Keith Pille's Weekly Shuffle
1.2.06

Every week, I will fire up the Shuffle Songs option on my iPod; the first song to come up, no matter what it is, will get an instant, unvarnished review. We're at the mercy of random chance and the limits of my digital music collection. Let's see where this takes us.

Is It Too Late?
World Party, Goodbye Jumbo

During American Nerd's brief holiday publishing break, I was saddened to hear that the actor Vincent Schiavelli had died. You probably don't recognize the name (I didn't know his name until he was dead), but you'd certainly recognize his distinctive, sunken-eyed face. I became a fan after he played a lecherous geometry teacher in Better Off Dead; the guy appeared in many, many other movies during the 80s and 90s, and he was always fun. He even gets the distinction of being the only thing that didn't suck about Ghost.

What does this have to do with music? Well, if my iTunes library was Hollywood, World Party would be an upper-level character actor like Schiavelli-- widely unknown, but well-loved and appreciated by those who recognize it.

Goodbye Jumbo is no one's nominee for Artistic Album of the Last Century, but it's a very fun little pop record. Released in 1990, it's a one-man production by former Waterboy Karl Wallinger, and sounds sort of like a Stones record from an alternate universe where the Stones aged gracefully (Wallinger's voice sounds a lot like Mick Jagger; he even plays this up with the backing “woo-woos” on the album's best song, “Way Down Now”).

“Is It Too Late?” isn't among the better stuff on the album, but it's not bad. Mixing laid-back delivery with a sort of lackadaisically-thrashing lead guitar line, it acts as a thesis statement for the rest of the record: we're going to rock, but we're not going to get too worked up about it.

In the end, I get excited when “Is It Too Late?” comes up on my shuffle, but I think that's mostly a Pavlovian response because I'm still CD-trained to expect “Way Down Now” to come afterwards.

Weekly Shuffle Scoreboard (Best to Worst):

1. "Rock N Roll Radio V2," Derailleur
2. "Back from Somewhere (live)," Husker Du
3. "Powderfinger," Neil Young
4. "Sliver (live)," Nirvana
5. "Whiskey Bottle," Uncle Tupelo
6. "Don't Be Afraid of the Robot," Electric Six
7. "Gassed & Stoked," Lou Reed
8. "You Are the Everything," R.E.M.
9. "Nicotine & Gravy," Beck
10. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (live)," Wilco
11. "The Calming Sea," Beachwood Sparks
12. "John, I'm Only Dancing," David Bowie
13. "Take It or Leave it," The Strokes
14. “Is It Too Late?”, World Party
15. "Monkey Dot," Money Mark
16. "I Wanted to Tell You," Matthew Sweet
17. "Soldier's Joy," Mark O'Connor
18. "Masoko Tanga," The Police
19. "Scenery," Neil Young and Pearl Jam
20. "We Got The," The Beastie Boys
21. "The Big Foist," The Minutemen
22. "Climbing up the Walls," Radiohead
23. "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," Mission of Burma