Orca Team Restraint.  Hip or hips.  Is it the guitar?  Spindly, unimpressive.  Is it the home movie quality videos?  Gauzey, nostalgic.  Is it his voice?  Lovely, confident.  Their palette is limited.  A guitar, a bass, a drum and his voice.  I know, I have denigrated every band on the planet.  But there is a lounge act quality that is superseded by their ability to make even this rudimentary exercise as feel good esthetes feel exceedingly impressive. We had the faded opportunity to see Orca Team in person and we failed.  It was late, it was a school night, we are old, all dreadful excuses - I am well aware, but we did not attend.  We should have.  Because this music is vital and alive.  All of the songs are slight variations of each other but imagine the interaction between the collective consciousness of an audience in a sweaty summer club and the singer in hot pants and bow tie, the guitar player in crinoline and the drummer playing fills to impress their mother.  It is unfortunate but even drummer's have mothers as we found on the last Allo Darlin' album and democracy is evil.  It seems their greatest aspiration is to be the house band in the next Quentin Tarantino movie.  See them in catholic school girl uniforms playing their slinky tunes to general indifference to the world t large and later hipsters dressing as them at Tarantino parties.  Do Tarantino parties actually exist or was that a concoction by Gilmore Grirls to put Rory Gilmore in Gogo Yubari gear to titillate the Aspergers set.  Is Edward Snowden Aspergers positive?  Is he making lists of his top five favorite John McEntire productions while hiding out in his Moscow aiport.  A few years back the Economist wrote a piece in their holiday issue about the joys of bribing your way through Russian airports.  I hope poor Edward is familiar.  Top track is playing now - Michael;.  In spite of the fact that I am barely mentioning the record in fact it is brilliant.   Edward Snowden vs. Bradley Manning in a battle for the hearts of mousy 20-something actresses who are looking for gentle souls.  Perhaps Edward is reading Katherine Angel's Unmastered while haunting terminals, eating Toblerone and running from the NSA, on the moving walkway just "out of reach".  I've just finished reading a review of Unmastered and am now intrigued.  Perhaps were I able to express myself without cliche, the same as Katherine has done, "Fuck Me.  Yes, Fuck Me." I could be so celebrated by writers in the Observer.  when my book is released from the great beyond it will contain pre-written blurbs about how the singer from Orca Team just could not put it down.  Nursing home fiction is where the kids are at.  Are Orca Team having loads of sex?  He has this ultra cool sheen of sophistication and puritanical filth, the same as an academic parsing the sexual nature of humans but could it be an act, is his persona strictly relegated to the stage where he exhibits great power over the minor masses that come ot see him and lust for his bass lines and polished croon.  When song six begins Little Suit begins a weariness sets in, you imagine you've heard this bass line before, his voice unchanging, affectless, pristine and cherubic.  They are from Portland.  I have never been to Portland but I imagine it to be the worst city on the planet.  Blubird, diaeresis excluded, were from Portland.  Alistair Fitchett was a large fan.  I love Unpopular but I read the playlists he has posted and I can't imagine ever going back, back to this self-imagined utopia that once was indiepop.  I don't know any of the bands he has posted.  Is each and every one brilliant?  Possibly.  In the days before being old it would have upset me that there existed genius in indiepop that I was unaware of, but these days, not so much.  I am seeking ambition perhaps.  Ambition of spirt and mind is where I am led.  I hope.  If...  The movie?  I can't tell.  I saw it once ages before, there was the Mike Alway obsession.  Perhaps Orca Team would have been too obvious for Alway.  They're better than the Klaxon 5 anyhow.  But there is this superficialness to the music, surface over soul, I have ben reading design blogs and it is difficult to combine the soul defining from the curators or soul destroyed.  That is cruel.  But is your world populated by things, fashion, ephemera or passion.  Is it so simplistic?  Are Orca Team passionate purveyors of their art?  Seemingly.  I should have seen them live and then offered a more knowing exposition but the music as delectable as it appears doesn't linger.  The Lowest Point, it could be harrowing, a life cast into the abyss by heartbreak but then the drummer comes in, drummer's mothers are a scourge.  When we have children I hope none of our children become drummers.  Not even should they be drummers that sing.  A laundry list of how he wrought his devastation, but the drums, the bass...Will they acquire a new sense of ambition on the next record?  Will they make another record?  Where do the paths to innovation lie within their ensemble?  Is it just more about refinements, better threads, improved choreography and glitter ball sex as Christmas.  Last track, a bit more restrained, mysterious, smaller than life, lovely, wonderful.        

Candy Claws Ceres and Calypso in the Deep Time.  Fort Collins' mightiest!  Back to plug their board into the tall fescue and find it stunning that that particular cultivar is digital rather than analogue.  They are all about working at the upper levels of the eq.  "Joel, this is not a toy for you and your friends.".  Hippies should be more gentle.  Firebreather is more gentle.  On Firebreather records, which are, ostensibly, Candy Claws records, the music and the voice live separate existences, brought together in redefined marriage by Anthony Kennedy's divine jurisprudence.  Strange that as a society has decentralized the entire concept of marriage in the foundation of western civilization that all of a sudden a person's worth is decided strictly upon one issue.  It's true, marriage is overrated.  I am married.  I love being married and everyone should be married.  But truly, it is overrated in the sense of its cultural importance.  I have been reading The Story of Civilization and it is a constant refrain, people rarely married for love, it was an obligation to the bloodline, to the family, to foreign policy, work rules, etc...But now apparently love is all we need.  It isn't.  We also need Candy Claws records.  They are certainly free of cynicism and this record could be a dream interrupted, perhaps they need to dial down the dosage of the Ambien, perhaps instead of the cables being plugged into the turf being watered outside the studio window they were attached as electrodes to the hippie head and of the Candy dude.  His brain a mishmash of static and COBE radiation.  Robert Goddard could be a distant relative.  As a Candy Claws record it is more similar to the first record than the spaced out last record.  Short songs, pop song structures, it could have started life as a Firebreather record for all we know.  It is a concept record about something cosmic and far out and it is a lovely one.  But these days I listen to records with hope that I can play these songs in the car, on a hill covered highway, when dark and my wife will turn to me and smile and squeeze my hand gently as it rests on the gear shift.  But when I play for her the new Candy Claws record and the mélange of distortion and impenetrableness comes forward for a slight introduction I imagine her turning her gaze to the window and dreaming of Zach Condon or worse Marcus Mumford.  The mosquitoes have arrived, I am typing this in my back yard, next to the soon to not be vacant home that sold for 40,000 dollars more than I paid for my house.  Madness.  Pangea Girls begins, it could have been marvelous, really, but it is just nice enough.  The evening continues now inside, in the kitchen, along the windows a line up of mosquitoes engaged in mating dances that date back to the Triassic.  Hmmm...they've reimagined Peppermint Delight as Pangea Girls, not successfully.  Peppermint Delight is a mix cd staple for me and although my career as a mixologist has waned in recent days I still have great success with that particular song and will not be altering my mix for the updated version.  The mosquitoes are now singing, odes for Gladiator bugs and other mythical creatures of the underworld and we're disappointed to see that the hailstorm that visited last evening was not impressive enough to result in a new roof from the insurance company.  Look at me sounding all progressive.  Puns, ha.  Next track, incomprehensible, but pleasantly so.  Are they shy?  Are they embarrassed?  These could be the loveliest songs ever made in Fort Collins, Colorado, they still might be, but they have mucked them up.  It's just the same as when Peter Jefferies married Jean Smith and decided to make Two Foot Flame records with Michael Morley when Michael Morley wasn't painting fences and when Jean Smith had eaten his talent with blood curdled on her fangs.  I am sure Jean Smith is lovely actually, just as I am sure these songs are lovely, but in the purposing of art the first thing that must be sacrificed is beauty.  Maybe I need to buy the CD.  Such anachronistic thoughts enter my mind on occasion.  There is a movie about to be made, allegedly, about some American's overwrought despair at the Smiths creaking up and his invasion of a heavy metal station in 1987 to force them to play Smiths tracks for 24 hours straight.  Sybil from Downton Abbey is scheduled to star, no wonder her eclampsia, but will it draw a significant audience?  Better to make a film about some fan's distress after discovering that the Cardigan's Gran Turismo is actually a classic album but she can't convince a single other person on the planet about this universal truth and her questioning whether all of the inhabitants of the planet have been infected with some otherworldly disease that forsakes for them the truth.  Kate Upton could play the Cardigans singer.  This record is frustrating, From Prairie(Charade) is up now and it could be a haunting, antiqued melodious adventure in evolutionary theory but we are still at war with our ear drums.  Perhaps, like the unisexual evolution in Boulder, there has been movement in human adaptation in Fort Collins and as a resident of Westminster my geographical isolation means I don't yet possess the dolphin sonar array and offset jaw line which allows me to make sense of the music on offer.  I can sense it's gorgeousness, viscerally but not as the divinely rational creature I am.  God apparently invented marriage although it was around long before we invented God.  Long before we invented the stultifying culture of consensus and uniformity.  It started with Mtv, when everyone became a fan of Skid Row because Martha Quinn overlooked Sebastian Bach's homophobic tee shirt, and then the goal of life became to have a reality tv existence rather than an actual one it is now acceptable only to have the same set of beliefs as your favorite character on How I Met Your Mother, anyone stepping outside of the boundaries of such conventions will be sprayed with Sebastian Bach's tee shirt.  Brendan O'Neill was right.  I wish I could speak of the songs, this one is lovelier than the one before and it was the loveliest thing ever but they are like the White Throated Needletail, swimming through the air between them and us just close enough to have their head chopped off by the Scottish wind turbines they have hidden in their pro tools.  Global warming has abandoned us this summer, we had snow this past May 1st and now that July is very nearly arrived the temps will not break out of the 80s.  James Hansen save us from the coming iceocalypse!    Maybe a love story between James Hansen and the White Throated Needletail will provide the libretto for the next Candy Claws record which promises to be even more inscrutable than the last one.  James Hansen is a enviable leading man, Candy Claws can smear his entrails across a piece of celluloid and expose him to the maunder minimum and make beautiful light where music should exist in the space between the speakers and my heart.  I was meant to see Camera Obscura this last Thursday at the prettied up Gothic Theater but I was more interested in watering the lawn.  It seemed more important to maintain my obligation to my lawn than to see Tracey Anne warble through her new role as Zooey Deschanel for smart kids.  Night Ela.  Maybe the leaked copies are contaminated with grodiness.  This could be marvelous and lonely, honestly, I could fall deeply in love with this record.  But it is just nice.  In Minturn, when the kids turn up to watch Candy Claws play next to Lake Constantine, they will hold each other and wonder why science is so mysterious, is there an intelligent designer, are the alpine glaciers going to leave us for the southern hemisphere, will the Denver Nuggets ever win a playoff series and why did I wait so long before upgrading my swamp cooler.  Humidity, it is a magnificent phenomenon.  It used to exist only in one place in my world, at the Denver Aquarium, where my friend the Napoleon Wrasse would wink at my as my asthma was induced by the tropical atmosphere.  In the time of Candy Claws records it was more humid and there was less oxygen.  Gladiator bugs could have been substantial members of the food chain consuming baby Thrinaxodons and ferns.  We live near to Fern street, perhaps if I stand on Fern Street while this record plays out of my tinny MacBook speakers I might then make the connection between the music and the harmony of the spheres and all will become lucid and I will have achieved enlightenment and merge with the sould of poets and Gladiator Bugs from all eternity.  For now, it's just ok. 

Sin Fang Flowers.  It has been some time since last we were acquainted.  When last we had spoken the world looked much different than it does now.  We had mentioned our foundling disappointment in the new Animal Collective.  We are not certain that we have listened to that album since.  Perhaps it has aged rather well.  Sin Fang are fans.  This is the voice of an adolescent Animal Collective, charter school kid, the version that the cast of DeadGirl goes for maple pecan pancakes to.  He's Seabear.  I've listened to their last album only a few times.  I remember it being lovely, once or twice.  He's certainly someone who could benefit from playing a show in Boulder.  He could open for Beth Orton. He could supplant Sam in her attentions.  He's lovely, truly.  First track is charming, lyrics less than the music but the impression is impressively soft.  In Boulder there is a new anthropological phenomenon. Or rather an evolutionary breakthrough--the merging of gender.  While at a Beth Orton show last autumn we discovered that while in Boulder it is rather difficult to discern the gender of strangers in a darkened room. Lively debates raged all evening upon whether our fellow attendees were male or whether they were female.  They were nearly universally blond, androgyne(obviously), physiques similar to 11 year old boys, collar length hair, and gender neutral dysmorphic perturbations.  Is it similar in all "progressive" locations?  Will they all perish when the windmills revolt, when the seabirds turn on the inhabitants, headless seabirds with an attitude and no particular carnivorous discernment between gender.  Second track has begun.  Is he a big fan of the Radio Dept as well?  Baby Bird?  Vocals are gently distorted, the drum machines are sedate, the politics are surely collectivist.  I enjoy this track as well.  He's all too lovely.  There was a show I used to be so fond of, in bachelordom, where they would record artists in very intimate settings--gym showers, back alleys, fish markets and when they produced a segment with Seabear(Sin Fang in band disguise) they recorded in his living room with a young girl accompanying the band as rhythm dancer.  It was charming.  This is charming, he has an effortless insouciance that carries forward through the air between earbuds.  In between the wires on the side of my head is an undiscovered country with indeterminate accents and punctuation.  This is very Baby Bird-esque.  Back before that may have been considered an epithet.  How exciting was it to discover a new Baby Bird home recording treasure, it was 1995 or 1996.  Impending Fatherhood made some the Happiest.... They had ever been and they could be found later, in some forthcoming epoch Dying Happy.  Uncool, I know.  Third track, still reminiscent of Stephen Jones, at least to my defective ears.  I am trying to remember what he looks like, surely an image is only a google away, but more interesting to caress the folds of my memory to recreate the version of Sin Fang that I find most pleasing.  He is unisex, black turtleneck, asexual glasses and eyebrows, fragile fingers and sharp canines.  And a soft step to sidle next to friends and enemies.  Fourth track.  I was linked on the My Autumn Empire facebook page and my page views have greatly increased as my activity has dwindled.  I refuse to make the appropriate correlation.  I have decided to begin to write more again.  I have started writing a second book.  When I write a book I write very differently than I do here.  This is mainly stream of conscious writing, self-indulgent and meaningless.  When I attempt to write a book; I've finished a "book" once, I turn more uncertain, more deliberate and I rewrite the same sentence eleven times and then don't show it to anyone ever even as I go to sleep each evening believing truly in my heart that I've written something that may worry over attention from someone, somewhere.    Next track, softer, sampled twinkles, his voice multi-tracked, gentleness on mountaintops of cotton candy and down feathers.  He is destined to live in Boulder I am sure.  I've thought that my novel should be a science fiction tale of a strange conspiracy born in Boulder where a merged gender emerges and is thirsty for conquest, imperialist androgynes bent on conversion of the masses to the Camaro crash helmet.  Words are tender, the sense is introspective.  He is also Seabear.  I played Seabear for my wife and she was not deeply impressed, softly, we argued over whether it was folk music and I had to put on my Linnaeus pants and discuss how there are different classifications of folk music and as he is from Iceland this is the Icelandic variant, rare in these parts but still very much representative of the genus.  Grouped shouty vocals at the end, make things a bit more thrilling, only slightly.  The reason the newest Animal Collective is disappointing is because it lacks a heart.  It exists without a heartbeat, the heartbeat rhythm that makes one mistake mundanity for modernity, incompetence for destiny and incoherence for enchantment.  Next track, treated vocals, more shouty bits, is he auditioning for Milky Wimpshake then?  They are meant to release another album soon.  Jump for joy.  Play this album until that day comes.  It is much better than the last Sin Fang album.  I seem to remember not thinking enough of that record to even offer an hour's worth of demotic dyspepsia.  This is Sin Fang having been greatly improved.  We are on now to track 7 Catcher, it is about something, we are not really that concerned over the lyrical content but it's cheerful and blood rushes to the tips of my fingers as I type in concert to the rhythm.  Jungle squeals made by tiny macramé puppets recorded under water, his own androgyne voice, his narrow, slight, small shoulders, his dexterity on display.  It is now a few months since I have begun this entry.  When once I was alone, eternally, now we are altogether, my progressive compatriots and me.  We will soon have a pair as neighbors, tattoos and babies and luxuriant relations.  Our home is apparently now worth 50,000 dollars more than when we purchased it, than it was one month ago.  Insanity breeds like prokaryotes, sans nucleus, like some sort of cytoplasmic gelatinous ooze that spreads by stolons or rhizomes and turns the land to quicksand that threatens to swallow the entirety of the G8.  That was a terrific, terrific song.  I haven't listened to this album since last I haunted the keyboard with my ordinary ordinariness.  I have a really dreadful haircut at the moment and sideburns and I am thinner than I once was, not as thin as I've been in my past life.  Kazoo orchestras and heartbeats and anticipation for a new Sally Seltmann record.  What if Sin Fang was a Sally fan, and what if he wrote an album in anticipation of a new Sally Seltmann record.  It might sound something like this.  These tracks have a cheer quality to them, anthemic, marching percussion, these tracks are not standing still they are bursting through your front door, having a cup of tea, watching the Premier League on ESPN2 and then tussling your hair, your poorly coiffured head, before catching a wave, an oscillation through the wall receptacle, past the transformer, through the spun secondary into the primaries out into pure plasma excitement.  Plasma may be overstating it, this is more the sound of a not yet room temperature toaster coil.  I had my annual work performance review at work and my lack of confidence when writing spills over, often, into my work.  I am valued far more than I imagine.  I was given a glimpse into a possible future and I was caught awake while dreaming, at an Indian buffet, across from my boss that is more than a decade younger than I am.  Was he speaking for himself or was he channeling the dark forces that operate behind the scenes at our organization.  Unknown.  Perhaps Sin Fang has written this song for me, an upbeat number called
Everything Alright.  Iceland is not the happiest place on earth.  Today I learned from HGTV that that distinction belongs to the magical pixie infested kingdom of Denmark.  On HGTV was a terrifically conceited and materialistic American of subcontinent descent who was dying to discover why the Danes were so happy.  I discovered her blog later, she doesn't seem to have any answers but from other research it could be sloth that is the key to happiness.  In only 3 metropolitan areas do the majority of adults have an occupation.  Terrific to live on other people's money.  While I fret over my unimportant work done well, Danes live unfettered, free to cultivate their fashionable xenophobia.  Another cheerful track this, Not Enough.  Undistinguishable from the other pedestrian mirth but enjoyable all the same.  I am writing with a slight case of detachment in this entry, as if I need to reintroduce myself to the movement across a qwerty.  I'd rather attempt to understand how Daniel Evan Weiss dances across a keyboard, is that the key to being a brilliant writer, to discover the hidden patterns that exist in the microfilamentous connections between keys on a keyboard.  Your J secretly exchanging ions and cations with the F6 key and somehow some born with a extra sensory ability to interpret the vibrations that emanate as a result and turn it into prose.  Prosaic, I have untapped an endless vein, but Poetry and Prose and the uncommon, the especial, unknown lie the pathways between my hands and the heart.  I am sad because tis lovely little bookshop dance record has not helped me to undiscover my inadequacies.