Index Finger: Suck it.

I think this is going to have to be a short entry. You see, i'm typing with only 7 of the 8 fingers I usually type with (I'm not counting the thumbs here, people) because I have a piece of tissue paper taped to my left index finger. Let me explain. Last night, after deciding to put some of the aging vegetables in my crisper to work and make dinner, I made the fateful decision to use "the big and sharp knife" instead of the "smaller, safer, dull knife I always use". I almost immediately sliced into my left finger, bleeding everywhere. The knife sliced in under the skin deep enough that there isn't really any skin I can tear off; it's just kind of a gill on my finger. It just is a flap. And it bleeds easily when exposed, and as luck would have it, I have no bandaids. So I made a bandaid out of tissue and tape (don't ask why I didn't go buy bandaids; I'm cheap about weird things), which is good to stop the bleeding but bad for everything else. Like typing.

On Friday night, I went to Teruko's bar and got really drunk off of sake for free. Everyone kept refilling my glass and I kept emptying it. Really, for the amount I drank I wasn't that drunk. And on the way home, I kept falling. No, silly, not because I was drunk, but because the ground was a sheet of ice again and I had to walk up hill. Why didn't I take a cab? Because I had my bike and drunk me didn't want to leave it in the city and have to go back for it, so I walked it home. Bad idea. At one point, I couldn't make it up this little hill near my apartment because it was just frozen solid. My bike was sliding everywhere, my feet were sliding everywhere. I was literally lying on my side trying to keep my bike from sliding down into the street. It was a pathetic sight. But I did eventually make it home. And today, I went shopping downtown and got some stuff that I was very pleased I found.

A few of the things I bought this weekend were knew albums by Bright Eyes (his two new albums dropped simultaneously this week) and ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead. Both albums are part of a disturbing trend that has hit my music catalogue in the last year - the below-expectations follow up album. These albums are actually really good - they just can't hold a candle to the last album that was put out. In the last year, so many follow-up to amazing albums were released: Iron and Wine (Our Endless Numbered Days), Wilco (A Ghost Is Born), Interpol (Antics), Ted Leo + RX (Shake the Sheets), and now Bright Eyes (I'm Wide Awake It's Morning / Digital Ash in a Digital Urn) and Trail of Dead (Worlds Apart). And not one of them managed to best the album they followed, at least in my eyes. Okay, so granted, most of those previous albums were literally the best albums released in 2002 and 2003 (most unanimously of course being Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", Trail of Dead's "Source Tags & Codes", Interpol's "Turn on the Bright Lights", and Ted Leo's "Hearts of Oak", while Bright Eyes's "Lifted, Or The Story in in the Soil Keep Your Ear to The Ground" and Iron and Wine's "The Creek Drank the Cradle" are a couple of my personal favorites), but you'd think one of these new records would have been better. Again, they are all good albums - they have stand-out amazing songs, and some were even my favorite albums from last year. But I find myself increasingly going back to those older albums.

Take the new Bright Eyes albums - if he had written one album instead of two, it almost definitely would have been a much, much stronger effort, and as it is, the "country" and "digital" separation he decided to use is pretty tiresome. It undercuts and handicaps the strongest aspect of his last album - the variety of styles that popped up. This album does have one thing in common with his previous discs - he starts it with an annoyingly long and unnecessary intro of people talking. Oh, and Conor's whiny-but-sarcastic emoting is starting to be annoying to even me (whiny-but-sarcastic emoting is one of my many talents) and a lot of the times you get the impression he's saying things just because they sound like they would be excellent things to feel pitiful about. Like, there is one song where he sings about staying up all night at the typewriter staring at a white sheet - should someone who just released around 25 songs simultaneously be singing about writer's block? He also manages to use that most-commonly-used-worst-sample-in-music-history, the dreaded "baby-crying" sample, ruining an otherwise decent song. Seriously, why do people think a baby crying is a good sample to drop into a song? Maybe they believe one of the most obnoxious sounds in life is going to sound intellectual or cool just because it is in their song. You know what? They are wrong.

The Trail of Dead record is their first major label release and you can tell. Sure, the album cover and notes have the same souvenir-shop-of-The-Crusades kind of cornball mysticism to it, but the album inside feels different. There is more money in this sound - the production is much cleaner and deeper - which isn't always a good thing. Trail of Dead's strong point has always been their acid-spitting vocals, slightly fuzzy and dark production values, and the fact that they break all their shit everytime they perform live. Come to the think of it, the consistent breaking of shit is pretty much the best part. Aside from cleaner production, the entire thing just feels brighter and lighter than "Madonna" and "Source Tags", and I'm not sure how I feel about that, particularly coming from a band called "..And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead". Shouldn't they be making me beg for my life rather than making me feel sunshiny?

So I guess the question becomes - is music recently in a slump of crappiness (there weren't as many good albums released last year as in previous years in my opinion) or did my taste in music frighteningly stagnify in 2002-2003 mode? God, I can see myself at 45, calling out for "Lover I Don't Have to Love" at a Conor Oberst show at The House of Blues. Terrifying. I better finally go buy Blueberry Boat by the Fiery Furnaces and that new LCD Soundsystem record and fast ...

Done typing. Damn this finger.