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.