But not like any acoustic music you probably listen to. Allow me to introduce Rodrigo y Gabriella.

I listened to their album a bit and I couldn’t really wrap my mind around how in the hell Gabriella was strumming so fast. Even after watching this video, I have no idea how she’s doing it.

Anyway, apparently, both of them met while playing in a speed metal band (think Slipknot) in Mexico City, and decided to do an acoustic version of that with some Spanish guitar influences, and this is what they wound up with. They actually do covers of Metallica songs and other metal songs in their shows. This is crazy awesome music, folks.

I just discovered The Swell Season. No, not the book—the band. Here’s one of their songs:

I’m really impressed with them so far. Apparently, they almost won a Grammy for the song “Falling Slowly,” which appeared on the Once soundtrack, but lost out to some song from the Dreamgirls soundtrack.

Also, I’ve recently discovered some of Regina Spektor’s other albums (most notably, Soviet Kitsch) and I’m really digging those. I’ve always admired her music, but I’d only heard one album (Begin to Hope), and I couldn’t get into it as much as some of her other stuff.

For those who don’t know, Janelle and I are big Over the Rhine fans. We actually met while attending an OtR show in Cincinnati back in December, 2004, along with other fans of the band from all over the country. Well, this past weekend, Janelle and I made the trek back to Cincinnati to attend the same show we met at, with a lot of the same people that were there the first time around. The weekend was amazing, to say the least.

For anyone who’s seen OtR in the past three years or anyone who’s heard Trumpet Child, you should also know that Mickey, their drummer, is officially retired now (from Over the Rhine, anyway). His last two shows with them were this past weekend.

Fans should know that Over the Rhine will be considering releasing an album of the covers they’ve done throughout the years. Some songs include “Fever,” “Hallelujah” (as made famous by Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright), “Moondance,” and “Orphan Girl” (Gillian Welch cover). There are tons more, but those are all I can think of off the top of my head.

Janelle took some pictures, so I’ll link to those when they go up.

(Links to music videos on YouTube.)

• Florence and the Machine
• Ra Ra Riot
• Ramona Falls

Leave it to the Decemberists to analogize the United Nations to high school:

Sure, they rip off Rushmore. But more things should rip off Rushmore.

Also of note, Mr. Deviant Monk showed me this video a few months ago. I think it’s worth a view as well. (Embedding was disabled, so you’ll have to click the link.)

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

This clip is from the session Notes and Neurons at the World Science Festival 2009, which asks the question whether responses to music are hard-wired into the human mind or culturally determined. I hope, for the sake of my ethnomusicologist friends, that there’s a good deal of the emotional response that’s culturally determined, but I wouldn’t be surprised if notes and intervals were hard-wired into us.

Without going too far into (or knowing too much of) the science behind it, groups of notes form harmonies because their wavelengths resonate together in a pleasing way. Other combinations don’t really work. Try walking up to a piano and hitting a C and an F# right in the middle of the piano (not near the top, where the wavelengths mesh more easily). You’ll see what I mean.

The pentatonic scale (used in the video above, although not explained to the audience until after the fact) contains only five notes (root, third, fourth, fifth, seventh, in Western terms), so those intervals are likely to fall on any scale worldwide. For example, in Western music, we (mostly) use an eight-note scale—but in traditional Asian music, for example, they use a thirteen-note scale. The pentatonic is the lowest common denominator of both.

If you’re wondering what this pentatonic scale is, you’ll here it in most funk bass lines and most rock guitar solos. It’s very popular in modern music.

Anyway, that’s your music lesson for the day. Next time: the blue note!

So I was searching YouTube for some English major rap songs (don’t ask) and found, much to my chagrin, that not only have people made quite a few English major rap videos, but numerous people have already beaten me to my long-held dream of writing and recording a rap song about Geoffrey Chaucer (in Middle English).

One, though, really puts me in my place. His name is Baba Brinkman, and, although he raps in modern English, this is some of the most brilliant English major rapping I have ever seen. This was performed live at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005. (The second and third are the best, in my opinion.)

Amazing song and video by Sigur Rós. It’s for their song “Glósóli.” It’s a little long, clocking in at 6:14, but well worth the time.

These guys sing almost entirely in Icelandic, so it all sounded like gibberish to me. Well, I found out today that they’re actually singing gibberish—they made up a nonsensical language that they call Vonlenska (“Hopelandic”) that sounds like Icelandic, but doesn’t actually mean anything. They still sing a good bit of Icelandic, but they lapse into Vonlenska periodically, sometimes switching back and forth in the middle of songs. Interesting.

I also found out Sigur Rós wrote the entire soundtrack for a documentary about the misfits of Icelandic society. Like, the producer didn’t just use Sigur Rós songs—Sigur Rós wrote an all-original soundtrack for it, and a rather lengthy one at that.

Anyway, I know I just wrote about these guys a few posts back, but I’m still really enjoying them. Thanks to Nicole and Nick at work for sharing them with me. I hope Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky were a good trade, because these guys are amazing.

Note: I did not use this song in my wedding. But it would be really cool to have the bridal party walk down the aisle to this song:

(That’s not an “official” video—just a fan who wanted to make his own video. If this song sounds familiar, I know they’ve been using it on ESPN as background music for some football segments.)

There’s a big entrance at 3:18, although it dies down toward the end of the song and builds up right up to the end, which leads into the bride walking down the aisle.

I’m well on my way to planning weddings. Great. Now I have to do something to prove I’m not gay. At least I talked about football in this post.

I’ve been having some recent conversations at work about music, and out of one of them, Sigur Rós came up. I can’t believe I haven’t discovered these guys yet. They’re absolutely amazing. Their album Takk (they don’t exactly speak a lot of English) is amazing. Here’s a song off of that album.

Musically, they’re in the same vein as Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai, although they’re quite different. It’s like pure, unbridled emotion in the form of melodies and counterpoints. There is some singing, but it’s all in Icelandic.

I got turned off to them because the first album of theirs I heard was their rare EP with Mogwai, which is more like ambient noise than music. Not so with their other stuff. Their album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust is really good too. Not the most engaging stuff, but absolutely beautiful.

As an aside, the group of us from work are all going to see Watchmen next weekend, so we get to talk about music and good movies. (Well, hopefully it’s good.) We’re going opening night (Friday), so I’ll try to get a review up here the next day for all those wondering how it is.