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

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

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

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

Caitlin Rose The Stand-In. For a song that isn't on this album Caitlin Rose has made a video with clown makeup applied to her face. I find her delightful in clown makeup and wonder if it wouldn't be a more desirable world if instead of wearing our same, sad, soggy mugs we all applied clown makeup early in the morning. Rodeo clown for extra points. We could make forlorn, melancholic eyes on foreheads for days when we are blue and a flower bursting from yoru cheek when your heart is ready to burst with love and joy. The new Love Language is dreadful sure, but this is marvelous. My wife asked me to download her country music and I don't know anything about country music but I discovered an online article that talked about women in country because we can't discuss anything without the proper taxonomy and Caitlin was mentioned in said article and while she's country-ish sure, the banjo in the now playing I Was Cruel is a slight indication of her sympathies. But she's indie. She's covering the Arctic Monkeys covering Alex Turner while in rodeo clown makeup. And she's marvelous, by the way. The new Camera Obscura record wants to be this record. I purchased tickets for the Camera Obscura album and then I heard the new album and they are old. I am old. Do I sound old. Would I paint a rocking chair on my face to lament my chronology induced infirmities. Would some enterprising bureaucrat eager to impress his or her superior propose an overarching federal regulation on the faces that could be painted on your face when trying to express the interior of your soul and blazing life force? Seven categories to categorize human emotion, to neatly place everyone into a box on a census form to be hugged by a bureaucrat terrified by life and the possibility of possibility. Third track now, rocking out a bit. She's got sass. I suppose if you are singing about broken hearts that makes you country too. Her version of the Arctic Monkeys version of an Alex Turner song is something country sure. The kids commenting on the youtube find her sacrilegious for having the chutzpah to interpret the arctic monkeys interpreting alex turner. Are we aware that Alex Turner is the singer of the Arctic Monkeys? We haven't see submarine. Next track, a peppy waltz, perhaps Caitlin's makeup, here on Only a Clown most appropriately, should be bangs, moony blue yes and twitter photos of puppies and former new/it girl nostalgia. She could be the protagonist in my new novel about a man who walks through restaurants in dockers and button down striped shirts proclaiming himself satisfied because his restaurant empire stretches free from teh west coast to Tuscaloosa and here to Westminster, Colorado. Of course Caitlin would need to butch up her makeup to pull off that role. There was an invasion of Starbucks pop girls a few years back with Corinne Bailey Rae and Colbie Caillat and Sara Bareilles and now it seems there is a twee renaissance of goth inspired country chanteuses. They've got their thrift store Flying Burrito Brothers records, their Patsy Cline danglers and red lipstick and dust in between their teeth. Caitlin looks a bit less well lived than Patsy did. Is it only life experience that informs country music? My grandfather loved Hank Williams, apparently, I am unsure because I never did meet him. Hank Williams was a republican. Enough said. And a morphine addict and an alcoholic becaus eof a bad hip so when he sang "In anger unkind words are said that make the teardrops start" they come conjured from life lived through a lens of unhappiness tinged with success rather than the opposite. Caitlin surely has delightful parents who support her every move including the the cover of Arctic Monkeys covering Alex Turner and her being the hugest fan of Zooey Deschanel ever(rampant speculation). But we're not concerned with authenticity, not really, we are insincere and we lack depth and when we write about music its always with a nod and a wink. I wish I had passion and zeal and could explain to you that this record will change your life forever. it could, it might, try it while under the influence of rodeo clown make-up, but I love it. I love the song playing now, Dallas, and while she was born there I am not sure the geography within is precise. I am reading her wikipedia page and her mother shares a grammy with Taylor Swift. Excellent. My mother has not written with Taylor Swift but I imagine she might really enjoy this record. My mother has turned into an enigma for me these days. I wonder if the woman I've known and known forever is her true self. I wish not to make this an analysis of my parents, although they do not know the existence of this website, but I wonder if her life wouldn't be soundtracked with these melancholic chord changes and vignettes the same as Caitlin's tragic rise from Taylor Swift's best friend's daughter to country crooner. By my life was bereft of tragedy, my parents kept their miseries out of the public eye, I could sense the uneasiness of happily ever after only a few times and usually I was too self-involved in the dramas of being a teenage introvert with declining vision to notice more than I should have. I could write an autobiographical second novel and include the legendary Zayne, Zach and Ziyad Roumaya and the washing machine incident and the sadness of the day I drove to Windsor to listen to The Second COming and the true decline began. This is Caitlin's second record, someone from Tie magazine loved her first album. Have you read Time or Newsweek lately? it is US weekly without the heft. is this a reflection of the times or just an outlier? Can we not take seriousness at all, is life eternal adolescence? Will Caitlin Rose get divorced and have her own substance abuse problems and work them out through her pop songs instead of through a lucrative series of installments in Time magazine? Hard to say. Justin Beiber is the most important person on the planet these days and even he seems past it. Will the next global superstar be an assemblage of cells inside my wife's uterus some day? Ann Powers loves Caitlin Rose. We love Caitlin Rose. Silver Sings is on now, it is a bit Zooey, a bit Camera Obscura, a bit of the girls who wear their bachelorette veils on Broadway in Nashville in front of Jimmy Buffett's. This song is marvelous, the chiming chords and her wonderful croon reflect the lyrics almost perfectly. But the words are not weighed down with expectation. A sad country song is freighted with history and I am not sure a suburban 25 year old can tap into the history no matter the shade of her lipstick. Does anyone allow anything within to marinate these days? This instant culture of posting heartache and disappointment on a twitter account or on a blog red by 19 people per day about less than obscure records by delightfully perky young ladies. Look for a Nora Jane Struthers review soon, Ann Powers also approves of her, and NPR approves of Ann. is there meant to be a superfluous e? I am not certain. Bernie Reeves was on the radio lamenting the death of humanities education in the university and he has a compelling argument, how the study of the foundation of western civilization brought students to the hallowed heights of middlebrow appreciation of more than just their narcissistic fantasies. What has it to do with Caitlin? Nothing. I imagine there are already college courses that discuss her and her mother's best friend Taylor Swift though. The sheer of immediacy has outshone our covenant with the past. Menagerie is rocking. Her voice at the top of her register, the beat pedestrian four-four and the guitar standard Nashville lick number 37. I have pet theories that don't mean anything at all to anyone but one is that a songwriter truly masters their craft when they can write a mid-tempo number that is compelling and emotional. The fast numbers can camouflage vacuity and the slow ones by their ponderous affected pretensions can often say less than intended but the mid-tempo collage filled record that doesn't bore me to death is a sign that you've really made it. Old Numbers then, a waltz with a mid-range pace and gothic ambience and a skronky New Orleans horn. It's charming and forever and when Caitlin's kids are worshipping the fetus of the future this song will outlive even their object of affection.

I was terrifically excited. I had a marvelous day filled with marvelous news and had slightly returned as a marvelous boy and I was expecting it to brighten even further when I discovered the new Love Language album but it is, unfortunately, rather dire and rather not good. Really. The last record is one of the greatest records in the history of this planet but this...is not. Insincere sad faces press delete.

Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City. A few weeks ago we watched the Vampire Weekend at the Red Rocks. Most of the crowd seemed there to be wooed rather by Of Monsters and Men than by Vampire Weekend. It was delicately brisk. Of Monsters and Men played as the early evening sun spilt and while the crowd imbibed and tended to their chronic conditions with their prescriptions and then performed their stilted high altitude sway to morose sorts dressed as frumpy matrons we sat and considered love and the view and the sky that sat so near above us. It turned to darker night and Vampire Weekend arrived, we're old, thank goodness, and we cheered the clock's lethargy. I don't remember which song they played first, or third, or ninth, but it was lovely. Their small, tinny songs expanded nicely against the flatirons and infused the crowd with a bombastic sense of collective indifference. We stared out across the plains below, we spied our tiny little home, we counted the stars and danced to A-Punk and Unbelievers which is playing at the moment. Coincidentally I just heard this song on World Class Rock just yesterday, it sounded tinny and almost too tiny for ears on the radio. Are they a radio band then? Perhaps they are best measured and possibly appreciated through earbuds plugged into laptops. The words mixing in with the letters on the display. When my fingers tap in time with my square-ness stuck to office chairs in the middle of summer I can picture the synthesized crescendo intersperesed among excerpts from condensed versions of John Updike or Upton Sinclair or Helen Gurley Brown. My uncle by marriage has just written a book. He wrote it and then strangely he has allowed others to read it. Do people do such things? I wonder. In the early days of blogging, long ago, I've been at this almost 12 years I would regularly change the name of my blog if I believed I was achieving any level of notoriety on the interwebs. I am not so concerned these days. I receive quite a few hits actually, mostly for My Autumn Empire incoherency but also for the gems hidden in the back catalog. Unbelievers has ended. And now the first single Step. The words don't mean anything at all. He spouts them in public, he acts terrifically proud when speaking of them in interviews. They are a hygienic band. I appreciate that. Fact: Modest Mouse were the worst band of the 2000s. It's true, not even Johnny Marr could disagree. The words are something approaching an avant garde landscape. The visual sense is overly stimulated so that a view from the inside of minds on Step is distressingly oblique, common and static filled. We watched The Bling Ring and I expected Vampire Weekend because Sophia Coppola is down with the kids but we missed Vampire Weekend and marveled at how brilliantly she captured the vacuous narcissism of the age, the nihilistic pursuit of celebrity, a fusing with the collective consciousness of the facebook nation. It was disturbingly empty. Diane Young now, this is Vampire Weekend circa 2007. These are the staples, the Ford Crown Victoria of the model line. When we were shivering in the wake at Red Rocks we oticed Ezra Koenig playing at playing Elvis Presley and it's obvious here in between the squelches and the momentum that the king of rock'n'roll has reached down from the clouds and blessed his side part. They are still a young band but they are not as young as they once were. Profundity, take notes. But it was just a few years ago when they were snot-nosed punks, fresh faced, exciting. And now? Do they listen to the Beach Boys and The Smiths? Do bands today have that archivist sense that so many brilliant bands in the past had or are they caught up in the present, in their Flo-Rida's and their Robin Thickes. Are they part of this rush to celebrity? Vampire Weekend on Girls this week! The headline buried in the surf. If ever a show had a short shelf life it is Girls. It's brilliant, certainly, but it is so wrapped up in the superficial that I can't imagine it resonating beyond the sell by date of the gouda or hummus. But in our newly trendy neighborhood we might soon hear the strains of Don't Lie wafting over the rows of Catalpas in bloom. When we were out walking the other evening we spotted what might be classified as a hipster: species unshaven, unclean, uninteresting, unromantic walking along the road while we gasped from across the way. A true hipster neighborhood would banish us for considering Vampire Weekend at all. Better to love their Beiber ironically and their faux John Mayer guitar solos played on their grandmother's expensive guitars at hipster christenings for hipster babies born into a world of diffidence and chemical amendments. I only have one hipster friend. She was not into Vampire Weekend when I last met her. I attempted to convince her of their brilliance but I was not the first one in, her friends, the hipsters, had contaminated her and she has a mind of her own and she may have thought they were dreadful. It is a legitimate opinion in some circles. We live in a square. It is part of our own avant garde landscape. Hannah Hunt starring a kinetic gardener populating thoughts along Interstate 10. They should have taken the train, gardening can be thought on luxuriantly while riding the rails, while embracing the peak of fine living circa 1953. Rail is one of the most regulated industries in the world, thus it is frozen in time, the speakers would spill Ann Murray if they hadn't stopped working before Snowbird entranced the world. A Canadian songbird is a repeating fugue of American life. Will Ann sing a charity track for the tragedy in Quebec. For the airplane crash in San Francisco, or the Islamists in Tahrir Square? Unknown. Vampire Weekend are incoherent to be political but they dutifully avoid taking a stand. But could they possibly surprise anyone with an expression of where they stand? Everlasting Arms speaks of stands, not the bleachers, not the stands that hold umbrellas in place, not the stands of leaf spot blighted Aspens, but their position on the unimportant issues of the day that take precedence in the collective heart that rules our lives these days. A society ruled by emotion and the fear of judgement. We will judge you and you and you and Vampire Weekend. We judge them splendid. If apolitical. The sky blushes. The strings digitized and pasteurized, the childlike voice. I appreciate that he is willing to make his voice ugly in pursuit of the esoteric. The chicken dance song has begun just now. Finger Back. It's for the jazzercise class for mothers who are pregnant by donors anonymous or unknowing, wear your ballet slippers, slide across the epay floors in sophisticated studios on impoverished avenues of dense urban collectives. We need to take a yodeling class. Is that imperialistic. Worship You now, they do yodel, then it's rather lovely, it smacks a bit anthemic, soaring voice, the drummer enthusiastic and the organ pitched climactic. It's an ear worm, as a professional reviewer might say while painting vividly with words. I despise people who would deign to explain to you why this song is not nearly as good as the third track on the new Ruby Pins album with professional credentials to back up their wrongheadedness. Actually, I am desperate to hear the Ruby Pins record. Grass Widow! They're lovely, sure, I should write about them some day soon, but they are pedestrian and pretty and Ruby P promises something a bit more austere and threatening. Youth and its fleeting grasp taunts Ezra Koenig. Vampire Weekend will never be able to be affixed with the label "threatening". My mother would love them. We called my parents en route to Red Rocks to the show. We should have conferenced them in with the band. They could have hopped on a train and been here in time for the Gezi album. My father could do sit-ups and push-ups on the train and beat my face up with his six pack of stomach muscles and I'd feel embarrassed for his having a six pack in his seventies. Were I to pick a surreptitious six pack smuggler in Vampire Weekend I would select the drummer as top candidate. Drummers are meant to be fit. Their mother's must be so proud of their time in the shuttle run. Maybe a drummer on steroids would join Danzig and then compete in the strongest man competition. Playful whee-ing in the the chorus run-out, wordless and fertile. Now a piano tinkle and a spoken word moment of seriousness. This record is fantastically charming. Ya Hey is only semi-wordless. In the night air it lingers with anticipation. Now to Hudson, the spooky side of Vampire Weekend. IDM programming, some selective opining on the European crisis??? Or the Hudson's river seduction of Northern New Jersey and the ruins of lives washing out to sea, the Greeks entombed by dreams of Deutsche marks and the words are rather interesting here. Is he not so incoherent then? Are his poems deeply furrowed pathways into the memory of western civilization afloat on a sea of arithmetic and philosophy? Nicomachus and Gauss, Hypatia and Godel, Sappho and Nina, the world and its shadow, life and anti-life, his name is alive. This album speaks to the man inside the boy, the night inside the dawn, and we take note of time's progress and turn to dreaming for hope eternal as the final moments fade to black.

Orca Team Restraint.  Hip or hips.  Is it the guitar?  Spindly, unimpressive.  Is it the home movie quality videos?  Gauzey, nostalgic.  Is it his voice?  Lovely, confident.  Their palette is limited.  A guitar, a bass, a drum and his voice.  I know, I have denigrated every band on the planet.  But there is a lounge act quality that is superseded by their ability to make even this rudimentary exercise as feel good esthetes feel exceedingly impressive. We had the faded opportunity to see Orca Team in person and we failed.  It was late, it was a school night, we are old, all dreadful excuses - I am well aware, but we did not attend.  We should have.  Because this music is vital and alive.  All of the songs are slight variations of each other but imagine the interaction between the collective consciousness of an audience in a sweaty summer club and the singer in hot pants and bow tie, the guitar player in crinoline and the drummer playing fills to impress their mother.  It is unfortunate but even drummer's have mothers as we found on the last Allo Darlin' album and democracy is evil.  It seems their greatest aspiration is to be the house band in the next Quentin Tarantino movie.  See them in catholic school girl uniforms playing their slinky tunes to general indifference to the world t large and later hipsters dressing as them at Tarantino parties.  Do Tarantino parties actually exist or was that a concoction by Gilmore Grirls to put Rory Gilmore in Gogo Yubari gear to titillate the Aspergers set.  Is Edward Snowden Aspergers positive?  Is he making lists of his top five favorite John McEntire productions while hiding out in his Moscow aiport.  A few years back the Economist wrote a piece in their holiday issue about the joys of bribing your way through Russian airports.  I hope poor Edward is familiar.  Top track is playing now - Michael;.  In spite of the fact that I am barely mentioning the record in fact it is brilliant.   Edward Snowden vs. Bradley Manning in a battle for the hearts of mousy 20-something actresses who are looking for gentle souls.  Perhaps Edward is reading Katherine Angel's Unmastered while haunting terminals, eating Toblerone and running from the NSA, on the moving walkway just "out of reach".  I've just finished reading a review of Unmastered and am now intrigued.  Perhaps were I able to express myself without cliche, the same as Katherine has done, "Fuck Me.  Yes, Fuck Me." I could be so celebrated by writers in the Observer.  when my book is released from the great beyond it will contain pre-written blurbs about how the singer from Orca Team just could not put it down.  Nursing home fiction is where the kids are at.  Are Orca Team having loads of sex?  He has this ultra cool sheen of sophistication and puritanical filth, the same as an academic parsing the sexual nature of humans but could it be an act, is his persona strictly relegated to the stage where he exhibits great power over the minor masses that come ot see him and lust for his bass lines and polished croon.  When song six begins Little Suit begins a weariness sets in, you imagine you've heard this bass line before, his voice unchanging, affectless, pristine and cherubic.  They are from Portland.  I have never been to Portland but I imagine it to be the worst city on the planet.  Blubird, diaeresis excluded, were from Portland.  Alistair Fitchett was a large fan.  I love Unpopular but I read the playlists he has posted and I can't imagine ever going back, back to this self-imagined utopia that once was indiepop.  I don't know any of the bands he has posted.  Is each and every one brilliant?  Possibly.  In the days before being old it would have upset me that there existed genius in indiepop that I was unaware of, but these days, not so much.  I am seeking ambition perhaps.  Ambition of spirt and mind is where I am led.  I hope.  If...  The movie?  I can't tell.  I saw it once ages before, there was the Mike Alway obsession.  Perhaps Orca Team would have been too obvious for Alway.  They're better than the Klaxon 5 anyhow.  But there is this superficialness to the music, surface over soul, I have ben reading design blogs and it is difficult to combine the soul defining from the curators or soul destroyed.  That is cruel.  But is your world populated by things, fashion, ephemera or passion.  Is it so simplistic?  Are Orca Team passionate purveyors of their art?  Seemingly.  I should have seen them live and then offered a more knowing exposition but the music as delectable as it appears doesn't linger.  The Lowest Point, it could be harrowing, a life cast into the abyss by heartbreak but then the drummer comes in, drummer's mothers are a scourge.  When we have children I hope none of our children become drummers.  Not even should they be drummers that sing.  A laundry list of how he wrought his devastation, but the drums, the bass...Will they acquire a new sense of ambition on the next record?  Will they make another record?  Where do the paths to innovation lie within their ensemble?  Is it just more about refinements, better threads, improved choreography and glitter ball sex as Christmas.  Last track, a bit more restrained, mysterious, smaller than life, lovely, wonderful.        

Candy Claws Ceres and Calypso in the Deep Time.  Fort Collins' mightiest!  Back to plug their board into the tall fescue and find it stunning that that particular cultivar is digital rather than analogue.  They are all about working at the upper levels of the eq.  "Joel, this is not a toy for you and your friends.".  Hippies should be more gentle.  Firebreather is more gentle.  On Firebreather records, which are, ostensibly, Candy Claws records, the music and the voice live separate existences, brought together in redefined marriage by Anthony Kennedy's divine jurisprudence.  Strange that as a society has decentralized the entire concept of marriage in the foundation of western civilization that all of a sudden a person's worth is decided strictly upon one issue.  It's true, marriage is overrated.  I am married.  I love being married and everyone should be married.  But truly, it is overrated in the sense of its cultural importance.  I have been reading The Story of Civilization and it is a constant refrain, people rarely married for love, it was an obligation to the bloodline, to the family, to foreign policy, work rules, etc...But now apparently love is all we need.  It isn't.  We also need Candy Claws records.  They are certainly free of cynicism and this record could be a dream interrupted, perhaps they need to dial down the dosage of the Ambien, perhaps instead of the cables being plugged into the turf being watered outside the studio window they were attached as electrodes to the hippie head and of the Candy dude.  His brain a mishmash of static and COBE radiation.  Robert Goddard could be a distant relative.  As a Candy Claws record it is more similar to the first record than the spaced out last record.  Short songs, pop song structures, it could have started life as a Firebreather record for all we know.  It is a concept record about something cosmic and far out and it is a lovely one.  But these days I listen to records with hope that I can play these songs in the car, on a hill covered highway, when dark and my wife will turn to me and smile and squeeze my hand gently as it rests on the gear shift.  But when I play for her the new Candy Claws record and the mélange of distortion and impenetrableness comes forward for a slight introduction I imagine her turning her gaze to the window and dreaming of Zach Condon or worse Marcus Mumford.  The mosquitoes have arrived, I am typing this in my back yard, next to the soon to not be vacant home that sold for 40,000 dollars more than I paid for my house.  Madness.  Pangea Girls begins, it could have been marvelous, really, but it is just nice enough.  The evening continues now inside, in the kitchen, along the windows a line up of mosquitoes engaged in mating dances that date back to the Triassic.  Hmmm...they've reimagined Peppermint Delight as Pangea Girls, not successfully.  Peppermint Delight is a mix cd staple for me and although my career as a mixologist has waned in recent days I still have great success with that particular song and will not be altering my mix for the updated version.  The mosquitoes are now singing, odes for Gladiator bugs and other mythical creatures of the underworld and we're disappointed to see that the hailstorm that visited last evening was not impressive enough to result in a new roof from the insurance company.  Look at me sounding all progressive.  Puns, ha.  Next track, incomprehensible, but pleasantly so.  Are they shy?  Are they embarrassed?  These could be the loveliest songs ever made in Fort Collins, Colorado, they still might be, but they have mucked them up.  It's just the same as when Peter Jefferies married Jean Smith and decided to make Two Foot Flame records with Michael Morley when Michael Morley wasn't painting fences and when Jean Smith had eaten his talent with blood curdled on her fangs.  I am sure Jean Smith is lovely actually, just as I am sure these songs are lovely, but in the purposing of art the first thing that must be sacrificed is beauty.  Maybe I need to buy the CD.  Such anachronistic thoughts enter my mind on occasion.  There is a movie about to be made, allegedly, about some American's overwrought despair at the Smiths creaking up and his invasion of a heavy metal station in 1987 to force them to play Smiths tracks for 24 hours straight.  Sybil from Downton Abbey is scheduled to star, no wonder her eclampsia, but will it draw a significant audience?  Better to make a film about some fan's distress after discovering that the Cardigan's Gran Turismo is actually a classic album but she can't convince a single other person on the planet about this universal truth and her questioning whether all of the inhabitants of the planet have been infected with some otherworldly disease that forsakes for them the truth.  Kate Upton could play the Cardigans singer.  This record is frustrating, From Prairie(Charade) is up now and it could be a haunting, antiqued melodious adventure in evolutionary theory but we are still at war with our ear drums.  Perhaps, like the unisexual evolution in Boulder, there has been movement in human adaptation in Fort Collins and as a resident of Westminster my geographical isolation means I don't yet possess the dolphin sonar array and offset jaw line which allows me to make sense of the music on offer.  I can sense it's gorgeousness, viscerally but not as the divinely rational creature I am.  God apparently invented marriage although it was around long before we invented God.  Long before we invented the stultifying culture of consensus and uniformity.  It started with Mtv, when everyone became a fan of Skid Row because Martha Quinn overlooked Sebastian Bach's homophobic tee shirt, and then the goal of life became to have a reality tv existence rather than an actual one it is now acceptable only to have the same set of beliefs as your favorite character on How I Met Your Mother, anyone stepping outside of the boundaries of such conventions will be sprayed with Sebastian Bach's tee shirt.  Brendan O'Neill was right.  I wish I could speak of the songs, this one is lovelier than the one before and it was the loveliest thing ever but they are like the White Throated Needletail, swimming through the air between them and us just close enough to have their head chopped off by the Scottish wind turbines they have hidden in their pro tools.  Global warming has abandoned us this summer, we had snow this past May 1st and now that July is very nearly arrived the temps will not break out of the 80s.  James Hansen save us from the coming iceocalypse!    Maybe a love story between James Hansen and the White Throated Needletail will provide the libretto for the next Candy Claws record which promises to be even more inscrutable than the last one.  James Hansen is a enviable leading man, Candy Claws can smear his entrails across a piece of celluloid and expose him to the maunder minimum and make beautiful light where music should exist in the space between the speakers and my heart.  I was meant to see Camera Obscura this last Thursday at the prettied up Gothic Theater but I was more interested in watering the lawn.  It seemed more important to maintain my obligation to my lawn than to see Tracey Anne warble through her new role as Zooey Deschanel for smart kids.  Night Ela.  Maybe the leaked copies are contaminated with grodiness.  This could be marvelous and lonely, honestly, I could fall deeply in love with this record.  But it is just nice.  In Minturn, when the kids turn up to watch Candy Claws play next to Lake Constantine, they will hold each other and wonder why science is so mysterious, is there an intelligent designer, are the alpine glaciers going to leave us for the southern hemisphere, will the Denver Nuggets ever win a playoff series and why did I wait so long before upgrading my swamp cooler.  Humidity, it is a magnificent phenomenon.  It used to exist only in one place in my world, at the Denver Aquarium, where my friend the Napoleon Wrasse would wink at my as my asthma was induced by the tropical atmosphere.  In the time of Candy Claws records it was more humid and there was less oxygen.  Gladiator bugs could have been substantial members of the food chain consuming baby Thrinaxodons and ferns.  We live near to Fern street, perhaps if I stand on Fern Street while this record plays out of my tinny MacBook speakers I might then make the connection between the music and the harmony of the spheres and all will become lucid and I will have achieved enlightenment and merge with the sould of poets and Gladiator Bugs from all eternity.  For now, it's just ok. 

Sin Fang Flowers.  It has been some time since last we were acquainted.  When last we had spoken the world looked much different than it does now.  We had mentioned our foundling disappointment in the new Animal Collective.  We are not certain that we have listened to that album since.  Perhaps it has aged rather well.  Sin Fang are fans.  This is the voice of an adolescent Animal Collective, charter school kid, the version that the cast of DeadGirl goes for maple pecan pancakes to.  He's Seabear.  I've listened to their last album only a few times.  I remember it being lovely, once or twice.  He's certainly someone who could benefit from playing a show in Boulder.  He could open for Beth Orton. He could supplant Sam in her attentions.  He's lovely, truly.  First track is charming, lyrics less than the music but the impression is impressively soft.  In Boulder there is a new anthropological phenomenon. Or rather an evolutionary breakthrough--the merging of gender.  While at a Beth Orton show last autumn we discovered that while in Boulder it is rather difficult to discern the gender of strangers in a darkened room. Lively debates raged all evening upon whether our fellow attendees were male or whether they were female.  They were nearly universally blond, androgyne(obviously), physiques similar to 11 year old boys, collar length hair, and gender neutral dysmorphic perturbations.  Is it similar in all "progressive" locations?  Will they all perish when the windmills revolt, when the seabirds turn on the inhabitants, headless seabirds with an attitude and no particular carnivorous discernment between gender.  Second track has begun.  Is he a big fan of the Radio Dept as well?  Baby Bird?  Vocals are gently distorted, the drum machines are sedate, the politics are surely collectivist.  I enjoy this track as well.  He's all too lovely.  There was a show I used to be so fond of, in bachelordom, where they would record artists in very intimate settings--gym showers, back alleys, fish markets and when they produced a segment with Seabear(Sin Fang in band disguise) they recorded in his living room with a young girl accompanying the band as rhythm dancer.  It was charming.  This is charming, he has an effortless insouciance that carries forward through the air between earbuds.  In between the wires on the side of my head is an undiscovered country with indeterminate accents and punctuation.  This is very Baby Bird-esque.  Back before that may have been considered an epithet.  How exciting was it to discover a new Baby Bird home recording treasure, it was 1995 or 1996.  Impending Fatherhood made some the Happiest.... They had ever been and they could be found later, in some forthcoming epoch Dying Happy.  Uncool, I know.  Third track, still reminiscent of Stephen Jones, at least to my defective ears.  I am trying to remember what he looks like, surely an image is only a google away, but more interesting to caress the folds of my memory to recreate the version of Sin Fang that I find most pleasing.  He is unisex, black turtleneck, asexual glasses and eyebrows, fragile fingers and sharp canines.  And a soft step to sidle next to friends and enemies.  Fourth track.  I was linked on the My Autumn Empire facebook page and my page views have greatly increased as my activity has dwindled.  I refuse to make the appropriate correlation.  I have decided to begin to write more again.  I have started writing a second book.  When I write a book I write very differently than I do here.  This is mainly stream of conscious writing, self-indulgent and meaningless.  When I attempt to write a book; I've finished a "book" once, I turn more uncertain, more deliberate and I rewrite the same sentence eleven times and then don't show it to anyone ever even as I go to sleep each evening believing truly in my heart that I've written something that may worry over attention from someone, somewhere.    Next track, softer, sampled twinkles, his voice multi-tracked, gentleness on mountaintops of cotton candy and down feathers.  He is destined to live in Boulder I am sure.  I've thought that my novel should be a science fiction tale of a strange conspiracy born in Boulder where a merged gender emerges and is thirsty for conquest, imperialist androgynes bent on conversion of the masses to the Camaro crash helmet.  Words are tender, the sense is introspective.  He is also Seabear.  I played Seabear for my wife and she was not deeply impressed, softly, we argued over whether it was folk music and I had to put on my Linnaeus pants and discuss how there are different classifications of folk music and as he is from Iceland this is the Icelandic variant, rare in these parts but still very much representative of the genus.  Grouped shouty vocals at the end, make things a bit more thrilling, only slightly.  The reason the newest Animal Collective is disappointing is because it lacks a heart.  It exists without a heartbeat, the heartbeat rhythm that makes one mistake mundanity for modernity, incompetence for destiny and incoherence for enchantment.  Next track, treated vocals, more shouty bits, is he auditioning for Milky Wimpshake then?  They are meant to release another album soon.  Jump for joy.  Play this album until that day comes.  It is much better than the last Sin Fang album.  I seem to remember not thinking enough of that record to even offer an hour's worth of demotic dyspepsia.  This is Sin Fang having been greatly improved.  We are on now to track 7 Catcher, it is about something, we are not really that concerned over the lyrical content but it's cheerful and blood rushes to the tips of my fingers as I type in concert to the rhythm.  Jungle squeals made by tiny macramé puppets recorded under water, his own androgyne voice, his narrow, slight, small shoulders, his dexterity on display.  It is now a few months since I have begun this entry.  When once I was alone, eternally, now we are altogether, my progressive compatriots and me.  We will soon have a pair as neighbors, tattoos and babies and luxuriant relations.  Our home is apparently now worth 50,000 dollars more than when we purchased it, than it was one month ago.  Insanity breeds like prokaryotes, sans nucleus, like some sort of cytoplasmic gelatinous ooze that spreads by stolons or rhizomes and turns the land to quicksand that threatens to swallow the entirety of the G8.  That was a terrific, terrific song.  I haven't listened to this album since last I haunted the keyboard with my ordinary ordinariness.  I have a really dreadful haircut at the moment and sideburns and I am thinner than I once was, not as thin as I've been in my past life.  Kazoo orchestras and heartbeats and anticipation for a new Sally Seltmann record.  What if Sin Fang was a Sally fan, and what if he wrote an album in anticipation of a new Sally Seltmann record.  It might sound something like this.  These tracks have a cheer quality to them, anthemic, marching percussion, these tracks are not standing still they are bursting through your front door, having a cup of tea, watching the Premier League on ESPN2 and then tussling your hair, your poorly coiffured head, before catching a wave, an oscillation through the wall receptacle, past the transformer, through the spun secondary into the primaries out into pure plasma excitement.  Plasma may be overstating it, this is more the sound of a not yet room temperature toaster coil.  I had my annual work performance review at work and my lack of confidence when writing spills over, often, into my work.  I am valued far more than I imagine.  I was given a glimpse into a possible future and I was caught awake while dreaming, at an Indian buffet, across from my boss that is more than a decade younger than I am.  Was he speaking for himself or was he channeling the dark forces that operate behind the scenes at our organization.  Unknown.  Perhaps Sin Fang has written this song for me, an upbeat number called
Everything Alright.  Iceland is not the happiest place on earth.  Today I learned from HGTV that that distinction belongs to the magical pixie infested kingdom of Denmark.  On HGTV was a terrifically conceited and materialistic American of subcontinent descent who was dying to discover why the Danes were so happy.  I discovered her blog later, she doesn't seem to have any answers but from other research it could be sloth that is the key to happiness.  In only 3 metropolitan areas do the majority of adults have an occupation.  Terrific to live on other people's money.  While I fret over my unimportant work done well, Danes live unfettered, free to cultivate their fashionable xenophobia.  Another cheerful track this, Not Enough.  Undistinguishable from the other pedestrian mirth but enjoyable all the same.  I am writing with a slight case of detachment in this entry, as if I need to reintroduce myself to the movement across a qwerty.  I'd rather attempt to understand how Daniel Evan Weiss dances across a keyboard, is that the key to being a brilliant writer, to discover the hidden patterns that exist in the microfilamentous connections between keys on a keyboard.  Your J secretly exchanging ions and cations with the F6 key and somehow some born with a extra sensory ability to interpret the vibrations that emanate as a result and turn it into prose.  Prosaic, I have untapped an endless vein, but Poetry and Prose and the uncommon, the especial, unknown lie the pathways between my hands and the heart.  I am sad because tis lovely little bookshop dance record has not helped me to undiscover my inadequacies.   

New Animal Collective is disappointing.  When's the next Panda Bear record then?

My Autumn Empire II. When I was a child there lived down the street from me two sisters. They were awkward, exceedingly intelligent and in ancient days subject to a litany of abuse, that is, until the one summer when the eldest came into bloom followed soon after by younger sister. Derision turned to lust but the tragedy of a young boy's folly had been laid, the story already cast. How is this relevant to My Autumn Empire? Well "A" and "I" are like Epic45. For years we were unimpressed, we nodded off, frankly we were indifferent. And then came Weathering. Have you not yet realized what a monument to glory and beauty that record is? You have probably not. We all laugh and are empathically generating the most desperate sadness for you. The first My Autumn Empire record was greatly anticipated on this strange little website. It was nice, it was a July Skies record made in the dark. Where Antony harding painted with color and warmth, My Autumn Empire was more deflecting choosing to surround his music less with the pastoral whimsy of England gone past and more of the ideal of the idyll. But then there is Weathering and then there is this. First track, a bit of Gorky's dreaminess, second track, a bit more substantial a Soft Machine-esque romp through the hit parade of dreams and the digitization of nature. But the bits and bytes and 0's and 1's have had their edges sanded off, their humanity restored, less instagram more kodachrome. There is a luminous sheen to the recording now. Did he pack away all of the lovely bits from the Weathering recording session, all of the good vibes, all of the love and harmony and joy and compress it into the grooves of these songs. I believe that he has. I began writing this entry before I took a journey north. Into Alaska. The final frontier for Americans with an expired passport. We were disappointed because we did not see a moose. Or Moose. We did see bears at great distances, elf'n'safety you know and Kenneth our bus driver was a stickler. Near to us on a bus a Korean family eliciting sympathy from all around because the patriarch, not handling the discomfiture of 195 culverts being installed along the park road, emptied the the contents of his stomach into Kenneth's clear plastic trash sack. kenneth was a rock, our rock. We made it to Eileson in a a few hours and we were members of the 30% club who get to see Denali and it is an impressive site. Kenneth played it up, he promised us wildlife and he failed to deliver. Caribou dancing on patches of summer snow off in the distance, arctic squirrels and bear cubs disinterested and non-photogenically camouflaged do not not add up to irrepressible memories. We pressed buttons on interactive displays and wrapped our hands in bear pelts. Later that week we saw Muck Oxen, caged, sexually frustrated, but without Kenneth. Third track. This has a 70's feel as if mixed through a Neil Halstead trademarked sepia filter. Repetition, space age effects and gentle whispers. It is all a bit Pink Floyd really. If Pink Floyd were as twee as Syd Barret imagined they would be. if Roger Waters wasn't such an accountant. If Roger Gilmour had a spine. It's nothing at all to do with mathematics, it's respiring, it is music with lungs and an atmosphere. The notes and coos flourishing in the richly bio-diverse ecosystem. There are only 8 tracks. It has not been long since the last My Autumn Empire album. It's dreadfully sensitive. I am somewhere in the middle on the sensitive scale. I operate chain saws and heavy equipment and I am tasked, at work, with terminating most of our employees and I am able to justify my grim existence as such but I am sensitive. I am able to eat breakfast at Watercourse in Denver and while I am certain I am pegged as a Will Durant loving liberal, in the traditional sense, I feel not uncomfortable but gently observant. We rode the train in Alaska. There was an alleged moose sighting while we were on board but I don't count a view of the rump as a genuine experience. But train travel is inspiring. Alaska, being the end of the world, is inspiringly isolated. The imagination needn't seek crevices and corners to hide to create a world more richly nuanced than that which is thrust upon our senses by entrepreneurs and service workers. It is nature unedited, and when digitized through the human glance and recorded on the cerebral cortex it is there to be painted exuberantly with the brush strokes of loneliness turned away by a marvelous travel companion whose face competed with the glory of divinity infused wilderness. The trees seemed lonely. Black Spruce and Birch. Sad, longing for friendship from their friends the Linden or Locust or Filbert. Until we reached near to Anchorage it was a desperately barren florascape. Even the bears were singularly unimpressive. A Grizzly Bear at 300 pounds sounds like a pet. Fourth track Sleeves, a jam, cosmic baby. Epic45 don't really jam. Do they? Perhaps these are the Weathering rejects where the other Epic45 person that isn't My Autumn Empire turns up his nose at the dirty hippie nonsense. The tie dye silliness. The 6 minute long nothingness. But it's a repeating dream, not unlovely at all. Next track. Nick Drake's photo has been put back into its place above the mantlepiece, acoustic finger exercises, different from July Skies. Epic45 can play guitar it appears. July Skies can't, not quite. No vocals. Two guitars intertwined, shy, one more than the other, a repeating motif and tenderness underneath. Nice. Now to Say it Again(I'll Kill You), very Nick Nicely through the Halstead filter. The lyrics are meant to be ironically shocking or whatever, soaring wordless bits, now a compressed trumpet smeared across the mix with twinkles and a heavenly halo interceding. Wonderful. This is a Gary Wright record, a Dan Fogelberg record, and we don't mind. Sensitive 70s men had facial hair the same as sensitive men from the 2010's. Fleet Foxes, the wait staff at Watercourse, Alexi Murdoch. Next track, vocals recorded down a phone line. This is a huge improvement over the first My Autumn Empire album. Truly stunning. It sounds a band. Is it a band? He's laying down a slinky electric riff next to his twee twaddle. A dream. Distortion, an acoustic guitar, primitive drum falls. It sounds as if his world is suffering the implosion of live without love, of living without hope, it would have rendered me speechless and thoughtful only a few months ago and now it sounds the sound of romantic happiness. Last track, Sleep, a lullaby. In the vein of Spectrum's Go To Sleep. The words a puzzle, a matryoshka doll. Now an effervescent organ. This is organic and heaven bound all at once. The songs dig their tap root deep beneath the verdant landscape and the tendrils of rhizomes and shoots and stolons interact and build upon each other until they coalesce into a portal into the world of laser light shows and hallucinogenic drugs and unfortunate facial hair even among the nonsensitive, the republicans and country line dancers. If I were to shave my head and listen to this album hair would grow unbidden in places unwarranted, on adams apples and inside my duodenum and my children would be conceived al hijra and be born with an inherent love of My Autumn Empire embedded in their genetic code.

Beirut The Rip Tide. Accordion, drums, horn, amazingness. Is there a more under appreciated band than Beirut? His is the oldest soul to grace a baby fat adumbrated face in a very long time. First track- a joyful sing along, effortlessly graceful, heart rending and majestic. Big. Not quite La LLorona massive but production wise things are greatly improved in the land of former gypsies, flugelhorns and Santa Fe area codes on mobile phones. I am meeting a great number of people from Albuquerque these days but not so Santa Fe'ans. I met an Albequerquean in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and two last evening at dinner. New Mexico just doesn't have the same sense that Colorado has, it seems more authentically part of the frontier still, barely tethered to the mainland, anchors oriented in the opposite direction, the soil radioactive by leeching and stiff breezes generated from horizon fall out and anasazi voodoo. Second track-Santa Fe, bouncy, music a trifle pianola-esque, music box music in repetition, his voice elegant and distant and the words just a bit out of focus. Are they masked because he does not enjoy the sound of his voice? It is truly the loveliest thing. The lyrics are always spare but most always gentle and poignant. Most always, perhaps always, a middle section of wordless worldliness and moonshot echoes and choruses uknown. Back to the pianola. Did he retreat to his inner New Mexico to record this record? Was the journey metaphysical? He's on and on about Santa Fe at the moment. I have never been. I was invited to Wisconsin on this past weekend. My roots are in the Midwest and as such the ghosts that inhabit these songs are foreign, disassociated, jin-like, relics of a mixture of betrayal and superstition. In fact they are clearly more interesting than an exposition of the darkness that lies at the heart of Sterling Heights, MI which is where I was raised. His voice is infused with a natural melancholia and the penchant for forlorn storytelling must somehow be tied both to genetics and the environment of being isolated on an alien plot. And Beirut is married now. I have been expressing my own delight at being in love. And now I am writing in a state of nervousness. When you are a loner used to being alone, enjoying Beirut in an insular existence it becomes doubly terrifying should you be wrenched back from happiness and cast back into a life without meaning. I mean to be a better person because I mean to be the person that someone already believes me to be. It is the most exciting process I have undergone to gain confidence that comes from without and from the feelings manufactured within because of the sustenance of joy and wonder. Love is everything else, Beirut is almost...but not quite. I had not had a proper reaction to this record for a very long time, it has not been the new Beirut record for some time but I have not come to terms even now. It's pleasant and terrific and smartly produced but hmmm...first there was the astonishment of youth, next the thrill of escapism not once but twice, the idea that brass could be so expressive and absolutely all encompassing was until March of the Zapotec unknowable to the likes of us. Next track, fourth track, Goshen, now my worries haunt my heart and I want to use this forum to express my terrors only. But it is the distance, the unfamiliarity of the silences spent in between the moments when life seems effortless, when with Goshen's elegiac horn refrain as soundtrack to a confluence of joy. Joy Joy Joy. I have found it outside of this existence as a conduit between the longings of pop singers and the soil falling over my head. Four tracks, four wonderful tracks, perhaps my expectations were too far evolved. I outpaced the boy wonder. He's married now, settled, content, professional. Fifth track Payne's Bay, is it all too familiar. The rustic west, the glint caressed from the big sky at sunset. The dryness can be wearying. Desmond Morris has called humans the aquatic ape. I am coming around to becoming an adherent. A lovely coda, a female voice has joined him and the song has begun its descent into dormancy, the middle of the day when the sun as terrorist drives the sane from view of the public into darker recesses where dreams of troubadours and retracing of the steps of Barbara Tuchman occupy a young man's fancy. Sixth track-The Rip Tide, the title track. I read an interview with Beirut that appeared around the same time as this album and I was let down that though his soul is surely antiqued and weathered it is from a physiological anomaly not through the following through the rabbit hole. I wouldn't imagine he will be penning a disconsolate ode for the Marechal De Retz or a celebratory hymn for the Lucrezia that deserves better than we allow because his depth of soul is a physical trait honed from birth rather than a sentimental attachment bolted on through experience and curiosity. And so the dripping horns that close out this track are from feelings bound in nerve endings and human emotion instead of a contrived nostalgia ginned up out of books and ancient paintings appreciated more for their age than their skill. Seventh track-Vagabond. Beirut by the numbers, still magnificently elegant, his voice wounded by instinct, the music weathered and restrained, the middle eight eclectic and playful, but then there are only nine songs. Should this have made the cut? Hmm...I find it rather easy to dismiss such goodness. Perhaps it is my nervous state. I only hope to make to Alaska, in Alaska lies salvation and the filling of senses and the removal of "Are you ok?", "isn't life strange" and "could we be this happy, are we so lucky". Perhaps there needs only the plaintive strains of The Peacock on wave generated oscillations perched far above to burst thought bubbles that lead hearts astray. The heart is the domain of Beirut, to listen to such luminous constructions without even the slightest tinge of agnosticism would reveal only the shallowness of your existence. Last track, such a song, a ukulele, his stirring tones, now a piano and the story seems essential and harrowingly meaningful if only be performance. The art of performance, the inheriting of a role, the transfiguration of a mundane existence by mere proximity to this genius. What an existence we lead, by technology we flit from England by way of Australia to Finland to Sweden by way of Australia and now to Santa Fe by way of a glamourous recounting of all of the magic conjured by all of the world's greatest pop songs with ukulele and a collection of tired consonants and dreams.

Beirut on late night television. Graceful.

Jens Lekman I Know What Love Isn't. More examples of Scandinavian subset of the male on the way. Jens is old news. In fact by recent photographic evidence he appears to have transformed from Scorpio Murtlock into Kenneth Widmerpool. If only Anthony Powell had been a visual artist as well. I always have held Jens as esteemed because of his earnestness, his dreadful joke lyrics and the fact that in his lack of fear of presenting life as a technicolor adventure of woe and baleful existence he endears as a bargain priced Barry Manilow. First track was a tender piano introduction and now straight into the soft rock of Erica America, the croon, in tact, the music gentle and peaceable and the testosterone extinguished. It's a halting introduction, minimized from the widescreen pop of the last record. Is he living still in Australia? Was he imprisoned in such a desolate region by the tortures of love and the tyranny of the heart? I can't imagine Australia wrapping a loving embrace around his ephemeral frame. The life he paints is mainly pitiable. Is the life of a rock star so difficult? He's been feted for certain, even in the most pecunious indie locales. But perhaps it is that the life of a rock star is not that interesting. See Allo Darlin'. Their second record isn't a patch on the first and seemingly all that has changed is that she is beloved the world around. Perhaps there is an adjustment period when people transform their reactions from that of a friend to an admirer from afar. Distant even when a few inches away in the same room of a cold house. Turning this new form isolation into an artful discourse is perhaps more difficult than a delicate outpouring of love for your friends that supported you always when you had only a ukulele, a heart and flat footwear. Jens was always to handsome for his melancholy. Third track. Still with the restraint. A rolling piano melody, pocket sized strings, his gentle voice reflecting somber meditations rather than an epic calling forth. Perhaps he is in Sweden, perhaps this was recorded in the heart of Summer and the sunshine that is escaping from the grooves on my mp3 player is a coming to terms. He's beautiful. He's immensely talented. We will grant him absolution for his inadequacies always because of this. I wrote of Cats on Fire previously and their arc is different. They were minor figures and slowly they've accumulated a comfort level with the world's turning away from indifference. Mattias from Cats on Fire seems more firmly ensconced in his principles and integrity and mores whereas Jens is the fragile soul who will sing always for hi supper, the next track as desperate as the last for fear of love slipping through his fingers like sand. Cliche, my apologies. They are mainly non-existent here. Earlier today I was listening to Cocoanut Groove and his grasp of he cliche is tenuous at best, at least in his adopted language, but Jens shorn of his ill-timed joke lyrics sounds effortless in his pathos. Here a sampled kitchen sink drip, a piano loop, strangely acidic strings and saxophone renderings in the background. My mother would approve, surely. The last title was so lovely, She Just Don't Want to Be With You No More. Are all love songs generally written from fear? The genuine love songs, the earnest love songs, those written from the despair of waking to a dawn alone. I have half of a lifetime filled with emptiness and now I have discovered my heart's complement and I am afraid. I write about it only tenderly, too timid to caress it fully for fear of spoilage or exposure. This is a bedroom record. His first. I can imagine him sitting shyly with lights raised only slightly, his guitar on the stand in the corner and hands outreached trying to comprehend the retchings of the human experience. Love is a potent word. Sue Johnson has said as much. I am a devotee, truly. The heart leads. There was an evening, recently, spent with laps filled and arms entwined and the words came quickly and poetic and I felt proud that I was able to express all of my heart's emanations without hesitation or stammering or yammering and I meant every word. Hyperbole has been deleted. I am no longer capable. And so these past few entries have expressed mundanity while my fingers dance lithely and my soul warms it is only that the tendrils across her face have me overcome. There is an Andromeda heights tender docility, a boyish grace, more synthesized saxophones and digital whistles and flutes and fragile accompaniment on the chorus. It's utterly lovely, you will despise, I am sure. Because Jens Lekman exists outside of this world, writ boldly in skywriting letters a thousand hands high, and now there is Jens Lekman. He was always there, but there was always this cloak of panache, this edifice of dashing elan, and the beauty that caused the gentle soul to succumb. I Want a Pair of Cowboy Boots. Is he a fan of the Pearlfishers? This nostalgic recollection of life as a recreation of all of the travails of children magnified, with larger handprints left on handrails reached for after recurring stumbles. Calypso Jens has arrived on The World Moves On. While listening and while writing I have sneaked a peek at the trailer for Cloud Atlas. I once read that Cloud Atlas is the novel that Kate Bush would write should she ever put pen to paper. I disagree. The trailer looks lovely, if you are able to remove from your memory all images of Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. In my ideal world actors would retire from the screen after their debut performances. There is no shortage. We could employ the fresh faces that would better match the composite of humanity I created in my mind. Luisa Rey is not Catwoman. Bargain basement calypso, the vocals carry the cheer, the cheesy horns like a fitful rainstorm in Denver in August. This summer has been cheerless. The fires, the heat, the lunacy of murder spread across the landscape and dictates the tenor of a macabre aura infecting everything that is still and the living move tentatively through the underbrush. Jens is more necessary than ever. And Cloud Atlas. It isn't as brilliant as you hoped it would be. The writing never matches the conceit. Does it? I do not think. A film version is an audacious idea, but again, Catwoman. Argh. Is Jens now lamenting Fredrik Reinfeldt? Recently divorced Fredrik. Wants to retire at 75 Fredrik? Possibly, the title of this track is The End of the World is Bigger then Love. How very unlike Jens is that title. Love is everything, he's wrong, the world could end tomorrow and I would not be unhappy with the world, we would continue in the aether as spirals of dna remnants floating out among the flora of the cosmos destined to forever recombine and become enjoined and live happily ever after. If only Fredrik was so all powerful, then the Radio Dept might actually write an interesting political song in response, up until this point he's an enervating presence on the state of Swedish pop. Title track now, a jolly rollicking strum, innocent queries unto the nature of romance. I can answer him, I know the answer, I know what love is. "Let's get married, I'm serious...". I will choose to ignore the next line. I am in love with this album and I have been in possession of its endless charms for only a few moments. The chorus so sincere and sympathetic, he's written an album that could be mistaken for resignation but I think it's a third party transcription of life as a pop star that was once destined for greater things but somehow set agee by the fact that world has not yet been destroyed and so it is populated with people whose greatest virtue is their incurious nature and their conservative approach to living. I was one of them, I have broken free, I am high above the clouds and the last track echoes softly back to earth and if only ears were more precise and if only hearts were more resilient this hug would fell the specter of disappointment that awaits almost all of us. But we're the lucky ones, we've discovered the undiscoverable, we're happy and Jens and his genteel songs are our lovely companions.