Trebuchet!

George Hrab’s new album is out now – Trebuchet! He put the entire album as a podcast, so if you haven’t heard his music before, go give it a listen there. (Dogma Free America also put the whole CD at the end of their most recent podcast.) I’m liking this publicity angle that George is taking – I really think this is more the way in to the future, rather than the more controlling methods of the RIAA, for example.

The album is a lot of fun. I downloaded it on iTunes the day I heard the podcast, and I’ve listened to it several times. I don’t think there’s a song on the album that I don’t like. Though I will admit that my favorite is still FAR. I am totally unashamed to admit that I had that song on repeat when I was out on a bike ride, and was singing along at the top of my lungs. Who cares if the other pedestrians thought I was off my head.

There’s also a song on the album called “Hai, Yookito ‘Ya.” While I should have realized that it was Ukranian – and I did recognize George’s mom’s voice at the beginning – my immediate thought was that it sounded Japanese, so I spent about 20 minutes making myself crazy over it. At this point, Japanese has become my default language on anything that sounds even vaguely like it; I guess that’s what I get for taking four years worth of classes. All is explained in his interview on Skepticality. However, I still think we should start calling George 勇気人 (brave man) or　雪人　(snow man) or possibly just 有機人 (organic man) since I’m pretty sure he’s a carbon-based life form. They all actually sound the same (other than the middle name actually has a shorter “u”) so he won’t even know which he’s being called at any given time.

And this was of course the day after I found out Devo had come out with a new album, called Something for Everybody. So I got a double dose of awesome, funky, geeky music.