This week got hosed up by everything I’ve done on my server. If you need photographic proof that it sucked, well, Misty has it. As such, I’m bootleg-free [not having had access to my Tasks install to make sure I did all the steps on Sunday], and honestly, the studio stuff has proven underwhelming. Ah well.

• Fountains of Wayne’s Traffic and Weather.
  
• Travis’s The Man Who.
  

Last week was, on the whole, pretty good:

• The Elliott Smith tribute album, To: Elliott, From: Portland. Can you see the meeting pulling this one together? “Well, unless we get a band that someone outside of the Williamette Valley has heard of, this is never going to sell. Does someone have Colin Meloy’s number? No? What about Colin Meloy’s grandmother’s hairdresser’s cousin’s number? Yes? MAKE THE CALL!” I’m not a Pitchfork-head by any stretch, but I largely agree with Brian Howe’s take: the We Are Telephones and Lifesavas cuts probably shouldn’t have been done, but most of the tracks are pretty seriously considered and reasonably faithful to Elliott’s originals while not changing the songs too much. I think The Decemberists’ cover of “Clementine” is farther from the mean than the rest of the album, but hey … Colin Meloy was going to do something cool with it. Two-and-a-half stars, three if you take away the two execrable tracks.
  
• 14 Apr 1995 [Santa Monica, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Jeff Tweedy. It’s one of the earliest post-UT dates for Jeff, and it shows, both good and bad. Two-and-a-half stars.
• 20 Feb 2000 [Washington, DC, USA] concert bootleg of Elliott Smith. I’m not sure that I have laid hands on a better-sounding bootleg of Elliott. The only flaw with it is that his voice isn’t up to the high notes here. Other than that, it’s just plain excellent. Four-and-a-half stars.
• 4 Jul 2001 [Chicago, IL, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. What could be more American than Wilco on the Fourth of July? Okay, so there’s lots of things. But they sparkle in this recording, which was Jay Bennett’s last show with Wilco. What a way to go out. Four stars.
• 16 Jun 2006 [Chicago, IL, USA] concert bootleg of Son Volt. Taping outdoor festivals is fraught with peril: you tend to have chatty crowds as people drift from show to show, you get no favorable sound reflections, and the sound mixes are rarely good, even with the band’s sound guy doing the mix. This taper tried, and while the band was well-leveled to itself, the vocals just never got there, and they’re muddy and indistinct. Jay Farrar has never been a fine elocutor anyway—I think that he went to the Eddie Vedder School of Mumbling—and so this recording really suffers. Two stars.
• 16 Oct 2006 [New Orleans, LA, USA] concert bootleg of The Decemberists. It took me a couple of tracks to warm up to this recording, but once I accepted its limitations—probably done mid-crowd, muddy highs, not the best monitor situation—I really began to like it. Man, these guys are ridiculously talented. Three-and-a-half stars … this would be higher if the taper were using something other than some binaural microphones. But as this choice was probably made for stealth, I should be more forgiving.
• 26 Jun 2007 [New York, NY, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. Okay, this is the show that Fred Wilson babbled about. Does it live up to Fred’s hype? I’d say so: it’s the first bootleg I’ve heard that’s brought some of the new Sky Blue Sky songs to life for me—chief among them “You Are My Face”. I’ve been very on-the-fence, as many Wilco fans are, about the new album. This recording may have changed my mind … four stars.