Rilo Kiley
Under the Blacklight

Cutesy indie-rocker Jenny Lewis returned with the rest of her Rilo Kiley cohorts recently with an album that was both poppier and safer than anything they’d produced prior. Some of the tracks here have the same kind of smoldering blues mystique that was so alluring about Cat Power’s 2006 album The Greatest while others employ riffs that would’ve been right at home in a Rock Kills Kid album. My current favorite is the wonderfully catchy "Breakin’ Up"  which — in a cute moment of wry wit — compares breaking off a relationship to a failing cellphone conversation (am i breaking up? / is there trouble on the line? / did your heart break enough? / did it break enough this time?)

There’s great stylistic breath in this album, and you’ll immediately notice how blindingly polished everything sounds. Hardcore fans will definitely be put off, but for people (like me) who have always thought of Rilo as "that cute indie band," it’s a really cute indie album. (3.5 out of 5 stars)

Patrick Watson
Close to Paradise

I stumbled on to this little gem while checking out the short list for the coming Polaris Music Prize this September. Apart from being featured once on Grey’s Anatomy, nobody has ever heard of this guy, and I personally believe he’s the scion of Jeff Buckley. (He doesn’t have the cherubic vocal range, but he’s got that same flair for dramatic falsetto.) Close to Paradise veers well away from Buckley’s R&B underpinnings though, employing Rufus Wainwright-reminiscent piano and strings. The entire album is damagingly brilliant, but "Luscious Life," "Drifters" and "Man Under the Sea" are standouts. (4.5 out of 5 stars)

This year’s Polaris is going to be crazy-tight. With big names like Arcade Fire (again) and Feist, the newer artists like Watson and (my pick) Miracle Fortress have the work cut out for them. Still, Final Fantasy took the prize home in 2006 against competition like Broken Social Scene, The New Pornographers and Wolf Parade, so miracles do happen.

(And check out Watson’s awe-inspiring performance at the 2007 Junos.)

Miracle Fortress
Five Roses

Did I mention that I secretly wish I were Canadian? A good 75% of everything I listen to these days hail from that perfect, perfect musical landscape.

Miracle Fortress is the one-man-band project of Graham Van Pelt, another Polaris contender. Five Roses is the perfect summer indie album, and there are tracks in this collection that could put the brakes on a typhoon just by their sheer euphoric warmth. My favorite cut by far is "Hold Your Secrets to Your Heart," which is a cascade of shimmering synths and a melody worthy of Brian Wilson. Definitely on my "Best of 2007" list. (5 out of 5 stars)

Yet Another Social-Network Acquisition was in the news today as Global Defense Strategic Logistics (and doesn’t that sound a little bit like a paramilitary organization out of Command & Conquer?) announced its purchase of Redhedd.com, an online community for people with red hair.

… Yes, I’m serious. An online community for people with red-hair has been bought by a weapons manufacturer who makes red-tipped missiles. Red-hair, red-tipped missiles … get it? Well, apparently somebody at GDSL did, as they supposedly made Redhedd.com founder Steve Warrington "an offer he couldn’t refuse." (Possibly along the lines of "if you don’t sign everything you’ve got over to us, we’ll ram one of these warheads up your red-cheeked buttocks." But that’s baseless conjecture.)

But yeah. This has got to be one of the oddest acquisitions I’ve ever heard of. The main reasoning behind the purchase was GDSL’s desire to "put a friendlier face on their AT-600 series of ballistic missiles." One of their first steps post-acquisition, according to the press release, will include creating a user-profile for GDSL as well as for the long- and short-range missiles in the AT-600 line.

Hmm, maybe I’m just not thinking this through, but it’s hard to imagine an unfriendlier profile than a red-tipped ballistic missile. Just think about what its avatar and photo galleries would look like. And who the hell would add a missile to their friends list? (Ok, actually, it might be kinda cool to have The Death-Bringer writing you a testimonial …)

So none of this really made much sense to me until I started thinking about what GDSL was trying to accomplish, i.e., drum up awareness about their gear. Let’s say they bought Redhedd.com for US$10m … admittedly a bit on the high-side for something this small, but they’ve got deep, missile-shaped pockets so it’s possible. The cost of a handful of ballistic missiles would totally make that money back for them (when India built 20 long-range ballistic missiles in 2001, it cost their government US$150m; the math doesn’t get much clearer than that). So even if they only closed 1 deal as an (indirect) result of this social-network acquisition, it’s still money well-spent methinks.

And of course, there’s the Google effect, which undoubtedly will help their marketing efforts even more. People tend to write about odd business strategies, and I’m sure the amount of noise these guys are making within the blogosphere certainly doesn’t hurt either.

So I finally did it. I bought myself a man-purse yesterday, after walking around Megamall like a window-shopping headless chicken for a solid hour.

Just to back up a bit: I’ve been considering this acquisition for a while now. The main catalyst was when my sister (god bless her) sent me a small vertical shoulder bag from Japan that looked like it had been taken straight out of Harajuku. I appreciated the usefulness of it tremendously; it was just the right size and weight for everyday use. The sole problem was that I simply could not seem to convince my friends that I wasn’t coming out of the closet every time they saw its scaly-leather-and-gold-studded countenance swinging along on my right hip. (I suppose that the context was the issue — if we were in Japan, that bag could quite possibly have been the manliest in the bunch. Here though, you’re talking Jansports and beltbags bought at Habagat, predominantly. It was a cultural thing, Lizz, sorry.)

Anyway, so I wanted a good vertical shoulder bag. That didn’t look like it belonged to Jimmy McElroy. And by golly, I wasn’t going to stop until I found one. (In retrospect, one hour of searching hardly seems like a monumental effort. On the other hand, I’m the kind of guy who can’t walk two steps without whining about it, so it was at least a decent effort.)

In truth, I didn’t even really know what I was looking for. I was literally going from accessories store to accessories store, just waiting for something to jump out at me from the rack. I had a couple of fakey encounters too. The main problem was that I didn’t think I was ready to go back to black leather (which ruled out most of the business brands like Samsonite and Pabder), but I didn’t like the rain-proof polyester sheen on the opposite side of the spectrum either (pretty much everything else).

And then I walked into Lacoste.

And there it was, sitting on a rack at the very back of the store. It didn’t jump or scream or otherwise broadcast its presence. It just kinda sat there, and effused the shelves with a warm glow.

Ok, so I’m exaggerating a bit here. But it was certainly the nicest little thing I’d seen all day and after walking around for nearly an hour, I was understandably relieved. I tend to go for subtle designs, and this particular bag was a dark, not-black color with just a few lines of light gray (and of course the telltale croc in the bottom right corner). Not leather, and not shiny polyester. It had a little pocket on the inside that for some reason took my cellphone in like the proverbial hand-in-a-glove. And it had a wallet built-in to the back, which essentially meant that you could use this thing standalone.

I was sold right there. Sure the thing had a price tag that was greater than my Samsonite laptop bag, but you can’t argue with destiny. Or that inexplicable need to indulge in the unnecessary. And hey, at least the closet door stays closed with this one, right?

I know, I know. I haven’t blogged in a pretty long while now. I have a decent excuse though, so I’m not going to apologize or anything.

We’ve been busy building our very first in-house product here at syndeo::media, and are fast approaching a point where we might actually have something to release. I’ve been pulling 7-day weeks since late July trying to get this thing out the door before more client-work comes in and I’m forced to defer again. (This means, roughly, that I won’t be having any weekends at all this month … hardly out of the ordinary, all things considered.)

I can’t say a whole lot about the product at this point, so expect the rest of this entry to be mostly ambiguous nonsense (which, again, is hardly out of the ordinary).

The big deal for me, of course, is the fact that I’ve been wanting to build this idea for forever (I wrote the original concept brief back in 2006 for God’s sake), and it’s taken nearly a year to polish it up to where it might actually be kinda cool when we release. To answer the main question on everyone’s mind, yes, it’s a social network. And no, we’re not stupid enough to think we could roll something out that directly competes with Facebook. And no, it’s not a localized social network like Eskwela either, mainly because I believe that localized communities are a strategic dead-end. (At a point in time when all the world is pushing for globalization, why should we be focusing on recreating Facebook for a specific population? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.)

But yes, it is a social network.

Strangely, during the two or three months I spent doing background research for this product, I spent more time reading about social psychology, communication theory and, of all things, refreshing my knowledge of formal sentence-construction, than I did actually thinking about the technology. From a tech standpoint, this is a pretty simple product (which, of course, completely belies the fact that I’ve rewritten, overhauled or just plain thrown-out nearly 30% of the code that I’ve thrown together for this thing). But I digress.

If all goes well, I should be able to write about precisely what this site is by early September, and then do an invite-only alpha shortly thereafter. And if _that_ goes well, we should have a nice, shiny beta by the middle of the 4th quarter, right around the time syndeo::media celebrates its first year. If that’s not a great motivation, I don’t know what is.