Midnight Cheese

This story starts with a terrible experience using Amazon.com, and ends with a wonderful outcome at the local record store.

I was making an Amazon purchase and decided to throw in the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album. Well, after everything was all said and done I was going to end up paying $10.50 in shipping for a $9.99 CD. This was after I had to call into customer service on the phone to have my password reset. (Another rant for another day.)

So I knew anyone local could beat $20.49 for a CD. I went down to Grimeys, paid $14 with tax and ended up with an EP that came with it.

This past week I officially cancelled XM in favor of using Pandora in my car through my iPhone.

I mentioned before my displeasure with with the XM/Sirius merger, mainly XM wiping out their music channels and replacing them with Sirius stations.

Pandora works exceptionally well in place of an XM radio as long as you’re only after music. (Which I am.) The Pandora pros include full color album art, complete artist and song titles, the ability to skip songs, and most importantly, the ability to customize your stations by voting songs up or down.

The signal reception is a non-issue. I can drive the 30 miles to work and back without ever encountering a break in the stream. This is true over 3G and Edge.

Cons are few. Sound quality is not as good as XM, although XM was pretty well compressed to begin with. Pandora really isn’t far off from FM quality and should only get better in the future as bandwidth increases.

Best of all, the money saved from XM can go to offset the monthly AT&T/Apple money pit.

Yesterday on the way to work I noticed XM had switched most of their music channels over to Sirius channels as a result of the Sirius-XM merger.

I’ve been an XM subscriber for several years now and have loved it. There’s nothing better than commercial-free radio. XM had a lot of fun with their station line-up as well. For example, most of their rock stations were named after characters from the old I Love Lucy TV show. 90s alt-rock was Lucy, 80s alt-rock was Fred, modern alt-rock was Ethel. Their promos and bumpers reflected this well.

Sirius channels are much more generic. Alt Nation, Classic Vinyl. So it sounds like no more witty promos and station IDs. One of my personal favorites from XM went along the lines of “Satellite Radio–Keeping listeners sterile…” and on the radio display it referenced the mass amount of power the satellites have to pump out to deliver the signal from space. Lucy mostly made fun of Art History majors and how much their life probably sucks now, post college. Good stuff.

Nothing like that coming from the Sirius folks. Reflects their name well, I suppose.

There’s just something sad about your favorite radio station going away. Reminds me of Thunder94 going out in the late 90s only to be replaced by KDF which soon switched over to country music. That left a nice void of alt-rock in the Nashville market for a good while.

Anyway, I may try streaming Pandora through my phone during my commute and see how that works out.

Today I discovered Muxtape which is a quick way to throw together a mix tape of sorts by uploading MP3s to their website. Anyone can then go to your Muxtape page and listen.

Not sure about the legality of this one since they’re storing unpaid for music on their server and letting others listen at no charge.

At the least, it’s a good way for the site owners to build a massive MP3 collection of their own.

I posted two songs today on my Muxtape.

This evening Merredith and I took a look at the posters on display at the Sound and Print show at MTSU. Every poster was just exceptional. We purchased a print from The Decoder Ring Design Concern as well as from Strawberryluna who just happens to be showing some of her work on Candor Gallery.

On the way out we cut through the University Center to get back to the car, and Forget Cassettes just happens to be playing with a couple other bands in what I assume is a lecture hall. So as we’re passing a side door to leave, FC is about 10 feet to our right just playing away.

All this at MTSU, even. Very surreal.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs played at War Memorial Auditorium last night and put on a very good show. Karen O can really scream. Collectively the entire band was very loud even to the point of drowning out any lyrics Karen might have been singing. Her screams were really the only thing to compete with the roaring guitar. The only real oddity of the set was the encore. At one point Karen went into the crowd to help her remember the lyrics, then they ended with Modern Romance, which was a little awkward finishing with such a slow song. But otherwise a good show all around.

Imaad Wasif opened and later assisted through the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ set. Deer Hunter played second. Unfortunately, this was very much like sitting through a high school talent show. They definitely begged the question of what is music and what is white noise, but in a very bad way. The lead singer looked like he could fall over and die from hunger at any point during the set. These guys were definitely the peas and carrots before the main course of the evening.

Bands whose names are in some way related to recording media.

• Tapes ‘n Tapes
• The Format
• VHS or Beta
• Editors
• Forget Cassettes

And probably many more.