Still Corners Creatures of an Hour. The important question is whether Still Corners' taste in film and recorded music is as all encompassing and clever as Broadcast. My productivity has fallen off after a rather prolific summer. You are welcome. I have not been writing other things, mostly, I have been asleep. For two months. I awaken only to listen to music. This record is nostalgic. Trish Keenan, we miss you. This record is very good. It is unfair to compare, we know, but they are the ones that sound so very much like Broadcast. First track, spare plot, it's about establishing a soft focus. Do their record collections extend beyond the likes of Flowchart and Semi-Gloss? Unknown. They must be young. Can they converse convincingly on Italian film directors from the early 1960s? There are other less important questions. Second track now, more propulsive, repeating keyboard motif, shards of sound effects as guitars, spooky monosyllabic harmonising in the background. I should be at work at the moment. Christmas starts on Monday. I will go to work on Sunday. I will be alone at work on Sunday. This is our dilemma, we actively seek solitude from ipods and the general avoidance of people and then lament our isolation in blog posts. Consistency is not a virtue. Broadcast wrote the most perfect pop songs ever written but they were not a pop band. Still Corners are a pop band and they write very nice pop songs. But the voice, it is not Trish Keenan. Third track, farfisa, thundering drums, hushed vocals. Broadcast had a brilliant drummer. He was replaced by a drum machine. Did he ever imagine it a good idea to be the focus of attention. Is it even true that drummers buy records for drummers? More guitars as accessories. i don't mind actually. it's colourings and interruptions from more interesting conversations and then it is over. Track number four. Even if the Egyptians were the peak of human achievement they didn't have cool space age bachelor pad pop music. Would I have felt comfortable as an Egyptian? My lack of ambition might have predestined me for a life of slavery to be wagered over by Hyksos interlopers. This is another bit of vague sensory experience. The songs have words, they don't seem to function for any purpose apart from sound poems, a caption to the imagery, through the looking glass in invisible ink. It is raining today. This is the first significant rain since July. Thus the desiccation of my muse? Will now the words come flowing forth? Already this is the second entry of the day. Boffo crescendo just now, ten keyboards all in a row. Now to the toy town portion of our program. Her vocals as dramatised through a telephone wire, nice switch now into the age of high fidelity. I really love this album, in an inconsequential manner of romantic activity. I am stuck on the anglicised spelling infatuation of my youth spent in a northern suburb of Detroit. This is intense prettiness. They create pretty things almost effortlessly. When the last note plays it does not linger. Perhaps the Egyptians did have space age bachelor pad music and just lacked the means of carrying it forth to generations to come. This will be the torment of our own age, the age of the incompatible format. How will I listen to my 8-track tapes in 43 years? Will there be hipsters to sell me their wares while protesting capitalism along 16th? I do hope so. The only song I can distinctly remember listening to on my parents 8-track player is Jewel Akens The Birds and the Bees I have distinct memories of life on the top bunk with an assortment of wicker hampers playing wicker hamper drums along to this song. I did not grow up to eclipse the sun. Nor have Still Corners. This track is a bit of spy thriller soundtrack action, guitars, groove and her voice. Her voice, unchanging, ethereal, unaffecting and unaffected. I used to have a friend that grew up betrayed by love, unable to appreciate any female voice with even an artifice of emotional resonance. She will love this album. i love this album. You should love this album. If you are alone it will make the lonely beleaguerment more passable. Next track, the voice used as ornamental decoration, there are the lead vocals and then pleasant harmonising vocals in the distance that add a warmer touch than the aggregation of dreamy synthesized sounds constructing the impenetrable wall of sound. The production is not great. It is all loudness nearly all of the time. They did not grow up huddled around a four track recorder, this much is clear. Did Subpop inform them that the songs should not exceed 4 minutes? Only 3 breach that mark and only just barely, and even if that condemns this record in more learned ears as inconsequential they aren't interesting enough to carry a groove into a trancelike state of human circulatory system sympathy. It's pretty pop songs, her voice is sweet sounding, but we won't be listening to this when we are conducting a sit-in at Goldman Sachs tomorrow. It is interesting that the general level of human intelligence seems to be invested in an indirect relationship with the amount of education one acquires. I am a snob. My degree is in physics. Physics is a "real" subject, provable, objective. How to deal with a subjective field of study such as Lesbian Post Modernism? It is the difference between bowling and figure skating, one at the whim of human ability and the other at the whim of human opinion. Madness. Another pretty track now. I spent a good amount of time in university. I spent some time studying less utilitarian subjects, I remember a brilliant essay on the movie Shane in one class and I feel proud to have assimilated Jack Palance fully into my heart. I worked nearly full time while attending school and two jobs when I was not attending school. Now I am interviewing college graduates who have never had a job in their life and the are 24. Perhaps they were in super cool modern pop bands and decided to pack it in only just recently when they realized they will never be as brilliant and influential as Thom Yorke. This track Submarine is just over 4 minutes, it feels ever so much more enduring.