The Sleeps in Oysters album is out. Hmmm...I may have to shake the cobwebs off of this Itunes gift card. I feel so 20th century, buying music, bah!

Update: Sleeps in Oysters Lo!. It starts off with a sample of something. Don't know what. I am devoted to research. I don't know anything at all about music and I am allowed to use that as an excuse for laziness. This song starts off similar to the eps that preceded the album. Pops and gurgles of electronics and disassociated voices and a general otherworldiness. It's marvelous. But then about midway through it takes a turn. It is a folk album. Were we expecting this? Have they always been a folk band? There were loads of songs about insects, I remember this, am I misremembering? Asking questions is annoying. Do you really care about insects? I don't. Godzuki's first album has loads of lyrics about insects but I don't notice it all that much while I listen. There are melodicas and guitars strung from broom sticks and wash basins and still the disorienting atmosphere of cacophony and it's brilliant. They are a folk band and I don't mind really. If I listened to music while I rode my bicycle I would listen to this. it is very industrial, it could act as a lubricant for my aching muscles, the singals generated from the auditory nerve coursing through my torso into my quadriceps and being transmitted to the gears of my hybrid bicycle. It would be electric. This is a very english record. Delicate, clever, pastoral, these things are not done well by Americans. They are done well by the French. It could be a general European trait. Perhaps not among the Scandinavians. Second tracks is small twinkles and blurbs and his distorted voice, it sounds a bit emo, he sounds vulnerable and wounded and it's nice. I could be in the right frame of mind for this. I have a reminiscence of Bitmap or the Beta Band. Am I again misremembering? Bitmap were never this gifted. Bitmap were a bit dreadful really. He should never have ventured away from Salako beach. Now there is electronic turbulence and cosmic background radiation and it is lovely and it devolves to his tender naked voice and a guitar. Very Nice. I don't remember his voice at all before this record. Did he sing before? Did they record this in a coffee shop and later take the tapes hope and splay them flat with electronics and end of the world business. Song over in a soft drizzle of twinkles and hummings and gentleness. It is a folk album and I don't mind. Now to a suite. Very pretentious. If I made a record I would include suites. This starts off with rain sounds, birdsong, electronics and keyboards, without voice. Very pretty, very pastoral as in picking daisies in spacesuits. How to program such things? DO you have to hear these sounds in your head and search for them on your sampler? Or is it all happy accidents? Is there a default setting and all electronic music is merely manipulations of these basic sets of defaults? I don't know. Again with the questions, argh. I need to move on to become a man of statements rather than questions. Part II has begun, his distorted voice, joined occasionally by his female partner, twinkles and tubular bells. These are all short parts of a larger whole. Oh, I apologise, this is Part 2 and the preceding was Part 1 and before that was merely the prologue. I would like to have a prologue on my album. Has Thom Yorke had a prologue on any of his albums? He seems as if he'd be a prologue kind of guy. I am now moved outdoors to finish typing this and the weather is beautiful. In Colorado there are years when the 90 degree days can start in May and End in September and then there are years when it doesn't truly warm until July. I prefer those years. I write effusive lamentations over the heat. I don't actually mind the heat because one of the joys of living here is an accompanying heat index that is less than the actual temperature but then the monotony of sunshine and 90 gets a bit wearying actually. You might not think that it would, but it does. Part 2 was a bit dull, sounded like someone dropping nickels into an empty glass vase. Snooze. Now to Part 3, the final part, the part that makes it all seem worthwhile. I have faith. Folk singer troubadour voice exercising his workman's blues, guitar at a pace now, it almost sounds traditional. His own lamentation is concerning winter. I like the winter. I like the mornings where all of the warmth is drawn from your exposed skin, the unique crunch of crystallized snow beneath your boots, the slow cranking over of a car starter and the sound of snow falling from pines. That pure whoosh. Now if an electronic band could recreate that sound we'd be getting somewhere. part 3 wasn't all that impressive but I still enjoyed it. I don't think that was an actual suite that just finished. I will have to do more research. next track, Sunday at the Margin, organs(air organs?) pumped and electronics squiggled and his soft voice. I remember that her voice was actually lovely. Am I remembering incorrectly? This is nice. I like this album. I think it is a summer album, but a summer evening album, it is too busy for the arc of the days heating. The lilacs in my yard are fading, it wasn't as great a year for blooms as it was last year, the rain dampened the enthusiasm of the flowers this year I think. And the continuing colony collapse has caused much distress in the world of lilacs and burning bushes and the rosacea family in general I would presume. Maybe we need to import giant Japanese Hornets to pollinate my lilac trees and to carry off little children dressed in designer clothes. They could carry them to the same place in India where David Cameron offsets his carbon emissions with poor Indian Boys operating a treadle pump. i could claim a carbon offset for each of the trees I have planted in my yard. Could I not? I am sequestering carbon! Also since I have been riding my bicycle I now have much shallower breaths than I once had so my production of CO2 must be reduced as a result. When I go to walk about the botanic gardens I will breathe more heavily and share my lovely sweet CO2 with the trees there. Girl singer alert. She has returned. I guess her voice could not necessarily be characterized as lovely, only in the sense that Rosie from Pram is the loveliest lovely on the planet, it's odd and quirky and as I do find those attribute endearing I suppose she is lovely. Whirrs and stutterings and stammerings, it sounds like me this past Thursday night. It feels more frightening fairy tale-ish when she sings. Is the record broken into two parts? Now a standard drum machine pattern and it sounds a bit like the second Godzuki album but it isn't about insects and of course neither was the second Godzuki record. This is the band's theme song. Better than We are the Pipeetes, the album has turned rather marvelous since she has taken over the microphone. Sit down son, time for me to sonne you. Guitars, electric guitars, silly lyrics. Don't Drum for Other Girls. This is summer. This is music for washing the car to. This is music for Reggie Blaze to call the police for. Reggie Blaze is possibly dead. I wonder how many of the people from the neighborhood are now dead? Claras? Luchinskinis? Prauls? The death of my childhood. A Capella. She is much more playful, I am playful, I have exorcised my melancholic demons while writing about Giorgio Tuma this morning. I like the self-help words, and now a piano, one in each ear, her awkward voice. Her half o the record is much more marvelous than his was. Sorry dude. Now digital strings and ambition and gracefulness and magic. I am being very specific in my praise here, let me choose another amorphous amalgamating adjective that means nothing at all. A digital horn next to the digital strings, a pop cuisinart and it's amazing. Really. It is like Pram if Pram had a happy childhood rather than the one they likely spent locked underneath the sink with only a box of boric acid for sustenance. And an ironing board cover for a pillow. It has fallen into disrepair and parts of the song are bleeding out into the air and it's beautiful. I wish I knew more words for beautiful. Now a sample of a gospel recording, clever. A 2-part epic to end the record, introduced by a sailor's hymn. Hymn over. Silence. Lots of silence. Not a refrigerator hum. Just the refrigerator hum. Hmmm...now maybe a TV test pattern hum has joined the refrigerator hum. It is anticipation that they are building, sometimes building anticipation is no good thing for other people. Now a signal from extra-terrestrial intelligence, a repeating pattern, manmade, the lost tribe of israel. Call Jehu. Three minutes have passed, not so epic then. This is the first time I have listened to this song. The lamentable age of CDs and digital music. I keep typing lamenting or lamentable or lamentation, i apologize. But wen forced always to listen to music from front to back and never from the middle onwards as you would when say listening to a cassette changes the relationship to song position on an album. Is it wise always to include the grand epic as the final track? Are there classes in university to discuss these important questions? I do hope so, for the sake of the safe continuance of human civilization. Now the sailor's voices have returned from the abyss and haunt your dreams. It's all very Poltergeist. Its Jobeth Williams getting baked in her bedroom while the kids are getting it down the hall. It's great. Sorta, I have faith that it fits in to something greater in the overall scheme because the album thus far has been fantastic and this is just the bit where Skunk Baxter would have guested with a wanky guitar solo 30 years ago. Almost silence, the vacuum of space, the sound of the wipers on the port hole window giving you a clear view of Sadal Melik. Now to part 2, it's lovely, her bare voice, something plucked, slowly then more quickly, like a metronome, like a clock, very Pram. Are they Pram lovers? Lovers in love with Pram? Delightful.

Listening to Plastic Mastery in preparation for the Gold-Bears record that is allegedly out soon. Something good on Slumberland? Sacre Bleu! Plastic Mastery are, of course, underappreciated musical gods who make my pedal feel featherlight while I listen and drive at the same time. It's Plastic Mastery weather.

New Alessi's Ark seems to have lost a lot of the girlish charm of the first record. Simon Raymonde's fault?

Update: It isn't as girlish but it is still utterly charming. More later.

If translations of lyrics on youtube are to be trusted then I have greatly misjudged Arnaud. It seems he's delightfully odd!

Maria Minerva Talinn at Dawn. How to be Estonian? I don't know. More homemade seeming electronic made in a bedroom made for eleven dollars but super cool electronic pop. See Bachelorette. I expect she'll land in a Hyundai commercial soon. I will be thrilled. Better her than Belle and Sebastian. I was watching Belle and Sebastian youtubes today and realized instantly, months have passed, that the new record is dreadful. But I also remembered a bit of advice from Stuart Murdoch when they were playing some festival and he was critiquing the other bands based on their dress and he came to the sensible conclusion that the more fashionable that a band's dress appeared the less likely it was that they had anything interesting to say in their music. He cited as examples in the pro-arctic monkeys who look terrible but seemed interesting and in the con- kaiser chiefs who represented the opposite end of the spectrum. Second track is on. I don't know how Maria Minerva dresses. She could be extremely fashion conscious, on the cutting edge, hanging out the same anti-semitic clubs as John Galliano but her music doesn't suffer terribly from the company. The vocals are almost vacant, barely there, the music is primitive and rudimentary but it's lovely all the same. California Scheming. Does it mean anything at all? I may have had a great deal of contact with former Estonians in my youth as Livonia, Mi was settled by Estonians. Allegedly. Colorado doesn't have such enclaves. In the Detroit area there is Hamtramck(where you can buy great Paczkis, the real ones, the ones that weigh 11 pounds each), there is Dearborn where you can get some great hummus, there is Sterling Heights(my hood) where nothing happens and then there is Livonia. Livonia of course is Wrn Defever's hometown. It is an interesting place, there are neighbourhoods where every house looks identical, the same red builder's grade brick, single story ranches, where there must be a small that differentiates each home for the owner because I can't make them out on my own with my eyes. Second track, a bit like the first, drum program preset, disembodied voices, it's for hipsters. We love it. We aren't hipsters. Ask our Thursday friend. Has Maria been to Livonia? Possibly the original Livonia. In Estonia. Or is it Latvia? I forget. It is probably filled with Stalin's footprints still puddled with the blood of the innocents. Kwame Nkumrah has probably been to Livonia. In Estonia. This song could be a travelogue of her travels in Livonia. I'd rather that His Name is Alive's Livonia evinced the real Livonia. Third track, floaty sampled voice, her voice more substantial, a bit Demarnia Lloyd. I posted a Cloudboy video recently. I am still in love with Demarnia Lloyd. It is all down to the name right? This is my girlfriend "Demarnia". Very cool. She wouldn't need to say a word. There isn't a whole lot happening on these songs. Bachelorette has clear ambition but I am wondering if my earlier suspicions about Maria are correct, of if she is a Nightingale the same as Walter Reuther, "she closes her eyes when she sings, and listens to nobody but herself". It's ok, I rather like it. Soon the days will begin to shorten. Where we live is on the eastern edge of the time zone. It is daylight here by 5am. This is not natural. In Livonian, in Winter, it isn't daylight until after 8am. Next track, Tallinn at Dawn, the title track. Sounds a lot like the last few tracks. She's not incredibly eclectic in her musical stylings. Should we admonish her for this? yes, but sometimes it is about the sound. We don't mind that the Acid House Kings sound the same on every record because they've hit on a sound and the fact that they sing in an affectless, emotion free register is of little concern. I will stop using the We. It is annoying, we find. This is an instrumental, she must have spent minutes on it. Next track, a bit more urgent, spacey synths, disembodied stereoscopic voice, tinny drum machine. Is tinny drum machine an option on Garage Band? Was this recorded on Garage Band. There are rumors that there will be another record this year. Will it be more developed? These are the black and white negatives, the tubes of cookie dough, the germinates. I could make this record. I will spend a few minutes tonight making this record. You will then review it and tell me how amazing and awesome I am. But I am not from Estonia. I could claim that I am from Livonia. I could bring Paczkis! Have you had a real Paczki? Not the fake jelly donuts at the grocery store. They will shorten your life by 11 minutes and 13 seconds, on each bite. Another track, a lot like the 5 or 6 previous. I will send her a book on how to write music, written by Martin Carr, it will be in the shape of a cd and instead of reading it she will play it in her discman in her trabant. Diversity is our strength. Isn't that the empty platitude that rules above the rest of the empty platitudes? I don't understand the whole concept of ethnic states. Are Estonians naturally drawn to defending other Estonians and is this only because people tend to be discriminated against because of their ethnicities and at this lies the root of coalescence? It isn't our similarities but our shared misery. Perhaps. Stalin ate Estonians with tacos. New Life. If she had someone who knew how to write music she might be super cool. She's got the ethereal chick goodness happening. She could write the lyrics in Estonian, emanate a true international ardor, write lyrics romancing the flat tax, poo poo'ing Olav Reju! I would be enchanted. I do rather like this. It's empty, vacuous, undemanding, but pleasant and dreamy. If it was from Lakewood, Colorado I might have a different opinion. But it is from Estonia. Jack Keoruac lived in Lakewood for a short period. I've driven by his home. It doesn't draw a lot of attention. I don't think. I haven't been on weekends. George Gamow's grave does not draw much attention either. People in Colorado are too concerned with their next rep of squat thrusts and mountain climbing to be concerned with the history that surrounds them. Even the dinosaur tracks seem lonely. Woe be to the Igaunadon! Stairs to Nowhere. Hmmm...if she made a real disco album it might be cool. All of this speculation on how great she'd be if she wasn't not great. Maria isn't as interesting a name as Demarnia but you could introduce her as my girlfriend Maria Minerva, always the pair, she could wear a name plate across her forehead. Oh, the last song is more interesting, multiple voices, cacophony, messiness, charming. She could come to Denver and the cultural monotony would force her to live inside her head the same as I do and create colours and space in her music. right now, it's greys and greis and grays.

Listening to new Panda Bear on NPR's site. It starts off very nice. Very reminiscent of the last record.

Update: Second track is buzzier with the same angelic vocals as on the first track. This is more Sonic Boom-ish? How much did he shape the record?

Update: New mix of Slow Motion is not so new. Hmmm...the repetitiveness is not as hypnotic as on the first album. I guess having Sonic Boom mix a repetitive record is the right choice. See Playing with Fire.

Update:Surfer's Hymn is seemingly pretty great!

Update: So far it is love. Off to sleep.

The Thoughts I Won't Keep You Here. A very sad record. A bit like Beirut, this is. His voice and delivery reminds very much of Tears Like X-Ray Eyes. It's folky, it's tender, gentle and desperately romantic. It's Sunday evening and on some occasions a Sunday evening could resemble any of those modifiers. On some Sundays in some hearts there is melancholia and dreamings and muted heartbeats weighed down by dread of the week that has past and the week to come. I really really like this album. I've just decided this and it is only playing for the second time. I am not certain when I acquired this record. This afternoon was the first time I played it. The first ever. After someone had departed. After I decided not to attend a house warming party because it was cold and snowy and I really wanted to get an appropriate fertilizer down on my grass. I gave my visiting friend a copy of Mr Tompkins in Paperback, she will despise this book, but that is alright. People should give other people books as gifts more often. I love to give books to people and see them unopened on the shelf, there is magic inside and one day when they are compelled by forces outside of our control, without our cognition, they will crack the seal and be taken in and forever changed and improved. Or not. George Gamow is a favorite. He would enjoy the thoughts. I imagine he would take his wife to see a thoughts concert even in his advanced age and slowly they'd dance, arms entwined, hands clasped and swoons in full effect. I went to his grave again today. I am obsessed. I was thinking of the Thoughts. A Pun. An untruth actually, I was thinking of lunch. I had a tuna melt. Second track, opens with an a capella moment of weakness, very nice, his voice isn't musical, it's emotional. Is that better? Only you can answer that question. There were days when i would sit at home in my childhood bedroom and listen to music such as this in the dark at 3AM and feel safest, safer than I have ever felt in the world. Not because of some lament over lost love but of a requiem for a lost life. A participant forever. And then there was a moment. some years ago. And then there were more. A girl with a familiar name, a name that carried weight in other's hearts but which was meaningless when we were together. And then there was a stranger. The end. My parents feared for my life. Was it the silence, was it the wave function of my momentum, was it the psychic connection forged at birth. Unknown. Third track. Another beautiful and very sad track. All of the tracks and beautiful and quite sad. There are three of them. I don't know a single thing about any of them but if one of them happened to be from Boulder, Colorado I would not need to pretend to be unsurprised. It wasn't windy this afternoon but I was not on my bicycle. I was concerned about my grass. Earlier I had my toes in the snow, frozen in place, praying for capillary action. I keep mentioning this, all week, to strangers who did not ruin my life, to strangers who will likely never grace my presence with their kindness, it must be tiresome. It may sound like a pose. It may sound like compulsion. Third song has finished, it was lovely. Another one has begun, nice. They have the presence to convince the listener that they mean it. Perhaps they do. I wrote a vague entry on the suicide of someone I used to love. Someone I thought I might marry. Someone who told me they were going to marry someone else because I never asked her. Someone who emailed me after a year to tell me of the birth of her daughter and someone whose mother called me on Friday before Christmas to tell me her daughter was dead. And then someone whose mother sent me a diary where I filled most of the pages, where a life not led was illustrated and annotated and documented with such care and precision that the grief I did not feel for her passing because of shock was felt for her passing from longing. I am a terrible person. I am a really terrible person. it is why I keep myself apart. I make people care for me and then I disappear. Fifth song is about disappearing, it's beautiful too. First my edges fade, they become indistinct and then I fade from your thoughts and when a hand is reached out I have mine plugging my ears and whisperings of inadequacy fill my mouth. But this record. Now an acoustic guitar and twinkles, very very softly now, it is very reminiscent of the first Tears in X-Ray Eyes record but it's nicer than that. Why isn't this where Mumford and Sons are now? This track might actually concern turf, Winterkill but there is mention of beasts and him being the winterkill. A metaphor? Pink Snow Mold and Kikuyu? Next track, a bit more rocking, for them, a bit more like a normal folk rock band. His voice is pitched higher and more urgent. Where before it was whispers and sighs now it is plaintive please and poetic determination. I've been to George Gamow's grave now 7 times. I've only read three of his books. Well four. I've only given one of them as a gift. On the airplane ride home I advised my departing friend to check the rivets and welds before she jumped across the jetway. I am flying southwest soon. I hope I have some of the same excitement on my flight. Next track, back to the sweetness, very pretty sweetness on display. I imagine him writing a song for all of his girlfriends, the evening after his first date, when the passion is at its zenith and it is emotion without reason filling in the gaps and causing the edifice to fall to pieces. This one would be for the one who wears long sleeves to the beach, in the middle of July. And he would understand and he would compare her to Syliva Plath, its a cliche, he knows, but she would find his insights dramatic and heart rendered and pledge her undying commitment to love. Or something like that. I can't write songs. I could write lyrics. I would probably compare long sleeves wearers to Flannery O'Connor instead and end up spent and alone watching a Katherine Heigl movie on cable television wondering over this hell on earth. The Thoughts would not be soundtracking that scene, probably Mumford and Sons. Next track, starts off with some raucous macabre doings and then falls back to a gentle appreciation. His voice is trembly and slight. It's headphone music for certain. Today I received a message as a test. I failed the test. On purpose. I am going to become the person I am when I write about myself. I am going to be witty, charming and affable. I am going to go out into the moonshine and call out to the world all of my heart's longings and desires and hope that an answer returns from deep in the ether where there are all of the answers to imponderables written in runic figures on tablets made of comets and ghosts. It will be a religious experience. I could sell tickets. I could send a book to the fates as a gift in return, perhaps The Doctor is Sick. Title track now. I played ice hockey on Saturday night, two weekends in a row I have played ice hockey. Last night before I played I had a furious row with my legs. Since I've been riding my bicycle my legs feel like rubber and of bare practical use when I am not on a bicycle. When I ride I am compelled to ride as fast as I can. I can't ride very fast. not yet, old ladies on their huffy cruisers blow past me on occasion, but i stepped on the ice and felt as if I had angel wings attached to my ice skates and the stream that forms quickly beneath each blade must have been slackened with glycerin or stuff from the ether itself. The same sort of material which allows heavenly seeming records such as this to be made. It's earnest now. I'm earnest now. I don't tell anyone that I am earnest because it is gauche. If I were to join the thoughts it would not be to be part of the musical ensemble but to brood in the background and to understand the maudlin nature of existence in sympathy with each note on display. Just two tracks left now. This one has a strong announcing movement, I rather like it. he has a poetic seeming voice the same as Beirut and so the words that bellow forth have a more poetic sheen than say what comes from the mouth of the Arcade Fire. Blood and Bones, it's a bit Irish, are they Irish? The Irish are typically sincere. While I've been reading a great deal of the English Civil War recently the Irish have not been made out well. Savages. Cromwell took it to them rather ruthlessly after he took care of Charles I. But I don't think the Thoughts are Irish. It is a silly name for a band. Last track. A bit Harvest Ministers violin, speaking of the Irish and sincerity and goodness. People often mistake me for being Irish. My name looks irish but it is Scottish. I tell everyone I am Canadian. I used to be. It is surprisingly intriguing to certain types who wish to think better of me than they should. If I could dream dreams with the songs of the Thoughts playing softly in the background commingled with laughter and joy and tears of delight then i could learn to love.

Maria Minerva is very great.

I've started riding my bicycle to work, 20 miles one way, and I am able to function as a human being afterwards. Amazing. It might be my nice new bicycle. The sales clincher was when the sales person said "it's ugly, no one will want to steal it".

Been listening to Inspiral Carpets Life over and over. I feel the invincibility of youth.

Update: New track on the Sound of Arrows myspace. Not as great as the last one, but still pretty, it's disneyesque but not as disneyesque as the last one.

Stretch Armstrong- the movie. Is this as bad as it has ever been? Frankie and the Heartstrings entry soon, perhaps posted from Texas.

Erm...new Sin Fang is not so good.

The Mummers are lovely. Are they for your mum and dad?

Update: Mink Hollow Road. Does this sound more impressive than it is? It's girlish and seemingly sophisticated, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Thom Yorke, etc...her voice is charmingly coy. It's Leslie Caron before she met Warren Beatty. It's Clara Immerwahr before Fritz started waering the Kaiser's uniform and working on his diabolical Chlorine while keeping the revolver in plain sight. It's rated G. It's romantic. It's the Divine Comedy circa A Short Album About Love Loads of orchestral flourishes, a small voice, big sentiments and weepy climaxes. Second track. I was eating some chicken. Her voice has a tinge of "Hi, I'm Bjork from the Sugarcubes", only a slight, not really, but in the climaxes perhaps she bites the same bits from Diamanda Galas. Records like these require directors and arrangers and people to drive the extended van shuttle ot record. That must be expensive. Was this expensive? It doesn't sound overly so. It isn't ambitious, there are just loads of people playing loads of instruments by the dexterity required seems workmanlike. I've spent the weekend elbow deep into the earth, toiling in the hypoxic and lifeless soils of the Colorado plateau. But then even though I live in Colorado I don't live on the Colorado Plateau. This track has a bit of Blur The Universal with a vocoder robot on vocals. I like it. It's got the feeling of a song that opens a serious television show about miserable people in their 30s and their parents who used to watch miserable shows about miserable people in their 30s in the 80s. Mel Harris guests. This is a bit sunny. it is sunny outside. it is always sunny. Even the industrial waste lands of the motor city are verdant compared to Colorado these days, smoke filled vistas, desiccated plants, peoples and buildings. An unslakable thirst has swept across the landscape and it feels as if the earth that i had my elbows into is shrinking, becoming eternally frozen in a dreary stasis. Third track, Driving Home, there are but six tracks in total. Rimbaud could describe and compare the industrial wastelands of the middle west and the sterile earth of the Rocky Mountains. Made for mountains not for verdancy. I planted a lovely clump style Prairie Fire Crabapple into the planet yesterday and it was more with hope and faith than with science. The tillage is beige, it's clay, it doesn't breath or lend itself easily to romanticization. If Zola were alive and forced to make a flowery descriptive introduction to live in Westminster, Colorado where the workers toil in inexactly planned technological parks and alongside windswept roadsides he'd consider giving up the gift. There are paintable landscapes on the eastern plains, A long riparian Cottonwood making a fierce stand against the will of nature, the tumbleweed's journey across unnatural boundaries, an emaciated coyote with your neighbour's kitten between its jaws. Fourth song, Cherry Heart. If people still knew how to make movies this could be the soundtrack of a sophisticated style musical set n the glamourous 1970s, perhaps in Gainesville, Florida, along the beach, a single story welling, a young girl at her piano writing songs for a Broadway hit musical and by the time her dream comes true the characters are dressed as lemurs and in spacesuits and on board unicycles in an irradiated Hiroshima. The music is tender and sweet but it hides a darker interior. It does have a touch of the same flowery hope as It's Oh So Quiet! but then that's not Bjork really, is it. If people still remembered how to make movies they'd make more movies like An Angel at my Table. It is so brilliantly uncomfortable to watch. when I was mired in my New Zealand obsession I was drawn to all things NEw Zealand including Janet Frame, well Janet Frame came after the movie and after Sweetie and to Weetabix and eventually to New Zealand itself. All because of a cassette of Kaleidoscope World but the only reason movies are uncomfortable to watch these days is because they are dreadful and uninspired and awful. Really. More of the vocoder succeeded by the most heartfelt seeming vocal immediately after. I do really enjoy this album. It is Sunday, late afternoon, as a child I would be just returning home from Church and the world seemed infinite and hopeful and now it is merely sunny and dormant. There needs to be an awakening, the sun must stop rising in the east, the canopy of stars needs ot be extinguished, something must come about to shake the state of torpor that has anesthetized humanity. Should we send an army to Libya, unite the Greeks and Phoenicians finally? rebuild the ports at Carthage? Tear down the Pyramids and install the terra cotta army in Westminster. yes, yes, yes, let's do all of this and more. Later. After I've planted my new boxwood hedge, after I've eliminated the bindweed that has usurped the bluegrass in the battle for turf prominence and after I've finished listening to the Mummers because they make everything seem lovely and charming and a bit inconsequential.

Certain types will demolish Frankie and the Heartstrings but I love them. They will tear them into little pieces but I will politely sweep them up and put them into my pocket.

Update: Frankie and the Heartstrings Hunger. The title makes me think of Eric Carmen but that is too obvious. The first moments are gentle plucks on a guitar and a distant howl and some background ambience and then whoosh a hoedown, indiepop style. It's straight out of 1985. It's upset because it wasn't included on Sounds of Leamington Spa Volume 8. Short spiky riffs makes listeners wonder if they know enough notes to construct longer ones? Unlikely. Dreamy. Liam Gallagher has attacked Thom Yorke and truly Thom Yorke deserves a scabrous upbraiding but unfortunately Liam Gallagher lacks the wit to deliver it. Sad. I was listening to French Films earlier, before this album, and are the Drums preparing litigation in response? But I am unfashionable and I really enjoy the Drums and I really enjoy French Films. I know, I should be listening to Captured Tracks instead. Perhaps you should be preparing litigation. I am allowed to travel for my job sometimes. On occasion I am allowed to travel to interesting locales, last year to Boston, one year to Nashville, another to Indianapolis which isn't all that interesting but much more interesting than Lubbock. I am heading to Lubbock this Tuesday. I've been to Lubbock once before. Frankie and the Heartstrings might do well in Lubbock actually. They mention Scott Walker, in rethuglican heaven or Texas they'd eat that up. Of course they are mentioning Scott Walker the overrated singer/songwriter but we could instead insist that they mean the other Scott Walker actually. I had had the volume at half-rate, this record is much more exciting at full volume. Second track has some post punk 1983-isms about it, some Josef K, some Fire Engines, but it's smooth and refined and I really enjoy it. I am one equipped with very low standards mind. Those that were there will scoff. Whatever. Stuttered chorus now, or is it the bridge??? Sharp guitars and probably immaculate hairstyles and now a guitar solo in an unaccomplished style, tremendous. Now the Franz Ferdinand aping of Franz Ferdinand's aping of Gang of Four's percussion. This one has some ambition in the arrangement. I spent the afternoon in Idaho Springs. My workmate says his family uses Idaho Springs as a sort of base camp before they later embark to Vail. They need to acclimate themselves to the altitude and to the smugness of all of us healthy Coloradans. Apparently we are the fittest state in the nation. Everyone here is busy running triathlons and scaling 14'ers and being vegan. But, I've mentioned this before, Coloradans are insufferably rude when it comes to basic interactions with fellow human beings. It wasn't like this in Texas. In Texas I met 1 and 1/2" steaks and windmills right in the center of town and a thrill ride final descent into the airport but always with a smile. Women in Texas all have manicured fingernails. Better to pull the rethuglican lever on a diebold I suppose. Lubbock is very very windy, there was a squally when i arrived and the sands of time piled up along the horizon threatening to erase all of the scars of the earth. I was safely ensconced in my hotel room. I am on a national advisory council for a very unimportant cause. Feel proud for me, I know my mother never imagined I would attain such status. Third track, a bit more raucous bootboy-ish, the vocals are Northern Soul-ish, it is all a bit Northern Soul-ish, maybe that is a better descriptor than Post-Punk. But then do I really understand Post-Punk? I was listening to Crocodiles on the bicycle ride home yesterday and Ocean Rain as well since it takes me rather a long time to make it home on my new bicycle and I had a minor thought, a revelation, that perhaps Crocodiles is the greatest post-punk record ever? I know, silly. I am enjoying this song, I like the gang-ish backing vocals. I've now seen photos of the band and they do have glamourous hairstyles and I approve wholly. Not enough bands have nice hair these days. Next track, more raucous non-raucousness, they are essentially a twee bunch of boys with a singer who does a convincing bit of not being posh. I am clapping along out of time. It is very physical music, it makes me move. There are only a very few number of moments remaining for me to enjoy music. I've been very concerned about the radiation from the Fukushima reactor, it has recently been detected in Colorado, and I have ben keeping abreast of the news and discovered that my house emits almost as much radiation as has escaped the plant. I live in a brick house. Bricks are little Fukushima power plants embedded into my walls and when I sleep my head is only inches away from certain meltdown. This evening I will move my bed into the center of the room. I apologize for making light, erm...glow. But I went to a political meeting this week, after avoiding bananas. I went to Jared Polis' community meeting. He is my congressman. Funny that, he seems entirely rational and reasonable, but oh dear his constituents are cracked! The first person to stand up demanded he shut all nuclear plants in US now. Then later came up the tragic story of Bradley Manning's torture(no one was quite specific on the method but my imagination was let loose with thoughts of his being denied access to Tru tv, lean pockets and copies of Mother Jones) and then finally to the request of the immediate impeachment of President Obama by the "i am not an anti-semite but Israel is poisoning Palestinian bananas" contributor. Ha. It was marvelous. Next time I may open my mouth. On the ride home I was rehearsing all of the speeches I meant to make but there were a lot of "older" women with long grey hair. Not a good look. Frankie and the Heartstrings are probably not for the long grey hairs but I bet they read Mother Jones. I can see the boys on a dock somewhere next to a container ship filled with plasma televisions complaining about the lack of action on climate change and how if we increase the taxes on carbon it will inevitably result in utopia. But I forgive them their sins. The fifth song was a bit of a power ballad, very nice. It does sound like Orange Juice. I am not the world's greatest Orange Juice fan. I may be committing apostasy. Under sharia Orange Juice will be banned. Sixth track, a swaggering number, terrific. My common lament is the lack of performance in music these days. The sell-out, the death or glory, the sweaty rapture. I don't think Frankie perspires a great deal while he's performing but at least he's adopted a simulacrum of someone who believes he's the greatest singer in the world during the three minutes of his perfect little pop song universe. More speculation--I would presume that these boys don't have day jobs, they are convinced of their worthiness, walking around the neighbourhood and in the pub telling everyone how they are gonna make it, not like their older brother's band. It doesn't sound tiresome, it sounds romantic. Edwyn Collins does produce the record. So I suppose he could email me later to discuss whether it does sound like Orange Juice. It is not as girly as Orange Juice, a negative, but only slight. Next track. That Postcard. An earnest tribute? Possibly. Earnest is a gruesome epithet. Are you sincere? Madness! If you are sincere you are to be mocked and disdained, better to not feel anything at all, at least not anything deeper than the subcutaneous level. Are these guys earnest? Unknown. They are not the Frank and Walters. Next track, slinkier. Not quite funky but I could see the insincere kids dancing to this. They could be scribbling in their notebooks all of their ironic enjoyments of this song. And then they go to university the following Monday morning and write essays on Joss Whedon. have you been reading Popmatters lately? They are posting 60 essays on the oeuvre of Joss Whedon and while it is of dubious academic value in spite of the numerous citations to other academic expositions of Whedon sometimes, occasionally a real human emotion slips into the prose and despite skepticism about their contentions about the importance of Anne in season 3 of Buffy there is an appreciation that people watched Buffy because it was funny, clever and human. But anyhow. Maybe after reading all of those essays the average Popmatters reader will then pick up a copy of the Economist's most recent Christmas issue about the pointlessness of acquiring a PHD. Second to last track Want You Back, a minor horn at the end, some impassioned outcries, nice. Last track now. This is very polite. I wonder if Coloradans were in fact forced to listen to Frankie and the Heartstrings I might not then enjoy living here more. Now it has turned to a gallop! Oh just a sprint. Impeach Obama! Save Bradley Manning! Stop Sending Aid to Cuba. These are words to live by.