Your CDs are fea­tured in $10 CD shops. Clearly, enough stock has been made that there can be excess and demand enough that these places will buy it and hope to move it quickly!

I bought a Switch­foot CD today. And enjoyed it. Their music works a lot bet­ter as an album than as stand­alone songs, espe­cially that hor­rific title track. I don’t under­stand its appeal at all. The rest is quite pleas­ant (and sur­pris­ingly, to me at least, overtly Chris­t­ian — prob­a­bly because they some­how get by with­out men­tion­ing Jesus or Christ or any­thing like that on their website)

Almost sar­cas­tic in places, which isn’t quite what I was expect­ing. I like that sort of thing. Meh.

Also been lis­ten­ing to Sarah Blasko the last week, try­ing to fig­ure out all kinds of clever links to the poem on which the album What the sea wants, the sea will have is based (Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner). So far I have noth­ing. Except a burn­ing ques­tion as to the hier­ar­chy of the two — is this like “the film based upon the book”, wherein the more art­ful form is gen­er­ally taken to be that which was prior? Or is there some­thing else afoot, when one can extrap­o­late an entire album from a rel­a­tively straight­for­ward (though admit­tedly tex­tu­ally rich and volu­mi­nous) poem?

There is a cer­tain frus­tra­tion deci­pher­ing con­tem­po­rary works that isn’t there with those of dead white men, sim­ply because with one there is the pos­si­bil­ity of exer­tion to obtain a straight­for­ward answer. That, of course, would be admit­ting defeat — and I prob­a­bly wouldn’t like it as much as the frus­tra­tion, anyway.

What the sea wants is, by the way, a prime exam­ple of why not to buy albums off elec­tronic music stores. The album is phys­i­cally superb (though there are dodgy jewel case ver­sions float­ing around — the card­board one is the good one) in terms of its pack­ag­ing (yay for UV spot printed birds & com­pre­hen­sive liner notes & pho­tos in a sep­a­rate book­let!) and content.

Also speak­ing of com­pet­i­tive advan­tages of… every­thing vs. online music stores… the $10 Switch­foot CD is not, in fact, a CD. It’s a SACD. Pre­sum­ably Hybrid good­ness because it played in an anachro­nis­tic CD player I’m using when in tran­sit at the minute (yes, you read that right. I can’t get a portable device that works with this loss­less stuff, it’s ridicu­lous. And if you dare sug­gest I buy an iPod, the lat­est Bond movie has a method of tor­ture that you may be inter­ested in – saw that film tonight with peo­ple, was good times – though that scene had every male in the build­ing cring­ing mas­sively). I wasn’t sure if it would even work — because, yes, I check the pack­ag­ing that closely before I buy stuff — more for watch­ing out to see if it was infested with crappy doesn’t-really-work-properly copy pro­tec­tion rub­bish than any­thing else. But it did. I don’t know if it’s any bet­ter, but I’ve only really lis­tened to the SACD ver­sion at work on a crappy Dell com­puter. It has bad AC’97 audio which = lots of line noise, etc.

Onboard audio can be okay for play­back (my Venus is but it bloody well should be given how expen­sive it was), just that com­puter wasn’t. And it’s time for me to sleep now so I’m not about to test, or then I’ll have to rip as well and inevitably wind up dis­cov­er­ing some new and excit­ing set of codecs that are bet­ter for SACD for x rea­sons, and so forth, then it’ll be 2am again and… gen­eral bad­ness ensues.

I’ve already sat up and read the Wikipedia arti­cle and lamented the copy pro­tec­tion mea­sures in place. Sigh. *feels like a geek… at least I’m not play­ing Wii ;-)*