Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “But after a career in television news and sports and as a musician recording albums and performing concerts, Tesh is back on radio in earnest. He is host of a nationally syndicated show heard on more than 200 stations around the country.”

The way I believe it works is this: if you have a frightening Nordic forehead and your musical contributions involve banging primitive arrangements onto a keyboard (not unlike a passive-aggressive caveman), you will, indeed, find work.

[RELATED: Developmentally disabled people are very excited about Huey Lewis & The News. (this link via MeFi)]

While it is quite true that Continuum Books publishes an abnormally large collection of titles on Pope Benedict XVI (aka Joseph “Harry Potter is Satan’s Spawn But Adolf Was Okay When I Was a Kid” Ratzinger), I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention their 33 1/3 series. If you thought that Nick Hornby’s solipsistic (and, one might argue, somnabulistic) Songbook was the high watermark of literary musical musings, then you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The work here is as passionate as Hornby’s, but it cuts across a more nuanced latitude: something that goes beyond Pitchfork-style snark or a particularly plodding personal essay about how an individual song or album is meaningful to the writer.

Depending upon the writer and the level of scholarship (others might say obsession, but then music lovers are often as febrile as literature lovers), the contributors here go out of their way to put songs and albums into a larger context, with telling details of David Bowie’s coke-fueled paranoia during the Low sessions or framing Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea within the larger context of the highly influential Elephant 6 collective.

Continuum was kind enough to send me a sampler. And one has to marvel at how even within this modest collection (surely not intended for me to peruse like this), innocuous deconstruction turns into something a little more cheeky and meaningful in the process. Here’s Geoffrey Himes, for example, writing about Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”:

“Born in the USA”: the phrase was so pithy and evocative that all he had to do was repeat it four times and he had his chorus. In its ability to sound like both a sentence of doom and a hopeful declaration of optimism, it was infinitely better than “You died in Vietnam.” But the song’s music ws still wrong; the verses were still too wordy, and the story didn’t quite cohere.

And Himes is just getting started. Only a few pages later, he’s enunciated the song’s narrative and meaning, put it into the context of Springsteen’s career, and dwelled upon its almost serendipitious recording history. (Jon Landau dismissed the demo as one of Springsteen’s “lesser songs” and when the E Street Band got together, the song was more improvised than one would suspect.)

Other books in the series include Andy Miller riffing on the great underrated Kinks album, The Village Green Preservation Society, Allan Moore on Aqualung, John Cavanagh on Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Ben Sisario on the Pixies’ Doolittle and a book of interviews with DJ Shadow on Endtroducing.

And speaking of music, I should also note that I was recently sucked in by Michael Nesmith’s Elephant Parts, a 1981 direct-to-video compilation of Nesmith videos and comedy sketches — including a game-show spoof called “Name That Drug” and a foreign film scene performed in gibberish (with subtitles to boot). I’ve no idea how this endearing little film fell off the cultural radar. Elephant Parts, produced roughly around the same period that Nesmith was sowing the early seeds for MTV (for better or for worse), is one of those rare offerings that is simultaneously subversive and innocuous.

This is a public service announcement.

Avoid the Fiery Furnaces live.

In the studio, the Fiery Furnaces are perhaps one of the more interesting White Stripes-style experimenters working today. But as a live band, they are about as tedious as a snare-bass backbeat that goes on without variation for six hours. Their drummer is an imbecile who seems to be under the mistaken impression that his six crappy fills, repeated ad nauseum, and his relentless pounding make him today’s answer to Keith Moon. The man beat so hard on his setup that his drum stands were constantly shifted out of shape, leaving him to constantly readjust them between songs. I suspected that he was either a last-minute replacement or a friend of a friend who happened to like drumming.

Singer Eleanor Friedberger, whose spastic stage presence resembled a speed freak who needed to be told bluntly that music was not a solid career choice, seems to be under the false impression that belting out all of her lyrics in a rapid and indecipherable clip makes for innovation. And Matthew Friedberger believes that turning his keyboard up as loud as possible, where notes are strained beyond recognition through a muddled sound mix, is the stuff that concerts are made of. This band is not tight. They are tone deaf and not in a good and carefully honed way a la Sonic Youth. Ms. Friedberger continuously sang in different keys than the band was playing. It made me sad, and it made me embarassed for them.

These people are not fun at all, nor do they appear to be having fun. In which case, why even bother to tour?

What’s worse is that the Fiery Furnaces have adopted an odd strategy that involves playing every one of their songs, if you can call an excerpt ranging from thirty seconds to two minutes a song, in a continuous and uninterrupted flow. This renders “I Lost My Dog,” for example, as a two-minute segment cast within an interminable garage band groove or “Bird Brain” as something played in the same tempo: too fast, too abbreviated, and sadly devoid of its original character.

I’ve heard garage bands sound better than these folks. Years ago, I recall seeing some terrible stoner band in Sacramento (name deliberately withheld) who insisted on playing long nine-minute songs — all in the same tempo, all with a tedious and rudimentary cast. I never thought for a moment that the Fiery Furnaces would top them as one of the worst concertgoing experiences of all time. And the sad thing was that I was very familiar with the Fiery Furances’ music.

Other goofball studio-reliant bands I’ve seen live (say: Of Montreal) at least understand that reproducing or transposing production-heavy songs live involves ingenuity and careful rehearsal. It’s a pity that the Fiery Furnaces would rather throw away an opportunity to stumble upon unexpected moments of innovation. It’s truly a disappointment, given the wild ideas and influences they’re willing to throw into their albums.

Oh well. At least Dios Malos was good.

So the big question Nine Inch Nails acolytes might be asking themselves is whether a cleaned up, happier, and oddly meatier Trent Reznor still puts out a good live show after five years off the concert circuit. The answer is a bona-fide yes.

On Wednesday night, I caught Nine Inch Nails at the Warfield. While the familiar stage elements were there (every member of the band resembles Trent Reznor; the live band goes out of its way to “adapt” each computer-generated song into a live set piece using real instruments, unlike certain bald Vegan assclowns who think that running up and down like a hamster with a sequenced beat is a live performance) and despite my reservations about the mixed new album, With Teeth, Reznor not only seemed to be having fun, but he actually cracked several smiles and threw several bottles of water into the crowd — at one point confessing how much fun it was to “break shit.”

Yet despite this jollier presence, Reznor demonstrated yet again that he’s one of pop music’s first-class growlers. Reznor performed for nearly 100 minutes straight without interruption and with terse commentary to the crowd. If anything, the angst in “Terrible Lie,” “Starfuckers, Inc.” and “Hurt” felt more nuanced and pointed, the mark of a man channeling the remnants of his anger into a high-octane purge. I got the sense that live shows function for Reznor in much the same way that a daily five-mile jog does for others.

My view of Reznor was occluded by a 6’5″ thirtysomething guy continually shouting “Come on, Trent!” while failing to shake his body in time. But no matter. From what I saw, Reznor exuded raw physicality. He wrestled his mike stand as if it were a mad demon that he was determined to conquer. Midway through a song, he would head upstage to a black expanse, only to return with raw and redoubled ferality. It helped immensely that his bassist and guitarist flopped onto the dais like fish at a steady rate of one flop per 2.5 songs. That’s dedication.

Perhaps the strangest element of the show was the audience. Because Nine Inch Nail’s followers had aged with Reznor, there wasn’t really a mosh pit to speak of — just a handful of guys who tried to stir things up, only to feel the steady advance of creaking knees just before stopping and trying again. It was the kind of demographic that a money man would kill for. Nine Inch Nails attracted a steady mix of people, 18-40. Casual listeners and bodiced goths alike sung and jumped along. And Reznor, to his great credit, didn’t unload too many of the standards. At least not until the very end.

But the oddest element was the marijuana use. Wafts of blue smoke trickled through the crowd, and I’m pretty sure that the second-hand smoke was what caused me to daze into the lights and the DF50 diffusion midway through the show. At one point, I’m certain I saw God. More importantly, it was curious to me how anyone could find Reznor’s music mellow. I’d expect people to 420 at a Phish or Primus show. Or even a Korn show. But Nine Inch Nails? I suppose with enough familiarity with the music, anything’s fair game.

Graham has the Mike Oldfield review to end all Mike Oldfield reviews. (via Speedy Snail)