Maria Minerva is very great.

I've started riding my bicycle to work, 20 miles one way, and I am able to function as a human being afterwards. Amazing. It might be my nice new bicycle. The sales clincher was when the sales person said "it's ugly, no one will want to steal it".

Been listening to Inspiral Carpets Life over and over. I feel the invincibility of youth.

Update: New track on the Sound of Arrows myspace. Not as great as the last one, but still pretty, it's disneyesque but not as disneyesque as the last one.

Stretch Armstrong- the movie. Is this as bad as it has ever been? Frankie and the Heartstrings entry soon, perhaps posted from Texas.

Erm...new Sin Fang is not so good.

The Mummers are lovely. Are they for your mum and dad?

Update: Mink Hollow Road. Does this sound more impressive than it is? It's girlish and seemingly sophisticated, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Thom Yorke, etc...her voice is charmingly coy. It's Leslie Caron before she met Warren Beatty. It's Clara Immerwahr before Fritz started waering the Kaiser's uniform and working on his diabolical Chlorine while keeping the revolver in plain sight. It's rated G. It's romantic. It's the Divine Comedy circa A Short Album About Love Loads of orchestral flourishes, a small voice, big sentiments and weepy climaxes. Second track. I was eating some chicken. Her voice has a tinge of "Hi, I'm Bjork from the Sugarcubes", only a slight, not really, but in the climaxes perhaps she bites the same bits from Diamanda Galas. Records like these require directors and arrangers and people to drive the extended van shuttle ot record. That must be expensive. Was this expensive? It doesn't sound overly so. It isn't ambitious, there are just loads of people playing loads of instruments by the dexterity required seems workmanlike. I've spent the weekend elbow deep into the earth, toiling in the hypoxic and lifeless soils of the Colorado plateau. But then even though I live in Colorado I don't live on the Colorado Plateau. This track has a bit of Blur The Universal with a vocoder robot on vocals. I like it. It's got the feeling of a song that opens a serious television show about miserable people in their 30s and their parents who used to watch miserable shows about miserable people in their 30s in the 80s. Mel Harris guests. This is a bit sunny. it is sunny outside. it is always sunny. Even the industrial waste lands of the motor city are verdant compared to Colorado these days, smoke filled vistas, desiccated plants, peoples and buildings. An unslakable thirst has swept across the landscape and it feels as if the earth that i had my elbows into is shrinking, becoming eternally frozen in a dreary stasis. Third track, Driving Home, there are but six tracks in total. Rimbaud could describe and compare the industrial wastelands of the middle west and the sterile earth of the Rocky Mountains. Made for mountains not for verdancy. I planted a lovely clump style Prairie Fire Crabapple into the planet yesterday and it was more with hope and faith than with science. The tillage is beige, it's clay, it doesn't breath or lend itself easily to romanticization. If Zola were alive and forced to make a flowery descriptive introduction to live in Westminster, Colorado where the workers toil in inexactly planned technological parks and alongside windswept roadsides he'd consider giving up the gift. There are paintable landscapes on the eastern plains, A long riparian Cottonwood making a fierce stand against the will of nature, the tumbleweed's journey across unnatural boundaries, an emaciated coyote with your neighbour's kitten between its jaws. Fourth song, Cherry Heart. If people still knew how to make movies this could be the soundtrack of a sophisticated style musical set n the glamourous 1970s, perhaps in Gainesville, Florida, along the beach, a single story welling, a young girl at her piano writing songs for a Broadway hit musical and by the time her dream comes true the characters are dressed as lemurs and in spacesuits and on board unicycles in an irradiated Hiroshima. The music is tender and sweet but it hides a darker interior. It does have a touch of the same flowery hope as It's Oh So Quiet! but then that's not Bjork really, is it. If people still remembered how to make movies they'd make more movies like An Angel at my Table. It is so brilliantly uncomfortable to watch. when I was mired in my New Zealand obsession I was drawn to all things NEw Zealand including Janet Frame, well Janet Frame came after the movie and after Sweetie and to Weetabix and eventually to New Zealand itself. All because of a cassette of Kaleidoscope World but the only reason movies are uncomfortable to watch these days is because they are dreadful and uninspired and awful. Really. More of the vocoder succeeded by the most heartfelt seeming vocal immediately after. I do really enjoy this album. It is Sunday, late afternoon, as a child I would be just returning home from Church and the world seemed infinite and hopeful and now it is merely sunny and dormant. There needs to be an awakening, the sun must stop rising in the east, the canopy of stars needs ot be extinguished, something must come about to shake the state of torpor that has anesthetized humanity. Should we send an army to Libya, unite the Greeks and Phoenicians finally? rebuild the ports at Carthage? Tear down the Pyramids and install the terra cotta army in Westminster. yes, yes, yes, let's do all of this and more. Later. After I've planted my new boxwood hedge, after I've eliminated the bindweed that has usurped the bluegrass in the battle for turf prominence and after I've finished listening to the Mummers because they make everything seem lovely and charming and a bit inconsequential.

Certain types will demolish Frankie and the Heartstrings but I love them. They will tear them into little pieces but I will politely sweep them up and put them into my pocket.

Update: Frankie and the Heartstrings Hunger. The title makes me think of Eric Carmen but that is too obvious. The first moments are gentle plucks on a guitar and a distant howl and some background ambience and then whoosh a hoedown, indiepop style. It's straight out of 1985. It's upset because it wasn't included on Sounds of Leamington Spa Volume 8. Short spiky riffs makes listeners wonder if they know enough notes to construct longer ones? Unlikely. Dreamy. Liam Gallagher has attacked Thom Yorke and truly Thom Yorke deserves a scabrous upbraiding but unfortunately Liam Gallagher lacks the wit to deliver it. Sad. I was listening to French Films earlier, before this album, and are the Drums preparing litigation in response? But I am unfashionable and I really enjoy the Drums and I really enjoy French Films. I know, I should be listening to Captured Tracks instead. Perhaps you should be preparing litigation. I am allowed to travel for my job sometimes. On occasion I am allowed to travel to interesting locales, last year to Boston, one year to Nashville, another to Indianapolis which isn't all that interesting but much more interesting than Lubbock. I am heading to Lubbock this Tuesday. I've been to Lubbock once before. Frankie and the Heartstrings might do well in Lubbock actually. They mention Scott Walker, in rethuglican heaven or Texas they'd eat that up. Of course they are mentioning Scott Walker the overrated singer/songwriter but we could instead insist that they mean the other Scott Walker actually. I had had the volume at half-rate, this record is much more exciting at full volume. Second track has some post punk 1983-isms about it, some Josef K, some Fire Engines, but it's smooth and refined and I really enjoy it. I am one equipped with very low standards mind. Those that were there will scoff. Whatever. Stuttered chorus now, or is it the bridge??? Sharp guitars and probably immaculate hairstyles and now a guitar solo in an unaccomplished style, tremendous. Now the Franz Ferdinand aping of Franz Ferdinand's aping of Gang of Four's percussion. This one has some ambition in the arrangement. I spent the afternoon in Idaho Springs. My workmate says his family uses Idaho Springs as a sort of base camp before they later embark to Vail. They need to acclimate themselves to the altitude and to the smugness of all of us healthy Coloradans. Apparently we are the fittest state in the nation. Everyone here is busy running triathlons and scaling 14'ers and being vegan. But, I've mentioned this before, Coloradans are insufferably rude when it comes to basic interactions with fellow human beings. It wasn't like this in Texas. In Texas I met 1 and 1/2" steaks and windmills right in the center of town and a thrill ride final descent into the airport but always with a smile. Women in Texas all have manicured fingernails. Better to pull the rethuglican lever on a diebold I suppose. Lubbock is very very windy, there was a squally when i arrived and the sands of time piled up along the horizon threatening to erase all of the scars of the earth. I was safely ensconced in my hotel room. I am on a national advisory council for a very unimportant cause. Feel proud for me, I know my mother never imagined I would attain such status. Third track, a bit more raucous bootboy-ish, the vocals are Northern Soul-ish, it is all a bit Northern Soul-ish, maybe that is a better descriptor than Post-Punk. But then do I really understand Post-Punk? I was listening to Crocodiles on the bicycle ride home yesterday and Ocean Rain as well since it takes me rather a long time to make it home on my new bicycle and I had a minor thought, a revelation, that perhaps Crocodiles is the greatest post-punk record ever? I know, silly. I am enjoying this song, I like the gang-ish backing vocals. I've now seen photos of the band and they do have glamourous hairstyles and I approve wholly. Not enough bands have nice hair these days. Next track, more raucous non-raucousness, they are essentially a twee bunch of boys with a singer who does a convincing bit of not being posh. I am clapping along out of time. It is very physical music, it makes me move. There are only a very few number of moments remaining for me to enjoy music. I've been very concerned about the radiation from the Fukushima reactor, it has recently been detected in Colorado, and I have ben keeping abreast of the news and discovered that my house emits almost as much radiation as has escaped the plant. I live in a brick house. Bricks are little Fukushima power plants embedded into my walls and when I sleep my head is only inches away from certain meltdown. This evening I will move my bed into the center of the room. I apologize for making light, erm...glow. But I went to a political meeting this week, after avoiding bananas. I went to Jared Polis' community meeting. He is my congressman. Funny that, he seems entirely rational and reasonable, but oh dear his constituents are cracked! The first person to stand up demanded he shut all nuclear plants in US now. Then later came up the tragic story of Bradley Manning's torture(no one was quite specific on the method but my imagination was let loose with thoughts of his being denied access to Tru tv, lean pockets and copies of Mother Jones) and then finally to the request of the immediate impeachment of President Obama by the "i am not an anti-semite but Israel is poisoning Palestinian bananas" contributor. Ha. It was marvelous. Next time I may open my mouth. On the ride home I was rehearsing all of the speeches I meant to make but there were a lot of "older" women with long grey hair. Not a good look. Frankie and the Heartstrings are probably not for the long grey hairs but I bet they read Mother Jones. I can see the boys on a dock somewhere next to a container ship filled with plasma televisions complaining about the lack of action on climate change and how if we increase the taxes on carbon it will inevitably result in utopia. But I forgive them their sins. The fifth song was a bit of a power ballad, very nice. It does sound like Orange Juice. I am not the world's greatest Orange Juice fan. I may be committing apostasy. Under sharia Orange Juice will be banned. Sixth track, a swaggering number, terrific. My common lament is the lack of performance in music these days. The sell-out, the death or glory, the sweaty rapture. I don't think Frankie perspires a great deal while he's performing but at least he's adopted a simulacrum of someone who believes he's the greatest singer in the world during the three minutes of his perfect little pop song universe. More speculation--I would presume that these boys don't have day jobs, they are convinced of their worthiness, walking around the neighbourhood and in the pub telling everyone how they are gonna make it, not like their older brother's band. It doesn't sound tiresome, it sounds romantic. Edwyn Collins does produce the record. So I suppose he could email me later to discuss whether it does sound like Orange Juice. It is not as girly as Orange Juice, a negative, but only slight. Next track. That Postcard. An earnest tribute? Possibly. Earnest is a gruesome epithet. Are you sincere? Madness! If you are sincere you are to be mocked and disdained, better to not feel anything at all, at least not anything deeper than the subcutaneous level. Are these guys earnest? Unknown. They are not the Frank and Walters. Next track, slinkier. Not quite funky but I could see the insincere kids dancing to this. They could be scribbling in their notebooks all of their ironic enjoyments of this song. And then they go to university the following Monday morning and write essays on Joss Whedon. have you been reading Popmatters lately? They are posting 60 essays on the oeuvre of Joss Whedon and while it is of dubious academic value in spite of the numerous citations to other academic expositions of Whedon sometimes, occasionally a real human emotion slips into the prose and despite skepticism about their contentions about the importance of Anne in season 3 of Buffy there is an appreciation that people watched Buffy because it was funny, clever and human. But anyhow. Maybe after reading all of those essays the average Popmatters reader will then pick up a copy of the Economist's most recent Christmas issue about the pointlessness of acquiring a PHD. Second to last track Want You Back, a minor horn at the end, some impassioned outcries, nice. Last track now. This is very polite. I wonder if Coloradans were in fact forced to listen to Frankie and the Heartstrings I might not then enjoy living here more. Now it has turned to a gallop! Oh just a sprint. Impeach Obama! Save Bradley Manning! Stop Sending Aid to Cuba. These are words to live by.