The video of this man singing Kelly Clarkson’s I Do Not Hook Up is a million years old now in internet years, but this is worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet, But mainly for the last five seconds.
As for the song, which is supposed the be the second single off Clarkson’s album, it doesn’t reach the amazingly wonderful heights of My Life Would Suck Without You, but it’s not actually bad, either.
I’m so very bored right now. Apparently now that I have a computer and groceries and a working television and no work I’m just going to spend my entire days trying to look at every porny thing in my Google Reader until I explode.
This joblessness thing is really fucking annoying.
Anyway, after the jump a survey of all sorts of things I’m sure you didn’t want to know about me. (more…)
Socially, there were few highlights during my freshman year of college. I lunched weekly with the French professors and helped organize the film festival and that’s about it; I didn’t go to parties and didn’t really talk to anybody and lived in a very elaborately constructed closet where I made up a girlfriend just for something to do.
But at least I had a radio show, albeit one at a station run by indie fascists. DJs were continually reprimanted for playing too much Radiohead and not enough Pedro the Lion. When Low’s Things We Lost In The Fire was released they told us it was the second coming. Immediately I resented it, especially after it was the #1 album at the station for three months straight.
Then, of course, I actually heard it. There’s bleak music, and then there’s bleak music when you’re stuck on top of a snowy hill outside of Utica. It really was like the second coming! Low even played at our school, and Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker were cute and funny and charming. Sadly, though, almost nobody from my school actually went to that show; it was full of people I never saw before or since, cute boys with matted-down side parts and Rivers Cuomo glasses.
Low were less preachy than fellow Mormon Pedro the Lion, with whom they were touring. But they were no less dour. I often think it’s lame to talk about bands in the context of what city they’re from, but I have a feeling Things We Lost In The Fire really is the sound of Duluth.
Dinosaur Act is, I guess, the closest the album has to single material; it’s slow and plodding and kind of loud. But it’s god a hook, dreary though it may be, and it’s the standout track the first bunch of times you listen to it.
As much as I like Low, though, Things We Lost In The Fire; is their only album I can really get behind. Their earlier stuff sounds a little weaker to me, and I got really annoyed by the production on their later albums. (I highly recommend their b-sides box set, though. It’s totally worth whatever you have to pay for it.)
The ones I’ve spent any time in–at least four days, say–are in brown. Though that five days in Chicago did at least give me some grasp on the middle 80% of the country. More about that tomorrow.