Today I met someone with the same name as me. Not Ron Powlus. I also had an eye exam and they questioned my cataract diagnosis from a previous visit. Maybe all of the chicken korma that I've been eating lately has cleared my condition? I have a pretty large storehouse of posts ready to go. Really. Prepare to be amazed at my prolificness in the coming days. Snow in 49 out of 50 states. Brrrr...just think if global warming wasn't rampant! Oh and the Brunettes album is really crap.

Oooo!!! New Sambassadeur album too. I am a despicable person. Truly.

Update: And it is marvelous!

OOOhhh!!! The new JJ is gorgeous.

Update: JJ No. 3. Only one listen and I can barely tell you how much I love this album. I am tempted to write some unreadable flowery block of prose entirely stream of conscious like where my fingers tap along in time and the rhythm affects the content and turns me into an aspiring tangents.com writer. They possess a sound more than they create great songs. Her voice is generically lovely. Here, on first song, it's breathier, soulful-ier, more tender. Tremendous. They could deliver smashing political arpeggios and have them taken as gospel by me even should they be "bolshevik" rants the same as Obama's caricature as socialist Zinn-meister. JD Salinger died today. I enjoyed Catcher in the Rye but the fact that I read it as a ten in high school, alienated and alone seems just too apt today. I should have been reading something far more daring and original, Maldoror or even James Joyce. I am not a James Joyce guy, obviously, I am a Brian O'Nolan guy, a Flann O'brien guy a Myles na gCopaleen guy. Because Flann O'brien novels are readable, taut, brilliant and marvelous things and James Joyce's are sometimes a chore. Interesting reading on Salinger's military history and relating it ot the modern belief that most people who suffered PTSD in Vietnam served in rearward units. First song was minimal, minimally gorgeous and very short. The songs are slightly longer this time around. They have still yet to write an epic lngth feature track that dazzles the gear junkies. The fall away, her voice, it feels richer and nearer. Very nearly a capella at the moment and it is perfect. A love song. It feels desperate and alone and marvelous. It fels everything all at once. Maggots in Australia yearning for freedom from freezers the land over need to hear songs such as this and form their own mysteriously prolific dance pop groups. People who delight at free college education in return for a life sentence in the bureaucracy will not enjoy this. They are Grizzly Bear fans and they are dreary sorts with blurry geometric patterns on their ties and socks and a complete misunderstanding of The Third Policeman. I am thinking I need to read Proust, and soon. Proust was featured prominently in a Gilmour Girls episode, first year, the golden years. Next song. Harmonica, plucks on tiny instruments, echoes and the swell of the surf. So so beautiful. More minimal attacments between vocals and music, until the drama of the chorus spreads its wings all over the floor carrying homes to the ceiling of the sky. This is so delicate but it would sound marvelous in a home equipped with a sound system, one hoe equipped with a very expensive system owned by an audiophile who worries over things like 'low end' I don't much worry about how something sounds. I turn soul enlightened when listening to this not because of any of the knob twiddling but the intersection of a dozen moments in space just now when the 'football sample' plays and in the background a gentle wash and twinkles and that errant guitar. Beautiful. Howard Zinn died yesterday as well. I never had a militant collectivist stage in my own academic career. I was a hard sciences guy. My teachers came from places like Iraq and Romania and Allen Park. I suppose they were all members of the union. I was a member of the union as a graduate assistant in Ann Arbor. It was one of the first graduate assistant unions, I seem to recall, I am not certain how many others there are now probably loads, filled with aspiring Doris Lessings. Ann Arbor was once a lovely place, a near utopia, if you were socialist. Not so much anymore, oh, they are still elitist and left leaning but there is less of a welcoming feel, their activism has gone corporate. Next song, acoustic guitars, they have ditched the attempts at outward folk music, there is an acoustic guitar here but the atmosphere is softened and unfocused and blissful. The entire record is blissful, soon, when my worst fear comes true, and I wake up in a coffin buried beneath several meters of earth and I am not in my trick coffin that I keep in my room just for that specific moment, well...I am hoping that the song that is running through my head at that precarious time is one of these songs. You may well be aware that I am all about the Lucky Soul album. Expect me to write about it soon but this album just kills that one. It's amazing. Really. Perhaps people will miss the jaunty numbers like From Africa to Malaga. This i what passes for jaunty on this album and it is somewhat lethargic and again squeezably soft. The new new age is here. I could imagine a remaking of Xanadu with JJ providing the soundtrack. Effortlessly. Picture in your mind glitter and shiny lip gloss and flowing sheer skirts and headbands and it is magnified as a blissful experience by exposure to this album. How many more people are there like me? Those who used to once believe in people like Matthew Kaplan or Mike Slumberland but now feel disillusioned by their spiritual descendants in Cloudberry cuckoo land and the entrepreneurial sort at Matinee. Thank god this isn't on Matinee records. I'd have to buy a Matinee records release. Well actually I won't be buying this, even though it is Canadian and I was a former Canadian, and I am pretty sure CanCon requires that all Canadians purchase only Canadian records. But really I have a very strong Anti-Matinee records streak in me, nothing personal, just that all of the records are terrible. Well except for Keris Howard records and that one Fairways records and really I don't mind the Lucksmiths either but the Lucksmiths could hardly be considered a Matinee band. I was driving the Lucksmiths across Kansas back when Matinee boy was still some sort of civil engineer and releasing Simpatico records. Next song, music consists of pushing the air about with pedals and keys and gentle nudges of the right persuasion. They are Swedish and they are on Secretly Canadian. Did Jens Lekman have something to do with that? Perhaps it is Jens Lekman and friend? Unlikely. He could never write something this non-narcissistic. Jens should be on Matinee, by rights. I am very negative. My apologies. He's on the periphery of the professional european indiepop set. The sorts who have very expensive antique guitars that they don't know how to play properly. The kinds who wear loafers to gigs, beneath their tailored suit coats and button downs. I am all for bands that don't dress shabby and look as unkempt as Animal Collective do but not as a professional choice. Dress sharp because you want people to think you're smart, not because it coordinates well with your brief case. Read this Northern Portrait. Next song. You Know. Another almost folk song, almost folk guitar, but the twinkles dazzle brightly, a basic beat, hand claps. On the vinyl version of the album there is another song, I am not worried, I'll find somewhere to 'borrow' it, but it is titled I Know. It could be a bark Psychosis cover! Imagine JJ covering I Know. Who was the female voice for I Know? I actually have that cd, back then you had to engage in planet defiling consumeristic hagiography and pay import prices for obscurities like Independency so I could look it up but my laziness has remained consistent all through my adult life. The last song. Perhaps the young woman from Bark Psychosis is now the singer for JJ? JJ singer seems more likely to be in her late 20s. There is a world weariness in her voice, just a delicate penumbra of fatigue, it melds well with the general romantic unanxious attitude. This record is an Italian sunset, well not the soot darkened end of days in Calabria but a gentler more idyllic sort that you'd probably dream of involuntarily.

Gold Bears is the new band from the guy from Plastic Mastery. They sound a lot like Plastic Mastery, I think, yay, perhaps more mature. Even having Stewart from Boyracer on one of their songs fails to contaminate the proceedings with the taint of mediocrity.

Magnetic Fields Realism. The Magnetic Fields have had a nistory of underachievement from their admirers. They began in the indiepop ghetto with Distant Plastic Trees and The Wayward Bus. They weren't on Merge in those days. I remember finding a copy of Distant Plastic Tres at Sam's Jams in fashionable Ferndale. After the viaduct was opened, before everyone fled Royal Oak for Ferndale. Near to the zoo. It was an amazing find. At the time. It may still be my most favorite Magnetic Fields. There is a documentary on the Magnetic Fields soon hitting the theater erm...theater. Will it travel to Denver? Will I make it through the surely hagiographic narrative? Probably. I think this is a wonderful record. Unlike many more learned than I that have proclaimed it less than satisfactory. A Magnetic Fields record ellicits curious responses. Disposable online presentations send out an a.p.b. for professional students(I can scoff now although I was once one but in fact I studied Physics along with Social Contract Theory) well versed in post modern dialectics and didactic uselessness armed brightly with four dollar adjectives and their concern about whether this is compelling enough to justify the honour of having them spend 11 minutes writing about. What's that? They spend more than 11 minutes writing four sentences? At least I offer the illusion of commitment by writing at least as long as the record plays. The first track has been playing during my opening rant, it's drab and clever and I rather like it. It is the one most often discussed in reviews and most everyone likes it which makes one think perhaps professional record reviewers are lazy and have listened to only the first track. It is a difficult life. Writing reviews for publications no one has heard of and yet not for compensation but for eternal glory. 35 years from now when records are recorded only uzing zithers and cocoanut shells someone, the Nick Southall of his time, will bring up your name in a falsely reverent tone. Whoo!!! Second track. Is this Shirley Simms? It is gorgeous. But of course he doesn't mean it to be gorgeous. I saw a blip of Daniel Handler from the documentary and he went on about how people think Stephin writes from his personal viewpoint and he doesn't. So this beautiful track is merely beautiful on the surface, scrape gently and the unending fount of bitterness and timely cynicism comes to the surface. Or am I misinterpreting that? I kid, of course. I'd love it if Stephin Merrit really cared about whether people thought his music is beautiful. I do. Does he actually only spend sleepless nights in worry over if people consider him clever? What a curious thing. I'll wait for the documentary to discover the truth. I could email Gail O'Hara. Hootenanny now. No one likes this one. Who knows why! It's marvelous. It isn't clever, it is campy, he's gay, he's allowed to do camp. This is the problem with the egghead reviewers as they are approaching this not as an indiepop recod but as something more significant as it relates to popular culture. Ask the next 17 people you meet on the 16th Street Mall in Denver about Stephin Merrit and all that will be returned are blank stares and the rich kids from Cherry Hills will ask you for money from behind their glazed stares of vacuousness. Irony. His songs are not complex. If I actually practiced I could play his songs. My friend K showed me how to play Come Back From San Francisco once and apparently he uses the same chords in all of his songs. But he knows how to construct songs, he does write charming little vingettes and his performance is not usually mailed in. He does romantic, he does impossibly dour, he does bored, he has a full repertoire of emotions it seems. But there is that shield. Which is what should exist because if I were to stand in his apartment and notice a Yann Martel novel on his book shelf and somehow relate it to one of his songs then I would be fantastically disappointed. It is how his music breathes and lives free from his being. Compare to say someone like Stuart Murdoch. God Help the Girl, those songs are marvelous, really, but I don't much like that record because he is so closely related to his music. Can you imagine anyone other than Stuart Murdoch singing Get Me Away From Here I'm Dying? I can not. So for the duration of God Help the Girl I was thinking gosh I wish Stuart had sung this instead of listless attractive young woman number 3. Doll's Tea Party exists on its own. Each song its own universe. Claudia Gonson or Shirley Simms or Andy Williams, it doesn't matter. Next track, all of them are exceedingly short. Cello, why doesn't Sam Davol sing? I don't know. Does he speak? Is he in the documentary effusive with praise? In concert he and the guitar player seem mute and thoughtful. Perhaps their deepest thoughts are written on tiny scraps of square shaped pink note paper and they fold them neatly into their shoes and later Stephin holds his hat out under their noses at the end of the day and they deposit their thoughtfulness carefully. Another beautiful song this. Every song is marvelous. Really. I didn't like the last record at all. Apparently the conceit this time around was to play an entire record on instruments that did not need to be plugged in. Tesla and Westinghouse be damned! It worked. Much better than teen dream Stephin having a therapy session while in a Jesus and Mary Chain Karaoke bar. Next track, gorgeous, male and female voices, winds and distant aches of affection and drama and dreams and anonymity. Is it wonderful because he rarely uses proper names in his songs? Stuart Murdoch is all about the proper name. This may be an answer to why the Gigi record is so delightful, especially now that I've deleted the less delightful tracks forever, but the forgotten man, the average "joe" is a generic face in the crowd hiding his struggles in view of everyone else but we see that person each morning glancing back from the mirror. Come to think of it Belle & Sebastian may have ben the original Livejournal. We're having a marvelous life, my friends and I, do despair for us for we are so unhappily engaged in mirth. Another Shirley song. She's the world's greatest singer you know. Then why is it that he doesn't have her sing all of the songs? I don't know. This one is gorgeous as well. You know back in the day, before the college courses on Papa Was a Rodeo the live version of the Magnetic Fields was always a treat. The ten cent disco replaced by Stephin on muted electric guitar and Claudia on piano. They would play dozens of songs, each one of them more magnificant than the next and there would stand Godzuki in the corner after having concocted their rareified kraut-maelstrom wondering how a short man and his guitar could hold an audience so rapt. It was the songs. We love Godzuki. Some love Dion more than most. Erika playing the drums, sigh. Seduced and Abandoned. Lovely. Do people outside of lame indiepop bands cover Magnetic Fields songs? Will Natalie Cole release a standards record soon with The Desperate Things You Made Me Do featuring smartly? Unlikely, but there is that stray wonder that escapes that attempts to consider the possibility of Stephin Merrit with an unfixed budget, with professional singers, with the encouragement of the age to create something truly inspiring. I often go back to 69 Love Songs and discover that I do actually love every track within but it is still small, tiny, miniscule. What could Glen Ballard do for Stephin Merrit? Will we ever find out. But then Better Things now and it is perfectly formed. Small and perfectly formed and despite the wall of indifference between creator and audience it still causes stirs that can be created only by the gifted. Henry Moore is laying about in the botanic gardens. I will be lucky enough to witness this every single day soon. I will live in the botanic gardens for a short period. And I will have conversations with Henry Moore through the bronzed beach figures relaxing in the sun. I'll ask him what he might have thought of Stephin Merrit and he won't reply but I'll smile syly and walk over to my colleague from work, who will be next to me thinking of Megan Fox and Natural Light and he will elbow me in the ribs and marvel at the bronzed breasts. It will be a dream come true. Dada Polka. On his book shelf is probably a photo of Stephen Mallinder looking at a Marcel Duchamp painting, for inspiration. Or so I hope. He probably has a photo of his mother playing tennis actually. We'll have to wait for the documentary for the truth to be exposed for all to see. This song represents the difference of love as a subject and love as a theme. Are there dance steps included in the liner notes? Yes-yes? No-no? I like this album very much. Last song sadness now. Many of the songs on here could have been last song sadness contenders. From A Sinking Boat. Is it Daniel Handler on accordion? I have read two Daniel Handler books recently. I didn't like either. I am all about Golems and Judaical history in fiction but the works seemed agitated, I never felt comfortable in the story. Perhaps Stephin Merrit should write his books as well.

Heard two songs off of the upcoming Sambassadeur album Days and I'll Try. Wonderful! Their own version of teenage symphonies in digital.

Update:Piano. Nice. I can't remember what I wrote the last time that I wrote about a Sambassadeur record. It is possible that I never have written about a Sambassadeur record. I was quoted once on the Labrador website when they released the Subtle Changes single. That was a laff, "really, really terrific"--Trumpet Army Opposite. There is some gravitas to be found in that endorsement. I think I always meant to state that Sambassadeur have more of a sound than a body of songs. All of the songs are vaguely similar although perhaps they do add a bit of soul on this one. But then here on first track Stranded you realize this could have come off of any Sambassadeur record. Especially the last one. They sound better and better with each succeeding record but then that merely reinforces the bias that they somehow worked late one evening in the Labrador laboratory and came up with this infectious sound revolving around "Digital??" strings and cheerfulness and a deadpan "pop" voice. It is true, however, that on Days she has a turn at the soulful diva bit. Really. It, Days, is playing now and the music is the same as always, perfect, but the voice is oddly human. The man does not sing at all on this record. Wise decision. Nobody will pull out pens from inches deep in exposed arteries and write a deep, devotional letter to the kind og Labrador on the greatness of him and the crime of excluding him from this record. Not really. Are these real strings in the middle break? Is it difficult to make them seem synthetic when they are real? I imagine they are poor and unable to afford real strings especially not now that Sound of Arrows have exited the Labrador ghetto. The Sound of Arrows record will disappoint me so grievously, I am starting to fret, I haven't any reason to express such concerns but you know Pas/Cal have left jagged, unhealing scars on my heart. Third song. More of the same "greatness". This is an amazingly amazing record. Just realise that you've heard it all before. This is the last of the upbeat chipper ones before the more somber middle section of the record. Perhaps there was an osmium shortage and so they lacked the catalyst for pep, there is a atmosphere of vibes and joy and warmth and the sound is rather perfect if you have indiepop ears like the ones that are still attached to my skull though now they are mostly vestigial. Are they maths students? I picture them, or possibly just one of them, as a maths student. I picture one of them, possibly the unmissed male singer who is probably doing something else on this record, lamenting his course in matrices and thinking to himself "I am not Werner Heisenberg, whaty use have I for matrices?" I don't know. I finished Linear Algebra myself and haven't encountered a matrix in all of my vast travels since. I haven't looked behind the refrigerator here though. Werner is often painted in a bad light because of his work on the Nazi bomb though of course he famously claims to have sabotaged the effort from within but who can be sure. My impression of him is the anti-Pauli but with a bit more substance than Einstein. Pacifists are great in that they are willing to let everyone else die for them you know. If there was a limited edition set of Solvay trading cards I'd plump for a Dirac, a Pauli and two copies of an Ernest Rutherford. The song playing now has more of the digital seeming strings and is somber and lovely. Her voice is wan and desolate, you could try to wrap your arms around it but only spectral trails and dust. How many records does Labrador move? Are they big in Japan? Are they bigger then Matinee? Let's hope they are bigger than Matinee since Labrador has good bands and Matinee has Northern Portrait. I still mean to demean that record sometime in the near future. I won't say it's bad just that it is the most soul destroying record I've heard in a long time. Is that awful? Probably, but then I am an awful person. Ask anyone. Next track, another somber track, more minimal, drums that sound like drum machines and a whispered acoustic guitar and then washes of strings. Very nice. Much better than the Dennis Wilson cover they blah blah blah'd their way through on the last record. Not sure why, on a nine song record, you would include a cover. Maybe it was a label suggestion. You know the kids today, they are all mad for Dennis Wilson!!! At least it wasn't Neil Young. Monica Queen is mad for Neil Young. There is the His Name is Alive cover of Blue Moon which has the nice side story of being the only song on the Mouth by Mouth album that Warren Defever's mother liked because she knew it wasn't by him. Ha. People in Livonia are havin'it! Sorry, I just watched a Stone Roses documentary. Manchester in the area! Old rock stars are lame. Next track, more minimal still, no strings, a couple of guitars and her voice. Her pitch is perfect but it is here when you sense she's not really into it. It sounds lovely and all but it also sounds vacant. Is that the goal? A Velvet Underground and Anna for the kids. The kids are mad for Lou Reed! He's old. See earlier bit about old people. I still like it, in spite of her emoitonal unavailability. Next track, pensive instrumental. Guitars, guitars, played or plucked slowly, slightly out of phase, nice. Over, I was, just now, reading Pitchfork's review of this record, they mailed it in. Seems like all Sambassadeur records are granted 7.0, C-. Unfair. Sandy Dunes now, their Phil Spector moment. It's marvelous. Pitchfork dude says they don't match their peaks from the past, he's crazy, this is as good as they have ever been. It's Camera Obscura without the feigned miserabilia. They're Swedish, they invented nihilistic existentialism, it is to do with the midnight sun and lack of pigment. I love this song. The entire record is a dream. How old are they? They don't seem young. Are they old? What is old? I consider myself old. I have not yet reached 40. Have Sambassadeur? There isn't a youthful verve on any of these records that they've made, just a polished sense of pop craftsmanship that is more admirable than daring. These are the sorts of records the people from Red Sleeping Beauty should be making rather than those dreary things they make with that guy in the Charade. Her voice is just a piece of furniture in a splendidly decorated apartment. We don't mind. Last song. Oh wait, there is a cover, Tobin Sprout, bah! Tobin Sprout has never written anything as good as a Sambassadeur song, bah. Abolish your false idols. Maybe they are old, only old people listen to Guided by Voices records. Last track, starts off slow and then moves into a mid tempo'd sci-folk bit of philosphizing. Aerials up, raise your hands to the heavens, a coded sort of emptiness broadcast across the frozen expanse to the north up into the ether, to the stars, say hello, we're glad you're here, stay warm.

New Magnetic Fields is a huge improvement over the last.

Update: It is really lovely.

An unsecured network arrived just in time for Martin Luther King Day! Look for possible posts, possibly, sometime! The Lucky Soul album is rather good. Is it not? Do stop listening to dreary Northern Portrait and listen to Lucky Soul instead. Ok? Soon...

Update: It's like when Tompaulin released that amazing second album when everyone had them pegged for mediocrity. Except this isn't about cancer or country or any of that other bidnis. Lucky Soul have made an amazing record! As unbelievable as that may sound it's true.

Update: Went back and listened to the first Lucky Soul album. It's middling songs with pretty string and horn arrangements. The new one is a huge leap forward.

Update: B-side to recent single is also marvelous.

Vampire Weekend Contra. I meant to write about Northern Portrait. I have come to understand that I have unsatisfied disdain for the Northern Portrait record. I have it in spades. But it is such an enervating record that it is difficult to maintain enough energy to disabuse possessors of the notion of its greatness rather effectively. But I do love this album. Don't you? It is so much fun. Look at my short sentences. I read a piece on Aldaily.com which discussed the finer points of writing well. I didn't subscribe to any of them. I shall. I shall start now. One of the tenets he proudly beamed over was short sentences. I suppose his greatest ambition is to write copy for the AP. My own ambition is not so lofty. I think I have finished my book. Really. I could fold it in half, glue it between two flat pieces of drywall and put it on display at the Smithsonian and you might be unimpressed. I read 91 books this year. Reading more has allowed me to steal more convincingly. I am somewhat certain that Flannery O'Conor is my new favorite author. I've never had a Horchata. Sheltered, I didn't know what it was until just a few moments ago. It seems to be a very Vampire Weekend concoction, good for their regime and their skin, they would drink it but that act is apparently demed criminal by reaction from those in the know sorts we think very little about. I will not drink almond flavored drinks until I have a prescription. Next song. This one is very Paul Simon. It is very Graceland. I was never one to buy into the theory that that was a great record. Of course we loved the You Can Call Me Al video but that's only because Chevy Chase was tall and Paul Simon was short and therein lies the drama of high comedy. As a song it's a song, sure, but this one is marvelous, moreso. Even the squealie bits delight, like those occurring just now. Vampire Weekend is a physical band, spasmodic involuntary motions accompany a listening, but it all sounds effortless. Animal Collective is similarly bodily propulsive but you can imagine them, spent, frantic, dripping with perspiration. I don't think Vampire Weekend know the meaning of hard work. It is all seemingly effortless. This one sneaks in a similarity to the Discovery record. We loved that record as well. We is me. I offer myself more credibility, a sense of authority, by adopting the "we". Would you not agree? You should. On my ceramic tile kitchen floor my stockings glide soundlessly while my head fills with the girly yelps of a girly young man. Bravo to girly young men who don't subscribe to misogyny and cartoon theatrics. There is an understated ambition to this. Is that a backhanded compliment? To whom do I offer my rhetorical questions? I am not sure. I have neglected this site for some time. I missed my window for ubiquity. I fear. Next song. Holiday. One that might make you remember the first album. There isn't a great deal of guitar on this album, some scrapes in the background, a glamourous line in the pre-chorus, now the wordy middle 8, nice, pretentious, charming. Would it be better should the world be filled with Noel Gallaghers? No. Hint, it is, already. Noel Gallagher has given us Nickelback. Commerce is the greatest aspiration of pop music. Vampire Weekend sell a considerable number of records in spite of their high mindedness. Bravo. Next song. Short songs. Mostly. My feet are warm now, frictionless stockings drift across the ceramic tile. 24 x 24. "She'd never seen the word bombs blown up to 96pt futura." I rather like that. But that was the last song. California English, skatting, the vocals could annoy the average listener, but you, my one reader, are not average. Indeed. The other reader, he is unmentionable. More guitar on this, it is subtly shading the plot from the background, it's percussion, heartbeat percussion, this is the connection to Animal Collective. Viscerally they are entirely different, head music versus heart music, the beat of the blood versus the wrinkles of a furrowed brow. I really love this album. Just one week before I was enmeshed in a musical funk and then this week, one semi-glorious passing of seven days, by divine intervention, an unsecured network appeared and I discover this, a beautiful Magnetic Fields record, Lucky Soul, oh dear. Yes, goodness is about. Now the race to the finish. I have experience with disconnected light switches, well disconnected disposal switches, I can find common cause with my betters. Over. Slowness. They didn't do slowies much on the debut record and here there are many. Each is lovely, they should do slowies more often. Again very minimally produced, twinkles on the piano tinkles, sharp arrangements. I should read back to the beginning of this entry and remember if I have already discussed how all of the second album ambition went into the arrangements. The arrangements are dazzling. Really. A less confident band would have shown off their chops, broadcast loudly the fact that they can play scales on the guitar now after having played all of the old familiar favorites to hedonistic young college boarders dozens of nights in a row on some cold February journey through academia. But no, it is understated, charming, smart. Smart is key. Dumb is the thing for most, smart is the thing for least. I finished AS Byatt's The Children's Book over the holidays and it is plotless but not pointless. But she is so smart. I love that she has a husband that is something of an expert on WWI and so when she is writing of the grindhouse of the trenches, the brutal and heartless extinguishing of so many points of light that she needed only lean across the double desk they share, it is pressboard, each facing the other, a lamp in the shape of an Anatolian appendage on the floor and ask him if indeed this is how all of England's bright young things met their end. Truly. Next song, Run. Run has horns. It has a soaring bit of instrumental chorus-try and it is absolutely marvelous. I read a review of this album and they complained about this song. Madness. Is that a horn? I think it is a horn. Oh, my ears. Have they cataracts? The middle section with hoots and hollers and softness parading as bravado. Nickelback will pummel these boys one day behind a rock club, in the alley, with bricks and canadian sabres and hair products. My feet can't stop mimicking my typing, I am typing in time to the beat, it is much more preferable to do this rather than to have to occasionally use the defibrillator on myself while listening to that Northern Portrait suburban library music. Perhaps I am not cut from Scandinavian stock, perhaps my own French heritage is signaled from deeper south, near to the Mediterranean than in the chillier, more static climes of Cherbourg or Le Havre. Everyone else just loves the Northern Portrait album. They are all correct. I am wrong. Next song. Speedy. The single. The transition from first to second album is made easier by familiarity. We know what Martin Phillipps wrote about "familiarity". I don't agree with Martin Phillipps about much of anything except for the Osmonds and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Thanks to Martin and Kahoutek magazine I was hip to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental band before you were but I never actually heard them until he covered them as Pop Art Toasters long after. Anyhow. Cousins is over. It's short. It's snappy. Next song. I just snapped my fingers in an involuntary reaction to my typing. If only I could type out future scenarios and make them come true by similar involuntary reactions. Type "incapacitate Ben Gibbard", type "write novel that isn't awful", type "buy chick magnet car", type "marry Rebecca Hall". Her voice, sigh, is it real, was it a construct of hollywood imagineering? Probably. I fell asleep by the end. Giving Up the Gun is spectacular. Really it is, there all sorts of things happening but it still does not overwhelm the senses, you sense the comfort of their diving back into the song at any point they like for this could be the extended jam where Paul Simon and Edie Brickell jump on stage to join them, a medley of this song, What I Am and The Boxer. I read Paul Simon's book on Paul Simon's finger picking, it did not take. I didn't read it this year. I could be more receptive now that my reading muscles are extremely well defined from use. The same muscles extend to the center of my back. I pulled out mulch and rock and am going to soon replace the mulch and rock with mulch and rock. Woo. i could stand on the 16th Street mall and flex my reading muscles and everyone would swoon dreamily. How difficult is it to build a pergola? I could install wireless speakers at the posts of a four posted pergola and have surround sound of afrobeat songs about Joe Strummer. Is that not the working theory on Diplomat's Son It is about Joe Strummer. Right? There was that history of rock music thing done by Dick Clark or Quincy Jones or Don Cornelius or whomever and Joe Strummer was in it and he seemed like fanboy with a heart of gold and love for Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. De didn't have expatiate on pretentious theories about how Vampire Weekend's excessive upper class appeal could led to a rebellion against Goldman Sachs and Conrad Black and the color of unpainted china. He was just on and on about making cool music without nonsense like underlying meaning and psychology. I Love Music is filled with guilty overprivileged wrongly overeducated children without a firm grasp of economics except as distorted by Hardt and Negri. I mean to write my own economic treatise with the working thesis that it was the Cadillac Cimarron that saved 80s American culture and gave birth to the aspirational agenda that dominates the boardrooms across America. I loved the bug guard across the front bumper of a glued up Cavalier. If this be a memorial to Joe Strummer it is a lovely one. Tender, cheerful, romantically idyllic. Not sure if any of those same adjectives would apply to Joe but he would approve. Err...I can imagine his proxy might. For these purposes, in my universe, I serve as proxy for reality and fantasy, so I approve in his stead. Last song. Slow pretty closer. Quavering voice. This is a wonderful record, really. UNlike say Lucky Soul it is not unexpected but the depth and emotion and artistry is something to applaud. Strings. Lovely.

Because my Holiday season has been filled only with long books and decent movies ('An Education' is not bad) I've noticed, in between, that Sound of Arrows and Bachelorette each have songs in automobile commercials.

Post-Christmas Prettiness!

Danny Norbury Light in August. Another record that perhaps should have ended up on Make Mine Music or made in Iceland. Either way. Pianos, scraping violins, lovely things abound. It's pastoral and fey and escapist and romantic and beautiful. All of my favorite things. I have this hole in the middle of me from worry and sickness from worry and fear that I am about to lose something. I don't have anything of value though. If I woke up tomorrow having lost everything that I have today I would have lost little of value. Not even my fabulous new sofa, well pair of sofas. It was like Spring today, thank goodness for global warming, the tides have been turned back by the bureaucrats in Copenhagen. Hallelujah. What is it about men with their messiah complexes? Now Al Gore is being feted as a poet. More piano, more violins, such loveliness should be treasured. When it is warm all of the time will this sound as pristine and wonderful? Will the sweat perpetually perched above my brow cause me consternation and worry the same as I feel now except as a source of existential ennui will I not be able to abide and find myself reaching for a copy of Vulgar Display of Power instead and later find myself starting a war in the middle east over my frustration at not being able to marvel at a Danny Norbury record. Who is Danny Norbury? Who is Rudi Arapahoe? Are these skilled classically trained musicians? This is probably just practice, finger exercises for the knowledgable and talented but for me, it is a revelation. A radiant glimpse into the heart of all of the stars in the sky. Third song. No vocals. More violins. It seems as if bands should hear this record and decide that they want to merge with Danny Norbury and co opt his talents and save on overhead and corner a market in terrifically pretty instrumental music. A Deaf Center/Norbury record might be landmark. I was about to write about Svete Gairner which is one half of Deaf Center and which is a really fabulous record as well but I am writing about Danny Norbury because someone named Danny Norbury should not be making music this lovely. Lovely is lovely. I write lovely and yet I rarely say it. It is an Anglophile's tick and it is easier to display irritants such as this in print rather than in person. If I met you, my one dear reader, I would come off more Canadian than Anglo. Anglo-Canadian. My father had his left eye removed. He has a hole in the side of his face where his eye used to be. He does not have cancer in the brain. I spent a few days earlier this autumn contemplating my life without my father. I couldn't listen to music like this then because it would turn my pensiveness to distress. I don't handle shocking news well. I was told I had a cataract and nearly fainted. I was told that there might be cancer in my father's optic nerve and I nearly fainted. He's always there. He's not ever tried to be anyone he wasn't. He's got this inborn integrity that screams silently but only by example. I should be more like my father. I possess gifts he never dreamt of, or perhaps he did. I've never asked my father about his dreams. I was always closer to my mother. The daughter she never had. All of my friends are girls. My father never had a best friend. I don't have a best friend. I don't have any friends. Danny Norbury is my lonely virtual friend, the tenderness with which he caresses the notes here, the basic repeating patterns, the elegiac violin, the words that would come to fill in the desperate moments of melancholy but don't ever arrive. Only one person that I have ever loved has died. In absentia. My father is on the golf course. I send words across a 2000 mile void, over digital lines, and I try to personify them into all of the emotions and actions I should grant the people I love so freely. But I can't. Next song, more aching violin, the music is leading me into this path of macabre reflection. it is now a few weeks later. I didn't see the hole in my father's skull. I was in Seattle. I was at a funeral. Aspen Trees. I listened to this record after the funeral. Now two people I have loved have died. I am getting older. I am old. The dead no longer age. It is a startling feeling when one reads one's own name in a suicide note pasted to a refrigerator with duct tape and grief ladled smears. When you spend Christmas in a state of guilt orchestrated partly from the great beyond and partly from a morbid sense of inferiority it is difficult to stay awake. Sleep is much preferred. Lying in bed with the window blinds cast open the moonlight casting luminous shadows across the platform bedroom furniture and your eyes closed to view movies projected involuntarily, subtitles in a language you never spoke, from a heart you never knew you had access to. Someone I loved and someone who hurt me more than I've ever allowed anyone to hurt me before then turned that echo of sadness, that reservoir of sorrow into an end undeserved. I sat in the rain, looking at the airplanes on their glide path. I looked and wondered at the happiness of airports. I cursed the glowing embers of contentment in the faces of those who knew they would return. I told my boss. I haven't told anyone else. Well, I told my ride. I haven't told anyone else. I could play I Turn Off the Last Light and Close the Door and not tell anyone else ever. Sad songs when you are sad are dangerous instruments. A distant reflective piano, an inspiration possibly born of the collective shroud of melancholy that threatens everyone who has never felt anything anyone would envy feeling. Never. Not ever. I didn't go to see my parents because I was ashamed of the fact that I wasn't feeling enough grief, I was stricken, I was not destroyed. Later, when I spent two days reading a journal I was never meant to read I learned that I had invoked or provoked all of the feelings I always longed to incite in a heart. But hearts can't talk. Light in August. This would have felt romantic one month ago. Well two. I would have swooned at the agile grace of sweep. Danny Norbury would have met only praise and hysteric joy from a naive soul. Now I watch other people revel in their grief, in public, and I hold mine secret. Two people I loved and two people who left, have now departed as strangers. Their shadows unrecognizable in the dimmed lightness of being. But the violin sighs. It is two months later. I still only feel capable of vague reflections on a tragedy. Suicide. When suicide's mother sends you a package that redeems your entire lifetime's worth of hope it is a remarkable thing. And today, strangely, I felt warmth pervade my stoicism. I feel suspicious when people are nice to me. I don't understand why anyone would want to share anything with me be it friendship or kindness or joy. And when they fear that I find them nothing at all like I find them I want to reassure them of their greatness, the brilliance of their everything that wears me out because I prefer to slouch poorly in the shadows surviving on notes from strangers scraping a violin desolately in some dusty English attic in the middle of June. Far from the sun. But you can't tell someone you care for how much you care for them. I try. I could create a simulacrum of emotion in a loosely woven string of sentences that would not breathe humanly at all. But there is the telephone line to animate, the modem to breath essence into, the ether to charge with emotion and I am not up to the task. Someone today effortlessly made everyone around her feel better. I was included in that group. It was an amazing thing to witness. Some people are truly blessed. The music in their soul plays on, endlessly beautiful.

Soap & Skin is the most wonderfully wintry record. I should re-read my entry on her. I think it was filled with endless praise, as well it should have been. Her next record might be really astonishing. When she turns 20.

New Klima album in January!:)

Granted, I have not heard the album, but, this is just silly.

Update: I have now heard the album and find that write-up even more ridiculous! More later.