The Procedure Club The Salmon of Doubt. I am a loner now. I ride the light rail and read books in seats while exhibiting a menacing slouch. I am terrifying. Really. I have just begun reading a new book. Anthony Powell, I always disregarded him because I felt some strange protectiveness concerning Evelyn Waugh. I took his racism and snobbery to be a personality quirk. His books are funny, in an unracist and unsexist way. Aren't they? I've nearly finished them all. Before this Anthony Powell I'd only finished Afternoon Men, but even as I am only 100 pages in I am ensnared. I may need to read all 12 volumes by month's end. First track was buzzy fuzzy(my scientific analysis, please do follow along), I thought it was starting off "I was happy, which is not like me at all" but it did not. Second track, buzzier still, less gothic, her voice recorded from behind the iron curtain. It is a bit like the Primitives meets my bathroom wall reverberating because of the end of the world or the Fourth of July. It is vague. Vagueness is the new punk rock. Better than having an opinion I suppose, an opinion that the founding fathers were all terrorists was offered recently. But what of John Dickinson who mainly opposed violent response to the King's edicts. But this is the age of the enlightenment and the words of Lillburne and Rousseau and Locke all resonated against the tyranny of the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Intolerable Acts, etc...These were grievous offenses to men of virtue. The crown still viewed the colonists as second class members of the empire. It was time for a revolution. Oh but only 33% of the colonists supported the revolution. Well, imagine trying to get 33% now to agree to a revolution against our current rulers. Good luck. Am I advocating revolution? No. But there are far more onerous impositions being foisted upon the population now than in 1776. The myth of wealth has suppressed resistance. But now that America is in decline, now that even future wealth is being consumed in a conflagration of historic proportions we will return to simpler times. When men were men and they ate the bark off of trees and boiled shoe leather. It will resemble the trailer for Breaking Away that I linked before. Perhaps the return of struggle will fill people with soul and depth and divest them of their intense narcissism? Or will it merely reinforce the isolation of technology that seems so comforting in the face of a reality of eroding comfort. Or will we all take steroids and become soldiers of resistance with tongues made impotent by the injections in your buttocks. I was sitting next to two muscled up young men and their speech was dreadful, it lacked dexterity, the words poured forth and with a dull thud landed on the table in front of them. They spoke nothing of ideas or ideals or passions or hopes, just gossip and cruelty. This is our world. There is a story on Popmatters concerning the anniversary of the murder of Lorca. Apparently governments are worst that murder poets or artists. A hierarchy of victimhood. Franco was awful because he seemed to be completely insensate to all of the suffering of his country, he was the ultimate technocrat. because his death squads were not passionately ideological but more materialist than the anarchists and communists it isn't more awful. Because the rebels were successful they have attained that mantle. but poets matter no more than the mean with tongues with more muscle than grace. Art of Ignoring is playing now. It is art school pretension, meaningless inaudible lyrics and bashing on machines. I rather like it. They are a duo. he is from Poland. She is not. The music is not varied or filled with depth, it is a sonic sheet, impenetrable and unchanging. There is the idea, an ideal, the blueprint, and it is tweaked slightly over the course of the album. This is similar to the last track. Her voice is pleasant enough but it shares the stage with the squiggles and denseness of the music in an egalitarian fashion. Are they political? He is from Poland. Perhaps this is concerning Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Kosciuszko uprising! How many people know about the importance of engineering to the revolution? Not very many. There is a Kosciuszko statue in my hometown of Detroit, on Michigan Ave, and there are very many Polish emigres or their descendants. Mainly in Hamtramck and in Macomb County and while there isn't a real interest in Kosciuszko in Hamtramck there is an interest in Paczkis. This track is noisy guitar, there is a minimalism when it comes to breadth of ideas. it is not so interesting more than overwhelming. volume is key, inject the rear of your stereo with the same needle that the muscly tongue types inject their buttocks and you will understand truly. Ed, more buzz, more indescribable tedium. I am for noise, I feel noise. But just because you've created a three second loop of noise doesn't mean that if you loop that four second loop for two and one half minutes that it is some great achievement. Apparently her voice is a marvel to behold. Who knows, you can barely hear her. could I have a bad version? This is the problem with bands whose favorite record is Psychocandy they don't listen to the same records that Jim and William Reid listened to, the soul records, the motown records, the MC5, the Stooges, the Beach Boys. Instead Procedure Club listen to Psychocandy. Ah, this next one is nice, there is space to explore, room for the ears to manipulate their surroundings instead of hunkering down. This one is Index Finger and still I cannot understand her. But instead of a maelstrom bleeding from one speaker to the next there is an arrangement, theoretically, there are guitar lines to e discerned in the mix and while the voice is inconsequential the whole is pleasing. Will this be played in the grocery store on my next visit? Not likely. I was shopping for milk and chocolate yesterday and there was Blur's She's So High playing in someone's headphones but it was so loud I could recognize it as I was purchasing Skim and they were going for a pint of 2%. I drink so much milk these days. Next track, more minimal still, trying to effect some sort of New York cool, blah blah blah, we hate New York. You are not cool, you are from Poland and you are not thin, let's have passion and earnestness instead. She's So High is a painful song, it soundtracked my first love affair. My first love affair did not occur until college. I was shy. Now I am just anti-social. But when I found out my girlfriend at the time was seeing someone else and just decided to stop calling or talking to me instead of telling me I was crushed and on the ride home from her house after one last glance at her black Pontiac Sunbird it was She's So High that soundtracked my ride home. All of my most important musical memories are intertwined with my being alone. I was never in a room filled with my best friends listening to Spacemen 3's O.D> Catastrophe and celebrating the invincibility of youth or the worlds that we would soon conquer. I was Widmerpool. Snowy is playing now, the volume has been reduced, it is mainly guitars and ethereal vocals, could pass for a Candy Claws track. But a Candy Claws record is not an assault, it is an impressionist landscape, wombedelic, charming naivety. They probably love Keiji Haino alsmot as much as Procedure Club person from Poland. The volume climaxed and that was rather nice. Now malfunctioning drum machines and human pain, and guitars, nice. Not sure why we need a voice. Why do we need a voice? I would like a printed lyric sheet. I would imagine a lot of the music is about boots and sleep and tensile strength of sheets of aluminum when played with large rubber mallets. This is the twee'st assault in the history of mankind. It is the equivalent of a Sherman Tank, the twee'st tank ever being confronted with a Tiger and running away. Are her vocals looped? Are they just lazy? Do they record an entire album in approximately 11 minutes? Most of this is repeating patterns of noise that doesn't distinguish itself from the background noise of everyday life. I listen to the conversations of people who participate in life almost every day and it is as discordant as this is, there is one agenda competing with another and in between there are all sorts of misplayed notes that cause dissension and unhappiness much the same as this record. Are people happy after listening to a Procedure Club record? Will they assume it is cool because it isn't well crafted or thoughtful? Probably. They will move to New York and have remixes done by people who used to be friends with people who used to know people who knew Panda Bear reasonably well. I can't wait for the next record. On the next record they will record one track for 43 minutes and it will be composed on one 2.3 second loop repeating for 43 minutes and the lyrics will be the instructions read in Swedish by a non-native speaker on how to assemble floating shelves from Ikea Ikea opens in Denver, well Lone Tree, soon. Come visit, we can re-enact scenes from 500 Days of Summer in Ikea and listen to the Smiths.