Something in me needs metal. The seed was planted at 16 when my friend Aaron inexpertly rocked the Metallica "Four Horsemen" riff in his basement, forever melding my young energy to the driving force of its dorky power.

This is the kind of orchestral, explosive metal that makes me want to listen to it over and over and over.

Just take a deep breath and let it wash over you.  Who cares what it's about?  The album is a concept album about like, Rasputin and astral travel and gnarly stuff like that, like metal should be.   

But… wait.  There's more to it than that.  Is that some strange rockabilly lick?  Is he teasing us with some kind of LA hair metal shit?  Why does he sound so much like Ozzy?  Is it wrong to let Heavy Metal caress you?

If you don't find yourself saying "whoa" at sometime in this 13 minutes then pack it in.  You have no metal in you.

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How to Cook a Wolf is the trendy Upper Queen Anne restaurant I wanted to hate, but I have failed.  Turns out that not only does it have a sexy decor that packs the place until late, but they really know how to serve a good, human meal that leaves me feeling nourished and excited.

I went in once about a month ago for drinks (it's very close to my house).  Queen Anne is a kind of fancy neighborhood, but not the kind of place where a trendy restaurant would normally go.  It's a bit of a credit to the 'hood that you can even get a drink at 11pm.  They made us some kind of crazy pear margarita and, even though we were already full from dinner, we got some olives, just because the place looked so cool.  

The olives were Castlevetrano… a rich, meaty bright-green kind that my girlfriend loves.  They seriously are some of the best, and we vowed to make it back.

A month or so later, we did.  We got the Octopus Salad, the Baked Polenta, and the Spaghetti.  Japansese food has honestly soured me to octopus, but this was thick slices tossed with some kind of crisp bean (Controne) and parsely.  It was meaty and nourishing and… we ate it with the gusto it was clearly designed for.  The polenta was a super moist, milky polenta.  Two rounds of it, baked crisp on the outside and sitting in a kind of rich, cheesy soup.  My girl and I don't use serving plates, we just scoop out of the serving dish and it felt totally natural here.  The spaghetti was simple and hearty with a huge pile of cheese on top.  It was tossed with anchovy, garlic and chili.  When we were done, the last few noodles were swimming in olive oil, which, although good, was a little much and discouraged us from eating every last noodle.

When I was there, I saw that they serve dinner every night until midnight.  In my neighborhood, there's nothing else I know of that serves dinner after 10, and I don't have a car.  So last night, after I was done with everything else I needed to do… I got a great idea.  Why not grab my book and walk up to Wolf?

It was such a good idea.  I got there just as the last of the dinner rush had cleared out, and I had the nearly full attention of the bartender.  I didn't get far into my book.  He picked my courses, poured me "half glasses" of wine to pair with everything, and generally made me feel like a king.  I had the Escolar Crudo, the Treviso Salad, and the Meatballs.  God knows what the wines were.  Escolar is a really buttery fish I've had several times before as sushi.  Here, though, they served it with an avacado puree and a little chopped grapefruit on top!

This is what you want to see in a restaurant like this.  They're going to take chances, and more often than not, it's going to work.  The salad was Traviso (something like radiccio) tossed with wine-soaked golden raisins.  The meatballs were just a hot metal oven dish of four hearty meatballs cooked in sauce.

Look, I've been to plenty of fancy restaurants.  I've been to plenty of trendy restaurants.  How to Cook a Wolf is a place that sits me down and feeds me, goddamnit.  That's what I like.

I've been listening to the new P.O.S. album Never Better for a few months now, and Pearl Jam's recently reissued Ten for a lot longer than that.  Why Go? has always been a song that strangely caught me back in the day, and I find myself involuntarily beginning to sing the song while I walk alone down the street.

She scratches a letter / Into a wall made of stone
So maybe some day another child / Won't feel as alone

It's just got that feeling to it like you're about to start singing something serious or something, and it's well within my comfortable singing range, so a dozen years later it's well burned into my neural pathways.

That's why I'm so impressed to see P.O.S. knock out a quick loop on a synthesizer and effortlessly sing this song much better than I ever could.  One thing I love about his version is how much more he enunciates the punchline to this bitter little song about a kid in a mental institution:

What you taught me, put me in here.  Don't come visit.

There's a no-commercial version on YouTube but the sound and video quality on this one makes it worth sitting through the commercial:

Then, just to remind you… don't underestimate the power of the scrawny, apoplectic young Vedder himself doing the song in his heyday:

And lastly, if you're curious what kind of music P.O.S. really makes, it's kind of smart, ascerbic rap.  This is the track I'm really impressed by from Never Better called Savion Glover:

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Bromst is pretty sweet.  I know that the first couple of songs might freak you out, but it's not going to bore you.  It's kind of hard core and tender at the same time.  I love the cover, a lot like the Dept. Of Eagles cover, it's just one little scene highlighted in the dark of night.

Plus, they have a song called Woof Woof with a lot of meowing sounds, but even in the two songs I'm featuring here, you might not be able to get how weird the album really is.  If you like this kind of thing, then there's a lot to love in Bromst.  Even if you don't… listen to each song once, close your eyes, and let the weirdness overcome you.

I hear that when Dan Deacon performs live, he performs in the audience instead of up on stage, and has the audience participate in making the music.  That sounds cool.

Snookered:

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Woof Woof:

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So when a new restaurant opens in Fremont, land of the upscale tech worker, it's a big deal.

And when it's a "Sustainable Sandwich Shop", that's even a bigger deal.  The also brand new and next door Phở place, Lucky's Phở , was packed with people from day one.  There's already a gourmet sandwich shop in the hood, so the bar is set high.  But I think Homegrown really has legs.  

I had a half sandwich of the Chicken Thigh Sandwich with: bacon, lavender pear butter, goat cheese and mixed greens on whole grain.  It was kinda tiny but it was also under six bucks.  I got a cup of their soup of the day, a chicken chili with hominy and delicious in it.  And a soda… under ten dollars.  This is a lunch place.

It's all wooden and friendly inside.  The feng shui could use a little love but this is good stuff.  There's beer, decent coffee, they compost everything… and they stay open until seven so you can go get an early dinner after work.  

I'll update you when I've tried half the menu.

I've had comments off thus far, but the other day, I shared the Barbra Streisand post in Google Reader, which shared it in FriendFeed which made it show up on my Facebook, where people actually commented on it. Ahhh, the modern world.

Anyway, I liked it… the high of people actually commenting on The Sweet Snob and not feeling like I'm not doing this thing in a vacuum.

So, I turned on actual commenting here. And to sweeten the deal, here's my offer. The first three people to comment and tell me your favorite Sweet Snob post so far can pick an album or film to get the Sweet Snob treatment.

Please offer a little context about the album or film you want reviewed like, why you love or hate it, or why it's the most amazing underrated electroclash progenitor of the 80's / most emotional Mahler symphony ever so that I have some starting point.

Note that I have to approve a comment by a specific person before it shows up, but I will do the first three comments submitted in the order they were submitted.  And… if you're not in the first three but I love your suggestion, I might do it anyway.

Ok, I'm sick of the sound of crickets around here.  Go.

In 1968 (I think), my Dad hitchhiked from Chicago to New York to go see Barbra Streisand perform in Funny Girl.  He's crazy about Streisand, and he's often absentmindedly "dadada"ing some gentle little musical theater melody… probably 30% Streisand, who knows.

I recently got him NetFlix for the first time as a Christmas present last year, and since he gave my sister and I our love for movies, I think he said he's now watched every Streisand special there is. He knows I'm no big fan of that style of music, but he told me if I were going to watch one Streisand performance, it should be A Happening in Central Park.

He said:

"This will give a glimmer of what there is to appreciate of her, when she was at her freshest, most spontaneous, and full of excitement and poise."

So I rented it on NetFlix, and when I was incapacitated on my couch with a twisted rib, I watched it beginning to end on the good speakers…

…and pretty much saw Barbra in her full glory for the first time.  There she is, this tiny, lovely Brooklyn girl gone huge, up there on the stage in front of a central park crowd of 150,000.  She can seemingly handle any meter and vocal range, no matter how challenging, with an incredible vocal power and expressiveness.

There she is, with this kind of faux humility, playing the "what, who, me?  wonderful?" card, telling all these little stories and holding court with this huge New York crowd.  She is their icon and hero… this pantheon to all that is Jewish and Brooklyn, being totally fabulous and hardly trying.

She has one costume change and both of her dresses are totally truly fabulous, both with diaphanous wings that flutter about in the Central Park breeze. I didn't realize how amazingly lovely she was in her prime.

My favorite song of the bunch is Cry Me a River, a song I love, which she brings her own amazing flavor to.  She does a few other Broadway standards I'm not familiar with.

But… there's something I still can't feel about Barbra, even at her effervescent best: I just don't find her funny!  A big part of her act is about her lightning quick changes from total heartbreaking to total Jewish hilarity.  Maybe it's a cultural thing.  Maybe it's that I'm not so crazy about musical theater in the first place, but I constantly get this feeling that she's just not as funny as she thinks she is.

I'm sure if I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950's I'd think she was a scream.  It's a kind of old fashioned humor that fits with the kind of old-school.  Twice she tells a long and "umm"ey story that results in either no song, or in one instance, a 10 second song.

The person I can't help thinking about as I watch her is: Feist.  Yes, Feist.  Feist is in some ways the modern Barbra… the amazing, beautiful, expressive singer with an amazing range and a love for covers who captures the zeitgeist of the moment.  But Feist just has so much more of a grasp of the modern idioms in this post Kurt Cobain world.  When I look at dinosaurs like Barba they just seem… pretty darn cheesy in comparison.

I don't argue with my dad though, this is a pretty amazing recording, and if you've ever been curious about what all the fuss about Streisand is (more grammys than God, 60 albums, etc.) you will probably be edified to watch this performance.  Plus, the price is right:

Due to the magic of the internets, it looks like YouTube has the entire thing in its entirety.  Part 2/6 has the aforementioned Cry Me a River if you want to get the flavor without watching the whole thing.

I didn't take any pictures or video.  It wasn't the most packed show (On St. Patrick's day) so it looks like no one else did either.  No one who posted to Flickr or YouTube anyway.

I did enjoy the show though, and was happy to see these Montreal-ites do their thing on stage after listening to the album many, many, many, many, many times over the past several months.  (See my earlier post about their album Parc Avenue.)

Unlike the crystal clear sound at Nectar when I saw Bon Iver, the sound was pretty muddy, and the vocals were way too low in the mix.

None of that mattered… I know most of the words anyway, and it was thrilling to see them.  One thing I loved, is that Warren Spicer, the lead singer, really went out of his way to vary his vocal interpretation from the album, making it a new experience (even though that made it hard for me to tipsily sing along).

I had plenty of time to loiter around after the show though, and at one point individually walked up to each and every band member and told them how much I loved the album.  

Note: I always follow some simple rules when I approach semi-famous people to express appreciation:

• I don't interrupt if a pretty girl is talking to them
• I don't try to get them to sign anything or do anything for me
• I don't try to make the conversation go on past its natural dying out point

I didn't mention any specific songs, just told each of them very sincerely that I loved the album and listened to it constantly.  I got the same, totally dorky "aww shucks" looking-uncomfortably-at-their-shoes reaction from each of them.  I should have told Warren at least that he really needs to drop the child-molestor mustache.  That probably would have got a more interesting reaction.

Anyway, since I didn't get any video, check out their killer recent video for Feedback in the Field: 

You know, I started The Sweet Snob with the best intentions, but I just got so into structure that I forgot to post and have fun, and with that, I will quit it, and tell you some things I've been listening to and loving. 

Badly Drawn Boy - EP1, EP2 and EP3: Back in the bad old days of LimeWire, when you had to just download individual songs with crappy ID3 tags (the piece of info in an mp3 that makes it show up right in iTunes) I got a lot of obscure stuff without any idea where it came from.  I got into the amazing Badly Drawn Boy album The Hour of Bewilderbeast.  It's mellow and clanky and weird and beautiful, and it's also the last album Damon Gough made before he started writing total pop pablum.  Anyway, I went on LimeWire and found a bunch of his weird old lo-fi songs and loved many of them.  Now, thanks to the power of the internet, I found these somewhat rare old EP's and am enjoying these songs all over again.

Chad VanGaalen - Soft Airplane: Now, instead of Badly Drawn Boy, I'm impressed by Chad VanGaalen.  I feel like if Damon of Badly Drawn Boy had grown artistically, he could be making more clanky, weird lo-fi music like this.  Chad VanGaalen is more badass, and kind of rocks out in a way that Badly Drawn Boy never did.  Chad starts out all pretty with Willow Tree, but gets into some intense blooping and clanging by Phantom Anthills.  I never know what mood I have to be in to listen to this album, but when I find myself in it, this is perfect.

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion: Yes with two L's in Pavillion.  OMGWTFBBQ this album is so good.  Not too many albums that me and my friend L. Beth Suki Tsunami Yockey Jones both love (she tends to exclusively like music that hurts you) but this is one of them.  It's willfully kind and beautiful and inspiring and it's like one of those kaliedoscopes you can see through, held up to a beautiful, kind, creative hippie girl who's doing this amazing dance.   I've never loved these guys but holy crap do I love this album!

Shad - The Old Prince: This is the kind of rap I like… well, one of the kinds.  Funny, smart, literate, self-depricating but not like, Eminem-self-depricating.  Awesome sweet beats.  There's this one rap called The Old Prince Stayed at Home, where he's talking about being really thrify.  About midway through, the beat stops and one of his crew says, "What happened?"  He says, "Uhhh, I couldn't afford the rest of the beat.  I mean, he was just charging soooo much.  It wasn't worth it.  We should just, you know, vibe with it.  You know, just… I'll spit the beat and you can clap or something."

That should be good.  You guys could leave like… some comments or something.  I know you have to sign up or something, but only the first time.

I'm returning to 2007 to see how my Best Albums of 2007 list has fared this year before tackling the best of 2008.

My review from the tinyblog:

If folk music has a future, this is it. Here's a guy pulling together the history of country music, indie music, rock music and folk music. What he makes doesn't sound futuristic, it sounds like American music at it's best. I could still be listening to this album when I'm sixty.

Sam Beam has a beautiful voice, I'll give him that. I was never so impressed by him before, as it sounded like just another pretty voiced folk music guy. It really takes more than that to impress me. M. Ward did it last year with Post-War, winning me over with his sheer brilliant songwriting and explosively pretty guitar interludes. This year Sam Beam is the man to win me over, but for different reasons.

First of all, this is not just a guy with a guitar. This is an incredibly rich and harmonious instrumentation: organs, steel guitars, an amazing mix of different percussion elements, and even a few electronic sounds thrown in there. But, it doesn't jar, and the whole album has a rich, unified sound. When I close my eyes and listen to this album it's like a golden grahams commercial, with pouring streams of honey colliding mid-air with tiny crunchy graham crackers. This is not a gimmick, this is a serious album. Whatever he was going for sonically, he nailed it on every track.

Next, this is some real, mature songwriting. You want to impress me? Write a song called Resurrection Fern and don't make it painfully obvious.

If you like your music straight-up beautiful and that's your highest ethic, then this album would have been #1 for you this year.

My Sweet Snob Commentary, a year later:

I sent the song Lovesong of the Buzzard to a friend in a mix CD and she said, "If I were stranded on a desert island with only that song, I'd be happy with that."

It's true, this is an album you can listen to a lot, and I don't know if I've found the bottom of its well of beauty. It's at once serene and exciting.

Sam Beam's sweet whispery voice goes down easy, sure, but this album alternately coos and clatters and he leaves little treasures in every song.

Lovesong of the Buzzard (I probably would pick a different song if I only had one, myself):

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House by the Sea:

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