I spent 1 hour writing a book today. I am rewriting a book I spent months writing back when I was alone all of the time. I am excited for the future. We can build our own future to live in. We can shut out the world of mediocrity and strive towards a lazy perfection as someone from the Orchids might say.

Alessi's Ark The Still Life. Our favorite child prodigy named for an italian blender has returned. She returned some time ago. I am not dutiful in my postings on here. She is now 23. part of the uncomfortable phase for readers when I was discovering brilliantly talented teenagers from around the world, quite accidentally possibly, making a turn as Stuart Murdoch possibly, creeps with poor grammar skills. Soap and Skin now has a baby. Alessi has a new record on Bella Union. Bella Union also released her second album which I did not love nearly as much as the first. This one is much better than the second. First track has a skeletal metronomic feel. Skat style whispers and her odd phrasing still intact, it's indelibly charming. I have this strange hope for her. She'll follow the creative muse and not turn into a music industry cliche, turn more towards Kate Bush(though her talent is not nearly so impressive) and not towards dating John Mayer. The songs are short, the first Tin Smithing is already over. Second track, classic italian blender stylings on the guitar and a shuffling trotting backbeat, wavering on the introduction to the chorus, delightful. How does she determine which notes to bend so flavorfully? Is it this that makes my ecstatic praise seem despicable and uncouth? Some clever tricks on the production on track two. On her second album the songs were all very short and lacked the drama that her teenaged flowering had had, it seemd she had already entered a barren middle section of her career even though the record was marginally attractive. Here she's been turned a bit more idealistic in her musical pursuits. Gone are the Lesley Gore covers and in are some goth window dressing that surround her basic folk leanings in more atmospheric accessories. In track three, The Rain there is hung about the basic structure an overbearing sense of drear. Next track an intermission, a moment of reflection, "I'm told there's good things I've done, when you're me, you remember none". A bit harsh on herself there. She seems as if she was reared among the characters of through the looking glass, in tall dewy meadows flush with sunshine dappled through leaves. And so her karmic introspection seems implausible though insistently lovely. Next track, Big Dipper, more of the cosmic cowboy sound effects with a bit of Spoon and Rafter feel brought into the tracks. She's not nearly so reverent as Neil Halstead though and so there are patches and quilts instead of a tapestry freighted with the history of country rock. Has she heard a Levon Helm drum solo? Probably. I imagine there are loads of people at Bella Union telling her to listen to Big Star records and Graham parsons, eager to abuse another child into an appreciation of the classics. I hate the 1960s, everything about them, mostly, except for the Beach Boys and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and the Kinks and Paul Simon. That's it. Next track, a bot of foreboding in the introduction. Is she a convincing goth? Not usually. She's adopting the role of mother in this track. Has she a child? Has one of Bright Eyes planted his flag? Unknown, it is irrelevant to the matter at hand, is she writing from experience now or are this poems and flights of fancy when next she plays live will she play barefoot on top of pianos constructed from coffins that once carried the bones of martyrs from the children's crusade? This one is a bit silly. There isn't much here and the producer is trying to imbue the proceedings with a sinister element that doesn't flow naturally from this warm hearted soul singer. Neil Gaiman-esque doors creaking, large animated eyes peering back from in between the notes, it's all a consistent tempo from start to finish and it doesn't have the whimsical flourishes that we loved on the first record but she's an artist now. A business person intent on making it in the wide world of music piracy and indifferent teens torn between descendants of Clare Grogan and hair products in boat shoes. WHen I was a child I was into Fastway and Vendenberg and Queensryche and Iron Maiden until I discovered the Smiths, until John Hughes led me down that garden path. How easy to discover this english treasure in this age of the instantaneous but are there children begging their parents for a child because Alessi has one in Afraid of Everyone. Introversts seem to be in style these days, the zeitgeist in a whisper. I am introverted. I am not shy. I am unskilled in casual conversation. i was watching a skype interview on the Wall Street Journal website and a kid who probably could buy me ten times over but still has the same haircut I had in 8th grade discussed Dale Carnegie and how he told a story about a bicycle he found in the middle of a lake to the boredom of his important guests and I thought only that he needed new friends. It could be a Flann O'Brien story come to life, the bicycle detective arriving a few minutes later to arrest you for a dash too furious of sarcasm and wit. We can't be witty, we must discuss the weather and then ask about Victorian Crime drama screen plays written for the most important person in Denver, the person that lives up stairs. I love the current track, Sans Balance, she seemed fully formed with a voice on her first record but this also sounds organically grown within the folds an crevices of her neocortex, is she multifaceted and clever as well as charming. it could be. Another great track has just begun. Simon Raymonde needs to book her on Axe Cop stat. She could play Alice after the miscarriage, a smudged innocence smeared across the camera eye, we would all feel so vulnerable and despairing for the youth of the world that seems irrevocably lost. The world seems so very old. Even the brightest hope in the galaxy, our fearless president, is nearly extinguished, hubris having been mistaken for competence and the grinding work of mediocrity that propels all of the universe in view has turned our mental existence to soup. It is in need of more italian blenders, fascist or not, and fewer messiahs. My parents assigned me an unremarkable name, I have lived up to it. Money, a short philosophical treatise in a tin pan style and church bells meet the vaudeville back beat. She was born a drummer you know. A Lucksmithian chorus comes into view, we're all holding up our beers and swaying back and forth reminiscing over when times were so much more magical when Martin Starr had all of the answers. Last track now. More of the mid tempo prettiness, organ on a small plank in the misty landscape behind her fluttering heart songs. She's probably a sweet young woman, ready for the world's mundanity and indifference to beauty to leave her lovely songs to die a pitiable death alone and afraid. If this world was better I'd grow one foot taller. But I am already taller than average, so there is so very little hope and italian blenders will remain on dusty shelves in the archives of dreamers. Update: Oh, apparently Afraid of Everyone is a cover from the band the National. I am unfamiliar with the National and I hope their baby was born happy and that they believe in protecting the public health and endeavor get their child immunized on schedule.

Nore Jane Struthers Carnival. I have been reading reviews of the new Love Language album. It is beloved, mostly. Strange. Stranger still that I agree with the Popmatters review which says nothing at all in that usual real record reviewer manner(apparently this voiceless writer has won a Canadian writing prize and I bet his parents are proud) but also realizes the record is a bit of a disappointment. This is the difficulty with expectations. I have set the bar low. I consistently travel beneath. I don't know anything at all about Nora Jane Struthers. I didn't have any expectations when I plugged in the high fidelity pink earbuds I was overjoyed with my undiminished lack of expectations. There are loads of banjos, violins played like fiddles and she's a real peach I'm certain. While Caitlin Rose is searching for some sort of authenticity at the end of a cigarette it feels that this record is more of a document of an idyll. The carnival, mama's boys and a jolly violin underpinning the well mannered stylings. It is rather excellent all in all and were I a member of the Popmatters staff I would now quote four lines of lyrics and discuss their penetrating insight into the human condition but I have terrible ears for sentiment. I love the wordless bits going about just now and I am convinced that only the most confident writers will substitute a whoa oh oh for their bathroom scribbled poetry. Second track The Carnival, brilliant. Cough medicine hidden deep beneath the sink to keep that breathy elegance on the first verse and then the rush of a chorus before the banjo walks us down the promenade. These all seem to be second records, these country albums that I have only just discovered my desire for. Nora is a proper looking young lady, lips painted on, hair do done just so, a fashion blog on her website even, all of which betrays her poshness. Possibly a podcast on events in the middle east in the near future? She's an english major and sounds it, from New York University so I suppose that makes her more folk than country doesn't it. Listen With Your Heart is playing just now, and her voice is wonderful and what I am discovering when making my shallow foray into country music is that the cliche is not dead in country music. While innuendo may be king on the pop chart in Nashville a good cliche can speak to the multitudes quicker than a tweet comparing Zooey Deschanel's eyebrows to a Luna Moth caterpillar. Am I saying that country fans are simple? They are. I am. Love songs don't need to be clever. Sure we love David Scott and his unending string of metaphors for that which defines most of us but there are moments when you want to sing at the top of your lungs(cliche) the most obvious proclamations of love love love. "Twirl me around Johnny", is she ironic? Do people in New York resent that question? But as the capital of heathenism in our god fearing country they must expect such scrutiny. Does anyone in New york accept the modifier "earnest" as anything other than an epithet? But then Nora moved to Nashville. She may have felt her sincerity out of place in the artifice of a hipster scene of "folk" singers in New York. This is all speculation. Speculation is my currency, I spend it immodestly. I used to spend all of my moments when writing about a record attempting to catch the rhythm of a record while I wrote and now in my old age I have turned to making obscure unfounded accusations and littering my posts with topical posts that relay my superficiality to full effect. When not listening to Nora I have been listening to podcasts on my commute. I am dreaming of the day soon, in 2016, when the light rail station opens near to us, just 1/2 mile from our front door, and I can listen to the Divine Comedy's Commuter Love properly for the first time with a french novel and a decent side part and fond memories of the days when I would listen to Nora Jane when I was not listening to podcasts. I have just recently finished the History of Mathematics series from the BBC and am desperate to pick up my Diff Eq's text and work my way back into the favor of the gods of Primes and Chaos and multiple infinities. How to distinguish between madness and pure mathematics? Unknown. Perhaps because i lack discipline and I don't actually resemble a mathematician I could just write a screenplay about Nicolas Bourbaki. Hugh Jackman as Andre Weil in passionate embrace with a dangerous bend and Nora Jane in the corner in a small cameo a new dress, featured on her blog in a movie tie in, and her song Let Me Fall playing over the final credits. But she's an English major so we would be Brighton instead of Paris and we would run around tennis courts with inaccurate Austen quotes written on our foreheads and we would smile because we're oh so much more clever than anyone who would bring up Lie theory in decent company. Party Line introduces a male voice in the background, a song about antiquated technology. My Uncle Ivan had a party line, you had to identify your phone calls based on the ring and anyone on the line could pick up and listen to the conversation. But when I was 14 I only remember the nudity on canadian television soundtracked, oddly, by the Cocteau Twins Lorelei. The party line was also in Canada. Chatham, Ontario. I feel prim and saddled by the reluctance to get too saucy with the cheerful demur stylings in my ears. It isn't challenging. It is soulful. Isn't it? I was lamenting Caitlin Rose not having lived it before singing about it just the other month but now I feel a strange kinship with Nora Jane Struthers. She's an approximation, a facsimile and I find it marvelous because of my general ignorance of this sort of banjo led folk music. I am also one more for the uptight bookish crowd than the head wrapped around a veil of tears cried through a filter of second hand smoke and stale beer. Two Women is the epic centerpiece? It could be. It is an ode to sorrow, the fabric of loneliness stretched over a spare frame. William Lee is begging for a reference(thank you podcast). But as I am walking across the room attempting to keep my laptop from becoming unplugged there just smoker's voices coming from the television and my rush to the restroom is made uneasy. Aging has never been her friend indeed. This track is a bit of a drag, I suppose it is meant to reveal the depth of a fashion blogger turned folk chanteuse but it just sounds a bit drab. The party line wouldn't be listening in on this one and the last bit of horses drinking champagne might have had those lonely enough to have held on to scratch their heads. Count my cliches. Orwell claimed that if you recognize the simile or metaphor that you have just written that you are compelled by good taste to delete it. I have no taste at all. I break most of the 6 rules in most of these inane entries. But I am not a barbarian. Truly. Country music would not count George Orwell as a fan I am sure. He was surely a jazz man, or Cole Porter? And the idea of an english major making a pop record would be close to sacrilege. I don't know anything at all about George Orwell. I haven't gotten to that podcast just yet. I have read his account of the Spanish Civil War though and of course we re-enacted Animal Farm on the playgrounds of our youth. I may soon become a father and I will let my children know that not all things are possible, that life is unfair but drams can come true if you work hard and you don't live life afraid. I have, for most of my life, lived with fear. I am determined that this will change when the day comes when I have to stand up to the scrutiny of my own progeny, when they look at their father and judge I will convince them of the quality of otherness in a life lived in a non-extraordinary manner. Nora could be exhibit A. This is a wonderful record. I am enjoying it immensely and I have found little darkness in the sentiments that are coalescing in my mind around the notes that fill my ears. the songs are probably too long. But this is the Nashville where I would dream in. Well tended landscapes, horses in the field, children with long, unruly curls and everyone dressed in white, brilliant white and Scorpio Murtlock lives in the abandoned firehouse just down the street. male voice weaves in an out near the ned of the record, unremarkably, but it is not unpleasant. Because the songs are somewhat protracted I find my head moving on, to Howland Isalnd, to Jarvis Island and shirtless photos of tiny Hawaiian men as forgotten colonists for the imperial spearhead in the south Pacific. Could I move the scene of action in my blockbuster screenplay about French mathematicians to a desert island in the Pacific with native Hawaiians playing the foil in this lord of the flies adaptation where Emmy Noether's name is used in vain while Jean Dieudonne reaches deep into the chest of a young boy and thrusts the still beating heart into the night sky to satisfy the gods of Mo'ai which have read the shape of the waves and sailed their canoes to this unchristian land and the handclaps in unison match the melody of Travelin'On and pixie dust covers the latest thriftstore book mark of Nora's.

Ruby Suns Christopher. Robin Thicke is the target. His face emblazoned on a billboard buried in the scrub oak alongside the desert highway in the heart of hirsute Ryan McPhun. The dad with the hair, the majesty of low expectations and some strange level of swagger and of course there is the inexplicably world conquering success, there is that. Ryan McPhun had a conflagrant van on the side of a Washington state highway at their near peak and well...they did provide the soundtrack for a Microsoft commercial but then it was Microsoft and it wasn't Apple. Jet had an Apple commercial and they are probably best friends with Robin Thicke these days. My assumption that this is meant to be a commercial dance pop record could be incorrect. Sex is camouflaged and so commercial success is hardly inevitable. They can't shake a desire to make the next Power, corruption and Lies. It's not particularly danceable, even for those afflicted such as I am, not particular polished and it's difficult to imagine anyone singing along to the first track Desert of Pop. Myself, I find track number one toe tappingly lovely and dance to the moon while it plays. My Thursday evening was spent browsing the last of the Busby Berkley "Gold Diggers" and it didn't live up to Stephin Merrit's imaginings, not nearly as much as Gold Diggers of 1933 does but it made me imagine the importance of movies such as it in a period of time when the entire American dream consortium doubted itself and the times were filled with villains that appeared larger than life from the newsreels and how a slice of escapism could be more important than almost anything else. Times are almost certain to be as tough very soon but there hasn't been a real resurgence of compensatory fun and ridiculousness. Has there? Pop music is increasingly dour and violent and vapid and disingenuous and worst of all it is serious. Is it because Tom Ewing proclaimed his love eternal for Britney Spears all of those years ago? When the condensation off of his metal etching of Simon Reynolds that hangs above the mantelpiece drips down into his beard filled with the stilted clinical praise of modern youth and its own brand of sterility because as they pour from his lips they get caught up in the thicket of axial forests. I want a record to make the "dance of the pudding" the love of our lives, the day of reckoning when Uncle Ben dies in a tanning bed and the market crashes and my trip to Idaho is to some remote colony of militia washouts n a bivouac hidden behind terminal moraines and speakers playing Ruby Suns Microsoft commercials to throw the agents who trained at Orbitz off the scent as only the poor are relegated to Microsoft. Now to In Real Life, guitars and samplers, drums, his cotton candy voice. All sorts of cool and whirry whirrs but hardly a trifling scent of desire. This is more sedate than the first track which was a blast. Piano! Big chorus, a Celebrate the Nun chorus. It was raining earlier this evening and the Clientele were playing on the car stereo and this was the dance music of my heart in the moment that existed. The rain, the words, the poetry to inspire the heart to leap beyond imaginings. When in this EO Wilson created reality where life is rational, mechanical, pre-ordained through social chromosomes it is a wonder that love can peal, can rescue souls, and love is alive and the genetic material of a kiss can be carried forward to the end. This is calculated. As calculated as a love poem, certainly. But Robin Thicke sounds as if he's having a great time being Robin Thicke. Perhaps Ryan McPhun has more particular needs, his falsetto on Dramatikk sounds the result of a tragic childhood accident, a trip to the wrong emergency room, multiple urethras, but this song is startlingly lovely. I will admit to finding Blurred Lines truly awesome, the feelings remind me of my puppy love for Andrew WK the first time I heard him when playing him on a college radio show late in the evening that was broadcast to 11 dorm rooms in the middle of the winter of 2001. But...this music moves my heart. It is the heart that is my center of gravity, a portion of the male geography due north of Robin Thicke's ego. Next track, a Hall and Oates'ish track turned goth disco. He's not from New Zealand. He lives there now, or he lived there then, he is on Subpop and I imagine the room erupting into a flurry of funky white guys in Melvins tee-shirts doing the electric slide across the table top made of recycled condoms and ramen noodle packages, giving each other high fives because they had the balls enough to release such a daring piece of music. Or they just dreamed, collectively, that it was lovely. it is. I am inserting myself into the mind bended world of Ryan Mcphun. The world of ten dollar synthesizers and .99 apps that can recreate the way out sound from 1984. This track has a feel of a 10 mile swim through lime jello. Next track, Rush. Frightened child vocals, synthesized dyspeptic beats and swirls. Is he a one man wonder when making records now? I think they operated as a duo on record in the past. They may still do. he used to drum for the Brunettes. It seemed a heady time way back in 2005, Mars Loves Venus and venus loves mars and trees were made of pound cake and Lawrence Arabia was set free and we fell away from our navel gazing and dreamed of a New Zealand renaissance. It did not happen. Brunettes dude went emo, Lawrence was always more Gondal than Glass Town Federation and the Ruby Suns went away from limpid and turned tenebrous. Fight Softly proved difficult to love. This is less difficult. It's soothing and amorphous but I can wrap my arms around it. Hugs not drugs. Boy now. Remember when they went a bit Animal Collective? This is a remnant of that era. When Ruby Suns went Animal Collective it was a positive reinforcement for the theories of evolution, when Architecture in Helsinki followed suit it was a war crime. There are scattered heart beat syncopations and vague sentiments that seem earnest and determined in their disguised state. Does he have anything to say at all? Unlikely. This does not cause me any great consternation. if you are born with a poetic ear the likes of Alasdair from the Clientele you play slow, complicated songs with the words as highlight above a delicate underpinning. if you are Ruby Suns you scrub the air of depth, you turn to tone poems and nostalgic feelings of childhood and life within the womb when you shared the rhythm of life with a superior being. Boy is mostly awesome by the way. I am not turning deliberately vague, it is the music, blame Ryan Mcphun for my own foggy notions. When now he has turned Justin Timberlake playing karaoke versions Republic we are unserious enough about changing the world through perspiration and innuendo to find it disorienting and dreamy. he loves the Olivia Tremor Control doesn't he. He has a prescription the same as Robin Thicke, surely, but why would we compare our friend Ryan to the colossus? I am not sure. It becomes more difficult to write an entry on music you feel less invested in and it is true that while I find this warm and rewarding I won't be begging with my tender mercies for my wife to not stare out the window while I play this over the Scion's tin can and string radio speakers because it won't ever likely make it into the rotation. it is dance music for the space between my ears, the space behind my eyes, the world that was once my prison and which is now a ruminative diversion from a truly romantic life. My life is a dream at the moment. The seeds of existence have spilled in nonrandom forms and the Earth is recreated in the future that will be possessed by someone other than myself. My future is in the seed implanted in uterine walls. And when the day arrives Ryan Mcphun will be a memory. Pleasant and ethereal. He is an ethereal boy. He was once salt of the earth, flesh turned to steel and worldly and now he is trpped in a snowglobe inside a snowglobe inside a snowglobe. Last track, Heart Attack, ghosts of Julian Henry meeting his tenage girlfriend's parents and his sighs of resignation. A crescendo, dismal background vocals, charm and a falling away, will Ryan end the record with a moment of triumph or will it wither into the conformity of mediocrity? It's truly lovely. If you are just oh too cool for Robin Thicke, meaning you are not cool, you will find this thrilling and electric and a dream and when the end snatches you from your travels you will have not been burdened with dissatisfaction. High praise!