Author: Dan Seeger

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College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 12 and 11

Dan Seeger

12. Low, Things We Lost in the Fire The first time I realized I may be falling out of step with the prevailing taste of college radio kids came fairly early in my post-collegiate years, when a breathless rave in the pages of CMJ New Music Monthly inspired me to go out and purchase The Biz, the third album by the Chicago band the Sea and the Cake. The jazz-inflected collection of languidly thoughtful songs was deemed smart, intricate and artistically challenging. It found it incredibly boring, maybe because I had inclinations towards neither bongs nor headphones. So it was … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 12 and 11

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

I had the blessed relief of a very light week at Spectrum Culture. The only piece of mine that went up was a review of the new film from Fernando Meirelles, which takes him yet further from the spectacular promise of his debut. I thought things couldn’t get much more dire than Blindness. Little did I know he’d adopt the multi-strand pile-up of coincidental misery typified by Babel and its tiresome brethren a few years ago. Luckily, I have a week off from movie reviews. After this one, I feel like I need it. Continue reading Spectrum Check

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One for Friday: Field Trip, “Run”

Dan Seeger

Back when I started this weekly music-sharing endeavor, my friend Lauren, blessed with youth and beauty, commented, “I’m intrigued to find out what type of thing you listened to in college.” She correctly ascertained, perhaps before I did, that the songs posted here would come disproportionately from the thick sliver of years that I spent as a wee, impressionable undergraduate at the student-run radio station at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (go Pointers!). While the bulk of the offerings that can be carbon-dated to the years between 1988 and 1993 offer a fair snapshot of who I was, I’d argue … Continue reading One for Friday: Field Trip, “Run”

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

So, Spectrum Culture this week… I truly believe in reviewing films almost entirely on their own merits. It’s hard to confront a film by a major director without putting it into a career-long context (and there’s obviously some merit to that approach), but a significant number of viewers won’t be doing that. They meet a film for what it is and any comparisons to other creative efforts will be superficial at best. Still, it was so very tempting for me to expend a whole lot of words in my review of Nikolaus Geyhalter’s documentary Abendland to the three-hour, staidly observational … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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One for Friday: The Soup Dragons, “Pleasure”

Dan Seeger

I think of the Soup Dragons as one of the highly favored bands of the 90FM DJs during the early nineties, but I’m not sure I’m correct about that. As I’ve written before, they were a fiarly unlikely band for me to champion at the time with their glammy, danceable grooves standing in marked contrast with the one-foot-in-the-gutter rough-hewn guitar rock that I favored. The Soup Dragons sounded like they knew what they were doing in a recording studio, understood how to get the most out of the technology at their control. They didn’t sound overly manufactured, but there was … Continue reading One for Friday: The Soup Dragons, “Pleasure”