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.