of navigators and admirals, lovers and cynics, and a hell of a lot of ocean. Although a commendable effort from a band that shows remarkable promise, WWI is on the whole a deflated bag of microwaved history and detached feeling under a pretty sky of musicianship. The band is capable enough, but White Whale trips into the whimsy pit of using concept art and fable as an avenue for forging a memorable sound. The result is a sweet outing of daring that doesn’t grip, but seldom fails to glow.

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Aqueduct mp3

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Aqueduct have a brand new song about dismemberment and/or the movie The Princess Bride called As You Wish.  (mp3 Courtesty of our friends at Barsuk Records) The full-length is called, Or Give Me Death and will hit the streets February 20, 2007.