Scripted Failures

Mood Mix

1. Mew, “Am I Wry? No”
2. Radiohead, “Lucky”
3. The Junior Varsity, “Get Comfortable”
4. The Cure, “Homesick”
5. Jeremy Enigk, “Been Here Before”
6. Circa Survive, “Act Appalled”
7. Foo Fighters, “Up in Arms”
8. Armor for Sleep, “Remember to Feel Real”

Friday Mixes is a weekly feature that showcases a mix of songs from various genres that usually share some common theme.  If you have an idea for a theme, email us at feedback@scriptedfailures.com and maybe we’ll use it.

So I’ve been listening to a lot of Cursive’s Domestica lately.  It’s one of those records that just seems to go through frequent cycles of high-rotation.  This time around, however, I paid attention more to the themes of the record and noticed more than a couple of parallels, so I decided to figure out once and for all what the common threads were in these songs and share them with you. The following table illustrates my findings:

As you can see “The Radiator Hums” exemplifies the most of all of these common threads.  I should do this for all of their albums (that is neither a threat, nor a promise).

EMI is still sore about In Rainbows, so they’re doing the only thing they can do: trying to milk as much money from the Radiohead properties they do control as they can.  They’ve already released all the old albums in a box set.  What else can they do?  Oh, yeah, a Greatest Hits album.

How can you blame them?  If I owned stock in a major record label, I think I’d be on the phone with my broker right now.  Granted, not everyone can afford to take the Screw You approach that Radiohead did, but it’s definitely becoming less and less important to have a deal with a major.  The music industry is in a tizzy over the fact that technology is just plain making them unnecessary.  It makes sense.  Home recording software has been lessening the cost of getting quality recordings, and the internet/digital media have made distribution methods cost nothing.  Scripted Failures has been recording pretty good DIY recordings for years, and we have practically no funds.  With just a little money spent on the right equipment, we could probably make a pretty good sounding album at home.

So this Greatest Hits thing.  It’ll sell.  It’ll sell well.  If you casually like Radiohead, you’ll probably pick it up.  If you’re a die-hard fan, and you own all the original albums, you might still pick it up, as Justin says, “just to have”.  Radiohead can’t do much about it, but drummer Phil Selway doesn’t seem to pleased about the prospect: “It’s well within their rights to do it. *sigh* So we’ll have to see.
But as I say, for us the main thing is that we’re excited about the
process of releasing In Rainbows and what we’re doing, around the
touring, around the way we’re able to release it, and most importantly
around the music itself.”

(Read the full interview with Analogue here)

If you’ve been reading our blog you know two things: number one, we haven’t updated in a long while (sorry, things have been hectic in Scripted Failures land cause we’ve been writing new songs), and number two that we’re quite stoked on The Foxglove Hunt.  A quick recap: The Foxglove Hunt is Rob Withem of Fine China writing all the songs, playing guitar, and singing, and Ronnie Martin of Joy Electric doing all the programming and synth work.  We’ve known for awhile that the album would be out sometime this year, but now we finally have a month, an album title, an album cover (obviously since you can see it right here), and some other rad news.

The Foxglove Hunt’s debut album “Stop Heartbeat” will be out in March on Common Wall Media which released Fine China’s amazing last record ever, “The Jaws of Life”.  If you head over to the Hunt’s myspace, you can hear the finished versions of the two demos that have been up for awhile (”That’s Getting Personal” and “Business Casual”), as well as a new song called “The Life Highrise”.  If that wasn’t enough you can also buy an mp3 single of the, I assume, album track “Don’t I Know the Way” that comes to you on an old school 1.44 MB floppy disk.  How fucking cool and retro is that?  Hell, it’s so retro I’m going to have to use my older PC in the garage just to get the damn mp3, since my laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive.  And if I read the picture right it looks like they might be only making 300 of these, so you better jump on it.  I’ve already ordered mine.

As for the three songs up, I’ve only allowed myself to listen to about thirty seconds of each, which was enough time to find out that “That’s Getting Personal” and “Business Casual” were the finished album versions, and that “The Life Highrise” sounds good.  If you read Ronnie’s blog on the Joy Electric myspace, you know that he is incredibly stoked about the record.  He said that these were Rob’s best songs ever and that it was the best project he had ever produced and worked on.  If Ronnie’s that excited you know this record is going to kick ass.  Now all they need to do is post a tracklist and a link to preorder and we’ll be set!