The Backbone of this Country is Independent Trucking

Oh- Oh yes.

The National: Alligator, Vamplifier: Long Silent Longing

The National: Alligator

The impulse when you come across something new is to try to hear something you've heard before. Your brain tries to put the pieces it finds into some understandable order. This recording is no exception. What do I want to compare this sound to? To the understatement and rhythm of Joy Division, to the repetitive prettiness of early Crooked Fingers. But there's a new complexity, there are epic, open spaces in the music where shit just goes nuts- pianos, guitars, background singers mixing with the lead. There are instances of delicate guitar work that eschew the whole Joy Division esthetic. Vocals like Neil Diamond, Ian Curtis, and Elvis packed together with lyrics which are the chronicle of a weird normality, a quotidian gothic. It's a recording that pulls you in to a new place, refracts you through a neglected facet of reality and makes you listen to accounts of things that simply refuse to rely on stock phraseology. Familiar words abut, and though the words are common enough, something in the arrangement requires all the power of your attention, like you've just walked in to a room where your best friend in the 4th grade is sitting there, unaging, in conversation with your grown children. Both are intimately familiar, but why HERE, why LIKE THIS?
What fury, what beauty. It's good.

Vamplifier: Long Silent Longing

I've been humming a lot of these songs and singing them to myself for the past couple of years. Now, finally, the cd is out and other people can get ahold of this great album and get hooked on these songs of obsession and love noir. Bluesy, garagey, pained, exalted. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great nod to both the femme fatale and Gary Numan. She Used to Be my Baby is frenzied in its remembrance of one who got away and took a chunk with her. Every time I hear the words "She used to be my baby, she loved me maybe", I don't know whether to smile in the solidarity of shared experience or sit back and wonder one more time what the hell that one WAS thinking, really. Stripped. Filthy. Tight. Smokey. Just listen to this record.

Some CL ads I recently authored

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Who fucking knew?

Fountains of Wayne do a cover of These Days. It's good. I'm not sure if anyone did it before her, but I know it as a Nico tune off of Chelsea Girls. Who knew?

My Dutch Wife!

Wild Anniemals Need Vodka, Are Very Polite

I just put on Magazine's "Permafrost," and as soon as the chorus line "I will drug you and fuck you on the permafrost" came up, I remembered I ought to write about my vanilla-mediated run-in with that cruel arctic clime last Thursday.
Saw the American debut of Norway's Annie at the glamorously packed Tribeca Grand Hotel by way of a free invite from a friend of a friend. Annie is a dancey, Kylie Minogue-y, Discoteque debutante with songs and moves endearingly clumsy and, as such, weirdly sexy. Imagine being Tom Hanks with Darrel Hannah nude as Venus standing in your living room making little girl noises and weird overtures to sex that you're not sure she- or you- understands. What is happening? You ask yourself. Then the mermaid pulls out a giant bottle of vodka and proceeds to drink half of it during her 5 or 6 song set. It's finally happening! the Tom Hanks you is forced to conclude. What do you do next? You scream "Play Heartbeat!" and attempt to dance ass to hip with the other early adopters, industry insiders and other types of sweating bodies while holding a messenger bag that you should have dropped off before going anywhere that night. Had a great time. Annie and her band do a good mix of European Giorgio Moroder disco revival replete with vocoders, Kylie Minogue coquetteishness, innocently direct overtures for sex and silly metaphors for aforementioned having lots of sex (see "Bubblegum"). Many thanks to my companion that evening, whose veteran scenester pushiness and unameliorated excitement at the prospect of seeing live music despite many unmoving bodies standing between her and the stage has imbued her with superpowers that turn her finely-lathed frame into some kind of mass surgical instrument/crowd drilling tool. Without her I would surely have pussed out and stood way back in the bar looking uncomfortable.
Annie was very polite.

A short note on personal responsibility

I just read that when John Lennon heard of Elvis's death, he was quoted as saying "Elvis died the day he went into the army."

We each have a responsibility to pax in perpetuity, do we not?

We each have a responsibility to our art.

why there are no guilty pleasures

Guilt is social. Pleasure isn't. Nothing is intrinsically guilt-inducing. Guilt is the internalization of external standards of moral trespass. Pleasure is automatic and can happen in absolute solitude, internally. A guilty pleasure is a combination of the internal self and external, social self, and it requires a decision, conscious or unconscious, to bring the detriment of guilt upon yourself. Guilt is the acceptance of a constructed social burden.
Guilt also differs from regret, because there are no overtly moral "should" or "should not" overtones, only "it would have been better" or "it would not have been better" given the particular context of reflection.

The Ease of Summer

Sam Prekop/Who's Your New Professor

Thrilljockey
Sam Prekop drives a big Mack truck of skill and arcane science through the leaden latent summer air like a faith healer through flesh. The summer. Remember those days of short pants, breasts, and near-naked spontaneity that taught you to ride a bike, that taught you to count your near friends and your free times dear, that taught you to throw a frisbee amid transplanted city girls on the Great Lawn at Central Park? Remember the simple slide into evening viewed through a slice of cooling humidity in the air? Remember easy living?
Deep in your heart, you know life isn't that simple, but if you take it fast enough and with enough gusto, if you take it all of an experiential piece, you can play along with yourself, pretend all those eighth-notes and off-beats, the algorithmic thrumming of your soul, the train under the street, the millions of obligations forgiven and enforced all around you really are simple and wonderful of themselves. With Who's Your Professor, Prekop brings all that to you at one more remove, stylizing it with his desperate-yet-unfettered aspirated vocals and refining it invisibly for you to take in the ludicrous gestalt of life refined as an essence for the ear, eighth-notes, off-beats, and high-energy jazz-hinting flourishes all. The very muted electronics and the unmistakable production give you at one and the same time the impression that it's a work of staggering simplicity and subtle, tweaked genius. And the guitar solo that reserved the long banquet hall for a couple of hours at the end of Dot Eye lacadaisically shoots a long snort of beatific lightning into your lobes. Imagine a "She's Not There" Carlos Santana working an electric guitar alseep inside a Picasso hanging on a wall inside the dream inside Garcia-Marquez's Eyes of a Blue Dog.
And I haven't even figured out what he's singing yet. This album is getting played all spring, all summer, all "all night," to invoke the poetic time/space the Breeders sing about on Last Splash. This is one for the record books.

caramel Krunch!

If none of you have tried this, you simply must.