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Good Mourning is the handsome if dark-eyed offspring of the deliberately melodic From Here to Infirmary LP and Alkaline Trio's more raucous earlier work. Whether or not the band "sold out" (or whatever) when Infirmary arrived with the stamp of ambitious indie Vagrant, the set nevertheless seemed forced. For Good Mourning, Derek Grant replaces Mike Felumlee behind the kit, joining the grating-like-gouda voices and ringing guitars of Matt Skiba and Dan Andriano on the AT's second Vagrant outing. It's an album that kills with catchiness. Though "This Could Be Love" details the steps a jilted lover would take to off him, Skiba's melodic sensibility is hard not to hum along to. Similarly, the triumphant final key change of "Continental" makes its bitter farewell to a suicide victim easier to swallow. This dichotomy between deathly fascination and darn-right pop sensibility continues throughout Good Mourning. Despite making one take a few extra looks at the black and red lyric booklet, it also points to the Trio's newfound confidence to weave its tortured pathos untreated into punk-pop hair shirts for teenagers everywhere. The laughs continue with "Emma" and "Fatally Yours," which features the classic couplet "You crashed your car through the front door/I pulled you from the wreckage/You told me that you missed me/But you meant with the grill and hood." Unlike their doe-eyed emo-punk peers, the Alkaline Trio's take on true love is closer to love-hate. "Donner Party (All Night)" is a snow angel in a blizzard of punk-fueled melody, where the dried blood looks black on the nighttime snowpack. Finally, a glimmer of hope shines from a crack in the mortuary curtains. Good Mourning closes with the plaintive acoustic number "Blue in the Face." The song's last line is a grudging request, but one that admits the faults of both parties, and accepts them as a better reality than the death wishes, dour proclamations, and damning dreams of sunlight that dominate the majority of the record. But even as the coffin closes, anthemic melody reflects in the blood pooled on the floor. ~ Johnny Loftus, All Music Guide
Jobs: Music good, Zune bad
In an interview with Newsweek, Apple chief blasts Microsoft's would-be iPod killer, saying its Wi-Fi sharing "takes forever."
Is Steve Jobs worried about the threat Microsoft's forthcoming Zune poses to the stranglehold his iPod-iTunes has on the digital media market?
No fan of Zune.
"In a word, no."
That's what Jobs told Newsweek in an interview published yesterday. The Apple chief went on to blast to downplay the Zune innovation of which Microsoft has seemed most proud: its ability to let users send other Zune users songs for temporary playback over a Wi-Fi connection.
"I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times," Jobs told the magazine about Zune, which hits stores November 14. "It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of headphone cable."
Most of the Jobs interview focused on the iPod itself, which celebrates its fifth anniversary October 23, and why the device and the iTunes store has had so much success where others have floundered.
"We don't strive to appear cool," Jobs said. "We just try to make the best products we can. And if they are cool, well, that's great."
Jobs also chronicled Apple's relationship with the major labels, which has turned over the years as the iTunes share of the download market has skyrocketed, and the company has resisted the labels' attempts to raise per-song digital prices.
"If we go back now and we raise prices--this is what we told the record companies last year--we will be violating that implicit deal" we made with consumers," Jobs said. "Many [users] will say, 'I knew it all along that the music companies were gonna screw me, and now they're screwing me.' And they would never buy anything from iTunes again."
Jobs also said Apple has always been up front about the fact that songs purchased on iTunes will only play on iPods.
"Nobody's ever demanded it," said of interoperability, or allowing users to buy music from any download store and have it play on any MP3 player. "People know up front that when they buy music from the iTunes music store it plays on iPods, and so we're not trying to hide anything there."
Jobs said he is most proud of the fact that the iPod brought "music back into people's lives" after it "had faded in importance for a while."
"Music is so deep within all of us, but it's easy to go for a day or a week or a month or a year without really listening to music," he said. "And the iPod has changed that for tens of millions of people, and that makes me really happy, because I think music is good for the soul."
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