I don't care if I'm alone here.
During Kurt Vile's set at Cornell a few weeks ago, I sat cross-legged, with my knees up and with my arms locked around them, my hands clasped together. I thought positioning myself like that would keep me awake, or if it didn't stop me from dozing off, the pressure on my arms from my legs starting to slack would wake me up, and I could at least catch myself before I fell over. I actually thought it out, and was like, "yes, this will work", and it did. It wasn't that Kurt Vile was boring. I mean he was a little boring, or I guess he wasn't exciting. But mainly I was just sleepy. He didn't go on until 1 am, and my usual bedtime is like 11:30. If I have to do laundry, which I can only do later on at night after Tyler's gone to work (because there are businesses below us and using the washing machine during the day interferes with their work, and because the washer and dryer are in Tyler's bedroom), I'll stay up a little later. But I have to put on a punk record (lately it's been Brilliant Colors or that live Vivian Girls LP; for a while it was Deep Wound or Total Abuse), something loud and fun, and...I don't want to say dance around my room, but kind of rock out? Bedroom mosh? It helps if I've had a couple beers. But I have to do that to keep myself awake. That's my laundry routine; quasi-raging, colors, whites. There was a little bit of punk before Kurt Vile went on, but not enough, so I had to figure out the right way to sit.

U.S. Girls played first, and they/she were/was decent. She had a tape recorder, a microphone, a ton of pedals, and an amp set up on a chair. She sang a bunch of words buried under hazy echoes and loud drones. It was a warped mess and it sounded good to me, and I recognized a couple songs so it was even a little familiar. It was also a little underwhelming. Weird bedroom droney stuff is great when you're by yourself in your actual bedroom, but playing it in front of people? As the opener? At the graduate/professional dining hall? I don't know. And she was dressed so normal--short hair, a couple layers of hoodies with pins, jeans, sneakers. That stuff doesn't matter, but I kept thinking, what if a girl came out in a dress and heels with her hair done up like she was in the Ronnettes and then blew your eardrums out? You'd never forget her.

Matthew Mondanile did his Ducktails thing after that. Originally I thought his other band, Predator Vision, was going to play. But he set up by himself and introduced himself as "Matt" and said he came up from New Jersey, and then he started playing some wah-wah guitar and I put it together. It was good. I've been all about him lately, and mostly he didn't disappoint. He did this kind of tribal-y jam in the middle of his set that sounded like Black Dice and went on way too long. And he sang a little bit, and his lyrics were like, "Are you the man/with the plan?" or something, and I was like, "uhhhh...". But he ended with guitar loops and gentle psych solos and it was all good. He also had this dirty brown jacket and glasses that reminded me of Egon from The Real Ghostbusters, and he smelled like weed everytime I walked by him.

I think Gary War played next. I don't know anything about Gary War, but I assumed it was just one guy. Maybe he is on record? He played guitar, and had a girl playing keyboard and a guy drumming. The girl had a notepad next to her the whole time they played, and I guess had all the keys on her board labeled with what note they were. At one point the pad fell on the floor and she stopped playing, picked it up, and then started playing again. I would probably do the same thing. The drummer played the same beat on every song, but people were loving it. I was mainly watching from the upper tier, while people I didn't know suddenly decided to dance to what was kind of Blank Dogs and kind of wasn't.

I guess the organizers saw people dancing and thought it was the right time to bring out the two-man DJ techno crew that was setting up when we first got to the show. I think they were called Teenage Fantasy. They were alright. They weren't offensive. I don't want to say it was "hipster dance shit", but it was hipster dance shit. A guy with kind of an afro in a Bad Brains shirt and a clean-cut guy. Loud beats, synths, mash-ups. When I saw their gear, I said, "Maybe it's just because I went to punk and hardcore shows for years and it's all I know, but I just want to see guitars and drums. I want to see dumb-ass kids playing shitty rock songs." I think what I was trying to say was, "I secretly hope Nazti Skinz have reunited and are playing every show I go to." We waited for the rave to stop, and it just kept going. People ate it up. There was a girl sitting at the top of the stairs leading to the upper area, staring straight ahead and slightly nodding to the beat. She looked like how Farah sounds--small, dark hair, bangs, quiet, scared but not. Every once in a while she would get up, grab people's discarded cups, throw them out, and then go back to her seat. If someone asked her what she did last night, she could say "I zoned out and picked up garbage."

Just before Teenage Fantasy ended their set, I bought a copy of The Hunchback from Kurt Vile right as he was rolling a cigarette. I felt bad interrupting him, but he didn't seem to mind. He smoked and then came back in and set up. He had tons of pedals like everyone else, but used two acoustic guitars--one 6-string and one 12-string. I don't know what all his pedals were doing but everything he played just sounded echo-y. He did a few songs from his new record on Mexican Summer and a few from Constant Hitmaker, including a clunky version of "Classic Rock In Spring". It's one of my favorite songs off that record and it should have bothered me that he was playing it weird, but it didn't. He switched a couple times from the 6 to 12-string and it seemed to take an eternity for him to plug and unplug, get the levels right, and start up again. But again, I wasn't that bothered. He brought up a guy named J. Turbo, who plays on The Hunchback (along with a couple other guys who make up Vile's backing band, The Violators) and did a bunch of wild but not loud solos over Vile's strumming and reverb-y singing. They finished with "Freeway In Mind" and Turbo played harmonica through this cool-looking mic going through a pedal. It was the best thing I heard all night.

I looked around and most of the people still watching were the same people who'd watched every band. The short-haired guys who all looked alike but at different heights; the Latin girls who stood by the same wall spot the whole night and danced when the PA played that "Born 2 B Fly" song between bands; the old dudes standing on the steps; the curly haired kid with the red pants who we saw when we finally found the venue. Who knows what they all thought they were getting into? They seemed like they could have stayed there all night, then got up and had breakfast together. I'm used to a kind of anxiety when I go to shows. The weight of expectation, the awkwardness of being around unfamiliar people. The need to feel comfortable and the desire to be broadened somehow. I'm used to that tension and I almost always debate going to a show right up until the last minute.

I went with Kaci and Ryan, who I don't know real well, but they were awesome. When we got to the show too early, we just went and got pizza, at this place that had a huge photo of George W. Bush, George Pataki, and Rudy Giuliani eating pizza by the entrance. We had to drive back downtown to get there, down these huge, steep hills, and then we had to get around these buses, and then find a spot in a parking garage. We walked in the shitty rain, got our food, talked about people we know in Rochester and high school mascots. At the show, everything seemed calm. You could get free fountain soda if you wanted. There were sort-of weirdos and bored college kids who wanted something to do and it was totally fine. The loud fuzz, beach jams, clangy synth punk, space beats, and slow folk were non-issues, explorations of a kind of patience.

Kurt Vile and the Violators - "Losing It"
Kurt Vile and the Violators - "Good Lookin' Out"

Meanwhile: I only bought one record on Record Store Day, but I made it count. At the House of Guitars (of all places! such a dump!) I found a sealed, original press of the Milk n' Cookies LP for $14. I think I was in shock for a few minutes. In his write-up for the 2xLP Radio Heartbeat re-issue (really a complete Milk n' Cookies discography), Max G. Morton says something about how you can pretty much throw away your Ramones records. I don't know if I'd go that far, but I will say "Not Enough Girls In The World" and "Tipically Teenage" never really leave my head. I feel like they're the official Matt-Tyler-Leah band, too. One of them anyway. So I just stood there like, "holy shit, is this really what I think it is?", and then I took a picture of it and sent it to Tyler, kind of to verify it. All I wanted out of life that day was to see Rational Animals play at Record Archive, and I did that and they were so good. They covered "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie" which was kind of obvious, and then they covered "122 Hours of Fear" and I might've decided they were the best band in Rochester. And then this Milk n' Cookies shit happens! Later that night, at the apartment, we watched the AVN Awards and it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. My friend Becca was there and I'm not sure she was crazy about watching porn awards. Or I couldn't tell exactly how it went over. She seemed weirded out when she left. I sort of regretted exposing her to a show where an actress accepted an award by saying "I swallowed a lot of cum that day". But there was also a guy who won the Best Male award and he stood up there and said something like, "I feel like fuckin' crying right now!!" when he clearly wasn't going to cry. I don't know, I thought it was hilarious. Earlier in the day I saw a vinyl copy of Belle and Sebastian's Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant at Lakeshore, and what I mainly regretted was that I'd talked myself out of buying it.

Belle and Sebastian is someone else's thing, not really mine. My friend Susanna is probably an expert on them. I think maybe Ryan McGinley is a superfan, too. I want that Belle and Sebastian/Bad Brains shirt, but I wouldn't say I know much about them. The first time I heard Fold Your Hands was at Ultrasonic Sound, a record store that was around from 1999-2001 or so, on Monroe Ave in Rochester. It was run by a guy named Jon (I think?) who's in the picture of Void on page 123 of Banned In DC, and in hindsight it seems like the perfect store, for any number of reasons. I bought my first copies of Spiderland, Unfuckwithable, and the Cap'n Jazz anthology there. If you were like, "hey, I need the Swing Kids discography", you could just go there and he'd have it, and when you got there, he'd be playing something like Loaded or maybe the Brendan Canty/Lois Maffeo record on the in-house stereo, and then you'd talk to him for a little bit and look up at the collection of early hardcore 7 inches lining the wall. At some point it switched owners, moved to South Ave, and was re-christened Analog Shock. It was alright for a while--the kid who took over put on some cool shows in the store's back room. But then the store hours got weird and he wasn't getting in any new stuff, and I went up a couple times in the middle of winter and there was no heat, and then it was just gone.

When I heard Stuart Murdoch's voice, I thought maybe it was John Cale. It must've been "Women's Realm" because there was his voice, very English and airy, and then a cute girl's voice. I asked what it was and maybe even bought it right there. I was so excited about it, it was weird. I remember bringing it over to my friend Jason's house, where all of us used to hang out, and my friend Brady and I were geeking out over it, especially the girl voice parts (Isobel Campbell, I guess). Jason thought this was way more my thing than the bands I was doing at the time, which were mostly hardcore scream-fests where sometimes I'd throw my bass on the ground or fall over. I agreed with him to an extent. Partly what I liked about Fold Your Hands was that it seemed like a cool older kid record. It made me think of cool older girls especially. The kind of girls who were a thousand times smarter than me, who I'd only hang out with accidentally, through some other group of friends, at diners. They'd show up with a chunk of raw sugar cane, or they'd go on and on about taking bartender classes and some guy they dated who "looked just like David Bowie in the dark". I was a straight edge kid, and when they'd go outside for a smoke, I'd want to go with them.

But what I mostly liked about Fold Your Hands was a lot simpler. The music was pretty and catchy, and the lyrics weren't hardcore lyrics. There were boys and girls writing letters back and forth in the middle of a war, and observational stuff about trains and living in a town that's beautiful apart from the people. I've been listening to it a lot over the last month, just on my way to work. There's a part of County Road 4 that runs through Seneca Castle, where the road curves around and there's a sudden drop in the speed limit from 55 to 30. I listened to "Waiting For The Moon To Rise" for the first time in years, going super slow on that stretch, early in the morning, when it was warmer than usual and the sun was flickering through the trees. It was great. I kind of needed it. I deliver mail to people with dirty diapers on their front porch, people who have long, detailed notes taped to their front door about how you need to take off your shoes before you come into the house. My two best buds are moving to the city into this apartment palace and I'm still going to be living in this Nazi date rape shithole. I need to not freak out, and I'm at a point where I'm probably not going to. I think Fold Your Hands is helping. I definitely get "The Broken Vow" in my head a lot for whatever reason, but I need to occasionally hear the weird fuck-you of "If my family tree goes back to the Romans, then I will change my name to Jones/If my family tree goes back to Napoleon, then I will change my name to Smith". That might actually be my thing.

Belle & Sebastian - "Waiting For the Moon to Rise"
Belle & Sebastian - "Women's Realm"
Belle & Sebastian - "Family Tree"

Fuckin' A! Some other songs are "Disappearer", "Sway", "Pole Position". My new favorite Buzzcocks song is "Lipstick", but obviously they're all my favorite. What else? Pukekos posted up both Brilliant Colors 7 inches and both Real Estate EPs. The Brilliant Colors records sound kind of scratchy and slower than I'm used to, but I think my record player plays everything slightly too fast. The Real Estate stuff is a little corny but who cares. There's a new Cult Ritual song, too. Holy shit. PS--the date on this post is April 30th, but I started writing it April 17th and posted it May 14th. What the fuck is wrong with me??

Hey! Sorry, this is another micro-post. Just wanted to say I'm deleting a bunch of files--pretty much all the mp3s from the latter half of 2007 through the first couple months of 2008. Spring cleaning, I guess. You have a week to listen to those songs, possibly download them, possibly love them, possibly turn your brain into mine, slightly. Then they're gone forever and you're stuck with the brain you already have, which is fine. So that's it. Oh and Freak Scene is back and functional and it's off to a great re-start. I think there've been three new posts so far. Also, Maggie Lee, who became one of my favorite photographers after I saw THIS, has been doing a thing on Vice called Zine Creamers, which should tell you everything you need to know about how awesome this girl is. Really cool shit, including (I think) Cassie Ramone's old zines, like I needed more reasons to love her. So good. But yeah. I guess that's really it. I feel like I should recommend some songs. I got nothing. Honestly, I've just been listening to Stan Getz a lot. What a nerd! The record he did with Luiz Bonfa, Jazz Samba Encore!, is great. I thought it was just a Sunday morning record, but it's more like an everyday all-the-time record. That'll change when I get my copy of Hallow (which is STILL AVAILABLE?! WHAT?!), but until then. Oh wait, this popped in my head the other day. OK, now I'm done.

Yoooooo! Here's a mid-March round-up. New issue of geneva13 is out and includes a column by me about Classic Arts Showcase, Harry Pussy, and Vothana, among other very important things. For those who already read it (or even those who haven't, or would prefer not to), some related listening: Chunklet, "Mic Check", Maria Callas, Eugene Onegin, Palatka, singer from the Black Crowes, Tyler (pictured), LVTN. Meanwhile: I hadn't been to Soul Sides in forever, but they put a ton of good shit up over the past few weeks. Check out Moses Dillard (and "Move On Up" while you're there) and...well, I was gonna say Pi-R-Square and the original version of "All Falls Down" with Lauryn Hill, but they're not up anymore. You'll just have to take my word for it. Chain and the Gang LP is out and at my house but I haven't listened to it yet. I'm seeing them (but really HIM) in April, on the anniversary of the birth of the Leah. Other things worth noting are "Crawl Babies" and "Should I Tell You". All I wanted to do on my drive home from work was listen to Maiden, specifically the part that kicks in at 1:46. Girma Hadgu's "Ené Alantchi Alnorem" is also good, maybe even better, especially on a nice day like this where I shouldn't even have to work, then drive home from it, then be on a computer. I do have the shades open. More posts soon.

ps -- check out kevin13's journal of urinals he's used in Ireland so far (wait, maybe it's Scotland).

Good Evening didn't come with a lyric sheet.
But it's so goddamn good! I wasn't prepared for how great this Nite Jewel LP was going to be, and I liked her (their?) 12" on IDIB and everything. The synths are farty and blorpy. It's kind of a dorkier, more relatable version of Glass Candy, which I'm all for. And it's super catchy and not in-your-face, and there's some '80s moping, and there's one song that's a total Arthur Russell thing. And some of the textural background-y stuff has made me say "that's fucking awesome" out loud even after 5 or 6 straight listens. The video for "Artificial Intelligence" isn't what I would've done, but whatever. If you and your friends are out late and then you come home, but you're not tired, and you sit around and make jokes about naming your kids "Shithead" and "Fuckface", this record will sound fucking PERFECT, and that's really what matters. Oh and the Gloriette logo is the best logo I've seen in a while. Also: Are you a girl? Do you want to start a band like this with me? Let's do this. Bonus points for girls who also want to do a band like Middle America, although if that happens, I'll probably ask you to marry me, just a heads up. Another also: These mp3s were made by someone else, from vinyl, and it sounds like they didn't have a good pre-amp/signal booster thing. So they're kind of quiet, but maybe that adds something.

Nite Jewel - "What Did He Say"
Nite Jewel - "Lover"
Nite Jewel - "Weak For Me"

This Fucking Sucks fucking rules!! I've been lobbying for the official release of the full TFS record for years, and now I know why. Oh and I was totally going to say something about Food Of The Gods, but now I don't have to. They nailed it! I guess right now I'm on the fence about Reading Rainbow; cool songs that I can't get out of my head, but a little bit of a cheese factor (lots of animal talk). Slightly less on the fence about Invasion, although I need to hear the rest of the record. Oh shit, did I mention Ducktails already? Go ahead and give me grief about the name, fucking 7" kills! Tapes are probly good, too, but my tape decks are out-of-order. Leah, did you bring back my boombox? Or wait...did you have it? I'm gonna look right now.

Just wanted to say something real quick about Ron Asheton. His death just passed by me, like I didn't even notice it really. I read the headline and had no reaction, and then I was listening to Howard on the way home yesterday and they were talking about him and The Stooges. They played "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and Howard said it was annoying. Artie liked it and then started talking about that Iggy Pop song "Candy". I was actually yelling at the radio, "Play something off Fun House! Or play fucking 'Search and Destroy'! Or 'Penetration'!" I know he doesn't play guitar on Raw Power, but he's still there. When I was in Berlin a few years back, I listened to Fun House just about every night before I went to sleep. I would lay there with my headphones on in this room with a really high ceiling and tall bookcases, in this great apartment that you had to go up a weird secret stairwell to get to, and listen to it all the way through. For whatever reason, it sounded fucking perfect, better than any other time I've listened to it. We went to a street fair and I almost bought a Russian pressing of it, but I wound up buying a Jerry's Kids LP instead, which is decent but I haven't listened to it that much. Years earlier, I'd given my cd copy of the MC5's Kick Out The Jams to this weirdo guy who hung out at Perkins, and Andrew and I watched him basically destroy it in front of us from across the table. I'd decided I was tired of it not being as good as I wanted it to be, so I handed it over. I almost did the same thing with my copy of Fun House, but I thought, no this one's still kind of awesome. I was 16 and every once in a while I would accidentally do the exact right thing. Now I daydream about getting a copy of the complete Fun House sessions and listening to nothing but that for weeks. I probably don't need to do that. But yeah, I felt like being unfazed by Ron Asheton's death was so retarded. I take so many bands and people for granted. There are so many songs that I forget about, and there have been so many times where I've been whatever about something I know I love just because I wasn't completely jazzed about it right at the moment. The Stooges fucking KILL always, every time (even when I don't feel like listening to them) and Ron Asheton was fucking cool, and I need to not forget that.

The Stooges - "Down On The Street"
The Stooges - "Loose"
The Stooges - "Lost In The Future (take 1)"
Iggy and The Stooges - "Penetration"

PS -- picture via Gnarlitude (sorry about the heavy swastika presence lately! nazi punks fuck off, seriously!)

Ruh puh pum puuuuummm
Crom-Tech - "Silent Plarm"
Crom-Tech - "Here Comes Mobo-Clais"
Crom-Tech - "Lit-L Floater Boy"
Crom-Tech - "O-Climtwist Tree"
Crom-Tech - "Have a Holly Jolly X-Mas"
Crom-Tech - "Deck The Stix"
Crom-Tech - "Crestnobs On Open Flimor"
Crom-Tech - "Chanukob-O-Chonkab"
Crom-Tech - "Clomtad Is Here"
Crom-Tech - "We Wish You XMas"
Crom-Tech - "Jorpeel Bells"
Crom-Tech - "Winter Wonderland"

Melt your brain to the floor! I mean Happy Holidays! Bonuses: "Santa's Coming Over", Riverbottom Nightmare Band. More bonuses: Last year's models, still good!

It's been a slow education.
The dream I had last night was great. I was in Japan for a conference, and we were walking back to our hotel that was built along a lake with a great view. We went around the back of the hotel and saw a series of these things that looked like giant hurdles (if you're familiar with the steeplechase, they were like the big hurdle that's right before the puddle of water) in rows leading down a hill from the back of the hotel to the lake (running parallel with the hotel). We looked out on the water and saw a guy driving a boat that was actually a piece of earth that had broken off from the mainland. He had just stuck a steering wheel in the piece of land, and was ferrying about 10-15 tigers, who were all sitting the same way and looking at us standing on the hill looking at them. The guy driving the boat decided to dock, without realizing that as soon as he got near the land the tigers could run after us, probably eat us. I thought about how fast I could run if that happened, and what exactly the tigers would do. How quickly would they start chasing us? If one of them swatted at me with their paw, how bad would it hurt? The driver got close enough to land that a couple of tigers were able to jump out. We started running towards the hotel. The two other guys from my office were way ahead of me, and one of them did a flip off one of the hurdles and landed on his hotel room balcony, about three floors up. I knew I wasn't going to be able to do that and wouldn't be able to outrun the tigers. I remembered I had the power to levitate, so I closed my eyes, concentrated, and started to float away.

Later, I walked down to a clothing store where my friend Kate was working. They only carried t-shirts, and left them in piles on the floor instead of putting them on shelves or hangers. She was playing a recording of her daughter saying the letter "X" over and over. She told me she had a live video of one of my old bands playing a show in Florida. I couldn't remember what show she was talking about, so she got the tape and played it on one of the TVs. I was playing bass with no shirt on and we sounded a lot like Palatka. A couple kids who were big fans of the band were in the store and started talking to me. One of them asked, "Which one was the wimpiest guy?" I figured he was talking about Brady, but I said, "Well...we were all wimps." I left the store to finish delivering some mail, but I had to drive through a mall that also had subway cars running through it. I had to be extremely careful not to get in the way of any of the trains, and I had to listen for these alarms that meant a train was coming through. I heard one of the alarms going off and tried to park the mail truck in a corner. I had to do an awkward parallel park and kept moving like 1 ft. backwards and 1 ft. forwards, totally fucking it up and saying, "Sorry, I'm new here." The alarms kept sounding and I finally got the truck parked, and then woke up to the sound of my phone ringing.

This was a much better dream than the one I had the night before, where my grandmother called me up and asked how I was doing, and then, her voice kind of breaking, said, "Well...I think I'm ready to kill myself." She hung up and then I tried calling my parents, but their line was busy. Finally I went over to their house and they just asked me exactly what she'd said, like word for word. I woke up around then. It's not that I think she would really do that or say that she was going to do that, or fucking call me up and tell me she was going to do it right before she did it, but I do know she wants to die. The last time I went to see her at DeMay, she asked me to read from a large-print daily devotional prayer book. I read the one for that day, something about using prayer or faith as a shield or a sword in the battle for...I don't remember exactly. It was about God. Then it had a prayer at the end and I read that, too. I didn't feel uncomfortable reading it. When I finished, I looked up and she had her head down and was covering her face. She looked up and I could see her eyes were teared up. Then I was like, "So...yeah". She looked at me and said, "You know what I pray for, don't you? For the Lord to take me." She said this with a smile on her face, like she was acknowledging that it was a funny thing, or that it was one of those things that doesn't seem funny until you mention it to someone. I think most people who have a good sense of humor and also get retardedly depressed would understand. I laughed when she said it. She'd said it before to me and my mom, and I think I said something like, "Well, you can't tell God what to do." This time I just said, "It'll happen when it happens." I changed the subject and asked about a picture of her parents that she had on one of her shelves. Then I gave her a piece of gum. I left and walked past the common area, where these three women in wheelchairs were sitting in a row watching A Carol Christmas on a huge-screen TV. I could see William Shatner's giant head talking to Tori Spelling's weird face and these women staring at it from about 4 feet away. When I first got to my grandmother's room, a nurse was helping her into the bathroom, so I waited on her couch and read one of the daily devotionals, written by a woman about her daughter, who'd wanted to be a ballerina when she was little, but got cancer and wound up dying roughly 18 years later. This is like the only thing my grandmother reads.

I drove to my sister's and then back to my apartment, listening to Bright Flight. Dave Berman's lyrics are the best--ridiculous sometimes but absolutely true. I have to get his book. Sometimes his voice--untrained and flat, but pleasant and reassuring--sends what would ordinarily just be good lyrics into another place. I got Bright Flight a few years ago, when I was working in Phelps. I never gave it a good listen, and when I was driving home, I looked at the tracklist and really wanted "Horseleg Swastikas" to be an awesome song, just because of the title. I'm not advocating being a Nazi, I just feel like most great song titles are paired with lackluster songs, and vice versa. Plus, swastikas were around way before the Nazis. My friend Andrew did a paper on the history of the swastika when we were seniors in high school. We drove from Newark the the U of R library so he could look up info. He was kind of freaking out about it. I half-assedly looked up info for my paper, which was about Punk, and in all likelihood the worst thing I've ever written. I'm not even sure I read Andrew's paper, or if he wound up finishing it. When I was driving I thought, we should be able to mention the word swastika or use it in a song and not have it be some loaded thing. We should be able to use it as part of something else entirely, that maybe turns the word swastika, or the idea of a horseleg swastika, or whatever you had previously thought of when you heard the word swastika, into something warm and sad and funny, something less race-hatey. With everything we have to suffer through--ABC Family movies, deadlines, being born without certain talents, wanting to die but not wanting to do it yourself--we should be able to say or not say whatever the fuck we want.

Silver Jews - "Horseleg Swastikas"
Silver Jews - "Room Games and Diamond Rain"
Silver Jews - "Tennesee"

I have to admit I'm mostly listening to The Sads' Silent Show LP. I'll maybe write more about it later. What else was I going to mention? Bands covering The Clean are Times New Viking and Pavement. Pavement's cover of "The Killing Moon" is a lot better, although what the fuck are "Major Leagues" b-sides doing on the Brighten The Corners re-ish? Do I need to read the liner notes more carefully? Did someone else need to do something more carefully? I haven't listened to the whole Street Carnage Radio with Paul Stanley, but I'm going to! I'm also going to download all this Huggy Bear stuff eventually, but in the meantime I'm looking at the hottest Debbie Harry photos ever. Christmas post is coming.

Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson

Also, more of the same old thing: BH, BT, BD. I'm ok with it, though. Oh and lots of Cult Ritual. I have a 24-hour heart monitor strapped to me as we speak, and some mystery ailment that's not terrible, but maybe it is? I have no idea. But I know I got great parents. And I can't shower until tomorrow afternoon. New thing for geneva13 got handed in, and includes a true story about listening to Genesis that goes, "I'm listening to Genesis", and that's the end of the story. More later.

I know I said Failures and Gary Wilson, but I feel like I gotta do some Halloween shit/month-end wrap-up shit. I can't really top last year's Halloweenr, but how about Xela's "The Illuminated" or Aethenor? I'm almost positive I mentioned the Xela tape before and then I just linked to a page that had a comment section where someone linked to a download. Pretty chintzy, so here's the whole thing, side A and side B. I don't think I ever mentioned Aethenor. I think I was actually going to save it for a scary music post. I guess I should say these are both good if you want "extended noise inside a cabin where you're going to die at the hands of a weird guy". Picking out songs that are supposed to be scary is kind of dorky, though. Maybe something like "Ghost Walk" or "Walking On My Grave" would be better? All I've been into lately is Earth (old and new-ish) or Shop Assistants or Black Tambourine. Not really horrifying, but good for cold drives and snow showers before it turns 60 degrees again. Finding out that I was laying on the couch while reunited Harriet The Spy was playing "Retarding Dimensionally" in Ohio was kind of horrifying, though. Somebody please do one of those "play that whole album" shows with them doing Unfuckwithable, PLEASE. It'll only take 20 minutes and I'll get to sing along to "I tried real hard to give myself a cold by getting my hair all wet/it never worked/it never even parted my hair down the middle" and "I'll be waiting in the parking lot with a fistful of food". I have so much to do--zines, mailing things, blowing up on youtube, hanging out with Ixor--and I already had a reasonable amount of time to do it. Oh well. Have a good Ghoul's Night Out! Your Fiend, Matt.

PS--"Animal Imagination"

You may look cute, but you puke all over it.
So yeah, Kurt Vile. Probably the biggest reason I got way into him is that he's like a guy you went to school with who was mostly quiet but always said funny shit and could draw really well, who never seemed bothered by anything and always knew exactly what was going on. Maybe I got that more from the interview he did with the guy from Clockcleaner or the interview some guy did with him that was all text messages, but I think it comes through in the music, too. He's that guy doing Leonard Cohen and The Church and Springsteen and Eno, recording weird loops and songs that are spacey and funny (but not jokey) in his room, and then hanging out later. It was what I needed to hear, especially during a summer that was kind of horrendous. Parts of it were good--the train ride down to see Harvey Milk, hanging out with Amy at her apartment before the show, the week that Andrew and Sara were here, seeing Sex Vid and Monotonix in one day. But mostly it was just a big hollow feeling and watching things go retarded. At a certain point I said "Fuck, I gotta do something", and started working on the zine that I've since been real lazy about, but is still happening and is still going to be pretty alright. And when I wasn't doing that, I went out driving during the record gas price bullshit and listened to Constant Hitmaker in between Shuggie Otis records and Dylan bootlegs, tried to find that lunar eclipse or whatever it was, looked at the trees and big open fields and got fucking lost. What else can you do when shit sucks and nobody's around, but it's really nice outside? Listen to a guy who can play like Elliott Smith and says "I got a trumpet, I know where to dump it".

Kurt Vile - "Space Forklift"
Kurt Vile - "Don't Get Cute"
Kurt Vile - "Classic Rock In Spring/Freeway In Mind"

I finally got real crazy about the Ai Aso/Wata She's So Heavy split, just in the last week. I got it months and months ago during my big Michio Kurihara phase, when I was listening to his Sunset Notes record and the Boris/Michio Rainbow record all the time, but I was lagging on it for whatever reason. Crazy shit, especially since Ai Aso sings on the best shit on Sunset Notes (I've listened to "The Wind's Twelve Quarters" so many times and I'm still not sick of it), and the line-up on Wata's song is basically Boris with Michio, maybe even from the Rainbow sessions, but I'm not totally sure. Not to mention the 7" comes with a huge booklet of photos of Ai Aso and Wata looking really pretty. Who's not going to buy this, even though it's kind of expensive? And the songs, holy shit. Ai covers King Crimson and does it spare with big drums and organ and guitar, and it's perfect. Wata covers Masashi Kitamura, who I don't know anything about, but it doesn't necessarily matter if you do. The song is a fucking killer. It's one of those beautiful slow building power-ballad-y jams that Boris always takes to the stratosphere. I don't even like it when they do the super rock stuff. I literally fall asleep when they do that. But when they get all quiet and then WAIL over a sad part, I wake up.

Ai Aso - "Islands"
Wata - "Angel"

Oh speaking of Shuggie, he's on the cover of the new Wax Poetics. And on the other cover is MF Doom. NICE. I went down to the Carolinas and listened to Interpol for the first time in forever. It was actually really good. The rest of the time I just wanted to listen to the Germs and the Buzzcocks, and then "Terrapin". I heard David Scott Stone hasn't been using his modular synth lately, which is maybe a good thing. The first song on side B of his Teardrops 7" is cool, but the rest of it is some snoozy noise. I hate saying that. I just want to hear his hardcore band! What else? Oh yeah, I already have a couple leads, but if you have a copy of the Ninja Turtles' Coming Out Of Their Shells Tour video (not the Making Of... video), and want to get rid of it, contact me immediately, please. Next post will be about Failures and Gary Wilson, no question about it. Maybe I'll mention Times New Viking. Err, I'll just do that now.

PS--Divshare issues have been worked out! You can listen to the songs without downloading anything. I'll fix the last couple posts so you can do that with those songs, too.

Holy christ, is September over already? Shit. Alright, well: I wrote a thing about a youtube clip of Nation of Ulysses (above) for Geneva13. Maybe you already knew that? I also go on to say that NOU were really good and other bands are good, too. If you want a copy, send $2 to here. Definitely read the TJ/Nahide Bascakir interview and the Betsy Francechi interview and Lesley Adams' piece about drying her clothes. Definitely read the whole thing, actually. For those who already read my piece and wanted to hear the bonus jams for Fall, here goes: Ted Curson, Soccer Team, and a different Kurt Vile song than the one I mentioned (I don't have an mp3 of "Everyone Is Talkin" lying around). Sorry they're not playing on the embedded player and going straight into download mode. I don't know what the deal is. I think it's some weird quicktime issue, even though they aren't supposed to be quicktime files? If you know another server with a player option, PLEASE TELL ME. I want to go on and on about Kurt Vile and Asa Osborne and Astrud Gilberto, but I don't have the time/brain for it right now. I will really soon, though, so check back like this week even. I could sort of go on and on about Nisennenmondai, Wound, anything coming out of Heartworm. So pissed I didn't order Scarecrow the second I saw it on sale. What was I doing? I've been listening to Beat Happening a lot, too. Jamboree mostly, and Black Candy. How the fuck did this happen? Probably started with a lot of Unrest. Some definite "what would Chunklet think?" going on while I drive around. Fuck it. It's not like I'm not going to order my copy of My Love Is Higher... first thing. I think I need a replacement cover for my Courtesy... vinyl, too. I feel bad for Henry re: Courtesy blunders that were beyond his control, but not too bad re: everything else he does/gets to do. Oh and I can't stop listening to Ahmad Jamal, or the two records I have anyway. When I said "jazz records" in my last post, that's what I meant. There's something about the covers (1, 2) alone. Vivian Girls had that video and a WFMU set. Still pretty in love with them a lot (note the shirt). Ten years ago they could have been playing with Operation: Cliff Clavin and I Farm and The Knockouts, maybe De La Hoya, too (Counter-Clockwise, Pissants, old Nobody Cares, etc?). 18-19 year old me with bleached hair and a blue zip hoodie with a Standfast patch on the back would have been in Chud heaven. Is that how anyone else thinks of them? I'll end on a totally unrelated note and say that The Man Who Wasn't There is a perfect movie. That and Ultra Flesh. If you know the last line of "I Hate Summer", you know how I feel.

Something for August, last minute! I just wanted to mention Ariel Pink because I've been way into him lately. I've liked him for a while, but I never really tried to push him on anyone. He does weird prog-pop on a four-track and sometimes sings like Frankie Valli. He puts out a bunch of records every year and all his cds are like 70 minutes long. He can write a catchy chorus about Bin Laden, but it'll be in the middle of a 20-minute suite. I could see people thinking "What the hell is this? I need to listen to Robert Palmer." Or "I haven't heard Minor Threat in a while, let's listen to that", or "I'm going to put on Licensed To Ill because I know all the words". I've gone back and forth on him, too. There was "Helen" and that video where he's like "I'M SATANIC", but then I thought he was biting R. Stevie Moore and Gary Wilson way too hard. The whole Blank Dogs scene came out and sounded like an oversimplified, cheap Ariel knock-off, but then I was like, this is kind of more palatable, and they're actually coming from a totally different place. It took hearing his live set on WFMU for me to finally understand the nuances. With a backing band, he sounds incredible. Check the difference between the WFMU "L'estat" and the original. Or if you're into garage jams, check the cover of "Calm Me Down". I can also understand being creeped out by Ariel Pink, but he brings back vibes that are never going to come back. Like this guy's face (minus the vag eyes), they exist only in the past. I don't know if that makes sense. I just like stuff like "Suicide Notice". Put aside the Paw Tracks hatred for a second, that's all I'm saying! If you can't, at least watch this review of Best Game. Beyond that, just listen to some jazz records. That's all I got. Sorry I've been phoning it in all summer. I've been standing in two time zones, wondering what time to be home. Werts zine will still be totally in your face, but not until later September or maybe October-ish. My periodical is way late. I might be a published author somewhere else, though. I'll let you know.

From the Dept. of Summer Bummers Dept.: Soiled Mattress and The Springs are playing their last show tonight in NYC. Actually they're maybe even playing right now. If you're in NY the City, go to The Yard next to the Gowanus Canal. I have no idea what any of that means. You can also go here to find out more info. This totally blows, though. I've loved these guys since I saw their "Tidal Wave" video (above) way back when. There was even a point maybe a year or so ago when nothing made me happier than listening to the Springtime! record over and over and over again. I think I said that like 7 or 8 months ago, but it's still true. Go buy it here, or go buy the cd with Springtime! and Honk Honk Bonk! here. Eventually go buy the Honk Honk Bonk! 12" back at Teardrops. Also, go look at the Fader video they did. I tried to watch it but my computer is not hi-tech enough. They also have some good news about future Mattress-related projects. Other good news: this 2-part Ian Svenonius essay on Marion Barry. I'd also like to point out that back in '95 or '96 when Mary J. was singing "You're alllll I neeeeed to get byyyyy" she was talking about listening to Deep Wound after spending 40 minutes just trying to leave Geneva. Fuck bicyclists, fuck athletes, fuck NORMS in general. I think I just moshed in my room. Werts Quarterly Review out by the end of the month!

Just so I have something to show for June 2008, here's some things: another Cohen cover by Harvey Milk (from the Daymare press of Life...), this Delphine song that can't be ignored, these Vivian Girls songs from the record you almost could have gotten but now you'll have to wait until Fall, and some bootleg Blood On The Tracks tracks below a lot of blabbering. Also, the Werts zine is moving along at the slowest possible speeds, but it WILL be out and in your hands and into your life soonish. In the meantime, go see Straight, No Chaser and L'antietam if you're in the same city they're in. Do everything you can not to make this a Summer of Bummers.

PS: I don't know if anyone read the Ben Ratliff piece about Thrones in the New York Times last month, but I swear I didn't see it until like 3 days after I wrote my thing. Am I too weirded out by this? I don't know.

PPS: THRONES RADIO!!

"If I am a perfection-
ist, I do a pretty shitty
job of it."
At the Thrones show last week, Tyler and I did the same thing. Joe Preston--the one man in the one-man band that is Thrones (as well as collaborator with the Melvins, Earth, Sunn 0))), High On Fire, and Harvey Milk)--played a slow, creepy song with drawn-out high notes on his bass, while his sequencer and pedals did other things, and we both stood there with our eyes closed and took it in. It's a fucking really dorky thing to say you did, but it was hard not to do it. He ended his set with "Obolus", and it sounded like he was breathing whole choirs of gold sparks into the microphone and I felt like I was at the end of a movie or possibly at the end of my life. Thrones songs can do that to you. They can fuck you up privately even in a public place where things are relatively normal. They can make it seem like something happened but you didn't know what it was. For some reason it wasn't really like this the last time I saw him, two years prior almost to the day and at the same club. All I remember of that show was us getting really lost on the way there, and my friend Mel telling me about some poem she'd written for a class that involved the term "comatose cocks", and Thrones being pretty loud and goofy. The only thing goofy about this time was maybe Joe Preston's hair and Jason Schulmerich's comment about Werner Herzog remaking Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage (which I honestly thought was a clever joke until I found out it was TRUE). Jason also told us about listening to Thrones on acid years ago, being gone for days and out in the woods and something about being on the bus. He didn't get into too many details. I told him my "Thrones-related mania" story, which wasn't as exciting, of being alone at my old apartment and staying up late listening to Day Late, Dollar Short and looking out into the hallway from my bedroom and suddenly being terrified. I didn't want to look into any of the other rooms. I didn't know what was out there. Jason tapped me on the chest and said, "You were scared of what was IN HERE."

Thrones - "Obolus"
Thrones - "Algol"
Thrones - "Simon Legree"

This page is gonna be on hiatus (it wasn't already??) for most of the next month while I try to get an actual, on-paper zine together. It'll be just like this page only it'll be multiple pages and mostly interviews and probably not have any reviews of records. And it'll have a cool cover, hopefully! In the meantime, devote yourself to listening to Morricone, Jackson Conti, F/i, and this Xela tape. Throw in some Dutronc, too, even if you're like "alright, enough with French shit already" to yourself. And most importantly, be excited for Life...The Best Game In Town. Also, watch the trailer for Zardoz, but NOT the movie itself. You can skip Indiana Jones and the This Is Awful, as well.

C'est la confiance et le courage.
Holy crap, am I behind on this thing or what? I think I forgot how to write these posts. But I also timed it perfectly, since I just got a Moog the other day and I was going to write about Steve Moore's Demo 2003. Originally issued in an edition of 50 CD-Rs, The Hlava label recently stepped up and reissued it as an LP in a slightly less impossible edition of 500 (it's also available as a download from his myspace space). If you're into Zombi--Moore's main gig--then you're definitely a nerd and you're definitely ready for this. Or if you're into any kind of Goblin-y soundtrack work, you'll again be a nerd and be happy and possibly scared. Or if you thought Andrew MacLaren's songs on the Newark! Here Too! comp. were the best songs, you'll have something new to secretly be really jazzed about. Nothing terribly complicated and obviously owing a huge debt to the backlog of Tomitas and Jarres and Carloses, etc., but fuck it. He does it like he fucking means it. Put this on and SPACE OUT! Or don't put this on if you don't really want to space out.

Steve Moore - "The Jefferson Institute"
Steve Moore - "Waves"
Steve Moore - "The White Knight"

There's also the Bastro/Codeine 7". I feel like I read something that said this was more of a collaborative record than a traditional split, but I'm still not sure. The A-side--a cover of Pierre Barouh and Francis Lai's "A L'ombre Des Nous"--is credited to the songwriters, while the B-side--a jarring piece of moody, discordant late-80s instrumental art-punk in five or so actual pieces called "Produkt"--is credited to both Bastro and Codeine. And if you look up info on either song you'll get multiple answers for who did what. But what's probably more important is that both songs will make you wish you were living in 1991. Or that 1991 was living in 2008. That was my initial reaction anyway. "A L'ombre Des Nous" especially is a total devastator. I put it on and kind of had my jaw dropped. Who does something like this anymore? Who finds the slow Slint jams in old soundtrack ballads? I never fucked with Codeine since I've never been able to make it through a whole Low record in one sitting, but they kill it on this 7" and I'm wondering what else they've killed. And "Produkt" is throwaway Bastro jams that are still pretty cool and summarize the entire '90s DIY hardcore aesthetic (which they more-or-less helped prototype). But again, my main feeling about this record was that it was the most refreshing punk record I'd heard in a while. And it's not even that the punk/hardcore/etc. scene now is that bad. I think I can actually say that now. Melodic hardcore looks like it's died out completely (at least around here, hopefully everywhere). Kids seem to be getting weirder and funnier and making bands that are weird and funny. Knowing when to start and when to stop is crucial, whether you're making music that's terrible or complaining about music that's terrible. Shit gets old and edges can get rounded off to the point where you're literally opening for Third Eye Blind. But there's always something else going on, and there's still the possibility that you'll hear a band covering a really good French song brilliantly and, at times, without a French accent.

Bastro/Codeine - "A L'ombre Des Nous"
Bastro/Codeine - "Produkt"

Check out the Plantlife song "Fool For U" here, or at least check out the first couple minutes (it's kind of long). The Santogold song isn't bad either. Errr no, actually--check out this Santogold song first. Imagine if that was on the radio instead of shitty Gwen Stefani songs. The world would be a little better. I found an old episode of MST3K that I've been trying to remember for 10 years. You can watch it starting here. What else?? Hmmm...oh this Doom beat is another reason I wanted a Moog. If you can tell me what the sample is from, I will be your biggest fan. Oh and thank you Kevin for giving me a really nice shout-out on Kpunk! I have never been called sharp and thoughtful in my life, I don't think.

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I thought it best if I cry.
It's got to be cool to be one of those guys who can rattle off a bunch of nonsense and have it come out perfectly formed and incredible, or to be one of those guys who can say one or two things that hang with you forever and almost call you out on some hidden shit you'd hidden even from yourself. The best I could do when I was in a band was stuff like "I've got a boner curse" and "We are not South America" and other stuff that was even more embarrassing, and in conversation I'll occasionally say stuff like "eat those farts like Pac-Man". It's not really the same thing. I'm not one of those guys. Mayo Thompson is definitely one of those guys, although I'm basing that on one week of listening to a reissue of his 1969 album Corky's Debt To His Father, and actually the most interesting thing about the record is that all the songs--as structured as they obviously are--feel like they could fall apart at any second but never do. I'm not really sure how they (Thompson and a bunch of people I'm guessing are from The Red Krayola) managed to keep it together--either by sheer will or mutual agreement not to stop playing until someone gave some kind of signal, or by playing really good bass lines and organ lines and horn parts (that are seriously the best things you'll hear all day), or because Thompson's voice sounds like D. Boon as Syd Barrett, or because he uses that voice to sing lines like "I'd like to get you alone just to know what you'd do". Or it could be otherworldly forces at work, turning what should be something creepy and irritating into something funny and awesome and relatable.

Mayo Thompson - "Dear Betty Baby"
Mayo Thompson - "Horses"
Mayo Thompson - "To You"

Speaking of otherworldly forces, check out Arthur Lipsett's Soundtracks, recently issued as an LP in limited numbers by Global A. While working for the National Film Board of Canada, Lipsett created sound and film collages that blew a lot of young filmmaker minds (apparently there's a reference in Star Wars to one of Lipsett's films) in the '60s. Soundtracks literally presents the complete audio tracks from four of his short films, and even without the visuals it's pretty fascinating and eerie--like Twilight Zone episodes constructed entirely out of random documentary footage. There's something terrifying about listening to disembodied speeches and machine sounds from the past, like it's coming from beyond the grave, but I can't stop listening. Plus, watch the first like 40 seconds of "21-87". It's the scariest shit. Not all of his work (or the little bit that I've seen) is that unsettling. Some of it's just beautiful shots of basic things you'd probably never see otherwise, and disparate elements put together to create a narrative. Whatever's happening on screen or on tape, though, there's a constant feeling that the world is really interesting and huge and there are ghostly things floating in the ether, above all else.

Arthur Lipsett Soundtracks

What else could you want? "I Feel", rare spy music, Failures, Heather Perkins? Everything Blank Dogs has ever done mixed in with good recommendations? I made a muxtape on my day off last week. Maybe you'll like that! You can listen to it here. It's got some songs I've mentioned here and some songs that are beyond discussion. It'll be up for a couple more days, and then I'll probably do a new one (I put a link up top, if you want to check). I'm going to try to do one every week, assuming I don't get sick of it, which is pretty likely.

You should not square it off.
FUCKIN' CLUUTCHYYY!!
Sorry. There's a new Clutchy Hopkins record out on Ubiquity called Walking Backwards and it's wonderful--probably the official album of Summer evenings 2008, but just as essential to getting through some March-April doldrums, if you have those. It's not even about him living in a cave or maybe/maybe not existing, either. He could be Rainn Wilson and it would still be about songs broadcast out of some uncharted quadrant of the funk/jazz/soul/hip-hop feedback loop, that have their own interior logic and speak on the realities and surrealities of living without any actual speaking. And even when there are vocals, they're from that Ecko school of the blues (though maybe Darondo has better/worse cred than that?). It's like they were reading mine and Tyler's minds! Nothing as extreme as "I Got Kicked Off The Oprah Show" or Barbara Carr, but still. He made that shit work! You got an ass kickin' comin'!

Clutchy Hopkins - "Horny Tickle"
Clutchy Hopkins - "Percy's On The One"
Clutchy Hopkins feat. Darondo - "Love of a Woman"

The other day at work I had a 20 minute break between stuff I had to do (between getting back from delivering Expresses and having to go pick up mail from Hobart & William Smith), so I decided to go hang out in my car. While a bunch of my co-workers were chatting and maybe making plans to get some beers at Trotta's after work, I sat in my car listening to part of Gastr Del Sol's The Harp Factory On Lake Street, absently picked at scabs on my hand, counted some of the change in one of my cupholders, tried to fall asleep, and then read something about Taylor Swift in the latest issue of Blender. What the hell is wrong with me? Three weeks earlier, I left Jim Seidel's retirement party feeling like shit, wishing I had been better friends with him, wishing there was at least one person at work who I had any real connection with (maybe someone who hates it as much as I do?), and wondering why I keep a comfortable distance from everything when I know I'll only end up feeling uncomfortable and retarded and awkward later. And then a few days go by and I'm there in my car, zoning right back into "This Job Is Fucking Stupid/Being Alone Is Awesome" mode. I'd rather do NOTHING by myself than potentially do anything with you guys. I'd rather listen to some random There Will Be Blood/Silent Way hybrid and David Grubbs sing-talking (I think it's David Grubbs) than shoot the shit. Is that terrible? I mean I like Gastr Del Sol. I like that they did pretentious things but were natural and charming about it, and I can appreciate that they're part of a larger tradition of dorks doing cool shit. But it seems like the flip side of that appreciation is that, professionally, I'm going to continue being probably the worst version of myself for the rest of my life. It's the price you pay for trying really hard not to pay a price.

Gastr Del Sol - "The Harp Factory On Lake Street"

YESSSSSSSSSSS! Also, get your Bohack record here and your Venom and Cannibal Coke stage banter here. My favorite part of Discreet Charm can be found here starting at around the 4:51 mark. Sorry there are no subtitles. You can make up your own dialogue! If all else fails, go with Hugh or Lenny or Prince Vince. Or..."o"...skip directly to "Hollywood Freaks" and Dock Ellis' story.

All alone (I) saw a spark.
I was really reluctant to talk about Belong's Colorloss Record. I saw Pitchfork liked it a lot, which should have made it immediately suspect, and then I read a review of the Pitchfork review that made me feel totally grossed out about music writing and the internet. It was like watching Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer or something. It was like that feeling. But I can't deny that I like Colorloss Record. If daylight savings time and very, very early mornings fucked you up to the point where you were partly hallucinating all last week, you might like it in the same way that I do. That's a really specific endorsement. There's also the spectre of ambient German stuff from the '70s, British psych (all the songs are old psych covers), black metal drones, and avant classical work that I'm only kind of familiar with hanging over the whole record. And it's understandably been tagged as a shoegaze thing, although it's the most extreme shoegaze shit I've heard. Like you're half listening to air and half listening to a band roaring from down a hallway, which maybe makes it sound like it would be too challenging or really not enjoyable, but it actually feels right. Some things are just better when they sound terrible! Or maybe a better thing to say would be "production and engineering decisions are very important". Like there are those guitar parts that pop up towards the end of Blur's "Coffee and TV", where it sounds like there's something really wrong with Graham Coxon's guitar and it's probably going to explode. How did he get that sound? What the fuck is Belong even playing? Sometimes it's completely about the sound of something and nothing else.

Belong - "Late Night"
Belong - "My Clown"

"Frankie Teardrop" is the official Tyler-Matt national anthem. I'm not sure what that says exactly. Also, "Miami Morning Coming Down II" is different from "Miami Morning Coming Down I". I'm not crazy about Shane Smith, but anything about North Korea is fascinating and scary, and I'm fucking amazed they were able to a.) go there b.) shoot anything and c.) not get trapped forever in a North Korean prison FOREVER or brutally executed. Check out these snacks.