The Radio Dept Running Out of Love. This is an alleged polemic. But the problem with a political record where you can't easily discern the lyrical content is that unless the music is made with chainsaws and the samples of republican virgins screaming as they are sacrificed to Mammon it does become difficult to offer a black power salute in response especially for a record as gentle as this. Truly, it must be said that the music on offer here is just, achingly, lovely. First track Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People or Sloboda Narodu for the Plebs. Perhaps a bit of an overreach to compare modern Sweden to Croatia under the Nazis? I am reading the lyrics, it appears to besmirch the ideal of the Swedes as gracious hosts to the unwashed masses. Again, it's just gorgeous though, as they rock the world with their words they delicately caress our souls. Beauty can be subversive - bourgeois! It is not quite Delacroix. Second track is Swedish Guns. Apparently the right wing fascists are mowing down Swedes and their newly arrived guests in the streets. I wonder if they know the definition of fascist? Governments in Europe are mainly center right leaning left and center left leaning further left, it why you have a populist reaction such as the apparent rise of Marine Le Pen in France not truly a fascist really more a national socialist but she arrives because there isn't any real difference Sarkozy and Hollande, technocrats that drive to the same destination in different gears. This track, again, is stunning, all softly focused dream pop and the voice an ephemeral contrail over top of the shimmer. Third track, We Got Game, the 'occupy Frihamnen' anthem. It's odd that even as the most powerful religion of the last 100 years has been proven to be collectivism they seem to be wary of it all just crumbling away as if the edifice lacks a foundation of popular support. The Swedish consensus is a bit more healthy than the US, they believe in government control and they regularly offer it an electoral mandate for every aspect of life but at least they are willing to pay for it. This song seems to be a cry for more direct and possibly violent action because the current government is going to imprison all of his friends seemingly because they are deft with a twitter post and hold the fate of the State precarious in the shadow of their witty and voluminous Facebook ripostes. But the song is a bit of a wet noodle. Will anyone be steadied at the barricades by someone with a Bluetooth speaker and a Radio Dept song? The lyrics are impressionistic, very 21st century that, they don't represent any studied opinion just an emotional fulmination. Next track is a bit empty, a brief instrumental, perhaps to spare us from the intensity of the previous four tracks. Sarcasm tag. Next track is occupied. Normally I don't care about the lyrics on records because in most cases they are the weakest aspect of the records I listen to. The exceptions stand out because the rule is mundanity. It is much more difficult to write lyrics. Music can be as vague as this and still sound romantic and breathtaking even as we wonder if its rudimentary nature pegs us as simpletons. The words here are a bit of a jumble, hope of a common cause, a common enemy and then betrayal? He was not a fan of Reinfeldt, I am a bit not up to date on my Swedish PM's until the current occupant, a trade unionist so perhaps this track is disillusionment, him being expressed in miniature. Will there be disappointment anthems for Obama? We wonder if true reflection will be possible with the mythical nature of his regime as remembrances exist now. Again another lovely tune. There isn't a great deal of variety on these tracks. I recall when the first Radio Dept record was released on Shelflife and there was a bit more diversity, some JAMC aping, some Ride devotion, a touch of 2 bit indiepop. But now it's all beige, it's new age for aging indie kids. Here's a pop track, the Kelley Polar sort, bloodless. It's charming even with the pet allusion to Cuba. What is the European fascination with Cuba? A nation strangled for the principled stand of opposing American imperialism. But the Cuba policy was a moral stand, it contradicts all of what he is standing for here with his talk of betrayal and failing founding principles. He wishes the boogeyman did not exist. Next track, an anthem for shut-ins Can't Be Guilty. It could be an assailment of those who would sleep through the peril of this very moment. It's a bit like a Prefab Sprout track, dream a little dram of when love breaks down in my heart. These narcoleptics are missing the rallies, they are not making placards with the Mercedes symbol, they are bespoiling the air with the public consciousness with their inanity. It's another lovely pop tune. This seems to be my most poignant commentary on the record, I think it purty. Committed to the Cause, a bit of Stone Roses swagger here and more of the enervated commentary on the state of the current opposition. This I can get with, but when your state of mind mostly matches the publically consumed culture differing only in degree in your delusion over the possibility of utopia, when every bit of popular culture at least adheres to a sanitized version of your reality it is difficult to muster a fiery passion. Were fascists truly a threat he'd probably be able to reach down for a but more vitriol but as most of his worries are part of a fictitious existential crisis it's a bit vanilla and ephemeral. NPR will hail it as visionary and furious but cute seems the most appropriate adjective here. They probably consumed a great number of drugs while creating this record as it now conjures a bit of the Happy Mondays here but instead of sedatives they needed a little more vigor, a little more tiger penis and less of the hippie lettuce. New age instrumental for the ninth track, two instrumentals on a political record leaves my revolutionary heart longing. Unfocused drift off, interstellar musing samples, an Sk-1 preset drum beat and some light panting. I would have left that one off. Last track, Teach Me To Forget. A more personal lament? A plea for his partner to enjoin on him the power to live without regret. It's a bit direct and pedestrian, it's The Drugs Don't Work for a new generation. It's still gorgeous, minimal, sparse and the percussion mimics my heartbeat. I am a sucker for heartbeat percussion, we have established this long ago, is it a physical manifestation of my partisanship. I respond to the heart, to the sentiment here even if I would find the members of the band's politics eternally silly. They move me still.

The Moles Tonight's Music. I returned with an already half-written entry on Hilang Child from over a year ago and was able to complete it relatively painlessly. I feel a bit refreshed. Richard Davies is still alive. Who knew? He's been hanging out with Guided By Voices and we wonder if that is progress. I remember Telegraph on its arrival and after a lifetime in my early 20s proselytizing it turned out all wonky. I blamed it on the kids, the wife(real or mythical), the pressures of being a provider. I feel these same things most days. It doesn't affect the writing here which is uniformly poor no matter the condition of our back account. But imagine you are Chris Martin, you have been transformed, from errant introvert with a fortuitous arrangement of chords and sad puppy dog eyes peering deep through the ocean suck now into a corporation. Imagine the dozens or hundreds directly dependent on your writing a "hit". Orthodontia depends on your pen. It's pressure that may not be conducive to creating artifacts of quality. Richard has ties to the golden age. This is the period in my mind when musicians mostly did not come from upper middle class worlds that I did not inhabit. Rodney Allen was the ideal. Could Rodney Allen exist now. Oh, first track was a bit dull. Second isn't much better. It's sparse. There were rumors that it was a potential sequel to Instinct. We love Instinct. It isn't. It's Pollard-esque, ideas or riffs masquerading as songs without clever song titles. His children, real or imagined, must be fully grown now. Doubtless they are of the new breed. Surely they are accomplished and fevered but singularly unimpressive. I essentially lost my job recently, before atrophy truly struck my soul but the last bit involved the invasion of millennials into my work life. These are children with valuable skills such as slack lining, veganism, hairlessness and an impressive travel dossier. But when they speak they are dreadfully uninteresting. It has spilled over into music. Rose Elinor Dougall is cast as a genuine pop star with her new album and it's mercilessly long and insipid. Beyoncé has figured out how to monetize google news/TMZ as song and Richard Davies is scraping his guitar against a window pane and boring me senseless. Is he a born again millennial? I am the cranky old man now. I haven't any desire to remain the vigilant teen into my 40s. I don't miss Tangents. I do miss Silencer. And I do miss the Moles. This is not the Moles. I haven't heard Cosmos which is the band that he created with Robert Pollard. He used to play with Flaming Lips. They have a new record out and I am certain I never want to hear it ever. I had a desperate sense of anticipation when I became aware of this record though. Nailing Jesus to the Cross made my pious friend Andrew cry once. Instinct was 20 some minutes of madness made marvelous, there was Cardinal, the first solo record and then there was Telegraph. I also mention having an eccentricity prolapse removed in a lament of some length, well the eccentricity is back and Bob Pollard's students probably love it. Of course those kids have all likely matriculated at Ball State by now as well, probably grad students on the gender studies faculty. Oh dear we have made it to but Song 5, Needle and Thread. His voice sounds smoother, he's lost that antipodean smoker's drawl, it's all a bit Eric Matthews vocally. Is he able to play guitar? I have been listening to Rodney Allen a great deal lately. Tangents once promised a lovely bit of romance about Rodney once and disappointedly offered only a few sentences when I craved volumes. I have idealized Rodney. Are there political bands and singer/songwriters today? Slings and Arrows, still we long for music. Politics today means emotion, witness the upcoming rich white girl march following inauguration. It has ben alleged that it was white racists that did in the US with the election of Trump. But has there ben a more monochromatic coalition than the 'feel the bern' gang? Wealthy college students with an impressive array of mandarin lessons as pre-teens and negative STD tests as co-eds living dreamily in an extension of their university endowed utopias. Nothing has meaning, nothing has value except love. I imagine many of the placards on Satuday will have L-O-V-E writ bold while they castigate the rest of the citizens at large as racists, sexists, bigots, homophobes, transphobes, islamophobes, anti-immigrant fascists. L-O-V-E. And then they will post n Facebook and feel as if the world has tilted on its axis. Nothing can stop us, at least not until we must pause and attend the next demonstration. Richard Davies will likely be in attendance, nearby to Robert Pollard, certainly. Red Carpet. It's a tough sled, this. He's recycling the same riff from track to track, it's all meant to mimic the early days in the garage seemingly. Poorly recorded lends it none of the authenticity he aspires towards. The Moles were the band that synthesized all of your favorite Flying Nun bands, there was the Bats in Curdle., there was the Chills in Accidental Saint, Snapper in Wires, the Clean in Surf's Up, and yet they were Australian and they were not dreadful, miracles are real. Relief comes, three tracks in a row that do not break the 2 minute mark. It isn't horrible, it isn't wonderful, it is merely disappointing. Let us discuss this track in earnest then. K.B.O.. I will need to google the title to understand the significance of the title. It does sound like Instinct. Perhaps because it was not recorded onto 35mm film it has lost its appeal? According to Wikipedia K.B.O. could refer to the following-- Kapamilya Box Office, Kuiper Belt Object, Korean Baseball Organization, "keep buggering on", "Keep the bastards out", kabalo airport of KBO! a Serbian punk rock band. I choose Kuiper Belt Object. A lament over Pluto's demotion I suppose I could ascertain the meaning through an examination of the lyrics but this record is indefensibly overlong! What is the point, exactly, of dumping all of this at once? I know Guided by Voices records typically have more than 20 songs. Has Pollard started a new religion? Some song about hobos now, so awful, an asthmatic wheeze on a harmonica and a sputtering collection of mumbles and now a sample of dissonant player piano, ugh. Uh oh, next track begins a bit interesting, oh...it's just a tease and our pique lasted only a few moments. Are you Free Tomorrow?. Just 73 more tracks to go. It's a synth bit that that teased as interesting, just a depression of a single key outshines the rest of the song which contains poor piano playing and someone with some poor homemade percussion. I read a piece on this album which seemed almost breathless with excitement over the return of the Moles! And I was sucked in, fake news has claimed another victim! There was a Cardinal album recently, umm semi-recently? I have not heard it. On evidence of this I haven't any desire to in the future either. Next track, Dreamland. Like a Bart and Friends outtake that didn't make it onto a Bart and Friends album and they essentially released everything didn't they? Maybe it is like when people try to claim the latest Bruce Springsteen album is his greatest ever just because his politics are so right on that they feel like they have to prop up a fellow traveler. David Bowie's last record was dreadful, same as everything he had done in the past 30 years, but he died so piety is understandably as a critic. Bruce Springsten voted for Hillary Clinton. It is interesting how that act has ben transformed into a moral touchstone, somehow voting for perhaps the most corrupt candidate since Harding is taking a spot on the moral pantheon next to Mother Theresa and St Denis. This track isn't horrible, hyperbolic praise be damned, it is called Beauty Queen of Watts. It' just an average indie rock song, very 1994, could be a spent out-take from 1994. High praise, I am out of control. Next track intrigues because it is called Chills and we wonder if it will be about Martin Phillipps? Tall Dwarfs wrote Self Deluded Dream Boy in a Mess about Martin Phillipps. That was a marvelous song. Let's talk about Tall Dwarfs instead of the Moles? Is 3EPs the best Tall Dwarfs record? Of course it is. I may have not been interested enough in Chris Knox's health situation considering I once sat with him at a park and listened to him telling me how dreadful Pontiac, Mi was. He was correct on all accounts certainly but there are two things you should be slow to criticize "a man's choice of work and his erm...closest urban center of poverty and decay". This isn't about Martin Phillipps. Surely the engineer fell asleep while recording this? It's a drone of no pleasing consequence at all, it isn't hypnotic, the lyrics are uninspired and it is too long. Richard Richard Richard. There are 249 tracks on this release, I am not sure he could have culled it down and made even an interesting EP. I am too cruel. I apologize. I am just letting loose my spiritual animal in response to listening, this is the first listen, I can hear one of you telling me you need to listen to it at least 17 times in order to get it. It is that time of year for that type of advice as best of lists are released. It is fascinating how there is such consensus in indie rawk circles, they all pick the same rap records to offer their bona fides to, the same pop girly records(this year Solange), the same old indie rawk guys records, etc...I will admit to buying a few records that may be written about here based on their position on best of lists, but I was more interested in the records in the 90s and 70s, not the ones in the top 10 because we know that the ones in the back end of the lists are the ones the contributors truly love and are desperate to include because of that love but are cowed into undervaluing their appeal because consensus demands it be so. Oh dear it has turned a bit Dead C. The advice for Dead c of course was you had to listen to it 403 times in order to get it. But why would you want to get a Dead C record that isn't Bad Politics? Robby Yeats, what a waste. But back to the best of lists, I read them, I don't recognize 95% of what is on them but I know, with all my heart's commitment, that the records voted best are the ones people think are important and that they think others think are important. And so...every dreary Radiohead record ever released will always make the top 10 because Thom Yorke's politics are even more spot on than Bruce Springsteen's. Only 7 songs left! We have made it to You're In My Band. More droning, more poor production, more poor performance. Guh. Is being a republican the most rebellious act in current state of American. When all of the culture apart from talk radio is in the collectivist camp is it not more anti-hero to rebel against the status quo? It might be. I can predict Richard's politics to be just slightly to the right of Thom. Richard began his adulthood as a barrister I believe. He once lived in the USA, are there ambulance chaser bench back signs with his mug on them? That would make for a fascinating record, a tribute album to the helpless saps he took advantage of to record self-indulgent indie rawk for the glory of no one in particular. He was never a good singer, but it never used to bother me, he used to know how to write an effortlessly eccentric and amiably charming pop song that had the needle pegged towards beautiful even with his unconventional musical abilities. What happened? Is it like an athlete, is it Tim Duncan trying to chase down Serge Ibaka and discovering the tread had come off of the wheels completely? Are these recent attempts at songs or have these been milling about for ages in the crevices of his mind, in between the depositions of slip and fall clients and their escape was a cosmic accident? Is there no one around him who could be honest and say yeah this might appeal to a 40-something Sentridoh fan but for the rest of the world we are hoping merely for indifference? The title track has arrived, anticipation is high, it isn't half bad on the start. Like the seque into a lone acoustic guitar, lack of voice is no hindrance to enjoyment. Oh, it is just back to the beginning bit, vapidity with an echo. I don't think that he'd even have the opportunity to turn down Donald Trump and even some lame Bruce Springsteen tribute band did out of deference to Bruce's music as if they have become sentient beings able to cast moral aspersions from on high. Oh I like this one, Artificial Heart, it could have come off the brilliant last Bats records. Reunions mostly suck, thank goodness Morrissey hasn't yet caved for a reunion, but the Bats last record is an exception and this is the rule. Epic last track, clocking in at just under 4 minutes, oh man those stabbing background riffs are not a good idea and it's a bit folky folk oh but then those riffs come and oh its not so bad now, very paisley print psychedelic. Very Sloan, very much of their kind of overpraised mediocrity. Getting old man, this makes it sound like the worst thing in the world ever.

Hilang Child The Garth Waterman. Devotional. What is it in the formings of a young man in the mean streets that brings him to a place where his music instead of being fitted with concerns over bling and facebook status and the color of his tattoo eleven days after he's gone septic and instead makes churchy music. Is he the new Hoser? No. But the celestial organs, the martial rhythm, the echoes of sincerity that bleed through in every moment. It's amazing. His name is Ed. I happened upon his first EP long ago. My wife was at her bachelorette party in the mountains, far away, we shared a psychic connection over Rahim Moore's folly. She had her spirits to drown hers in and I had Ed. This then the second EP, first track is not far removed from the first EP except for the insistent middle section that impels introspection, furiously to the end. Are there atmosphere settings on computer, are they available locally. Update - 01/11/17- we do eagerly anticipate the album, he promises something new. We fear novelty in general. So much has changed in the interim, children, career dissolution, school, large houses, tiny landscapes all in a whirl without a whiff of nostalgia fueled escapism. Perhaps this is why I have drifted from music. It was the locus when my life was adrift, no that I am moored in the living it does seem less essential. But still I might dream of a new Hilang Child record. Over a year ago I wondered how he grew awkwardly and awry from the standard of the day. He's English sure but their youth culture is as knuckleheaded as it is here. Is it simply the infusion at birth of an old soul, an adolescence bathed in the pathos of depressive singer songwriters, an understanding of beauty and loveliness that comes as armament of an old soul? The title track is just lovely, church bred organs, his untethered voice and the drama of a life lived surely not by the song's composer but from his tapping into the ether of genius that allows the breath of world weariness to be expelled from someone who surely hasn't a clue and who spends many of his idle days longing for trainers and video games. Second track, more martial beats, a bit more unfocused, something like the third track from the first EP. There is a orbit of sounds intermittent and elliptical, the piano is the anchor but the dreams add the solidity and guitars and chimes climb like contrails across a sunset. I don't know if the lyrics are profound, he is rather young, they sound so but that may be because his voice has outpaced his psychic infusion of the human condition. Third track, Rushlight, a bit of a rocker for him. He's a drummer for some other band that I attempted to become familiar with once but their releases are thin on the ground. The drumming here is pedestrian for certain, he's making a wise move to turn away from a life of a clubber with a heart. it's all a bt pedestrian sounding really, dissect this song and it is simply a load of repeating phrases but it sounds marvelous and wonderful and as if it wasn't in your life as a young man and you discovered it alter dying in your bed of triple throat cancer you would life your last exhalations filled with regret over having missed a lifetime filled with Hilang Child. It has been some time since I have written anything, pardon my hyperbole. But he really is splendid, truly. Last track now, A Noble Kin of Guy, terribly title, but the dreamy voice and piano and the reverb and the echoes of a nation's torment over a millennia of existence. It's a bit singer songwriterly versus a dramatic folk turn style of emotions washing over you. It's a bit throwaway really, it sounds lovely, it's a Gorky's like b-side that they tuck away on a teuton dance number and you discover and treasure for the simplicity and the heart and the warmth of spirit.

I feel as if I should arise from hibernation, oh but I am terribly ill.

Sally Seltmann Hey Daydreamer. There were the Moles, Even As We Speak and the Lucksmiths. That was the extent of it, the roster of Australian music that wasn't wretched. Truly. Oh but you laugh in my face what about the Go Betweens? I laugh back in your face with cheese whiz on my breath. The Go Betweens rank with Felt and East Village as the most over lauded, under heard bands and yet somehow, incredulously, over-appreciated bands ever. I realize this is an unpopular opinion. But such is the beauty of life, the right for me to think that 16 Lovers Lane is mostly pish and for you to think I am insane. Sally Seltmann is Australian and she's brilliant. By the way. This is the artsy fourth album. There is also Allo Darlin and when they were mostly just Australian, you know back when they were mostly a solo thing, they were amazing and while they are still pretty great they have started writing songs about the Go Betweens and when pressed to pick a favorite Go Between, though the most sensible choice of Lindy was not offered, head AD "Elizabeth" defers. First track is artfully arranged title track, bassoons?, trills, her multi-tracked voice, some sorts of woodwinds, samples and it is all mixed into a delicate thrill ride, a high speed chase in a radio flyer. It is packed with nostalgia, sepia tinged sentiments, dreams teased into existence and charm. Is it all charm? But what of Summershine records you say? Ok, the Rainyard were almost there but have you head the Earthmen? But then Sally is a far way removed from indie. She's a bit of a big deal in Australia I suppose. She's in a band with two others more popular than her but she's the genius right? Second track Billy more of the haunted daydream feeling. Her husband is producer. He's in the Avalanches. Yes, the Avalanches are horrible. Paleness with a muscle shirt, beating your heart senseless until you feel worthless and alone. But everyone else loves the Avalanches. I know. Sally in untarnished by association. His name is Darren. There are a fair number of Australians named Darren I feel. This track is titled Billy and there are bells and softly patted drums and a distance that didn't exist on the last record. On her last record Sally was possibly the most honest purveyor of confessional pop music I had ever heard. It was a record cleanses of pathos, bathos, bathetic it was not, pathological only in the sense of its soul laid bare feel. It was a comment on her life as she was living it. It was made poetic almost by accident. This is decidedly more pristine. These are characters that exist only on the periphery, at least through the first three tracks. Do I miss Sally as narrator? I do. But this is wonderful, all the same. It is a gorgeously produced record. Now to the psychdelia. Is she a fan of Richard Davies? It has his common track of a repeating motif on the piano as background and more dexterous maneuvers saved for voices and strings and charisma. Needle in the Hay. Were I a real record reviewer I would be listening to the lyrics and offering interpretations to you at no extra charge, I'd delve deep into the mind of Sally and discover the source of the delay for the next Avalanches record hidden somewhere in between the lines that obviously refer to strife in the Seltmann marriage. But I am not a real record reviewer. I remind of this in order to excuse my incoherence. Next track, Dear Mr Heartless, her voice recorded in a separate frame of mind than the music. The words forlorn the delivery optimistic, the music a giddy jaunt. Confidence has turned her heart to the greater world at large. This could be about an important person in her life or it could be a rebuke to a fake record reviewer such as myself. Would I be offended at being classified as a "guilty sunset"? Hardly. Martial drumbeat, muted horns, the general buzz of being self assured in a recording study and now harpsichord and bass notes played slow. We are soon to execute a move we have considered not too closely and so we will feel a sense of true dislocation soon as we wither live in the basement of occupied territory or we move into a an apartment we hope doesn't contaminate the spirit of life to such an extent that we voluntarily leap from third floor windows into the beds of el caminos carrying pigeon feathers and foam rubber baby prosthetics. Our soon is not chubby. Is this wrong? I am a bit astry with my thoughts because the tone of I Will Not Wear Your Wedding Ring is a bit comically sinister. Is it meant to be sinister? It's like Heavenly opening for Huggy Bear, we are all feminists but hygiene is not a universal right as recognized by the international. There's drama, it makes me smile or it makes me giggle and I suppose that wasn't the point. Lovely mind. Right Back Where I started From. Here could be the continuation point from the emotions that held point on the last record, harps, and electric whistles and her shyness on display. Now the piano rises up and her voice abundantly proud and wordless. It is building to some sort of crescendo. Are crescendos cheap ploys then? It was a lovely thing, this track, and now it's reached a higher level of emptiness, it is louder sure but when the drop comes the intensity returns. Is it the perception of the lack of distance between Sally and her listener that beguiles? She is not a star and do we love her more for her commonness? Catch of the Day, shouty bits about fish and self determination. The last record did have a scent of self help manual about it but not in any overbearing sense. When Sally sang about flowering apart from her loved ones it seemed more an acquiescence to life as a pop singer in the Antipodes. Synthesizers join the fray and a return to the harmonic chanting, all she needs is a didgeridoo and a Peter Garrett cameo. Not my favorite but not horrible. Not East Village horrible. YOu know Paul Kelly has redeemed himself quite nicely in Birdie. And he is a handsome man. I am in desperate need of a haircut but I am feeling a bit melancholic and I am enjoying it for a moment. I am happy always these days, I am with my soul mate, the person that I can be most myself with and the person I believe is most true to themselves with me and we have an amazing son that I am singing both sides of Louder Than Bombs too but there were those moments growing up when you felt pleasantly melancholic, alone, always, and without prospects and there with you, to guide you along, were your friends, on cassette. Sally must have had many of the same friends and she sounds eminently happy but perhaps she should spend a few more moments with old friends and reflect on the sunny side of being alone. But then Holly Drive arrives with its galloping rhythm and my heart turns yellow again, the life force of love and happiness carrying me through another day of feeling inadequate and sure that some day I will be discovered as a fraud. I have a wonderful family, a wonderful lie and Sally has written a song about it with steel guitar and cherry blossom scent spread across the grooves. Perhaps it was the perception of men from Australia as being comically male that has infected our enjoyment of pop songs that originate from there. Is Australia the Canada of the Southern Hemisphere while New Zealand is the Scotland? Possibly. But New Zealanders reminded me much more of Canadians than Australians did. Australians have a higher sense of self regard than the new globally dominant super power in soccer, the USA. So when Peter Garrett comes off all wet and socially aware it is a bit ridiculous. Last track. Beautiful. Confessional. A love song for her lover. Her lover could be an Avalanche, a Gray Whale, or this song itself. There is hope in the goodness and charm of people whose soul radiates joy such as this.

Moto Boy Keep Your Darkness Secret.  Do you google Moto Boy?  Do google him.  You will discover that he looks every inch the pop star.  He is chiseled softly from talc with floppy fringe featured, the cheekbones, the 'I look as if I just stepped out of a Mael party' look.  What is not to love?  Royston, Purina, Ablixa, Apropos, Nausea,  Moto Boy is Oskar genius.  Why then...whatever.  This is the third record.  The Berlin record.  Does it sound German only because I am aware that it was recorded in Berlin or because Berlin has a distinctive effect on pop stars that record there.  Achtung Baby and the Berlin trilogy?  I don't know.  Did the Strokes embody the sound of New York or did their sound embody the implied sound of New York?  Who can be certain.  Lou Reed's Berlin should sound like Michael Bloomberg then.  Are there blind taste tests in the mall where you sit peacefully with a Rand McNally and for you are played varieties of unknown music and you are endeavored to select the origin city?  I would imagine not.  And if Berlin is so influential upon the sound of pop music why then is nearly all of the domain set of German pop music, including that fortuitously recorded in Berlin, uniformly dread inducing?  First track Midnight Rain, it's a bit more smoldering than he has been in the past, fuller, fleshed out and it is gorgeous.  I don't suppose it is German now. I have a niece now in Berlin, born in Berlin this week.  Oh Berlin, you will have absconded with my American niece.   My wife's lineage is Swedish and I am in line for the 53rd earldom of the Scottish/French Canadian dominion and so we are rooting for the Scottish to come out in our own son, with heavy sighs we dream that the New Zealand of the northern hemisphere influences him the same as Berlin has affected this record.  When listening to this album for the first time I was waiting in line at a restaurant and in front of me were some clean, fit, drab young teenagers,  They all had the same fashion sense, they each wore a ball cap and I had this crushing sense of fear that my son would soon join their pack.  He would become anonymous, the middle member of the middle sized, middle ranked group on the popularity scale at middle brow American High School.  It can be comforting to be anonymous in a pack.  But I also stood just outside the group.  Even as I reveled in my ordinary stature.  I imagine Moto Boy was spit on by the anonymous members of the middling utopia.  I've railed against the worship of mediocrity in our world today.  From the President to Quentin Tarantino to cronuts to Sydney Crosby it is an epidemic.  the fear of standing apart.  Second track Keep Your Darkness Secret and variety is not important in Berlin apparently.  Each of the songs here follow a similar pattern save for the jaunty one near the end.  Cheekbones sucked in, muscles unflexed and his tender croon on full display as a sometimes plodding rhythm drives the songs into an ethereal world of loves lost, fought over and knives drawn and bloodied.  I imagine him as a dramatic sort, every drag on a cigarette a Vonnegut novelette.  It is him. He is the star of the record, not his playing which is sublime or the production which is the same, but the melancholy that he has absorbed through his skin and slowly excises over the breathy exhalations here. Next track, Someday a bit like the last one but the quality control is so exceedingly excellent it seems a brilliant compendium instead of redundancy.  I am in search of a new home these days.  It is some few weeks since I had started this entry, my son is long and lean now.    I am having pangs of the usual longing for relevance in his life, the need to finish the novel I finished a few years ago and have decided needs to be rewritten.  I could reimagine it, Moto Boy as lead character, in a nursing home crooning his heartbreak to the closed head injury patients on ward while the LPN's swoon and secretly wish they did not know that he was in love with Morris the man who lost his mind on an operating table, 2 lbs into a paint pail and a quarter million dollars per year in therapy to achieve the look of tall fescue in his eyes that are less a window into a soul than a desperate plea for absolution.  This is Love.  My wife's favorite.  Se has taken to singing this to our child.  I am more partial to the Smiths because those words inhabit the nearest reaches of my own mental universe.  I can sing most Smiths songs on recall and I wonder the effect of my singing, out of key, Asleep to my agitated 10 week old will be.  Will he take a turn as Christabell LaMotte or perhaps take a turn more sociopathic.  So often fears have swords drawn to combat the brilliance of dreams.  Smeared guitar near the end, as an outro of excess to cover up the doubt that is elegantly expressed within the lyrics.  I am writing in between sighs, in one ear attempting to decipher the meaning of life as conveyed by a Moto Boy pop song and in the other attempting to unravel the cipher of my son's panoply of cries, grunts and coos.  Fifth track has begin, the trip-hop inspired beat has fallen away in favor of  gentler motif of synthesized tones and piano tinkles.  There is a cross pollination of aspirations at work, the goal of embracing music by connecting with a universe spanning, harmony of the spheres influenced collective consciousness my mind entangled with the notes as they drift across the expanse and more locally the desire to not miss my son's first left eyebrow raise.  This is the perfect soundtrack for all of it.  Heaven In a Heartbeat Come  More softly chiming notes from a piano, the drift of the city ambience pressed into the grooves, his voice, expressive and revealing.  If it is not Berlin it feels then like alienation, a strange land where you pour your heart into the night and the echoes are untranslatable,    Europe is not so homogenous as the social engineers would protest. Sweden is probably more like Berlin than Sweden is similar to London but the words are in English and the heart is a Scandinavian blend of wan and desperation.  Now to the post rock dance single.  Minimal architecture, very late 1970s/early 1980s dreamscape with a Casio preset rhythm, a ringing guitar riff, and a When in Rome sense of drama.  It all seems so very serious.  He played guitar in the Cardigans before finishing this album and their sense of alarm at people considering them bubblegum fluff may have over spilled into the water cooler and fostered a sense of paranoia, or Moto Boy is generally forlorn.  Stereotypes.  "We were too young to love..." and in a just world this would be the soundtrack to the last skate at Swedish roller rinks all over the kingdom.  It's insistent catchy and doesn't seem out of place even on an album of such funereal grace.    Next track back to the template established on the first few songs, slowness accompanying heartbreak and loneliness.  "Do you want me like I always wanted you?".  In the great history as it is written in several decades this will be the Berlin album but it is his Bob Wratten moment, his torment turned catholic, his emotional abyss spread forth for all to access, his misery made lovely and wonderful.  Synthesizers provide a greater amplitude for his heartache, and the swell of the music mimics the emotional tumult.  Second to last track, Nothing Shatters Like the Heart and it is a bit of a pastoral lament, the shimmering keyboards, his voice like a torch singer, female backing vocals, an optimistic performance art piece called despair.  Here is the cigarette lighters in the air, the indie sway, the squeeze your sweet thing's midriff ballad we were all hoping for.  The words, simple and pure, all artifice stripped away, direct and clear.  How does it translate into German?  I could ask my German niece when next I see her.  Epic climax, the keyboards in concert, his voice more urgent, a few baby's come to the fore, the moans o pleasure disguised as tearful moments of torment.  Buble' could cover this.  Marvelous.  Last track to a glorious record now, we are sad to see it come.  Just ten tracks.  The more familiar Moto Boy tone on the guitar, the Feed Me With a Kiss tone, the In a Room Without You tear soaked tenderness.  His voice soft, landscape changing, the emotion spare and penetrating.  He did not learn this from the Cardigans.  Cardigans bubblegum princess married someone from a dreadful band.  Said dreadful band once opened for My Bloody Valentine in Detroit and so she has reason for despair, a lifetime of listening to that, oh dear.  Or she could listen to Moto Boy, she could play this crescendo at full volume while trying to drown out the sounds coming from the home studio in their studio apartment in Williamsburg just above some indie actress having an orgasm to the new Mumford and Sons smash hit record.  Mote Boy the god king of the melancholic universe. 

today, there is this youtube person "thelazylazyme" and they post the most wonderful things.

Lanterns on the Lake Until the Colours Run. Second albums are key. The first Lanterns on the Lake was gorgeous sure but is the next version the same as the first with a few more monstrous licks they learned from playing the same 11 songs over and over, night in and night out in Nijmegen and the next in Heidelberg? Everyone has a "good" idea. The first Lanterns on the Lake album was an antique, or it was antiqued, it felt out of place, discovered, underexposed. They had ideals. Second record begins now with muscles rippling, tee shirts tight to the chest, band logos written in pen on spiral notebooks. Or on a nook. Does an antique have inherent value while new and modern lags? No. I have taken some time to warm to this album. I have needed sunday mornings curled in an uncomfortable chair with a special afghan and nutella and toes dipping into the cool morning air to learn to appreciate muscles. In music, muscles usually have negative connotation. In this city, this is true. We prefer the dainty, the delicate, snow filled globes and nostalgia rather than SUV's filled with the others. First track is a fitter Devics, it is very loud, except for her, the singer, music is still tender in her heart. Second track, a bit more nuanced, a bit more artistic, a bit more lovely. Now the chair where I came to my new conclusion has been moved to the basement and on the table next to it sits the Morrissey biography. My wife asked my mother to purchase it for me. I was delighted. It wasn't a set of golf clubs. I devoured. I read closely in haste. I was not inured. And today, I am heart broken. Devastated. Morrissey is small and petty, bitter, he is not worldly, not at all, in spite of the world having him in its embrace. It starts off vague and uninformative, he barely attempts to make pretty his mundane existence through a less than revealing concatenation of dour British television plots more poetic, he paints lovely portraits in inartistic prose of his favorite relatives and the image of his father the brawler is fascinating and when he speaks of his love for music I fall in love the same as he had, all over again. But his account of how the Smiths formed is almost vacuous. I was in a band, then I was not, oh and then I met Johnny Marr. Essentially. The Smiths were a love story but in his mitts its a discarded footnote. And the ponderous dissection of the Joyce affair, ugh. Is it about money? Was it only about how little Geoff Travis cared about the Smiths having a number one record? But Morrissey as Morrissey made the mundane poetic the way that Belle and Sebastian can not. Stuart Murdoch needs the fanciful and unreal. Perhaps because he did not have a Johnny Marr to fulfill his need for inspiration outside of the realm of imagination. Did Lanterns on the lake make this record hoping to make a mint? Perhaps not. I shall not taint them by association. But they trade in anonymity, assiduously cultivating it in their characterless montages. We, I, long for the intimate associations with our pop stars I think. We do. We want Paddy Mcaloon and, sadly, Morrissey. Or we want Stars, we long for their cleverness as homage in itself to Prefab Sprout and stories written by Torguil about Paddy. Love letters across an ocean. This, LOTL, is an open ended missive to the ocean of sound that is filled in with broad strokes. The delicate touches here are wonderful, but they are enveloped and smeared. These sexual coos, turned virginal do thrill, until the ocean swallows them, the sea swells rise and it is an impressive production but the moment of inspiration, the distillation of loneliness that propels their vision is lost and instead of the universal ache we achieve sympathy with their collective idleness, But it is individuals that make pop music most thrilling. A Bob Wratten line repeated ad infinitum turns catholic and we sing it in our inner voice and it is more beautiful than it has ever existed in the real world. This is the real world, with sparklers and twirling skirts and beautifl children with biblical names. I love it, don't mind my rambling. But when Morrissey existed in his pop songs only he was miraculous, he turned his mundane world into a shimmering escapade across the heads and crooked backs of those we knew didn't understand. We ate our burgers and wore our leather shoes, he would guess that this meant we did not get it, but he's wrong. Morrissey is dreadful. The Smiths as the Smiths exist only now. We can not isolate strains of genius from the whole, not any longer. Lanterns on the Lake exist only as a whole, the collective. They, allegedly, nearly split before making this album. It does not channel ferocity or anger, it's a gentleman's maelstrom on these first three tracks, and then the effects of the ubiquitous aether seeping into the grooves and pops and crackles are mostly implied but fervently. Would this music work with a personality? If the words were filled with meaning and desperate specifics and written with an agenda would it move the masses. I shared the Smiths agenda, I know I did, and I know that you did as well. I am uncertain about the agenda of Lanterns on the Lake. Green and Gold now. Pianos, Pianos. Her-whispering. I don't know any of the names. The names seem unimportant. This is gorgeous, it is the background soundtrack that plays when all of the best moments of your life occur to someone else. You live vicariously through the best moments of life because you can't remove yourself from the hope and comfort of conformity. This track is stunning, truly and this album is amazing and I love it but there is a higher ideal. I get it from the 1 minute trailer for the new Pains of Being Pure at Heart record, possibly only because I have angst and envy over his duffle coat and I am easily manipulated by the overexposed film of Kip Berman looking like a Dead Poets Society extra but it makes hairs flutter. His favorite romantic is surely Keats because even through Pains of Being Pure at Heart are affluent and have the disease of affluenza that has dampened the spirit of indiepop until it has reached near to its current state near demise and the idea of him writing a record where he really means it seems almost inspiring they still identify only with the purity of the struggle they are unfamiliar with. A small victory will win out and cheer us and yet...Green and Gold has finished and the soul is stimulated only esoterically, they haven't imprinted the feeling on my life's work. That sounds overly dramatic. My soul has impressions only of real life these days, reflections of unimaginable happiness and joy that lie less than a month away, of having a partner that fulfills all of my heart's desires and for whom I perform constantly so that she knows I am here. I am not inside of my own head. I am. But I am here in the world as well and willing and loud and unlike this song I am not the filler of her life. The drummer seems more important on this record than on the first record. Drummers having mothers, blah blah blah, it has all been said before. And the guitars are blurred into an unappealing tone of beige. Purity is normally white. The tumult that birthed this record has left a watermark. The sound comes first. Next track. Picture Show and there is the piano, the undistilled cacophony and her, whispering, they move her voice to a level just barely beyond discernible. Even when with sole piano accompaniment it's a bit too loud, the quiet made compensable by the masses. When they play the Broomfield Events center here this track will move the masses. Te entire state of Colorado will rise up and declare thir libertarian impulses freely and we will, with pitchforks, charge the hill and we will not be ashamed of gay marriage and weed for every one. And Lanterns on the Lake will sit on stage staring at their shoes. The heirs to Halstead have been exposed. Slowdive shall return. Piano and vinyl crackles. I mistook it for antiues and value once before now I understand it is manipulation of the loveliest sort. An experiment in the familiar until this track, ah, this track! Another Tale from Another English Town. Lying in bed one Sunday morning, while ti was much too cold to venture forth to my uncomfortable green recliner, I played this for my wife and it was astounding. The frisson between the notes and the air of a Colorado morning was remarkable, and we had hope, real hope. It remains. It isn't distinguishable from the rest of the record. But perhaps I long for their Englishness to be more prominent? We have given our son and anglophilic appendage, eh will love England as much as I love the England that existed in the Vistors Gold Mining in the Would Be Goods Marvellous Boy, here and of course in That Joke... and all of the other most important songs in the world ever that have existed forever in my heart where time is not fungible. The drama here is different, I was wrong, her voice commands instead of retreating and the force when combined is dazzling and the final few strums close the book on a beautiful chapter. The climax before a milder denoument. LAst track now, guitars and drums(how novel) and more of the beige we would have ben overjoyed with its exclusion. Her voice is pressed between pages but the pages are glossy and too thin and so it is all bleeding together and I can't quite make out the words and so my heart...the spectator...sigh. And the drums go on.

Hmmm...very many views of the Princeton entry. Perhaps editing is key? Or does everyone dearly love Princeton?

Mehdi Zannad Fugue. I have a tenuous link with France and so now I shall grant my official blessing to the dazzling goodness here. My own mother is fully French-Canadian. Street! And yet apart from Marcel Beliveau the French hold the Quebecois in dramatically low esteem, erm... Or so I assume. I have not done any research. The anti-anglo forces marching in the streets of Paris as profession probably admire their implacable threat of secession as thumb in the eye of all things Anglo and Amerikkkan but the French spoken in Quebec as a bulwark against yankee imperialism only soothes when used by the likes of Felix Leclerc. And so my credibility, as always, is in doubt. Mehdi Zannad used to be Fugu and now he has released this album entitled Fugue, or not just now, not really. It was released in 2011. Do you understand? Oh so long ago. 6 years after his previous album, more than a decade after the romantic and baroque debut. He's a genius(Roger Kimball would blast my carelessness), truly, and this is his heart in full bloom as much as the last record and the record before and the entire pantheon of music that was and ever will be ruthlessly ignored but is secretly, truly, the greatest thing ever and which will cause you great heartache when you discover it on your deathbed 47 years from now and realize those moments you spent with Bros are gone forever. It's sunny, optimistic and seemingly effortless. I have come back from reading a dreadful review in a magazine run by people from whom I once purchased many records, in the past, and, yes, I agree with everything he wrote apart from the sentiment and the ridiculous complaint about the brevity but say it with style or pose, at the least. The record is short. It is standard measure 70s pop. The Raspberries, Todd Rundgren, Ozark Mountain Devils and more modern practitioners such as AC Newman. Similarities abound, but this is clearly out of their league, all of them. It is in french and the language "like a piano without pedals" remains impenetrable to me although I did take 3 years in high school and my genetic predilection towards francophilia should have been an aid more than it is now but it is not. Third track, Le Tableau. Acoustic guitars, his honey sweet voice, endlessly effeminate and warm. Possibly this is a lament, as it is a fair bit more dour than the two opening tracks, this was the pattern off the ebb and flow on the last album as well. But that record was in English. The glory of English as a application in pop music is that English words float in the ether of unintended associations. French as the language of diplomacy is made of concrete. Second track was L'aeroport. It contained lyrics written by a french director I have never heard of. He has written all of the lyrics. I watched Romantics Anonymous on the Netflix a few days ago. I don't know who directed it. Possibly Mehdi's best buddy was in the chair. It was charming and lovely because while it was very French it was also very not French. In each morning commute I have been listening to "Thinking Allowed" from the BBC and recently they had a panel discussion on Michel Foucault and I found it fascinating and they also Erving Goffman and Walter Benjamin as well and while all of these people are mad strangely I found myself most sympathetic to the line of thinking of Michel Foucault. Unexpected. Mad men all of them but intellectuals in France have been the root cause of a great deal of evil in this and the previous centuries and so I find myself betrayed by my own sympathetic heart. He's dead, he died, he would have loved this record. Possibly. He was very french and in his classicism and devotion to more anglocentric pop music Mehdi is perhaps less than French. It is Phoenix, very French tres' annoying, that is shifting units and annoying sensible folks the world over while Mehdi probably sails an anonymous skiff out into the future. Now Oh Sarah, gorgeous folk pop. If you google Sarah without an h on the internet you receive a great amount of conversation about the seriousness of the slight you can impose on someone whose name is Sarah and whose name ends in an h if you decide, cavalierly, to abscond with superfluous consonants. My favorite superfluous consonant is Thom. Mostly because I find Thom Yorke mainly ridiculous. Anyhow, this Sarah is anonymous but marvelous still. Another short song, another wonderful song. This begins with a tender plaintive, acoustic dream and then moves into a celebratory hymn to anything you wish because it is in French if you recall and our ignorance a bridge to anywhere. I was watching a show on Public Television where they were attempting to teach Japanese through people discussing how to hail a rickshaw. It was disappointingly ineffective, I am still not fluent. A short instrumental now, a piano gently struck and a french horn and a soft chord here and there with wordlessness arriving about halfway through. Just magical. Why is he toiling in this rarified obscurity? Is he shunned among the natives for his embrace of English on previous records? But this is in French. Remember. Johnny Hallyday is surely nearing the denouement of his career, surely there is room for Johnny, Jordy, Felix Leclerc and Mehdi Zannad at the top of the charts? There is a new film about the chef at the Elysee palace during Francois Mitterand's imperium. Communists like to eat nostalgic food is the crux from what I can gather from the interwebs. Why then will not Francois Hollande invite Mehdi to the palace to tickle the piano and like an oneironaut carry the entire cabinet back to their life of privilege, the ecole superieure, the tough struggles of their life as union agitator, freshman MP, then reflexive totalitarianism as cabinet minister. Francois could invite Segolene, dance a rhumba and drift back to times when he seemed promising. we all were promising once upon a time. My promising era ended 11 days after my own birth. I was not born in France. I could have been. Au Revoir is genius. Comment Faire now. He's singing someone else's words, recall, but he's effecting a marvelous spirit in the music. It's joyous, boyish, cheerful, sunshine. The fall snuck up on us rather sinisterly announcing itself yesterday with the first snow flight of the season. Nothing overly traumatic, a few flakes, the sight of your breath at the end of your own nose and the cheer that comes when night turns now dominant over the day and we will soon live sharper, closer lives than in summer when the black world extends only a few meters beyond your arm's grasp. Where demons and monsters linger in permanent shadows where men scurry and fail in tests of courage that withers and dies without the nourishment of sunlight. So this record is important. It is the earth and moon and sun all distilled into wonderful pop songs, impelled into the greater existence by a heart's most pure sentiments. It covers the darkness like sediment, brightening the abyss one layer at a time. L'Allemagne on now, a bit of a dirge finale but repetitive and hypnotic to an acoustic trill and dream. Dreams always. Last track, Paresse. Harpsichordish piano chords, buoyant and clear, an opening act before the drums arrive and the meat of the drama arrive. Laziness. Is this a plea to his own sensibility? He has released but 3 records in 10 years. Each has been terrific, mind, but I am certain there are dozens of songs we need to hear and we will never because of paresse or ignominy or quantitative easing, but there are now 3 records where before there were only 2, in fact this was true only a week ago and so cheer and love and smile and listen.

How have I existed these past two years entirely unaware of Mehdi Zannad's Fugue? How! It is incredible. More, soon. Fugu, fugue, perfect, perfect.

Princeton Remembrance of Things to Come. An expatiation on the concept of prettiness. We've spent a lifetime admiring Paddy M for understanding loveliness, for embracing it and documenting it throughout his life and music. Princeton are not so old. They were an indiepop band from a large city. Now they are more ambitious, enough to match their origins. This is texture. A repeating motif, layered percussion, parched falsetto and meaninglessness all in a swirl. It's pretty. Pretty is pretty. The strings grow to a gentle cacophony and then his voice, very Ruby Suns, falls into place and it's emptiness on tape. Did their fancy friends with the designer paraphernalia object to their sweetness and cause them to move their preferences to icier climes. This record is Finland or this record is Lapland. Second track, their indiepop skeletons betrayed, a looping keyboard line and some twinkly accompaniment, the drummer had a conference call. Repetition is meant to be hypnotic. There are loads of people who will make claim that their favorite Spacemen 3 record is Playing with Fire, but they lie. Or they are dull. Sure the three gospel tracks are earth shatteringly revelatory but only most especially when looking back through your best mate's Spiritualized endorsed mirrored glasses. Princeton probably own Playing with Fire. But do they understand, does anyone really, that it was a dress rehearsal for Recurring? And what have Spacemen 3 to do with this? Nothing at all. That Sonic Boom was a child of wealth is immaterial. It's something more reminiscent of a Baxendale record actually. It's still cute. I suppose they are wealthy and hang out with Nora Jane Struthers and make comment on her saddle shoe blog and they are precociously talented. This is dreamy and vague and pleasant and what it lacks in drama it makes up for in precision. But the first Princeton records were for love and falling and sharing that feeling with friends on pop tapes and this is not. This is studied isolation and the Super G. It's meant to be sophisticated and so this may disqualify my own ears. Daniel Barenboim dismissed modern music makers as people attempting communication more than music. And perhaps he is correct. A great deal of importance is placed on lyrics in popular music. Princeton's lyrics are suburban travails writ microscopic and are easily waylaid among our greater concerns. While someone will hear this record in a record store and love it immediately I can't imagine they will spin it at home except when they are alone wishing they were somewhere else. The most glorious pop music is for reveling, for choosing over going out, for the experience of pop music itself. This is for the soundtrack of being anywhere else but here. Pitchfork and real reviewers will comment on the lyrics, and they will dismiss the record because of it. Can you break out of the indiepop ghetto and move in more cultured circles with a sampler and a Casio SK-1 preset or three? Bob Wratten was not successful even with the championing of Everett True. This is the Field Mice gone house music. But this is 2012, or it was, this is 2013! We're much more savvy connoisseurs of pop music. We have Miley Cyrus and Grimes and Alice Glass to inform our sensibilities and allow us to live as adults do we need Princeton? We also have Ruby Suns and Discovery and there does seem to be a small cottage industry of bands seemingly indebted to the Beta Band and Bitmap and 64 bit graphics and vacuousness. Paddy Mcaloon spoke of strophic song construction in Uncut where the music does not change from verse to chorus and it fits storytelling and vignettes perfectly but Princeton are too young to have lived and their souls are too antiseptic fro them to have anything meanginful at all to contribute to the frontline of human emotion. It's remarkably taut and economical. Did they hint at this on the last record? No. But there is Kisses you see. There is music for Holding Teeth playing at the moment and it has achieved some sort of enchanting groove, twinkles and dazzle have made up for the vacant lead vocal. I don't mind wealthy people. Would that I possessed wealthy friends I would turn them on to this because it is music for those with means. This is for racing in European autos with formula one tuned suspension and the signs racing past your window pasted on with umlauts and leather panted models advertising the next Arling & Cameron show. It is all about layering and crescendoes and on records that attempt to achieve bliss in this manner it is about gently maneuvering air currents and sound waves and trimming wavelengths deftly to not upset the balance of the room's atmosphere and here they are most effective. Scalpels have been wielded. If Auburn Lull made dance music it might sound like this. I begin now my involuntary leg waggle. First rule of not being a real record reviewer, (1) read other reviews while you are writing an entry on the very same album. I am reading a review now that claims the first Princeton record sounded a lot like Vampire Weekend. Hmm...and then he goes on and on about how this almost sounds like Owen Pallett. It does have strings, loads and loads. Owen Pallett is a marvelous human being and his vocals in the Gigi record are sublime but he's never been one for me as a solo artist. I can appreciate his own strain of genius which is colossal but his music doesn't fit my own soul's template. This is closer. There are horns, there are mantras made into vocals, it's almost, but not quite, as if they have a copy of Screamadelica as a hidden track in the soundtrack of their conscience. Inside of their heart plays music with soul. But Bobby Gillespie really means it. if he could he'd plough the same furrows as those on the frontline at the great fast food struggles of 2013. But when people compare music to bands such as Primal Scream they often go awry or say you want to compare the Raveonettes to the Jesus and Mary Chain because they have a bit of distortion but you end up being silly with egg on your face and all down the front of your shirt because the Jesus and Mary Chain made soul music and if you are soulless and make distorted music you end up sounding like the Maryonettes or indeed the Raveonettes which is cruel but they sound wonderful and their music makes me want to move to somewhere where music hasn't yet been invented. Poor Labrador records. They lack cachet. The new Club 8 record is astonishingly lovely all the same and I can't wait for anything from Sambassadeur soon and they did once release a record or two by Sound of Arrows but the Maryonettes are really not good. Now it is a bit more fully realized, the electric keyboards sound as if they were recorded in the garage. Their garage must have diamond plate floors, ceiling fans, a hydraulic lift, maybe a microbrewery for the kids? It's also very short. Forgettable. Next track, Andre, metronomic chimes and his voice is in smoothed out indiepop mode. It's still indiepop kids that will truly understand this- no? I know indiepop kids are desperately conservative musically but this is hardly revolutionary. Princeton have invested in a sampler or seven and they looped their cool sounds the same as Chris Knox has been doing since 1981. But the voice is so very pleasant and I wonder in between the notes whether his speaking voice is so poised. What is his vocabulary like? To which side does he part his hair? These are the inspirations that come from this very "pretty" music. More strings, perfectly placed in the mix, it is impeccably assembled, and then the move back to the verse which is mechanistic and in the 17th century and discovering the clockwork mechanism of everything in life with a vital force breathed into it at the beginning but Princeton caught an ill breeze and it sounds a bit asthmatic. I love it, sure. But I have very low standards. I have vicarious ambitions for these young men, clearly they are talented and they have constructed a gorgeous record but will your younger sister trade in her roller skates for a copy? Even with the factory aping cover art? But imagine this album in 1983. It would have sounded world changing, the european chill ambiance, the minimal sentiments(very Talk Talk) and the knowing pretentiousness of perfection tuned sharply. But now the world is so very small. My recurring theme. If I want to find out everything about Princeton the band, the university, the township, the seminary, etc...it is but a few clicks away. Click once and I will load a youtube clip of them describing their favorite records growing up and not be surprised that they loved Bell Biv Devoe and that they wear v-neck sweaters in the summer time because they are thin, on second click I will discover the value of the home they grew up in, on third the summer they spent with Josh Hartnett making sailcloth, etc... I was looking for upcoming rock and roll shows here in Denver because I am a rock and roller for certain and came across the RiotFest with a who's who of 90s has beens on the bill from Blink 182 to Rocket from the Crypt and down near the bottom of the roster is listed Stars. Imagine the music of Princeton mixed with the wit of Torquil from Stars? Sublime! If only evolution could occur within the span of a lifetime, I would breed these twin boys in Princeton and their gorgeous music with the charms of Canada. I do not want to pay 89 dollars to see Stars. But Byers, Colorado is lovely if you are a paleontologist or a funny car racer, and you should all come and embrace the Colorado aummer which has only just arrived. While browsing the website for RiotFest I also noted that somehow Alternative Press magazine is involved and while, most probably, that magazine has plumbed the same depths as Spin now does it was an historically important periodical during the days when you had to write witty correspondences to record labels hoping they would throw in a lyric sheet for an Able Tasmans record, a Rodan button, or a kind word for your penmanship. And you would write because some proto-blogger in 1993 compared some band you never heard of to the Smiths because they mentioned Philip Larkin in a lyric or called some shiny new thing the new Stereolab because they bought a farfisa but never learned how to play it. Uphill both ways my friend. This track is amazing. I may have to change my mind about this record, it may, in fact, be the greatest record ever. This is Louise and it sounds new and original and daring and gorgeous and all of the things you long for in life. Is it my own eternal sunniness that soured me on this record at first? I can recall the puzzlement when first I was listening to it and now it sounds fresh and exciting and my spirits are lifted. This benighted country has a new savior and it is the twins in Princeton. We thought we were meant to have twins not so long ago but there is only one heartbeat. My wife has two heartbeats at the moment and so the layered percussion could be a wombedelic interpretation of existence. Clamouring for your Heart. It started off as a small dream of a romance and now the looping has been layered and they have these cathedralesque group vocals and its a bit mesmeric and sparkly and my involuntary dance spasms are acting up once again. This is dance music for the head. I have a friend that is a DJ for a club night here in Denver and she might play this track and be very successful or she might opt for the new Minks record instead. Coming soon - my new conversion to the charms of Captured Tracks. Second to last track, very indiepop. How do they decide to keep this track as a tiny little indiepop track, polished only slightly and the others turn into attractive dance epics? This is really very nice as well. I am convinced, this is a wonderful experience. Perhaps sound is important after all. Here the strings support the chorus and turn this from filler to endearing and hauntingly remote. His vocals have a narcoleptic quality, wan but crystalline, the same as a frosted early morning in November just after the time change when we conserve the days to save them for summertime. Last track, falsetto, he sounds constricted, it does not feel effortlessly effeminate. Twinkles, a female voice in accompaniment and an exiguous arrangement and it's very close to perfect. Spacemen in prayer.

Prefab Sprout Devil Came A'Calling. I do not often read my blogger statistics page closely. I will admit to a certain frisson when the peaks are obvious but then I notice the traffic, that it is mainly for the very short posts where I say nothing at all rather than the loquacious entries where I say just as little. Brevity is key. I should start a twitter account. There was a not clever person on I Love Music who sold a box set of his twitter reviews. He's a small business owner. Now he's editor of Spin possibly. Paul Krugman should release a box set of his music reviews. I came across an entry of his concerning the Civil Wars recently and it was much more compelling than his economics pieces. If only politicians were wise enough to believe in the fantasy of the multiplier effect and spend 100 trillion dollars per year so that we would have an economy 1.8 times that size. And we'd all own New Zealand jet packs and first editions of Moose's Honeybee with the free seven inch inside. Paul Krugman's territory on the interwebs is called Conscience of a Liberal and he's devastated by the split of the Civil Wars. I am as well. But this is not the space for cynicism. This is about the new semi-unofficial record by Prefab Sprout. We were in pause, we were waiting for a new Sally Seltmann record to recharge our depleted wells of optimism and then this album appeared. Theoretically. Will I be committing some sort of egregious breech in protocol by expressing my love for this record? I haven't yet even discussed the last lost record that came to the surface a few years ago. Paddy Mcaloon was always, in interviews, discussing the roster of records he had recorded and abandoned and we laughed and dreamed and thought he's mad, he's really laying it on thick. But then these records have arrived. late. In the shadow of detached retinas or cataracts or deafness or tinnitus or any other catalogued harrowed disability that stalk the constantly infirm, whichever. First track is Adolescence and it's marvelous. I have just read an interview with him in Uncut and he states that he alone produced this album. None of the others are able to play on the record because his ears have let him down. But have they? No. This is marvelous. How does this boyish charm remain so effervescent and glowing even in the wake of apparent darkness and misfortune? There are electronic sounds that are abounding and just twinkles of electric guitars, no real percussion, but it's marvelous. Truly and effortlessly marvelous. Digital horns now at the end and it's marvelous. Like a brilliant novelist who has lost the use of his limbs dictating the genius that he can not contain within through a voice box to the undeserving world. Why will the world persist with its ignorance in the face of this? It's amazing. I am mad, truly. But song two is playing and there is a synthetic??? harmonica now and it sounds like a rush, as if he feels time's stalk over his shoulder, through shadows attached to even the day's brightest hours. His children had to learn silence. But then the house may have been filled with The BEst JEwel Thief in the World which means their home and hearth is blessed with joy. The last record was from 1992 or 1993 and it was filled with romance and paens to his optimism and ability to find beauty in the ordinary world of the ordinary. Strangely, for demos, that record seemed more ambitious than this record. This is smaller, closer to something like Protest Songs. THird track now, Devil Came a Calling. I was listening to a lecture by Daniel Barenboim and he had the same vitality in his voice as Paddy conveys in all of these songs. He must know that there is not anyone writing songs like this these days. There is David Scott, yes, but I don't know if David Scott is as self aware as Paddy Mcaloon, as comfortable in his brand of genius. David Scott is still the shy troubadour trying to win her over with his next song more beautiful than the last. There is a new Pearlfishers album soon as well, woo! But Paddy inhabits the characters that he creates so vividly in all of his songs, he's the Lothario, the winsome lover, the story filled outsider that somehow captures a moment pure and distilled with only a quick glance. Billy now. And he sticks with the music. He doesn't comment on the larger world. Are we let down by his reticence? I don't think so. Daniel Barenboim finished his lectures with some utopian nonsense about how music can build bridges because he has a tiny orchestra filled with the caring dissidents among the blood thirsty. Music can't change the world, sorry Paddy, sorry Daniel. And there is in our world only grievances paved over, grievances still simmering but only political correctness keeps us blind to these differences as if somehow we could just listen to Tristan and Isolde with new ears and a thoughtful posture we'd awaken to a brave new world. But it will not happen. I will play Billy to my co-workers, I won't actually, and they will abuse me for my lack of masculinity and the world will continue to spin on its current axis. The artist will never slay the wicked. It is the sad truth of reality. But when the wicked rest it is these monuments of grace and beauty which allow us to have a reason to stand up against the tyranny of darkness. We will blow up buildings in Syria and eventually force Assad from power by bribery or deceit but the root cause of this current disease will not be cured and Prefab Sprout will hopefully continue to release songs as strikingly loving as Grief Built the Taj Mahal. The veil of genius is what attracts me. I have been downloading many pleasant country albums recently to share with my bride and I wouldn't label any of them genius. Certainly not. But truth is the new Leann Rimes record is really rather brilliant. It's as if she had to become a dreadful home wrecker in order to discover the darkness that resides in her soul that allows her music to become embedded with a new passion and resonance. She's justifying her treachery through her art. In a modern world we would pay artists as proxy's to speak for us in their works of creation instead of boorish empty suits like John Kerry who is so consumed with the postmodern reality of not believing anything that he can't create a single cogent thought that could convince anyone of the rightness of even the most righteous crusade. Paddy would be my diplomat in these stakes and we would be run over by a silly tinhorn dictator the next day when his jolly tales of magicians and their assistants weary of being sawed in two creep over the airways through the official channels of diplomacy. I would double Paddy's pay however and he would write an inspiring patriotic anthem about he nostalgia of childhood spent in freedom in the lap of tyranny and we would fend off the invaders and park our Specialty bicycles on the graves of the vanquished and plant flowers as a requiem. MYsterious now, amazing. It's jaunty and cheerful and fills my heart with sweetness and love. I am as happy as I have ever been. Happiness has become a habit and I don't need reminding of its joys but then there is music such as this, or Sally Seltmann or Romantics Anonymous and I realize that habits need reinforcement. A tender kiss, a tender word, a tender thought shared in a turbulent moment can hold sway even as the world seems to collapse all around us. The Dreamer. I was a dreamer. This website was my own proxy in my struggle with life. I shied away from the difficult process of living, the connectedness of the living appalled and I hid alone with my nose in a book, my head in a pop song but now the Push Kings are nearly 40 and we've realized that Michelle Williams is a dreadful actress and many of the things we had hope of have turned to dust. Once I would close my eyes and like the protagonist of this song "become the dreamer" but I want now to sleep little, to welcome our child to the miracle of life and play Prefab Sprout records for our babies and have them grow up open minded and cheerful and optimistic and libertarian. And I would like then to be Mariners fans. I think. It seems off kilter enough for a child in Denver to grow up a fan of the Seattle Mariners, well versed in their history with posters of Tom Paciorek, Julio Cruz and Floyd Bannister on their walls. And when the impossible happens and the Mariners win a World Series they will celebrate only quietly and with a spin of The List of Impossible Things. My children will love Prefab Sprout, this will be our mantra as parents. And they will believe that magnets have souls and in Pythagoras as a reasonable alternative to divinity. This is glorious. Honest. There is Graeme Downes, there is Steven Millhauser, there is Pierre Mondou and there is Paddy Mcaloon and they represent the world's greatest sins of nescience. But we few will treasure their edifice of majestic inspiration and will pass it on to the generations coming and write in uninspiring sentences of the greatness that was Prefab Sprout. "Really, you should have heard the first four songs of Steve Mcqueen, for a college student cast adrift they meant everything...and even more".