The greatest blog that ever lived (variations on a shaker hymn).

Anyone who knows me knows my favorite album of all time is this:



Out of the thousands of albums I've owned (and the thousands more I've had the chance to listen to via my career path), not a single record comes close to creating the intense feelings of love, loss, loneliness, depression, desire and confusion that Pinkerton does. It's the only album I own on CD, cassette and vinyl. I have the entire disc memorized, and used to play it out in my head during the last 36 minutes of any given college class to pass the time (I always felt especially accomplished when I'd sing the final "I'm sorry" from "Butterfly" right when the teacher would let the class out).

One of the benefits of being at my parents' house for the holidays (besides my mom's laptop and wireless internet) is their ridiculous digital cable package. Working in the field of rock writing, while full of fringe benefits, has yet to reveal a way to score free cable, and as such, I get about 12 channels on my TV in Cleveland. But here, I've been indulging in multi-hour marathons of Deadliest Catch and Project Runway, watching a rerun of the mtvU Woodie Awards and more, but what I stumbled upon takes the cake: It's an hour-long concert film called Across The Sea: Weezer Live In Japan.

Filmed in 2005 on the band's Make Believe tour, Across The Sea was originally supposd to get a DVD release but that's still not materialized. Only a clip of one song had leaked out on YouTube until recent months, when the full thing started airing on some channel called Palladia (which I'm tuned to right now). After about 10-15 minutes of uninteresting candid footage, the concert begins, and man, is it a fun one: "Don't Let Go" finds Rivers Cuomo sans guitar, running around the stage like a madman doing aerobics. Rivers uses "Surf Wax America" as a chance to try out his growing Japanese-language skills, before Brian Bell and Scott Shriner nail the "You take my car, I'll take my board" a capella in front of a few thousand adoring Japanese fans. Cuomo even lets Shriner sing lead on "Dope Nose" and Bell take the mic for "Why Bother," perhaps foreshadowing their most recent album's dalliances with lead vocal-swapping. But the true gem of the special is the song it took its name from, "Across The Sea."

I would be very, very hard-pressed to find a Weezer song more honest, personal and raw than "Across The Sea." The centerpiece of Pinkerton, the song tells the story of Cuomo falling in love with a Japanese girl who sent him fanmail. What starts off as innocent appreciation mutates into Cuomo blindly falling in love with the girl before digging deep into his psyche and wrestling with his own feelings of inadequacy and desolation. It is, in a word, incredible. There's a reason the band very rarely play it live, even though many other Pinkerton songs continually make appearances in concert. What's super-fascinating about Rivers' performance on this song is, unlike the rest of the concert, where he's running all over the stage, clowning around with bandmates and cracking jokes with the fans, for "Across The Sea," he is stock-still, obviously focused on both his guitar part and his vocal delivery, both of which are (in typical Rivers fashion) virtually note-for-note perfect. It's obvious that (at the time of recording) nine years later, after everything the band have been through and everything Rivers has gone through personally, "Across The Sea" still means something special to him.

I feel like I'm rambling, so I'll just shut up now and let you watch the clip of the song (big ups to Weezed for getting the whole special on YouTube):



Happy new year, everyone. I hope you are each able to find a song in this coming year that will move you for the rest of your life just like how I found this song so many years ago.

Do you still blog me?

My girlfriend and I are about to whip up a mean pair of stuffed pork chops, so I have to make this quick:

1. As some of you may know, I used to be an editor for Punknews.org before AP was so nice as to actually offer me money in exchange for skilled labor. The kind folks over at the 'Org asked me to write up a list of my personal best albums and songs of 2008, and I was more than happy to oblige. You can read it here, if you're interested in seeing what dominated my stereo this year.

2. The lady and I just got back from seeing Seven Pounds. I can't really talk about the movie without giving too much away, but I will say that it's most definitely worth seeing (even when tickets are $10.75 a person -- Chicago's movie theater prices are OUT OF CONTROL), and very sad and touching. Go see Milk first, because that film was brilliant, but after that, see this (and after that, see Slumdog Millionaire, which I saw the other day with my folks -- it's one of the strangest yet most honest love stories I've seen in a very long time).

3. Remember my blog the other week about Head Automatica on The Tonight Show? Of course you do. Well, thanks to loyal blog reader Toya, I've been alerted to the clip's presence on the ol' interweb. The video is below; skip to roughly the five-minute mark to watch Daryl Palumbo's eyes bug out of his head. Hilarious stuff:



Hope all your holidays are going well. I stepped in a foot-deep puddle last night and now my only pair of shoes smell kind of like sewage. Anyone got a pair size 14 wides lying around their house? Lemme know!

(Coffee's for bloggers.)

All right, the results are in: It was close, but Fall Out Boy won our clash of the titans with Folie A Deux debuting at No. 8 with 150,000 sold. The All-American Rejects' When The World Comes Down came in seven spots back at No. 15, with 112,000 units shifted. That means the winner of my "guess the winner" contest is...

beener48, who guessed FOB would debut at No. 1 (whoops!) with total sales of 148,000. His guess was the closest to 150k I received (the position number would've only been used for a tie breaker). beener48, send an email to editorial@altpress.com with the subject line "CONTEST WINNER" and include your full name, address and T-shirt size (also, tell me which shirt you want out of our store).

As for the rest of you, thanks for participating -- and I'm still shocked that no one picked AAR. This was actually a lot closer of a race than you think, especially when you figure that FOB's Infinity On High sold 260,000 copies its first week and AAR's Move Along did only 90,000 its first week. Looks like one band is on the rise and one's on the decline...

In other news, I called 911 for the first time last night -- I was driving from Cleveland to Chicago through an absolutely awful storm, and in my rear view mirror, I saw a semi truck jackknife into the grassy median, then flip over. It was super intense. I hope the driver is okay, and that his or her holiday season only improves from here.

If I could make you blog things.

So I've been playing the Two Tongues record nonstop this past weekend, as I'm writing the review for an upcoming issue. The short version? This shit is totally, utterly awesome. If you don't know, Two Tongues are Chris Conley (vocals/guitar) and David Soloway (bass) from Saves The Day and Max Bemis (vocals/guitar) and Coby Linder (drums) from Say Anything, and their self-titled debut comes out Feb. 3, 2009, on Vagrant. It is a beast, let me just say that. Here's "Crawl," the first track off the disc:

Crawl - Two Tongues

There's another song off the record, "Wowee Zowee" (what's up, Pavement reference) on the band's MySpace page that I highly recommend, as well.

I really, really wish more bands would intermingle like this more frequently. Sure, it's cool to see the singer of one band walk onstage during another band's set to throw in some guest vocals here and there, but I'm talking about taking two songwriters from different bands, throwing them into a room and having them write brand new music together. Too many bands are content to write and record in their own little bubble (no offense to Cartel); I just wish they would venture out and explore the notion of songwriting with someone else. Who knows what kind of gold you could strike?

With as much as Kevin Devine tours with Brand New, why hasn't he written a collaborative record with Jesse Lacey yet? Or considering how many side bands Craig Owens has, would it be that much more of a stretch for him to sit down with Anthony Green and create something completely new? (The Sound Of Animals Fighting doesn't count.) I think I personally would love to see Ted Leo and Against Me!'s Tom Gabel sit down and write an album's worth of songs together (and maybe throw the Weakerthans' John K. Samson in there for good measure). Now it's your turn: What two contemporary songwriters would you love to see hook up and make a new band?

Beating blog baby.

Holy shit, did anyone just see Head Automatica randomly pop up on The Tonight Show tonight? I'm currently at my parents' house in Illinois and they had the show on, and Jay Leno was doing a "Jaywalking" bit going door-to-door doing Christmas-style gags. Who was behind one of the random apartment doors he knocked on? Daryl Palumbo! The next thing I know, the whole band are on camera, goofing around with Leno in a Santa suit, passing out Clay Aiken CDs and hanging out with midgets dressed up as elves.

Totally surreal.

I'm sure video of this will surface on the ol' internets in the near future, and when it does, I'll post it here. But in the meantime, this incident reminded me of another classic "WTF?" moment on The Tonight Show from many years ago. In a similarly styled bit, Leno went door-to-door asking about Elvis Presley and lo and behold, he ended up at Weezer drummer Pat Wilson's apartment. (At the time, Weezer were still "off the grid" -- this was pre-Green Album.) Check it out:

Blogger, we're goin' down.

This is it: The clash of the titans is official underway.

What am I talking about, you ask? Well, if you've been living under a rock, surprise! Today, Dec. 16, is the day that the following hotly anticipated albums hit stores:





Obviously, this is a pretty big head-to-head for the pop/rock scene; it's basically our version of the Kanye/50 Cent battle from last year. So who do you think will come out on top in next week's Billboard charts? Let's look at the stats.

THE TALE OF THE TAPE

PREVIOUS ALBUM
-Fall Out Boy's 2007 release, Infinity On High, debuted at No. 1 with 260,000 copies sold, and has since gone on to sell over 1.5 million copies in the U.S. alone in nearly two years.
-The Rejects' previous album, 2005's Move Along, debuted at No. 6 with 90,000 copies sold, and was certified double platinum six months ago (I definitely know this because conveniently, an RIAA-certified double platinum plaque for the record showed up at the AP offices today).
ADVANTAGE: This one is close, but I gotta give it to FOB for selling that many records in a culture completely engrossed with stealing music digitally (when Move Along came out, digital piracy was nowhere near as huge).

LONGEVITY
-FOB are now five albums deep (though I think we can all agree that Evening Out With Your Girlfriend is pretty terrible) but their biggest album to date is 2005's From Under The Cork Tree, which has sold nearly 3 million copies. Infinity has only moved half that.
-AAR are as methodical as they come with their albums. Their first, 2003's self-titled effort, sold 40,000 its first week and went onto sell over a million copies. Move Along, as mentioned before, sold 90,000 its first week and went onto sell over two million copies. See a trend developing?
ADVANTAGE: I'm going with the Rejects on this one. FOB's career is starting to look like a bell curve: It starts out small, peaks in the middle and then slowly declines at the same rate it grew.

STAR POWER
-Pete Wentz is as ubiquitous as it gets in terms of celebrity -- dude's even been on the cover of People magazine. Your parents might still not know a Fall Out Boy song by heart, but I'm willing to bet they'd recognize Wentz's grinning mug if it were put in front of them. (Of course, they might want to slap it out of instinct.)
-Tyson Ritter is definitely the face of AAR, and has done everything from modeling to TV acting (anyone see him on House last season) to starting his own clothing line -- all things Wentz has done, too. But strangely, the "sellout" backlash never really hit him as much as it has Wentz. Maybe it's the lack of girl jeans.
ADVANTAGE: A very tough call. Will Pete's celebrity status help record sales? His face isn't on the cover of Folie A Deux, so that won't help. And even though Tyson's very well known and easily recognizable, is his lack of media saturation going to have an Axl Rose effect (see that thing at the bottom of the charts? That's Chinese Democracy). I'm gonna give this one a tie.

NAME RECOGNITION
-A quick Google search for "fall out boy" turns up 17.2 million results. The phrase "fall out boy sucks" turns up 12,500.
-As for the Rejects, searching for their band name will get you 7.72 million hits. As for "all american rejects suck"? A mere 192.
ADVANTAGE: Bigger isn't always better. I'm going with AAR on this one.

Now that you've read my analysis, it's your time to pick a winner, and the best part is, there's a prize involved! Here's how you enter: Leave a comment below with your pick of what you think will end up higher on the Billboard Top 200 next week, either Fall Out Boy's Folie A Deux or the All-American Rejects' When The World Comes Down. You have until next Tuesday to guess, as Billboard will post their chart on next Wednesday. With your guess, you need to also put what chart position you think the record you're picking will achieve, as well as how many copies you think it will sell, rounded to the nearest thousand. So, for example, this what your comment should look like:

I Think Folie A Deux will debut at No. 4 with 137,000 copies sold.

It's that simple! Submit your guess below (obviously, only one entry per person), and the person who is closest without going over on the copies sold will win a box full of swag from my office, including CDs, T-shirts, stickers and a whole bunch more stuff. The position number will be used as a tiebreaker in case two people guess the same sales total for the same band.

Got it? Good! Submit your guess now.

PS - If you want to rig the vote ever so slightly, you can always go out and buy either album. Amazon MP3 has both albums on sale incredibly cheap - $3.99 for Folie and $2.99 for World.

At home he's a blogger.

I always look forward to the last few weeks of December, as it's when a whole slew of spring tours start to get announced and my MySpace calendar starts to fill up. Here's my picks for what you need to spend your hard-earned ducats on (and what you should avoid like the plague).

THE BIG WINNER: Taste Of Chaos
LINEUP: Thursday/Bring Me The Horizon/Four Year Strong/Pierce The Veil/Cancer Bats
FROM: 2/14-4/9 (dates)
Finally, Taste Of Chaos gets it right -- make the venues smaller, lower the ticket prices slightly and get one hell of a solid lineup to ensure the absolute minimum in audience smoke breaks. I've seen all of these bands live before with the exception of BMTH (but I've heard great things about their live show), and I can tell you that they each totally bring it every single night. Also, as one of the lucky few who have gotten to hear the new Thursday record already (hey, membership has its perks, what can I say?), I am already sufficiently stoked to hear some new jams in a live setting.

RUNNERS-UP

Murder By Death/Fake Problems (dates) -- MBD's spring tour features the band playing both Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them? and Red Of Tooth & Claw back-to-back, plus original keyboardist Vincent is returning for this tour. (Of course, there's no Cleveland show. Goddamnit.)

Where's The Band? Tour (dates) -- The frontmen of the Get Up Kids, Thrice, Saves The Day and Bayside all doing solo acoustic sets together? This is like the Revival Tour for the emo set. Sign me the fuck up.

THE BIG LOSER: Saints & Sinners Tour
LINEUP: Senses Fail/Hollywood Undead/Haste The Day/Brokencyde
FROM: 2/27-4/2 (dates)
The mind boggles at how awful this lineup is. Senses Fail is tolerable-to-good on occasion, but wow, talk about a shit supporting lineup. I won't even harp on Haste The Day, because whatever, they're a by-the-books Christian metalcore band, no big whoop. But Brokencyde and Hollywood Undead? If you want to pinpoint exactly where the scene's ass started to bleed, check whenever those two bands made their MySpace pages. I wouldn't be caught dead at this show.

RUNNERS-UP

Avenged Sevenfold/Buckcherry/Papa Roach (dates) -- I truly hope we can stop writing about A7X in 2009. Consider it my New Years resoution.

Escape The Fate/William Control (dates) -- Hey, Escape The Fate: Do you plan on still keeping your second guitarist hidden behind a scrim onstage, or will you actually let the audience see him this tour? Whoops, I think I let the cat out of the bag...

Okay, your turn: What's the spring tour you're looking forward to the most? Outside of the AP Tour, of course...

I'da called you Woody, blog.

So I just finished watching the Gaslight Anthem play "The '59 Sound" on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, and I'm actually sort of beaming. I'm so proud of them for coming essentially out of nowhere last year to becoming this massive buzz band in punk rock, and the best part is, they totally deserve all the attention and then some.

Plus, I can safely say this is the first band to ever sleep at my house and play Conan O'Brien in the same year (or ever, really).

The '59 Sound is easily one of my top 10 albums of 2008, and the title track is without a doubt one of my favorite songs of the year, too -- I play a mean air guitar to it almost every morning when I get out of the shower. It's a sight to behold. Anyway, if you still have somehow avoided hearing this band, please check out the video for that song below, and if you like it, make sure to buy the record -- hell, it's only $3.99 on Amazon MP3 this week, and I strongly encourage you to take advantage of that sweet deal.

Become what you blog.

I was cleaning up the ol' hard drive this weekend and came across this picture from the Chicago stop of the 2000 Warped Tour:



Yup, that's a significantly younger (and facial hair-free) yours truly with a significantly younger (and neon-free) Gabe Saporta, who at the time was the frontman for a mid-level emo-punk band called Midtown. it's kind of crazy for me to look back at that picture and think about how much has happened in my life. In the past eight years, I not only became the reviews editor at Punknews.org but also was able to parlay the skills I learned from doing that into a real-life job with AP, which still blows my mind.

When that picture was taken, I was essentially a "nobody" -- just a kid who loved punk, ska, emo, indie rock, etc. (Yet somehow I was still able to finagle an all-access press pass which you can see stuck on my chest, thanks to my brother's old zine). About a month or so after that picture was taken, I started my freshman year of college, never actually thinking I could turn my love of underground music into anything more than a hobby to let me get away from whatever my real job would end up being. I actually entered college planning on majoring in music education, which I attempted for almost two years before, after having pulled enough hair out of my head to stuff a king-size comforter with, I gave up and made the completely arbitrary switch to Speech Communication, which was done for two reasons: 1)Because I like to talk and 2)It was the only major my college offered that I could feasibly complete in two years. It's kind of ironic that after all of that, I ended up actually being a music educator, just not in the conventional sense of the job.

I have no idea if Gabe Saporta thought he would still be playing music eight years after that picture was taken; at the time, Midtown's debut album, Save The World, Lose The Girl, had been out for a few months, but the band were still very much an opening act (unfortunately, something they never really grew out of over the next five years). It's pretty fair to say that at the time of the above picture, Gabe was pretty close to being a "nobody," as well -- just some kid from Jersey playing pop-punk.

So what's the lesson learned from all of this? Well, for starters, never assume what you're doing now is what will end up defining you as a person for the rest of your life, because odds are, it won't. But at the same time, don't be discouraged if you're in a place in your life right now that you're not stoked about, because in a few years' time, your life may have completely flipped for the better. (Or maybe you'll end up playing bongos in Cobra Starship, which is sort of splitting the difference.)

Bloggin' & stealin'.

Yesterday, we editors had a series of e-mails going back and forth regarding scheduling the meeting to decide our annual 100 Bands You Need To Know special. I wanted to share one of those e-mails with you in particular, from none other than Tim "I heard he bites the heads off cats" Karan:

Today's a lot hectic for me.
Like Harrison Ford I'm getting Frantic.

(Daily Beastie Boys reference: Check.)

If something doesn't quite seem right with you after reading that, it's okay, you're not alone. Tim actually didn't quote the Beastie Boys at all; instead, he quoted "One Week" by Canadian one-hit wonders Barenaked Ladies." Seriously.

What's that, need an audio/visual cue to be sure? Allow me:



Granted, this song is a decade old, so some of you may have only been in single digits when it first came out, but as someone who had to hear this thing virtually every day of my high school career, I can assure it was a massively huge song at the time. (To put it into perspective, Tim was approximately 37 when this song first came out, give or take a year.)

Let's be honest, people: Do you really want to wear a T-shirt from someone who not only can't properly reference the Beastie Boys but instead references a clumsy rap from this guy:



Oh, notice that plane he's posing next to? Dude crashed it into the Canadian wilderness a few months back! Tim admitted being a pretty bad road rager in his most recent blog; I think there's more in common between these two than I initially thought. Do you really want to wear a piece of clothing with the word "TIM" on it now?

This message paid for by The Committee To Re-Elect Scott Heisel As King Blogger

The separation of blog and skate.

You must watch this. Funny, sad and true, all at the same time:

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Jack Black cast as good ol' JC? If that were real, it would probably be enough to make me stop being politely agnostic and actually go to church again.