New Still Corners single--

Aye, there is a new Nick Nicely album out.

Update: Buh, cassette only?

Jobriath Creatures of the Street. I will admit to only listening to this because Morrissey listed it as one of his most favorite records. He has also curated a reissue. Morrissey's influence in my life is still supreme. This may need remedying. I do not think for myself. I should. I don't need a mad monk making my life more of a mockery than it is, next he will be pushing beets and criticize my stomach and not my thinking. First track is Heartbeat, a bit of an introduction, on the piano He was a piano prodigy. In line with Graeme Humphreys. In King of Prussia, Pennsylvania piano prodigies may not proliferate. But in King of Prussia there is the canvas to create a persona to last. Interesting people are not born in interesting places. Ah but what of Maria Callas, Whitey Ford, Gouverneur Morris? The exceptions. They were born in New York. I think. New York is more interesting than Denver. Slightly. But they have the rule as well, see Anne Hathaway. She's not interesting. if you are surrounded by fascinating things and exciting moments bloom each and every day then you don't feel compelled to create yourself in antagonism to your environment. I often long for a persona of my own. I needn't wear fairy wings and glittered platform shoes but I need a gay personality. I have a persona. My existence in pixels and lines of resolution is far more riveting than my existence among the bees and the beavers. Ohh La La, now, fueled by people on authentic cocaine, a singer proud to be hairless, guitars made from trees imported from Nepal. What were Jobriath's inhibitions? Did he leave behind a catalog? I would like to know. He seems fearlessly unconcerned about the existence of everyone else on this planet and I marvel at it. i think very little of my fellow earthlings but it isn't because I celebrate myself but rather because I do not celebrate them and their omnipresent mediocrity. This is genius. In fact, the songs are tagged in Itunes with "genius". Brilliant. I bet Thom Yorke would like a persona. He's just a guy with a superfluous consonant. He's dull. Truly. he wasn't born in King of Prussia. I would imagine he was born middle class, how else to explain all of that guilt that strangles? Next track Scumbag. Stuff about formerly famous actors behaving rudely. It's a lark, it's a bit of vaudevillia juvenilia and we love it. The pianos are delicately tricked into subservience. His hairless arms shaken from the cold of indifference. I don't much like anyone on I Love music, I am being very negative, sorry, but one of the oddest things in the world is to display for all of the world your visceral dislike of an unknown glam singer from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. But the following misguided sentiments were posted in search of personal vanity--

"Is he Bowie like ?
If your definition of Bowie is: very gay man who made albums that were supposed to be glamorous and arty rock but which were stubbornly tuneless and did everything but rock."
"This thread is subtitled: Respect not the dead, let's bag on Jobriath."
"His music sort of sucks and is inadvertantly hysterical
I also have to admit I haven't been able to listen to the entire album.

Perfect. An ideal reissue of Jobriath would have included recommendations like these. They would potentially bring in an entirely different audience, like people who always slow down and form a traffic jam on the highway because they want to see the remnants of a multiple car crash."

I used to be almost capable of that sort of vitriol. But it is more brilliant to love. I was listening to the radio yesterday and there was a man who was 31 and had already been the recipient of two heart transplants and now he was ready to join the PGA tour and conquer the world one putt at a time. It was inspiring. I am not much for golf. But he was only slightly more interesting than Thom Yorke. This is Ecubyan and it is marvelous. His pianos out of phase, his voice from a distant galaxy, yes yes he wishes he was a spider from mars. Strings and delicacy, it's very short, most of the songs are very short. I've recently discovered that i should have loved Suede from the beginning. There is a bit of Jobriath in Suede. Good Time. Very good. It's a bit of a glam stomp rocker. Which are the great Glam bands that deservedly received the attention they received while Jobriath ended up on the streets hawking his hairlessness to sustain various illicit habits? Slade? No, they were horrible! Alvin Stardust? No. Heavy Metal Kids? No. Jobriath was the greatest of them all. Or not. probably not, but this album is wonderful. His first is rather good as well. But this has the indulgence he hadn't yet earned but which he expelled furiously in the face of public apathy. Everything on here seems committed and dramatic and intense. Natalie Merchant should listen. You can't turn everythign in life into a glam stomp rocker but it would be more fun if you tried. Walk into a payless shoestore with an elephant trunk hanging from your left nipple and a saxophone slung across your back and ask for a pair of shoes three sizes too small for your feet and then go home and sit at the piano and write a bouncy little ditty about it and sing it as if it is the most important thing in the world ever. Do it, now! And really is New York that interesting? People make places and Denver is uninteresting because the people here are unsure of what it means to be a person in Denver whereas in New York I think the atmosphere of zeitgeist overwhelms most and it is this patina that New Yorkers wear that is only visible to those outside of their little bubble covered metropolis and like the remnants of the brown clouds that hover ovr Denver it causes asthma and cooties to non-natives. What a Pretty just finished, a glamourous fairy tale, a pean to style of substance. It was a very short pean. Liten Up, the ode to Thom Yorke. When he played Glastonbury did he feel the collective exhortation to action? while half of his audience was texting their friends, or twittering strangers, or uploading photos to facebook to advertise the fact that they are being condescended to by Mr Thom Yorke. collectivists trust crowds. They haven't read Wilfred Trotter. In Boulder the collectivists are banning sugary snacks from city owned vending machines. This is done to save you from yourself. The difficulty in collectivism is of course aligning the interests of the group with the majority of individuals. It is why collectivism so often turns into totalitarianism. You need to force consensus at the end of a barrel. But anyhow, Jobriath was surely a collectivist. He hasn't read Lysander Spooner. But his music is individualist. His music is odd and expansive and I love it and I forgive and Thom Yorke for wanting to save me. Next track, Gone Tomorrow. I saw the other piano prodigy of my record collection Graeme Humphreys once play a set of torch songs while inebriated to people who were lucky enough to have avoided the Dead C in Dunedin. It was pianos and laughs and people whispering in my ears all of the secrets to Richard Feynman's hearts desires. And invites to skipping pebbles on a beach and it was dreamy and romantic. And with military attache bags filled with those same pebbles that disappeared along with shoreside remnants from two other continents and there was a leak from my being, a discharge to rudimentary existence and now that I've listened to the golfer with three hearts and Jobriath and Bachelorette and thrilling electrical storms outside my window I am changed. I am singing along to Jobriath, with his well coiffured backup singers and the tingling guitars and 2001:A Space Odyssey effects and the world is at our feet. Last track, a reprise, a summation of all of the highlights, by rights it is about 28 minutes too short at 2:53 but when we move to King of Prussia because ethanol subsidies have led to global armageddon and Des Moines is the most powerful enclave in a desolate post apocalyptic wasteland we'll search for the foot prints in history and see if our soles can endure.

Dustin O'Halloran Lumiere. Dustin O'Halloran is only slightly older than I am. He lives in Berlin. Sarah Kirkland Snider won the best classical record of the year with her tribute to Spoonfed Hybrid. Will this be so honored? It is classically minded or it is merely classical. It is at these moments when my complete lack of qualification for discussing music becomes most apparent. A Great Divide, starts as if emerging from the vacuum. Twinkles and the harmony of the spheres, randomly assorted searching for a symmetry to be displayed in all directions. Slowly it comes into form, rumbles on a piano, a gamma ray burst amplifies the moment, and then strings sigh and we melt. Would it be easier to construct a drawing or diagram of the music A map to the human heart alighted from the designer? I am not sure. I am able, usually, to fake my way through it. I make mention of some bright young thing or a Mitford and distract you from the fact that I am unable to describe such startling beauty. The opening track is revelatory, it is gorgeous. A classical fiend would find it difficult to stifle a yawn but we mere plebeians are taken aback, the breath is stolen from our lungs so that we remain speechless and our hearts beat in sympathy to the disturbances in the air that surround us and comfort us from the desolation of modern isolation. Music is insulation. Music allows you to head out into the frigid world of human relationships. A prophylactic against misery. Perhaps this is an uncommon view, perhaps people wear headphones on trains and become only slightly aware of the world around them because of habit or anti-social behaviour. But for us, for us it is an innoculant. It is a thesaurus worth of defense. Second track, shorter, an interlude, for piano. He is in Devics as well. Devics singer makes solo records. It is not the same. She's forced to words to describe her emotional state. This is candid, unswerving, less prone to interpretation. There is a universality to the emotion of music that cannot be captured by the written word. It is when I lament over reading Baudelaire in English. It is what Heloise and Abelard avoided and what has allowed them to reach across the void for nearly 1000 years by writing of the art of amoris. It is Emmy Noether working under the withering effects of inequlity to prove the power of symmetry. And these works allow images to be conjured quickly in even the weakest minds such as my own. Emmy Noether toiling under candlelight, undernourished, undeservingly banished, while a young student surprised to discovr a very different David Hillbert and under a spell by the catholic nature of mathematics and its twin--Music. It's almost resembling a compulsory event in figure skating, the required elements, the routine that is somehow made more effortless by the truly gifted, injected with passion and soul and brought to flower when mediocrity would only lead to the mundane. Emmy Noether does not exist anymore. Except in pages where she flits between her proofs and your briefly glimpsed remembrances. Where some might fall for Heloise others might find in Emmy or Hypatia even the stuff of enduring happiness. There are violins and cellos and pianos and it's so incredibly beautiful. It leads to thoughts of beautiful things and these thoughts lead to pleasure. I was speaking to someone about mathematics and how it should be taught. This record is mathematics and that is not meant as a denigration. Most beautiful things in nature and most lovely things created by human hands are symmetrical and mathematics is about discovering that underlying symmetry. A sort of edifice to construct everything upon, a double helix, a spiral galaxy, it doesn't lose in wonder by understanding the rules that govern its design. I think it is with a sense of loss that too often the leap is made from understanding to speculating on the cause or the motivation. Philosophy discovers things that are unknowable and offers conjecture without proof. Abstract mathematics discovers things that are previously unknowable and previously impossible and offers proof of sui generis. But this record is a basic document. It is mostly filled with empty spaces, nearly a vacuum but bursting forth from the empty spaces is radiance and live giving warmth and the design may have seemed by providential accident but it only seemingly. It has fallen away, now to a less precise rendering on a piano, the human divide, the divorce of human behaviour and probability. The strings reappear and together two halves with but a tenuous tether between them drifting in concentric orbits around a center of gravity. Opus 43. Devics were never this magnificent. I am absolutely fond of Devics. I saw them live. They played the Gothic Theater here, they opened for the Czars. Sara Lov had a flower pinned in her shocking blonde hair and it was torch songs and it was symmetry and it was touching and I was head over heels. I thought of telling my parents that I had seen the woman I was meant to be with for the rest of my life. With her megaphone on Heaven Please and her well pressed skirt and fashionable footwear I was mute and she was not winnable and we have met but once ever since that moment. Quintette N.1, discrete packets of music all in a row, a pulsed beam of elegance until near the midpoint when all o the elements combine to create a colloid, a compound of endearing sympathy. It takes bravery to fill a record mainly with space, to place the emphasis on one element at a time. In records where the effect is a collage it is easy to miss the moments that are off, the mistakes that are not excised, when you have the music stripped to the barest elements there is more clarity in the examination. If I knew anything at all about playing the piano or a violin's vibrato I could make a superior assessment of each because of the easy witness granted. But I am unknowing. I am not proud. Next track, a double tracked piano, by clever effects geographically removed from each other, a string section enhances the scene. It is music in search of a visual to anchor it, spinning in time with an affinity for direction. But at the same time the imagery that is engendered is resplendent. Twinkles and bells and distant tones, it is magnificent. He is making another record for release soon. He has other solo records. I am sadly lacking. It builds upon itself, a cascade, a cataract...hmm...cataract is not quite right. The inefficiency of language. I sometimes make light of the fact that official French has but 50,000 words where English is up over 988,000. is this why Gide compared the French language to pedals on a piano, the precise tone available by having a limited number of options as analog to the musical scale. Is this record an analog then to the French language and something more bombastic and ludicrous is English. possibly. I would not be diminished in stature if I were to roam the streets of some charming french country village with a boombox on my shoulder rudely blaring Dustin O'Halloran to the residents. The local agrarian collective/committee for public safety would require that children be let free from their bourgeois classes where they might learn the basic of Cantor's theorem, if third graders had ambition, and they would adopt rustic behaviours and commune with the land and give thanks to Lev Bronstein for all that is good. Last track has been playing for a few minutes, rain song, the gentlest piano and pain as portrayed in a string flourish held high above the clouds. This is theoretical music. It takes a gifted mind to understand group theory beyond the duels for love and inherent madness and while it does not require the same for loving Dustin O'Halloran it sets this record apart from the Giorgio Tuma because while this is a monument to nature as described by humans Giorgio is a monument to humans as inscribed in nature.

Wintercoats has uploaded a couple more beautiful songs--

Wintercoats

His first EP is still available for free download. It's a bit Spoonfed Hybrid, a trifle Durutti Column, something like Cody, etc...Really very lovely.

I am to be yelled at disapprovingly at work tomorrow. I always am when I return from vacation. I should not take any vacations. I will keep Lightning Seeds songs in my head all day long.

Cats on Fire Dealing in Antiques. Cats on Fire are the greatest indiepop band in the world. I know, that is something akin to saying I am the greatest American futboler on the planet. But even the might Cats on Fire can not make Your Woman interesting. Why was this a world conquering hit? Did Jyoti make a mint and spend it on thrift store furniture and gym memberships? I would hope so. It's not got a hook, it isn't particularly catchy, I forget it a mere moment after it ends. I don't understand. Teach me. I didn't mind Hair Like Alain Delon, how thrilling if that had been the hit. But it was not. Song over, goodness. Goodness comes next, Poor Students Dream of Marx, just genius! Really. I could be even less articulate and say just awesome! Really. It's folky, it's sophisticated and smart and perhaps its the image of them that I have in my head of very dapper and composed sorts who seem rather keen on the occupation of pop star. They are the world's tiniest pop stars. They are tall, slender, well dressed, outspoken and the music is perfectly composed. There is this brilliant blend of insecurity and confidence. They have probably never played before more than 100 people. Maybe once or twice, but not three times. They certainly do not make any money. But it's youth and youth is meant for poverty and adventure. The drummer has left. Next track, Never Land Here. Another beautiful pop song. The chorus makes hearts tingle. The drummer has left. I mentioned that a few moments ago. He has another band. Burning Hearts. Everyone else loves them. Why would you leave Cats on Fire then? He does sound like Morrissey. Others will make claim otherwise. English as a second language is no impediment. He's particularly clever. Why then are they not to be disparaged by us as part of the professional clique of European indiepop bands? I don't know. I don't have any hard and fast rules for love, we make them up as we go along. I love many things about this song, the words, the chorus, the 60s garage rock riff. It's wonderful. Will the new drummer ruin them? Doesn't the guitar player play drums in Le Futur Pompiste anyhow? I don't know if anyone loves the last Le Futur Pompiste record. Fourth track, Marr-ied to the jangle, monotonic vocals but it's all in character. Some near virtuosity on the guitar. Were I a teenage girl I might find it worthwhile to follow Cats on Fire around the planet while they toured. Keep a diary, list every song they ever play, follow them to diners and barber shops collect things not ruminated upon, locks of hair, discarded match books. Keep a collage, become a doyenne of the Anorak bulletin board. It will be marvelous, sing like Morrissey as the song ends. Next track, folky, spare, lovely. They aren't cute for cute's sake, they have more depth than that. I may be giving them too much credit. The last record was a disappointment until I listened to it and now I love it. I keep mentioning love. I have all of this love in my heart, it is hidden beneath layers of titanium and peat moss. I can express it to the fates, to pop songs, to the stars above but not to anyone in particular. This is a collection of oddities or rarities or some such. It is as good as their last 2 records. You should buy this album and then buy the other two as well. But do not buy them from Matinee. Buy them from someone else. Next track, dizzy acoustic guitar, his languid vocals, his class, his politeness. When teenaged girls do follow them and they do come to Denver in June they would notice the snowfall on June 20th! It did not snow in the city, no, but the mountains are deluged. The bicycle track was closed due to high water. I rode in my car. It was snowing, no, but it was raining. I haven't any fenders. Fenders seem uncool. I am not normally concerned with my appearance but my bike has a peculiar unattractiveness and fenders might simply interrupt the equilibrium in my head and heart. I love my bicycle. I've never had such a lovely bicycle. I say bicycle always, never "bike". I love Andrew Brough. Do not get misunderstand. This is much better than Bike ever were. Delicate acoustics, mandolin?, piano, his voice, so nice. It's circular. Emmy the Great should attend a Cats on Fire gig. There is something about a band willing to perform. Isn't there? There is. The songs are rather terrific and he could get by by phoning it in, but he does not. This one starts off a bit Twisterella. Always with the "a bit". No more! This site is turning dreadfully mediocre. Is it my recent prolificness? Have I turned into Robert Pollard? Just the way he, Matthias, sings 'I don't know why I keep trying' is wonderful. He's excited about his beautiful songs, I'd be thrilled by them, he wants to inhabit them to make you care about them and when each night after he has sung them to a half empty room to continue sending out signals to the ether hoping for a less desperate response. I don't know where theses songs have came from apart from the ether, I think some of them were the demos that were forever available from their website back when I was still on dial-up and had pseudo-integrity. I was very anti downloading when I was incapable. Now that my neighbours have shared their good fortune I am less principled. This song is My Friend In Comfortable Chair, that may not be the title. It is very Smiths, it is very 1985. Wouldn't it be brilliant were it very 1885? Time machines and steam fairs and blocks of ice stored in hay bales. There is a rush to the words, they make sense, they belong in the places they are placed in. That was a sentence that didn't mean anything at all but I am prone to those. Next track. You Will Find Me Where You Left Me. Slower. Did they not have a drummer then? Female voice. She's no competition. No Soulangeana. i do not have these sophisticated blooms. I am possessor of mere Violas and Peonies and Snapdragons. The Star Lillies from bulbs have poked their heads above the horizon but they are not in bloom, late bloomers, the same as me. And now the drums, epic drums, Morrissey croons, female accompaniment, delightful. Does he mind my comparing him to Morrissey? Morrissey is the archetype, no? It is like a poet being compared to Shelley. It is like a ballplayer being compared to Roberto Clemente. It is like a summer's day being compared to you. Martial drums, lagging vocals, winded things, more female accompaniment. Even when he seems undressed, haggard, undone it still sounds so magnificently effortlessly pop. Do they write a great number of songs or are all of the songs this fantastic. Are drummers important? I listened to Ride on the ride home today and Loz Colbert is important. He is god king of the shoegazing universe. Have you heard Kaleidoscope? Funny because the rest of the are somewhat ordinary. We are all mostly ordinary. This is why we celebrate the extraordinary. Vicariously. I've heard this song before. The original version? Higher Grounds. I was once convinced that this was the superior version but no longer, the album version is much improved. It isn't much changed. None of this "the demo was the bomb" nonsense for us, no. We are men/man of the people. Interesting that this has much more going on as far as the music goes but the performance is not as thrilling as on the more rudimentary tracks. I could be misinterpreting everything. He might be, curse of all things, ironic. I don't think it is possible. Next track. I'd to be compared to Morrissey, except to when it comes to animal rights. He's oddly anti-human. Humans are awful, certainly, but I wouldn't want to live among the baboons even after a night's amarula debauchery. This track is They Produced a Girl, sounds like an early one? Sounds like he was recorded in the broom closet down the hall with a sock puppet over the microphone. He does really sound like Morrissey. No? I keep asking you questions, when will you answer me? The words are not soporific or selfish or insular, it;s effervescent and trilling. I visualize the facial expressions he has made all of the times he has sung this song, they change regularly, he isn't pained or expressive but quirky, effusive, athletic. He's got very nice hair. At the moment my own hair is very long, I am resisting the efforts from work mates to give it a trim, I am having romantic getaways in my locks, dreams of mud flaps gone by. Next track, another I have heard before. i think this was on the first official EP. It was not on the first official LP. Was it? Another louder and more spirited number. Surely he writes these for the boys in the band, for cardio, for the girls in the balcony, for the floorboards underneath. It's physical because it has a treacly garage organ. There isn't anything sinister at all about them but they seem subversive. Their pleasing hygiene, the chiming guitar chords, the handsomeness, it's all very underhanded. Pipas love Cats on Fire. We've already told you how smart Pipas are. It's racing now, the organ, the end. Next track is chiming, very much so, I've called other things chiming but none this much. I hadn't been aware of this one before this record. It's maybe not my favorite track on the album and yet it is still almost marvelous. Who would be their ideal drummer? I am not certain. It will need to be a dapper sort, a swell, a haircut in well tailored jeans. He'll possibly need to play the drums but we've already established that the guitar player plays drums in another band. I could be drummer but I don't have any nice clothes actually. I could write the website and describe the new drummer as Anthony Perkins in Friendly Persuasion. Is that not suave? It is. This is a bit of a lament, dirge-y, it's a b-side too marvelous to be forgotten and placed under the short leg. He's fond of the lyrical dash, we're fond of him. Am I a teenage girl? Possibly. If I would let the world in on my secrets I might have teenage girls telling their middle aged mothers to stop convulsing over me. But I am hidden in the undergrowth, I have the tall poppy syndrome. This song is wonderful. I keep saying that as well but then there are very many songs and not so many adjectives available on an empty head. I hope the water on bicycle trails recedes enough for Ride your Bicycle to Work day. The worst day in the world for we "serious" bicyclists. I ride early enough that I will not be adversely affected but I feel sad for the spandex militia bobbing and weaving and risking their lives with the raging Platte on their right and 364 days a year sedentary joiner on their left. I am not a joiner. This song is Draw in the Reins, it was not on the first album, perhaps it should have been, it's amazing. Oh wait, it was, ha. This version is better. Crooner mode has been activated, female admirer has been discovered, Happiness is Chemistry. Is this a cover? This title seems familiar. i googled, it appears to be an original. It is very nice and original. They seem an anachronism, they seem thoroughly unmodern. Conservative. Brendan O'Neill lamented over the Smiths conservatism. He is mad. They were classical. They were nostalgic. But Johnny Marr is hardly conservative, Morrissey as protagonist is humorous and not a musical conservative. Yes yes, we know they are also the dreaded oh so serious collectivists but we can overlook that in the Smiths as well as in Cats on Fire. Why is it that so many musicians are collectivists? I don't think it is the existence inside of a band that conditions them to such thinking, a band is a gang and a gang feels isolated from the larger world. when Cats on Fire is on stage and being mocked for their fey manners and delicate features and tender pop tunes they are not feeling part of the greater human consciousness. They are reacting against it. always turned towards the wind, breaking through the resistance because to ride with the tide would mean death or mediocrity. This track is different. Is it a different singer? It is a bit more nasal. Mike Joyce? Andy Rourke? Innes Phillips? Last track, too short, really. There are 20 tracks but there needs to be 25, at least. This is the free single. The toss away. The Hague. I will listen to the lyrics because that is a portentous title. A lament for the travails of a war criminal denied his conjugal rights? A story of war criminal tourism? 'The moral of my parents they weren't hollow after all and nowadays I live just a little bit above my friends'. I may have transcribed that last line incorrectly. This is gentle and lovely. Always. Will the world collapse in on them and give rise to cynicism or will their hearts remain pure?

Emmy the Great Virtue. Dinosaur Sex. It is meant to rain this evening. I am very excited for the rain. Emmy the Great is possibly music to be best listened to during inclement weather. It's delicate but tense, fragile but filling, and really the closest comparison I can make on the first track is Moose. Yes, Moose! The music, at least, it has that same polish, that same elegance and perfection that was present on those records where Moose was derided for being too too pretty. I often complain about things being far too pretty. Actually, I don't. "and dinosaur sex led to nothing", hmmm...Pram once sang about transparent dinosaurs. Emmy wrote this under the influence of heartache, apparently, I don't receive the press releases but I have seen a few reviews of the record already and her fiance departed for the lord. Which? I am not certain if it was Jesus or Allah or Gaia. Is there not room in one's life for religion and love and marriage and happiness? I was recently reading that Annie from Elastica is exceedingly religious now as well. Perhaps Annie was engaged to Emmy? That would have made for interesting pop music, surely. I would not leave my love for Jesus or Allah or Gaia. I haven't been in love for a very long time. I haven't walked in the rain with someone I love for a very long time. I saw a y-jack for headphones yesterday while I was perusing the aisles at Best Buy and I thought of words I had exchanged where discussions turned to sharing a y-jack and listening to music on headphones together. It seemed romantic, it was silly. Second track, not very Moose-like. She's a folkie. Somewhat traditional. She is being handsomely praised for this album in some quarters. Hmm...I think maybe I enjoyed the first one more. Glamourous backing vocals, professional, the words could be clever. I should listen. But real music reviewers will cover the lyrics. Why is it that they focus so much on the lyrics? I suppose it is easier to dissect their meaning to interject subtext and inferences where none exist than to misinterpret so freely a guitar strum or drum fill. "And when the drum fill comes in now he's making a statement on the NLRB's decision to not allow Boeing to flee the union utopia for the backwater of South Carolina". My parents live in South Carolina, they were meant to be first on the lot to purchase a dreamliner from Boeing when they actually finished one. Now where will they buy their jumbo jet? China, exactly! Third track, oh this has started off very nice. There is a bit of 10000 Maniacs in her. I love 10000 Maniacs, or at least their first two records. The songs may be too long here. Because the pleasing introduction hung about for a bit too long and now the chorus is a bit understated and dull. Yes, the first record was more charming. She's older now, she's been told she's charming and clever and wonderful and beautiful and intelligent. Surely she is. But it isn't good to hear such things. I tend to avoid people when they are going to compliment me. I tend to delete my blog when I am aware that people are reading it. I tend to disappear. The chorus isn't unlovely, it's just a bit mundane and the Moose-y echoey guitar strum has returned and is she a fan of Moose? Have they granted her permission? I hope so, but given the choice of course we'd rather have a Moose album. Next track, more spartan seeming folk, words coming frantically, it's kinda ok, oh, now it is very nice, triangles, mentions of the rapture, pretty. She mentioned religion a fair amount on the first record. I had a discussion with my parents about religion and accused my father of only toting his bible when he became ill. He admitted to it. But I think my father has a hidden complexity and depth that he will not reveal to anyone. I often believe that I am not at all similar to him because he is outgoing and friendly to strangers and I shrink in comparisons and he has blonde hair and blue eyes and I am darkly complected and my oldest brother looks now exactly as my father did 30 years ago and I look exactly like my mother did 30 years ago. I have wicked right handed slapshot from the slot and my father has a surgical left-handed wrist shot from the top of the circle. This one is circularly rhythmic and complex. It may not be complex. This record may be better than the first one. it has been ages since i have listened to the first one. Let's be honest. I'd rather listen to the 10000 Maniacs. It's her voice, it's uninteresting. It's not excessively petty, it isn't gut wrenching, it isn't ethereal. She's meaty. But she's pork steak. This is rudimentary folk music at the moment, Cassandra. She's got more depth in her being, surely. These could be profound statements but honestly the words don't intrigue me, I hear a lot of mundane expressions all strung in a row. "what use is love if it always passes?". I'm uncertain. "what use is life to those who are not living?" that's sub-Chris Martin. why is this being so deeply praised then? Unknown. I do enjoy this record. next track, high hat, they're giving me the high hat. She isn't very old. She's older than Alessi's Ark. She's less interesting. Is it because Alessi writes her material more naturally, expelling whatever it is that comes into her art while Emmy means to be interesting? Are pop lyrics meant to be interesting? I read an interview with Robert Scott and he had a brilliant attitude that he writes lyrics about anything he wants and so his absurdity is organic and charming. Emmy had an agenda, seemingly, we hark back to Jesus and perhaps she is railing against the void? it is a timid wail, if thus, but it could be that she's trying to answer her own questions. it doesn't appear to be all that interesting actually. It is like when bands attempt to build bombast and it falls flat see A Northern Soul when really they should just let things come out and present themselves as whatever they are see A Storm in Heaven. This is a dirge, it's dull. The music is dull, her voice is dull. I am being too unkind. It may be my state of mind, I've just watched some dreadful adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray with Colin Firth and it has made me deeply unhappy. it's an amazing novel, we all agree, but there is a psychological torment to accompany the hedonism but in the movie it is overwhelmed, the senses indulge in the flesh and the soul of the movie disappears. There isn't any hedonism on display here. it's a suburban existence. She may live in the big city but it is thrift stares on tree lined avenues and beach access and green belts. I don't feel it is her life lived. i shouldn't have discovered the back story, this is semi-jaunty but it's dull. That is the operative word. It is lovely but isn't near lovely enough to be not compelling. Now is the fall away, the climax, I am not intrigued. There are still 3 more tracks. The songs are far too long. This is brilliantly constructed. I am far too unkind. I hope it isn't about Sylvia Plath. Is it? "there is a country made of telegrams and tail coats and no one to grieve for it", huh? Aren't folk songs meant to be informative? She is an imitation, her music a six-time photocopied facsimile. She'll be on the Brits performing this year, surely. Do I lament her professionalism? No. Perhaps. No. Yes? It's just so mannered and held within this narrow range of emotion and intensity. Does she get angry? I would like to hear her anger on tape. This is all so dear and harmless, her diary pages with silhouettes of care bears and ten speed bicycles. I want mutations and pandemics. Or actually more of how it is now, it's pop music, she isn't so concerned with exposition and just singing rather nicely at the top of her range and there are chiming guitar chords and now pianos and percussion and it is genius. Which song is this? Exit Night/Julia's Theme. I haven't idea who is meant to be Julia and the beginning was k-rub but it finished very nicely. Well done Emmy! My opinion means so very little. next, a quiet one, hey she does have some range. Why has she not allowed it to escape more freely until now? Oh, this is the same song, this must be Julia's bit. Excellent! It had a bit of Monica Queen in it. She is rather a good songwriter I think, she isn't much of a performer. Next track, country-ish, travelogue, cliche cliche cliche, blah blah blah, I am being lazy. If Cortney Tidwell was singing this it might be rather good. But Cortney is buffing wood floors with Kurt Wagner somewhere else. I keep wishing that other people sang other people's songs. There are possibly more good songwriters than performers especially in indie. These are wonderful songs, but she can't deliver on their promise. This has a bit of Paula Frazer in it as well. It has ben many years since I saw Paula play live. I can still recall it vividly because it has a visceral impact because of the depth of her performance. It wasn't the turn of phrase. It is the fact that I am convinced by Paula Frazer or Cortney Tidwell or even Alessi's Ark because they have a unique means of expressing themselves. Emmy does not, she oculd be mistaken for anyone on the Indietracks stage. Her songs shine. She's a lilac or a peony when all we long for is a Dendrobium. Last track, Trellick Tower, piano and voice, it's the same as most of what has already come to pass. The lyrics seem to address her situation quite literally. Kristin Hersh it is not. Hmmm...I think I need to listen to the first record once again. Do I love the first record? I thought I did. I am having doubts.

Orwell Continental. Orwell gone pop. I won't reiterate my previous laments about Phoenix. I should. But I will not. All of this is in English. It will not be allowed into Quebec then. I can see the apparatchiks in Bell Canada, I believe that it is still called Bell Canada, working feverishly to sever all lines of communication to protect the gentle ears of the population of Quebec from the endemic spread of anglo-pop even if it does originate in France. My mother is French-Canadian. I am not certain that she is a huge fan of Orwell. Probably not. I mention my mother's ethnicity often. it means that I am to at least some degree a frog. I am a dissident. My parents left for their long journey home early this morning. Colorado is on the far eastern edge of the mountain time zone and so sunrise is around 5AM. Very early. It aids me in my bicycling endeavours across the platte each morning. My parents visit for one week and I revert to the son they know. I am amorphous. I can adopt different personas based on the situation. I played in a softball game on Friday and I was Jock me. I hit a home run and made a diving stop but we still lost but only just. Second track, acoustic guitar and soft voice, I love Orwell. This is a lovely pop record, perhaps he was inspired by the breakout success of Fugu when he recorded his bubblegum pop record. That record was genius, absolutely, you ignored it, Fugu is probably washing dishes in an Applebys. After softball I came home and was Fox news watching son. All during the week I was golf playing son. I could be a serviceable golfer. It is a curse. I am athletic. As I am also now very old I have to prepare to prevent pulls of quadriceps and tendons and egos. When my parents left I turned back into recluse son. I don't say anything all day long. I make an effort at silence. I am saving my words. There is a limit that is granted each soul as it departs the guf on sparrow's wings. I learned this from Demi Moore. This track is lovely, it's bouncy, mid-tempo, harpsichord-ish, jaunty, delightful, in english, it is all in English and so I will not repeat the folly of my Arnaud Fleurent-Didier interpretation when I ascribed to him all sorts of nefarious motives when really he's just very odd. I love him even more. Now an electric piano-ish sort of thing, slinking, sliding, warm and nice. Now are these digital strings? I reviewed the last Orwell record and I was contacted by their manager afterwards. He was a one man concern back then but I am led to believe that he has recast the outfit as an actual band. They wear matching red stars over their hearts, vote in concert for Olivier Besancenot and smoke near the entrance of the Grand Palais. Are these digital strings? An echo. It's very much in line with this sort of thing, the Orwell thing, the Fugu thing, the Chut thing, a crystalline, delicate, filamentous pop that endears itself to me so easily. Now to cheap drum machines. More english. Was he poetic in French? He is not in English. I am unable to read in French. I own several books by French poets but have only ever experienced these poems in English. It isn't the same,t eh words seem dressed up, inhibition poured upon, nuance discarded. Antonin Artaud must be more brilliant in French. I could send these books to Andrew Sullivan and he could pause from his journey up Sarah Palin's uterus and read them to me in the original French. It would make all of the difference. I wonder if my parents know who Andrew Sullivan is? They receive nearly all of their news from Fox news. We had a philosophical argument where they were attempting to convince me that somehow their needed to be a national consensus on morality or else this country was doomed. I argued that it is the compulsion against personal conscience that has led to most totalitarian excesses and murder and they didn't seem to agree with me. Orwell has not yet addressed this on this record. I am being patient. I am certain that he will. But state compulsion of personal conscience be it for religion or any other sort of ideology is the nose under the tent. And then I said truly it is all down to private property rights. Bertolt Brecht was brought up. They agreed. Slightly. But when the government makes claim on the air we are all heading in to the basement. This is a slower track, it reminds me, to be fair, of the Allen Clapp solo record. Obviously he is not so nerdy and his voice is more appealing but it has that cosmic piano bar feel going on so far. There is the piano, in the foreground, his voice multi-tracked, and vintage Todd Rundgren sound effects to round out the track. Nice. Now to the track Eastern, more of the tinny drum machine. It is a recession, we may not have been able to qualify for a loan for the more spectacular beat package He could have gone to the showroom and asked for the Will.I.AM package and was told he only qualified for the government subsidised MC 900 Ft Jesus package. I don't mind. Drum machines should sound rustic in my world. They should have cobwebs floating in the dappled sunlight. Is this an instrumental? Pianos, fake harpsichords, drum machines, loveliness, some harmony vocals at a distance. Very nice, a bit reminiscent of a Giorgio Tuma track perhaps. I am also waiting patiently for the Giorgio Tuma revolution to begin. Musicians will be exposed to his new record and be drawn into a vortex of pop majesty and wonderment. There have been many lovely records released this year actually. This one. Others. This track started off as a gentle pastoral ode and has been layered into a more robust type of cumulus cloud chamber pop. A hypnotic keyboard motif. A repetitive vocal, very Stereolab, it is all very hypnotic. Non French speakers of the world will feel superior to the masses in several Arrondisements that will lie ignorant of such beauty. I am inspired to travel to France and describe the loveliness of the sentiments on this record, even if perhaps they do not exist, to the greater population of France. I am just dreadful. I could travel to Laval instead. I love the French. Truly. i visited a beautiful French restaurant with a very kind person recently and had mussels and cheese. It was a delightful evening. This could have been the eclectic soundtrack to my having mistaken bowls of mussels for very large bowls of soup. Gazpacho! But that is Spain. We are spending this evening in France. Durutti has just been talked out of his raid on the national Bank. Whew. This is the only reason that I read, so that I may make incoherent references to whatever it is that I am reading at the time of my varied musical infatuations. This track is a bit modern seeming, almost club-ish. Wailing guitars or electronics now, a drum machine preset, vanilla vocals but it is still very good. His voice is not distinctive. It is pleasant. The words are not distinctive, they are diverting. Whereas Fugu seemingly bleeds his heart across all of these tracks this is more professional. I don't mind professionalism. If this were American I might mind. If this was Liam Hayes I might mind. Why doesn't he release records? I saw him play live once. He is exceedingly talented. I think he is aware of this. This may be his problem. He might be best served by a move to the continent. A bit more interesting drum machine/sampler patter to open Them. It starts off a bit singer-songwriter-ish. I keep describing everything as something-ish, my apoliges, I get into ruts. It is difficult to type whatever comes out of your head and not have it rotate in circles and be reminiscent of what you wrote from the same head only a few days before. I haven't written anything at all this week. My parents do not inspire me. My father could be a muse. He's had a remarkable run of bad luck and doesn't seem to have let it bring him down. He is without his left eye now. He had a very large portion of skin from his back removed and affixed to his face by surgery. It resembled a foreskin. Truly. But he has had several surgeries since and they have reduced the genital nature of his face. Soon he will wear an eye patch. I was hoping he would have a tattoo applied either of an eye or of an eye patch. Tattoos are so passe though, he declined my proposal, he is much too hip. My parents may be more hip than I am, in spite of their rejection of Glen Beck. I am unhip and unaware. I am buried in the early 20th century with Jean Marais and Nijinsky and Tristan Tzara and I don't mind. Every time I turn on the radio I hear David Mamet and he is never discussing Orwell. He mentions Wilfred Trotter though and Gustave Le Bon. I would like to be able to inject those two names in my everyday correspondence and conversation but I find the opportunities to are somewhat difficult to come by. A Long Way to the Start, strings, these seem real, are they real, I think they are real. Now the drum machine. Drum machines and strings are the future of music. Ask Bjork. She may be on NPR at the moment debating David Mamet about nationalising geothermal resources beneath Iceland. La Pasionaria as an elf. This is a charming pop song. I like it. Where my father's missing eye went he is unsure. I would have kept it as a souvenir. I have photos of my brain. When I had a seizure once they took several photos of my brain. It is unremarkable, as you can ascertain by perusal of this website, but I find it beautiful especially when juxtaposed against the titanium screws and plates in my jaw. It feels as if I have created a Maginot Line, a defense against intruders, a reinforcement of the blood-brain barrier to keep encephalitis out, to keep dementia at bay, to stop CJD cold. Short track now, this may be the third instrumental track, again it reminds of Allen Clapp. I am going to assume this was unintentional and I may be the only one to make that leap. Allen is not sophisticated or European or cool but he is charming and earnest and stripped of the barrier of language these tracks fall gently in line with those descriptors. Last track, gentle, rolling, last track pastoral travelogue, beautiful. he recently played live with Amor De Dias. it must have been a wonderful evening. Orwell in tee shirts and flip flops and Amor De Dias in the rain. Echoey chorus. How is this effect achieved? Dreaded compression? I am going to revert to writing an entry nearly every day, be forewarned. It will be mainly concerning the Spanish Civil War for the next couple of weeks, I am halfway through more than 1000 pages. I can't read when my parents are here, I feel pretentious. Better to be obnoxiously pseudo-literate in private. I have found this to be a universal truth. But when friends ask me about Orwell, if I had any, I will tell them he should be shared in great helpings and his loveliness is but another universal truth.

Have been playing host to visitors. More soon.

Update: Playing Giorgio Tuma for my mother. I think it is love. Of course it is.

Would Be Goods Eventyr. The last entry was over a band I didn't much care for. It isn't that they are Canadian. I have sympathies in that direction. Now I will talk about the Would Be Goods. Even though I am leery because Jessica Griffin is much more sophisticated and intelligent than me. Most people are. First track, a delight, it's jangly, it's smart, her voice is arch and uncommonly English. Now a buzz saw guitar solo. Momtchiloff? I would like ot use his name as an exclamation! Is he still in Would Be Goods? He's surely terrifically suave and interesting, having travelled from Amelia Fletcher's orbit to Jessica Griffin. Like climbing free of the Alongonquin Round Table and ending up at court with Madame De Pompadour. It's smashing, a blast. Second track, a bit more of a stroll, still very English. Is she aware of her Englishness? At moments while adrift you might consider whether she really did escape from the frames of A Room With a View. Lucy Honeychurch's well studied but unseen tennis partner. Is she proud of her Englishness? I am possibly aware that her French is very refined. But then isn't that all too English? I am reading a bit about the Spanish Civil War. I am enjoying the tale of Louis Fischer. He was from the Nation and yet he was a partisan. How much more thrilling would newsmagazines be if they didn't pretend to be objective? Especially for the more hawkish types like Mark Steyn to take up arms on the side of choice and then write of their experiences. Staff memebers of National Review lined up in opposition to staff members of the New York Times. Not as an Ernie Pyle but as a Kleber or better yet a Junger born anew and absolutely intoxicated by the murder and death and all of the accompanying excitement of armed conflict. The English come off as a bit of a gang of boobies. Eden especially. The end of empire, when a country whose actual importance in the grander scheme of things has diminished but their self opinion has grown in stature. There was still India. There were far off places of empire to have a grand adventure on. Now? There is not. Where to find the next Kipling? The next Burgess? David Mitchell is well travelled, in his large head. I have no idea if his head is oversized. My own is. Living inside of your own head is a lonely existence. Third track, back to the flighty jangly pop. All of her records on Matinee have been almost identical. A slight variation on the Monochrome Set. They did used to provide backing for her. Perhaps she has time for Bid? Over a game of badminton at Balmoral? How wonderful if it had been the Would be Goods performing at the Royal Wedding? Can't you just see the stiffs grooving to the organ propelled In Bohmeia. Again, this is not much removed from everything else she has ever done but she has a likability. Is it down to my infatuation with her intelligence? I would like a girlfriend more intelligent than I am. Perhaps I have had many. Could be. But I haven't met many with a wide range of interests and with a willingness to take a tangent into the unknown. Really I am just looking for someone to come to George Gamow's grave with me and enjoy it. This track is groovy like a Tramway track. Like a song the Bristols might cover one day. Like a track that Laetitia Sadier would not admit to enjoying but would lift the essence from in a second. Quick stop. Next track, The Girl at Number 7. She's not much of a singer is hse. A bit nasal. A bit unaffected. A bit prissy. These are some of my favorite things. I would live happily if I was described as such, any day, any hour. Today is Father's Day. I started writing this entry a week or so ago. I enjoy time travel. I have changed quite a lot since i have started this entry. I am exceedingly wealthy, I drive a fancy automobile and wear really nice clothes these days. That was a short one, a vignette, a quick tale of the girl we've always known. Chelsea's Claudia Cardinale. Next track, smaller. I suppose if you were to diagram the grammar of these tracks it would be impeccable. This is a bit louche. Or as louche as Ms Griffin is capable of being in song. Is she more daring in person? Does she travel through the unkempt portions of London and act the miscreant tourist through the depravity on site and then write gently pasteurized pop songs a few hours later after her absinthe liquor has been absorbed by the air that surrounds after transpiring from her cillia and chromataphores. Next track, a bit more gothic. Has a touch of the Terminals-castratti-lyrics about practicing scales dressing like Madame Bonnard and impotence or lack of interest. It is all very Elizabeth Inchbald. I would say Jane Austen but surely the Would Be Goods are more obscure than that? The idea of a female fronted band is intriguing to me because the stereotype is the touched male genius from Mozart to Brian Wilson to the guy from My Chemical Romance. Portrayals of women as artists then seem by contrast as wounded spirits, oppressed, certainly not feted. You get the odd stand alone such as George Sand or Mary Wollstonecraft. She kept Shelley's heart in her desk drawer after all. is Jessica Griffin a tough taskmaster? Is she filled with these tiny little tales of victorialand? is Motchiloff amazed each time he sits with her and she strums her ukulele and sings 'all you little donkeys are going down to hell'. It sounds so elegant. If Amelia Fletcher is the world's second oldest teenager then Jessica Griffin represents the archetypal opposite, the old soul encased in muslin and and uncomfortable underwear. Bleached every third sunday. I don't like the smell of bleach, I've only just discovered this when cleaning my bathroom and being very nearly overcome. i could wake in a seemingly literary stupor and have attractions to verisimilitude and find myself in tuxedo and guitars and a member of the Would Be Goods in my shower knee deep in bleach and subway tile. Next track, I really rather enjoyed the last one, I should have done a finer job of exposition. This one is slower, this one is called Baby Romaine. "When love is over you run to catch your face in a mirror". Lupe from Pipas was once in Would Be Goods. Is she still? She has a PHD. There seem to be an overabundance of doctorates in London indiepop circles. Is it this which leads to the distance, these are lovely tracks, and I am sure they incribe an arc in the center of jessica Griffin's heart but it doesn't evoke passions and colors and senses of the soul. Does it? It's immaculate, clever and perhaps desultory. We love it, we love it still. Ignore my unkind words, they burrow their way out of the fascistic, darker creases of my cortex. Next track, clever organs, clever lyrics about hothouse flowers and analogies to hearts. Oh, it has never been done before! I kid. Rarely has it ben done better. Baby Romaine seemed to be concerned only with completing the pun. All of the vocals are identical. Is this some great and rare ability? "Subtle charms...", exactly. Now we've moved fromt he hothouse to the conservatory and hollyhocks. I really enjoy this one, the chorus is playful and expressive and charming, it is always charming. That could be the twitter review. "Charming". Twitter really is beyond the abilities of most. Is it not? I visited the site where sadly unclever types are compiling the twitter versions of the classics of western literature and it is dreadful. It is uninteresting. Pithiness is a rarer gift than monotonic vocal abilities. Who would have been master of Twitter if we could bring forward anyone from history? Oscar Wilde of course. His was a dearer form of narcissism, a self-protection racket from the greater world who could not appreciate. "I have nothing to declare but my genius." The Buddha? Babur? Stalin? Imagine a twitter from Stalin. instead of taking to the pages of Mundo Obrero he could tweet his latest aphorisms straight into the pockets of useful idiots the world round. Oh, last track, it is called Professor Momtchiloff mystery, I would hazard a guess then that he is still in the band. A funky instrumental, a spy thriller on the BBC so it is muted, restrained, weakened by the weight of the sunrays creeping underneath the velvet curtains. It's pretty ok. The world is a happier place with the Would Be Goods haunting the outward edges.

.

Ensemble Excerpts. Not long ago, for some, Montreal was the capital of the world. It was bleeding dreary and bloated post rock bands from every municipal orifice. And now, there is only the Arcade Fire. They have acted as imperial fiends, choking out the rest of the population of musicians in Montreal. Ensemble are from Montreal. They are only just alive. First track, introduction, a buzz and gentle spill. Second track, strings, baroqueness, a female voice. Lovely. RIYL Klima. I would hold Klima above all that Canada has to offer. I've been to Montreal a few times. As a former Canadian I was privy to free travel across the dominion. I've mentioned the facades of Montreal before. And there were milk bars and my uncle's full length Wolf coat that shed all through my father's Buick Park Avenue. Later my uncle would be prescribed psychotropics. he would turn dreadful. He would be dreadful to everyone he knew. Later he killed himself. I have a theory about psychotropics, from the idea that they even out the highs and the lows and the danger of removing anxiety from decisions like that on whether to end your life. I am imagining my uncle in a untroubled state of mind when he decided to depart. I met someone last week and I was dreadful to them. After meeting they could only describe to me their unhappiness. I am poison. With a nice record collection. Third track, piano and buzz. En Francais please. It's more of a pop song, less of an exhibit. A bit of the scrapies on the violin, it's sedate, it's measured, it sounds Spanish, as in it sounds like a band on Elefant. Flat and unaffected, a gravelly male voice in accompaniment. Is this to fulfill the requirement for French content? What is this covetous feeling towards french canadian culture? Is it a world marvel? I am not convinced. Next track, an effeminate croon. In nature canadian males have an effeminate lilt to their speaking voice. I have an innate ability to identify members of their species with very many fewer signifiers than others may require. This is something vaguely reminiscent of what Arnaud Fleurent Didier would product. Sing-song, see-saw, middle ground, unimpressive but pleasant. I am under the impression that the French do not feel any particular kinship with their cousins in North America. Is it related to the refusal of French Canadian men to register for the draft in WWII? My father, until this day, has a soft hatred of Maurice Richard for his having scored 50 goals in 50 games while all of the best anglo players were away in Europe fighting Nazis. And the riots and the celebration. Pah. I am not a big fan of Maurice Richard myself. Perhaps I have given myself an insight into the inherent ethnic conflicts in ethnically based societies such as the Balkans. I am enlightened. Thank you ensemble. An anemic emergency horn, soft female spoken word. My father is a Toronto Maple Leafs fan, long suffering, it's clear that he has very little time for Les Habitants. In my youth on Saturday evenings spent watching Hockey Night in Canada when on occasion Dick Irvin would be spouting inelegant fluff about "the Rocket" I could hear the grinding of molars and the venting of spleens in my father's torso. The blood would rush to the surface and I knew my allegiance was meant to shift to Darryl Sittler and Mike Palmateer. I obliged, but I was always guilty of a sincere admiration of Pierre Mondu. Partly for his name, and mainly for his grace. This track is exceedingly dull. He's on and on flatly in French, perhaps it is profound and compelling for French listeners but not for culturally chauvinistic monoglots. Next track, a lithe violin, a mandolin? I don't know, my ears, they're rubbish. It is late. This evening the sun was not fluorescent. It was rudimentary, mundane, uninspiring. The fumes from forest fires that scattered the photons have moved into Kansas. Farewell radiant sunsets, we shall miss you. Is this music to listen to sunsets to? No. possibly music for reviewing socialist militias, the Durutti column, Leon Blum's audience for his hair trimming. It's nice. I prefer when she sings. It's still mediocre but more pleasantly so. I had high praise for this record some time ago. I will admit to not actually ever having made it this far while listening before. I am a very busy man. I have youtube videos to post. I have Ponderosa Pines to inspect for the dreaded Mountain Pine Bark Beetle. Denver is infested. Run for your lives! Write musical laments for the Lodgepole pine, in four years there will be but one left in the entire state. Call Candy Claws, a eulogy for the Lodgepole pine, a split album by Firebreather and Candy Claws. Marvelous. when all of the Lodgepoles are gone then will fall the Ponderosa and Scotch pines and soon we will truly resemble the Atacama. And this year instead of the plague of locusts we have the next plague--moths. So many moths fluttering past as I watch the story of Egypt's greatest inventions. I am always so skeptical when these people so confidently re-enact life in ancient cultures. WHat is to say that all of these monuments to eternity on the Giza plateau. Luxor, Kanais were not composed of the same sort of flippant public exercises in masturbation as is on display with most public art today? At the thornton police station there is a ludicrous statue of what looks like two rock-em sock-em robots in a specious pose. What is to stop a cultural anthropologist 300 years in the future from claiming some great religious significance for this statue? What's to stop some overcredentialed PHD from claiming a road side billboard for hooters as evidence of a great fertility cult that existed in the Poudre Valley 1000 years ago? Nothing. I hope to be around in 500 years. I am enjoying this track, the title is in french so I am not going to type it out, it was an instrumental and was the most marvelous thing on this album thus far. Not to radio telegraph static, mass coronal ejections. This is truly lovely as well. She sings unremarkably. It's part of the whole. It's egalitarian. We are sui generis, except when we are not. The Bloc Quebecois was nearly voted into extinction recently. Could they not have trotted out the one legged lion Lucien Bouchard one more time. Is Lucien still alive? Is Jacque Parizeau? Lucien was victim of the flesh eating bacteria. That is a mark of distinction. It is also a comment on socialized medicine. MRSA is rampant in Canadian hospitals, and SARS too. When my aunt was diagnosed with Cancer she was sent home to die. She was 68 years old. Social justice required her to die. This is the compact. And before her was my grandmother, 76 and stricken with colon cancer and given aid and comfort and little more. My brother and I in the waiting room feeling like aliens watching the Moscow Olympic on the CBC on a black and white television while playing bumper pool. The music is not making me nostalgic, I was born that way. Next track, dreadful! He can't sing. We should start a letter writing campaign to disabuse him of any aspirations for future vocal endeavours. If this was the only Ensemble record ever I am not sure the world would notice. This is the second to last track, the words are in French, they are at a frantic pace and it's nasal and flat and silly. This should have been an instrumental. Perhaps he was in a boy band in a previous life, in the Pandava Boys, with their stage mother Kunti, on the sub-continent in their yellow trousers and bowl haircuts. It was marvelous. This is not. It is decidedly irritating. I do not recommend this album. My word carries weight with no one so an anti-recommendation is like an echo in space. It is over, thank goodness. Last track. Dissonant strings or horns???, rudimentary recordings, her voice. For the next record they should hire Klima for voice. On the next album they should retire instead and spend their evenings on stools at milk bars listening to French Mittens on the jukebox.

Epic45 Weathering. One of the problems with appreciating a band like Epic45 is their "epic" anonymity. They are faceless, nameless, personalityless, whateverless. I can sit and dreamily romanticize the music but when I think of them, as would be pop stars, I don't get any impression at all. They are me, dreary, drab, dull, well except that they make lovely pop songs. Now, apparently Lady Gaga is the most important person in the world now because she sold like 17 million copies of her album last week. That's pretty alright. At least she doesn't seem to shrink from the attention and she tries to live like a pop star. How would Epic45 compete? Could they do anything so daring as to guarantee them a adjoining spot in the tabloids? The could try to buy Theresa Macri's descendants? They could eat 100 pound notes in remembrance of F. Scott Fitzgerald though I suppose many would think they were just aping the KLF. They could make interesting music. Oh wait. They do. They could marry a royal, or a new royal's sister in law. They've made a huge leap with this album. Where before it was much pretty and inconsequential soundtracks to pastoral postcards of rural England now it is Hood-like cinematographic pop, it is Bark Psychosis mastery of space and stillness, it is gorgeous is what it is. It is also very long. First track has been playing for a bit, starting off with the usual field recordings and whisperings and then it is joined by a menagerie of instruments possibly played by many other people. There are but two in Epic45. Sometimes there are three, when they are joined by July Skies. They share the same affinity for test patterns, cable knit sweaters and postcards of vintage aircraft over green fields of albion. Now the end of song one, it fell away to nothing and now to bliss. This really is a huge improvement for them. I've always liked them because i am a sucker for most things in the Make Mine milieu. Basic, soft, gentle, pastoral, hippie-ish, not very male. But on this record they've incorporated so many lovely things. Now there is a wash of synths and tape recorded hiss and fluff and it closes out the introductory record in wonderful fashion. song two. A very Hood strum starts, overexposed 35 mm tape effects, fractured strums, low tech electronics probably lifted from an obscure film. Whispered vocals, very very Hood. It's also somewhat reminiscent of Bark Psychosis again, the prettiness invades from unknown vertices, almost as of the song is being invaded by all of these uncontrollably lovely aliens with their space rays of prettiness for sprinkling pop songs. Now a softer voice. I would suppose that music for these guys is a part-time affair. Make Mine Music is a collective. As such it is probably a dismal failure, though it still exists. I should not be so unkind. I am reading about the collectivist experiments in Republican Spain in 1936. Even with a sympathetic author they seem improbable in their silliness. Epic45 would seem in their element writing a song about the Spanish Civil War, it might be a lament to the republic, the tender apogee of human kindness crushed by the Falange. It would also sound a bit like Bark Psychosis did in 1990. Bark Psychosis is one of the greatest bands in the history of the world ever. Well, they were, until they released Codename:Dust**er they were. And this is reminiscent of their greatest achievement, the pushing of the air in between the notes into delicate sculptures of significance. I remember reading an interview in Emily's Hip Pocket with Graham Sutton and his epiphany when he discovered that silence was more powerful than sound. Not because he was pompous and pretentious and a fan of John Cage but because he heard Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden. Of course Talk Talk is the progenitor of most of this sort of thing. This deliberately paced, miasma inducing, intricately minimal aesthetic. Third track, hums and organs, strings, the space in between compressed but you can still breathe. It is similar to Auburn Lull. Auburn Lull is the champion Bark Psychosis acolyte in the modern world so to be compared to them is high praise, even coming from me. This is an instrumental. A short interlude. Speakers maneuver the air. Fourth track, a surprise, a vocal appearance by Baby Bird. It reminds slightly of his Dying Happy days, Petrol Cigarette and The Unemployable Rub Oil On Her Coffin, etc...he is in hypnotic chant mode, the music builds to a crescendo, cheap tinny drum sounds, liquid falling in the background, a repetitive guitar line builds and then falls back, again. His voice, slightly affected. He's a big fan. Allegedly. I can understand it. I miss Baby Bird. Those first five records were so terrific, Chris Knox without being insufferably PC. Chris Knox without being cranky. Homemade beautiful things. Then he became a pop star and I hated him for it. I am not consistent. I am earlier lamenting the anonymity of Epic45 and now condemning Baby Bird for his turn into the spotlight. This is the joy of not having any readers at all. I am allowed my inconsistency. This is the joy of deleting all past blogs and websites, I can be even more inconsistent because all previous evidence of my biases in pop music have been removed from the face of the earth. Lucky for you. This is a marvelous track. Another, that is four in a row. Next track, folky, reminiscent of My Autumn Empire things. A very high voice, oh wait, a female voice. Lovely lovely. Just a guitar, some ambience and her voice. Amazing. What if they were pop stars? What if they made their way into the public conscience? Could this music arouse the masses? It's beautiful, for certain, could they induce rapture in the loins of young girls and their manservants? Unknown. It's not transcendent like say Chopin or Fanny Elssler. If I rode down the streets with a loud speaker attached to the top of my automobile and played this track at full volume I would receive only genuine stares of confusion and rage. Track playing now is human moans, random drum fills and mistimed appliance emissions. I find it beguiling. You should too. But what about them? The masses. Those that chase mediocrity with all of their heart? This could be labelled mediocre, because it is not as great as Bark Psychosis, it is not even as marvelous as Auburn Lull. But mediocrity in service of yourself is not great crime, mediocrity mislabeled as magnificence is criminal. See our current political class, see our current cultural attache, see our current human condition. Would that Barack Obama or Peter Orszag had retired at 19 and gone on to a career Yemeni weapons trader. But instead we are forced to accept mediocrity as deity. This is a mediocre moment on this otherwise lovely album. It is These Walks Saved Us, a fractured female form, a guitar finger exercise, shortness is its only virtue. Now to an even shorter number, very July Skies. More bands should sound like July Skies. How exciting that this album should be so enchanting and on the eve of a possible new July Skies record later in the year? Antony Harding programs the cinema of my mind. He soundtracks the rain that falls from the sky. Is he mentor then to Epic45? Does he take the young men out for tea with their harmonium and acoustic and sits patiently and allows them to play their latest compositions for him and he declares them good. I am enjoying the thought of his having given blessing to Ghosts I Have KNown. It sounded like him singing. Was it him. Ah, it was. And on clarinet as well. Now to the title track. Very Mark Hollis, this. Could they not have coaxed Mark Hollis out of retirement to join them on this track? What is the going rate for a Mark Hollis guest appearance on a record? It can't be exorbitant. Can it? It was acoustics and voice and now it is multiple twinkles, acoustics and voice, now a drum, another acoustic guitar, a violin, it's elegant. It's amazing. Have they always had this in them and only just recently acquired the ambition to realise beauty such as this? You can dispose of all of the rest of your Epic45 records. Honestly, you will hear this, if you are a fan, and you will be astonished. It's reverent, it's ethereal, it's heavenly. Oh, a false ending, birdsong, but there is still half of the song left to go, toy orchestras and birdsong, it's an intermission of sorts, now to violins more breathless than previously, it's a slow rising, it's a rebellion against the boredom of post rock. This is on Make Mine Music. It is doubly strange, their newfound ambition rather, strings in concert, metronomes, dazzling array of tender sounds all made into a sparkling whole. I don't even mind the plodding drums. But drums are mostly unnecessary and would not it have been grand to invest in a rudimentary drum machine with some sort of gauzey filter attached instead. I am not content with this near perfection. I apologise to the powers that govern such things, it is why I shall be cast into the depths of hell when my lonely days are over. In hell I will listen to to Joe Satriani. i will be seated next to my high school chemistry professor as we are mocked ironically by Charon. Oh dear, my fate is sealed. Last track, pianos, two voices, it's a sing along, it's clunky and erratic and marvelous. Really really marvelous. The words are barely messaged across the notes, but it sounds poignant and revealing and they seem so proud of what they have accomplished as well they should be. They should go out into the world armed with copies of this wonderful record and play it for people in churches and in school yards and shopping malls and without comment just allow such majestic elegance to wash over the crowd and leave the scene without leaving a single footprint. Plead for the ephemera of melancholia and the red sun of Krypton over the horizon this evening. Pssst...there is a hidden track, a secret continuation. How unexpectedly thrilling!

Graeme Jefferies Messages From the Cakekitchen. My favorite album for most of the 1990s was this. It was released in 1987. This makes some day from this year the 24th anniversary of the release of Messages From the Cakekitchen. Someone somewhere really must have a commemoration to give this album the recognition it deserves. I am much too busy. I am not really. Perhaps the big date has already passed? In the battle between Graeme and his brother I've always sided with Graeme, and mainly it is down to this record which is amazing, more amazing than anything else they ever did. But Peter gets all of the love, the plaudits, the critical esteem. Perhaps it is something to do with Graeme's leather pants, his French drummer, his rockist tendencies. But he's this under appreciated man in the shadow of his brother. Now, I do love Peter Jefferies too, he once took the time to write me a letter extolling the virtues of Snapper in regards to Stereolab. I was devoted to him up until he married Jean Smith and decided being unlistenable was erudite and happening. First track was s sinister bit of post-punkish menace. His creaking, impossibly deep baritone over an organic bed of dissonance. Now to the second track Reason to Keep Swimming, spindlier, sparse, his flying v guitar in very thin layers painted across the track, his voice very dramatic and imparting, his lyrics bleak and bleaker, then the crashing shards of his guitar. All of this on a four track recorder. would it sound the same in a studio? Cakekitchen recorded in a studio. Sometimes it was brilliant; see The Mad Clarinet, Dave the Pimp, etc and sometimes it was not, see The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. It's back to a soft almost whisper, he sounds less brooding, less of a crooner, more the spidery appendaged stranger in the mist. Next track, Prisoner of a Single Passion, amazing, gorgeous, brilliant, this is the track where things go from pretty awesome to godlike. Sung almost blankly by Maxine Fleming, sorry, no idea who she is or was or will be, but the music spined by a basic basic guitar line accentuated by cascading bits of viola and wild guitar dissonance. The sort of thing Alastair Galbraith would make a living off of later in live, even on Cakekitchen records. It's this glacial voice in the middle of a cauldron, undamaged by the external forces, this mad brew of cacophony(I keep using that word, is there a synonym?) and certitude. After the bizarre ache of the musical firestorm she rejoins the mix in an absolutely unaffected manner, it's inhumanly restrained and inhumanly perfect. I only discovered this record because of Ajax mail order catalog. I remember the days when I spent nearly all of my money(I was a poor college student) on records out of the Ajax catalog. This was my muddied phase, I was stepping away from the pristine things like the Smiths and the Stone Roses and discovering the darker underworld of the anti-podes. There were these bands who made unbelievable records in pressings of 50, records pressed on handcut lathes, in their bedrooms on four track recorders and they still produced these amazing documents of the heart and psyche. Nothing That's New has started, layers of guitar, each more expressive than the next, his aching voice, the epitome of desperation and longing. The lyrics? Sometimes Graeme turned a trifle too surreal but always with a historical bent. Ah, the second guitar has arrived, it's an icy blast that soothes, his voice so tender. This may be why I prefer him to his brother, Peter was less apt or was perhaps physically unable to be gentle as a singer. Look at Graeme's contributions to This Kind of Punishment and there was always the meeker involvement of a protagonist such as Hermann Doubt or The Men by the Pool, tender and forgiving, beautiful and organic. Peter sometimes was all too buried in his Teutonic frenzy. Now to Simple Tapestry of Fate, a double tracked vocal, one tender, one darker or perhaps one more asthmatic. A short vocal phrase, then the beguiling coda, joined by a recorder? Piano, ocean sounds, all of the warmth of the world that lay undiscovered by most in New Plymouth. Amazing. Then to If the Moon Dies. It's back to darker forces, to more agile bends and curvatures, it's rudimentary seeming, the entire record is. But at this time I was also becoming obsessed with Moonshake Eva Luna and really if you ask me now what my favorite record of the 90s was the answer is now Eva Luna but the ugliness of the voice versus the beautiful cataclysms expressed in the music on both of these records is a dichotomy that is not explored often enough in music these days. yes, there was a golden age. The gentleness I discussed earlier might be a turn off to most bands today, especially Amerikkan bands that are so desperate to be considered hard. This was one of the traits that so endeared New Zealand music to my heart, the feminine side that was on display to often. It is a brusque existence on a tiny archipelago 1000 miles from anywhere and the isolation, the idea that they were creating this records for an intimate circle of friends and admirers gave them a confidence and self-awareness to make their music the embodiment of their souls. or so I imagined. I saw Graeme play live as a duo as the Cakekitchen and he did not play any of these songs. He needn't there are dozens of brilliant Cakekichen songs to entertain the poor eared college students of planet USA. He had his leather pants, his French drummer, he was fantastically thin and alien. It was beautiful. Now to The Cardhouse two delicately plucked guitars in sympathy with each other, his double tracked vocal, amazing, the ache and poignancy of this track is stark and revealing. Orwell says if you recognize a phrase after you type it then you should delete it. I would need to delete this entire entry then. WHen I really love something I fall into real record reviewer mode. This album means so much to me, I can't convey that effectively. The End of the Affair was on last night and Bendrix discusses his inability to write happiness and goodness and I agree. It is difficult, without seeming fawning, to write about how much love someone or something or anything at all really. I still don't understand the bit in the movie where they reunite and head to Brighton. Does it not reduce the agony of knowing she loves you and yet being unable to possess her. The book handled it much more brilliantly, but then isn't that always the case. Will you read this and decide to renew your subscription to Ajax Mailorder catalog? Does Ajax even still exist? Unknown. Probably not. The Greenkeepers now. The one that I always looked past in the 90s because while it's a delightful number, his voice especially ethereal and lovely, it comes after The Cardhouse and ust before Is the Timing Wrong?. It's a place holder, it's a short repose, it's as marvelous as anything else on this record. I tried to proselytize the Jefferies brothers, in my youth, I was unsuccessful. Do you need a certain sympathy to the spirit in which this music was created to enjoy it? Often I heard back that those I tried to convince were unconvinced by the lack of structure. But that is the magic, the loose threads at the end, the danger of it all unfurling because of its delicacy and intensity. Last track Is the Timing Wrong, the spic, multi-segmented closer, the opening a drifty acoustic lament and then part two an electric dash to somewhere. A drummer. There are not many drummers to be found on this record. Peter played drums. Not on this record. On This Kind of Punishment records. It is still astonishing to me that these records were created in their own echo chamber. They were originally released on Flying Nun in ridiculous issues, we're talking 50 or less. Did Paul McKessar not understand these records? Was Roger Shepherd hostile? Was Roger Shepherd in England? I bet an Alf Danielson record would have been issued in nothing fewer than 1000 but real pop royalty is treated so harshly? There was the darker, seamier side of Flying Nun, the This Kind of Punishments, the Rips, the PLagal Grinds, Axemen that always seemed unloved and undeserving in the eyes of everyone involved. How could someone put this record on the turntable at record company headquarters and now when the track turns from a frenetic dash to a spare acoustic guitar, his tender voice, a wailing viola and not have your heart swell to the size of a beach ball? Are they not human? Would not the most reasoned response to this gorgeous record by 'angeli sunt'? I kid. But this viola, his voice, everything, it's devastating.

Kort Invariable Heartache. Cortney Tidwell was born in Nashville. TS Eliot was born in St Louis. Someone I know that walks around carrying a very heavy book filled with poems by Allen Ginsberg is probably not aware that Cortney Tidwell was born in Nashville. Possibly he is aware of TS Eliot's birthplace, on Locust St. I don't know. What has TS Eliot to do with this record? Nothing at all. My middle name is Allen. I just once had an argument with a student over where TS Eliot was born, convinced, they were, of his having been English. He may have gone to the World's fair, seen Esther and Rose. By her birthright Cortney should be royalty in Nashville. But she isn't. She makes brilliantly odd country records that mix in shades of Joy Division, Patsy Cline and This Mortal Coil to amazing effect and as such she could frighten everyone in Nashville. My brother lives in Nashville and while I have never asked him directly I can sense his own paranoia over running into Cortney, such is the luminescence of her spectre that haunts that particular metropolis. Or not. Her grandfather ran Chart records! I know, that didn't mean anything to me either. It does mean things to some, those more important than you and me. It is the reason for this record which is composed of Chart Records covers. On the first track it sounds a lot like a Lambchop record. Kurt Wagner has a distinctive voice but then Cortney sings, sigh, so incredible, so effortless, so country. You still imagine her sitting there with a "Meat is Murder" tee shirt on while singing but the idea of royal lineage could possibly mean something. I am not a budding eugenicist, no, but there could be something of the nurture end versus the nature end, because this is better than 99% of the country music you have heard in your life. Really. Well, that could be hyperbole, I am prone to it. It is confined to my fingers however, in person I tend to have a permanently dour countenance that provokes the people I meet into the deepest furrow of sadness, so inescapable. They would need this record cast from the heavens as a lifeline, a good tiding, things have been worse for many others and yet beauty comes from despair, on occasion. Their voices mesh nicely, hers the sound of an angel, his the stumbling regular man, the forgotten man. Cast not from clay from some recipe for Golems and ubermensch but from a zygote bathed in the mundanity of the every day. Gorgeous. This entire record is gorgeous. Second track, more Lambchop-ism, steel guitars, brushed drums, Kurt Wagner. I don't understand it when people describe their music taste as loving everything but country. Even in the gloss of your Martina McBride's and Sara Evans' and Taylor Swift there is brilliance to be found. This is amazing. "lips don't make a sound, just pretend she's not around, or she'll know that she still means everything to me". Heartbreaking, then the violin, crushing. I have resigned myself to a life alone. Me with my pop songs and long books on the Spanish Civil War, the cause for my recent allusions to La Pasionaria, Angel Castano, etc...I've made it up to the beginning of the Civil War just today. I am very excited. Third track, A Special Day, the first Cortney solo piece. It's an ordinary track, but her voice is spellbinding, "today the world is smiling, it don't push and shove, the busy city seems so calm, when you're in love". The city that we live in does always seems calm. But I am not in love. I hoped to be. It is just that emotions seem subdued, hidden in unknown catacombs, allowed to escape free to the ether because of the usual lack of cloud cover. We had nearly 5 inches of rain in two weeks. It was marvelous, I miss the all day rainy days so much, possibly more than anything from my life in Michigan, and we had a surfeit of them. But ah, it was not to last, now we must wait for the Arizona monsoon to begin, pray for a dew point of 55 degrees in Phoenix , Arizona, relieve my parched skin if not my desiccated heart. Fourth track, a marvelous duet, Picking Wild Mountain Berries, so much fun. It's sprightly and jaunty and bouncy and the lyrics are absurdly country. is this the country that hardens hearts? It is ok for Beyonce to vacuously prance about about girls running the world but giggling over "skinny dipping in a cement pond" is beyond the pale. Madness. The world is mad. I keep running into people who seem to believe that public service or working for a non-profit is the pinnacle of human achievement. This in a time of so much suffering for people who long only to be paid an honest wage for an honest day's labour. Is it not more noble to start a company and gasp! make a profit so that your company can grow and employ hundreds of people that can support their families, that can buy jet-skis and compact discs to help other people support their families? What is the glory of a government job? It isn't sacrifice. it is overhead. it is security. I don't know. people are led about by the nose so easily. Think for yourself, make a country record influenced by Blue Monday, do it. Next track, a beautiful sad country ballad, Cortney on voice, the music hushed and churchy, and the crescendo provided by the depth of her intonation, the emotion of her conviction, the trepidation of the accompaniment. Marvelous. I had a Peter Jefferies moment there, my apologies. What if these songs actually meant anything at all to me? I would be a wreck. Now even as a dispassionate observer of human emotion I can subjectively comment on their objective brilliance. or some such. The end, beautiful. Next track, pianos and pedal steel, Cortney. Her father also worked at Chart Records. I have never heard of any of the artists. Are you a big fan of Shorty Bacon? I am almost certain that I would be, if I knew who he was. Possibly he is a woman. Do you know LaWanda Lindsey? I don't either, but I love her name. With a name like that you can probably bring the pain in an authentic seeming country tune. Cortney has taken the lead on the last few, Kurt Wagner is a smart man. Is he still installing hardwood floors in between Lambchop gigs? I sort of lost touch with Lambchop around the time when they started covering songs by Dump. I am anti-Yo La Tengo. In all things. They did a fair job of making a Dump song rather lovely, but by then it wa a question of judgement. The friends you keep, etc...I don't have any friends. This is a difficulty when it comes to a Saturday evening. This is a duet, Kurt in very very deadpan mode, he does sing, there is a tremor in his voice, it's delicate and lovely even as it's creaky and unadorned. Cortney in the spotlight, magical. Are they touring for this record? I could look. Ah, they are playing in Berlin, very near my birthday, how very convenient. I think the word has been out on Denver for a very long time because bands I would like to see rarely ever visit the front range. Are they still receiving email from Barbra Streisand telling them to boycott us because our insensitivity to Culex mosquitoes? I don't know. Now, a goofy-ish number, his voice is so indistinguishable from Lambchop. No? Is this sexual? The chorus "penetration" sung liltingly. Ha. Chart Records released a fair number of records. They could be at this for some time. or there could be other pairings, Harriet Wheeler and the guy from Moose, Kristen Hersh and the guy from Mojave 3, Caroline Crawley and the guy from the Renderers. It would be a marvelous series, I could be curator. Comically deep vocals at the start of the next track, then it softns in the light, "my life without April, is like the next year without spring". It's romantic and touching and this is what most country entails. Sure you have the insanity of Toby Keith wrapping himself in the flag while acting the part of boorish dullard who exemplifies all of the worst things of the flag, but then there is Suds in the Bucket which doesn't appear to be about anything at all but so wonderfully does it execute its vapidity that we don't mind at all. This record is just gorgeous. I am not sure when it was officially released. I "borrowed" it last year, I've been loving it all winter long, caressing it softly, turning over on my pillow and saying good morning. That's a bit lascivious. I am lying. It's a rainy, night-time drive to Cheyenne kind of record. I haven't had many journeys of that sort recently. Some innuendo arises again, ho, look at my pun. "I can't sleep with you...on my mind". Clever. Cortney in top form, as always. I've suddenly found the motivation to write a great deal lately. I sit down and just keep typing and so perhaps the quality is lessened, I had such high standards in the past, ha, but I am finding that it is good to discipline myself by writing especially as I am armed with the knowledge that no one at all reads this and yet I still persevere. it has spilled into writing for other reasons, writing with the intention of others enjoying what I have written, of editing things that I have written so that it seems not completely incoherent. Music inspires me more than anything else. I am convinced of this. Second to last track, another duet. Again, marvelous. Are they playing on Broadway in Nashville? Broadway in Nashville is such an amazing location, all week long there are live bands in bars all along the length of the street. The dreamers and schemers all in one room. When we were there there was the ethereal chanteuse part-time bartender/part-time singer songwriter, there was a Alannah Myles/Madonna going crazy on a steel guitar and chewing beer bottles in her perfect teeth and the boring overweight guys that seemed to be the most popular of all. Why is it that most of the best selling country acts tend to be male? Is it misogyny? Why is it that country starlets need to look like models and the guys can be fat, unhygienic and born with the face of a capybara? Last track, the sad send-off. A song for my current state of mind "it looks like a good night for crying, but what good would missing you do, if you're gonna stay as gone as your are, well who'll help me find me someone new". Sad. Cortney in full heartache mode. I feel like I can call her Cortney and not Ms Tidwell. Or Mrs? She is married. Her last album was about her husband and her son. I bet her son is wearing a Cabaret Voltaire tee shirt as we type.

Bachelorette Bachelorette. Yesterday we discussed the "smart set", and wondered silently over if Eddie Gathorne-hardy had a favorite pop band and might they have been the Sonnets. But you are saying to me that you aren't that concerned with band's whose lyrical dimension is a lament over the lack of arugula at the country club buffet and you desire for something more interesting, of greater worth well then we give you Bachelorette. The one person phenomenon from New Zealand. First track Grow Old With Me, refrigerator hums, analog gates firing, her voice, her otherworldly voice. I'd be interested in telephoning New Zealand and listening to her speak. I am assuming there are alien effects pedals at work here, making her voice superhuman, but what if she answered in that VOICE. I knew someone who made claim to have called New Zealand and spoken to Rachel Phillipps rather regularly. Rachel is Martin's sister, of course. She would speak openly of her brother apparently. I had the number. I always meant to dial it from my rotary phone at the Kmart hardware counter. I never did. A few years later I walked past Martin on a Dunedin street, he with a leather messenger bag and pointed footwear and me with a stare permanently fixed downward and these animated blisters. First song is over. An introduction. Spacey. This album is more subdued than her last record. Second track The Light Seekers, a camp fire strum along, if your campfire is on the Seti-campus at the Allen Array. There in the mist the faded apparitions of Carl Sagan, Laika, Jules Verne, etc...listen to Bacheloreete strum her guitar with her tiny fingers on titanium strings, the smores smeared with marmite, the sketching in the sand of venn diagrams and rude graffiti in praise of Leonard Susskind. her voice, an instrument, she's not a marvelous singer, it's "emotionless" as the Pitchfork reviewer helpfully pointed out but that is the point. Isn't it. This is not an organic Fleet Foxes body lice with chords moment, it's scientific. Third track, a bit buzzier and with more purpose. It is interesting. Very. I know most pop singers are not interesting and even less so when they believe that anyone is concerned about their thoughts on grave matters but sometimes it's the entire package that convinces. The odd way she shapes her voice, the willingness to fill nearly all of the channels with her voice, the basic programming, it's all exceedingly delightful. Would I prefer her singing a tale of her having absconded with some rare Caravaggio for sale later on the black market for 100 million euros? Possibly. But that is for the next Simon Warner album. Are there Hp Lovecraft references here? Unknown. I've never read HP Lovekraft. i remember as a child my father having received the a manuscript copy of Battlefield Earth, I don't remember the context or why he had it in his possession. It was bound in a work binder, as if it was straight removed from Kinkos and even at my tender age back then I knew it was pish. L Ron Hubbard said the fastest way to make a mint is to start a religion. Writing dreadful novels is just a perk or propheteering. Next track, echoey vocals, minimalism, loveliness. Pitchfork also criticized the number of syllables she employs. I hadn't noticed. I used to find it endearing that Peter Jefferies always seemed to have a few words that ended in -tion, and that seemed more of the counterfeit style that I was easily dazzled by. I am easy. fourth track over, fifth track now, her voice fills the air, love. Sugarbug. The music is basic. on the last record songs were plucked from obscurity to sell automobiles. If they selected songs from here they might be moe appropriate for advertising interferometers or woolen socks. Being on Drag City and being so technologically minded seems anachronistic. Have they had other mainly digital acts? I will admit to not being much of a drag city fan, not since Making Losers Happy, it ranks with Siltbreeze in being mainly dreadful except for when they were releasing records from New Zealand artists. Well, I did like the first couple of Palace records. Does her geography speak well of her in the Drag City offices? Possibly. Next track, more of her voice. The scuttlebutt is that she is disenchanted with the music business and that this is the last Bachelorette record ever. This would be a tragedy. Retired at a young age, spending her mornings at the YWCA swimming laps in a black one piece, taking the early bird at the Country buffet, shuffleboard with the dispeptic in the early evening. Very sad. This is a beautiful album. The last record dazzled. This one is just about restrained loveliness, a confidence that you can make remarkable statements in whispers and wheezes. On the last album there was a pattern. The songs on the last album started of rather mundanely, then about one minute in they exploded in digital bloom, usually with her voice cascading from speaker to speaker, the music at the upper range of the eq and just exquisitely alien beauty. Now we are expecting those crescendoes bathed in distortion and the harmony of the spheres and so she has instead travelled down a different boulevard. It's reflection and tenderness, right now it's a bit X-Files. I will admit that the X-Files theme in pop music is a bit tired. Why not Breaking Bad my friends? There could have been a tie in with the next season, a complimentary bag of methamphetamine, a free miniature replica of the recreational vehicle/meth lab and a copy of the self-titled album by Bachelorette. Why is it that more people don't experiment with their voice in a similar way to Bachelorette? The Pitchfork expert mentioned Juliana Barwick as a more deserving example, the la benemérita if you will. But there isn't any commitment to a Juliana Barwick record, it is all sound, lovely snippets of sound but everything seems accidental, accidentally pleasing Bachelorette probably has a schematic of each and every one of her songs, a life sized model of each note and turn of phrase, a four dimensional plot of each moment of pristine gorgeousness. Next track, Digital Brain, more of the basic preset electronics, but her voice, layered, the hand claps sampled, perhaps a poor migrant farm worker, perhaps Dolores Huerta. This is Dolores Huerta's skin keeping time to the amorphous voices floating in synchronous pulses. Dolores would not approve of this blog. I would praise her skin, but I have not seen her skin, I have not heard her claps. But Bachelorette might provide her own handclaps. Second to last track, very affected voice, basic drum pattern, synthesizers, very Radiophonic/Dr Who soundtrack. Is this the plan will Bachelorette abandon us mere mortals and instead focus on providing the soundtrack for all of the next dozen spacecraft sent hurling out into the void on ion propulsion rockets? Hers could be the voice that greats higher intelligence a dozen light years from earth. When Gil Gerard is unfrozen he will ask for a Bachelorette CD first off and then a drink of Tab. Is Gil Gerard still skeet shooting on ESPN at three in the morning? I hope so. Last track, the epic track, the multi-segmented track, the lovely synths, the heart rate throb, her voice multi-tracked. I am repeating myself. The title suggests discontent. in this track is contained the message that brings tears to the eyes of every sensible person on the planet. You might say, hey we can hope that Maria Minerva learns a thing or two about writing a pop song and we really won't miss Bachelorette. But you'd be terrifically incorrect, we'd all laugh at you, heartily, and then we'd go back and listen to that desperate sign off in the midst of the dreamy cacophony as it slowly comes into focus "for the last time goodbye" and weep in infrared.