Club 8 The People's Record. Swedes in Brazil. Goth Samba? The music is still a trifle bloodless but tiny quibbles about platelet count aside this is terrific, really, even more than in the anthropological sense of terrific. Is he a big fan of Os Mutantes? Or perhaps merely the world's biggest fan of whatever other famous Brazilian psych-pop group you may know of? I am unaware of any others. The last Club 8 record was soft and gentle and dreamy and wonderful. This record is almost fierce, it's decidedly social and wonderful in its homage and yet it is contradictory in that certainly the music is vibrant and electric and yet somehow still the lyrics are infected with that decidedly morose and introverted genealogy. But this is not Pitchfork, we won't spend 99% of the time on our "funny" rejoinders(we are not funny) and 1% of the time on the lyrics and their psychic impact on the fabric of spacetime. Singer delivers the words nicely, indeed, she has given them with more enthusiasm and fire than ever before, her blood possibly supplemented by iron rich carnivore delights. Beef from the Pampas, the gauchos traveling north to the beach with marbled slabs and where thus formal albinism is thrust into deeper oblivion. Did they recruit authentic natives to give their bit of musical imperialism that genuine creepiness? I would have preferred if they had listened to the aforementioned Os Mutantes in Gothenburg and simply proclaimed themselves a Samba band by right of tenure. Enough of this cultural tourism where we do research and embed ourselves to create a greater understanding of anything. Let's keep it superficial, all we need is place a black man with the voice of a carton of newports on the end of the record. Second song. I mean, come on, they are hardly Flaubert. Someone might have justifiably emailed me a complaint about my last post where I compared a fictional creation (Crabbe) with a non-fictional creation (Flaubert). I could have mentioned Salammbo instead, or done it more proper still with Hamilcar Barca who of course is both a fictional presence and an actual resident of history. But I did not. I am not that clever. But then how many have read Salammbo? I met a French-English translator earlier this year, she was then working on a novel by Dumas, a lesser known work, I told her I didn't know the more famous works even. I've not read the Musketeers and so even though apparently this lesser known work was also about dashing cavaliers and the like and she was terrifically excited to not be translating manuals for installing dishwashers I only feigned my excitement for her. I never saw her again. We could have danced to this record. That would have changed her mind. Second song has a riff slightly altered from the first song riff, both tracks are sprightly and energetic and lovely. Is this my favorite Club 8 record? Possibly. I am certain that it is light years ahead of the last Legends record, I think, I've only listened to that record once actually. When is the next Acid House Kings record anyhow? Third song, it starts off with a bounce, is Samba dancing all about fluid shoulders? Much of it seems to take place between the neck and the waist. I am unable to dance the Samba. It is all about the rhythm, and I am formerly Canadian. I imagine the Samba beat here is synthetic, a pre-set on his sampler. But I am a hopeless cynic assuming everyone possesses the same degree of sloth as do I. There is even an exclamation point at the end of the title Shape Up!, hopes for an exercise video endorsement or soundtrack? Johann and Karolina Samba to the Oldies oh dear I forgot the exclamation. I jest, really, this is a beautiful record. Now to the Goth Samba, the echoey anemic vocals and the slinky beat and skeletal Joy Division-esque guitar. Have they created a new genre? Unlikely. Surely there is a video on Youtube to expose them as frauds the same as there are for Stereolab and Broadcast where fiends have unearthed the original source material and revealed those two bands as better fans than originators. Of course we still love them. Sound Dust soundtracked my time spent preparing for my last encounter, a coffee with a woman who claims she will sell 300,000 copies of her book of interviews with people better than you or me. I hope she succeeds. I haven't sold a single copy of my novel about people less good than you and me. I could have staged my novel in Carthage, a sequel to Salammbo, burned elephants inside of bronze statues dedicated to the cult of Obama. She's "dancing with the mentally ill". This is the best Club 8 record. It is official. i like to listen to it in the mornings at 5:30Am on my drive to work with both of the windows open, the Ipod misfiring(only one channel comes through, another triumph in the history of Apple engineering!) and forget that my hair is all disheveled and ridiculous by the time I reach work. The young ladies to impress at work all look much older then their 32 years, with their assorted children, unwedness and smoking fetishes. I retreat to my cubicle and dream of moving to Brazil with Club 8 and feeling the sand between my toes while thinking the child prostitutes have a future as a call center representative someday. Next song, slow, could be a Sundays song played through a filter, covered by someone like the Xavier Cougat. It's that great. Still the words. Is this meant to cause the blood to warm, to stand the hairs on top of your head completely erect and turn your hair musclebound even, well then it is let down by the moroseness of the lyrics. Of course, I, as a legitimate disregarder of anything authentic, love it. But a more serious connoisseur of the samba might feel let down and yet they are unlikely to be let down as they are unlikely to be aware of Club 8's existence and for this we will feel doubly sorry for their ignorance. I am on vacation from work, officially. I will spend it in solitude contemplating my future or lack of it. I am old. I am childless. I am starting to believe I find most of my species disgusting and ill-served. I am just dreadful. I will listen to this music and it will round my shoulders and tone my hips. I already have my stomach muscles somewhere, I could tone my obliques as well. There were samples of car alarms in the last track. Nice. Now what sounds like real drums or a sample of real drums, short stabs on the organ, sounds sinister, sounds like the soundtrack to a dark episode of Airwolf where Jan Michael Vincent and Ernest Borgnine come to blows over Marty or Shelly Winters' performance in Lolita. I am staring out windows at my neighbours wondering if there are John Shade's among them. I could stalk the shadows and peer through 1970s aluminum paned windows and dream that I was the king of anything but then I have to move the sprinkler. The saxophone now blazing is a relic from the 80s, blazing sax solos are now ironic when once they were iconic, is the path to Shelly Winter's heart paved with saxophone, I can see Club 8 on soundtracks to future films from the New School mavens. Paul Dano or Jesse Eisenberg slouching in a corner with a glass of ironic grape soda, beautifully lit statues, thinking how gauche it would be to show that you are alive, that you care about anything, and that you had ever perspired in your life. Over. Now with the spindly guitar solos again, and now strums, and now high pitched keyboard whistles, it is a jug band samba revival. Are these drum programs? It is nice. Club 8 are starting to show their age, they may be older than I am even, they were once impossibly beautiful and now well they are merely beautiful. He is too desperate to appear the ramshackle teenager still. He is a proper music titan, honourable progenitor of the Labrador dynasty. He releases really very dreadful records by the Maryonettes sure, but we forgive him for that, because he releases records from Club 8. He releases records by The Radio Dept sure but perhaps he will make up for that by releasing records from Death Masses in the near future. Perhaps. Song over. The reason that no one has read my book is because I didn't write it as I write these entries, without thought or any sense of reason. I attempt only to accommodate the tone of the record by syncopating my typing to the rhythms of the music at hand. Now "poor kid from Sao Paulo" choir background vocals. She's so poised. Perhaps they did make a pilgrimage for burgers to Argentina and they stood alongside the avenues as the royal retinue of Nestor And Cristina Fernandez approached and tossed alms and subsidy coupons for inexpensive LPG from Trinidad and Tobago. This is a cheerful number about the certainty of death. Maybe they listened to what Cristina had to say and worried about their vast collection of sovereign Argentine debt. Is Club 8 merely the alter ego of a corporate mogul? Is Johan some sort of corporate titan swooping with terrific wingspan down upon tiny telecoms and paper mills and selling off their assets so that he can get really expensive haircuts? That would be fantastic. Sadly, he probably thinks Radio Dept is just about right on. Last track now, a dreamy, drifty number, a bass drum repetitive in the heart of song, her voice vague and small and lovely and some more choral vocals from street urchins for that "beachy" doom heart that the Scandinavians love so dearly. What is life like on a Swedish beach? A midnight tan from the midnight sun?