Yearly Archives: 2004

Okay, we mentioned Greg Kott’s Wilco book coming out soon, but check this shit out:

This October Wilco will release a picture book made
in collaboration with the visual-culture studio,
PictureBox, Inc. Accompanied by a 40-minute CD of
unreleased new music, The Wilco Book is a full color
160-page visual analog to the band?s music.

The book has a website up here. [credz chromewaves]

The Vines cancel their Incubus tour and Ted Leo announces a summer tour.

Whether or not you’re a fan of The Polyphonic Spree…follow this link.

Check out this Beatles video done in flash. The graphics look like a Beatles video game. Or a modern day version of a Peter Max cartoon.

Chip Midnight interviews Hayshaker Jones, straight outta Cleveland and into your hearts.

Tankboy reviews fellow Chicago pal Rachael Yamagata’s new album in his latest Lost in Guyville entry. A highlight:

People that can draw us together with collective emotions and feelings not mired in schmaltz while creating beautiful music deserve to be pop stars. If that is true then Rachael Yamagata is a pop star in the truest sense of the word already.(full review)

Here’s a a flash application that will keep you busy for at least five minutes.

Pick a beat and then sample your favorite Chappelle show character. Rick James, Prince, they’re alllll in there.

Greg Kot, Chicago music critic and author of the forthcoming Wilco biography has written two articles in this Sunday?s Chicago Tribune all about Rob Duffy?s fave band of not-so-merry men. The longer piece deals with the new disc in general but this shorter article deals primarily with Jeff Tweedy?s recent battles with migraines, anxiety and an addiction to painkillers.

Tweedy on the subject of his entering rehab a few months ago:

“I really didn’t think I would ever be normal again when I went in,” he says of that gray weekend in March. “I was begging them to institutionalize me. I didn’t want to kill myself, but I wanted to die.”

For the record, after my personally cool response to A Ghost Is Born I?ve given the album quite a few spins and realized that it is definitely an album to file in the ?growing on me? category.

Quine is chiefly remembered as a member of Richard Hell’s Voidoids, later working with Matthew Sweet, Lloyd Cole, Lou Reed and others, as well as the man behind bootleg Velvet Underground recordings later released as The Quine Tapes. At the time of this post, details surrounding his death are few. Earliest reports claimed it was suicide, as it appears he’d slipped into a depression over the abrupt loss of his wife last August.

Quine’s official site confirmed the rumor this morning (which had been floating around Sunday evening), and will be forwarding sympathy emails to the surviving family.

Billboard’s official report.

Considering there’s about five albums I want to buy this week, this comes as good news:

The average retail price of full-length CDs fell to $13.29 in the first quarter of 2004–a decline of 4 percent from the same period a year ago, according to a new study. The top 50 CD sellers nationwide sold discs for an average price of $13.36, a drop of 3.1 percent versus a year ago, said a survey released Thursday by the NPD Group. Meanwhile, catalog CDs–comprised of titles that are 18-months-old or more–dropped below the $13 threshold to $12.99. (full story)

[credz blogcritics]