Living Velvet.

It’s Friday, you’re in love.  Good.  But have you heard the new Mars Volta album Octahedron? Well, it was streaming over at the band’s MySpace page but now all you get are tracks “Since We’ve Been Wrong” and “Cotopaxi.”  That’s too bad because listening to it I got the sense that Octahedron might be the most relaxed album the Mars Volta have ever recorded and that this isn’t really a bad thing at all.  Because if any band is in danger of becoming boring by actually doing too much it’s the Mars Volta.  At any rate, the album drops next Tuesday so we can all listen to it (again) then. Yep yep.

What else is going on this week?  Well, Rolling Stone has Fred Durst talking about the misunderstanding of Limp Bizkit and word that Courtney Love is making another Hole record.  And if that weren’t enough garbage for your DeLorean they’ve also got the scoop on the new record by none other than Living Colour.  I always thought Time’s Up was a pretty good album that seem to unfairly fade into oblivion because it didn’t have a “Cult of Personality” sized single.  Is that crazy?  Let’s ask Arsenio:

How much does that sound like a Jane’s Addiction tune??? I’ve never been crazy about that song, but take the vocals up an octave and wow – total Jane’s. But then would Little Richard come do Arsenio with Jane’s? Probably not.  So eat it, Navarro.

Moving on, I think the big news out of the indie world this week is this project this “Record Club” project that Beck has launched.  Pitchfork can tell you all about it or  you can hit up Beck’s site for the unfiltered details, but the long and short of it is that he’s enlisting friends to record a cover of an entire album just in one day and then release the results on a weekly basis.  The first album selected is the great The Velvet Underground & Nico and here’s how opener “Sunday Morning” turned out:

Not bad, right? And, yes, that is Giovanni Ribisi on xylophone or whatever.  But my initial excitement for this has now turned to guilt and minor disappointment.  Because when I stopped to think about I realized this: isn’t it sad that the most exciting music news of the week has nothing whatsoever to do with actual new music?  Isn’t this no different from those who get excited about seeing Phish cover Purple Rain or Dark Side of the Moon backwards or whatever it is they do instead of playing actual Phish music? (For the record, I’ve never seen or listened to Phish so I don’t really know what I’m talking about but what I always seem to hear from people who do go to Phish concerts is how awesome their cover of _______ was, so that’s where I’m coming from.)  I mean, I’m not immune from getting excited about hearing a good cover and I realize that at the end of the day it’s all extremely harmless.  It’s not like Beck is charging me to watch that video.  But still…it’s worth questioning right?  Somebody had to ask it.  I mean, wouldn’t it be great if instead of being excited about a cover of “Sunday Morning” we could get that excited about a new song that was every bit as good, simple, and lovely as the one from 1967? That’s forty-two years folks…

Food for thought.  Enjoy the weekend.  More next week…