I’m an old Black Sabbath fan. War Pigs is one my favorite Sabbath tunes, and here’s a great cover by another awesome band, Cake with some appropriate film footage to boot. No Tony Iommi solo, but still worth a watch, IMHO.

Update March 6: Had another great time up at the Checkmate this month! Updated image.

I play Irish and Celtic music for fun. For about a year now I’ve been getting together pretty regularly with a friend to practice at least once a week. Occasionally we’ll cruise out to another friends’ place for a session (Seisiún) with some more folks, and once in a while we’ll take a field trip to see a band play. It’s always a learning experience - as a teacher once told me when I was taking my education classes, “after this class, you’ll never take a boring class again. Even if you’re not interested in the subject matter, you’ll be analyzing the teacher’s technique.” For almost a year I’ve been making half-hearted plans to run up to see…

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I heard a great interview this morning on WUSB (90.1 Stony Brook, NY - wusb.fm) on the Cheap Thrills show with Timothy Sellers of Artichoke, The Band. It was a great interview and Timothy is a really interesting (or perhaps a more apt description might be ‘interested’) guy, but the really cool part is that his latest album is a reinterpretation of the classic 1977 Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bullocks. What’s great about it is that the ‘wretched sentiment’ (as Rosanne described it) of most of that album is presented in a totally un-offensive way, a purposeful contrast according to Tim. Investigating Artichoke a bit more you’ll find Tim’s previous album, “26 Scientists, Volume One Anning-Malthus” which seems equally interesting because each song is about a different famous scientist!

If you listen to a lot of music on the computer, listen up. I’ve tried a ton of music player apps over the years, and while my most recent favorite to date is Amarok, I can’t run it (without a lot of work in fink) on the Mac yet. I’ve been using iTunes long enough to understand it’s strange non-intuitive idiosyncrasies to the point that I actually enjoy using it. But whenever a comparable open source project comes along (especially if it uses Mozilla code) I have to check it out asap. Songbird is a ‘mash-up‘ of a browser and a music player. Whether it will get popular or not remains to be seen, but it does change the way you experience new music.

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For those of you who already dig They Might Be Giants in all their irrepressible, industrious, and insanely prolific glory, this may not be news to you - but TMbG has been running a podcast since last year sometime and it’s awesome. The podcast is not just a rehash of old TMbG classics, it’s an entire (mp3)radio-like program with strange versions of favorites, new wierd loops, and bits of their latest ideas. The podcast (also linked from their domain dialasong.com is the logical successor to the actual ‘dial-a-song’ they ran off their answering machine in the early 90s except that in this format there’s enough time (and tape?) to really explore ideas.

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I heard over at the Fossil Apostle that Dio will be teaming up with Sabbath again for a tour in 2007 titled after their 1979 album Heaven and Hell! For fans of Dio (also of Rainbow fame), and Black Sabbath (with or without Ozzy) this should be fun. Imagine - Sabbath with a singer you can understand again! and Iommi always seemed to be allowed to jam out more with Dio to me. I always dug Dio lyrics too - they were about medieval or supernatural stuff which basically, always seemed cooler to me than singing about drugs.
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This is a modified version of a post I just made to the TdB message board: The family was bummed that it wasn’t really feasible to truck down to PA to see Ned’s band, the Trespassengers play at the 2nd annual NewBerry bash, but we had a great time at the Slainte Irish festival for the short time we were there (about 5 hours).

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