A shake isn’t something you need to think a lot about to consume, and neither is Boston “lo-fi fuzz/punk” band Thick Shakes.

Those are the most loving of scare quotes and backhanded compliments, don’t worry. Punk! It doesn’t really mean anything anymore, does it? This will only add to the confusion, because Thick Shakes is all early-’60s nostalgia. Except, louder? They release stuff on cassette, I guess because they want an excuse not to sell anything. But cassettes are a ’70s thing. My brain hurts.

Some people, who are probably fun people when they aren’t writing music reviews, think this sounds like “a washing machine inside a washing machine.” I don’t really have an opinion on that either way; I just thought you might enjoy that image.

See? We at Air & Sea Battle are all about FUN. Which this band, unequivocally, is.

Stream their album here, right now.

Or! You could catch them live at Arlene’s Grocery in NY on Thursday. Or other places too, if they exist.

That’s three options. Probably more options than there are ice cream flavors in the UK. Sorry, people in the UK. That was a low blow.

You get this:

If Go Organic Orchestra sounds like the worst kind of faux-avant garde nonsense, I have to admit the lack of hyper-aware, arched-eyebrow brand consciousness is refreshing to me. They don’t need a cool name to sell me on the concept.

Whatever it is. It’s something that is neither jazz nor orchestra nor “world music.” Despite a conductor, it’s somehow freer than jazz, which tends toward either the nihilism of free jazz or the sing out, step back of the quartet. Here we can improvise more than how to get from A to B; we can go to Z and get there on the kazoo. And instead of a conductor being a performance showboat who did all the real work with the orchestra in rehearsal, we get the thrill of music being invented on the spot; in theory, with the precision of a decoded Beethoven symphony and the carefree collectivity of African drum circles.

The thing about this is that it almost doesn’t matter when it doesn’t work. And it often doesn’t work. That’s what you miss unless you see this in action. (Go Organic played Roulette in New York last week; see here for stops on Rudolph’s tour.) Rudolph can be furiously signaling, starting songs over, to little effect, and yet you almost hope the orchestra keeps fighting him. If jazz and classical music are both caught in an age-old battle of tonal versus atonal, structure versus improvisation, the Go Organic Orchestra at least stages the battle in a completely new way.

And yet. We still wish it could be something, the small, very small part of us that lingers on a Baldwin making a joke about the Baldwins, as the channels go by. Okay, maybe we just love a guaranteed trainwreck, if famous people are going to be in it, even if it happens at approximately three miles an hour.

So, it was in this milieu that I decided, as penance for my recent blogging absence, I would seek out the true spirit of Award Season, wherever it may hide. The results show the darker side of life through Oscar’s eyes.

It might have been a good idea to plan this more than an hour in advance. Needless to say, the two sure-fire TV owners were not home. The Wilson Ave laundromat, my usual TV source, was stuck on Spanish soaps. No matter, the Internet led me to Williamsburg, which you might think would be the place least likely to care about the Oscars. True, it was a lederhosen-only affair, but that only increased my foolish yearning to find entertainment value in this somehow.

Skipping down Lorimer Street to a band that was really cool three years ago in a clearance Gap coat, I brought shame upon the hallowed night I sought, even ten contiguous states of irony away. I ignored the glances from all around that seemed to say, “We have far more important places to skulk to than a Oscar party, but if we were going to one, we would not even slow down going by if we saw you through the window.”

More determined than ever, I tried to remember if I had seen any of these movies besides Up and the 45 minutes of Avatar I saw before, delirious with Sigorney Weaver and 3-D aggravated flu, I sat somewhere quiet and had an acute episode of not vomiting.

Sighing a little in contentment at not needing to even make an effort not to vomit at the moment, I reached Pete’s Candy Store. Yes, that’s a bar.

A man, dressed suitably all in black, paced outside. Could he, too, be a wise man following the stars? I asked him.

“I’m just waiting for my girlfriend.”

“Are you going to watch the Oscars?” I gestured, helplessly.

“That’s tonight. Isn’t it.” He turned to look toward the flicker inside.

“Yes.” I did that thing where you pull up your bottom lip and nod, then scurried inside.

There was exactly one man in lederhosen, and he made up for all the rest. Noting this, and the full bar tilted toward a TV, unnecessarily captioned given the reverent hush, I realized my grave error. Even in Williamsburg, people who go to Oscar parties do actually want to see the Oscars. I did not belong. Also, it was full.

I left, passing the pacing man, thinking we both may have set our hopes too high.

Walking back down the other sidewalk, I came across the only thing real that’s left in this broken world, the refuse of the rich. I had my pick of a CD tower, a ’90s-chic red pillow, a mostly intact wicker basket, and a bathroom…thing. I could only think of the consolation prizes for the big Oscar losers some PR firm is giving out, but somehow I felt, with pride swelling, that I was the real loser. Maybe in the entertainment marketplace my dollar matters not, but my vote alone could save something from the junkyard. The real Oscar.

Some crap that won’t ever fit in the room.

I was encouraged by the two of you who clicked on my latest attempt at bridging the high and low to ponder, can classical music be blogged? Would anyone care if it were?

You must watch this immediately.

Now, you may have been compelled to click Related Videos. There is exactly one live performance of Johannes Brahms there. It is a terribly recorded youth symphony. There is a nice close-up of a timpani roll at the start, however. The roll is remarkably smooth and sensitive given the performer’s age.

Do you see? Stuff’s BORING. The largely coma-inducing history of music commentary has been obscured by the anomaly of the mass-media explosion of the last 60 years. For worse or for worse, it is the performers, the people, who are interesting to non-musicians, and in popular music we have persona to argue about in spades, these hipster days.

Classical music got rid of persona once composers stopped being crazy fascists and romantics and turned into tape-mixing nerds. This is a good thing for musicians’ fragile egos, but a terrible thing for making people interested in classical music. If pop music could be improved by forcing its artists to perform without banter in plain black clothing to a silent audience, classical music could use some good old fashioned controversy. About things other than whether this is music.

Less than 100 years ago, people  rioted to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Or at least, that’s what Stravinsky always liked to say. The ballet’s radical atonality and rhythmic schizophrenia was probably less offensively interesting than the fact that metaphoric sex was happening on stage.

When there isn’t a repressive governmental regime to flout with dressed-up pagan ritual, it gets harder to make people to sit silently in a concert hall for an hour and tell them this is fun and subversive.

Youtube is no substitute, and where else will we see this? Just as cinema gives The Third Reich the same form as Schindler’s List, Youtube gives Brahms’ Concerto in D Minor the same form as Raisin Brahms. We see, not violence and terror and the sublime, but people jumping around in ’70s pastels. The Rite of Spring becomes, at best, weirdly beautiful, but kind of lolzy.

So, my preposterous question is, could blogs bring fire back to classical music?

Here, now, is an entertainment-quotient blog roundup, semi-based on this terrifyingly scientific roundup of classical blogs:

The New York Times Arts Beat
Their blogs are pretty good. +20
No oversharing. -6

Unquiet Thoughts

From the New Yorker. +/-19
Charts. +4
“While the battle for [music] education looks tougher than ever, the media can always be manipulated.” Honesty! +3

Sequenza 21

A composer blog! +7
Complaints about application fees. -7

Think Denk

Most recent post a somewhat-stilted-but-still-quite-funny charticle parody. +21
Most recent post from December. -18

“M” is for Musicology

Incredibly insular comments on reader letters on academic “bitch-slapping.” +12
Use of “palindromic.” +3
Name kinda sucks. -4

Opera Chic

Most recent post about dead celebrity. +16
Celebrity not a musician. -15

Slipped Disc
Now this is what I’m talking about. Rankings! Ripping apart arts “journalism”! General Curmudgeoning! +25
No pictures of this guy shouting angry British things. -3

London Symphony Orchestra
“And what do you play sir?”
“I play the flute”
“Really, thats nice. You don’t look like a flute player”
“Oh”
American stereotyping! Also, there’s a play about someone throwing up. This one obviously wins.

Still, none of these really uncover musicians as the petty, entitled people they are. Where is the dirt? Where is the politics? Where is the generic brand bottled water being thrown at the gong? I know you’re out there, disgruntled stagehands, ready to dish. You’re our only hope.

Yoshihisa Hirano (Obviously I just copied that from Wikipedia. Hackery!)

This is a story of a guy. Some would call him a hack. Together with another hack, Masashi Hamauzu, they made something awesome no one will care about. This makes me smile.

Masashi Hamauzu just quit Square Enix. This may have been because they assigned him games everyone hated (except me, sometimes). Then they made him write four CDs of music for a game about zippers.

Anyway, this other guy is a “real” composer. He went to Juilliard. Now, among other things, he orchestrates video games.

Today we will be discussing his work in the aforementioned zipper game, Final Fantasy XIII, which also features a kid named Hope saying serious things about conforming to Japanese society and loving peace while summoning Motorcycle Transformer Shiva so you can press buttons and kill things.

But!

What if this orchestration was really, really good?

This is not a new thought, but it is a thought nonetheless: People, in the stands, used to sing the national anthem. Now they politely watch some celebrity do it. Probably with live autotuning.

Is this a problem?

Anyway, here are some American minstrels. Are they good? Let’s find out:

Charles Bissell – It Ends With A Fall

This is a little gimmicky in its lo-fi-ness, but there’s some meat underneath.

http://dontmakelists.tumblr.com/post/376468166/328-charles-bissell-it-ends-with-a-fall

Friendly Fires – Hold On (Holy Ghost! cover)

This is just plain awesome.

http://blahblahblahscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/hold-on-holy-ghost-cover.mp3

And a Nigerian. But Nneka was on the TV, just like football! I’m not really a fan of this song, but she rocked out on Letterman:

Nneka – Heartbeat

You are confused. Who cares if someone makes a bad remix?

I cannot answer this question.

I will, however, detail this enemy to artistic effort and nuance with the most effortful and nuanced of blog posts: A how-to!

How to Make a Remix and Maximize Your Pan-Flashing and Feedback-Looping Quotients:

1. Choose a song that hasn’t been remixed yet that is either: a) topping the Billboard charts, or b) the Hype Machine charts.
2. Steal Reason and some samples.
3. Slap together a few loops.
4. Make Important Decisions:

Will the synth hits be on the beat or off?

Will the song have a rising echo that overtakes the verse to get to the chorus?  If so, how many times?

Will the sampled song end after the hi-hats and bass end or before? Maybe we should end with that Jens Lekman finger cymbal. No one’s done that yet.

Now blast it off to as many hype machine blogs as your email program can handle, and you, too, can resound across the blogodrome!

So, we are late today. And by today I mean this was supposed to be three days ago. In honor of that, I bring you not one, but two Hype Machine-related posts. (Because of that, no theme in this one. For that just scroll down. Er, up. To the one you probably already read.) Go crazy, kids.

This first one I forgot what it is since I copied it here. I liked it, I guess.

http://media.puddlegum.net/wp-content/uploads/03-Dont-Look-Down-or-Back.mp3

But Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn, how could I ever forget you? The blog compared it to The Andrew Sisters, which is quite apt, but it’s too good to be a copycat. Adorable radio stage folk singin’.

http://boxstr.net/files/6365152_ofija/Have%20You%20Seen%20My%20Sister%20Evelyn.mp3

Ginger Ninja. Why is your name so terrible? Oh, you’re from Denmark.

This is pretty stupid. Like really stupid. But endearingly earnest.

http://soundcloud.com/alienhits/ginger-ninja-bone-will-break-metal

These things in the Most Pop were good, because they are not disco remixes (see next post).

Lo-Fi-Fnk – Marchin In

http://www.dangerdanger.org/wp-content/uploads/Lo-Fi-Fnk-Marchin-In.mp3

Stephen Marley – Hey Baby

http://files.earmilk.com/upload/mp3/02-stephen_marley-hey_baby_(feat._mos_def).mp3

I mean, I’m not going to lie, if you don’t already know what new music you want to listen to, you are just straight-up lazy.

But in case you are lazy AND singularly devoted to us, starting today and each week until I stop doing it, I will cut you off some wheat from the auto-blog chaff. (Unless you have a gluten thing, too, in which case I think we should see other people.)

Today I will order your selections by the complexity of their carbohydrates:

Hibernation-Grade: Fink – This is the Thing
Listen
Apparently I have a thing for European guitarists, because once again the thing that starched my heart-collar today was this. The lyrics are vapid singer/songwriter whatever, but there is direction and twisting and suspense in the chords, instead of vague strumming, so this wins.

Somewhere Between Breadstick and Fruit Snack: Alex Metric – It Starts (Primary 1 Remix)

Listen
I am old and only slightly less lazier than you and have no idea what an Alex Metric (name sounds so uncreatively narcissistic it has to be faux-ironic) or a Primary 1 is, but these sweet synths seemed like they maybe they would like some tea and Fink (they certainly have the repeating-meaningless-line-ad-infinium thing in common). All I know is, the non-remix is pure teenage corn syrup and will not be going in our tea, that’s for sure.

Aspartame with a side of Olestra: BonoJay-ZThe EdgeRihanna – TELLING YOU HOW MUCH THEY REALLY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN FOND OF HAITI

Also, terrible, awkward French. No link, just do the right thing without bad (or good, really) musical incentive and donate directly here or here or, heck, even to Wyclef’s CASH4GOLD4HAITI fund instead. (Just don’t listen to his song, either.)

I Am Oak, courtesy of the Netherlands, has apparently been around since 2005, but judging by the tracks on their Last.fm page, their early stuff was a little too spare to garner global attention.

But this track, Gold and Porcelain, could be their breakout hit, as much as a folk band not from Amsterdam can have a breakout hit. It’s very Sam Amidon, except with an extra edge of restrained Northern European heartbreak.

And a video for you ADDers: