Ron Powlus Role Model

2012-02-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

New Frank and Walters album out this month:).

2012-01-24T20:38:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-21T08:40:00.000-08:00

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 Scarlett'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 shy. 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 shyness 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 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 thr 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 true that I might 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 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. There were the gentle Magic Theatres ready to be extinguished by the conservative forces even on the streets of Periclean Athens, when Euripides expressed his greatest of doubts and sympathies. Second to last track, The Old Cottage. I am writing 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.

2012-01-20T19:56:00.000-08:00

2012-01-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-02T08:26:00.000-08:00

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 invisible 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 parlous 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.

2012-01-01T19:07:00.001-08:00

2012-01-01T17:29:00.001-08:00

2011-11-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

Sad.

2011-11-27T19:03:00.001-08:00

Favorite album of the year 2011- Giorgio Tuma In the Morning We'll Meet, he's a god.
Most listened to record of the year - Sally Seltmann/Love Language , even if each is from last year.
Favorite Indiepop record - The Heart Strings Flap Your Crazy Wings, wonderful.
Others-Sound of Arrows, The Bats, Panda Bear, Acid House Kings, Frankie and the Heartstrings, Amor De Dias, Bachelorette, Beirut, the Blueflowers, Deaf Center, Dustin O'Halloran, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, the Drums, Epic45, Gold-Bears, Hildur Gudnadottir, Julia Holter, Lanterns on the Lake, Pj Harvey, Regina, Sleeps in Oysters, Summer Camp.
Pretty but boring - Still Corners
Pretty Blah - Sin Fang

Seems like a smaller list than usual. Oh well, on to 2012. Soap & Skin in January? That might be totally awesome and original. Or it might not be. Azure Blue out in December.

Update: Oh and I forgot Seefeel which I really did not care for at first but now I love, a nice companion to Panda Bear.

2011-11-26T13:07:00.000-08:00

Azure Blue - The Catcher in the Rye from Jonas Börjesson on Vimeo.

2011-11-26T09:37:00.000-08:00

Sound of Arrows Voyage. It begins. Into the Clouds. I have been waiting for this album for a very long time and so when it begins with an only slightly altered Into the Clouds I turn slightly anxious. But of course this song is a dream. It is beautiful, gentle, technicolored and expansive. You might then wonder, oh, it is all downhill from here. It is not. I would imagine the Sound of Arrows support the Occupy people. But is this music not the antithesis of Occupy wherever? It is hopeful, it is ambitious, it is outward looking. Occupy wherever seems to be very conservative. Life as a static model, preserve my privileged position and inoculate me against my poor judgement. I made easy decisions. I was incurious. I am incapable of thinking for myself. Yes yes, these are all broad generalizations but i have driven past our local franchise several times in the past week and they seem a lethargic group. There are four police cruisers that have them hemmed into a tiny portion of Civic Center Park. It is very quaint with their sleeping bags lined up along the sidewalk and their enervated spirits projecting anything but enthusiasm. They have a website. I wonder if the designer is an actual occupier, or rather safely ensconced in an undisclosed location. Second track, next single Wonders, glorious, it's Fantasia re-imagined as a synthpop landscape, border-less, populated with the same mythical beasts and fairies that populate the lysergic fueled trips of those who want to indulge in all of the successes of capitalism while maintaining the dreary romance of believing that you are a dissident in your own country. It is all very authoritarian. There are surely a dozen Leni-wannabe's armed with digital video cameras documenting this momentous occasion. Third track, My Shadow, a bit more artful. Disinterested vocals, spare accompaniment until the chorus shines brightly. This is youth on parade. Do not assemble and collectively plead for your right to be inert. Start a business. Start an organization that has momentum enough to carry minds into fanciful lands and exercises. I am reading a biography of Rosa Luxemburg at the moment and to speak truthfully it is something closer to a hagiography but to be fair it was written when fascism was on the rise and communism seemed a lesser trial even with the bolshevik autocrats already on the march in Moscow. Not a single mention yet about the coercive tendencies of socialists. But she comes off as something of a scientist, trying to theorise everything about human existence and interaction into a compact set of laws to be interpreted and managed by a socialist elite, divorced entirely from human emotion and superstition. It is similar to What is to be Done minus the idea of events being driven from the top down by a professional political class. It comes off as absolutely absurd until you realize that all of these mad ideas have come to fruition. These occupy wherever dopes are pleading for technocrats to save them from their foolishness, the same as an inert Greek populace potests only to maintain the unmaintainable status quo. The current US administration is filled with people who want to manage a 15 trillion dollar economy without having any experience even in a micro sense. Magic is playing now and the video for this song includes children who awaken in a world depopulated with adults. it is where we exist currently. The idea of being an adult is terrifying to most people. The idea of being responsible for the decision you made to acquire a massive load of debt without any concrete logistical plan to retire it holistically is anathema to perpetual adolescents. My oldest brother ran up a considerable amount of credit card debt when he was a teen. My parents bailed him out. And then he ran up more. If you subsidise a behaviour you will guarantee more of it. Next track Ruins of Love, the long slow track, still dreamy, still ambitious, still wonderful. Will this take hold in these dreary times of austerity? Will life turn grey and uninspiring and only art will be composed of dreams and hopes and when you stare at a painting or into a soundscape will you feel these deep nostalgia for life as we once knew it. Rose Luxemburg was a genius, but she seemed artless, dour, too realistic except that she wasn't. She would look at events and miss the irrational components entirely. I also have recently finished The Instinct of the Herd and Wilfred Trotter is a contemporary of Rosa and he seemed to grasp events far more cogently. When individuals assemble and identify as groups they don't take on the nuanced characteristics of esoterica such as labor theories and economism but they acquire emotional arguments as cudgels and are carried along by the powerful instinct of the herd whether it was Germany as the predator or England as a mix of Predator and Prey partially paralyzed by the mistaken belief that they were indeed rational beings. Humans are not rational beings. How disheartening for occupy wherever to self identify as a terrifyingly insignificant minority as 152 million americans stop only just short of murder to secure a flat screen television. This is the instinct of the herd. Longest Ever Dream, a female voice, a lovely pop song, the next single? Sound of Arrows are from Sweden. They live under a false consensus. I claim it is false because I believe the most difficult thing to align in socialist societies is class interest. Occupy wherever would be wiser to not attempt to make claim to speak for anyone other than privileged college students who bought into the myth that where you attend college matters. This should be their message, with Sound of Arrows in the background, do not listen to your counselors and parents attend a local university and demand a more rigorous curriculum instead of a new student activity center. I've mentioned this before but I interview prospective employees for my company and while I don't work for a prestigious or important firm I am still amazed to read the applications of college graduates. The inability to articulate anything meaningful is a dreadful disgrace and scourge visited upon the youth of today. Listen to an Occupy Denver protester, they haven't read Rosa Luxemburg or Herbert Marcuse or even Marx bur they are "marxist" because it is fashionable and they have tee shorts to proclaim it so. It is romantic to live in opposition to the status quo. but they have won, marxism is on the dais and they can't seem to recognize their success. Conquest, a bit of heart worn drama, a bit of Wham!? Less Pet Shop Boys but more gay discotheque even. What has this entry to do with Sound of Arrows, nothing at all. But are you all that interested in Sound of Arrows? Probably not. You should be. They've taken ages to record this album and unlike Pas/Cal and their "let us have done with it, for now at last" it is wonderful. But then they are youth. Pas/Cal's sun had set long before and it is youth that we treasure above all else. Nova, another single, they aren't innovative but do not disguise a distate for non-innovation for the same concerning ambition. This is an album filled with grand statements, a treatise for escapists, the same as Rosa Luxemburg. Because as she was describing a world that did not exist and that could neverexist so too have Sound of Arrows re-imagined our own calamitous existence. The music carries you above the dreary hollowed out reality of life as we know it and engenders a dream of something greater. It might still be a collectivist dream but slowly pop music will evolve to a more individualistic manifesto, celebrate as a group, come together and spread joy(I was at a christmas light ceremony yesterday with hundreds and it was lovely) but when you fall away from the bosom of the group do not long to re-enter it as a means of protection from the cold, venture bravely out into the abyss and succeed on your own terms. I say this as someone without a single measurable success. I know. I wait for my Bernstein-ian dismemberment. Now to There is Still Hope an epic seeming dreamy ballad that introduces itself as the summation, the final track contender but is in fact the second to last track. Washes of synths layered upon each other, tender anesthetized riffs rising falling and finally his tender voice exhorting love to will out, hope to capture the moment. It is an inspiring beginning, it is almost disarmingly earnest. iw oudl hope that they are earnest, that these tracks are the true evocation of their hearts. In the age of irony or manipulation it would be lovely if someone who truly meant it and conveyed it could stand alongside the John Mayer's of the world as a counterpoint to unfeeling cynicism. Socialism is not feeling. Capitalism, the infusion of a life filled with risk and unlimited reward is the emotional choice. Choosing to live unhindered by the reality of tumult is not living at all. The last a tender instrumental, time to reflect, time to reassess, the world is about to end, feel melancholia and joy and retreat to the things that are important, life, love, happiness, noen of these things can be delivered by your fearless technocrats.

2011-11-26T07:32:00.000-08:00

Amazing.

2011-11-13T17:15:00.001-08:00

I am working 1 million hours per week, well, at least for the next 10 days. Sound of Arrows album is the only thing that can make me smile.

2011-10-22T20:24:00.000-07:00

Listened to new Neil Halstead single about tennis, on my Saturday night, not very good. I am listening to Celia's Dream now, to counteract.

Update: Slowdive is the greatest band in the history of the world ever. For this Neil Halstead is forgiven for all past, present and future transgressions.

2011-10-22T18:17:00.000-07:00

The Bats Free All the Monsters. " We have so little time to say the things we mean." It is gauche, unimpeachably, to quote Gus Van Sant movies as the height of sagacity. But I like that contention. I do spend an inordinate number of words on this website not conveying much of what is inside of my heart. It is always what is in my head that spills out in among the pixels. Head or heart? Which is the more compelling? From the opening riff the Bats hit me in the heart. It is the tenderest Bats record ever. His voice, restrained, moved back farther into the mix, the sentiments gauzy and washed over and sweet. He's older, they're older, we're older. We are beyond the apogee of civilization. We need nostalgic reminiscences such as this to remind us of how beautiful life once was. When I was a child in the 1970s and we last had our existential crises I was too young to understand the decay and despair. I would watch Jimmy carter have press conferences about changing the direction of the part in his hair and when I would walk hoe on my birthday I was super charged and energized and filled with joy. Now children are not allowed to walk home from school. They may not be allowed to listen to the Bats. Why tempt them with hope and loveliness and joy. This world is going to slip into the abyss of Nick Cannon and 'Through the Wormhole' and Van Jones. The Bats will move on to another world, a better world...there must be. Second track, the track when we realize that Robert Scott has suddenly realized that Kaye Woodward has a voice and it is terrifically lovely. Was it as a result of a loyalty to Jane Sinnott that he seemed to have not noticed this previously? There's the incalculable bats jangle(is there an algorithm for the effortlessness that they convey with guitars). DO their riffs repeat? They are complex enough to disguise repetition. His voice, again, muted, hers tres super! And then a Kaye lead, ah bliss. The Bats writes songs about everything. They write songs about date rape, strangely cheerful ones about date rape actually, and political songs and songs about love and everything else important. Perhaps now that the end times are arrived the important things in life that have not yet bean sullied by bureaucratic intervention will come to the fore once more as a celebration of the traces of humanity that have not been crushed by the heavy hand of government. I was working on a municipal bid for our company this week and it is a minor contract, certainly in the face of our 4 trillion leviathan and yet the process of removing beetle kill trees in summit county requires the oversight of nine different government agencies. At a minimum there are nine bureaucrats that we must be answerable to in order to use a chainsaw to remove dead trees. Madness. The current track is Free All the Monsters. They have been chained to desks by stifling federal mandates. Gamera not allowed access to restricted flight paths, Godzilla for not making his flame meshed breath safe for children's pajamas, Godzuki in violation of youthful curfews. It is all very depressing. It was such a rapid slide. it all began with bicycle helmets. I ride my bicycle to work, most days, when I am not lazy, but the scorn that is heaped upon me when I pull into the parking lot without wearing a bicycle helmet is immense. When did it become everyone Else's concern over the risks I choose to subject myself to? Robert Scott has children. I am sure, because his heart is pure and his soul unblackened by cynicism as mine has been, he makes his children wear bicycle helmets even though when he was a child he never wore a bicycle helmet. And he learned the limits of mortality. He didn't mature in a risk free society where you can choose all of the easy paths and feel entitled to a reward at the end. I work with a great number of first generation immigrants. They come from cultures of self-reliance and where the government was more likely to murder you than to suffocate by needless regulation and they have a spirit and vigor that has been nearly extinguished from the native population. but their children, their children are comparatively benign. Our overlords have nothing to fear from the children. They will Occupy Wall Street and demand more government oversight, more bureaucratic indifference, more state sanctioned mediocrity and inertia. Because it is safe. This is why indiepop music has stagnated over the past 15 years. Wealth, as ephemeral as it appears now, has blunted the rebellious instincts of pop music. There is only a retreat to isolation and narcissism worth commenting on. but this album? It's gorgeous. But they are not children. The Bats are old. The Bats are older, much older, than I am. They can be reflective and ruminative and it sounds romantic and wistful rather than inhibited. In the Subway not, a bit of kraut rock-ish motorikness. A groove. Paul Kean is married to Kaye Woodward. They also have children. I am not sure if Malcom, the drummer, has children. he was once in the Bilders. With Bill Direen. Is he a fan of cabaret? His drumming is not flashy. What would happen if he came in with a load of Can records and a Jaki Liebezeit haircut and an assortment of cowbells with mention to his band mates that he had a song. Where would the Bats be then? In the Subway is also great, it isn't gentle and demure, well it is, they are desperately unable to shed their genteel natures, but it is insistent and basic and charming and my gosh I love the Bats. I am so glad that they have returned to us. hey were banished for a short period. The Bats released two dreary, uninspired records. This record sounds more polished, as if it has been more expensively produced than the last few records. Next track, more double tracked vocals, there is a very strong Daddy's Highway feel to many of these songs, a Law of Things confidence. It's marvelous. My heart is sometimes shrouded by an inexpressive camouflage called my countenance. My heart sometimes has a muffled heartbeat. i want the beats to be obvious to everyone I meet. How brilliant for a lovely stranger to meet you and to be charmed and beguiled because the pounding of your heart is obvious to them and to everyone in the room, I am so desperately happy to see you that my heart can not be contained within the realm of this dust and flesh. Devotchka songs express that feeling. The Bats are more the subtle tingling sensation that travels up and down your spine in an unconscious realization that although the world faces Armageddon that a smile could disarm nations filled with belligerents intent on your destruction or the crushing thoughts of inadequacy that assume primacy in more private moments. Space Dust now, beautiful, it's got pace, it has jangle, his voice distant and sparkling. Her voice just beneath. Are the Bats a democracy now? Has Robert Scott acceded to popular convention and allowed his band mates a say on the musical direction of the band? Hard to say. This is a Bats record, he is the Bats, but after 30 years, they are the Bats. And they are Minisnap. It doesn't sound like Minisnap record. Minisanp is more bouncy, effervescent, fey, insubstantial, this is all of those things but in a stable mixture that comes out uniquely their own. Big echoey vocals at the moment, thick guitar lead, his charming rhythm track. Wonderful. On the Bank. I had two musical childhoods. The first I spent in England. My friends were Morrissey and Ian Mccullough and Paul Heaton and other minor figures of great importance. I have Paul Heaton's heart in a jar in the side drawer of my desk. I would, if it was available for purchase on ebay. The second I spent in New Zealand. With Martin Phillipps and Robert Scott and the Kilgours and Graeme Downes and they, neither, had greater influence, they wove a tapestry of insecurity and obscurity. I am able to hide in fantasies of exotic Aotearoa and Cemetery Gates and be made to only briefly escape for gulps of air at the surface after a vigorous swim through the amniotic fluid of my own indulgences. I met someone this week and admitted my love of cemeteries, of the dead, and their life's journey and my need to fill in the gaps and spaces in between the epitaph and the earth. I admitted that my first date was at a cemetery near my home. I did not feel self conscious or strange. I realize now I am destined to be alone, with pop songs to accompany my loneliness and my intense narcissism. I write laments over this age of narcissism but is it not true that shyness and introspection is the most damnable version of this social malady. it is. I deem the world as it exists unworthy of my interest. I deem the world as it presented itself to Ikhnaton to have been preferable to our own even though it is unchanged, essentially the same, perpetually uninteresting and populated entirely with people more concerned with the quenching of appetites than reflection. This is why the Bats are one of the most important bands in the history of the world. When the four of them come together it's for the expression of joy. It's a timeless act of human kindness and they should have monuments erected to them in appreciation. Last track, the acoustic ballad. Charming and effortless. Magic, just as the song says. Graeme Downes has morphed into Ward Churchill, Martin Phillipps hasn't written anything I would admit to owning for 18 years, the Kilgours want to be 18 forever but Robert Scott has been Robert Scott since forever and it could be this world's great under appreciated charm.

2011-10-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

Exciting news--Sound of Arrows album is out on November 7th! Woo hoo! One day after my mother's birthday. Cast these pestilential spirits from my being.

2011-10-20T19:57:00.001-07:00

2011-10-16T20:02:00.000-07:00

Billy Bragg singing protest songs seems so quaint. Still clinging to Clause IV?

2011-10-13T19:53:00.000-07:00

Gothy goodness.

2011-10-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

A Winged Victory For the Sullen S/T. There is...err there was a five ton asteroid hurtling towards the Earth. Perhaps it has already finished hurtling. Update: It has. This may well be the very last record I hear before I am obliterated by space rocks. Update: It isn't. I would not have minded. This album is a dream. Song titles are unimportant. The first song title is languid and lovely. It is Dustin O'Halloran and some other guy. The "some other guy" seems to be appropriating all of the attention in online mentions of this album. I haven't any idea who he is. He's in a Kranky band which makes me think he makes dreary, overly long music when he isn't making A Winged Victory for the Sullen records. Remember the second Jessamine album? That was brilliant. It had complicated packaging. First track is drones and keys. I am assuming the other guy handles the drones and Dustin the piano? The piano is rudimentary. The drones are exquisite. Is the piano rudimentary really? I can not be certain. I am on this kick that every thing these days is mediocrity defined and so I have perhaps unintentionally disparaged Dustin's own virtuosity. Mediocrity on parade is what is causing the general malaise in our universe I believe. From politicians to artists to just the drivers of every day life, your parents, your bus driver, your ice cream vendor. Does anyone really appear to be trying for perfection? Look at the crop of people destined to take over for our current mediocrity-in-chief...just dreadful. And Occupy Wall Street wants to grant these incompetents even more power to ruin your life. While they defecate on police cruisers. This is the problem with collectivism, the guy who defecates on a police cruiser must be granted the same privileges as everyone else. Instead of a true meritocracy where you are forced to claim your successes we will define success down and claim victory for everyone while we slide into the abyss. But most people achieve very little, even in measure of their tiny ambitions. Track two, again song title is unimportant but it is Requiem for the Static King Part 1. Strings and drones begin, heavenly. it sounds as if it was recorded in the corner of a very large room bereft of everything but the small group of musicians. I always lament my inability to judge the inherent worth of a piece of classical music based solely on an objective criteria of ability and quality of composition. But then is classical really so different from any other from of music and is it not all subjective interpretation. Possibly. I listen to the rocket scientists that are now occupying Denver and their world is one filled only with subjective pronouncements. They are unaware of any inviolable physical law which may govern the universe as a whole but fully cognizant of the miasma of emotional treatises disguised as academic arguments. A living wage? Oh, track three has begin, this is Part 2. Government transfer payment are by their nature merely subsistence payments and to have government mandate a minimum wage essentially means this will act as a false ceiling. Currently the minimum wage is $7.25. We can not hire anyone for $7.25 an our, not even in this economy, because it is not deemed a salary worth enduring the aggravations of labor for. So a minimum wage of 20$ isn't in reality any different than a minimum wage of $7.25 in comparison of purchasing power. Wages are a business' number one cost, if you are forced to increase wages so dramatically your costs have just increased and so you will either ned to shed workers and demand more productivity from those you retain or you will need to raise your prices. Without a minimum wage you can achieve some sort of real price on staples such as food and fuel and other items but with government mandates and other foolish policies you have an artificial economy with everyone suffering under the delusion that $20 and hour is a livable wage when in fact it isn't any different than $7.25 per hour. Unless you are in a union and your collective wages are tied to the level of minimum wage. But anyway. And you know I attended a fairly prestigious university and was able to pay tuition while I attended University. It took me longer to graduate because I was only able to attend classes part-time but I went every semester and I graduated without any student debt even wiping out a year of medical school debt thanks to being part of a team that developed a fairly lucrative algorithm for Raytheon. But anyway. End Capitalism, end the most amazing two centuries of progress for the human race. We can listen to these beautiful records on our Ipods for the next 1000 years because when the government runs everything innovation is halted. Look at the most highly regulated industries in America, rail(innovation does not exist), air travel(innovation does not exist), finance(innovation is forced into dark recesses where risk is unnecessarily raised because the prospect of return in an over regulated market is minimal), etc, etc, etc... Is Morrissey occupying London or some town in Italy? Probably hoping for a government mandate against vivisection and the introduction of a vegetarian commando force to thin the population of carnivores. What has this to do with music? Nothing at all. But this is an astonishingly pretty album. Song five, the pre-release teaser. I know it was so overplayed here on commercial radio that it feels like an old friend now. Not actually. I have been dating people recently and am beginning to wonder if I am meant to be anti-social and a shut-in after all. I don't much feel a connection with any other human beings. I have a friend at work, a married friend, who I suddenly appreciate because she seems to have shared sensibilities with mine but then I have only ever seen her at work. I am confident, dominant and dynamic at work and at home I curl up in a corner of my basement pressed against an outside wall and read very long books and fall asleep with thoughts of the contradiction of the main tenets of buddhism in my head and heart. If there is no soul then how is one reincarnated? And why must men corrupt everything pure. This music feels pure, a salient distillation of perfection, minimal, spare, intense. Why can't all human emotion be channeled as efficiently and with such a staggering level of warmth and joy. These are my subjective truths. This is my emotional outburst. Dustin O'Halloran deserves as much credit as "some other guy", every records that he makes is gorgeous and the records that other people make where they seem to be offering tribute are also gorgeous--see Lanterns on the Lake. The longest track on the album now. The centerpiece, 12 minutes long, minor keys, drones, slow motion ambience, just amazing. I would walk about my neighbourhood this evening listening to the album whilst dodging raindrops but it never does rain here and there is the incessant intrusion of train whistles that are visited upon us nearly every evening. Will occupy Wall Street shut down commerce sufficiently to stop the trains from interrupting my sleep? And when I ride my bicycle to work I have this overwrought terror of the train tumbling from the tracks on top of me and my specialized bicycle as I race underneath the railroad bridge as the train passes overhead. And there are the skunks. This song is mainly empty spaces. What skill in recording to prevent this from being meaningless nothingness. There are slight crescendoes that weave slowly into and out of the mix, there is a ebb and flow of tender emotion. It does feel like a paean to loss, a soundtrack to decline. A nostalgic view of the once believed moment of permanence when everything was fine and nobody hurt. The mythical age that has never existed, ever. The title of this one is The Symphony Pathetique and it is let down a bit by the title, it sounds as if it could be ironically applied. Irony is so overdone. Give me the dreadful earnestness of someone like Chris Martin, however uninformed, over the knowing nihilism of Stephen Malkmus who seems genuinely terrified of expressing an earnest belief in anything. We have moved into the second half of he symphony, a slow draw down of forces until it is merely drones and their echoes filling the mix. A symphony for the autumn brilliance. Even in Colorado where trees are treated so rudely by the elements there is color enough to harken the spirit and allow one to turn a blind eye to the foolishness of our generation bathed in ignorance. I am eating chocolate and considering the gentleness of this album as a balm to counteract the disappointment I feel entitled to own. Slowly the symphony is reawakening and drones are cascading, drone upon drone, half filled with the minor particles of the standard model. I lied. It did rain here. It rained last Saturday and I was meant to be at work but I stayed home because of the rain. It has not rained since. It will likely not rain again until April. But if it does rain our hearts will be prepared, our souls strengthened and Dustin O'Halloran prince of stainless song craft will be there to capture our sudden elation. It will be drawn out, it will be slowed, it will be compressed into a fine distillate from a cacophonous colloid and it will rise to the occasion and save us from the mediocrity that has been so brutally cast among us threatening the existence of our entire civilization. When A Winged Victory for the Sullen is, by government mandate, proclaimed the only music worthy of public consumption then we will all gather in dells and city squares and in tiny hovels and we will look to the heavens and feel untethered by the paucity of our physical existence and truly experience timelessness as it should be visited upon everyone at least once in their life. And we will eat chocolate and Kate Bush will be there.

2011-10-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

New Bats!

Pretty, but, aye the last couple have been pretty dud.

2011-10-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

Still Corners Creatures of an Hour. The important question is whether Still Corners' taste in film and recorded music is as all encompassing and clever as Broadcast. My productivity has fallen off after a rather prolific summer. You are welcome. I have not been writing other things, mostly, I have been asleep. For two months. I awaken only to listen to music. This record is nostalgic. Trish Keenan, we miss you. This record is very good. It is unfair to compare, we know, but they are the ones that sound so very much like Broadcast. First track, spare plot, it's about establishing a soft focus. Do their record collections extend beyond the likes of Flowchart and Semi-Gloss? Unknown. They must be young. Can they converse convincingly on Italian film directors from the early 1960s? There are other less important questions. Second track now, more propulsive, repeating keyboard motif, shards of sound effects as guitars, spooky monosyllabic harmonising in the background. I should be at work at the moment. Christmas starts on Monday. I will go to work on Sunday. I will be alone at work on Sunday. This is our dilemma, we actively seek solitude from ipods and the general avoidance of people and then lament our isolation in blog posts. Consistency is not a virtue. Broadcast wrote the most perfect pop songs ever written but they were not a pop band. Still Corners are a pop band and they write very nice pop songs. But the voice, it is not Trish Keenan. Third track, farfisa, thundering drums, hushed vocals. Broadcast had a brilliant drummer. He was replaced by a drum machine. Did he ever imagine it a good idea to be the focus of attention. Is it even true that drummers buy records for drummers? More guitars as accessories. i don't mind actually. it's colourings and interruptions from more interesting conversations and then it is over. Track number four. Even if the Egyptians were the peak of human achievement they didn't have cool space age bachelor pad pop music. Would I have felt comfortable as an Egyptian? My lack of ambition might have predestined me for a life of slavery to be wagered over by Hyksos interlopers. This is another bit of vague sensory experience. The songs have words, they don't seem to function for any purpose apart from sound poems, a caption to the imagery, through the looking glass in invisible ink. It is raining today. This is the first significant rain since July. Thus the desiccation of my muse? Will now the words come flowing forth? Already this is the second entry of the day. Boffo crescendo just now, ten keyboards all in a row. Now to the toy town portion of our program. Her vocals as dramatised through a telephone wire, nice switch now into the age of high fidelity. I really love this album, in an inconsequential manner of romantic activity. I am stuck on the anglicised spelling infatuation of my youth spent in a northern suburb of Detroit. This is intense prettiness. They create pretty things almost effortlessly. When the last note plays it does not linger. Perhaps the Egyptians did have space age bachelor pad music and just lacked the means of carrying it forth to generations to come. This will be the torment of our own age, the age of the incompatible format. How will I listen to my 8-track tapes in 43 years? Will there be hipsters to sell me their wares while protesting capitalism along 16th? I do hope so. The only song I can distinctly remember listening to on my parents 8-track player is Jewel Akens The Birds and the Bees I have distinct memories of life on the top bunk with an assortment of wicker hampers playing wicker hamper drums along to this song. I did not grow up to eclipse the sun. Nor have Still Corners. This track is a bit of spy thriller soundtrack action, guitars, groove and her voice. Her voice, unchanging, ethereal, unaffecting and unaffected. I used to have a friend that grew up betrayed by love, unable to appreciate any female voice with even an artifice of emotional resonance. She will love this album. i love this album. You should love this album. If you are alone it will make the lonely beleaguerment more passable. Next track, the voice used as ornamental decoration, there are the lead vocals and then pleasant harmonising vocals in the distance that add a warmer touch than the aggregation of dreamy synthesized sounds constructing the impenetrable wall of sound. The production is not great. It is all loudness nearly all of the time. They did not grow up huddled around a four track recorder, this much is clear. Did Subpop inform them that the songs should not exceed 4 minutes? Only 3 breach that mark and only just barely, and even if that condemns this record in more learned ears as inconsequential they aren't interesting enough to carry a groove into a trancelike state of human circulatory system sympathy. It's pretty pop songs, her voice is sweet sounding, but we won't be listening to this when we are conducting a sit-in at Goldman Sachs tomorrow demanding the erasure of the student debt that we willingly agreed to before engaging in a 6 year plan to study Lesbian Post Modernism. It is interesting that the general level of human intelligence seems to be invested in an indirect relationship with the amount of education one acquires. I am a snob. My degree is in physics. Physics is a real subject, provable, objective. How to deal with a subjective field of study such as Lesbian Post Modernism? It is the difference between bowling and figure skating, one at the whim of human ability and the other at the whim of human opinion. Madness. Another pretty track now. I spent a good amount of time in university. I spent some time studying less utilitarian subjects, I remember a brilliant essay on the movie Shane in one class but I paid as I went along. I worked nearly full time while attending school and two jobs when I was not attending school. Now I am interviewing college graduates who have never had a job in their life and the are 24. Perhaps they were in super cool modern pop bands and decided to pack it in only just recently when they realized they will never be as brilliant and influential as Thom Yorke. This track Submarine is just over 4 minutes, it feels much longer, the drums will not be presently praised.

2011-09-22T20:46:00.000-07:00

2011-09-22T20:06:00.001-07:00

Lanterns of the Lake=Gorgeous.

Update: Often just a short period after I make this vacuous posts I retract my initial impression. I will not this time, probably. This is a lovely record. Bella Union's new Devics? A country Devics? The first tracks begins all Klima-esque, oh, my swooning heart. A distant whisper, unfocused electronics, strings, hums and delightfulness. I've been reading Stilwell and the American Experience in China and it is marvelous. Barbara Tuchman is a goddess. I have come to realize that as soon as I am master of the art of the Blitzkrieg that I will embody the reincarnation of Joseph Stilwell. I am him, he is me. All of her terms that she employs for the creation of a psychological profile of him apply just as specifically to me. It is both heartening and unsettling, heartening to think that greatness has flaws the same as I do but also disquieting because born with the same hopeless feelings of inadequacy he overcame them and marched into eternity as a giant of his time while I have dinner with breathless editors about my fancy disguised as a novel. I did actually have dinner with a book editor. I gave her a copy of my "book". I can't tell if she thought that our meeting was a business meeting or a date. Will I sleep with her to have my book read? Has anyone read my book? Unknown. I could role play in the guise of Uncle Joe in the boudoir to liven things up a bit. This is me, at Rooseveltian angle. And this, after my earlier laments at the vulgar. My apologies. Second track, the male voice, gentle, soft, alright but then she arrives and it's terrifically lovely. Pianos and strings and dust shaded vistas and mountains cascaded out of the desert sands. They are from England. I conjure speculations. It sounds so terrifically polished for a debut record. Did Simon Raymonde produce? There is a Bella Union sound now. This is almost archetypal. Strings and prettiness, a gauzy artistic sheen, spare impressions of emotion. Affecting still. Handclaps arrive just now and it's suppliant of romance. Third track, more horse drawn carriages on lap tops and a fair distance between notes and her tender voice. Very beautiful. The Chinese do not emerge as romantic figures in Barbara Tuchman's book. When reading it is tempting to think that they have not altered greatly from the great traditions. Perhaps they have. i don't know. I've never been to China. My brother went, to work at a factory to build automobiles, he never actually left the factory except to depart. They lived at the factory because there was running water, there were security fences, there was food. Apparently these things were in short supply even within the near vicinity. Will the Chinese eventually come to love Lanterns of the Lake? Or will it go down the same as Noel Coward for the GI's in Ledo? "You know what to do with the pianos." An inside joke between the General, Barbara and myself. Pianos should be played ever more frequently on popular records. I love piano based pop songs. Is this pop? Sure. Ambient folk pop. Fourth track, very brief, a hymn like quality to it. As being from a former maritime power this references the Sea. Will England's resurgence only arrive when they once again take to the seas? When in gardens all over Albion men and women construct seagoing vessels bound for strange and exotic lands. There are still dramatic sea shanties pouring forth from the quills of songwriters all over the land, it should encourage the national spirit. All the hooligans and chavs aligning behind the gorgeous tones of Lanterns of the Lake. Next track, rock music. A bit Jack. The English do this so much more convincingly than the Americans. Is it part of the national character? This ability to write seemingly literate, melodic rock music. I have been all too dreary recently, all of the very and decidedly pretty. I miss rock music. I miss the Playwrights and Moonshake and Flying Saucer Attack. I want to be aurally beaten down, but with a smile on my face, always, with a tender lash. This is not intimidating. This is the louder version of their quieter moments. This is for the drummer's self esteem. We've built to the crescendo of drums and strings and hypnotic rattles and hummings. Very nice. It does remind very much of Jack, especially on this track, the rent-a-string section to add glossy pretensions. The martial drum beat. The gin soaked pose. This is vaguer than alcohol. This a hymnal to our times when everyone believes very deeply in empty and meaningless platitudes, where I search in glances and notice people not much differentiated from the primitives in Our Oriental Heritage. Where lethargic protest is seen as relevant and meaningful. At least Lanterns of the Lake seem more interested in loss, in romance, in the moves of the human soul through our dilapidated civilization. Will Durant does make an excellent case that civilization peaked with the Egyptians and that we have regressed since then. Sixth track now, after the massive crescendo that ended the previous. Tender laments on violins, feathery whispers, underexposed electronics and a dreamy mix. It's analogous to our current social experience, so very close to cacophony but held together by some unseen common purpose. The drummer is reading Negri in the corner, until rainstorm percussion and drama require that he place his Hatchard's book mark in place and render drama. A lovely piano coda at the end. I have been listening to this album when I drive home from work every night. I am nearly old now. I am aware that I will spend all of my life alone, as I always have, just Will Durant as company and without a Hatchard's book mark of my own. Next track, very Devics, but different. They are for the bombast, the poetic, the less personal. Sara Lov, with her flower in her hair, her not dainty ankles, described a more personal vision in her songs. Los Angeles has a port but it does not have a history intertwined with the sea. he sky. "Here, here, let's just stay here, you should love me here." There is nothing so nakedly hopeful here. And isn't that what is important, this notion of someone that you can just be with and who can make you happy. It is not concerning whether they love the Beach Boys Today! more than Pet Sounds, although that is important, it is whether they can breathe in complementary patterns. Tricks now and there is not much here that resembles Devics. Alessi's Ark? When she is 30 and making records with Ryan Adams. We will lament for poor Alessi when that day comes, from fascist blenders to "Fred Armisen in drag". Apologies to whomever it was from I Love Music that I lifted that from. Christmas consumes me now. It does every year. I wake up and I go to work, I go to work and drive home, in the dark and it is only the hope that records such as this continue to be released every year that carries me through. Thsi won't be voted anyone's favorite record on blogs. It may be mine. Every year there are amazing records released. What a lucky time to be alive. And there are a few that strike one's fancy more than others, you wouldn't campaign for their inclusion in any sort of pop pantheon except in the annals of brilliant human emotion only partly contrived through their sampling. But are they overly literate? They make no real allusions in the lyrics that I am able to discern, but this is the age of the pretense of being an artist or artistic is more important than the concept of beauty. The narrative has superseded ability. And so Occupy Wall Street is an exercise in myth making. Thom Yorke is an exercise in myth making. When I do work, on Christmas, on Sundays, some time is spent unproductively watching BBC documentaries on classic records. The series is titled Under Review and I watched the episode on Hounds of Love and then on OK Computer. The comment to be made is not on the comparative quality of the two records but on the admirers featured within. Radiohead's supported sounded all the less convincing of the brilliance of Thom Yorke because even though they may have a singular vision it is so vague and indecipherable, he is unwilling or unable to capture anything that makes him distinct from anyone else in his music. i am not concerned that his lyrics are vapid examinations of political subjects but that his vapidness is so impersonal. Kate Bush has a lion's heart(pardon the pun) in comparison, so willing to be ugly in the pursuit of beauty. Maybe I should have been the age that I am now in the 1970s and in England and close to the sea. Current track is I Love You, Sleepyhead. As impersonal as a Thom Yorke track but because I don't have any expectations of profundity it registers as exquisite rather than tedious. So so lovely, truly. Last track then. A short track. Pj Harvey-esque, a hint at future endeavors? Indeterminate poetic couplets, next to the last page of Kristen Hersh's The Letter.

2011-09-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

New Kate Bush in November:) My birthday month.

2011-09-05T20:33:00.000-07:00

I lied. Tomorrow. I finished a huge project at work today. I am suddenly weightless and I am smitten with the cleaning woman.

Update: and then I was somewhat ill.

2011-09-02T19:49:00.000-07:00

More regular posts beginning tomorrow. Julia Holter album is stunning.

2011-09-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

The Heart Strings album is the best album of the year. If you disagree then you are sadly uninformed. I've been meeting vulgar people recently. Am I alone in my decorous ways?

2011-08-30T20:15:00.000-07:00

The Drums Portamento. The Drums are really pretty great. I know...I can't even convince myself. But they are, really. They are certainly not cool. They exude earnestness. They seem manufactured, perfect haircuts, sharp clothes, contrived controversy??? If in the future someone came out and proclaimed that they had written all of the songs for the Drums but that he was forced to toil like David Cameron's treadle pump boy, impecunious and in obscurity because he didn't fit the image then well I might find that more convincing even than my own earlier proclamation. In my last entry on the Drums I made disparaging comments about Anthony Powell. This was previous to my having read the first three volumes of Dance to the Music of Time. Now of course I want to marry Anthony Powell's worm riddled remains and name our first baby She-Evelyn. I was young, I made mistakes. Yes, the Drums debut album was only a year ago. I have aged dearly. This is the record where the singer says all o the things he meant to say on the first album. He's just not very interesting. But it is the sound that is important. "I've seen the world and there's no hell, and I believe that when we die we die". Profound. Sounds Assyrian. now that I am planning on reading the entire collection of Will Durant's essays on civilization I can sound convincing when I compare pop song lyrics to Near East cultures. The Assyrians seem somewhat minor actually. It makes me seem all the more obscurantist and this, by my reckoning, appears to make me all the more impressive. of course this song may not be Assyrian at all but confident of the level of historical knowledge of my audience I will make the claim without fear of the "but I've read well and I've heard them said a hundred times, maybe less, maybe more" gotcha moment. This is not a challenge. But the typical Drums fan is the anti-me and wears product in their hair, loves Teen Nick and thinks Charlie Rose is sexy. Right? I've migrated from Will Sergeant in the first entry to Will Durant. I have evolved. The song titles are very direct. The song about not having any money is called Money, there is one about not knowing how to love called I Don't Know How to Love and one about loving a person that is hard to love called Hard to Love. Time is short, he's moaning about wasting it on the lovely second track, he doesn't have time for you to misinterpret his metaphors. I had an email discussion with a stranger who was upset because I told her that her Robert Frost quote did not mean what she thought it meant. It was the pedantic Drums fan in me. She became very indignant but I thought everyone was aware that the line about "and I--I took the road less travelled" was ironic later justification of the path he chose and that the choice was the insignificant bit of the poem. But I suppose not. I imagine the Drums will have a track about The Road Less Taken on an album at some undetermined point of the future and it will be titled The Road Less Taken and because he is so desperately earnest and aboveboard he'll also misinterpret the meaning. Third track now. There are less guitars on this album. There are more synthesizers. They fired one of the guitarists. They had two, they don't have a bass player, although,,,there is low end on this album. There are his soporific backing vocals as well, the ones where he adopts his Morrissey affectation on for the live performances on British chat shows. He has a way with a catchy tune. I mean he's basic, he probably thinks Rick Perry is a great thinker and likes RC Cola but that doesn't mean his songs can't embed themselves deep inside of your consciousness so that you are furiously trying to battle the echoes that ring through your mind at inappropriate times. This is the first single. This is Money. I spoiled the surprise by giving away what the song was about earlier. if this was David Scott he would have been more clever. But David Scott is in Scotland and they have trees and the smell of an ocean less polluted by radiation because they are farther from Fukushima than Brooklyn is. Do they have eclectic trees in Scotland? I have planted several on my plot in the last few years, I try to be eclectic but this is Denver, apart from the Riparian Cottonwood trees do not exist. So my Redbud is exotic but then it is not as exotic as a contorted Redbud or a Turkish Filbert and my Prairie Fire Crabapple is semi-exotic because it is multi-stemmed but not as exotic as a Prairie Rose Crabapple. I do like my Bosnian Pine but it may not be long for this world. Tears. I will bury it in the yard and have a suitable service, it may have bean the reincarnation of Chandragupta! Next track. it's about someone he's having difficulty holding his affection for. It reminds a good deal of the first record, the second guitar being replaced by a digital bass line. There are squiggly electronics, did Flood produce this album? Perhaps one of his disciples. When Flood produces your album it is normally an indication that you have completely given up. You've pulled out the checkbook and written an absurdly large number in the box and given the rest to your drug dealer. I don't think the Drums are making that kind of money yet. Next track, maybe the best track, I Don't Know How to Love, I like the vocal treatment, very echoey/tremelo-y. There is a searing quality to his voice, stripped of nuance it just assaults the primeval center of your brain, short circuits the cerebral cortex, and I have a physically pleasant reaction to the music. They had sense enough to not be on Captured Tracks, why confuse us. Captured Tracks is one of the worst things to happen to music in a long time. I know everyone else loves them. I am wrong. I know. But it all sounds so hopelessly unambitious. I listened to the Soft Set again and it is lounge menace. Bah. I listen to the Drums and I am aware of their meaning in the greater scheme, he's a melancholy Smiths fan with his own band and he's probably an autocrat in charge of every aspect of the band's music and style and I can appreciate that. What is the Soft Set? It's tepid, it is enervating, it is meant to be hip and hundreds of thousands will proclaim it thus but they will be even less convincing than I am when proclaiming the genius that is the Drums but I will say it again--the Drums are gods! Sorta. If they were a tree they'd be an Autumn Blaze Maple, pretty bland, but Soft Set would be something that people would mistake for exotic but is really pretty vanilla like say a Golden Rain Tree which is really just an overgrown weed with lovely lantern seed pods that even the squirrels turn their nose up at. The last track was somewhat fabulous too. He's insistent with his drama. This track started off a bit meh but now the chorus springs to life and it's almost epic. If He Likes It Let Him Do It. Sadly, the title does not hide any deeper connotations within. This track is why they are much more popular in England than in the USA. It's a bit goth. There are probably loads of closeted Fields of the Nephillim fans that worship tracks like this, the hysterical Robert Smith-esque harmony vocals, the spindly guitar, the washed over synthesizers. it is all very grand and self-important, a bit like a 21st century Englishman born to a country whose idea of self-importance has grown as their nation has passed into absolute irrelevance. Americans will sound this quaint in 20 years when Bhutan is the dominant world power. Next track. I Need A Doctor because his hart aches with love. It's silly but so were the Field Mice and you are plopping down 50 dollars for a mint copy of the Emma's House 7" aren't you? I still have mine. I'd be willing to part with 49 plus shipping and handling for the pleasure of mailing it to you. I can't recall the last time I listened to a 7 inch record. I occasionally listen to LPs through my guitar amp. I have been somewhat remiss about taking advantage of the fact that as king of the castle I am able to play records in my basement very loudly without concern for my neighbors with glasses to their ears on the other side of paper thin fire rated walls. I could play the first Trash album very loudly this evening, followed by Palace Brothers Days in the Wake, if my neighbours heard Pushkin percolating through the foundation and through the earth disturbing the Cranberry Girdlers they'd be too moved by the Appalachian melancholy to phone the cops to report me for being a menace to the neighbourhood. I bet Soft Set plugs in his guitar or his computer and plays his music really really loud and yet his neighbors are too sympathetic to his impotence as a musician that they offer pity instead of outrage. This is In the Cold, not a Judas Priest cover, a soft synth ambient track, the set-up for the big finish. Last track now, How it Ended, subtle. is this his Her Handwriting, did some lawyer swoop in and steal away his beloved? Will she reappear on the second record singing songs about how much he still loves her and how he really thinks they should give it another shot and all that he wanted while standing outside her bedroom with his guitar playing demo versions is for her to be happy even if it is not with him. But this is a nice pop song. He's a nice guy. Is he vegan? Will his eyes recede inside of his head? Will they end up on Sub Pop and will he end up dating Sarah Shannon? Questions.

2011-08-23T19:49:00.001-07:00

Alligator Indian seem pretty alright.

2011-08-22T19:48:00.000-07:00

Phil Wilson God Bless Jim Kennedy. When you listen to the Beach Boys you must immediately realize that all of your life is encompassed in the futile attempt to find the human embodiment of a Beach Boys song. Or, perhaps it is just me. I have several times believed I was on the trail, blessed, but always it has turned out that the trail was false. Even better...what if I was the Beach Boys in a heart that belonged to someone else. That is highly unlikely. The Beach Boys are perfection. I could possibly pass time as a Drums song, maybe the Orange Peels or possibly the June Brides! There was a Beach Boys poll on I Love Music filled with all number of tracks that I was entirely unfamiliar with and I have discovered that each and all of them are brilliant and I am now on a mission to "borrow" all of their albums post Smily Smile. Old music is better. But nothing is greater than the Beach Boys. We mean not old music like 60s old music, apart from the Beach Boys and the Left Banke and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band but rather music from the 1980s, the time after Vandenberg when I came alive. Phil Wilson made old music, in the 80s. Phil Wilson is still making old music, in the 00s. He's probably near 50 now. His music is not...but in the spirit of old music better, Phil Wilson is still making old music, and it is still better. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart are making dreadful things for dreadful people, it yearns to be old music. It is not. But they are the children of affluence, coming along at the financial peak, the children of Clinton, devoid of passion, unimaginative characters and utterly charmless. Pains of being pure at heart, ugh, so efficient. The chords are strung together so that this seems literate. Were I to quote the lyric sheet I might be disappointed at its mundanity. It reminds a ton of Sneaky Feelings. Tarantino's next movie should be based on Positively George Street, James McEvoy as Matthew Bannister, sadly he dies because we can't bear to watch gormless James Mcevoy on screen. Emily Bronte concurs. Mark Ruffalo as the evil Chris Knox. Rose McGowan as Lesley Paris. Second track, more Sneaky Feelings, it is a bit more David Pine than Matthew Bannister. Matthew had the big personality. Phil seems more the reticent pop star. I wasn't aware of him in the 80s, at his own peak, I discovered him in the 90s. Along with the Shop Assistants and April Showers and Revolving Paint Dream. This is Found a Friend. It's marvelous, it is all truly marvelous. I made two mix cds recently for a stranger, I had to decide between warm and inviting and odd and eccentric. I went for warm and inviting. I made a mistake. Perhaps my first mistake was made when I had an epileptic seizure when someone decided they would not stand for illegally sneaking into the botanic gardens with me. I actually went to the botanic gardens later that afternoon and sat beneath an alder tree that needs to be pruned and pondered the Henry Moore statues that have long since departed. The new installation is far less impressive. Third track now, a bit of the nasal, he's probably political, less so than when he was in the trenches writing screeds for zines against the iron lady, poll taxes, coal miners' miseries, etc... Now he's against tuition fees and consumed with priggish laments because lasik is not covered by the NHS. Probably. He's always been so awfully polite. Thus he lives with Sneaky Feelings among my nostalgic reminiscences. He has a wardrobe full of splendidly tailored suits, spectacles to read the Guardian over and on the weekend he spends time with all of his friends he's known since the 80s. They are all overweight but he's superbly fit. He runs 3.4 kilometers each evening after the sun sets. These are the moments he memorializes in his songs. I could actually listen to the lyrics, but they do seem ultimately mundane. Is he married? Not probably. He works in tech support writing technical manuals for Ricoh and their Chinese subsidiaries. In weekends over the summer he attends indietracks and thinks Jyoti Mishra is a bit of a creep. Or not. He could be a real estate broker, a bank teller, special aid to the prime minister on Indian boys and their treadle pumps. I bet he's a fan of Annie Clark. I am a fan of her slender wrists, her fingers, her swan neck. but her music? Meh. i read someone compare here to Kate Bush. But there is a demon inside of Kate Bush, it has fury enough to escape and thrill the world in brief bursts of brilliance. St Vincent is two ply in comparison. it is all very polite, much like Phil, but even Phil fills a pan with burning emanations of fury much more than Annie Clark would ever be capable even while he's wearing his favorite red pullover, in Wales, on another weekend far from home with his best friend's sister who thinks he should have been married an age ago. I am jealous of this life I have constructed for Phil Wilson. My own life is apparently mirrored in the new Julian Barnes novel. I've not read it. I have recently read a review of it though. The review was concocted by a website intern. it was decidedly unimpressive. But he is interning at one of my favorite websites. He did not have to take literary license upon his existence and create a reality more in line with a beach Boys song than a Bros song. I hold no such comfort in my own reality. Because while I know a great many things I am never in a position to impress anyone with my useless mental accessories. I am in the corner with my headphones on at the St Vincent show leering. Phil Wilson has continued playing during my sojourn into the crevasses of my mind. It's The Sum Of, he is a fan of Love Dance. He invented Love Dance. He invented Sweden. This one is a bit monochromatic. his voice has aged, he's taken to camouflage to disguise its shortcomings I think. Listen to this record and then listen to the June Brides retrospective, marvel at their similarities. Is he wearing the same sharply tailored suits that he was wearing when playing private audiences with the Queen in 1987? He may. He may have been trapped in amber since 1987, the person from Cloudberry records discovered him on an archaeological expedition to find the remaining members of The Vernons. he took a bicycle pump and inflated Phil. This is Pop Song #32, he's probably written this song 93 times. In his life there are many moments that require an anthemic indiepop strummer with distant verses and singalong empty headed choruses about the circularity of life and the meaninglessness of life in general. heady stuff. I feel as if Morgan Freeman should be narrating in between tracks. is Through the Wormhole inflicting the amount of damage on respectable science that I imagine it is? Are children running to school with earrings in their ears and their hair frosted white and repeating the maddening gossip broadcast on that show? Where are you James Burke. Please, James Burke you must invade the United States of America and publicly insult Morgan Freeman and his partners on national television. "Oh yeah, time travel is possible, you just need to harness the power or multiple black holes. yeah, no big deal, I nearly did it last week while I was administering my "prescription" in my mother's basement. This is Give Me Consolation. It sounds like Phil Wilson in the 1980s as if this was a record enclosed in a time capsule and the earth worms and succulents had invaded the capsule and sucked all of the life force from the grooves. it's pretty good, it's competent, he's obviously a genius but these songs are pretty uninspiring. Will anyone hear this and demand an explanation for his silence for all of these years? Not certainly. I'd rather wait five years until the next Trash Can Sinatras is released and ignored. Strings, Celtic influences, Dexy's giddiness, I rather like this one but still his voice is neutered. has it always been neutered? I don't believe it was. The pre-chorus is brilliant and bountiful and then the chorus, his warbling is bad news man. This is why he is writing eloquent passages on making 2-sided copies from 1-sided originals with daydreams of the time that he faxed his privates to Elizabeth Price and she fainted from the vulgarity. Today I was in Boulder and I spent a short amount of time watching college students cross the road in front of me. An unimpressive lot. CU Boulder is a fine school. But it looked to be a bunch of social science majors who will leave university with massive amount of student debt and a head filled with cheetos and red bull. They will then come and interview with me and I will feel despair for the human race. Last track, a lament about how it has all been said before, it has, and better. But that's no reason to be disappointed. he's still marvelous, really, and when it is 3 degrees fahrenheit outdoors and I am traipsing alone through a darkened botanic gardens I will listen and life will seem only slightly better but that's a nice beginning, sometimes.

2011-08-21T09:36:00.000-07:00

My Friend Wallis On Hawaiian Time. Vancouver is in Canada. I am expert on all things Canadian. Truly. Ask me a question. This is some Canadian girl. Crystal. One of the songs is called Crystal Formation, it is her journey from zygote to embryo through cleavage to fetus and her emergence as a lo-fi superstar. Which are the cool bands from Vancouver? Are there any? That would be a Canadian question. I may have lied about my expert status. First track, Sun Spots, repeating messy percussion, tinkles on a guitar, or two, whispers. I like it. Second track, more interesting than the first track. These are random doodles. It has a bit of Make Mine Music-ness to it. She's Canadian so most certainly she is a collectivist. She's a big fan of Ralph Bunche, as we all should be, this is when the UN meant something, when the United States actually had standards and could lecture other nations about the evils of colony administration and the virtue of self determination even as we colonized the far east and Puerto Rico and Polynesia. Ralph and Harry T sitting in a tree, talking bout diplomacy, first comes Guam then comes The Marshall Islands, then comes Ralph with a scolding for you. Ralph is from Detroit. I am from Detroit. He died only a few weeks after I was born. I could be the reincarnation of Ralph Bunche. I am letting down the concept of tanasukh. But then I get all of my knowledge of Arabic studies from Rodney from the Dead Milkmen's website. This track is called On a Whim, the alternate title for the collection. I am researching My Friend Wallis and they appear to be a band. There are beards. This is very disappointing. Why the preponderance of beards? I had a date this week with someone I think approves of beards very heartily. She granted me a stern proscription at the end of the night which could not hardly by mischaracterized as an allurement. So I have resumed my search for Ralph Bunche's karmic soul mate. I am not searching by my criteria alone, but by his. It makes things difficult. Crystal from My Friend Wallis seems wispy and ethereal and barely there but I discovered a photograph of her eating in Olympia, Washington, possibly at Miranda July's favorite diner, and she is eating quite a substantial lunch. Perhaps it was a staged photo, perhaps truly she exists only on the nutritive value of starlight and good vibrations. Third track, a bit of the tropicalia. Physiologic emanations, breaths...shaped into coos and whirrings and it's sensual and deightful. What do full band efforts sound like? I listened to one. It sounds a bit like Ruby Suns. It is the end of summer. I am pleased to see it pass. Summer is the loneliest time of the year because one is expected to be out and about, meeting and greeting and conquering the world and I spend it indoors reading books not about Ralph Bunche but Serge Diaghilev and Stillwell and other things that will never allow me to interject them into a decent conversation with lovely strangers. "Oh, I was just reading a book about Stillwell, funny that you should mention him...", oh but you did not. You stared out the window, into the empty street, across the way to the future site of bowling pins and fashionistas. I look much younger than my age when my hair is cut short, when it is long and when I do my impersonation of someone in My Friend Wallis and allow my facial hair room to grow I then look Arabic. The Tanasukh! Rodney! Next track, an instrumental? Over one half of the way through and there is as of yet no voice. She has an insubstantial voice, she may have Epstein Barr, perhaps she plays guitar while lying in bed incapacitated by the virus. Stuart Murdoch had Epstein Barr and it is there, in bed, that he learned how to become a rock star. He wrote songs about life sized models of the velvet Underground in clay because someone once mentioned that on Delia Smith's cooking show. We all fell for it. Then he visited my friend's house party with the other members of Belle and Sebastian and it was sex, drugs and rock and roll. Allegedly. Next track, the female Panda Bear. Panda Mother. Percussion on the underside of a laundry basket, her voice wordless, her voice multi-tracked. It doesn't sound very Canadian. One thing I am expert about is picking out the effete Canadian accent even amidst a clamorous crowd of thousands. I can pluck from the ether the dulcet tones of an les habitants and anglophones alike. My ears are dexterous. That was Rain Song, the percussion was meant to mimic thunder, I would presume. It was nice. Next track, Summer, but I've already discussed my summer lament. I will look forward instead, soon it will be autumn and soon after that Winter. I will step out into the cold and feel alive. Summer is the time of suppressed stimulation. My skin turns inside out and my nerves are shielded by melanophores that I fail to keep unexposed. I am not a big fan of the tan. I don't want rickets and I hold my left arm outside the car window as I drive IT work to avoid rickets, mainly, and also because i style my hair by driving with the windows down at the speed limit along i-25. Even in winter. This is a vague record. You can purchase it on bandcamp for 5 dollars. That might be an overreach. She could tour with My Volcano Playground. Similarly dreadful band name, similar sensibilities in creating popular music. Next track, the songs are possibly about something, it is difficult to notice. There are a great number of dreadful bands that are clearly influenced by Animal Collective, far fewer, it seems, that can trace direct lineage to Panda Bear. I would say that My Friend Wallis are huge fans of Panda Bear. We should all be fans of Panda Bear. Instead of people lining up outside of the new Ikea store here in Centennial, Colorado, four days in advance, in order to receive a new couch they should instead be lining up outside of Panda Bear's digs in Lisbon demanding he be far more prolific than he is. How is it that the Smiths recorded nearly their entire output in barely 4 years but it takes bands today years and years to record but one 9 song record. Next track, Sky Horse. Her vocals an oscillation, a wave building on itself, doppler. Christian Doppler is buried in Venice. I would like to have a catalog of famous interments. His father was a stonemason, I wonder if his tombstone is awfully impressive, I would hope so. If I had a catalog of the dead I could pay my respects in an efficient manner, mapping out a route, marking off the markers as I had visited them. Physicists and poets and mathematicians and architects only. Not pop stars, certainly not pop stars from Canada. When Neil Peart is buried there will be very many sad people. I've never been to Venice. I have been to Italy. Unimportant fact. Three or four notes, coos and whispers and moans of sensual delight. Are these the noises that are expelled in the throes of passion? I wouldn't know how to react to that. Last track, title track, a bit busier, guitars and ukuleles and the harmony of the spheres tapped into with a aluminum conduit filled with good intentions. It's dopplerish. A new genre-doppler pop, tracks that begin skeletal and slowly fill in and rise in pitch and intensity and interest. Compounded. Puns. No words. No voices, but this could be the most compounded track of them all.

Update: Of course Zumpano were from Vancouver, apologies. Ah but so were Skinny Puppy and has Vancouver ever apologized for that?

2011-08-20T19:41:00.001-07:00

TRAILER: SOUND IT OUT - A documentary by Jeanie Finlay from Jeanie Finlay on Vimeo.

2011-08-17T21:32:00.000-07:00

My Autumn Empire The Village Compass. Epic45 have just released their masterwork. This is one of Epic45. Which half? Unknown. The one most influenced by Antony Harding. Possibly My Autumn Empire sits behind willow trees on the edge of the July Skies estate and swoops down on dusk born drafts and steals the scraps of discarded briefs of July Skies poignancy and earnestness that waft through windows and crevices and airspaces. First track should have been born as a July Skies track, it is rarefied pastoral nostalgia inducing loveliness. The music is scenery, it is coaxed from the rocks and trees and the mycelium that acts as conduit to the exhalations of rural England and transmit it across hilly fields and tendrils of common heritage. If july Skies is Fokine then My Autumn Empire is Fokine, oh wait...which is Massine? Hood? But they are in Leeds, they mine the same collective vein of homey reminiscence but with a determinedly more futurist outlook. Brave Timbers as Nijinska? My reading habits are transparent attempts to improve my random reference ability. I've been watching ballet videos on youtube to more greatly understand my own references. The Rite of Spring is amazing, truly. Watch, become and archaeologist just the same as My Autumn Empire and July Skies, trawl the countryside in abandoned RAF sites and discover fragments of the jawbones of Gerry's blown to bits by Spitfires and Hurricanes and mount it on an obsidian plaque and lean it on a mantelpiece in a place of honour. Anglicized. Next to photographs of Antoine Langulet and the consumption of the dead, like nostalgia more powerful than the present. Second track, this one has vocals, still nostalgic and warm. I made a mix cd for a stranger recently. I made two actually. Neither contained a song from My Autumn Empire though they are certainly deserving of a place of respect on any even middling mix cd. I did include a short July Skies track. Ethel Wingfield was a hero to My Autumn Empire, surely, and by connection and inheritance Thomas the Tank Engine and Optimus Prime. This track is a repeating soft acoustic motif, double tracked whispers, tenderness verging on subtleness. So entirely lovely. If people were as lovely as this track we'd all be much happier. We'd be duller. The looters prowling the London fashion scene would instead be armed with miner's lamps and a forensic sifter and possibly tube socks pulled to their knees over Timberland footwear. They'd be nose deep into the earth, sifting the past for flint blades impaled in skull bones from the 14th century looking for the next Towton. Giggling to each other when the new issue of Archaeology on Parade arrived and the next Leakey centerfold passed in secret among the mirthful assembly. Next track, more pace, acoustic guitars, it is autumnal, it is also spring-like, it is also wintry. It is not summery. Those are profound statements. I am aware, I have my application for the Nevsky Pickwickians on the windowsill. After turning down the Algonquins, of course, St Petersburg in the fall, with My Autumn Empire and Putin shirtless hanging over the toilet. This is incidental, it's a feeling, a jubilant mood springing from good news, perhaps a new postcard with contains another photo of a test pattern from BBC circa 1966 when over the air broadcasting ended at 8PM. Next track, Woodland Theme, Wood Alcohol. Our softball season ended this evening and a retrospective video of our season would require melancholy tones and maudlin sentiments. We finished 1-11. I was the coach. He sings on this track. I would not imagine that he is a fine athlete. I see the members of Epic45 as civil servants, toiling quietly in a field office in the Midlands, sneaking off early on Friday afternoons to watch Fawlty Towers and then to count the paving stones between the pub and the spot where the descendant of Forkbeard once purchased of the Sunday issue of the Daily Mail. Profound. Next track, more ringing acoustics, nicely recorded, backwards masking, a mellifluous mix and random loveliness. The effect is like a rainstorm in an empty parking lot paved with pea gravel and leafy spurge. BBC Telford, a recreation of a television call letter ring? Is this nostalgia to children of England? is this history? Piano Magic used to make academic papers disguised as pop records but they wrote dreadful songs and used thrilling titles like Artist Rifles. Better than the International Brigade. British history seems so much more sensible than nearly every other European country. I was listening to very intelligent people discuss the French Revolution and they discussed the Tennis Court Oath and the death of Danton and the lifting of the state censorship just prior to Estates-General which made late 18th century France seem much like mid 17th Century England, and yet Cromwell turned down an invitation to become King, granted after murdering very many Irish and sawing off charles I's head. But would Robespierre have done the same? Marat? Of course not. The latin mind. It is not chronicled in these songs. These are decidedly english songs by a decidedly english man. They are soft and sweet and beautiful and I like it very much. if they were anthropology buffs and if they did truly become agitated to the point of sheer overexcitement when they were invited to the reenactment of the Battle of Prestonpans I would be delighted because while I would never lose my soul to the daily grind of a war reenactment regiment I would like to have friends that indulged in such deliciously odd endeavours in their free time. When they are not at work in the meteorology office looking through single paned windows to weathervanes installed by the first clique from the Royal Society, erected when they were not out surreptitiously collecting urine in order to obtain a purer sample of Phosphorous. Merry and lovely, an instrumental. I love the word lovely. I use it in public and it diminishes my esteem among my more masculine colleagues. It is a cross that I bear, especially now, when my hair is so very short and I feel compelled to sing The Sound of Arrows pop songs near my work desk. Branch Lines in the Snow. Did this serve as a template to the new Epic45 album? That album is amazing, truly, this not as much but it is still remarkably warm and inviting. The Eggman to their Boo Radleys. Martin Carr is dead to me now. The Gatelings. Where the Boo Radleys used to pretend that they were disembarking at the jetway in Heathrow to rapturous throngs I suppose Epic45 dreamed instead of travel by train, in antique carriages, the sort similar to those described in ghastly passages from La Bete Humaine. And the very muscular women. Flutes, lithe, graceful, a dream. The denouement has begun, a slow descent into the parts that we are all assembled from, the ether, the star dust, the assorted detritus from 4.5 billion years. Last track, finger exercises. have they visited Hull? Have they communed with Salako, installed a table in chairs on a secluded beach and netwroked via ouija board to the saints of all sovereign nostalgists. This is not modern. It is not exciting. It is just very pretty and well deserving of your time. Take it home, cuddle its grooves and feel yourself forcibly inhabited by the harmony of the spheres. Thom Yorke writes music this inconsequential and he is proclaimed a genius. He is not. My Autumn Empire is not a genius but instead of playing at the populist carnival barker they live the life of a true collectivist, poor but principled, daring but not innovative, as self interested as anyone else at the fair. Lovely electric guitar mimicking the atmosphere of a rainshower at dusk, mimicking of anything else you might hold dear to your heart and with birdsong and many other beautiful things.

2011-08-14T10:15:00.001-07:00

Luke Sutherland in a new band called We Can Love You. 2009 is pretty new. Isn't it?

2011-08-13T10:02:00.001-07:00

2011-08-12T17:37:00.001-07:00

2011-08-10T11:36:00.001-07:00

I will need to go to work in order to prevent myself from ordering more used books. Rosa Luxemburg you tantalize me! i did get a raise and was terribly excited about putting more money in my 401k until the end of the world arrived. Time to dust off Fritz Haber's plan for extracting gold from seawater as a back-up?

2011-08-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Wetherbeat Scene. This is high school in Leeds. My high school resembled this not at all. Were there bands in my high school? Yes. My classmates had well coiffured parents to purchase for them very expensive guitars and designer shoes and shag haircuts for their Volvo's rear view mirrors. Do I sound bitter? No, they played Rush and Black Sabbath and the Who at talent shows. I did not much care for my high school classmates. I attended a posh high school with the Dart children, with Dennis Deconcini's son, with other assorted famous sorts-Selma Beitner. I didn't know any of them. I wasn't in a band with any of them. Stewart Anderson would have started a band with all of them. He started one with nearly every one in Leeds. Fun fact, Richard Adams was once in Boyracer, I was completely unaware of this. Fun fact, again, Hood somehow sounded a lot like the New Zealand band Trash surely even before they were aware of New Zealand and Mr Blucher and Killing Kapitalism with Kindness. Stewart Anderson is a cowboy now. First track is by The Liddles. i don't own the book that accompanied this release so I am not sure if Stewart was in the band, the vocals bear a striking similarity but it could be a Leeds/Gedge wannabe thing in general. It's buzzy, fast, the vocals are distorted and they are urgent. It's marvelous. It could be a soundtrack to Stewart and Richard running loose in a cemetery with swords drawn and battling to the death over a copy of the latest Sha La La flexi-disc. A slashing curve through the air, a whiff of menace, a tunic turned inward and a boom box in the corner playing the House of Love's Destroy the Heart. Second track, a casual mumble along, a bit Beat Happening-ish-ness. He's having a conversation with his friends, instead of writing meaningless aphorisms in a yearbook he's written a song and put it down "on tape". It's terrific. Next track, number three, more pace, more punkish attitude, snotty vocals, incompetence, dreaded cool. Oh, it's hood, it is very Bruce Blusher, it picks up in pace as it goes along. Were they listening to Boogie Down Productions before they recorded this? Was it technical limitations that kept them from their love of hip-hop and experimentation back then? How did they come to know nearly all of the most tedious backpack rappers? Next track, this sounds a bit more serious, like when they were ripping their jean jackets they intentionally left heart shaped holes in the breast to safety pin a set list from the Shop Assistants to? This is definitely Stewart Anderson. Was he the pivot around with the world rotated in Leeds? he is a cowboy now. I've said that already. There was a heartbreaking story about his family in a local Arizona paper with Stewart and his wife and their Autistic children and their struggle to get their children to speak before the age of 5. I've never done anything worthwhile and here's Stewart who displays passion and heart and earnestness in nearly everything he has ever done and this sadness is visited upon him. The Paisley Springtime is next. Sounds like the Hood stuff. Was there competing factions in Leeds? The Hood faction and the Boyracer faction? It is Joy Division for kids. They make splendid noises with guitars and it is surprisingly well recorded for kids allegedly between the ages of 14 and 17. When I was 14 I was playing ice hockey and delivering newspapers and taking standardized tests that convinced everyone that I was special and then I spent the rest of my life convincing them otherwise. I did not have swords or passion to wear on a scabbard around my waist. Next track, a female singer, Baby Doll Lounge. A girlfriend? A cover of Primal Scream now. There are two types of people in the world, those who believe Velocity Girl is the climax of Primal Scream's career and those who do not. I sued to, but now I've become one of those other people. Can you really believe that this is better than Higher Than the Sun? But Jim Beattie means a great deal to a great many people, possibly the majority of people in Leeds. Hood, again, sounding like Trash. Trash, the band, not the commodity. Boyracer now, sounding more listenable than they were apt to have been as they matured. It's wonderful. Boyracer only made one great album and one great single. The rest, I don't like as much. It's hard to say unkind things but one doesn't need to like everything, how to decide what you truly love if you don't mind everything. Even me, the king of low standards, can stand back and in a pseudo-objective manner evaluate the Boyracer canon and find it wanting. It was about productivity. It was Robert Pollard versus Paddy McAloon. But that Boyracer that just finished was ace. Now to another Baby Doll Lounge number, more sophisticated arrangement, the girl voice, the David Gedge in the song title, the Sarah Records nod, the implied socialism. What is the Hood reaction to the riots in England? Do they approve. Their politics are always murky, they focused their energy on the sound of England, the smell of England, the leaves and sand and abandoned air strips and stale lager. The Harbour Pilots Mr Magoo now, I mentioned Trash and this does have a whiff of kiwi compilations. Xpressway records, a sympathetic access shared across a commonwealth. This would be part of the Hood sounding bits. The two factions were the more kraut-rawkin' elements and the more sugary fuzz pop action. Hood now. Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse. Inaudible voice. Their first album was released a few years after these were recorded, there wasn't a great amount of growth from then to there but since then of course their evolution has been immense. Currently they are making dreadful records on their own. One day, soon, the Adams brothers will reunite and we will be spared future Bracken and Long Declining Winter records. Sunlight will banish the shadows. Bastard Postman, mumbly nonsense. Now to another Boyracer track. Why was it that he was seemingly so concerned with melody and tenderness in these days? Were all of these songs written to impress the Wetherbeat music faculty? Did all of the bands here attend music class together, play Ave Maria on the recorder, move into the private practice rooms and trade mix tapes of the Velvet Underground and Mighty Mighty? Dream of having Amelia Fletcher as the date to the prom? This is really terrific. Better than anything on their first few albums. Apparently Stewart's fellow cowboys have had a great deal of mirth shared over his photos of him with pink hair. He is in New Mexico now. Amy Linton came from New Mexico. She used to drive to Denver for Wax Trax records, still boggles my mind, but now she's living as a man and she would probably appreciate a cowboy in Sweden with pink hair. Baby Doll Lounge again, another lovely number. I think it is Stewart and someone else. It's almost sophisticated, it's almost Carousel to Boyracer's Heavenly. It would have been even more marvelous if they wrote songs about the other bands. If the lead singer of Baby Doll Lounge was seen out with the singer from the Liddles then the singer from The Paisley Springtime could write a song about how dreadful the new Liddles song is. There could be comic books, a full length movie starring Michael Cera could be in the works. Michael Cera as Stewart Anderson. Canada on the River Aire. Another Baby Doll Lounge number, they were clearly the stars. They would have had the full page foldout in the center of the annual. Where did they go? Was Stewart in the band? This singer is very nasal and flat and wants desperately to be the new Lou Reed and can't stand Doug Yule. Who keep the archives? Were there more bands in the scene? Maybe there was the Brian Howard of the bunch, the most talented of the lot, but who posterity will never have a chance to judge because of their lack of proximity to a four track recorder? There was one band in my high school that everyone was impressed with. I looked them up on Facebook when I was searching to see how far my colleagues from high school had lapped me in the quest for life's greatest prizes and discovered that they are still playing bars in the same corner of the world. At least I have moved to Denver. At least my novel respiratory infection that has infected my spine is from the other end of the continental divide. of course, I am the end of the family line, the Denver lineage will be as barren as the infertile hypoxic soil beneath my feet. The Spires now, sounds a lot like a more primitive version of Boyracer. Was this young Stewart? I could drive to Arizona. I could stalk his ranch. I could drive the new friend that I met this week that has spent nearly 17 years in bed. She was awoke to the world anew, filled only with the sarcastic worldview of John Stewart and in spite of a lifetime beneath the sheets a pretty healthy outlook on life and probably more interaction with the world than I have when I am not forced into it by my job. But I made another new friend this week, a former literary agent who is reading my book and I admitted to people that I work with that I am writing a book, and I attended parties and was intoxicated and clever and charming and there may be hope for me. But then there was Sunday, and my respiratory affection settled in my feet and my feet settled in concrete and fear. A hood song finished. Now the Liddles, it's a bit Sea Urchins. It's a heartache/lament. Baby Doll Lounge again. Flat voiced singer. he may have gone on to Exeter university, studied urban planning, married a good looking girl who gets on well with her family and spends his time looking up his friends on Facebook seeing if they have lapped him as well. I am not unique. My pathos are not extraordinary but they leave me hollowed out. That track was not a William Shatner song. Hood Tractor now, haven't I heard this? Isn't this a rarity? I can see all of the members of Hood being big into Urban Planning, with backpacks and their ipods and large can headphones filled with the new Kanye album and filled out prescriptions to codeine in their wallets chained to their belt loops. Were they the pretentious kids? Were they listening to Radio Ethiopia and Fifty Foot Hose and did they have a mentor who worked in a Leeds record store and excoriated them when they made anything approaching melodic? A Talulah Gosh moment now. Baby Doll Lounge again. Sounds like a demo. But then these are all likely demos. But then there is this, there is Apricot crumble and apart from the lyrical conceits it sounds almost sophisticated in its recording quality. It sounds like Stewart, before he was winded by too many years of smoking, too many times he had skipped cross country practice. Spent his afternoons in the library reading William S. Burroughs and Salinger. Would he read Catcher in the Rye, reading might seem a bit too static for Stewart Anderson, he is a man of action, he might read for action, the same as John Milton, but for enjoyment? He doesn't visit the English Literary canon a great deal in his musical corpus. When he is riding horses I imagine he has an ipod on and he's listening to Joy Division and Ace Frehley's solo album and his horse is more sympathetic to the latter. The equine fever. Orchid Sunrise by the Harbour Pilots. It doesn't sound much like Sarah Records, any of this, it is clear that Gedge was the dominant influence. And Bruce Blucher, newly arrived from the future. This is a bit more motorik, dexterous drumming, a bit of a Loz from Ride fan, and some artsy guitar and monotone vocals. I like this. Maybe top 10. There are 36 tracks here. I am running out of steam. I've never been to Leeds or else I might compare the songs to the geographical signposts of the surrounding countryside. I could compare the youth of this, my generation, to today. Now instead of creating fuzzy pop bands kids burn down cities. An improvement? but you can understand why the Guardian horde would cheer on the mindless looters and rioters because they mistake nihilism for passion. In a world where everything is met with mild indignation for fear of offense causing it is nice to see primal emotion on display. This is the essence of the human experience, selfishness. I had a long discussion in Chicago with someone over the motivation for altruistic acts and my contention was they are always self motivated, that people are not moved by the greatness of the cause but by the emotional reward. This person disagreed with me and he has 19 service companies and employs over 800 people and has his personal assistant sleep in the same hotel room as he does. The Liddles are a more Smiths-y Boyracer. Was Stewart's favorite band before his favorite band was the Wedding Present the Smiths? Does that last sentence make sense? i don't think so. this track is about the existential angst of expectation. Surely being a cowboy in Arizona was never part of the equation. Surely a group with this prolific attitude towards recording had also the same industriousness when it came to recording happenings on video? But then video cameras were very expensive then. Telephones still had cords and John Major was beloved. Or not. Sympathy by the Special Guests, sounds like Boyracer, martial drumming, distorted anarcho-guitars and ethereal voices floating in the mix. Now the voice is double tracked. A deeper voice in the foreground, clever. I think maybe Stewart Anderson was the most popular boy in school. I have typed his name more than one dozen times. He deserves the acclaim, I am attempting to entrap all of his Leeds friends who are using Facebook to see if he lapped them in life's great pursuits. He has. Hood She's Caught in Sunshine, this is rather good. All of their tracks were pretty samey for the first few years. Leeds then not known for diversity. Which are the great bands from Leeds? Aye, Gang of Four, that seems obvious now. Oh and Chumbawumba. The kings. But of course towering above them all is the Ian Saints or the Pale Saints. Ian isn't a cowboy. He's in Japan. Did he go to this high school? He is probably slightly older than these kids. What did his high school recordings sound like? Was he the most popular kid in high school? Who signed his annual? Boyracer My Town. Another great Boyracer track. As curator did Stewart craft this compilation to put himself in the better light? Unlikely. Maybe he's just a genius. Maybe he's just shy about displaying it. There are a lot of Boyracer songs and most of them are not great. Each of these Boyracer songs is great. A conundrum. I am back to work tomorrow morning. I haven't been to the office in nearly two weeks. I haven't missed it. This is the beginning of my period of misery, between now and Christmas. I turn into a dreadful person, curmudgeonly, like Gedge, without the benefit of a tribute album such as this. I used to love Christmas. Another small Baby Doll Lounge song. A bit Red Sleeping Beauty. Racing acoustic guitar, the passion of the moment, the need for struggle, the age of rioting for a cause greater than self enrichment. The Liddles now with the last official track, a bit Spacemen 3? Not really, maybe, slightly. maybe more House of Love, maybe there was a photograph of Terry Bickers hanging on the wall in young Stewart Anderson's bedroom and when he left to form Levitation there was great excitement and joy and then crushing despair and ultimate defeat when Coterie and Need for Not were officially released. Why hasn't there been a Levitation resurgence? Shouldn't LTm be reissuing them any day now? Terry Bickers later rejoined House of Love, did anyone care? I'd rather see angelo Bruschini back in the Blue Aeroplanes actually. This track is a bit more ambitious. It's like the prog numbers on that greek compilation that was released a few years ago. It's like the Bilders. it's like Boyracer gone progressive. Morrissey would frown. Last track now, the hidden track, a live track, from the talent show? Sounds like at least 53 people in the audience, drums, a Run DMC cover, ah youth.

2011-08-08T22:12:00.000-07:00

Legendary Creatures The Burgundy Demos. Woodland nymphs escaped from the motor city. if you had seen the Life Without People episode that focused on Detroit you may have noticed that they did not need to do any special effect alterations. The city is mainly empty. Soon it will return to prairie, the buffalo will roam, the timber wolves will swim across from Isle Royale, the Moose will nudge up next to the Black Bears that will move out from their marshmallow hunts in the local dump and roam the city streets overrun with cheat grass and plantain. The Legendary Creatures will fit right in, with their jug band ethic, their shuffling drumbeats and rustic organs. First track was some O' Brother Where Art Thou goodness. Second track is more, it's a bit more confessional, A bit more Patsy Cline, but it's homeward bound on the midwest that adheres with sod houses and snow fences and riparian settlements. There is one from Pas/Cal in the band. And unlike all of the other Pas/Cal offshoots this is marvelous. It's intimate, her voice sounding newly arrived from 1953 and the music minted on wax cylinders and played on analog tubes and analog wash basins and digital dreams where the city has reverted to rural splendifolia. Lovely. Third track. It is the bass player from Pas/Cal that left before the Pas/Cal album came out. perhaps he was their final filter. perhaps it was Nathan Burgundy who would stand athwart the mixing board and yell stop when Casimer Pas/Cal thought let me just add 19 more tracks of guitar and disastrously annoying vocals over top of this. He might be the Tim Tebow of Pas/Cal beatified by exclusion. Until he plays a single down/note he will forever be the hero. Third track has a male voice. I don't know which male voice. It's soft, it's gentle, literate, considerate. her voice is the loveliest of the pair and she is prominent on the backing track but I don't mind his voice, he could be nice for a track or two on the debut album. But let's not overpraise him just in case. I really love this set. Last track, opening with some expansive organ, Mo Tucker'd out bass drum, her dreamy voice, rustic americana as played through a His Name is Alive filter. Why don't more bands from Detroit acknowledge the debt owed to Warren Defever and Karin Oliver? Unknown. These people probably have spent many hours in the Noise Camp. Is Warn a dreadful host? I've ben to Noise Camp. It is a difficult navigation to winnow through the popular front, the terrain of like minded homes with their red brick exteriors and inadequate dream lives until you reach the land where the Dirt Eaters came to roost, where Love's A Fish Eye was born, where Lovetta Pippin once stood tall. So very tall. But the Legendary Creatures don't sound like His Name is Alive, perhaps Tarnation(who were once produced by Warn) with a mind to the bloodline of colts and fillies. Horses are important.

Update: Well, of course, there is an album available, already.

Update: Unknowingly prescient as the "album" versions sound very much more His Name is Alive'ish. Not sure is this is for the better, they have lost a bit of a foggy gloom of the demos.

Update: Just two new tracks on the "album".

Update: Warn co-wrote two of the tracks. The two new songs are fantastic.

Update: Warn will hold the land in grady steam.

2011-08-08T14:52:00.001-07:00

Loving and tragic.

2011-08-08T14:40:00.001-07:00

2011-08-08T14:03:00.000-07:00

I am terminally melancholic and sometimes the Gigi record lifts me above. Believing that you are worthless is a lonely existence. It is only the things that escape that have meaning- quips, clauses, or exhalations.

2011-07-31T10:14:00.000-07:00

New Rudi Arapahoe record is done. Now I know what to buy my family for Skyscraper Day on September 3rd.

2011-07-27T20:19:00.001-07:00

Candy Claws Glacier Prey. Bicycle music. It seems that a dog in Australia has tested positive for the Hendra virus. I remember feeling the most desperate heartache when I read a pro-med post concerning a young veterinarian that died from the Hendra virus for no other reason than his love of animals. Fear the flying fox seeking figs! Or fido. I mention heartache and I recently, well this evening, had dinner with someone who had an infection of the pericardium and nearly died. if he had gone to sleep one evening he would not have awoken the next morning. Frightening. He was wearing a purple fitted shirt and cowboy boots this evening, if the virus had been active I am not sure that is the ensemble to be seen dead in. I was wearing something far less fashionable. Not a headband. Candy Claws have been seen all over town with their beaded headbands and vaguely arranged musical thoughts. I could wear a headband now, my hair is unseasonably unkempt. I live now, only, for the ride home with both windows down and my hair dashed haphazardly by the turbulence of life in the fast lane. Cue Urban Dance Squad. First track here, 670,000,000, 670,000,000 insights into my soul. Or a reference to their favorite year BC. It was noise, it was nice, it was vague. Second track, less disorienting, gentle keyboard triggered samples, her gentle voice(inaudible). They are children of the blooms, flower power, raised on corn and fueled by raw milk. Are they aghast by the recent Morrissey comments? Possibly only because he made them in public but the silly equating of animal life and human life is what leads to things like genocides and totalitarianism and a role in life similar to a worker in a hive programmed only for the collective good and in this case not just humanity but for Gaia's sake. Snow Bear River Fire. Why is this not an official release? it is available for free download from their website. It isn't as accomplished as the two official records. The lyrics, inaudible, although my ears have been made even more suspect by the humidity and the accompanying air conditioning in Chicago. I spent the past four days in Chicago. Interesting in that the buildings are so beautiful and the people are not. i was on the most exclusive avenue in Chicago and surrounded by the unglamorous set, Midwestern, overweight, incurious stares affixed to their faces. I will admit to staring up and staring down, I like to watch people and when they wend through a chasm created by remarkable architecture and when they take the stares down to a subterranean street beneath the glitz and glamour it is interesting to see the relief. I spent a fair amount of time inside of taverns and pubs and a delightful Piano bar but always the walk home was spent with my head craned, watching the reflection of the unspectacular night on the panes of glass. Third track, very Procedure Club, see dull. This sounds like a demo, this sounds the germinate, this sounds like gentle whirrs of the air conditioning reflecting off of the glass inside of the elevated train. In the future there will not be air conditioning, because the ice had disappeared from the Arctic air conditioning will be banned except for inside Air Force One and inside Margaret's ice cream factory. Fourth track, softer, more glacial. Twinkles. Are they still in Fort Collins or have they moved to the big city? They should move to Chicago. They could busk near the Marilyn Monroe statue and excoriate the cretins assembled there while the greened Nathan Hale statue only one half of a block away keeps lonely vigil in front of the Chicago Tribune. I suppose Marilyn Monroe had a larger impact on culture than Nathan Hale, at least in the conscious culture, but Nathan Hale helped to create the unmentionable character of America, the unspoken, inherent, soon to be withered away and decayed spirit of freedom. Fifth track. But the Marilyn Monroe statue makes a better photograph. I know. i do not take photographs, it is a better exercise to sit in reminiscence and try to recreate the image in your mind. Post your photos online, we are having a wonderful time. This is a vague pop song, a vague croon, a slow march in the dappled sunshine beneath the ubiquitous honey locust of South Chicago. I walked inside of the exclusive retail centers and did not feel at home. I am no socialist agitator, it did not anger me to see such ostentation on display, but it didn't seem to be jolly or warm. I would imagine were I so flush I might be cheerful all of the time. Like the fifth avenue charlatan hippy children in our rather posh hotel in town to watch Lollapalooza. There to see Electric Touch I am sure. This is an Ace of Base cover, sounds like a Candy Claws song, the recognizable keyboard snippet follows shortly after the recognizable chorus. Ho hum. But how are the tattoo'd masses that consume their socialism through a straw where enmeshed in the fruits of their parents capitalistic pursuits able to sleep in such accommodations. When I travel I travel in hostels. My parents were mostly working class while I grew up but still I am steeped in the hopes of Lysander Spooner and Wilfred Trotter. Next track, after the cover, nice Wall of sound-ish experimentation, a sketch for the next record, a hint of things to come for the Firebreather record? Possibly. It is nearly over. But drinking on a business trip is so commonplace. I am on vacation now. I am staying at home and I am not going to drink or eat but I am going to run every day. I am going to run through the neighborhood and learn more of my neighborhood. Perhaps I will become a social agitator and assemble my neighbors for a march on the town hall. We will demand that they stop painting on streets notes in bright white spray paint indicating that because the inhabitant of the home adjacent has not paid his sewer bill(12 dollars a month, hardly onerous) they are going to be forcibly disconnected from the public sanitation system. Apparently this operation with a back hoe is expensed to the homeowner that can't afford the 12$ per month for sewage service at a rate of $8000. Currently we are listening to a dream. Kaleidoscopic. On the airplane I read in the newspaper that Kaleidoscopes are from Scotland originally. It was invented by David Brewster. later it was mass produced by an American and it is a fascinating thing to realise how the angle of reflection of the enclosed mirror has such an effect on the resulting projection. Is there a statue to David Brewster in Scotland? Would he rank higher in cultural importance than Marilyn Monroe? Unlikely. Another sketch of a song, Hiding, reflections of notes and notes and shimmers and shine. it has a subtitle, "sound idea". It was very humid in Chicago. Music travels less well in humidity. But I was conscious to not wear my headphones while walking around the city. When I passed lovely young women with their earbuds inserted they all stood erect, passionless, determined, fearful of the squalor that surrounded them among the spires ascending from Nordstroms and the like. The harsh reality of the commonness of Midwestern living. But apart from the tourists, who infested the area I was in, there were the locals and they bread a true culture much unlike the sterile conditions here in Denver. Perhaps I romanticise the existence of local dialects and culture but the homogenization of human existence is a scourge that would be well defeated if people knew the existence of the beauty of everyday life rather than the imagined excesses of some far off utopia that should be benevolently spread beyond its borders into our mundane lives. Another slow instrumental track. it sounds as they are swaying back and forth out of existence, leaning forward and casting a reflection and then pulling back into the rip caused in the space time continuum by the mass of humanity preventing an elevator from leaving the ground floor. All of these tracks sound familiar. Are these ideas that have already come to fruition? My friends the pop songs, my only friends. My friends, the readers, my only friends. This entry is as vague as the music on offer, The Blue Octavo Notebooks. Each succeeding song recorded on smaller film stock to reflect the intimacy the idea has with its genesis, the lack of remove, the sound hasn't disassociated from the expansion of the mind kept for true disassociation by their beaded headbands. Headbands are a difficult look. It is difficult not to look like a member of Khan's entourage while wearing headband, especially if you do not know all of the words to Xanadu. I have finished the first movement of Dance to the Music of Time and am in love. And because my heart is very small and mainly vestigial it makes me weary and unable to use it to further conquests of hope and time and human interaction.

2011-07-24T10:33:00.001-07:00

2011-07-23T20:51:00.000-07:00

Panda Bear Tomboy. Somehow this record is very much smaller than the last Panda Bear record. It is very similar to the last record. But we tire of the lack of novelty quickly. We are on to more novel forms of novelty already. I love this album. I love Panda Bear. I enjoy his interviews when he earnestly proclaims his desire to make something worthwhile enough to attract attention and allow him to provide for his family. It's the smallness that charms. First track is a repeating bit of rhythm, some found sound samples and his overachieving voice. Is it overachieving only by technology? I am not certain. Second track. The songs are much shorter than on the previous record. Sonic Boom produced this album and he has fingerprints left as smudges in places conspicuous and others less so. On this track the repeating motif on the guitar would not sound out of place on a Sonic Boom/Spectrum record circa 1992. It might just now, now when Sonic Boom has squandered the good will fostered by his legions of snack cake/drug dealer/trance imbibing aficionados. His fortune is much reduced. There are the rumours that he makes it down the hill occasionally with copies of the Spacemen 3 Rugby recordings to finance his "lifestyle". Is it still his "lifestyle"? Unknown. I always thought that both he and Jason Pierce looked terrifically fit for heroin addicts. And Sonic Boom had that haircut. I wanted that haircut. I achieved it once, for a brief bursting moment in 1993. But it fell away. This was the last time I was ever truly happy. This track is like the first, repetitive, hypnotic and awesome. It is all awesome. Third track Slow Motion. This is one of the ones he released before the album and I was much dismayed over. it has had a reworking and it fits in much more cohesively as part of a flexible whole instead of jettisoned out on some jetty exposed to the elements and the cold penumbra of space. It is raining again. After the rain there exists the still silhouettes against and overcast sky, the buildings and trees and hopes and dreams. Stillness is oppressive. When the wind chimes through the catalpa trees and the honey locust trees it signifies movement and change and expression. The stillness encases all of life in a bound, spiny memory box. Nothing exists except on the border between the existence within and the dreamed of existence that lies just out of reach. My boss straddles this line. He has a new Volvo. Repetition is difficult. Sonic Boom mainly got it wrong. Except on Recurring. Side one of Recurring-the Sonic Boom side-is genius. Absolutely. J Spaceman's side, not really. he has the truncated bit of Feel So Sad which is amazing sure and Hypnotized but after that-meh. He may have already had half of Lazer Guided Melodies in the can. Who can be sure, they could have been recording in a studio demarcated with an impregnable dividing wall of saran wrap with a full spread of snack cakes on one side and syringes filled with Sheep collagen on the other. One of them has a chin. Surfer's Hymn, a bit more propulsive, more "hymnal". His voice is earnest. He seems entirely earnest. Animal Collective has more the feel of an athletic endeavour than an exercise in hipster ennui. Am I misreading these things? Heart comes the human heart rate rhythm so common to Animal Collective records. It is the Panda Bear heart that sets the tempo in Animal Collective. This is more primal. He has a heart more centered and carried closer to the surface than his colleagues in Animal Collective. Next track, the songs are so much shorter. Last Night At the Jetty, doo-wop vocals well forward in the mix, an uncoordinated sample providing the melody and distant garage door claps for percussion. His voice is multi-tracked and it feels like a choir of routinely modest young men. Did it take ages to create these tracks? What is the process? I would imagine that he makes something more lush and intricate and busy and that the art is the excision. Dissecting the prolapse and witnessing the rebirth. The lyrics? Insignificant. Surely his family rises to the fore and is utmost in his mind, he's a technological busker counting on the good will of those more magnanimous than myself to come through. I will do my part by giving to the cause, I will learn the Portuguese word for inspiring someday in remembrance of the greatness that is Panda Bear. Panda Bear in Portuguese is Panda Urso? Is it not? must consult my Tavares, Mello & Grunewald guide to Portuguese in order to be certain. Why is is that I am on a first name basis with so many dictators? Unknown. From Bainimarama to Nazarbayev I have their name at beckon call in my consciousness. It might be the fault of the Economist which in spite of their silly opinions on climate change and tax increases is still mainly right in identifying dictators when people like Bob Stanley have created shrines to them out of Helen Love 7" records. Drone, was this a collaboration with Sonic Boom? I need an aimless, meandering bit of loveliness to fill in the middle four minutes of my mostly marvelous record. I will call the man who gave us Forever Alien! Enough about Sonic Boom. I won't mention when I saw him live in New York by himself with his keys taped to the floor, his fringe looking magnificent and his voice resembling Gabriel. I won't. You will have to imagine the most serene moment of your life ever and then feel disappointed when I tell you it can't compare. After Drone. back to the cheerleading pop songs. I know people who love Panda Bear but do not love Animal Collective. His heart is many chambered and for his own records he shrinks it away from that of a highly prized heart of an athlete and it turns sentimental and romantic and now with the percussion coming from the floor being stomped under feet of the Williamsburg masses. I am having visions of silk screened flyers, possibly created by members of the Axemen visiting Panda Bear as an homage from the knowing forebears who he must deeply respect, and the Williamsburg types and Taylor Swift seeing these silk screened flyers next to gig posters for the Drums and a congregation of nothingness and irony and a march in place to MGMT or Joanna Newsom records and a surreptitious microphone hidden beneath floorboards, underneath the parquet. Next track, a piano, field recordings, lovely voice, Scheherazade. In just over one week I will visit the swimming pool where Johnny Weissmuller once dipped his toe. I haven't been in a swimming pool in a very long time. 20 years? Possibly. I remember being in a swimming pool and being terrified of the contacts on my eyes floating away on the surface of the swimming pool and being unable to circle underneath and to surface in perfect alignment to recapture my lenses. This is a bit like a Verve b-side, a bit Endless Life or a b-side to Blue. I spent a few hours watching live videos of Verve on youtube a few weeks ago. When Richard Ashcroft was muffled by the maelstrom, when John Leckie took Nick Mccabe by the hand and they opened a pathway to miracles. And then Richard Ashcroft had an acoustic guitar and a quiver full of laments and bad advice. oh dear. Is Avey Tare the Richard Ashcroft to Panda Bear's Nick Mccabe? No. I like Avey Tare. I don't like his solo records. But were not the first few Animal Collective records solo Avey Tare records? I am not knowing enough. This track feels like a gospel experience, I am reminiscing about my life spent in a church in Warren, Michigan when the congregation rose as one and sang hosannas to the lord. It sounded nothing at all like this, to our detriment it would appear. My parents once considered the ministry as an appropriate occupation for my brother. My oldest brother was a heathen. I was unconvinced. Mostly this track is constructed around the voice. Layers of his voice, mostly inflexible, it's sound manipulations more than emotional registry. He moves my heart by the gracefulness of the construction, by the isolation, by the oneiric invocations. It is truly too lovely for me to give justice to. Will the Belle and Sebastian fans who imbibe the toot with Belle and Sebastian also have this cd on their floating shelf above their turntable? I was meant to camp out in front of the new Ikea store in order to win a new sofa. I did not. The first 38 brave campers will win a sofa. I hope it is a nice sofa. This track is more Beach Boys-y teenage symphonies to Jobs. His voice at the top of his register, but restrained, the cacophony is imaginary, the fragile construction is inconspicuous. Is this the record to play for seduction? You could establish a meaningful connection with a meaningful rhythm to this track, the percussion softly escalates your pulse until a mild form of exertion turns to a conflagration of passion. Is Panda Bear sexy? Unknown. My sex is indeterminate. Heart rate percussion muffled beneath woolen duffle coats and textured scarves. So nice. I could listen to Panda Bear and recreate all of the times when I didn't feel insecure and inadequate and feel that sense of invincibility one should feel when you are 19 and the world is at your beckon. The world never answered my call or I remained mute. Unknown. Panda Bear has stepped into the breach and offered his soul to the world at large and I applaud most heartily. If only I could offer a real reply instead of counterfeit insouciance. Last track. his voice, multi-tracked, out of phase, dreaminess. Amazingness. Last track respiteness. In the final epiphany of Walter White I am hoping that this track is the soundtrack as the world comes to heel and in with very tiny fingers and too many toes to count we arrive at the moment in time when Brian Cox may proclaim our love as more lovely than anything you can imagine. The universe in a flatly monotonic outreach. Chocolate absorbed through my skin. The atmosphere of language. Hosanna.

2011-07-18T19:48:00.001-07:00

If you were stylish and smart you would be listening to Giorgio Tuma's In The Morning We'll Meet.

2011-07-17T16:08:00.000-07:00

The Procedure Club The Salmon of Doubt. I am a loner now. I ride the light rail and read books in seats while exhibiting a menacing slouch. I am terrifying. Really. I have just begun reading a new book. Anthony Powell, I always disregarded him because I felt some strange protectiveness concerning Evelyn Waugh. I took his racism and snobbery to be a personality quirk. His books are funny, in an unracist and unsexist way. Aren't they? I've nearly finished them all. Before this Anthony Powell I'd only finished Afternoon Men, but even as I am only 100 pages in I am ensnared. I may need to read all 12 volumes by month's end. First track was buzzy fuzzy(my scientific analysis, please do follow along), I thought it was starting off "I was happy, which is not like me at all" but it did not. Second track, buzzier still, less gothic, her voice recorded from behind the iron curtain. It is a bit like the Primitives meets my bathroom wall reverberating because of the end of the world or the Fourth of July. It is vague. Vagueness is the new punk rock. Better than having an opinion I suppose, an opinion that the founding fathers were all terrorists was offered recently. But what of John Dickinson who mainly opposed violent response to the King's edicts. But this is the age of the enlightenment and the words of Lillburne and Rousseau and Locke all resonated against the tyranny of the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Intolerable Acts, etc...These were grievous offenses to men of virtue. The crown still viewed the colonists as second class members of the empire. It was time for a revolution. Oh but only 33% of the colonists supported the revolution. Well, imagine trying to get 33% now to agree to a revolution against our current rulers. Good luck. Am I advocating revolution? No. But there are far more onerous impositions being foisted upon the population now than in 1776. The myth of wealth has suppressed resistance. But now that America is in decline, now that even future wealth is being consumed in a conflagration of historic proportions we will return to simpler times. When men were men and they ate the bark off of trees and boiled shoe leather. It will resemble the trailer for Breaking Away that I linked before. Perhaps the return of struggle will fill people with soul and depth and divest them of their intense narcissism? Or will it merely reinforce the isolation of technology that seems so comforting in the face of a reality of eroding comfort. Or will we all take steroids and become soldiers of resistance with tongues made impotent by the injections in your buttocks. I was sitting next to two muscled up young men and their speech was dreadful, it lacked dexterity, the words poured forth and with a dull thud landed on the table in front of them. They spoke nothing of ideas or ideals or passions or hopes, just gossip and cruelty. This is our world. There is a story on Popmatters concerning the anniversary of the murder of Lorca. Apparently governments are worst that murder poets or artists. A hierarchy of victimhood. Franco was awful because he seemed to be completely insensate to all of the suffering of his country, he was the ultimate technocrat. because his death squads were not passionately ideological but more materialist than the anarchists and communists it isn't more awful. Because the rebels were successful they have attained that mantle. but poets matter no more than the mean with tongues with more muscle than grace. Art of Ignoring is playing now. It is art school pretension, meaningless inaudible lyrics and bashing on machines. I rather like it. They are a duo. he is from Poland. She is not. The music is not varied or filled with depth, it is a sonic sheet, impenetrable and unchanging. There is the idea, an ideal, the blueprint, and it is tweaked slightly over the course of the album. This is similar to the last track. Her voice is pleasant enough but it shares the stage with the squiggles and denseness of the music in an egalitarian fashion. Are they political? He is from Poland. Perhaps this is concerning Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Kosciuszko uprising! How many people know about the importance of engineering to the revolution? Not very many. There is a Kosciuszko statue in my hometown of Detroit, on Michigan Ave, and there are very many Polish emigres or their descendants. Mainly in Hamtramck and in Macomb County and while there isn't a real interest in Kosciuszko in Hamtramck there is an interest in Paczkis. This track is noisy guitar, there is a minimalism when it comes to breadth of ideas. it is not so interesting more than overwhelming. volume is key, inject the rear of your stereo with the same needle that the muscly tongue types inject their buttocks and you will understand truly. Ed, more buzz, more indescribable tedium. I am for noise, I feel noise. But just because you've created a three second loop of noise doesn't mean that if you loop that four second loop for two and one half minutes that it is some great achievement. Apparently her voice is a marvel to behold. Who knows, you can barely hear her. could I have a bad version? This is the problem with bands whose favorite record is Psychocandy they don't listen to the same records that Jim and William Reid listened to, the soul records, the motown records, the MC5, the Stooges, the Beach Boys. Instead Procedure Club listen to Psychocandy. Ah, this next one is nice, there is space to explore, room for the ears to manipulate their surroundings instead of hunkering down. This one is Index Finger and still I cannot understand her. But instead of a maelstrom bleeding from one speaker to the next there is an arrangement, theoretically, there are guitar lines to e discerned in the mix and while the voice is inconsequential the whole is pleasing. Will this be played in the grocery store on my next visit? Not likely. I was shopping for milk and chocolate yesterday and there was Blur's She's So High playing in someone's headphones but it was so loud I could recognize it as I was purchasing Skim and they were going for a pint of 2%. I drink so much milk these days. Next track, more minimal still, trying to effect some sort of New York cool, blah blah blah, we hate New York. You are not cool, you are from Poland and you are not thin, let's have passion and earnestness instead. She's So High is a painful song, it soundtracked my first love affair. My first love affair did not occur until college. I was shy. Now I am just anti-social. But when I found out my girlfriend at the time was seeing someone else and just decided to stop calling or talking to me instead of telling me I was crushed and on the ride home from her house after one last glance at her black Pontiac Sunbird it was She's So High that soundtracked my ride home. All of my most important musical memories are intertwined with my being alone. I was never in a room filled with my best friends listening to Spacemen 3's O.D> Catastrophe and celebrating the invincibility of youth or the worlds that we would soon conquer. I was Widmerpool. Snowy is playing now, the volume has been reduced, it is mainly guitars and ethereal vocals, could pass for a Candy Claws track. But a Candy Claws record is not an assault, it is an impressionist landscape, wombedelic, charming naivety. They probably love Keiji Haino alsmot as much as Procedure Club person from Poland. The volume climaxed and that was rather nice. Now malfunctioning drum machines and human pain, and guitars, nice. Not sure why we need a voice. Why do we need a voice? I would like a printed lyric sheet. I would imagine a lot of the music is about boots and sleep and tensile strength of sheets of aluminum when played with large rubber mallets. This is the twee'st assault in the history of mankind. It is the equivalent of a Sherman Tank, the twee'st tank ever being confronted with a Tiger and running away. Are her vocals looped? Are they just lazy? Do they record an entire album in approximately 11 minutes? Most of this is repeating patterns of noise that doesn't distinguish itself from the background noise of everyday life. I listen to the conversations of people who participate in life almost every day and it is as discordant as this is, there is one agenda competing with another and in between there are all sorts of misplayed notes that cause dissension and unhappiness much the same as this record. Are people happy after listening to a Procedure Club record? Will they assume it is cool because it isn't well crafted or thoughtful? Probably. They will move to New York and have remixes done by people who used to be friends with people who used to know people who knew Panda Bear reasonably well. I can't wait for the next record. On the next record they will record one track for 43 minutes and it will be composed on one 2.3 second loop repeating for 43 minutes and the lyrics will be the instructions read in Swedish by a non-native speaker on how to assemble floating shelves from Ikea Ikea opens in Denver, well Lone Tree, soon. Come visit, we can re-enact scenes from 500 Days of Summer in Ikea and listen to the Smiths.

2011-07-17T09:55:00.001-07:00

Former The Smiths frontman, Morrissey, said,

“It’s a self-regarding gesture. I would find the idea of compiling a set list that doesn’t wildly excite me to be too restricting. The fire in the belly is essential; otherwise you become Michael Buble — famous and meaningless.”

2011-07-17T09:49:00.001-07:00

2011-07-14T20:28:00.000-07:00

Conquering Animal Sound Kammerspiel. It begins twinkly. Soft plucks, gentle piano, squealie voice. I don't mind the squealie voice. It is not Japanese squealie voice which disrupts my constitution. It is non-Japanese. It is not Tujiko Noriko. I haven't actually made it through this album entirely. It is likable but it isn't necessarily memorable. They are a new band. They don't have any pretensions yet about how to play their instruments or who their favorite member of Can is as of yet and so a lot of this is primitivism. Tristan Tzara, I've conveniently just finished a biography, would approve. Have you read his dada contributions. Was it more compelling in person because it has not travelled the age in between effectively. He was 20. But 20 in 1916 is not 20 now. "Thought is made in the mouth". And thus Twitter. Second track, more atmosphere or rather samples of atmosphere, fractured acoustic guitar, tension. Loveliness. I believe they are Scottish. I know, it is not difficult to confirm that. The internet has made us all sloths. I possess in the palm of my hand of all the entirety of human knowledge. Michael Scot travelled to Toledo for the same. He would look down on me as fatuous and decadent. But imagine the delight if Michael Scot could travel forward and see the access to the human encomium that is the internet. And yet might he have been Almohad equivalent of an obscurantist today, preferring the demo translations of Ibn Rushd before Abelard came and ruined the party. I have been to Toledo, Ohio, many times. It does not compare. My life would not compare favorably at all with Michael Scot and he didn't even have a car. I have a car. I could leave tomorrow and drive to the coast, take a ship westward and end up in an alien continent with Leptospirosis and disease ridden Civets and pollution. It has been raining ferociously for most of the week, each evening we are visited by a tremendous act of nature and it thrills. And on television I watch small children running through flooded parking lots in front of pawn shops and because I have read the Pro-Med mailing list for far too long I worry about them getting Leptospirosis. Leptospirosis is the curse of the good samaritan. although, I watched this week as a woman was rescued with a rope and unfashionable know from two inches of water along Dry Creek Road. Fourth track, the third was especially lovely but I was lost in tangent. This is reminding me of something. It will come to me. Is it not true that comparison is the bane of a real music reviewer's existence but it is the most effective way of describing the sound of music. Is comparison awful? I would love to be compared to someone I thought was fabulous. What if I was compared to Morrissey? And if the job of the new Morrissey was already filled by someone else more deserving then I could possibly rate as the second Jobriath. That position has not been filled. The governor of Texas is going to run for president. I wonder in a debate when he is asked who his personal philosopher is will he answer Jesus Christ? Almost certainly. What if he answered Morrissey instead? Sure he has some goofy ideas about militant vegetarianism but that would resonate in a world where i discover online profiles who seem to believe that torturing animals is worse than starving children. The lack of humanism in our age of narcissism. Perhaps their response is a comment on the obesity crisis and they find the idea of chubby children losing a few pounds not unreasonable but taping a kitten to a refrigerator door is. They are both reprehensible. Next track, we missed an instrumental, it was an incidental instrumental, an intermission. Is this similar to Palms? It is twee. Palms have constructed a facade of toughness. Are these entries "thoughts created in the mouth"? Possibly. It could be that I am an accidental dadaist. My genius lies in my naivety. I am not 20 years old. Because of the rain coming out of the south, from Arizona, because the dew point in Phoenix is above 55 degrees and it is really hot in the mojave desert the electric sunsets have returned. Denver is a city of grime. All of the dust and sloughing and the magnesium chloride returning to its original state. The rain is a baptism, thank you Lloyd Dobler. That last track was a bit unmemorable, it may have been where I was lead astray by previous listenings. It is the longest track and yet it is not the last track and so by rule it is meandering and uninteresting and probably should have been left off of the album. But one track must be longest unless all of the tracks are of equal length and then the true egalitarian spirit would take hold and music would be universal and would lead to cosmic harmony. I spent most of yesterday at a country club. There was an emergency. Several dozen trees were damaged and it may have meant that fabulously wealthy patrons might be denied their round of golf. It was have been an unspeakable tragedy. But the country club survived this Saturday and I skulked in shadows underneath the cottonwoods that survived their armageddon and watched the scions of "powerful" families, pretenders, on the driving range in their jodhpurs and with their generic scionness turn on little white balls, rotate their hips, come to level plain at the top of a back swing and lap up their inherited privilege. I felt like Durruti planning my next military offensive on the children of the Bourgeoisie. Last track was ok. It is easy to not pay attention to the music. Is that a problem? Probably. Electronic bands are a strange lot, they seem to have an endless repertoire of sounds and constructions to chose from and yet so many electronic bands sound just the same. Is it because Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook.com and did not become a member of an Orbital tribute band? I watched The SOcial Network and my two favorite characters were the guys who went around talking about themselves all of the time, "I am 6'5" and 220 lbs and there are two of me". Awesome. it was high comedy. I wish people at Harvard were that gifted, we might not have been afflicted with our mediocrity in chief if the Harvard depicted in fantasyland actually existed. The world is shaped by the tiniest minority. This is a more minimal track, radio static, her unaffected voice, swirls of melancholy and miasma. Nice. I should have listened to these tracks before, but the rain. The rain has taken on the convenience of being a built-in excuse for my lethargy. Similar to when the northern sky was dressed up in comets, when my mother would ask me if I had applied to some corporation I would say "But Hale-Bopp!". She would understand. Comets for the blind. There is the name of the second Conquering Animal Sound record. i don't know what their band name is meant to signify. I don't know is an acceptable answer, I am always told this. I am flying to Chicago soon and I will carry the philosophy of Morrissey in my pocket. it is a self-reliant philosophy and while sure he is a labor supporter and was just as outraged as Johnny Marr when David Cameron was expressing his undying love for the Smiths he espouses and individualism in his music. The fear of being apart from the herd must be overcome because the herd is based on belief and not the truth. Thom Yorke would have your fate ted to the masses, the unthinking masses that require not strawberries from Kenya but free newspaper records. This song is Giant. Her voice multi-tracked, it appears more interesting and lovely when it is difficult to focus it, they should remember this on future releases. They will release seven albums and then have children and move to New Zealand and live next to the Thompson Twins. And the sheep. I am 6' and 190 lbs, there is only one of me. I did not go to Harvard. I went to the University of Michigan. I did not create Facebook.com. My new online profile, oh and I think starving children is worse than torturing animals but I wouldn't engage in either. Neither should you. Last track, Ira, repeating musical motifs, pinched vocals, the same as always. They could be marvelous, they will need some practice in order to learn exactly how they might become marvelous. Just now, they are not.

2011-07-12T21:27:00.001-07:00

2011-07-12T20:15:00.000-07:00

The Heart Strings Flap Your Crazy Wings. The rain is pouring forth rather furiously just now. The pop songs that emanate from the Heart Strings are mere striplings and are timid little cuties. They might turn to oceans of sand in the calamitous rain shower and was away between your fingers and your toes. "It takes strength to be decent and kind". It's true. The sarcastic world will hear this album and act with derision and as I am now reading the Instinct of the Herd and have now realized that the gregarious instinct of man means that this irrational belief is unchangeable by reasoning I will instead just assume you, the Heart Strings skeptics, are mentally defective. The earnest are to be re-educated. I've only just got to the bit about the mentally unstable actually being overly sensitive and unable to see the intrinsic altruism of existence so my line of thinking here is on less sturdy placement. Second track. Buzzier. Swooning synths, distorted weak sauce voices, it's marvellous. Truly. Third track, more buzzy synths, it reminds me somewhat of a Honeyrider record only instead of a California surfer dude in control it's a library science major trying out for the pep squad. More distorted voices. In the background there are the electrical sprites dancing across the sky, proclaiming history through their vulgar fulgurites. A fall away to twinkles, a tender voice, dreamy female backing vocals, just so incredibly charming. I am weak sauce. There is ambition here. There is ambition towards achieving a sense of beauty for its own sake. I trust in this interpretation. It is my heart's delicate attachment to the meek. They shall not inherit the earth but I will buy their limited edition pressings every day and the on the one that follows afterwards. Fourth track, his voice, a ukulele, the impressions of twinkles, a bit of the Fonda 500 sensitivity on the vocals. There is of course Frankie and the Heartstrings. This hasn't anything to do with them. I haven't yet lost power in spite of the maelstrom framed by my bedroom window, night to day, stillness to fireworks. When I first moved here it rained nearly every single day of the summer. It was a wonderful way to synchronise your biological impulses, the fire caressing the air, the speakers crashing the sky, the the prodigious amount of water causing the appearance of impromptu lakes making me nostalgic for home and forests of mullein and leafy spurge to spurt recklessly. I like rain. This is a truly fearsome storm. I like rain. The Heart Strings would be declared earnest by bureaucrats at Musical Nomenclatura Agency. The songs would be stamped inoffensive and blandished with official speak so as to be properly accessible to the working class. it isn't revolutionary. Revolutions aren't all that revolutionary. I am learning that they are irrational. most of the "furniture" of the human mind is irrational. Belief is the basis for everything. When I tell you that the Heart Strings are endearing and warm and gentle and kind and wonderful and sweet unless you have formed an irrational opinion based on your group you will most likely just accept the opinion of the larger communal organism and just dismiss them. The earnest will be rounded up, they will have pink stars affixed to their chests and their cats will be run over with Caterpillars and people with commercial drivers licenses will be the new politburo. A wheezing organ. A pep rally cheer, drum fills, cleverness, sweetness. I need more adjectives for romantic and charming. Vampish? Enchanting? It is very 1991. It is the sort of thing that the people I loved in 1991 would have put on a mix tape for me, the sort of thing I would have listened to while out walking in a fierce thunderstorm such as this, underneath the utility pylons with dreams of her or her best friend in my head. This is an essentially random take on nothing at all. Du-du dum dum dum. The number one dream of many people now is to be a bureaucrat. This is step one on our road to the Wanting Seed. We all want to work for the ministry. The one child policy will arrive next, not for fear of overpopulation but as a means of reducing the communal carbon footprint, and then the fetishization of homosexuality as the responsible choice and then when you die you become phosphorous. Unless you are a diet soda addict and instead you turn to trypanosomes that swim down the veins of your last sexual activity mate. But perhaps The Heart Strings will save us from our bleak destiny. Clear Channel will force all of their stations to play this and the herd will decide it is good and not destroy this change and instead sanctify, memorialize it as part of the canon, see symmetry where there isn't any and we'll throw Russell Brand into the void instead. The Heart Strings are friends, they make music for their friends, surely their fans are dreadful. They wear hair slides, they wear wellington boots when the weather stays fine and smoke to make their voices deeper. I am a fan. I have just outed myself as dreadful. It is true. My insecurities make me rather difficult. i am off to Chicago soon. I will swim in the pool where Johnny Weissmuller swam his olympic trials, I will be further along in my path to greatness afterwards. i could enter a footnote in my "novel" concerning Johnny Weissmuller and rebel hijackings of celebrity golf carts. It will make my memoir different from the norm. Nice Hangover. In Chicago I will be very close to home. There will be water, the great lakes, my ancestral home. i will walk out into the surf and strip myself naked and wash myself clean of all of the mundanities of life in Colorado. I will remember our ascent as the aquatic ape, descendant of Pakicetus, aerobic and proud/ What does Colorado stand for? Fitness? Fleece? It is difficult to say. There is still plenty of snow on the mountains but mostly people don't seem to notice. If only a Subaru was truly autochthonous. Staring at the snow. Whistles. His voice is generic indie pop voice but in the most delightful meaning of the word. Big buzzy bits now, Don't Let the World Gang Up On You. A song for Dominique Strauss Kahn. It has two parts, the verses and the ecstatic bits. His voice, reverberated, the drums compressed, the world impressed. This is a marvellous, marvellous record. I met someone who may be a member of the sarcastic syndicate. I can alter my behaviour, alter my appearance, I can eliminate my sincerity. I could grow a beard to hide my non-jutted jawline and non-simian brow which betrays my twee sympathies. I am not hairless though. The last track The Watering Can of Love. A very Duglas Stewart song title. Falsetto, churchy organs, more voices, sophistication. Dreamy. When I invade the country club where Mark Ruffalo plays golf I will commandeer the golf course short wave radio station and play the Heart Strings and it will break more than par.

2011-07-11T20:30:00.001-07:00

2011-07-10T18:46:00.001-07:00

Lady Lazarus Mantic. The name, Sylvia Plath reference, ugh. But it's actually lovely, the record, Sylvia Plath perhaps. Why not be more independent and far ranging and adopt a nom de guerre from a poem by Anna Laetitia Barbauld? You know, the rumor is that she counted Marat among her lovers. And she hung out with Joseph Priestly who was eminently more cool than Ted Hughes. In fact if Sylvia had perhaps chosen her Ted's more wisely she wouldn't have placed the damp dish towels across the threshold and checked the pilot light. If she had me Theodore Hall instead, I believe he arrived at Cambridge before she died, well she might have had a rich and wonderful life. He could have seduced her with tales of watching Kim Philby look at photographs of Giraffes and she could have written a poem for him about treachery and naivety. He was a dashing young physicist/spy. First track was distant voices and piano, surely it was all torment and the rain. The rain has been coming each and every day. It isn't a melancholic arrival, it is angry and tumultuous. This isn't angry, it's monotonic and basic and I rather enjoy it. This second track is much like the first only with less distant voices and more notes on the piano. Is Lady Lazarus to be counted among those who scrape Ted Hughes vile name from Sylvia's tombstone every season? I hope not. Anna Laetitia was a prototypical romantic poet, were she more astute Lady Lazarus could have chosen Cristina Rosetti instead and coloured her record with the flourish of a pre-raphaelite instead of the greys of a luddite. She could cover Shelleyan Orphan. She could have hair filled with curls and Ivo Watts Russell as a close personal confidant. In the 1990s this might have been released on Xpressway records. It's primitivism. More shrill voiced sentiments and inexpertly played piano. The songs are somewhat long, I am not certain I will be able to maintain my literary allusions for the duration. Shelleyan Orphan were mocked for their literary pretensions. Sad. Graeme Downes was also criticized for his pretensions and so he stopped mentioning Dostoevsky and started to sing about blankets over the sky and wars in his head. Now he's old and he croons sad bitter excoriations of straw men and shadows of history. Perhaps also if Sylvia Plath's father had bene the Belgian apiologist Maurice Maeterlinck rather than the dreaded Otto of Daddy well she would have grown up reading The Secret Life of Bees and hallucinated over its strange passages over the courtship of bees and the glory of their devotion and been a happy child and we would never have been concerned about Sylvia Plath. I rather like the Bell Jar and I would like to have read her final notebooks. Am I anxious for 2013? Next track, a bit more pace. It has a Peter Jefferies as neutered by Jean Smith feel to the music. it is all repeating motifs and moans of confession. There is a bit more color in this track provided by a embedded melody and some low rumble in the mix but not a whole lot. With this little variation over the course of the first five tracks she might have considered not having released so many tracks on her album. I am something of a tapophile myself. I enjoy visiting cemeteries. I have two purposes for visiting cemeteries. The first is to sing at the top of my lungs all of the lines to Cemetery Gates and the second...erm, no. I like to go to cemeteries and make lists of names. There are fascinating names carved in stone and I have no compunction over stealing them for my own purposes. Dramatically rendered names are not my strong suit. Better to borrow someone else's inspiration. The second reason I enjoy cemeteries is to look at the headstones and create in my head a life story for these strangers that lie in peace. It is especially easy to conjure romantic tragedies for those that passed far too early. My first ever date was in a cemetery. It was a moonlit picnic against a stream that formed the boundary of a cemetery in Lake Orion, Michigan. I don't revel in the macabre or morose I chose to celebrate life even if it is in the past. A brighter track here, thundering chords on the piano, her voice recorded in a public restroom alongside the interstate. It is called Half-Life. How many tracks have there been that have been called half-life? i would wager there have been a great many. This is a fine addition to the canon. It would be lovely if each regularly repeated song title and sentiment had a canon to compare current offerings to all that has come before. This could be the purpose of the cloud. I don't fell great excitement about the cloud. Already our wireless connectivity is depressed, the idea of 1 million teenagers listening to Bieber on their Android phones rather than their ipods and this causing me headaches at work when trying to transfer photographs of trees on houses and trucks mangled on overpasses is not an appealing imagining. Another similar track. The piano is repetitive, hr voice is not really decipherable, so if she is deep and expressing keenness in spades we are hopelessly unaware. Is this Peter Jefferies piano that she is playing? Did she smuggle her way onto an Otago bound freighter, steal her way onshore, catch a ride to Gwen Jefferies home and steal Peter Jefferies' beloved keyboard? Is his keyboard now in B.C.? Is he still married to Jean Smith? Does she still wear her bearskin cap? Next track, no piano. Twinkles or trickles on a teapot. It's uninspired and dreary. I am enjoying it. "Just do something girl, was my reply, just do something girl, don't worry about anything". Hmmm...was this the advice given to her before she absconded with Peter Jefferies' prize? Perhaps. I should write about The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World some day, "just do something"-right? Good advice. I don't like The Last Great Challenge... as much as I love Messages from the Cakekitchen. Peter has less tenderness in his croon. it is more scientific. He could have had a brilliant career as an Earth Sciences teacher. Midnight Music Condition for a Broken Heart, I like that title, it seems more plaintive and urgent. Still rudimentary attempts at the piano but her voice seems more pleasingly engaged. I can't make out the words, not clearly, but with a clever title such as this surely the words form the basis of a splendid dream. Did it cost 11 dollars to record this album? I don't know where lady Lazarus is from. i would imagine she is american, who else to be so obvious to select a Sylvia Plath poem to label confessional music. Next track, less good title, I Couldn't Find Me in Anything. Less good music. Less good voice. I was unaware that I had downloaded this. I've had it for months. I will delete it as soon as I am finished typing. "This isn't writing, it's typing" but I am not in Lakewood and I am not Jack Kerouac and you are not Truman Capote. I am anxious to write about Heart Strings instead. They are not ponderous and important, they are charming and endearing and I more closely resemble the latter. I can be serious. I know a lot of things but how to come off as something not monstrously pedantic? I don't Know. I just nod and smile when the founding fathers are labeled terrorists. What of George Mason? What of James Madison? I was in no condition to found a nation when I was 25. 35. 38. But there was kissing. And I haven't been kissed in some time. Next track, ugh, she's showing off on the piano, oh dear. It's a struggle. She should take lessons. Perhaps it is Isidore Isou that has stepped in on the piano. he's wearing a 4 foot collar and top hat and can't see the keys from the bees. maurice maeterlink has his head in his antennae. This is perhaps the worst instrumental that I have ever heard. Perhaps. That is unkind. I had a friend that used to love Cat Power because she was absolutely certain that she could play guitar better than Cat Power and this gave her a feeling of superiority over Cat Power. My friend would love Lady Lazarus. now there are buzzes and her dreary voice, oh this is tedious. i have a few more tracks to endure. I will maintain. This is a short one, Pearl, only 2 minutes long. SOunded like the painful birth of a pronoun. Another track, same as the rest, only longer. I will need a glass of milk in order to finish this. This is work, and I might just need an exhortation the likes of which Marcus Aurelius delivered in Dalmatia, "You have no real love for yourself; if you did you would love your nature,and your nature's will. Craftsmen who love their trade will spend themselves to the utmost in laboring at it, even going unwashed and unfed; but you hold your nature in less regard than the engraver does his engraving, the dancer his dancing, the miser his heap of silver, or the vainglorious man his moment of glory. " Remember that the next time someone says to Levene "you call yourself a salesman you song of a bitch?". There is elegance. I mentioned kissing. It was dreadful kissing because I am apparently now a dreadful kisser. My muscles have lost their fine movement. My face is alien to the rest of my being. Listening to the bloodless is in no way going to improve my methods of seduction. But it is the last song, soon I will be able to turn the page and listen to the Sixths Kissing Things and allow Sarah Cracknell to reignite my passion. No.

2011-07-10T16:04:00.001-07:00

Possibly a new Prefab Sprout record in October!? Trapdoor Melancholy. It could be a marvelous halloween.

2011-07-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

All of the slow and pretty, I am beginning to calcify.

2011-07-10T10:07:00.001-07:00

2011-07-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

Beirut The Rip Tide. As obsolete as warships in the baltic. Wishing she could call him heartache but that's not a boy's name. Hello stranger, the stranger I've become, I've become an air raid. I am positively thrilled over the news of a possible Prefab Sprout record appearing this autumn and so as you no doubt recognized those were Prefab Sprout quotes without quotations. It is my Apollinaire impression. And isn't part of the charm of Prefab Sprout his electrifying dramatization of the mundane and petty into something effortlessly gorgeous? Apollinaire might approve, what were his feelings over the English anyhow? I don't mean to slight Beirut. He's lovely, really. He's got that silly less than taut baby fat that migrates seasonally from his face to his pectorals and back when the solstice strikes his silhouette. Eva Mendes is a Smiths fan and loves Manchester. It's true. I read it online. Accordion, this is the Beirut on Magnetic Fields album. I've discussed, previously, my desire for bands to become active partisans. I would like them to stop getting sympathetic tattoos and instead to adopt arms and join the battle on their preferred side and after the experience then write a passionate record about their experiences. Beirut would have served in the the Popular Front obviously, in the Red Army, on the Long March, they would caress their Mausers all day and in the evening exhale their traumas into their lovely little accordion squeezed pop songs. Beirut have a theoretically old soul. The music feels antiqued. fIt has passion in spite of its refinement and elegance. They could only be American, or French. Second track, more Magnetic Fields-y pop music. This is the most "pop" Beirut album thus far. At this point in the continuum he must be looking for some sort of remuneration for his efforts. He must be 25 by now? Ancient by rules of the pop game, a guest spot opening for GaGa, a television appearance on the view where he endorses Anthony Weiner for IMF chairmanship and a halftime spot at the super bowl. The world is his. It's a lovely record. Just terrifically lovely. But what of the baby fat? The repeating motif here reminds me of Ride's Time Machine. Is that unlikely? The seventies keyboard riff that adds a sense of rustication to the efforts, always his voice is rustic and there are the flugelhorns and the martial drumbeat. It's all eminently posh. Third track, accordions wheeze, urban landscapes painted in the background by field recordings and atmosphere and a tender mid-tempo stroll. He writes pastoral captions for musical postcards. It is all very evocative of time passed, of a simpler ethos, of a commitment only to the passion of the vision. I've just finished a biography of Tristan Tzara and he's rather unimportant in the greater scheme of things, isn't he. Dada was a lark. His championing of Rimbaud as the bringer of sophistication to the benighted continent is a laff, and the idea that the work of art itself was less important than the undirected thought that was its genesis seems to lead to a world where nothing matters except for the ephemerality of dreams and undirected thought. Art is born in the mouth. The Dead C would appeal to Tristan Tzara and yet the rest of us know how absolutely dreadful the Dead C really are in reality. fourth track now, piano, a ballad, a California pop song. It is all well thought out and prepared. The Magnetic Fields have the Dada Polka, Beirut have their mexican folk songs and their panoply of horns and sympathies for the weak. Just now a climax is achieved with the registered drumbeat, the melancholy horns and his voice so tenderly offered. Next track. Payne's Bay, a geographical reference? Ah, I've googled, Barbados. Perhaps a memoir of his trip to Barbados with his super model girlfriend where she travelled to recover from her debut at fashion week with baby Beirut in the front row taking photographs with his instamatic. This is beautiful. The last full Beirut record was more thematically timid, each track had a softness and here, on the new record, there is a more symptomatic boldness, a greater use of dynamism and musical heft. A female voice has joined him, his voice is so intensely doleful and when twinned with his glittering carnivalesque ballads it is inspiring and romantic. I don't mind the baby fat. Next track, more pop, a wooden block, pianos, strings in excess, drama in perfect measure. There is an element of ambition in all of this tiny pastoral symphonies. Each vignette a resplendent monument to the beauty of the human experience. I might comment on the lyrics but it feels as if this is the music of the working man, this is the music to be played on the front lines against the storm troopers of the republican party who want to deny you a comfortable retirement attainable at 52 years old. This is the rallying cry of resistance against those who would deny a bureaucrat's right to have sexual relations with an african hooker in a 3,000 dollar per night suite. These are the battles to be documented by the emotions spilled forth in the wake of Beirut's pop masterworks piped through loudspeakers in the tent cities filled with children with trust funds and keys to their Audi's parked overnight in a two hour parking space. These are the times that create lasting art. They might. My recent laments have expressed dismay over the damage that comparative wealth has wrought on independent music. Indiepop is less a revolt of the young and more a "gap year". Something to fill the resume while attending prestigious universities as a legacy enrollee before taking that job at Goldman Sachs. I love this album and while I am completely unserious as a revolutionary because I believe the ideal president is the one elected on the platform where he claims he doesn't have any answers to the problems but that he knows that most government solutions actually exacerbate the problems they attempt to remedy and so he's gonna put the entire place up for sale and go fishing instead. But we have this need for a messiah. Obviously the current occupant is a born mediocrity. More of the same is likely to follow. Perhaps if instead of getting fair trade tattoos if Chris Martin exhorted self reliance and freedom from government regulatory tyranny from the stage we might see the light instead of a future of narcissistic darkness. The Peacock, an intermission, a gently rumbling hum and his plaintive voice over multiple tracks. Nice. Last track. A ukulele, twinkles, an extended intro and his poetic ear for writing lyrics that seem more profound and amplify his effect as a storyteller and wrap the listener in a warm cocoon of collective inspiration. I really do think Beirut are one of the greatest bands on the planet. I will love them forever, honestly. Applause.

2011-07-01T21:01:00.000-07:00

2011-07-01T20:21:00.001-07:00

Deaf Center Owl Splinters. Deaf Center are Norwegian. The same as Edvard Munch, Henrik Ibsen, Quisling...oh, sorry. The music is wordless and as such we are thus granted the freedom to attach any significance to the music that we would like. It could be a reaction against the diminishment of the power of the written word in America. Are there book burning still in America? I haven't been to one in ages. I do recall the emotional "power" of that scene in Footloose when the good people were burning all of the scandalous books--Are you there God? It's Me Margaret, How to Eat Fried Worms, The Push Cart War, etc...all aflame! And then John Lithgow, in his handsome phase, swooped in and saved the day but later he blushed when his daughter cursed in church. But now? Would they burn Sula or an EM Forster novel? They would be doing the children a great service if they would. And what happens when all school children are toting tablets and nooks and kindles and the like, will we burn books only metaphorically? Gather around a barrel of paper towels dipped in kerosene and chant Indonesian koans? But then there aren't many movies made now that have the societal impact of a Footloose and so without Kevin Bacon who will make that urgent call to action. We are the poorest that we have been in generations. Deaf Center would be ideal for movie soundtrack work. I am not familiar with Norwegian filmmaking at the moment. Should I be aware of any Norwegian filmmakers at the moment? The first track would soundtrack the scene where in Svalbard a depressed Norwegian laments the midnight sun and lingers over an application to the oil fund in Norway to fund his experimental re-pigmentation that can only be performed in North Korea. He is an albino but we only learn this as the second track begins and he removes the sombrero from the top of his head. The music could underscore the dexterity in which the protagonist places his periods and half-stops and the agony of font selection for his application. It would be sombreros and typewriters, marvelous, the scrapes and radio static would unite effortlessly with the scene. This is the excitement of wordless pretty things. The Oil Fund in Norway is a monster. 570 billion dollars. Do they accept tender pleas from Norwegians to fund emergency liposuctions or performance art pieces on the premise that 'the destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves'. perhaps not. I remember reading an article on summer homes in Norway and the outrage found nationwide when some louts were outfitting their homes with electricity and air conditioning. Apparently there are loads of old cars in Oslo because the entire nation is frugal. I am frugal. I could be Norwegian. i could write the Oil Fund and submit a grant application expressing my desire to study the differences between a pseudo-Canadian's frugalness versus an average Norwegian's frugalness. Will I succeed? I could send them a copy of my "novel" and ask them to publish it. Third track, started off with a bit of ominous urban soundscaping, then the piano arrives and it is a David Fincher movie, it is softer, and lovelier. It is not very Canadian. I was once Canadian. I have mentioned this in the past. But there is reason now. It was recently Dominion Day, sorry it was recently Canada Day, and I was displeased at my lack of options here in Westminster for celebrating this monumental occasion. In Detroit it was on Dominion Day that the major fireworks display occurred. We would travel as a family underneath the Detroit river and sit on the Windsor side of the river because there was less likelihood of being murdered in Canada than in the USA and watch the fireworks and have romantic visions of the Viscount Monck and Sir John dancing arm in arm after the establishment of Canada as a sovereign nation in 1867. It must have been romantic. Atom Egoyan could make a film of this, their torrid affair covered up by the history books and Conrad Bain as the Viscount. Conrad Bain could be deceased. Next track, the epic centerpiece of the album. It is ten minutes long. This is reminiscent of the Dustin O'Halloran record that I recently wrote incoherently about. it has less of a classical structure, it is looser, it would fall more soundly in the electronic camp than in the indie classical movement. The air is moved around the room by synthesizers and found sound rather than having a composer move delicately among the spaces in between the molecules. Electronic music even at its tenderest is still an aggressive form, there is little room separating the oscillations and waves and so it acts almost as a glacier would as it carves the landscape all things powerless to resist, mountains of granite, conifer forests, human civilization, all consumed in the frozen wake and similarly all human experience is overwhelmed by the impact of electronic dissonance. Not really, I became lost in metaphor. Instead of a glacier I should have compared it to isostatic rebound after the glaciers have receded. And suddenly the epic movement has ceased. This track begins with samples of a violin being abused? Lovingly. A cello? My ears. For someone with this deep seated attachment to music, it soundtracks everything I do whether it is present in the air or not, I have been blessed with miserable ears. The treated stringed instrument is manipulated forcefully and with grace in a very small space, it feels as if this song was recorded in a very tiny space and squeezed onto this album through some sort of semi-permeable surface to remove the excess filamentous accompaniments and all that is left is minimal brutality. So lovely. The first Deaf center album was also very lovely. It was also wordless. I am not sure that more music should be wordless but possibly more people should be. That is a cruel aside, my apologies. I make apologies to the shadows of former readers who become so disgusted with my lack of artfulness that they vow never to return to the Ron Powlus universe ever again. Has Ron Powlus ever visited this site? Surely he is one for ego-surfing. Would he be disappointed? I am not living up to the legend that he has established. he could be a massive Deaf Center fan. He could take cruises in the Norwegian midnight sun with Owl Splinters on his ipod and ear buds in his ears as he stares out across the deck and admires the beauty of the non-setting sun. Next track, minimal piano, I am fairly certain that I could play this piece. It is an assemblage of five or six notes repeated over and over. This could be soundtrack work, they could compose these records while watching television, this the soundtrack to a particularly dismal financial news report. But are there dismal financial reports in Norway? They have 570 billion dollars. They could retrofit a great number of summer homes with electricity for 570 billion dollars. We could not. My company is receiving stimulus money. We are spending it to alter the environment, to conduct a war on an insect, to pay our employees Davis-Bacon prevailing wages. Next track, samplers and samples of strings placed far out among the celestial objects on the posterior side of the horizon, among Gannyede and Ceres and Iapetus. This could be on the next Voyager mission. It sounds like space traveller music, if I was in a spacecraft hurtling at excessive speed towards another star I might listen to this. I might not. It would be a long journey and I might be alone and this is isolated music, this enhances the feeling of solitude with its elicitation of the womb and rain and our journey from the ocean depths to the tops of expansive mountain ranges. If I was a spaceman I might opt for some Bob Seger. I can't imagine Bob Seger would be a big fan of Deaf Center, I can't visualize him on his deck at his house on Orchard LAke in Michigan blasting the Deaf Center through his speakers that look like stones in the landscape. Last track, Hunted Twice. Refrigerator hummings in opposite channels. Are songs such as this constructed or are they accidentally discovered, as they are tuning up the piano do they simply twist knobs and depress keys and write unknown variances of source code and happen on a lovely bit of melancholy such as this? It seems that there are now manipulated strings in the mix as well, these sounds have a human origin. I am almost certain, again, my ears. There is a metronomic beat on piano keeping time in the foreground, the sound is unfocused and plaintive, pastoral, Norwegian. And then, just now, there is but the metronome and a soft tingling from keys and it gently dissipates into confessional tones.

2011-07-01T20:19:00.001-07:00

Oooo! New Beirut has appeared. I don't condone such things. If I would then I should call it really lovely.

2011-06-26T10:43:00.001-07:00

New Still Corners single--

2011-06-24T21:19:00.001-07:00

Aye, there is a new Nick Nicely album out.

Update: Buh, cassette only?

2011-06-23T21:16:00.001-07:00

2011-06-23T21:08:00.001-07:00

Jobriath Creatures of the Street. I will admit to only listening to this because Morrissey listed it as one of his most favorite records. He has also curated a reissue. Morrissey's influence in my life is still supreme. This may need remedying. I do not think for myself. I should. I don't need a mad monk making my life more of a mockery than it is, next he will be pushing beets and criticize my stomach and not my thinking. First track is Heartbeat, a bit of an introduction, on the piano He was a piano prodigy. In line with Graeme Humphreys. In King of Prussia, Pennsylvania piano prodigies may not proliferate. But in King of Prussia there is the canvas to create a persona to last. Interesting people are not born in interesting places. Ah but what of Maria Callas, Whitey Ford, Gouverneur Morris? The exceptions. They were born in New York. I think. New York is more interesting than Denver. Slightly. But they have the rule as well, see Anne Hathaway. She's not interesting. if you are surrounded by fascinating things and exciting moments bloom each and every day then you don't feel compelled to create yourself in antagonism to your environment. I often long for a persona of my own. I needn't wear fairy wings and glittered platform shoes but I need a gay personality. I have a persona. My existence in pixels and lines of resolution is far more riveting than my existence among the bees and the beavers. Ohh La La, now, fueled by people on authentic cocaine, a singer proud to be hairless, guitars made from trees imported from Nepal. What were Jobriath's inhibitions? Did he leave behind a catalog? I would like to know. He seems fearlessly unconcerned about the existence of everyone else on this planet and I marvel at it. i think very little of my fellow earthlings but it isn't because I celebrate myself but rather because I do not celebrate them and their omnipresent mediocrity. This is genius. In fact, the songs are tagged in Itunes with "genius". Brilliant. I bet Thom Yorke would like a persona. He's just a guy with a superfluous consonant. He's dull. Truly. he wasn't born in King of Prussia. I would imagine he was born middle class, how else to explain all of that guilt that strangles? Next track Scumbag. Stuff about formerly famous actors behaving rudely. It's a lark, it's a bit of vaudevillia juvenilia and we love it. The pianos are delicately tricked into subservience. His hairless arms shaken from the cold of indifference. I don't much like anyone on I Love music, I am being very negative, sorry, but one of the oddest things in the world is to display for all of the world your visceral dislike of an unknown glam singer from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. But the following misguided sentiments were posted in search of personal vanity--

"Is he Bowie like ?
If your definition of Bowie is: very gay man who made albums that were supposed to be glamorous and arty rock but which were stubbornly tuneless and did everything but rock."
"This thread is subtitled: Respect not the dead, let's bag on Jobriath."
"His music sort of sucks and is inadvertantly hysterical
I also have to admit I haven't been able to listen to the entire album.

Perfect. An ideal reissue of Jobriath would have included recommendations like these. They would potentially bring in an entirely different audience, like people who always slow down and form a traffic jam on the highway because they want to see the remnants of a multiple car crash."

I used to be almost capable of that sort of vitriol. But it is more brilliant to love. I was listening to the radio yesterday and there was a man who was 31 and had already been the recipient of two heart transplants and now he was ready to join the PGA tour and conquer the world one putt at a time. It was inspiring. I am not much for golf. But he was only slightly more interesting than Thom Yorke. This is Ecubyan and it is marvelous. His pianos out of phase, his voice from a distant galaxy, yes yes he wishes he was a spider from mars. Strings and delicacy, it's very short, most of the songs are very short. I've recently discovered that i should have loved Suede from the beginning. There is a bit of Jobriath in Suede. Good Time. Very good. It's a bit of a glam stomp rocker. Which are the great Glam bands that deservedly received the attention they received while Jobriath ended up on the streets hawking his hairlessness to sustain various illicit habits? Slade? No, they were horrible! Alvin Stardust? No. Heavy Metal Kids? No. Jobriath was the greatest of them all. Or not. probably not, but this album is wonderful. His first is rather good as well. But this has the indulgence he hadn't yet earned but which he expelled furiously in the face of public apathy. Everything on here seems committed and dramatic and intense. Natalie Merchant should listen. You can't turn everythign in life into a glam stomp rocker but it would be more fun if you tried. Walk into a payless shoestore with an elephant trunk hanging from your left nipple and a saxophone slung across your back and ask for a pair of shoes three sizes too small for your feet and then go home and sit at the piano and write a bouncy little ditty about it and sing it as if it is the most important thing in the world ever. Do it, now! And really is New York that interesting? People make places and Denver is uninteresting because the people here are unsure of what it means to be a person in Denver whereas in New York I think the atmosphere of zeitgeist overwhelms most and it is this patina that New Yorkers wear that is only visible to those outside of their little bubble covered metropolis and like the remnants of the brown clouds that hover ovr Denver it causes asthma and cooties to non-natives. What a Pretty just finished, a glamourous fairy tale, a pean to style of substance. It was a very short pean. Liten Up, the ode to Thom Yorke. When he played Glastonbury did he feel the collective exhortation to action? while half of his audience was texting their friends, or twittering strangers, or uploading photos to facebook to advertise the fact that they are being condescended to by Mr Thom Yorke. collectivists trust crowds. They haven't read Wilfred Trotter. In Boulder the collectivists are banning sugary snacks from city owned vending machines. This is done to save you from yourself. The difficulty in collectivism is of course aligning the interests of the group with the majority of individuals. It is why collectivism so often turns into totalitarianism. You need to force consensus at the end of a barrel. But anyhow, Jobriath was surely a collectivist. He hasn't read Lysander Spooner. But his music is individualist. His music is odd and expansive and I love it and I forgive and Thom Yorke for wanting to save me. Next track, Gone Tomorrow. I saw the other piano prodigy of my record collection Graeme Humphreys once play a set of torch songs while inebriated to people who were lucky enough to have avoided the Dead C in Dunedin. It was pianos and laughs and people whispering in my ears all of the secrets to Richard Feynman's hearts desires. And invites to skipping pebbles on a beach and it was dreamy and romantic. And with military attache bags filled with those same pebbles that disappeared along with shoreside remnants from two other continents and there was a leak from my being, a discharge to rudimentary existence and now that I've listened to the golfer with three hearts and Jobriath and Bachelorette and thrilling electrical storms outside my window I am changed. I am singing along to Jobriath, with his well coiffured backup singers and the tingling guitars and 2001:A Space Odyssey effects and the world is at our feet. Last track, a reprise, a summation of all of the highlights, by rights it is about 28 minutes too short at 2:53 but when we move to King of Prussia because ethanol subsidies have led to global armageddon and Des Moines is the most powerful enclave in a desolate post apocalyptic wasteland we'll search for the foot prints in history and see if our soles can endure.

2011-06-21T20:34:00.001-07:00

2011-06-20T20:17:00.000-07:00

Dustin O'Halloran Lumiere. Dustin O'Halloran is only slightly older than I am. He lives in Berlin. Sarah Kirkland Snider won the best classical record of the year with her tribute to Spoonfed Hybrid. Will this be so honored? It is classically minded or it is merely classical. It is at these moments when my complete lack of qualification for discussing music becomes most apparent. A Great Divide, starts as if emerging from the vacuum. Twinkles and the harmony of the spheres, randomly assorted searching for a symmetry to be displayed in all directions. Slowly it comes into form, rumbles on a piano, a gamma ray burst amplifies the moment, and then strings sigh and we melt. Would it be easier to construct a drawing or diagram of the music A map to the human heart alighted from the designer? I am not sure. I am able, usually, to fake my way through it. I make mention of some bright young thing or a Mitford and distract you from the fact that I am unable to describe such startling beauty. The opening track is revelatory, it is gorgeous. A classical fiend would find it difficult to stifle a yawn but we mere plebeians are taken aback, the breath is stolen from our lungs so that we remain speechless and our hearts beat in sympathy to the disturbances in the air that surround us and comfort us from the desolation of modern isolation. Music is insulation. Music allows you to head out into the frigid world of human relationships. A prophylactic against misery. Perhaps this is an uncommon view, perhaps people wear headphones on trains and become only slightly aware of the world around them because of habit or anti-social behaviour. But for us, for us it is an innoculant. It is a thesaurus worth of defense. Second track, shorter, an interlude, for piano. He is in Devics as well. Devics singer makes solo records. It is not the same. She's forced to words to describe her emotional state. This is candid, unswerving, less prone to interpretation. There is a universality to the emotion of music that cannot be captured by the written word. It is when I lament over reading Baudelaire in English. It is what Heloise and Abelard avoided and what has allowed them to reach across the void for nearly 1000 years by writing of the art of amoris. It is Emmy Noether working under the withering effects of inequlity to prove the power of symmetry. And these works allow images to be conjured quickly in even the weakest minds such as my own. Emmy Noether toiling under candlelight, undernourished, undeservingly banished, while a young student surprised to discovr a very different David Hillbert and under a spell by the catholic nature of mathematics and its twin--Music. It's almost resembling a compulsory event in figure skating, the required elements, the routine that is somehow made more effortless by the truly gifted, injected with passion and soul and brought to flower when mediocrity would only lead to the mundane. Emmy Noether does not exist anymore. Except in pages where she flits between her proofs and your briefly glimpsed remembrances. Where some might fall for Heloise others might find in Emmy or Hypatia even the stuff of enduring happiness. There are violins and cellos and pianos and it's so incredibly beautiful. It leads to thoughts of beautiful things and these thoughts lead to pleasure. I was speaking to someone about mathematics and how it should be taught. This record is mathematics and that is not meant as a denigration. Most beautiful things in nature and most lovely things created by human hands are symmetrical and mathematics is about discovering that underlying symmetry. A sort of edifice to construct everything upon, a double helix, a spiral galaxy, it doesn't lose in wonder by understanding the rules that govern its design. I think it is with a sense of loss that too often the leap is made from understanding to speculating on the cause or the motivation. Philosophy discovers things that are unknowable and offers conjecture without proof. Abstract mathematics discovers things that are previously unknowable and previously impossible and offers proof of sui generis. But this record is a basic document. It is mostly filled with empty spaces, nearly a vacuum but bursting forth from the empty spaces is radiance and live giving warmth and the design may have seemed by providential accident but it only seemingly. It has fallen away, now to a less precise rendering on a piano, the human divide, the divorce of human behaviour and probability. The strings reappear and together two halves with but a tenuous tether between them drifting in concentric orbits around a center of gravity. Opus 43. Devics were never this magnificent. I am absolutely fond of Devics. I saw them live. They played the Gothic Theater here, they opened for the Czars. Sara Lov had a flower pinned in her shocking blonde hair and it was torch songs and it was symmetry and it was touching and I was head over heels. I thought of telling my parents that I had seen the woman I was meant to be with for the rest of my life. With her megaphone on Heaven Please and her well pressed skirt and fashionable footwear I was mute and she was not winnable and we have met but once ever since that moment. Quintette N.1, discrete packets of music all in a row, a pulsed beam of elegance until near the midpoint when all o the elements combine to create a colloid, a compound of endearing sympathy. It takes bravery to fill a record mainly with space, to place the emphasis on one element at a time. In records where the effect is a collage it is easy to miss the moments that are off, the mistakes that are not excised, when you have the music stripped to the barest elements there is more clarity in the examination. If I knew anything at all about playing the piano or a violin's vibrato I could make a superior assessment of each because of the easy witness granted. But I am unknowing. I am not proud. Next track, a double tracked piano, by clever effects geographically removed from each other, a string section enhances the scene. It is music in search of a visual to anchor it, spinning in time with an affinity for direction. But at the same time the imagery that is engendered is resplendent. Twinkles and bells and distant tones, it is magnificent. He is making another record for release soon. He has other solo records. I am sadly lacking. It builds upon itself, a cascade, a cataract...hmm...cataract is not quite right. The inefficiency of language. I sometimes make light of the fact that official French has but 50,000 words where English is up over 988,000. is this why Gide compared the French language to pedals on a piano, the precise tone available by having a limited number of options as analog to the musical scale. Is this record an analog then to the French language and something more bombastic and ludicrous is English. possibly. I would not be diminished in stature if I were to roam the streets of some charming french country village with a boombox on my shoulder rudely blaring Dustin O'Halloran to the residents. The local agrarian collective/committee for public safety would require that children be let free from their bourgeois classes where they might learn the basic of Cantor's theorem, if third graders had ambition, and they would adopt rustic behaviours and commune with the land and give thanks to Lev Bronstein for all that is good. Last track has been playing for a few minutes, rain song, the gentlest piano and pain as portrayed in a string flourish held high above the clouds. This is theoretical music. It takes a gifted mind to understand group theory beyond the duels for love and inherent madness and while it does not require the same for loving Dustin O'Halloran it sets this record apart from the Giorgio Tuma because while this is a monument to nature as described by humans Giorgio is a monument to humans as inscribed in nature.

2011-06-20T19:56:00.001-07:00

2011-06-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

Wintercoats has uploaded a couple more beautiful songs--

Wintercoats

His first EP is still available for free download. It's a bit Spoonfed Hybrid, a trifle Durutti Column, something like Cody, etc...Really very lovely.

2011-06-19T19:46:00.000-07:00

I am to be yelled at disapprovingly at work tomorrow. I always am when I return from vacation. I should not take any vacations. I will keep Lightning Seeds songs in my head all day long.

2011-06-19T19:29:00.000-07:00

Cats on Fire Dealing in Antiques. Cats on Fire are the greatest indiepop band in the world. I know, that is something akin to saying I am the greatest American futboler on the planet. But even the might Cats on Fire can not make Your Woman interesting. Why was this a world conquering hit? Did Jyoti make a mint and spend it on thrift store furniture and gym memberships? I would hope so. It's not got a hook, it isn't particularly catchy, I forget it a mere moment after it ends. I don't understand. Teach me. I didn't mind Hair Like Alain Delon, how thrilling if that had been the hit. But it was not. Song over, goodness. Goodness comes next, Poor Students Dream of Marx, just genius! Really. I could be even less articulate and say just awesome! Really. It's folky, it's sophisticated and smart and perhaps its the image of them that I have in my head of very dapper and composed sorts who seem rather keen on the occupation of pop star. They are the world's tiniest pop stars. They are tall, slender, well dressed, outspoken and the music is perfectly composed. There is this brilliant blend of insecurity and confidence. They have probably never played before more than 100 people. Maybe once or twice, but not three times. They certainly do not make any money. But it's youth and youth is meant for poverty and adventure. The drummer has left. Next track, Never Land Here. Another beautiful pop song. The chorus makes hearts tingle. The drummer has left. I mentioned that a few moments ago. He has another band. Burning Hearts. Everyone else loves them. Why would you leave Cats on Fire then? He does sound like Morrissey. Others will make claim otherwise. English as a second language is no impediment. He's particularly clever. Why then are they not to be disparaged by us as part of the professional clique of European indiepop bands? I don't know. I don't have any hard and fast rules for love, we make them up as we go along. I love many things about this song, the words, the chorus, the 60s garage rock riff. It's wonderful. Will the new drummer ruin them? Doesn't the guitar player play drums in Le Futur Pompiste anyhow? I don't know if anyone loves the last Le Futur Pompiste record. Fourth track, Marr-ied to the jangle, monotonic vocals but it's all in character. Some near virtuosity on the guitar. Were I a teenage girl I might find it worthwhile to follow Cats on Fire around the planet while they toured. Keep a diary, list every song they ever play, follow them to diners and barber shops collect things not ruminated upon, locks of hair, discarded match books. Keep a collage, become a doyenne of the Anorak bulletin board. It will be marvelous, sing like Morrissey as the song ends. Next track, folky, spare, lovely. They aren't cute for cute's sake, they have more depth than that. I may be giving them too much credit. The last record was a disappointment until I listened to it and now I love it. I keep mentioning love. I have all of this love in my heart, it is hidden beneath layers of titanium and peat moss. I can express it to the fates, to pop songs, to the stars above but not to anyone in particular. This is a collection of oddities or rarities or some such. It is as good as their last 2 records. You should buy this album and then buy the other two as well. But do not buy them from Matinee. Buy them from someone else. Next track, dizzy acoustic guitar, his languid vocals, his class, his politeness. When teenaged girls do follow them and they do come to Denver in June they would notice the snowfall on June 20th! It did not snow in the city, no, but the mountains are deluged. The bicycle track was closed due to high water. I rode in my car. It was snowing, no, but it was raining. I haven't any fenders. Fenders seem uncool. I am not normally concerned with my appearance but my bike has a peculiar unattractiveness and fenders might simply interrupt the equilibrium in my head and heart. I love my bicycle. I've never had such a lovely bicycle. I say bicycle always, never "bike". I love Andrew Brough. Do not get misunderstand. This is much better than Bike ever were. Delicate acoustics, mandolin?, piano, his voice, so nice. It's circular. Emmy the Great should attend a Cats on Fire gig. There is something about a band willing to perform. Isn't there? There is. The songs are rather terrific and he could get by by phoning it in, but he does not. This one starts off a bit Twisterella. Always with the "a bit". No more! This site is turning dreadfully mediocre. Is it my recent prolificness? Have I turned into Robert Pollard? Just the way he, Matthias, sings 'I don't know why I keep trying' is wonderful. He's excited about his beautiful songs, I'd be thrilled by them, he wants to inhabit them to make you care about them and when each night after he has sung them to a half empty room to continue sending out signals to the ether hoping for a less desperate response. I don't know where theses songs have came from apart from the ether, I think some of them were the demos that were forever available from their website back when I was still on dial-up and had pseudo-integrity. I was very anti downloading when I was incapable. Now that my neighbours have shared their good fortune I am less principled. This song is My Friend In Comfortable Chair, that may not be the title. It is very Smiths, it is very 1985. Wouldn't it be brilliant were it very 1885? Time machines and steam fairs and blocks of ice stored in hay bales. There is a rush to the words, they make sense, they belong in the places they are placed in. That was a sentence that didn't mean anything at all but I am prone to those. Next track. You Will Find Me Where You Left Me. Slower. Did they not have a drummer then? Female voice. She's no competition. No Soulangeana. i do not have these sophisticated blooms. I am possessor of mere Violas and Peonies and Snapdragons. The Star Lillies from bulbs have poked their heads above the horizon but they are not in bloom, late bloomers, the same as me. And now the drums, epic drums, Morrissey croons, female accompaniment, delightful. Does he mind my comparing him to Morrissey? Morrissey is the archetype, no? It is like a poet being compared to Shelley. It is like a ballplayer being compared to Roberto Clemente. It is like a summer's day being compared to you. Martial drums, lagging vocals, winded things, more female accompaniment. Even when he seems undressed, haggard, undone it still sounds so magnificently effortlessly pop. Do they write a great number of songs or are all of the songs this fantastic. Are drummers important? I listened to Ride on the ride home today and Loz Colbert is important. He is god king of the shoegazing universe. Have you heard Kaleidoscope? Funny because the rest of the are somewhat ordinary. We are all mostly ordinary. This is why we celebrate the extraordinary. Vicariously. I've heard this song before. The original version? Higher Grounds. I was once convinced that this was the superior version but no longer, the album version is much improved. It isn't much changed. None of this "the demo was the bomb" nonsense for us, no. We are men/man of the people. Interesting that this has much more going on as far as the music goes but the performance is not as thrilling as on the more rudimentary tracks. I could be misinterpreting everything. He might be, curse of all things, ironic. I don't think it is possible. Next track. I'd to be compared to Morrissey, except to when it comes to animal rights. He's oddly anti-human. Humans are awful, certainly, but I wouldn't want to live among the baboons even after a night's amarula debauchery. This track is They Produced a Girl, sounds like an early one? Sounds like he was recorded in the broom closet down the hall with a sock puppet over the microphone. He does really sound like Morrissey. No? I keep asking you questions, when will you answer me? The words are not soporific or selfish or insular, it;s effervescent and trilling. I visualize the facial expressions he has made all of the times he has sung this song, they change regularly, he isn't pained or expressive but quirky, effusive, athletic. He's got very nice hair. At the moment my own hair is very long, I am resisting the efforts from work mates to give it a trim, I am having romantic getaways in my locks, dreams of mud flaps gone by. Next track, another I have heard before. i think this was on the first official EP. It was not on the first official LP. Was it? Another louder and more spirited number. Surely he writes these for the boys in the band, for cardio, for the girls in the balcony, for the floorboards underneath. It's physical because it has a treacly garage organ. There isn't anything sinister at all about them but they seem subversive. Their pleasing hygiene, the chiming guitar chords, the handsomeness, it's all very underhanded. Pipas love Cats on Fire. We've already told you how smart Pipas are. It's racing now, the organ, the end. Next track is chiming, very much so, I've called other things chiming but none this much. I hadn't been aware of this one before this record. It's maybe not my favorite track on the album and yet it is still almost marvelous. Who would be their ideal drummer? I am not certain. It will need to be a dapper sort, a swell, a haircut in well tailored jeans. He'll possibly need to play the drums but we've already established that the guitar player plays drums in another band. I could be drummer but I don't have any nice clothes actually. I could write the website and describe the new drummer as Anthony Perkins in Friendly Persuasion. Is that not suave? It is. This is a bit of a lament, dirge-y, it's a b-side too marvelous to be forgotten and placed under the short leg. He's fond of the lyrical dash, we're fond of him. Am I a teenage girl? Possibly. If I would let the world in on my secrets I might have teenage girls telling their middle aged mothers to stop convulsing over me. But I am hidden in the undergrowth, I have the tall poppy syndrome. This song is wonderful. I keep saying that as well but then there are very many songs and not so many adjectives available on an empty head. I hope the water on bicycle trails recedes enough for Ride your Bicycle to Work day. The worst day in the world for we "serious" bicyclists. I ride early enough that I will not be adversely affected but I feel sad for the spandex militia bobbing and weaving and risking their lives with the raging Platte on their right and 364 days a year sedentary joiner on their left. I am not a joiner. This song is Draw in the Reins, it was not on the first album, perhaps it should have been, it's amazing. Oh wait, it was, ha. This version is better. Crooner mode has been activated, female admirer has been discovered, Happiness is Chemistry. Is this a cover? This title seems familiar. i googled, it appears to be an original. It is very nice and original. They seem an anachronism, they seem thoroughly unmodern. Conservative. Brendan O'Neill lamented over the Smiths conservatism. He is mad. They were classical. They were nostalgic. But Johnny Marr is hardly conservative, Morrissey as protagonist is humorous and not a musical conservative. Yes yes, we know they are also the dreaded oh so serious collectivists but we can overlook that in the Smiths as well as in Cats on Fire. Why is it that so many musicians are collectivists? I don't think it is the existence inside of a band that conditions them to such thinking, a band is a gang and a gang feels isolated from the larger world. when Cats on Fire is on stage and being mocked for their fey manners and delicate features and tender pop tunes they are not feeling part of the greater human consciousness. They are reacting against it. always turned towards the wind, breaking through the resistance because to ride with the tide would mean death or mediocrity. This track is different. Is it a different singer? It is a bit more nasal. Mike Joyce? Andy Rourke? Innes Phillips? Last track, too short, really. There are 20 tracks but there needs to be 25, at least. This is the free single. The toss away. The Hague. I will listen to the lyrics because that is a portentous title. A lament for the travails of a war criminal denied his conjugal rights? A story of war criminal tourism? 'The moral of my parents they weren't hollow after all and nowadays I live just a little bit above my friends'. I may have transcribed that last line incorrectly. This is gentle and lovely. Always. Will the world collapse in on them and give rise to cynicism or will their hearts remain pure?

2011-06-19T19:28:00.001-07:00

2011-06-19T10:34:00.001-07:00

Emmy the Great Virtue. Dinosaur Sex. It is meant to rain this evening. I am very excited for the rain. Emmy the Great is possibly music to be best listened to during inclement weather. It's delicate but tense, fragile but filling, and really the closest comparison I can make on the first track is Moose. Yes, Moose! The music, at least, it has that same polish, that same elegance and perfection that was present on those records where Moose was derided for being too too pretty. I often complain about things being far too pretty. Actually, I don't. "and dinosaur sex led to nothing", hmmm...Pram once sang about transparent dinosaurs. Emmy wrote this under the influence of heartache, apparently, I don't receive the press releases but I have seen a few reviews of the record already and her fiance departed for the lord. Which? I am not certain if it was Jesus or Allah or Gaia. Is there not room in one's life for religion and love and marriage and happiness? I was recently reading that Annie from Elastica is exceedingly religious now as well. Perhaps Annie was engaged to Emmy? That would have made for interesting pop music, surely. I would not leave my love for Jesus or Allah or Gaia. I haven't been in love for a very long time. I haven't walked in the rain with someone I love for a very long time. I saw a y-jack for headphones yesterday while I was perusing the aisles at Best Buy and I thought of words I had exchanged where discussions turned to sharing a y-jack and listening to music on headphones together. It seemed romantic, it was silly. Second track, not very Moose-like. She's a folkie. Somewhat traditional. She is being handsomely praised for this album in some quarters. Hmm...I think maybe I enjoyed the first one more. Glamourous backing vocals, professional, the words could be clever. I should listen. But real music reviewers will cover the lyrics. Why is it that they focus so much on the lyrics? I suppose it is easier to dissect their meaning to interject subtext and inferences where none exist than to misinterpret so freely a guitar strum or drum fill. "And when the drum fill comes in now he's making a statement on the NLRB's decision to not allow Boeing to flee the union utopia for the backwater of South Carolina". My parents live in South Carolina, they were meant to be first on the lot to purchase a dreamliner from Boeing when they actually finished one. Now where will they buy their jumbo jet? China, exactly! Third track, oh this has started off very nice. There is a bit of 10000 Maniacs in her. I love 10000 Maniacs, or at least their first two records. The songs may be too long here. Because the pleasing introduction hung about for a bit too long and now the chorus is a bit understated and dull. Yes, the first record was more charming. She's older now, she's been told she's charming and clever and wonderful and beautiful and intelligent. Surely she is. But it isn't good to hear such things. I tend to avoid people when they are going to compliment me. I tend to delete my blog when I am aware that people are reading it. I tend to disappear. The chorus isn't unlovely, it's just a bit mundane and the Moose-y echoey guitar strum has returned and is she a fan of Moose? Have they granted her permission? I hope so, but given the choice of course we'd rather have a Moose album. Next track, more spartan seeming folk, words coming frantically, it's kinda ok, oh, now it is very nice, triangles, mentions of the rapture, pretty. She mentioned religion a fair amount on the first record. I had a discussion with my parents about religion and accused my father of only toting his bible when he became ill. He admitted to it. But I think my father has a hidden complexity and depth that he will not reveal to anyone. I often believe that I am not at all similar to him because he is outgoing and friendly to strangers and I shrink in comparisons and he has blonde hair and blue eyes and I am darkly complected and my oldest brother looks now exactly as my father did 30 years ago and I look exactly like my mother did 30 years ago. I have wicked right handed slapshot from the slot and my father has a surgical left-handed wrist shot from the top of the circle. This one is circularly rhythmic and complex. It may not be complex. This record may be better than the first one. it has been ages since i have listened to the first one. Let's be honest. I'd rather listen to the 10000 Maniacs. It's her voice, it's uninteresting. It's not excessively petty, it isn't gut wrenching, it isn't ethereal. She's meaty. But she's pork steak. This is rudimentary folk music at the moment, Cassandra. She's got more depth in her being, surely. These could be profound statements but honestly the words don't intrigue me, I hear a lot of mundane expressions all strung in a row. "what use is love if it always passes?". I'm uncertain. "what use is life to those who are not living?" that's sub-Chris Martin. why is this being so deeply praised then? Unknown. I do enjoy this record. next track, high hat, they're giving me the high hat. She isn't very old. She's older than Alessi's Ark. She's less interesting. Is it because Alessi writes her material more naturally, expelling whatever it is that comes into her art while Emmy means to be interesting? Are pop lyrics meant to be interesting? I read an interview with Robert Scott and he had a brilliant attitude that he writes lyrics about anything he wants and so his absurdity is organic and charming. Emmy had an agenda, seemingly, we hark back to Jesus and perhaps she is railing against the void? it is a timid wail, if thus, but it could be that she's trying to answer her own questions. it doesn't appear to be all that interesting actually. It is like when bands attempt to build bombast and it falls flat see A Northern Soul when really they should just let things come out and present themselves as whatever they are see A Storm in Heaven. This is a dirge, it's dull. The music is dull, her voice is dull. I am being too unkind. It may be my state of mind, I've just watched some dreadful adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray with Colin Firth and it has made me deeply unhappy. it's an amazing novel, we all agree, but there is a psychological torment to accompany the hedonism but in the movie it is overwhelmed, the senses indulge in the flesh and the soul of the movie disappears. There isn't any hedonism on display here. it's a suburban existence. She may live in the big city but it is thrift stares on tree lined avenues and beach access and green belts. I don't feel it is her life lived. i shouldn't have discovered the back story, this is semi-jaunty but it's dull. That is the operative word. It is lovely but isn't near lovely enough to be not compelling. Now is the fall away, the climax, I am not intrigued. There are still 3 more tracks. The songs are far too long. This is brilliantly constructed. I am far too unkind. I hope it isn't about Sylvia Plath. Is it? "there is a country made of telegrams and tail coats and no one to grieve for it", huh? Aren't folk songs meant to be informative? She is an imitation, her music a six-time photocopied facsimile. She'll be on the Brits performing this year, surely. Do I lament her professionalism? No. Perhaps. No. Yes? It's just so mannered and held within this narrow range of emotion and intensity. Does she get angry? I would like to hear her anger on tape. This is all so dear and harmless, her diary pages with silhouettes of care bears and ten speed bicycles. I want mutations and pandemics. Or actually more of how it is now, it's pop music, she isn't so concerned with exposition and just singing rather nicely at the top of her range and there are chiming guitar chords and now pianos and percussion and it is genius. Which song is this? Exit Night/Julia's Theme. I haven't idea who is meant to be Julia and the beginning was k-rub but it finished very nicely. Well done Emmy! My opinion means so very little. next, a quiet one, hey she does have some range. Why has she not allowed it to escape more freely until now? Oh, this is the same song, this must be Julia's bit. Excellent! It had a bit of Monica Queen in it. She is rather a good songwriter I think, she isn't much of a performer. Next track, country-ish, travelogue, cliche cliche cliche, blah blah blah, I am being lazy. If Cortney Tidwell was singing this it might be rather good. But Cortney is buffing wood floors with Kurt Wagner somewhere else. I keep wishing that other people sang other people's songs. There are possibly more good songwriters than performers especially in indie. These are wonderful songs, but she can't deliver on their promise. This has a bit of Paula Frazer in it as well. It has ben many years since I saw Paula play live. I can still recall it vividly because it has a visceral impact because of the depth of her performance. It wasn't the turn of phrase. It is the fact that I am convinced by Paula Frazer or Cortney Tidwell or even Alessi's Ark because they have a unique means of expressing themselves. Emmy does not, she oculd be mistaken for anyone on the Indietracks stage. Her songs shine. She's a lilac or a peony when all we long for is a Dendrobium. Last track, Trellick Tower, piano and voice, it's the same as most of what has already come to pass. The lyrics seem to address her situation quite literally. Kristin Hersh it is not. Hmmm...I think I need to listen to the first record once again. Do I love the first record? I thought I did. I am having doubts.

2011-06-18T20:22:00.001-07:00

2011-06-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

Orwell Continental. Orwell gone pop. I won't reiterate my previous laments about Phoenix. I should. But I will not. All of this is in English. It will not be allowed into Quebec then. I can see the apparatchiks in Bell Canada, I believe that it is still called Bell Canada, working feverishly to sever all lines of communication to protect the gentle ears of the population of Quebec from the endemic spread of anglo-pop even if it does originate in France. My mother is French-Canadian. I am not certain that she is a huge fan of Orwell. Probably not. I mention my mother's ethnicity often. it means that I am to at least some degree a frog. I am a dissident. My parents left for their long journey home early this morning. Colorado is on the far eastern edge of the mountain time zone and so sunrise is around 5AM. Very early. It aids me in my bicycling endeavours across the platte each morning. My parents visit for one week and I revert to the son they know. I am amorphous. I can adopt different personas based on the situation. I played in a softball game on Friday and I was Jock me. I hit a home run and made a diving stop but we still lost but only just. Second track, acoustic guitar and soft voice, I love Orwell. This is a lovely pop record, perhaps he was inspired by the breakout success of Fugu when he recorded his bubblegum pop record. That record was genius, absolutely, you ignored it, Fugu is probably washing dishes in an Applebys. After softball I came home and was Fox news watching son. All during the week I was golf playing son. I could be a serviceable golfer. It is a curse. I am athletic. As I am also now very old I have to prepare to prevent pulls of quadriceps and tendons and egos. When my parents left I turned back into recluse son. I don't say anything all day long. I make an effort at silence. I am saving my words. There is a limit that is granted each soul as it departs the guf on sparrow's wings. I learned this from Demi Moore. This track is lovely, it's bouncy, mid-tempo, harpsichord-ish, jaunty, delightful, in english, it is all in English and so I will not repeat the folly of my Arnaud Fleurent-Didier interpretation when I ascribed to him all sorts of nefarious motives when really he's just very odd. I love him even more. Now an electric piano-ish sort of thing, slinking, sliding, warm and nice. Now are these digital strings? I reviewed the last Orwell record and I was contacted by their manager afterwards. He was a one man concern back then but I am led to believe that he has recast the outfit as an actual band. They wear matching red stars over their hearts, vote in concert for Olivier Besancenot and smoke near the entrance of the Grand Palais. Are these digital strings? An echo. It's very much in line with this sort of thing, the Orwell thing, the Fugu thing, the Chut thing, a crystalline, delicate, filamentous pop that endears itself to me so easily. Now to cheap drum machines. More english. Was he poetic in French? He is not in English. I am unable to read in French. I own several books by French poets but have only ever experienced these poems in English. It isn't the same,t eh words seem dressed up, inhibition poured upon, nuance discarded. Antonin Artaud must be more brilliant in French. I could send these books to Andrew Sullivan and he could pause from his journey up Sarah Palin's uterus and read them to me in the original French. It would make all of the difference. I wonder if my parents know who Andrew Sullivan is? They receive nearly all of their news from Fox news. We had a philosophical argument where they were attempting to convince me that somehow their needed to be a national consensus on morality or else this country was doomed. I argued that it is the compulsion against personal conscience that has led to most totalitarian excesses and murder and they didn't seem to agree with me. Orwell has not yet addressed this on this record. I am being patient. I am certain that he will. But state compulsion of personal conscience be it for religion or any other sort of ideology is the nose under the tent. And then I said truly it is all down to private property rights. Bertolt Brecht was brought up. They agreed. Slightly. But when the government makes claim on the air we are all heading in to the basement. This is a slower track, it reminds me, to be fair, of the Allen Clapp solo record. Obviously he is not so nerdy and his voice is more appealing but it has that cosmic piano bar feel going on so far. There is the piano, in the foreground, his voice multi-tracked, and vintage Todd Rundgren sound effects to round out the track. Nice. Now to the track Eastern, more of the tinny drum machine. It is a recession, we may not have been able to qualify for a loan for the more spectacular beat package He could have gone to the showroom and asked for the Will.I.AM package and was told he only qualified for the government subsidised MC 900 Ft Jesus package. I don't mind. Drum machines should sound rustic in my world. They should have cobwebs floating in the dappled sunlight. Is this an instrumental? Pianos, fake harpsichords, drum machines, loveliness, some harmony vocals at a distance. Very nice, a bit reminiscent of a Giorgio Tuma track perhaps. I am also waiting patiently for the Giorgio Tuma revolution to begin. Musicians will be exposed to his new record and be drawn into a vortex of pop majesty and wonderment. There have been many lovely records released this year actually. This one. Others. This track started off as a gentle pastoral ode and has been layered into a more robust type of cumulus cloud chamber pop. A hypnotic keyboard motif. A repetitive vocal, very Stereolab, it is all very hypnotic. Non French speakers of the world will feel superior to the masses in several Arrondisements that will lie ignorant of such beauty. I am inspired to travel to France and describe the loveliness of the sentiments on this record, even if perhaps they do not exist, to the greater population of France. I am just dreadful. I could travel to Laval instead. I love the French. Truly. i visited a beautiful French restaurant with a very kind person recently and had mussels and cheese. It was a delightful evening. This could have been the eclectic soundtrack to my having mistaken bowls of mussels for very large bowls of soup. Gazpacho! But that is Spain. We are spending this evening in France. Durutti has just been talked out of his raid on the national Bank. Whew. This is the only reason that I read, so that I may make incoherent references to whatever it is that I am reading at the time of my varied musical infatuations. This track is a bit modern seeming, almost club-ish. Wailing guitars or electronics now, a drum machine preset, vanilla vocals but it is still very good. His voice is not distinctive. It is pleasant. The words are not distinctive, they are diverting. Whereas Fugu seemingly bleeds his heart across all of these tracks this is more professional. I don't mind professionalism. If this were American I might mind. If this was Liam Hayes I might mind. Why doesn't he release records? I saw him play live once. He is exceedingly talented. I think he is aware of this. This may be his problem. He might be best served by a move to the continent. A bit more interesting drum machine/sampler patter to open Them. It starts off a bit singer-songwriter-ish. I keep describing everything as something-ish, my apoliges, I get into ruts. It is difficult to type whatever comes out of your head and not have it rotate in circles and be reminiscent of what you wrote from the same head only a few days before. I haven't written anything at all this week. My parents do not inspire me. My father could be a muse. He's had a remarkable run of bad luck and doesn't seem to have let it bring him down. He is without his left eye now. He had a very large portion of skin from his back removed and affixed to his face by surgery. It resembled a foreskin. Truly. But he has had several surgeries since and they have reduced the genital nature of his face. Soon he will wear an eye patch. I was hoping he would have a tattoo applied either of an eye or of an eye patch. Tattoos are so passe though, he declined my proposal, he is much too hip. My parents may be more hip than I am, in spite of their rejection of Glen Beck. I am unhip and unaware. I am buried in the early 20th century with Jean Marais and Nijinsky and Tristan Tzara and I don't mind. Every time I turn on the radio I hear David Mamet and he is never discussing Orwell. He mentions Wilfred Trotter though and Gustave Le Bon. I would like to be able to inject those two names in my everyday correspondence and conversation but I find the opportunities to are somewhat difficult to come by. A Long Way to the Start, strings, these seem real, are they real, I think they are real. Now the drum machine. Drum machines and strings are the future of music. Ask Bjork. She may be on NPR at the moment debating David Mamet about nationalising geothermal resources beneath Iceland. La Pasionaria as an elf. This is a charming pop song. I like it. Where my father's missing eye went he is unsure. I would have kept it as a souvenir. I have photos of my brain. When I had a seizure once they took several photos of my brain. It is unremarkable, as you can ascertain by perusal of this website, but I find it beautiful especially when juxtaposed against the titanium screws and plates in my jaw. It feels as if I have created a Maginot Line, a defense against intruders, a reinforcement of the blood-brain barrier to keep encephalitis out, to keep dementia at bay, to stop CJD cold. Short track now, this may be the third instrumental track, again it reminds of Allen Clapp. I am going to assume this was unintentional and I may be the only one to make that leap. Allen is not sophisticated or European or cool but he is charming and earnest and stripped of the barrier of language these tracks fall gently in line with those descriptors. Last track, gentle, rolling, last track pastoral travelogue, beautiful. he recently played live with Amor De Dias. it must have been a wonderful evening. Orwell in tee shirts and flip flops and Amor De Dias in the rain. Echoey chorus. How is this effect achieved? Dreaded compression? I am going to revert to writing an entry nearly every day, be forewarned. It will be mainly concerning the Spanish Civil War for the next couple of weeks, I am halfway through more than 1000 pages. I can't read when my parents are here, I feel pretentious. Better to be obnoxiously pseudo-literate in private. I have found this to be a universal truth. But when friends ask me about Orwell, if I had any, I will tell them he should be shared in great helpings and his loveliness is but another universal truth.

2011-06-17T07:13:00.001-07:00

Have been playing host to visitors. More soon.

Update: Playing Giorgio Tuma for my mother. I think it is love. Of course it is.

2011-06-09T22:25:00.000-07:00

2011-06-09T22:07:00.000-07:00

Would Be Goods Eventyr. The last entry was over a band I didn't much care for. It isn't that they are Canadian. I have sympathies in that direction. Now I will talk about the Would Be Goods. Even though I am leery because Jessica Griffin is much more sophisticated and intelligent than me. Most people are. First track, a delight, it's jangly, it's smart, her voice is arch and uncommonly English. Now a buzz saw guitar solo. Momtchiloff? I would like ot use his name as an exclamation! Is he still in Would Be Goods? He's surely terrifically suave and interesting, having travelled from Amelia Fletcher's orbit to Jessica Griffin. Like climbing free of the Alongonquin Round Table and ending up at court with Madame De Pompadour. It's smashing, a blast. Second track, a bit more of a stroll, still very English. Is she aware of her Englishness? At moments while adrift you might consider whether she really did escape from the frames of A Room With a View. Lucy Honeychurch's well studied but unseen tennis partner. Is she proud of her Englishness? I am possibly aware that her French is very refined. But then isn't that all too English? I am reading a bit about the Spanish Civil War. I am enjoying the tale of Louis Fischer. He was from the Nation and yet he was a partisan. How much more thrilling would newsmagazines be if they didn't pretend to be objective? Especially for the more hawkish types like Mark Steyn to take up arms on the side of choice and then write of their experiences. Staff memebers of National Review lined up in opposition to staff members of the New York Times. Not as an Ernie Pyle but as a Kleber or better yet a Junger born anew and absolutely intoxicated by the murder and death and all of the accompanying excitement of armed conflict. The English come off as a bit of a gang of boobies. Eden especially. The end of empire, when a country whose actual importance in the grander scheme of things has diminished but their self opinion has grown in stature. There was still India. There were far off places of empire to have a grand adventure on. Now? There is not. Where to find the next Kipling? The next Burgess? David Mitchell is well travelled, in his large head. I have no idea if his head is oversized. My own is. Living inside of your own head is a lonely existence. Third track, back to the flighty jangly pop. All of her records on Matinee have been almost identical. A slight variation on the Monochrome Set. They did used to provide backing for her. Perhaps she has time for Bid? Over a game of badminton at Balmoral? How wonderful if it had been the Would be Goods performing at the Royal Wedding? Can't you just see the stiffs grooving to the organ propelled In Bohmeia. Again, this is not much removed from everything else she has ever done but she has a likability. Is it down to my infatuation with her intelligence? I would like a girlfriend more intelligent than I am. Perhaps I have had many. Could be. But I haven't met many with a wide range of interests and with a willingness to take a tangent into the unknown. Really I am just looking for someone to come to George Gamow's grave with me and enjoy it. This track is groovy like a Tramway track. Like a song the Bristols might cover one day. Like a track that Laetitia Sadier would not admit to enjoying but would lift the essence from in a second. Quick stop. Next track, The Girl at Number 7. She's not much of a singer is hse. A bit nasal. A bit unaffected. A bit prissy. These are some of my favorite things. I would live happily if I was described as such, any day, any hour. Today is Father's Day. I started writing this entry a week or so ago. I enjoy time travel. I have changed quite a lot since i have started this entry. I am exceedingly wealthy, I drive a fancy automobile and wear really nice clothes these days. That was a short one, a vignette, a quick tale of the girl we've always known. Chelsea's Claudia Cardinale. Next track, smaller. I suppose if you were to diagram the grammar of these tracks it would be impeccable. This is a bit louche. Or as louche as Ms Griffin is capable of being in song. Is she more daring in person? Does she travel through the unkempt portions of London and act the miscreant tourist through the depravity on site and then write gently pasteurized pop songs a few hours later after her absinthe liquor has been absorbed by the air that surrounds after transpiring from her cillia and chromataphores. Next track, a bit more gothic. Has a touch of the Terminals-castratti-lyrics about practicing scales dressing like Madame Bonnard and impotence or lack of interest. It is all very Elizabeth Inchbald. I would say Jane Austen but surely the Would Be Goods are more obscure than that? The idea of a female fronted band is intriguing to me because the stereotype is the touched male genius from Mozart to Brian Wilson to the guy from My Chemical Romance. Portrayals of women as artists then seem by contrast as wounded spirits, oppressed, certainly not feted. You get the odd stand alone such as George Sand or Mary Wollstonecraft. She kept Shelley's heart in her desk drawer after all. is Jessica Griffin a tough taskmaster? Is she filled with these tiny little tales of victorialand? is Motchiloff amazed each time he sits with her and she strums her ukulele and sings 'all you little donkeys are going down to hell'. It sounds so elegant. If Amelia Fletcher is the world's second oldest teenager then Jessica Griffin represents the archetypal opposite, the old soul encased in muslin and and uncomfortable underwear. Bleached every third sunday. I don't like the smell of bleach, I've only just discovered this when cleaning my bathroom and being very nearly overcome. i could wake in a seemingly literary stupor and have attractions to verisimilitude and find myself in tuxedo and guitars and a member of the Would Be Goods in my shower knee deep in bleach and subway tile. Next track, I really rather enjoyed the last one, I should have done a finer job of exposition. This one is slower, this one is called Baby Romaine. "When love is over you run to catch your face in a mirror". Lupe from Pipas was once in Would Be Goods. Is she still? She has a PHD. There seem to be an overabundance of doctorates in London indiepop circles. Is it this which leads to the distance, these are lovely tracks, and I am sure they incribe an arc in the center of jessica Griffin's heart but it doesn't evoke passions and colors and senses of the soul. Does it? It's immaculate, clever and perhaps desultory. We love it, we love it still. Ignore my unkind words, they burrow their way out of the fascistic, darker creases of my cortex. Next track, clever organs, clever lyrics about hothouse flowers and analogies to hearts. Oh, it has never been done before! I kid. Rarely has it ben done better. Baby Romaine seemed to be concerned only with completing the pun. All of the vocals are identical. Is this some great and rare ability? "Subtle charms...", exactly. Now we've moved fromt he hothouse to the conservatory and hollyhocks. I really enjoy this one, the chorus is playful and expressive and charming, it is always charming. That could be the twitter review. "Charming". Twitter really is beyond the abilities of most. Is it not? I visited the site where sadly unclever types are compiling the twitter versions of the classics of western literature and it is dreadful. It is uninteresting. Pithiness is a rarer gift than monotonic vocal abilities. Who would have been master of Twitter if we could bring forward anyone from history? Oscar Wilde of course. His was a dearer form of narcissism, a self-protection racket from the greater world who could not appreciate. "I have nothing to declare but my genius." The Buddha? Babur? Stalin? Imagine a twitter from Stalin. instead of taking to the pages of Mundo Obrero he could tweet his latest aphorisms straight into the pockets of useful idiots the world round. Oh, last track, it is called Professor Momtchiloff mystery, I would hazard a guess then that he is still in the band. A funky instrumental, a spy thriller on the BBC so it is muted, restrained, weakened by the weight of the sunrays creeping underneath the velvet curtains. It's pretty ok. The world is a happier place with the Would Be Goods haunting the outward edges.

.

2011-06-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

2011-06-07T20:16:00.000-07:00

Ensemble Excerpts. Not long ago, for some, Montreal was the capital of the world. It was bleeding dreary and bloated post rock bands from every municipal orifice. And now, there is only the Arcade Fire. They have acted as imperial fiends, choking out the rest of the population of musicians in Montreal. Ensemble are from Montreal. They are only just alive. First track, introduction, a buzz and gentle spill. Second track, strings, baroqueness, a female voice. Lovely. RIYL Klima. I would hold Klima above all that Canada has to offer. I've been to Montreal a few times. As a former Canadian I was privy to free travel across the dominion. I've mentioned the facades of Montreal before. And there were milk bars and my uncle's full length Wolf coat that shed all through my father's Buick Park Avenue. Later my uncle would be prescribed psychotropics. he would turn dreadful. He would be dreadful to everyone he knew. Later he killed himself. I have a theory about psychotropics, from the idea that they even out the highs and the lows and the danger of removing anxiety from decisions like that on whether to end your life. I am imagining my uncle in a untroubled state of mind when he decided to depart. I met someone last week and I was dreadful to them. After meeting they could only describe to me their unhappiness. I am poison. With a nice record collection. Third track, piano and buzz. En Francais please. It's more of a pop song, less of an exhibit. A bit of the scrapies on the violin, it's sedate, it's measured, it sounds Spanish, as in it sounds like a band on Elefant. Flat and unaffected, a gravelly male voice in accompaniment. Is this to fulfill the requirement for French content? What is this covetous feeling towards french canadian culture? Is it a world marvel? I am not convinced. Next track, an effeminate croon. In nature canadian males have an effeminate lilt to their speaking voice. I have an innate ability to identify members of their species with very many fewer signifiers than others may require. This is something vaguely reminiscent of what Arnaud Fleurent Didier would product. Sing-song, see-saw, middle ground, unimpressive but pleasant. I am under the impression that the French do not feel any particular kinship with their cousins in North America. Is it related to the refusal of French Canadian men to register for the draft in WWII? My father, until this day, has a soft hatred of Maurice Richard for his having scored 50 goals in 50 games while all of the best anglo players were away in Europe fighting Nazis. And the riots and the celebration. Pah. I am not a big fan of Maurice Richard myself. Perhaps I have given myself an insight into the inherent ethnic conflicts in ethnically based societies such as the Balkans. I am enlightened. Thank you ensemble. An anemic emergency horn, soft female spoken word. My father is a Toronto Maple Leafs fan, long suffering, it's clear that he has very little time for Les Habitants. In my youth on Saturday evenings spent watching Hockey Night in Canada when on occasion Dick Irvin would be spouting inelegant fluff about "the Rocket" I could hear the grinding of molars and the venting of spleens in my father's torso. The blood would rush to the surface and I knew my allegiance was meant to shift to Darryl Sittler and Mike Palmateer. I obliged, but I was always guilty of a sincere admiration of Pierre Mondu. Partly for his name, and mainly for his grace. This track is exceedingly dull. He's on and on flatly in French, perhaps it is profound and compelling for French listeners but not for culturally chauvinistic monoglots. Next track, a lithe violin, a mandolin? I don't know, my ears, they're rubbish. It is late. This evening the sun was not fluorescent. It was rudimentary, mundane, uninspiring. The fumes from forest fires that scattered the photons have moved into Kansas. Farewell radiant sunsets, we shall miss you. Is this music to listen to sunsets to? No. possibly music for reviewing socialist militias, the Durutti column, Leon Blum's audience for his hair trimming. It's nice. I prefer when she sings. It's still mediocre but more pleasantly so. I had high praise for this record some time ago. I will admit to not actually ever having made it this far while listening before. I am a very busy man. I have youtube videos to post. I have Ponderosa Pines to inspect for the dreaded Mountain Pine Bark Beetle. Denver is infested. Run for your lives! Write musical laments for the Lodgepole pine, in four years there will be but one left in the entire state. Call Candy Claws, a eulogy for the Lodgepole pine, a split album by Firebreather and Candy Claws. Marvelous. when all of the Lodgepoles are gone then will fall the Ponderosa and Scotch pines and soon we will truly resemble the Atacama. And this year instead of the plague of locusts we have the next plague--moths. So many moths fluttering past as I watch the story of Egypt's greatest inventions. I am always so skeptical when these people so confidently re-enact life in ancient cultures. WHat is to say that all of these monuments to eternity on the Giza plateau. Luxor, Kanais were not composed of the same sort of flippant public exercises in masturbation as is on display with most public art today? At the thornton police station there is a ludicrous statue of what looks like two rock-em sock-em robots in a specious pose. What is to stop a cultural anthropologist 300 years in the future from claiming some great religious significance for this statue? What's to stop some overcredentialed PHD from claiming a road side billboard for hooters as evidence of a great fertility cult that existed in the Poudre Valley 1000 years ago? Nothing. I hope to be around in 500 years. I am enjoying this track, the title is in french so I am not going to type it out, it was an instrumental and was the most marvelous thing on this album thus far. Not to radio telegraph static, mass coronal ejections. This is truly lovely as well. She sings unremarkably. It's part of the whole. It's egalitarian. We are sui generis, except when we are not. The Bloc Quebecois was nearly voted into extinction recently. Could they not have trotted out the one legged lion Lucien Bouchard one more time. Is Lucien still alive? Is Jacque Parizeau? Lucien was victim of the flesh eating bacteria. That is a mark of distinction. It is also a comment on socialized medicine. MRSA is rampant in Canadian hospitals, and SARS too. When my aunt was diagnosed with Cancer she was sent home to die. She was 68 years old. Social justice required her to die. This is the compact. And before her was my grandmother, 76 and stricken with colon cancer and given aid and comfort and little more. My brother and I in the waiting room feeling like aliens watching the Moscow Olympic on the CBC on a black and white television while playing bumper pool. The music is not making me nostalgic, I was born that way. Next track, dreadful! He can't sing. We should start a letter writing campaign to disabuse him of any aspirations for future vocal endeavours. If this was the only Ensemble record ever I am not sure the world would notice. This is the second to last track, the words are in French, they are at a frantic pace and it's nasal and flat and silly. This should have been an instrumental. Perhaps he was in a boy band in a previous life, in the Pandava Boys, with their stage mother Kunti, on the sub-continent in their yellow trousers and bowl haircuts. It was marvelous. This is not. It is decidedly irritating. I do not recommend this album. My word carries weight with no one so an anti-recommendation is like an echo in space. It is over, thank goodness. Last track. Dissonant strings or horns???, rudimentary recordings, her voice. For the next record they should hire Klima for voice. On the next album they should retire instead and spend their evenings on stools at milk bars listening to French Mittens on the jukebox.

2011-06-06T21:55:00.001-07:00

2011-06-05T19:06:00.000-07:00

Epic45 Weathering. One of the problems with appreciating a band like Epic45 is their "epic" anonymity. They are faceless, nameless, personalityless, whateverless. I can sit and dreamily romanticize the music but when I think of them, as would be pop stars, I don't get any impression at all. They are me, dreary, drab, dull, well except that they make lovely pop songs. Now, apparently Lady Gaga is the most important person in the world now because she sold like 17 million copies of her album last week. That's pretty alright. At least she doesn't seem to shrink from the attention and she tries to live like a pop star. How would Epic45 compete? Could they do anything so daring as to guarantee them a adjoining spot in the tabloids? The could try to buy Theresa Macri's descendants? They could eat 100 pound notes in remembrance of F. Scott Fitzgerald though I suppose many would think they were just aping the KLF. They could make interesting music. Oh wait. They do. They could marry a royal, or a new royal's sister in law. They've made a huge leap with this album. Where before it was much pretty and inconsequential soundtracks to pastoral postcards of rural England now it is Hood-like cinematographic pop, it is Bark Psychosis mastery of space and stillness, it is gorgeous is what it is. It is also very long. First track has been playing for a bit, starting off with the usual field recordings and whisperings and then it is joined by a menagerie of instruments possibly played by many other people. There are but two in Epic45. Sometimes there are three, when they are joined by July Skies. They share the same affinity for test patterns, cable knit sweaters and postcards of vintage aircraft over green fields of albion. Now the end of song one, it fell away to nothing and now to bliss. This really is a huge improvement for them. I've always liked them because i am a sucker for most things in the Make Mine milieu. Basic, soft, gentle, pastoral, hippie-ish, not very male. But on this record they've incorporated so many lovely things. Now there is a wash of synths and tape recorded hiss and fluff and it closes out the introductory record in wonderful fashion. song two. A very Hood strum starts, overexposed 35 mm tape effects, fractured strums, low tech electronics probably lifted from an obscure film. Whispered vocals, very very Hood. It's also somewhat reminiscent of Bark Psychosis again, the prettiness invades from unknown vertices, almost as of the song is being invaded by all of these uncontrollably lovely aliens with their space rays of prettiness for sprinkling pop songs. Now a softer voice. I would suppose that music for these guys is a part-time affair. Make Mine Music is a collective. As such it is probably a dismal failure, though it still exists. I should not be so unkind. I am reading about the collectivist experiments in Republican Spain in 1936. Even with a sympathetic author they seem improbable in their silliness. Epic45 would seem in their element writing a song about the Spanish Civil War, it might be a lament to the republic, the tender apogee of human kindness crushed by the Falange. It would also sound a bit like Bark Psychosis did in 1990. Bark Psychosis is one of the greatest bands in the history of the world ever. Well, they were, until they released Codename:Dust**er they were. And this is reminiscent of their greatest achievement, the pushing of the air in between the notes into delicate sculptures of significance. I remember reading an interview in Emily's Hip Pocket with Graham Sutton and his epiphany when he discovered that silence was more powerful than sound. Not because he was pompous and pretentious and a fan of John Cage but because he heard Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden. Of course Talk Talk is the progenitor of most of this sort of thing. This deliberately paced, miasma inducing, intricately minimal aesthetic. Third track, hums and organs, strings, the space in between compressed but you can still breathe. It is similar to Auburn Lull. Auburn Lull is the champion Bark Psychosis acolyte in the modern world so to be compared to them is high praise, even coming from me. This is an instrumental. A short interlude. Speakers maneuver the air. Fourth track, a surprise, a vocal appearance by Baby Bird. It reminds slightly of his Dying Happy days, Petrol Cigarette and The Unemployable Rub Oil On Her Coffin, etc...he is in hypnotic chant mode, the music builds to a crescendo, cheap tinny drum sounds, liquid falling in the background, a repetitive guitar line builds and then falls back, again. His voice, slightly affected. He's a big fan. Allegedly. I can understand it. I miss Baby Bird. Those first five records were so terrific, Chris Knox without being insufferably PC. Chris Knox without being cranky. Homemade beautiful things. Then he became a pop star and I hated him for it. I am not consistent. I am earlier lamenting the anonymity of Epic45 and now condemning Baby Bird for his turn into the spotlight. This is the joy of not having any readers at all. I am allowed my inconsistency. This is the joy of deleting all past blogs and websites, I can be even more inconsistent because all previous evidence of my biases in pop music have been removed from the face of the earth. Lucky for you. This is a marvelous track. Another, that is four in a row. Next track, folky, reminiscent of My Autumn Empire things. A very high voice, oh wait, a female voice. Lovely lovely. Just a guitar, some ambience and her voice. Amazing. What if they were pop stars? What if they made their way into the public conscience? Could this music arouse the masses? It's beautiful, for certain, could they induce rapture in the loins of young girls and their manservants? Unknown. It's not transcendent like say Chopin or Fanny Elssler. If I rode down the streets with a loud speaker attached to the top of my automobile and played this track at full volume I would receive only genuine stares of confusion and rage. Track playing now is human moans, random drum fills and mistimed appliance emissions. I find it beguiling. You should too. But what about them? The masses. Those that chase mediocrity with all of their heart? This could be labelled mediocre, because it is not as great as Bark Psychosis, it is not even as marvelous as Auburn Lull. But mediocrity in service of yourself is not great crime, mediocrity mislabeled as magnificence is criminal. See our current political class, see our current cultural attache, see our current human condition. Would that Barack Obama or Peter Orszag had retired at 19 and gone on to a career Yemeni weapons trader. But instead we are forced to accept mediocrity as deity. This is a mediocre moment on this otherwise lovely album. It is These Walks Saved Us, a fractured female form, a guitar finger exercise, shortness is its only virtue. Now to an even shorter number, very July Skies. More bands should sound like July Skies. How exciting that this album should be so enchanting and on the eve of a possible new July Skies record later in the year? Antony Harding programs the cinema of my mind. He soundtracks the rain that falls from the sky. Is he mentor then to Epic45? Does he take the young men out for tea with their harmonium and acoustic and sits patiently and allows them to play their latest compositions for him and he declares them good. I am enjoying the thought of his having given blessing to Ghosts I Have KNown. It sounded like him singing. Was it him. Ah, it was. And on clarinet as well. Now to the title track. Very Mark Hollis, this. Could they not have coaxed Mark Hollis out of retirement to join them on this track? What is the going rate for a Mark Hollis guest appearance on a record? It can't be exorbitant. Can it? It was acoustics and voice and now it is multiple twinkles, acoustics and voice, now a drum, another acoustic guitar, a violin, it's elegant. It's amazing. Have they always had this in them and only just recently acquired the ambition to realise beauty such as this? You can dispose of all of the rest of your Epic45 records. Honestly, you will hear this, if you are a fan, and you will be astonished. It's reverent, it's ethereal, it's heavenly. Oh, a false ending, birdsong, but there is still half of the song left to go, toy orchestras and birdsong, it's an intermission of sorts, now to violins more breathless than previously, it's a slow rising, it's a rebellion against the boredom of post rock. This is on Make Mine Music. It is doubly strange, their newfound ambition rather, strings in concert, metronomes, dazzling array of tender sounds all made into a sparkling whole. I don't even mind the plodding drums. But drums are mostly unnecessary and would not it have been grand to invest in a rudimentary drum machine with some sort of gauzey filter attached instead. I am not content with this near perfection. I apologise to the powers that govern such things, it is why I shall be cast into the depths of hell when my lonely days are over. In hell I will listen to to Joe Satriani. i will be seated next to my high school chemistry professor as we are mocked ironically by Charon. Oh dear, my fate is sealed. Last track, pianos, two voices, it's a sing along, it's clunky and erratic and marvelous. Really really marvelous. The words are barely messaged across the notes, but it sounds poignant and revealing and they seem so proud of what they have accomplished as well they should be. They should go out into the world armed with copies of this wonderful record and play it for people in churches and in school yards and shopping malls and without comment just allow such majestic elegance to wash over the crowd and leave the scene without leaving a single footprint. Plead for the ephemera of melancholia and the red sun of Krypton over the horizon this evening. Pssst...there is a hidden track, a secret continuation. How unexpectedly thrilling!

2011-06-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

Graeme Jefferies Messages From the Cakekitchen. My favorite album for most of the 1990s was this. It was released in 1987. This makes some day from this year the 24th anniversary of the release of Messages From the Cakekitchen. Someone somewhere really must have a commemoration to give this album the recognition it deserves. I am much too busy. I am not really. Perhaps the big date has already passed? In the battle between Graeme and his brother I've always sided with Graeme, and mainly it is down to this record which is amazing, more amazing than anything else they ever did. But Peter gets all of the love, the plaudits, the critical esteem. Perhaps it is something to do with Graeme's leather pants, his French drummer, his rockist tendencies. But he's this under appreciated man in the shadow of his brother. Now, I do love Peter Jefferies too, he once took the time to write me a letter extolling the virtues of Snapper in regards to Stereolab. I was devoted to him up until he married Jean Smith and decided being unlistenable was erudite and happening. First track was s sinister bit of post-punkish menace. His creaking, impossibly deep baritone over an organic bed of dissonance. Now to the second track Reason to Keep Swimming, spindlier, sparse, his flying v guitar in very thin layers painted across the track, his voice very dramatic and imparting, his lyrics bleak and bleaker, then the crashing shards of his guitar. All of this on a four track recorder. would it sound the same in a studio? Cakekitchen recorded in a studio. Sometimes it was brilliant; see The Mad Clarinet, Dave the Pimp, etc and sometimes it was not, see The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. It's back to a soft almost whisper, he sounds less brooding, less of a crooner, more the spidery appendaged stranger in the mist. Next track, Prisoner of a Single Passion, amazing, gorgeous, brilliant, this is the track where things go from pretty awesome to godlike. Sung almost blankly by Maxine Fleming, sorry, no idea who she is or was or will be, but the music spined by a basic basic guitar line accentuated by cascading bits of viola and wild guitar dissonance. The sort of thing Alastair Galbraith would make a living off of later in live, even on Cakekitchen records. It's this glacial voice in the middle of a cauldron, undamaged by the external forces, this mad brew of cacophony(I keep using that word, is there a synonym?) and certitude. After the bizarre ache of the musical firestorm she rejoins the mix in an absolutely unaffected manner, it's inhumanly restrained and inhumanly perfect. I only discovered this record because of Ajax mail order catalog. I remember the days when I spent nearly all of my money(I was a poor college student) on records out of the Ajax catalog. This was my muddied phase, I was stepping away from the pristine things like the Smiths and the Stone Roses and discovering the darker underworld of the anti-podes. There were these bands who made unbelievable records in pressings of 50, records pressed on handcut lathes, in their bedrooms on four track recorders and they still produced these amazing documents of the heart and psyche. Nothing That's New has started, layers of guitar, each more expressive than the next, his aching voice, the epitome of desperation and longing. The lyrics? Sometimes Graeme turned a trifle too surreal but always with a historical bent. Ah, the second guitar has arrived, it's an icy blast that soothes, his voice so tender. This may be why I prefer him to his brother, Peter was less apt or was perhaps physically unable to be gentle as a singer. Look at Graeme's contributions to This Kind of Punishment and there was always the meeker involvement of a protagonist such as Hermann Doubt or The Men by the Pool, tender and forgiving, beautiful and organic. Peter sometimes was all too buried in his Teutonic frenzy. Now to Simple Tapestry of Fate, a double tracked vocal, one tender, one darker or perhaps one more asthmatic. A short vocal phrase, then the beguiling coda, joined by a recorder? Piano, ocean sounds, all of the warmth of the world that lay undiscovered by most in New Plymouth. Amazing. Then to If the Moon Dies. It's back to darker forces, to more agile bends and curvatures, it's rudimentary seeming, the entire record is. But at this time I was also becoming obsessed with Moonshake Eva Luna and really if you ask me now what my favorite record of the 90s was the answer is now Eva Luna but the ugliness of the voice versus the beautiful cataclysms expressed in the music on both of these records is a dichotomy that is not explored often enough in music these days. yes, there was a golden age. The gentleness I discussed earlier might be a turn off to most bands today, especially Amerikkan bands that are so desperate to be considered hard. This was one of the traits that so endeared New Zealand music to my heart, the feminine side that was on display to often. It is a brusque existence on a tiny archipelago 1000 miles from anywhere and the isolation, the idea that they were creating this records for an intimate circle of friends and admirers gave them a confidence and self-awareness to make their music the embodiment of their souls. or so I imagined. I saw Graeme play live as a duo as the Cakekitchen and he did not play any of these songs. He needn't there are dozens of brilliant Cakekichen songs to entertain the poor eared college students of planet USA. He had his leather pants, his French drummer, he was fantastically thin and alien. It was beautiful. Now to The Cardhouse two delicately plucked guitars in sympathy with each other, his double tracked vocal, amazing, the ache and poignancy of this track is stark and revealing. Orwell says if you recognize a phrase after you type it then you should delete it. I would need to delete this entire entry then. WHen I really love something I fall into real record reviewer mode. This album means so much to me, I can't convey that effectively. The End of the Affair was on last night and Bendrix discusses his inability to write happiness and goodness and I agree. It is difficult, without seeming fawning, to write about how much love someone or something or anything at all really. I still don't understand the bit in the movie where they reunite and head to Brighton. Does it not reduce the agony of knowing she loves you and yet being unable to possess her. The book handled it much more brilliantly, but then isn't that always the case. Will you read this and decide to renew your subscription to Ajax Mailorder catalog? Does Ajax even still exist? Unknown. Probably not. The Greenkeepers now. The one that I always looked past in the 90s because while it's a delightful number, his voice especially ethereal and lovely, it comes after The Cardhouse and ust before Is the Timing Wrong?. It's a place holder, it's a short repose, it's as marvelous as anything else on this record. I tried to proselytize the Jefferies brothers, in my youth, I was unsuccessful. Do you need a certain sympathy to the spirit in which this music was created to enjoy it? Often I heard back that those I tried to convince were unconvinced by the lack of structure. But that is the magic, the loose threads at the end, the danger of it all unfurling because of its delicacy and intensity. Last track Is the Timing Wrong, the spic, multi-segmented closer, the opening a drifty acoustic lament and then part two an electric dash to somewhere. A drummer. There are not many drummers to be found on this record. Peter played drums. Not on this record. On This Kind of Punishment records. It is still astonishing to me that these records were created in their own echo chamber. They were originally released on Flying Nun in ridiculous issues, we're talking 50 or less. Did Paul McKessar not understand these records? Was Roger Shepherd hostile? Was Roger Shepherd in England? I bet an Alf Danielson record would have been issued in nothing fewer than 1000 but real pop royalty is treated so harshly? There was the darker, seamier side of Flying Nun, the This Kind of Punishments, the Rips, the PLagal Grinds, Axemen that always seemed unloved and undeserving in the eyes of everyone involved. How could someone put this record on the turntable at record company headquarters and now when the track turns from a frenetic dash to a spare acoustic guitar, his tender voice, a wailing viola and not have your heart swell to the size of a beach ball? Are they not human? Would not the most reasoned response to this gorgeous record by 'angeli sunt'? I kid. But this viola, his voice, everything, it's devastating.

2011-06-04T11:43:00.001-07:00

2011-06-04T11:39:00.001-07:00

2011-06-03T20:49:00.000-07:00

Kort Invariable Heartache. Cortney Tidwell was born in Nashville. TS Eliot was born in St Louis. Someone I know that walks around carrying a very heavy book filled with poems by Allen Ginsberg is probably not aware that Cortney Tidwell was born in Nashville. Possibly he is aware of TS Eliot's birthplace, on Locust St. I don't know. What has TS Eliot to do with this record? Nothing at all. My middle name is Allen. I just once had an argument with a student over where TS Eliot was born, convinced, they were, of his having been English. He may have gone to the World's fair, seen Esther and Rose. By her birthright Cortney should be royalty in Nashville. But she isn't. She makes brilliantly odd country records that mix in shades of Joy Division, Patsy Cline and This Mortal Coil to amazing effect and as such she could frighten everyone in Nashville. My brother lives in Nashville and while I have never asked him directly I can sense his own paranoia over running into Cortney, such is the luminescence of her spectre that haunts that particular metropolis. Or not. Her grandfather ran Chart records! I know, that didn't mean anything to me either. It does mean things to some, those more important than you and me. It is the reason for this record which is composed of Chart Records covers. On the first track it sounds a lot like a Lambchop record. Kurt Wagner has a distinctive voice but then Cortney sings, sigh, so incredible, so effortless, so country. You still imagine her sitting there with a "Meat is Murder" tee shirt on while singing but the idea of royal lineage could possibly mean something. I am not a budding eugenicist, no, but there could be something of the nurture end versus the nature end, because this is better than 99% of the country music you have heard in your life. Really. Well, that could be hyperbole, I am prone to it. It is confined to my fingers however, in person I tend to have a permanently dour countenance that provokes the people I meet into the deepest furrow of sadness, so inescapable. They would need this record cast from the heavens as a lifeline, a good tiding, things have been worse for many others and yet beauty comes from despair, on occasion. Their voices mesh nicely, hers the sound of an angel, his the stumbling regular man, the forgotten man. Cast not from clay from some recipe for Golems and ubermensch but from a zygote bathed in the mundanity of the every day. Gorgeous. This entire record is gorgeous. Second track, more Lambchop-ism, steel guitars, brushed drums, Kurt Wagner. I don't understand it when people describe their music taste as loving everything but country. Even in the gloss of your Martina McBride's and Sara Evans' and Taylor Swift there is brilliance to be found. This is amazing. "lips don't make a sound, just pretend she's not around, or she'll know that she still means everything to me". Heartbreaking, then the violin, crushing. I have resigned myself to a life alone. Me with my pop songs and long books on the Spanish Civil War, the cause for my recent allusions to La Pasionaria, Angel Castano, etc...I've made it up to the beginning of the Civil War just today. I am very excited. Third track, A Special Day, the first Cortney solo piece. It's an ordinary track, but her voice is spellbinding, "today the world is smiling, it don't push and shove, the busy city seems so calm, when you're in love". The city that we live in does always seems calm. But I am not in love. I hoped to be. It is just that emotions seem subdued, hidden in unknown catacombs, allowed to escape free to the ether because of the usual lack of cloud cover. We had nearly 5 inches of rain in two weeks. It was marvelous, I miss the all day rainy days so much, possibly more than anything from my life in Michigan, and we had a surfeit of them. But ah, it was not to last, now we must wait for the Arizona monsoon to begin, pray for a dew point of 55 degrees in Phoenix , Arizona, relieve my parched skin if not my desiccated heart. Fourth track, a marvelous duet, Picking Wild Mountain Berries, so much fun. It's sprightly and jaunty and bouncy and the lyrics are absurdly country. is this the country that hardens hearts? It is ok for Beyonce to vacuously prance about about girls running the world but giggling over "skinny dipping in a cement pond" is beyond the pale. Madness. The world is mad. I keep running into people who seem to believe that public service or working for a non-profit is the pinnacle of human achievement. This in a time of so much suffering for people who long only to be paid an honest wage for an honest day's labour. Is it not more noble to start a company and gasp! make a profit so that your company can grow and employ hundreds of people that can support their families, that can buy jet-skis and compact discs to help other people support their families? What is the glory of a government job? It isn't sacrifice. it is overhead. it is security. I don't know. people are led about by the nose so easily. Think for yourself, make a country record influenced by Blue Monday, do it. Next track, a beautiful sad country ballad, Cortney on voice, the music hushed and churchy, and the crescendo provided by the depth of her intonation, the emotion of her conviction, the trepidation of the accompaniment. Marvelous. I had a Peter Jefferies moment there, my apologies. What if these songs actually meant anything at all to me? I would be a wreck. Now even as a dispassionate observer of human emotion I can subjectively comment on their objective brilliance. or some such. The end, beautiful. Next track, pianos and pedal steel, Cortney. Her father also worked at Chart Records. I have never heard of any of the artists. Are you a big fan of Shorty Bacon? I am almost certain that I would be, if I knew who he was. Possibly he is a woman. Do you know LaWanda Lindsey? I don't either, but I love her name. With a name like that you can probably bring the pain in an authentic seeming country tune. Cortney has taken the lead on the last few, Kurt Wagner is a smart man. Is he still installing hardwood floors in between Lambchop gigs? I sort of lost touch with Lambchop around the time when they started covering songs by Dump. I am anti-Yo La Tengo. In all things. They did a fair job of making a Dump song rather lovely, but by then it wa a question of judgement. The friends you keep, etc...I don't have any friends. This is a difficulty when it comes to a Saturday evening. This is a duet, Kurt in very very deadpan mode, he does sing, there is a tremor in his voice, it's delicate and lovely even as it's creaky and unadorned. Cortney in the spotlight, magical. Are they touring for this record? I could look. Ah, they are playing in Berlin, very near my birthday, how very convenient. I think the word has been out on Denver for a very long time because bands I would like to see rarely ever visit the front range. Are they still receiving email from Barbra Streisand telling them to boycott us because our insensitivity to Culex mosquitoes? I don't know. Now, a goofy-ish number, his voice is so indistinguishable from Lambchop. No? Is this sexual? The chorus "penetration" sung liltingly. Ha. Chart Records released a fair number of records. They could be at this for some time. or there could be other pairings, Harriet Wheeler and the guy from Moose, Kristen Hersh and the guy from Mojave 3, Caroline Crawley and the guy from the Renderers. It would be a marvelous series, I could be curator. Comically deep vocals at the start of the next track, then it softns in the light, "my life without April, is like the next year without spring". It's romantic and touching and this is what most country entails. Sure you have the insanity of Toby Keith wrapping himself in the flag while acting the part of boorish dullard who exemplifies all of the worst things of the flag, but then there is Suds in the Bucket which doesn't appear to be about anything at all but so wonderfully does it execute its vapidity that we don't mind at all. This record is just gorgeous. I am not sure when it was officially released. I "borrowed" it last year, I've been loving it all winter long, caressing it softly, turning over on my pillow and saying good morning. That's a bit lascivious. I am lying. It's a rainy, night-time drive to Cheyenne kind of record. I haven't had many journeys of that sort recently. Some innuendo arises again, ho, look at my pun. "I can't sleep with you...on my mind". Clever. Cortney in top form, as always. I've suddenly found the motivation to write a great deal lately. I sit down and just keep typing and so perhaps the quality is lessened, I had such high standards in the past, ha, but I am finding that it is good to discipline myself by writing especially as I am armed with the knowledge that no one at all reads this and yet I still persevere. it has spilled into writing for other reasons, writing with the intention of others enjoying what I have written, of editing things that I have written so that it seems not completely incoherent. Music inspires me more than anything else. I am convinced of this. Second to last track, another duet. Again, marvelous. Are they playing on Broadway in Nashville? Broadway in Nashville is such an amazing location, all week long there are live bands in bars all along the length of the street. The dreamers and schemers all in one room. When we were there there was the ethereal chanteuse part-time bartender/part-time singer songwriter, there was a Alannah Myles/Madonna going crazy on a steel guitar and chewing beer bottles in her perfect teeth and the boring overweight guys that seemed to be the most popular of all. Why is it that most of the best selling country acts tend to be male? Is it misogyny? Why is it that country starlets need to look like models and the guys can be fat, unhygienic and born with the face of a capybara? Last track, the sad send-off. A song for my current state of mind "it looks like a good night for crying, but what good would missing you do, if you're gonna stay as gone as your are, well who'll help me find me someone new". Sad. Cortney in full heartache mode. I feel like I can call her Cortney and not Ms Tidwell. Or Mrs? She is married. Her last album was about her husband and her son. I bet her son is wearing a Cabaret Voltaire tee shirt as we type.

2011-06-02T22:02:00.001-07:00

2011-06-02T20:24:00.000-07:00

Bachelorette Bachelorette. Yesterday we discussed the "smart set", and wondered silently over if Eddie Gathorne-hardy had a favorite pop band and might they have been the Sonnets. But you are saying to me that you aren't that concerned with band's whose lyrical dimension is a lament over the lack of arugula at the country club buffet and you desire for something more interesting, of greater worth well then we give you Bachelorette. The one person phenomenon from New Zealand. First track Grow Old With Me, refrigerator hums, analog gates firing, her voice, her otherworldly voice. I'd be interested in telephoning New Zealand and listening to her speak. I am assuming there are alien effects pedals at work here, making her voice superhuman, but what if she answered in that VOICE. I knew someone who made claim to have called New Zealand and spoken to Rachel Phillipps rather regularly. Rachel is Martin's sister, of course. She would speak openly of her brother apparently. I had the number. I always meant to dial it from my rotary phone at the Kmart hardware counter. I never did. A few years later I walked past Martin on a Dunedin street, he with a leather messenger bag and pointed footwear and me with a stare permanently fixed downward and these animated blisters. First song is over. An introduction. Spacey. This album is more subdued than her last record. Second track The Light Seekers, a camp fire strum along, if your campfire is on the Seti-campus at the Allen Array. There in the mist the faded apparitions of Carl Sagan, Laika, Jules Verne, etc...listen to Bacheloreete strum her guitar with her tiny fingers on titanium strings, the smores smeared with marmite, the sketching in the sand of venn diagrams and rude graffiti in praise of Leonard Susskind. her voice, an instrument, she's not a marvelous singer, it's "emotionless" as the Pitchfork reviewer helpfully pointed out but that is the point. Isn't it. This is not an organic Fleet Foxes body lice with chords moment, it's scientific. Third track, a bit buzzier and with more purpose. It is interesting. Very. I know most pop singers are not interesting and even less so when they believe that anyone is concerned about their thoughts on grave matters but sometimes it's the entire package that convinces. The odd way she shapes her voice, the willingness to fill nearly all of the channels with her voice, the basic programming, it's all exceedingly delightful. Would I prefer her singing a tale of her having absconded with some rare Caravaggio for sale later on the black market for 100 million euros? Possibly. But that is for the next Simon Warner album. Are there Hp Lovecraft references here? Unknown. I've never read HP Lovekraft. i remember as a child my father having received the a manuscript copy of Battlefield Earth, I don't remember the context or why he had it in his possession. It was bound in a work binder, as if it was straight removed from Kinkos and even at my tender age back then I knew it was pish. L Ron Hubbard said the fastest way to make a mint is to start a religion. Writing dreadful novels is just a perk or propheteering. Next track, echoey vocals, minimalism, loveliness. Pitchfork also criticized the number of syllables she employs. I hadn't noticed. I used to find it endearing that Peter Jefferies always seemed to have a few words that ended in -tion, and that seemed more of the counterfeit style that I was easily dazzled by. I am easy. fourth track over, fifth track now, her voice fills the air, love. Sugarbug. The music is basic. on the last record songs were plucked from obscurity to sell automobiles. If they selected songs from here they might be moe appropriate for advertising interferometers or woolen socks. Being on Drag City and being so technologically minded seems anachronistic. Have they had other mainly digital acts? I will admit to not being much of a drag city fan, not since Making Losers Happy, it ranks with Siltbreeze in being mainly dreadful except for when they were releasing records from New Zealand artists. Well, I did like the first couple of Palace records. Does her geography speak well of her in the Drag City offices? Possibly. Next track, more of her voice. The scuttlebutt is that she is disenchanted with the music business and that this is the last Bachelorette record ever. This would be a tragedy. Retired at a young age, spending her mornings at the YWCA swimming laps in a black one piece, taking the early bird at the Country buffet, shuffleboard with the dispeptic in the early evening. Very sad. This is a beautiful album. The last record dazzled. This one is just about restrained loveliness, a confidence that you can make remarkable statements in whispers and wheezes. On the last album there was a pattern. The songs on the last album started of rather mundanely, then about one minute in they exploded in digital bloom, usually with her voice cascading from speaker to speaker, the music at the upper range of the eq and just exquisitely alien beauty. Now we are expecting those crescendoes bathed in distortion and the harmony of the spheres and so she has instead travelled down a different boulevard. It's reflection and tenderness, right now it's a bit X-Files. I will admit that the X-Files theme in pop music is a bit tired. Why not Breaking Bad my friends? There could have been a tie in with the next season, a complimentary bag of methamphetamine, a free miniature replica of the recreational vehicle/meth lab and a copy of the self-titled album by Bachelorette. Why is it that more people don't experiment with their voice in a similar way to Bachelorette? The Pitchfork expert mentioned Juliana Barwick as a more deserving example, the la benemérita if you will. But there isn't any commitment to a Juliana Barwick record, it is all sound, lovely snippets of sound but everything seems accidental, accidentally pleasing Bachelorette probably has a schematic of each and every one of her songs, a life sized model of each note and turn of phrase, a four dimensional plot of each moment of pristine gorgeousness. Next track, Digital Brain, more of the basic preset electronics, but her voice, layered, the hand claps sampled, perhaps a poor migrant farm worker, perhaps Dolores Huerta. This is Dolores Huerta's skin keeping time to the amorphous voices floating in synchronous pulses. Dolores would not approve of this blog. I would praise her skin, but I have not seen her skin, I have not heard her claps. But Bachelorette might provide her own handclaps. Second to last track, very affected voice, basic drum pattern, synthesizers, very Radiophonic/Dr Who soundtrack. Is this the plan will Bachelorette abandon us mere mortals and instead focus on providing the soundtrack for all of the next dozen spacecraft sent hurling out into the void on ion propulsion rockets? Hers could be the voice that greats higher intelligence a dozen light years from earth. When Gil Gerard is unfrozen he will ask for a Bachelorette CD first off and then a drink of Tab. Is Gil Gerard still skeet shooting on ESPN at three in the morning? I hope so. Last track, the epic track, the multi-segmented track, the lovely synths, the heart rate throb, her voice multi-tracked. I am repeating myself. The title suggests discontent. in this track is contained the message that brings tears to the eyes of every sensible person on the planet. You might say, hey we can hope that Maria Minerva learns a thing or two about writing a pop song and we really won't miss Bachelorette. But you'd be terrifically incorrect, we'd all laugh at you, heartily, and then we'd go back and listen to that desperate sign off in the midst of the dreamy cacophony as it slowly comes into focus "for the last time goodbye" and weep in infrared.

2011-06-01T18:54:00.000-07:00

The Sonnets Western Harbour Blue. I live in Westminster, Colorado. Come visit, there's nothing to see! It isn't rife with indiepop sorts. My neighbour's listen to hip hop mainly. I can hear it on Saturday mornings. So, talk of the Sonnets has been thin on the ground. I'd love to discuss them with someone. Come visit, I'll make egg scrambles! I am lonely, yes, but that is always. The Sonnets would likely polarise even those people with their fingers on the underground, their hair intertwined with Help Stamp Out Loneliness fans, their noses filled with the whiff of pretension. The Sonnets are dreadfully unoriginally. This is not great crime in Westminster. We are an accepting lot. They sound a lot like another very unoriginal band from Sweden, they sound a lot like Napoleon. They dress very nice. They have style. It doesn't belong to them, their style, but they take time to have a decent haircut, a nice seam, a baby blue turtleneck. These are things that enhance their Swedish wanna be northern soul-ness. Second track, Sebastian Said. Are they derided as a second rate Napoleon in their homeland? In the video for this song they are found on a sailing yacht, cutting wave tops, sea spray in their youthful visages. What is the great crime of singing about finding that perfectly fitted blue blazer and a comfortable pair of dock siders instead of the usual bits about the maladies of the mind? It is summer time. It was meant to be 90 degrees here today. It was not. But I am listening to the Sonnets anyhow. Third track, a bit Modesty Blaise this. Again, no points detracted for unoriginality, it is performance that matters. There is care taken in the arrangements, the playing, the singing, the style. We must applaud these things, to do otherwise is racist. You are probably enjoying a Cadbury product as I type, so you know a racist when you see one in the mirror. But racism is silly. We love everyone. They are Swedish. Is this important? No. I really enjoy this and I wouldn't mind if they were from Arvada. Or Madagascar. A horn, somber, elegant, the arrangements are pristine. I've already mentioned the arrangements. I don't know anything about music at all so when I mention the arrangements it doesn't mean anything at all actually. I could discuss the pattern they employ when they shave their cheek. I could mention the angle of their shoe horn. I could mention the temperature of the sun's core. It would all be the same. Fourth track, smokier, deeper, this is the romantic ballad, I get the feeling that it will encompass a falsetto? Does he possess a falsetto? It hasn't arrived. Would I be surprised if it does? Possibly. I've not listened to this for a while. I've been trying out the new Bachelorette record and it's lovely. Binary opposition these, Sonnets, human, warmth, delicate, Bachelorette, alien, chill, intricate. What would be their maladies of the mind should they feel the need to discuss them on the next record? A discontentment with Fredrik Reinfeldt? A discontentment with the last Radio Dept record? My own malady is the excessive praise that that record has received. I have not made official comment on it, but it is dour dreariness, truly. But maybe the Sonnets are concerned with living the lifestyle of a pop star. He's loving a life in the spotlight, in Malmo when they walk down the streets there must be 3 or 4 people who recognize them each and every week. They give them a hopeful look of appreciation, "keep it up man because I can't get through Wednesday morning without Lost Without You Ever Since. Next track, number 6, more brilliantly crafted pop. I am painting a picture in my mind of the creative process, the singer arrives, the rest of the group are already seated, turtlenecked, singer scarfed, he's snapping his fingers, he steps to the microphone and the words just pour forth. it is emptiness, it is cliche, it is hollow bodied soul, but it's perfectly measured, the guitarist with his guitar on one knee plays a sharp spiky riff, the drummer is clapping his hands, the keyboard player with square tipped shoes is playing a variation of something Irving Berlin played 1000 times more competently. A dream. This song is terrific! It is called The Blues and the Vows, it isn't devotional or bluesy, it's just a lovely mid-tempo ballad. Next track, Everybody's On A High. It doesn't appear that he owns a falsetto. Sad. Perhaps when they break out of the Malmo ghetto they will be able to afford one on credit. Whispered middle 8, I love the confidence to be so daft, to be so open to derision. Marvelous. Did this make anyone's best of the 2010 list? You all blew it then! While you were listening to your Shit Robot and Janelle Monae you had this emptiness creep all over your tendons and ligaments and it was the vague uneasy recognition that you could have been listening to the Sonnets. If Siesta were still releasing records, does Siesta still release records, they would be unhappy that they didn't release this record. Have you noticed that ever since Ramon Leal left Siesta it has been mainly downhill from there. Forget Hamas and Abbas, Gillard and Abbott, Jeter and Rodriguez, let's get Ramon and Siesta back on good speaking terms and bring back the beautiful life of a Siesta pop record. It exists in spades on this album, take it, grind it up and sprinkle the dust underneath your super fantastic beefsteaks and make a cobb salad and have a revelation of greatness. last track, starts off cooly with just the organ and his voice, gorgeous, now the guitar and a higher pitched organ, more gorgeous. Fancy people will deride this, probably as heartily as they will deride Frankie and the Hearstrings but Louis Phillippe rips off Jacques Brel and Jacques Brel rips off someone, possible George Auric? I rip off many people. My heart comes from La Passionara, my wit from the depths, my hair from Sonic Boom. We are all unoriginal, some just have more flair of existence in their tributary manners.

Update: Louis Phillippe has written on his website recently with great effusive praise for Flann O'Brien. He must read the Dalkey Archive and The Poor Mouth.

Update: the Bachelorette record is really really terrific!

Update: Whoops recently in Louis Phillippe time means 2006. He's probably read The Poor Mouth by now and possibly Byrne by Anthony Burgess as well.

2011-06-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

Bachelorette-Bachelorette, a beautiful album. Subdued. Less technicoloured wonderland. Still wonderful, really.

2011-05-31T20:17:00.000-07:00

Shouldn't there be a new Love Dance record soon? The planet really is in desperate need of one.

Update: The This Year's Model track on the Marsh-Marigold myspace is terrific:).

Update: Maria Minerva entry somewhere in the past. Tomorrow-the Sonnets.

2011-05-30T19:29:00.001-07:00

2011-05-30T19:15:00.001-07:00

2011-05-29T20:22:00.000-07:00

Alessi's Ark Time Travel. She's 20 now. Almost 21. I was twenty once, it was so very long ago. I was in college. I was listening to Ride. I had a conversation about who it was I was in love with at the time and it was Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Lloyd and Clare Grogan, I didn't list any pop stars. It was a throughly male childhood of pop fandom, mine. Later came the Throwing Muses, Lush, Kate Bush, Harriet Wheeler, sigh. Ok, I lie. Of course I hadn't any idea who Clare Grogan was when I was 20, to my utter sadness as an older adult. This is less fairy tale and less whimsical than the first album. It's spare, it's short, it's charming, still. She has an endearingly odd way of turning a musical phrase. As if I would see the words written on the back of a piece of bazooka bubblegum wrapper and just sing it deadpan and straight and Alessi would instead convert it into some strangely affected bit of melodrama. It's charming. I've said that. Already on to song two. An acoustic guitar, a cello or a violin, a trumpeter. Very nice. She's moved to SImon Raymonde's label now. Perhaps they have sent her to camp with some of the other folks on the label, pack up your sleeping bag, your can of corn mash, and your bear repellent. Perhaps she has come here to Colorado with John Grant and he took her to Estes National Park and showed her how to be really very depressed and feeling as if the world finds you worthless and this has helped to inform her music. It is a national tragedy that John Grant has not been recognized as a precious national resource and granted access to all of the most important avenues of power. With a voice like his he should be in charge of national air traffic control, in charge of tarp, in charge of NOAA, instead he's giving interviews where he makes me incredibly sad. Granted, oh pun, his last album was dreadful. Seocnd track The Wire. Alessi does sad but not miserable. Last time I spoke of fascist blenders and parents. This time I will not. But The Wire? Blenders have wires? Third track, a bit Belle and Sebastian actually. I can imagine her as a fan of Belle and Sebastian, perhaps falling in love with The Life Pursuit and working her way back through the catalog until she finally ended up using the money from her royalty check for selling blenders to the Red Brigades in Italy to purchase an original pressing of Tigermilk. I once sent Mario from Shoestrings on a goose chase for Tigermilk because I thought I had seen a vinyl copy in Royal Oak. I hadn't. He was not happy. I've never actually spoken to him. It was a rumor spread by third party. This has that Belle and Sebastian shuffle. Mark from the Lucksmiths once told me that they had the best set of drums ever. I don't know how he came to this conclusion. We were listening in Kansas City. That is the end of my name dropping. Fourth track, more of the shuffle, I think some of the shine that is missing that was on the first album is that a lot of this flows into each other without there being a great deal to differentiate the material either sound wise, content wise or energy wise. Whereas I thrilled to the change of pace each time Gold-Bears segued one of their songs together with another here it takes the focus off of the individual songs and we must judge the record as a whole. I judge it kindly. I enjoy that she looks like a 20 year old still in search of her identity, that her image seems self-constructed and that she doesn't have a stylist or someone to compose her public persona. I would imagine she dresses the same on Sundays at home mowing the lawn as on Thursdays on the road in Tulsa playing some country bar with Milwaukee's Best on tap. Fifth track, less rocking, she never really rawks, this has a slight country twang, she might make a fantastic country record one day, move to Nashville for a month and one half and work with Cortney Tidwell and dress up her country odes and laments with beats and breaks and it'd be terrific. She could play each night on Broadway in Nashville. it would be like camp, except without John Grant. Maybe they sent her camping with the Devics in LA, in Compton, pitching a tent next to the Korean convenience store. Sitting around an oil drum singing Devics songs "here, here, let's just stay here". Awww...is that racist? Unlikely. Sixth song is an instrumental, lovely, I enjoyed the piano especially. Next track is another reserved, acoustic strum, her voice inflected so oddly that it is delightful. Not enough music is about performance these days. It is about that execrable epithet being a songwriter. I bet Alessi wrote all of those songs, well except for this one which is a Lesley Gore cover, endearing, but she doesn't seem to imagine that her songs contain such immeasurable depth that she doesn't need to embellish them with heart and soul. This is an ideal cover. Lesley Gore was the prototypical teenager, Alessi seems cut from the same mold except for her expansive imagination. I think the image of she and John Grant warding off the bears in the park by playing Lesley Gore 45s very loud is cute. There are too many people who take themselves far too seriously. There are too many people who worry about where they are at. Too many people that live by some rigid code of conduct. I live inside of my head, when I exit it is awkward and difficult. The answer is to leave it less often, to write books and have fantastical experiences through the written word and brilliant pop songs and leave real life to the rigid, to the wooden creatures that don't exist in my head. Next track has been playing, a bit more gothic, she's not frightening or haunting and I am not sure she could be, but this has a darker current to it and her voice is more subdued. Is this how the first take comes about or does she write a song and then Alessi-ize it? I wonder. The music is played very competently, I am meant to comment on the music occasionally. I wonder whose grave she would visit if given the chance, whose heart she would keep in the drawer next to her on the desk a la Shelley, whose sliver of brain case she would keep and have others mistake for a dried out leaf. Perhaps Roald Dahl, Connor Oberst, the guy from Mumford & Sons. She probably doesn't much like the John Grant album either, she wishes the Czars were better friends and wonders who Gil Scott Heron is and why all of her band mates are sad over his passing. She mentions Otis Redding in this track. She covered Lesley Gore. Let's hope that Blue is not next on her turntable of discovery. Second to last track, a short one, her guitar, her voice, this is where she shines because stripped bare of all of the fluff it's her and her imagination on display and a heart that beats through her chest. Lovely. So very lovely. if you meet anyone ever who has a disparaging word for Alessi then you should disqualify them from humanity immediately. Last track. The Bird Song, strange multi-tracking, strange noises, strange plucks, bird songs, charming things all in a collage of charm and now a harp, harps are very trendy, and is that a male voice? My ears. As understated as the rest of the album, as wonderful as the rest of her being.

2011-05-29T09:02:00.000-07:00

I've written a lot of posts in the past two days, see the three for Sleeps in Oysters, Giorgio Tuma and Gold-Bears below, later today Amor De Dias and Alessi's Ark. It is all self-indulgent nonsense. Same as always. I may start posting excerpts of a "book" soon. Possibly on a different website. Maybe it is time to resurrect Trumpet Army Opposite?

2011-05-29T08:05:00.000-07:00

Amor De Dias Street of the Love of Days. Pipas and the Clientele. Pipas have departed the scene, much too soon(are they truly over?) and the Clientele made just one record too many. Have there been any successful experiments in democracy in bands that were at one time autocratic? Unlikely. I discussed in one of the entries that I had written yesterday my indiscreet envy over those who can create effortlessly beautiful things almost at beckon. It is not for them to labor over some elaborate rodomontade, to efface some graceless mythology to leave for posterity or the judgement of those that come. No. These are real constructions to span the years beyond their passing and the future. While hopeless sorts such as we are left to peculate the legacy of others by trying to somehow enhance our own meagerness by absconding with slivers of reflected glory those who can create beauty either through art or literature or architecture or invention are left as examples of the more glorious spirit of humanity. They reign as arbiters of that human greatness that is not inherent but somehow comes to the fore through dedication and passion and inspiration. I assume that the songs that sound like the Clientele, such as this one that is playing now, Touchstone, were written by Alasdair and the others that sound less like the Clientele but not quite like Pipas are by Lupe. The first track, an introduction, ephemeral, birdsong, nature flows, and then to this song, delicate and less sonorous than the Clientele were apt to be. Delightful. Third track. A Lupe number. Are they easily identifiable by singer? Perhaps. Lupe has vision beyond England or Scotland. She sees across the horizon to warmer climes, she is able to tap into a deeper vein of human temperament than melancholy and literary allusion. But Alasdair too, he sounds relaxed, especially in comparison to how he has sounded in the past. The Clientele were always folk, but they had a theoretically classical rock sound, and they seemed comfortable in their pretentions, enough to be concerned with possession of requisite jazz chords for recognition by musos less dazzled by the tambourines in Saturday and more by the solos on the far too complicated last Clientele record. I didn't write about the last Clientele record. It sounded exhausted. It sounded busy. It sounded whatever the opposite of lush was. I didn't enjoy it. The last Pipas record was very long ago. I enjoyed it. But their existence seemed always so slight, on a dash, records birthed on the roadway on the way to a farmer's market, on board a train, next to a bus stop on a morning after a brilliant night of rainfall. The songs here are very short. Lupe's influence? This one, a near instrumental, languid, sparse, lovely. Of course I lament my inability to create beautiful things and excise the fact that it is through my own lack of effort. I write these entries on a whim. I could sit and edit and rewrite and truly express what I want to express in some classically romantic form but I don't have that sort of earnest dedication. I am preternaturally talented in most things. I am lacking only in discipline. Another Clientele-ish number. Alasdair has not travelled as far from his roots as has Lupe. Perhaps, it is only that his is the more distinctive style. Style is important. I have given thought to my own possible set of mythologies in which to enshroud myself and the idea of creating a persona along say the lines of Edouard de Max and make every occasion of my conscious life memorable, to exhale a veneer of literary pretense atop my normally staid being. I could dress the part of a dashing cavalier of letters, speak in an affected manner, make references to Jacque Vache and purchase the praise from my very own Henri Rochefort to construct my being so that I would leave a lasting imprint on this world and the next. And then, in moments when like Boulanger I am forced to exist outside of this mythology when I turn morbidly mediocre I would rely on my improbably handsomeness to carry the day. The last Lupe song, a bit like an organic version of Pipas. Pipas are/were well versed in technology. I would imagine Alasdair being somewhat allergic to the idea of a sampler on his records. I could be incorrect. It is difficult to write about people who are much more intelligent than I am, clearly this is true of both of the protagonists here, and so I stick to my own visceral reactions and attempt not to dissect the mechanical structure of this album or make improper speculations. It is all very tender and sylph-like. Now a number in Spanish. An english title. It swings. Are there books to describe the etymology of specific cultures in Europe and how they became derivations of one another and the influence of alien forces such as the Moors and the Huns and Mongols, etc...It is fascinating that a relatively young civilization such as Europe, in comparison to the great precursors Egypt, Sumeria, India, China, blah blah blah has developed such a cultural richness and precise definition of ethnicity. Of course it is mostly falling away now, old buldings and bureaucracy cannot save your world, and with the cultural hegemony of the anglo-american model. There are portable redoubts but Maria Minerva doesn't have to be from Estonia, she could be from Philadelphia, the Field mice are very important in the Phillipines, Slowdive is dominant in Peru. It is a sad thing. What will come when all cultures merge into one super organism? Will it then break apart like Pangea and Gondwanaland and then reflower in distinctive colours and flavours all over the planet? One can hope. Harvest Time is absolutely lovely, lithe and delicate, as if he's been listening to Tim Buckley recently, or Graham Nash. Beautiful. It is all very beautiful, and thus my intense misery. Misery comes when you are envious of the gifts of others. We should revel in their heart filled creations, I know, Dream(Dead Hands), gorgeous. Lupe's voice is less distinctive, a whisper more than a voice, matched with Alasdair's here it is perfection. The guitars so gently plucked, the notes falling sweetly from the forest canopy, gently rustling the dew from leaf tips. She lives now in England. I believe. Here then could be her reflection of London, the emerald landscape, the rain showers that featured so prominently in nearly every Clientele song, propriety. If only the world that exists in pop songs existed in the hearts of those without. But in the age of narcissism it is rare to find that jeweled heart that isn't bound by rigid adherence to dogma and self-belief. I am not well defined. I am nearly middle aged. I suppose. But I am willing to become something considered an improvement over the person that I was yesterday. I want to discover someone who has discovered more than I have and hasn't, as a result, shut out all of the remnants of things thought left behind in the dust. This is very accomplished, clearly, but it doesn't sound as self-important as a Clientele record, there is a effervescent charm that seemed rather more studied on God Save the Clientele. The last three tracks have arrived, Stone, we may have hoped for an Alastair Galbraith cover but no fear for it is a gorgeous Lupe original. It is reminiscent of a story from my own life. One afternoon in the mountains was spent contemplating the endless sky and uplift and we discovered a note written in a man's script where a promise was made to the void, a promise to improve this world, to improve the lot of everyone he loved within it. Endearing. This seems a ethereal pean to the loveliness of nature instead. Her cooing whisper, her gentle strum. How many times have I used gentle. It is the overarching theme. Play this record in a less than stout breeze and it would all collapse but in a sturdy set of headphones and while safely esconced in a dark room in the middle of a late spring evening it survives and reaches magnificent heights. The last Alasdair song. Perhaps he has moved further from his center of comfort than I had imagined. These are really warm pop songs. This is the title track. The colours of the sky, the temperature, the taste of the countryside seems to infect every aspect of the record. It is the country ideal, the pastoral idyll, the England of July Skies. Lost, remembered, forgotten, relived. The last track a reprise. So many days to treasure.

2011-05-28T21:20:00.000-07:00