New Animal Collective is disappointing.  When's the next Panda Bear record then?

My Autumn Empire II. When I was a child there lived down the street from me two sisters. They were awkward, exceedingly intelligent and in ancient days subject to a litany of abuse, that is, until the one summer when the eldest came into bloom followed soon after by younger sister. Derision turned to lust but the tragedy of a young boy's folly had been laid, the story already cast. How is this relevant to My Autumn Empire? Well "A" and "I" are like Epic45. For years we were unimpressed, we nodded off, frankly we were indifferent. And then came Weathering. Have you not yet realized what a monument to glory and beauty that record is? You have probably not. We all laugh and are empathically generating the most desperate sadness for you. The first My Autumn Empire record was greatly anticipated on this strange little website. It was nice, it was a July Skies record made in the dark. Where Antony harding painted with color and warmth, My Autumn Empire was more deflecting choosing to surround his music less with the pastoral whimsy of England gone past and more of the ideal of the idyll. But then there is Weathering and then there is this. First track, a bit of Gorky's dreaminess, second track, a bit more substantial a Soft Machine-esque romp through the hit parade of dreams and the digitization of nature. But the bits and bytes and 0's and 1's have had their edges sanded off, their humanity restored, less instagram more kodachrome. There is a luminous sheen to the recording now. Did he pack away all of the lovely bits from the Weathering recording session, all of the good vibes, all of the love and harmony and joy and compress it into the grooves of these songs. I believe that he has. I began writing this entry before I took a journey north. Into Alaska. The final frontier for Americans with an expired passport. We were disappointed because we did not see a moose. Or Moose. We did see bears at great distances, elf'n'safety you know and Kenneth our bus driver was a stickler. Near to us on a bus a Korean family eliciting sympathy from all around because the patriarch, not handling the discomfiture of 195 culverts being installed along the park road, emptied the the contents of his stomach into Kenneth's clear plastic trash sack. kenneth was a rock, our rock. We made it to Eileson in a a few hours and we were members of the 30% club who get to see Denali and it is an impressive site. Kenneth played it up, he promised us wildlife and he failed to deliver. Caribou dancing on patches of summer snow off in the distance, arctic squirrels and bear cubs disinterested and non-photogenically camouflaged do not not add up to irrepressible memories. We pressed buttons on interactive displays and wrapped our hands in bear pelts. Later that week we saw Muck Oxen, caged, sexually frustrated, but without Kenneth. Third track. This has a 70's feel as if mixed through a Neil Halstead trademarked sepia filter. Repetition, space age effects and gentle whispers. It is all a bit Pink Floyd really. If Pink Floyd were as twee as Syd Barret imagined they would be. if Roger Waters wasn't such an accountant. If Roger Gilmour had a spine. It's nothing at all to do with mathematics, it's respiring, it is music with lungs and an atmosphere. The notes and coos flourishing in the richly bio-diverse ecosystem. There are only 8 tracks. It has not been long since the last My Autumn Empire album. It's dreadfully sensitive. I am somewhere in the middle on the sensitive scale. I operate chain saws and heavy equipment and I am tasked, at work, with terminating most of our employees and I am able to justify my grim existence as such but I am sensitive. I am able to eat breakfast at Watercourse in Denver and while I am certain I am pegged as a Will Durant loving liberal, in the traditional sense, I feel not uncomfortable but gently observant. We rode the train in Alaska. There was an alleged moose sighting while we were on board but I don't count a view of the rump as a genuine experience. But train travel is inspiring. Alaska, being the end of the world, is inspiringly isolated. The imagination needn't seek crevices and corners to hide to create a world more richly nuanced than that which is thrust upon our senses by entrepreneurs and service workers. It is nature unedited, and when digitized through the human glance and recorded on the cerebral cortex it is there to be painted exuberantly with the brush strokes of loneliness turned away by a marvelous travel companion whose face competed with the glory of divinity infused wilderness. The trees seemed lonely. Black Spruce and Birch. Sad, longing for friendship from their friends the Linden or Locust or Filbert. Until we reached near to Anchorage it was a desperately barren florascape. Even the bears were singularly unimpressive. A Grizzly Bear at 300 pounds sounds like a pet. Fourth track Sleeves, a jam, cosmic baby. Epic45 don't really jam. Do they? Perhaps these are the Weathering rejects where the other Epic45 person that isn't My Autumn Empire turns up his nose at the dirty hippie nonsense. The tie dye silliness. The 6 minute long nothingness. But it's a repeating dream, not unlovely at all. Next track. Nick Drake's photo has been put back into its place above the mantlepiece, acoustic finger exercises, different from July Skies. Epic45 can play guitar it appears. July Skies can't, not quite. No vocals. Two guitars intertwined, shy, one more than the other, a repeating motif and tenderness underneath. Nice. Now to Say it Again(I'll Kill You), very Nick Nicely through the Halstead filter. The lyrics are meant to be ironically shocking or whatever, soaring wordless bits, now a compressed trumpet smeared across the mix with twinkles and a heavenly halo interceding. Wonderful. This is a Gary Wright record, a Dan Fogelberg record, and we don't mind. Sensitive 70s men had facial hair the same as sensitive men from the 2010's. Fleet Foxes, the wait staff at Watercourse, Alexi Murdoch. Next track, vocals recorded down a phone line. This is a huge improvement over the first My Autumn Empire album. Truly stunning. It sounds a band. Is it a band? He's laying down a slinky electric riff next to his twee twaddle. A dream. Distortion, an acoustic guitar, primitive drum falls. It sounds as if his world is suffering the implosion of live without love, of living without hope, it would have rendered me speechless and thoughtful only a few months ago and now it sounds the sound of romantic happiness. Last track, Sleep, a lullaby. In the vein of Spectrum's Go To Sleep. The words a puzzle, a matryoshka doll. Now an effervescent organ. This is organic and heaven bound all at once. The songs dig their tap root deep beneath the verdant landscape and the tendrils of rhizomes and shoots and stolons interact and build upon each other until they coalesce into a portal into the world of laser light shows and hallucinogenic drugs and unfortunate facial hair even among the nonsensitive, the republicans and country line dancers. If I were to shave my head and listen to this album hair would grow unbidden in places unwarranted, on adams apples and inside my duodenum and my children would be conceived al hijra and be born with an inherent love of My Autumn Empire embedded in their genetic code.

Beirut The Rip Tide. Accordion, drums, horn, amazingness. Is there a more under appreciated band than Beirut? His is the oldest soul to grace a baby fat adumbrated face in a very long time. First track- a joyful sing along, effortlessly graceful, heart rending and majestic. Big. Not quite La LLorona massive but production wise things are greatly improved in the land of former gypsies, flugelhorns and Santa Fe area codes on mobile phones. I am meeting a great number of people from Albuquerque these days but not so Santa Fe'ans. I met an Albequerquean in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and two last evening at dinner. New Mexico just doesn't have the same sense that Colorado has, it seems more authentically part of the frontier still, barely tethered to the mainland, anchors oriented in the opposite direction, the soil radioactive by leeching and stiff breezes generated from horizon fall out and anasazi voodoo. Second track-Santa Fe, bouncy, music a trifle pianola-esque, music box music in repetition, his voice elegant and distant and the words just a bit out of focus. Are they masked because he does not enjoy the sound of his voice? It is truly the loveliest thing. The lyrics are always spare but most always gentle and poignant. Most always, perhaps always, a middle section of wordless worldliness and moonshot echoes and choruses uknown. Back to the pianola. Did he retreat to his inner New Mexico to record this record? Was the journey metaphysical? He's on and on about Santa Fe at the moment. I have never been. I was invited to Wisconsin on this past weekend. My roots are in the Midwest and as such the ghosts that inhabit these songs are foreign, disassociated, jin-like, relics of a mixture of betrayal and superstition. In fact they are clearly more interesting than an exposition of the darkness that lies at the heart of Sterling Heights, MI which is where I was raised. His voice is infused with a natural melancholia and the penchant for forlorn storytelling must somehow be tied both to genetics and the environment of being isolated on an alien plot. And Beirut is married now. I have been expressing my own delight at being in love. And now I am writing in a state of nervousness. When you are a loner used to being alone, enjoying Beirut in an insular existence it becomes doubly terrifying should you be wrenched back from happiness and cast back into a life without meaning. I mean to be a better person because I mean to be the person that someone already believes me to be. It is the most exciting process I have undergone to gain confidence that comes from without and from the feelings manufactured within because of the sustenance of joy and wonder. Love is everything else, Beirut is almost...but not quite. I had not had a proper reaction to this record for a very long time, it has not been the new Beirut record for some time but I have not come to terms even now. It's pleasant and terrific and smartly produced but hmmm...first there was the astonishment of youth, next the thrill of escapism not once but twice, the idea that brass could be so expressive and absolutely all encompassing was until March of the Zapotec unknowable to the likes of us. Next track, fourth track, Goshen, now my worries haunt my heart and I want to use this forum to express my terrors only. But it is the distance, the unfamiliarity of the silences spent in between the moments when life seems effortless, when with Goshen's elegiac horn refrain as soundtrack to a confluence of joy. Joy Joy Joy. I have found it outside of this existence as a conduit between the longings of pop singers and the soil falling over my head. Four tracks, four wonderful tracks, perhaps my expectations were too far evolved. I outpaced the boy wonder. He's married now, settled, content, professional. Fifth track Payne's Bay, is it all too familiar. The rustic west, the glint caressed from the big sky at sunset. The dryness can be wearying. Desmond Morris has called humans the aquatic ape. I am coming around to becoming an adherent. A lovely coda, a female voice has joined him and the song has begun its descent into dormancy, the middle of the day when the sun as terrorist drives the sane from view of the public into darker recesses where dreams of troubadours and retracing of the steps of Barbara Tuchman occupy a young man's fancy. Sixth track-The Rip Tide, the title track. I read an interview with Beirut that appeared around the same time as this album and I was let down that though his soul is surely antiqued and weathered it is from a physiological anomaly not through the following through the rabbit hole. I wouldn't imagine he will be penning a disconsolate ode for the Marechal De Retz or a celebratory hymn for the Lucrezia that deserves better than we allow because his depth of soul is a physical trait honed from birth rather than a sentimental attachment bolted on through experience and curiosity. And so the dripping horns that close out this track are from feelings bound in nerve endings and human emotion instead of a contrived nostalgia ginned up out of books and ancient paintings appreciated more for their age than their skill. Seventh track-Vagabond. Beirut by the numbers, still magnificently elegant, his voice wounded by instinct, the music weathered and restrained, the middle eight eclectic and playful, but then there are only nine songs. Should this have made the cut? Hmm...I find it rather easy to dismiss such goodness. Perhaps it is my nervous state. I only hope to make to Alaska, in Alaska lies salvation and the filling of senses and the removal of "Are you ok?", "isn't life strange" and "could we be this happy, are we so lucky". Perhaps there needs only the plaintive strains of The Peacock on wave generated oscillations perched far above to burst thought bubbles that lead hearts astray. The heart is the domain of Beirut, to listen to such luminous constructions without even the slightest tinge of agnosticism would reveal only the shallowness of your existence. Last track, such a song, a ukulele, his stirring tones, now a piano and the story seems essential and harrowingly meaningful if only be performance. The art of performance, the inheriting of a role, the transfiguration of a mundane existence by mere proximity to this genius. What an existence we lead, by technology we flit from England by way of Australia to Finland to Sweden by way of Australia and now to Santa Fe by way of a glamourous recounting of all of the magic conjured by all of the world's greatest pop songs with ukulele and a collection of tired consonants and dreams.

Beirut on late night television. Graceful.

Jens Lekman I Know What Love Isn't. More examples of Scandinavian subset of the male on the way. Jens is old news. In fact by recent photographic evidence he appears to have transformed from Scorpio Murtlock into Kenneth Widmerpool. If only Anthony Powell had been a visual artist as well. I always have held Jens as esteemed because of his earnestness, his dreadful joke lyrics and the fact that in his lack of fear of presenting life as a technicolor adventure of woe and baleful existence he endears as a bargain priced Barry Manilow. First track was a tender piano introduction and now straight into the soft rock of Erica America, the croon, in tact, the music gentle and peaceable and the testosterone extinguished. It's a halting introduction, minimized from the widescreen pop of the last record. Is he living still in Australia? Was he imprisoned in such a desolate region by the tortures of love and the tyranny of the heart? I can't imagine Australia wrapping a loving embrace around his ephemeral frame. The life he paints is mainly pitiable. Is the life of a rock star so difficult? He's been feted for certain, even in the most pecunious indie locales. But perhaps it is that the life of a rock star is not that interesting. See Allo Darlin'. Their second record isn't a patch on the first and seemingly all that has changed is that she is beloved the world around. Perhaps there is an adjustment period when people transform their reactions from that of a friend to an admirer from afar. Distant even when a few inches away in the same room of a cold house. Turning this new form isolation into an artful discourse is perhaps more difficult than a delicate outpouring of love for your friends that supported you always when you had only a ukulele, a heart and flat footwear. Jens was always to handsome for his melancholy. Third track. Still with the restraint. A rolling piano melody, pocket sized strings, his gentle voice reflecting somber meditations rather than an epic calling forth. Perhaps he is in Sweden, perhaps this was recorded in the heart of Summer and the sunshine that is escaping from the grooves on my mp3 player is a coming to terms. He's beautiful. He's immensely talented. We will grant him absolution for his inadequacies always because of this. I wrote of Cats on Fire previously and their arc is different. They were minor figures and slowly they've accumulated a comfort level with the world's turning away from indifference. Mattias from Cats on Fire seems more firmly ensconced in his principles and integrity and mores whereas Jens is the fragile soul who will sing always for hi supper, the next track as desperate as the last for fear of love slipping through his fingers like sand. Cliche, my apologies. They are mainly non-existent here. Earlier today I was listening to Cocoanut Groove and his grasp of he cliche is tenuous at best, at least in his adopted language, but Jens shorn of his ill-timed joke lyrics sounds effortless in his pathos. Here a sampled kitchen sink drip, a piano loop, strangely acidic strings and saxophone renderings in the background. My mother would approve, surely. The last title was so lovely, She Just Don't Want to Be With You No More. Are all love songs generally written from fear? The genuine love songs, the earnest love songs, those written from the despair of waking to a dawn alone. I have half of a lifetime filled with emptiness and now I have discovered my heart's complement and I am afraid. I write about it only tenderly, too timid to caress it fully for fear of spoilage or exposure. This is a bedroom record. His first. I can imagine him sitting shyly with lights raised only slightly, his guitar on the stand in the corner and hands outreached trying to comprehend the retchings of the human experience. Love is a potent word. Sue Johnson has said as much. I am a devotee, truly. The heart leads. There was an evening, recently, spent with laps filled and arms entwined and the words came quickly and poetic and I felt proud that I was able to express all of my heart's emanations without hesitation or stammering or yammering and I meant every word. Hyperbole has been deleted. I am no longer capable. And so these past few entries have expressed mundanity while my fingers dance lithely and my soul warms it is only that the tendrils across her face have me overcome. There is an Andromeda heights tender docility, a boyish grace, more synthesized saxophones and digital whistles and flutes and fragile accompaniment on the chorus. It's utterly lovely, you will despise, I am sure. Because Jens Lekman exists outside of this world, writ boldly in skywriting letters a thousand hands high, and now there is Jens Lekman. He was always there, but there was always this cloak of panache, this edifice of dashing elan, and the beauty that caused the gentle soul to succumb. I Want a Pair of Cowboy Boots. Is he a fan of the Pearlfishers? This nostalgic recollection of life as a recreation of all of the travails of children magnified, with larger handprints left on handrails reached for after recurring stumbles. Calypso Jens has arrived on The World Moves On. While listening and while writing I have sneaked a peek at the trailer for Cloud Atlas. I once read that Cloud Atlas is the novel that Kate Bush would write should she ever put pen to paper. I disagree. The trailer looks lovely, if you are able to remove from your memory all images of Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. In my ideal world actors would retire from the screen after their debut performances. There is no shortage. We could employ the fresh faces that would better match the composite of humanity I created in my mind. Luisa Rey is not Catwoman. Bargain basement calypso, the vocals carry the cheer, the cheesy horns like a fitful rainstorm in Denver in August. This summer has been cheerless. The fires, the heat, the lunacy of murder spread across the landscape and dictates the tenor of a macabre aura infecting everything that is still and the living move tentatively through the underbrush. Jens is more necessary than ever. And Cloud Atlas. It isn't as brilliant as you hoped it would be. The writing never matches the conceit. Does it? I do not think. A film version is an audacious idea, but again, Catwoman. Argh. Is Jens now lamenting Fredrik Reinfeldt? Recently divorced Fredrik. Wants to retire at 75 Fredrik? Possibly, the title of this track is The End of the World is Bigger then Love. How very unlike Jens is that title. Love is everything, he's wrong, the world could end tomorrow and I would not be unhappy with the world, we would continue in the aether as spirals of dna remnants floating out among the flora of the cosmos destined to forever recombine and become enjoined and live happily ever after. If only Fredrik was so all powerful, then the Radio Dept might actually write an interesting political song in response, up until this point he's an enervating presence on the state of Swedish pop. Title track now, a jolly rollicking strum, innocent queries unto the nature of romance. I can answer him, I know the answer, I know what love is. "Let's get married, I'm serious...". I will choose to ignore the next line. I am in love with this album and I have been in possession of its endless charms for only a few moments. The chorus so sincere and sympathetic, he's written an album that could be mistaken for resignation but I think it's a third party transcription of life as a pop star that was once destined for greater things but somehow set agee by the fact that world has not yet been destroyed and so it is populated with people whose greatest virtue is their incurious nature and their conservative approach to living. I was one of them, I have broken free, I am high above the clouds and the last track echoes softly back to earth and if only ears were more precise and if only hearts were more resilient this hug would fell the specter of disappointment that awaits almost all of us. But we're the lucky ones, we've discovered the undiscoverable, we're happy and Jens and his genteel songs are our lovely companions.

Cats on Fire All Blackshirts to Me. I shan't comment on the title. But...I am always puzzled at the pride that collectivists hold in their own brand of enlightenment. Pardon me. I've been reading about the epicureans. Indulge me love for Will Durant for only a few sentences. But why is it that these permissive life philosophies so rarely attract more than a tiny minority? Examine the current crop of fashionable socialists, the committed, the hard core. They exist in the arts, in the academy and in labor. All areas of diminishing importance in every day life. Is this fact tied to economic theorizing? Unlikely. The masses have always been lax, it is now that the elite have turned sloth-like as well. Gore Vidal has died today. First track has been on for a bit, it's lovely. Cats on Fire are the most wonderful indiepop band around today. They have panache, style and a genuine commitment to expressing their politics and I find this admirable. They would love nothing more than to be world conquering pop stars, I suspect, though could they live with the guilt of material advantage that would arrive with such success? Second track, the lead single, My Sense of Pride, it's marvelous. There's this huge chiming lead guitar and of course the impeccable and mannerly lead voice. Lead singer resents comparisons to Morrissey. But be fair, you sound a great deal like Morrissey dear sir. It is in the richness of tone, the confidence in melancholy, the strident obeisance to fashion. This is the second mention of fashion in my entry. They dress smartly. They have an ardent pursuit of elegance and refinement and it is expressed beautifully in their music. But back to the permissive set of life philosophies, if only for an uninformed moment, but there is this pendulum in human history that appears unending. Inevitably the gifts of every generation are concentrated in a mere few and so inequality is a never ending reality, throughout history and neither Savonarola nor Winstanley or Bakunin or Marcuse will be able to halt that wheel. Will Durant himself says you can either have equality or freedom, you can not have both. The pervasive cancer of the French revolution has allowed many to live as if this dictum is untrue, by biology acquired by genetic reassortment mankind has been transformed into a perfectibility. Impossible. Third track was amazing by the way. But lead singer has a marvelous diary and he's inspiringly creative and rightly proud of his brilliant work as a pop singer and pop songwriter and he admirably refrains from Cats on Fire's lack of impact on the world at large. Is it preferable to be fanatically adored by a devoted core of tiny proportions or to be superficially appreciated by the unwashed? I am not sure. I am adored by the tiniest coterie of one, red hair, brilliant laughter and a body whose integument is composed of goodness, kindness and depth of soul with inerrant ability to make everyone in her sphere of influence to feel the saintliness of love. Cats on Fire have devoted fans. A relatively large smattering, large is comparative, surely, but they have more fans than the Receptionists had, surely, and fewer than Embrace. The first half of that statement is axiomatic, I have more fans than the Receptionists, and the second is criminal. Fifth track, After the Fact. Brilliance. It has a new whiff of the slinky. In his diary he admits to a drearily straight laced past, straight edge, ideological purity, a cloistered sense of purpose. Now he's out and about, he's above the crowd, eleven feet tall in pointed ankle highs. He's got an amazing guitar player in tow. The guitar player may have even better hair. They have astounding hair, truly. Google image search should you not believe me, cuffed jeans, smart jumpers and smooth coiffures abound. Next track, softer, but still there is new confidence in his emotional register. He's been a marvelous singer always. Now there is a tenderness that comes from respect for the art, the professionalism of repetition and the reflection of life in a liberal democracy bordering the hegemonic soviet tragedy. The Sea Within You. He's bright. He's charming. He's beautiful. Why is he not a pop colossus? Why isn't Moto Boy either? Nordic and statuesque doesn't seem to have the same cache as it once had. While recording this album they posted photographs of the spartan accommodations that housed the process. Was it lead singer's home? I've forgotten his name? No. It is Mattias. We're friends, yes, but I keep my distance for his comfort. I am in Denver and Mattias is in Finland. I sent him a link to a Giorgio Tuma track once, it was a celebration of Yuri Norstein. Mattias had just posted his own tokens of admiration for the man and I chipped in with a youtube and he thanked me for sharing such beauty. Is that not the honorable life? This should be the credo for this website gone unread, "thank you" because while I rant on and on about politics and the absurdities of collectivities I have a deep desire to impress upon the 8 people, on average, that read most of the posts on here that most everything that inspires me to incoherence deserves your love and adulation. Cats on Fire are artists. This is an inspired monument to cleverness, passion and joy. There is joy even among the tides that lap mainly melancholic. The female voice has joined the lead male voice and it's folk music and I imagine he's authentically rustic and enviably ascetic. I lead a mainly ascetic lifestyle. But love turns ones soul profligate in so many ways, outpourings of emotion and reception of life's possibilities allow a short circuiting of one's previous allegiances to stoicism and monasticism and uprightness. Pah, I am still upright but I am off to Alaska soon and desperate to make regular journeys all over the world to show off my new sense of pride in the art of living. I could label the music of Cats on Fire as a manual on that particular aesthetic, even the shabby attempts at social commentary, because they have an unerring sense of quality control and commitment to each moment they share with the world at large. Second track with the sloganeering group chorus. Idealism. An ode to Leo Jogiches? In my heart it will be a tribute to Leo's hair. Why are not all pop songs concerned with Eastern European socialist hair? It's a bit Housemartins, a trifle McCarthy. It's jolly. Next track, It's Clear Your Former Love. It's marvelous. Even in their spartan amenities they have produced a pristine sound. Here the guitar gathers momentum and his voice louche and reserved and piercing and with a clarity that is so unique in "indiepop" these days. They were a band for a fair amount of time before they were officially released. They did release demos on their websites and the like but you can tell there is an accomplishment in their craft. Here it was clearly what they decided to not include that has influenced the joy in listening. Joy. The word is pervasive in my life. In a world impecunious with this emotion it can trigger guilt. It can turn the brightest day into an evening tinged with dreams haunted by fears of departure, loss and despair as if in this existence the only constant is disappointment and the fact that unfathomable happiness has visited cannot entirely detach the forlorn sense of suspicion. A Few Empty Waves, an anthem, starts off a gentle plucking and flowers into a romantic wash of dreamy ennui. It is so Morrissey. Again why would anyone take offense at being compared to the master? I live most days lamenting the fact that it was my brother that was able to model his hair on Morrissey and not me. I was stuck with Sonic Boom's hair. Little Snack Debbie. I also lament the reality that there has never been anyone ever that has compared me to Morrissey. I was told once that I looked like George Clooney or more frightfully that I resembled the singer from Train. I am fairly certain the singer from Train is 73. Do I look so haggard? But Cats on Fire are youth. They exist in their blissful landscape, sui generis, and I suppose as a grown man it would be deflating to see your identity reduced to a postulate or addendum to another's well worn path of deteriorating successes. Also Morrissey has a very large head. Last track, tinkles and a chorus of melodicas? Accordions? Unknown, but oh so lovely. A symphony of the expression of their previously described youthfulness. The anthem of the lonely punching above their weight and carrying a message to the faithful, apathy is appropriate in the face of the destruction of the utopia you worked so sparingly to create but to which you are absolutely entitled to.

Allo Darlin' Europe. Elizabeth Morris is from Australia. She lives in England. She's made marvelous English friends in England, she claims as much in her songs. She's bff with Amelia Fletcher, probably. I once stood near to Amelia Fletcher, it was spine tingling. I am not sure if anyone that I know would understand my spine tingling sensations, they haven't any basis in medical maxim, only universal truth. Sciatica? I have recently self-diagnosed myself with Sciatica. I imagine that I could explain it, if pressed; I could list Amelia Fletcher as the most important female in music from the past 30 years, really, but tides of laughter would crest over the major cities on this planet and life as we know it would continue. What a disappointment for we lovers of all things Allo Darlin'. First track, Neil Armstrong, mid-tempo pop goodness about astronauts, if only obliquely. This is the third opening I have attempted, actually this is the third time I have rewritten the entire entry. Allo Darlin' mean so much more today than they did just a few weeks ago. Circumstances define everything. Elizabeth Morris is our friend. She introduced herself so dearly on the first record. It was a recitation of her favorite records, her favorite boys, her favorite hangouts and a glimpse into her marvelous mind. Why is Amelia Fletcher important? Because you feel as if the mere possibility that she might see you in the front row of her show, swoon, have her heart turn cartwheels offstage for you would give you this unrealistic chance at happiness and eternal salvation because the queen of indiepop is in love with you. Then she would start talking why she prefers Pigou over Salter, swoons become an epidemic, a post on pro-med mailing list ensues and some lonely sole still pining over a poor Australian veterinarian dead too soon from Hendra virus moves his sympathies to you and your tragic case of the vapors. Love. Love. Love. It is real. Theirs is an art to love and to the swoon and pining and it is difficult sometimes to elucidate a compelling narrative concerning love over a sundae, love under 600 thread pharaoh sheets and a summer drive through Nederland into the cloistered valleys of lodge poles and transient aspens. This is the second album. Elizabeth has moved away. It is Allo Darlin' now. Collectivities are never as endearing as an individual. And so the first track Neil Armstrong will elicit adjectives far different than those employed with ubiquity on the release of the first record. Competent, vague, dreamy, catholic. She believes in me. But is she really in love with a moon landing denier or is it a hook? Pop singers don't necessarily lead more interesting lives than the rest of us but when the conceit turns on pivots outside of her sphere of influence it turns uninspiring perhaps. Second track. I labeled this a bit of that nostalgic geography perhaps made most famous by the Lucksmiths. Am I wrong? I was in Australia for nearly a year, not so recently, I was unaware of Capricornia. This is the jangle. The breed is not uncommon, her video a stratocaster strum, flats, hardwood floors and shabbiness. Amelia Fletcher would never have allowed this level of shabbiness. Even when living live as a riot grrrl they had definitive style. Allo Darlin' boys are mainly unimpressively coiffured, spend some money boys, lazily attired and content in their penumbrous existence. But the music is exciting and the words are revelatory. It's train music, sentimental and chorus carry you along on journeys into crevices and nooks of significance and imagery painted on dream canvasses. Sorta. The characters here are never as neatly defined as on the first album. I can imagine her old friends discovering joy when listening to the first record, a notebook full of eccentricities and moments to remember have ben traded in for a tour journal filled with anonymous faces seen from sun streaked windows, from behind eyes adjusted for uniformity. How disappointing for Elizabeth turned Allo Darlin' to look out into a sea of faces and see only the same vacant stares reflected back at her. The world is populated with an enervated and uninspiring and tautological spirit these days. By rights we should be on the precipice of a major conflagration. But the social contract is a steadying force. The illusion of wealth is difficult to release. And so we have the second Allo Darlin' record and it does not compel action. Third track. Europe. A treatise on the unified currency? The Common Market? Mediterranean sensibilities versus Anglo-Saxon sensibilities? I've just finished volume five of the history of civilization. The Renaissance and I have a soft spot for Benvenuto Cellini, a man whose talent made others overlook the fact that apparently he was a mass murderer. Would we forgive the Smittens if Colin Smitten decided to murder his local Vermont General Assembly man in glorious Colonna form. Unlikely. I can't forgive Colin Smitten for his music really. Allo Darlin' should not be so forgiving either. In our diminished universe they are Tintoretto to Colin's Schiavone, but we are feeling overly kind being as our hearts are full at the moment. Next track Some People Say, again with the vague collective, the same transition as on the band dynamic. I can imagine a scene at an inexpensive curry restaurant in Shoreditch or wherever it is that they are dicing and the boys in the band lamenting over the slowies. Let's become a proper rock band was probably uttered by some foolish knave and we are thus lastly situated with a second record freed from the nuance of character study and heartache and wedded to chiming chords and hallmark sentiments cast out into the void to anyone and everyone. Perhaps everyone on the first record was fictional, perhaps the chili existentially representative of a couple in the throes of Hold Me Tight We hope not. Next track. Some People Say is exceedingly lovely by the way and it is my favorite track by a fair measure but my mind is distracted with wedding rings and fairy lights and Alaskan sunsets. Elizabeth has turned her band into my blog. References plucked from the aether for their catholic appeal, words and phrases constructed from their euphony rather than the eminence of emotion. The guitar player wants guitar solos, he has them, the bass player remains anonymous, drummers are drummers unless they play in Long Fin Killie or Pram or Moonshake or they are named Loz. This is a string of breathless sentiments that never add up to a conclusion. Am I too cruel? Yes. I love this album. But someone that I love has fallen in love with the first Allo Darlin' album and I am sad that I don't want to share this album with her with the same vim as the first. Sad. Next track, Wonderland. It could be a loveletter to Rajon Rondo. Could these be even more specific than the first record's paeans? Is this why they are cloaked in a generic impenetrableness? Possibly. But she's a ravenous polar bear now and it isn't the same as wanting to be in his arms when the music ends is it? It is not. Rajon Rondo deserves a tribute band, certainly not a tribute indiepop band. This is not it. We're just listening and praying for rain. "...and I don't care". Hmmmm...the next track is Tallulah and perhaps it is the pace of the majority that has clouded the storytelling that we once found so enchanting. Enchantment is a frightening thing. I am enchanted at the moment. I can't see the world for the disaster it is because I have hope and faith and it all emanates from one person who has reached through the miasma of mediocrity and I may even soon be able to peer into a mirror in public at a distance greater than a few centimeters. Tallulah is her favorite Go Betweens record? Ir merely the most convenient metaphor? But the power of music to catapult one away from the exigencies of your current existence into a day dreamed far away. "i'm wonder if I have met all the people that will mean something". Sadness. Another rollicking chiming guitar track follows, it is difficult to mean so much at such a volume. James Hetfield isn't reaching into his soul is he, he's got hammers where is heart should be and bread pudding where his head should be attached. Elizabeth isn't yet made of bread pudding but her Swedish travelogue has now become a lament reminiscent to the Lucksmiths nostalgic geography(again) and cartesianism. She just wants me. She's never been cool. She was. Oh she was so irresistibly cool. She still is. This is a lovely track. It's just that other Schiavones like the Pocketbooks or the Language of Flowers can be this generically pleasant. Allo Darlin' are meant for greater places in the pantheon of indiepop endearment. Still Young. Again with the rock and roll. It sounds American, or worse, gasp! Could she really be Australian after all and not this cosmopolitan citizen purveyor of the world's delights? The horror of such imaginings can not be overstated. This one is based on a groove, probably written by the drummer. Did the band write these tracks? Is this another strike against democracy to be recounted by the heirs of Will Durant in future Volume 11 of the history of civilization? When discussing the temporal reign of Benedict in the early 21st century and Allo Darlin' listed alongside Damien Hirst and Aaron Sorkin as the leading lights of a benighted age. My favorite record by the Go Betweens is the usual, none, they're dreadful. Truly. They rank with Felt and the Michael Heads of the world as entirely without merit in my heart. My heart has thawed recently and it burst forth with hibiscus and althea blossoms at the moment but not nearly verdant and febrile enough to overcome some biases. This track feels like some sort of centerpiece to the album. Is it? It's difficult to judge it's worth still and this is the 33rd time that I have listened to this album. My Sweet Friend. Gah, even the pop stars are nameless. It was Michael Jackson presumably, mention it, call your friend Mary or Isobel or Davin and carry the listener at least into an idealized version of life as a minor pop star in London. These are just words lifted from a piece of paper, it isn't a live pressed between a grooves. She's reminiscent of the importance of pop music's association with all of the moments in life worth sharing and yet her threads have spun away from the central axis of her and her magnetic personality. I don't want her as just the singer in a band. Take a moment and think back to the show in that suburb of Minneapolis, the young girl who wrote poems about you on her earrings and baked waffle cones for inmates who train seeing eye dogs for the blind. Let us move away from you and her and him and some famous some such or other, make a record for your friends and share it with a world desperate to be a part of your circle. Please. ,

i'm here. my heart is yours. i'd die.

Here, here let’s just stay here you should love me here here, here let’s just stay here I should love you dear When the wind comes And the sun again my love I’ll be here I found a way true In silence with you What do you hear And what do you want to hear Here, here Get me out of here Wake me under city lights An apple and a kiss on my ear Fly like days Let time erase All our mistakes I found a way true In silence with you What do you hear And what do you want to hear

the most important thing in the world to me when i was 19 the most important thing in the world to me when i was 22 the most important thing in the world to me when i was 29

for last night for tomorrow

More Pretty

Pretty

vs.

vs.

Tomorrow

my actual favorite album from the 90s

In Livonia all of the houses are identical.

Cecil B

We'll look like...

Zing zing zing went my heart strings.

Italy.

Secret reference enclosed.

If only the world knew...beauty.

It is 1030 miles by car. Now you know I'm leaving, and 12,000 miles of open air, won't stop me believing that that faint foot fall is you.

sally, sally, sally.

The future.

Eyes. Small, blue, pearls.

Catalpas and maples all around us.

American hot dogs.

Banjo for someone, somewhere.

I've finished entries on Cats on Fire and Allo Darlin'. Hmmm...So there is Jacques instead.

Tax day. Home interest is a lovely thing on but one day of the year.

Update: Allo Darlin' is charming, completely and utterly. Indiepop is in a parlous state but with these two records, the Papa Topo, perhaps there is a renaissance in the offing? Now all the world requires is a new Aislers Set record and utopia will become a distinct possibility, Chevy Volts and Shale gas for everyone.

Update:

Sonic Boom has produced the new Mad Scene lp?!

Julian the Apostate is my new favorite. More tomorrow. Update: Is Louis IX my new favorite? The Pious vs. the Easy Rider?

Now Listening: First Giorgio Tuma record:):):):):):). Stereolab tee shirt is now clear.

New Princeton is lovely. Rich dudes making posh pop? Loads of dancey dancey and strings.


Update:

New Saint Etienne here. Who needs this when you have Sound of Arrows? Sounds like old people. We are all so old.

The Magic Theatre London Town. I was once caught googling for friends who might be engaged in the same adoration of Giorgio Tuma as I was. I discovered only a few, just. One, only one, mentioned this album. Marvelous. This is Ooberman. Mostly they were competent at not being very good. But this is stupendous. Steamroller, a bit of Broadway meets Scarlet's Well. It does remind of Scarlet's Well and the Bugaloos seem an appropriate measure as well. Bouncy, talkative, charming, smart. Second track, strings, twinkles, harps, shyness. It comes down to shyness. I am shyly unshy. I am aware of this. Once when at an uninteresting seminar someone I didn't know very well at the time was asked to use one word to describe me and she offered "confident". I was stunned. I know her deeper now, she might change her answer. Confident is uninteresting, confident is Nickelback, confident is Asian tattoos and a Buick Regal. I am Will Durant trying for my deliberate self, I am corduroy slacks, I am unassuming comfort. Second track, starts off a trill through a brisk morning glade and then an expansion to fill the space between the trees and the cathedral sky above, hands outstretched, hands touching, occupy protesters after then biennial scrubbing. Magical. My neighbours were forcibly evicted. I returned home one evening this week with Magic theatre spilling from the open driver's side window and on their front lawn was a mountain of rubbish, furniture, tubed televisions, mapsco patterned divans, your grandmother's end tables made for holding marlboro ashes and soda cans carved into pop art or illicit utensils. Magic Theatre was an inoculant. My parents, when visiting, offered the theory that my neighbours were drug dealers. The plywood nailed over the front door with a sign prohibiting entry may confirm this. I don't live in the hood. I don't think that I do. I go across the street and talk to my neighbor, I am able to overcome my isolation on occasion, and when my mother delivered tortieres through the post they were there waiting, defrosting, while I was busily doing little of consequence at my vocation. In a truly dastardly neighbourhood tortieres left unattended would be precariously sited. Summer Sun, this is summer, this is cheer and glorious happiness and I don't know these things in any recent vintage outside of a pop song. It is winter, although the chinooks(in my mind I secretly insert Sirocco rather than Chinooks) have convinced most people otherwise, at least until the snow returns on Tuesday. Snow seems so unwelcome on many occasions, it arrives and the winter sun, a distant cousin, declares it as unwelcome as the competition that surely drove out my entrepreneurial neighbors. How many drug dealers can be supported in a neighbourhood this size? Have there been white papers conducted on this topic? Surely there have. A bureaucrat's nose never finds repulsion at any sort of intrusion. Next track, Rowing Boat Love Song, wonderful. Pianos, her plaintive voice, tender and sweet. It is two from Ooberman. I should have loved Ooberman. There were the requisite descriptors, twee, fey, wet, girly. But they weren't. They were Welsh. I do think that was true. But they seemed entirely too competent, confident-gasp! We haven't time for those unafraid of the world and all of its inherent dangers such as success, happiness and unloneliness. The acoustic coda, a Millhauser novella as pop song. Now some dramatic pop string arrangement, the sort Belle and Sebastian might have commissioned from friends before their friends were Hollywood starlets and eponymous film directors. This is the title track, pop songs of London bring to mind Saint Etienne and this is far greater than anything Saint Etienne has produced since I was in college. The last moment of my vanquishing. I knew I was a better student than all of my comrades in knowledge seeking. It was an objective measure. But life is mainly subjective. It is why, though I proclaim Magic Theatre's greatness, they toil in obscurity, they post cryptic passages of illness and bereavement on their facebook page in between the sweat and manual labor described of making the second album. Yes, there is a second album in progress. Wonderful. A new Pearlfishers this year perhaps as well. My escapism will be maintained softly. When riding my bicycle at 4:30 in the morning with a tail wind and the sliver of moon on the southern horizon all of my inadequacies of humanity will be forgotten for a moment or two. Next track, drama, very Scarlet's Well meets Dark Shadows, her voice the timid victim, the music a touch sinister, the story of Poullain de Saint-Foix on the prowl. Imagine the blood dripping, infused with glee, while in pursuit of his victim and his sardonic quill. Magic Theatre could exercise such passion in pursuit of their own nemesis. I haven't read any reviews of this record, positive or otherwise, but it is truth that you must fear that I am willing to send my own pummeling able servants to anyone professing anything other than love and admiration and gratitude that such a record exists. This is more baroque innocence, a refreshing march along a city street with windows painted shut her voice soaring and arriving through grout lines and cynicism with blasts of triumphalism, brotherhood and the experience of living with hope not just the empty proclamation of authoritarianism. I have now almost finished three volumes of The Story of Civilization and there truly is nothing new under the sun. I recall writing, here...crickets, after having read Xenophon about my worry that modern translation had too colloquialised the Anabasis but now I might consider that human animal stopped evolving thousands of generations ago, even socially. Even then there were the gentle Magic Theatres ready to be extinguished by the conservative forces while stranded on the mean streets of Periclean Athens, when Euripides expressed his greatest of doubts and sympathies. Second to last track, The Old Cottage. I am conceptualizing a second book now. I have met with three book editors and have decided that the first was not good. I just finished a note to my future self and if at the end I have failed to live up to the terms I will reevaluate and consider my options and oil work drudgery in the Dakots and occupy pipelines and the tar sands. I was once Canadian. I could be once more and when playing this record loudly in shipping container barracks among the mercenaries of capitalism and escape smudge tar sand effluent beneath my eyes to help with the sodium glare and tuck myself into a little ball in the corner and measure my biceps in metric denomination. This is beauty more deserving but I find myself incapable. Last track, stirring orchestration as an introduction, and now gentle keys, distant choral voices that speak with empathy and here ethereal whispers. Marvelous. It is titled elegy. Vague, sylph-like, romantic, starry eyed and real. This is the soundtrack of the life I'd like to have lived, the longing for a soundtrack so dramatic for those events passed. This would comfort the psychological infirmities of age without wisdom.

Magic Theatre London Town, wonderful. This is Ooberman? I don't believe it. So wonderful!

Azure Blue Rule of Thirds. I am watching youtubes this New Year. I have just discovered a "documentary" on the Auckland music scene from 1983 and a very young Russell Crowe with mudflap has just appeared on screen and apparently he was someone or had something to do with alternative music in Auckland in the early 1980s. Delightful. Apparently this is when the Dance Exponents were meant to conquer the world. They did not. Azure Blue's friends do not harbour such ambitions. I wouldn't imagine. This is synthpop. This, the fella from Irene. We miss Irene. We miss Corduroy UTD. We miss all of the more earnest young Swedish bands more than we will miss the Radio Dept when they appear on/in documentaries praising all things Gothenburg that you missed the first time around. If there was a documentary about the local music scene from my own days of teenage rebellion I will be absent. I was there. I watched the shows, I taped a cellophane K to the front of my shirt and fell for girls who complimented me on my purchase of Long Fin Killie records and the like but I was as inscrutable then as I am now. First track, Fingers, decent, loads of Sk-1 presets, his nice voice, earnestness, can you be an earnest synthpop artist? It did not work all that successfully for the My Favorite man. Alister Fitchett might approve. I have also been watching youtubes of feverfew performances. My namesake, smiling in the studio, very sad, to die when people love you. If I were to plunge several stories to my doom it would not be as sad. My mortgage banker might be disappointed. Second track, Catcher in the Rye, not sure what the chorus has to do with anything. Is it meant to convey he's sensitive and cliche'? I read The Catcher in the Rye when I was in high school. It never meant as much to me as the Great Brain did. But it is a cultural touchstone, it is wise to name your song Catcher in the Rye, perhaps Azure Blue has a sophisticated business plan for his new venture. Irene were only minimally successful after all. I loved them. You were indifferent. Perhaps instead he should have played slowed down, dramatic covers of classic indie songs and sold them to companies producing holiday advertisements. I could watch it on Youtube. Third track. More rudimentary synthesizer. I nominated this on the I Love Music best albums of the year. I am not sure I should have. I will be tempted to vote for dreary things over this, do people really love Atlas Sound and King of Limbs and that screechy person Tune-Yards? She sounds as if she grew up listening to the same records as all of my favorite bands on Too Pure but then she was in a car accident and airbags deployed and it was serious and there was a coma and she woke up and made this. Would Too Pure have realized her dreadfulness in 1994? Possibly not. White girls being edgy and obtuse is the new thing. Will there be bands doing occupy tours in 2012? Have there already been? A guitar, an ipad and really nice boots. The symbols of poverty! Fourth track, a bit dramatic, his voice further in the mix, more scientific. Is he an avid follower of the development of synthesizer in popular music? It doesn't seem so. This sounds like a Small Factory side project circa 1996. Mediocre. It is on Matinee. Is Matinee still the taste maker in indiepop music? They held that position shortly. But the state of indiepop is one of turmoil at the moment, I am not certain that is a title anyone wishes to hold. There is Allo Darling, there is the Heart Strings, and then there is this. It might have been lovely with a guitar instead of a keyboard. I am no Luddite but he isn't a synthpop person. He's the guy with a scarf, a striped shirt and a tattered copy of Folksinger's Guitar Guide. Isn't he? I mean this all sounds serviceable but sometimes synthpop is a cheat, it seems easy to happen upon a lovely wash of dreaminess but it wears thin after a few moments especially if the voice is melded with the landscape so that it is only sound, the story is removed, the narrative turns cold and uneventful. Case in point, this song, the drum pattern used in 3 million and one Freezepop songs, a voice mixed low into the mix and a two note chord on the keyboard. It doesn't mean a thing to anyone in the world. Feverfew mean more to me as a voyeur staring 20 years into the past with a young woman with crisps, reel-to-reel tape decks and Paul Stewart with a dreamy haircut and all of this potential clinging to him like an aura of stately elegance. This is the sound of underachieving. The meme of 2011. The world is being run by underachievers with ecstatically elevated levels of self-esteem. Isn't it? Will people love this record? There is not anything to latch onto. It rushes past in a blur, the individual components seem not differentiated from the whirr of the whole, contrast this with Sound of Arrows. Certainly Sound of Arrows had a more munificent budgetary master but they seem to have corralled their ambition with their heart and created a stereoscopic, technicolor landscape to become lost in whereas this record is sterile and icy and remote even though it is tiny in comparison and should, by all measures, be easier to wrap your arms around. Should you wrap your arms about this record I fear emotional disappointment. The Shore now, prettiness, it seems melodramatic and heartfelt but the words are smudged, the emotions muted, the humanity dressed down. It seems a very long album. Does Matinee fund these recordings? This person has a pedigree so it seems he would easily be able to discover financing in all sorts of unexpected places but I can't imagine Matinee having given up his occupation as urban planner is capable of funding recordings even of this rustic, homemade sort. Can you get synthesizer modules on your macbook that are more interesting than this? Or do you have to fully commit, buy loads of programming manuals, excise superfluous consonants and write your own code. Two Hearts. More synth wash as foundation, shifting sands, too much noise, coy effects repeated every measure, lifeless backing vocals, meaninglessness piled upon meaninglessness. Oh dear this is decidedly negative and rude, it has, just now, become more interesting, he's previously excitable but here he has been neutered. I am in good spirits, truly. I was intending to write a lovely piece on this but this is the risk when you engage in a bit of automatic writing. You could write samples lifted from the back side of bran flake cereal boxes. last track, a bit more space, oxygen has returned to the mix, but it still isn't wonderful, dreary mostly, Russell Crowe would feel let down, absolutely. 2011, sigh.