WELL, WELL, WELL, VELOCITY BOY

The American president Americans have been waiting for.
Sentridoh: Forever Instant


Juvenilia, or:
Fun With the Wayback Machine
(Part Two of A Potentially Recurring Series for When I'm Too Busy/Sleepy/Boring/Lazy/Vain for to Write Much)

Weezer is the only band I loved in 7th and 8th grade that I still love today. They're amazing, absolutely amazing. Half of the songs are the story of my life, the other half are the story of my dreams (whatever the hell that means). Basically, these guys rock. For those of you who don't own their second album, Pinkerton, c'mon, buy it, it's awesome (just like the first one, shown below)!

(me, 1997 or 1998)


Embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past.
Blur: All Your Life

The reason for this recent stroll down memory lane, aside from the fact that I drive myself crazy enough writing paid assignments these days (so the prospect of a multi-hour, thoughtful blog project is less practical/appealing than it once was), is a note from a polite person yesterday who says he remembered a cheesy, godawful recording I put on MP3.com in 1999 or 2000. It was a six-minute dirge called "Don't Fade Away," which I wrote about college graduation and performed outdoors at my high school with my friend Phill Daniel (for some kind of battle of the bands, but we weren't actually competing because Phill organized the thing). Anyway, as a music critic I was way too embarrassed, self-conscious, and paranoid to send even a friendly-seeming correspondent such a totally crappy track (off-key vocals, wanky guitar solo, ridiculous emoting, goofy beat programming, sampled strings!, conga drums!), but somehow I found myself on the archive site at archive.org, looking at my old MP3.com page.

When I did this, I noticed something totally random. I had only two links to "Other MP3.com Artists". One was to my friend Matt's Klunko IDM project. The other was to a lo-fi project called Lackthereof, by a guy named Danny Seim. Lackthereof. Danny Seim. These things seemed familiar to me. So I did some Googling.


mp3 (zshare)
We don't never say shit, we the Blue Man Group.
Jazz Butcher: Susie

Forkcast, Oct. 3, 2007

At a Menomena live show, it becomes head-slappingly apparent how vital Danny Seim's drumming is to the Portland band's fractured, loop-based pop songs. Starting even before Menomena made their startlingly good 2003 debut, I Am the Fun Blame Monster, Seim has released seven solo albums under the moniker Lackthereof. 2004's Christian the Christian was the first to receive proper distribution, and now a follow-up, My Haunted, is on the way via Portland label FILMguerrero.

Full circle, like Cheerios.
Quiet Village: Victoria's Secret & other songs (something of a Silent Movie preview, I guess) [possibly NSFW at the VERY end!]

RIGHT NOW MY JOB IS EATING THESE DONUTS

I will punish my body until I believe in my soul.
My Bloody Valentine: Lovelee Sweet Darlene

Is it weird that I like to hear Justice's "D.A.N.C.E." (vid) and "B.E.A.T." (stream), two sides of the same dance-pop single, as metamusic? In this jaded day and scene, their fun-oriented directness seems to me like a music-critical statement in itself. Where LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" ironically challenged aspiring dance fans to wayback through hipster history (where kids' lack of taste-- "you don't know what you really want"-- would always keep them a little "behind"), the simple Jackson Five-Oh instructions of the Justice tracks return the dance floor from the heads to the hips. Even if those hips belong to wedding-reception grandmas who'd just as soon be wiggling to "Y.M.C.A.". Oy.

Frank Rich was wrong, as expected: Thus far, Don Imus's firing hasn't had a "chilling effect" on free speech, at least not on other talk radio outlets, the New York Times reports. To Rich's credit, he finally turns on the press myth of Saint Condoleeza Rice in today's column, though he continues to place Colin Powell on a long-since-undeserved pedestal. Oh, to be Rich.

Saint John McCain doesn't care about gay people. Mainstream media orgs don't care, period. (Also: Matthew Yglesias on McCain's infinite dumbness.)

FreakyTrigger's latest Poptimism podcast includes Simian Mobile Disco, Justice, Uffie, and a Robyn vs. The Cure mashup.

Kelefa Sanneh praises the virtues of nostalgia. I have a couple of quibbles, but I love that he recognizes the trans-genre importance of sentimentality to music fandom: "We fans are a flighty, easily distractible, gossipy, hopelessly sentimental bunch; our fondness for reunions only underscores the point. Fans of punk and postpunk once thought of themselves as different, but the current reconstitutional convention makes it clear that Pixies fans aren’t so different from Fleetwood Mac fans." (But surely Steve Albini is still better than Fleetwood Mac fans?)

Get Lonely: Bob Desper album download.

Barry Ritholtz lists famous wrong opinions: "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."

Oh and I forgot to link to my Patrick Wolf review at Playboy.com (Cleveland Steamer jokes get edited out even at Playboy, kids, sorry).

Surely you've listened to M.I.A.'s "Hit That" by now.

BOFA DEEZ.


It's about to get metaphysical.
Architecture in Helsinki: Heart It Races


Brian Williams wuvs Rush Limbaugh. I am so gonna keep blogging about your worthless millionaire ass, Williams.
Rush Limbaugh: Barack the Magic Negro

MY BLOG IS LIKE THE INTERNET... FOR LUDDITES

Sorry, it must still be the CR talking. Thank you for the unexpected support, unexpectedly non-batshit letter writers!

I had him pegged as more of a "Kokomo" guy, but whatever:

"D" is for "delightful," and try and keep your trousers on.
John McCain: Bomb Iran (Beach Boys cover)

A week earlier, ingeniously disingenuous Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan praised McCain for "sound[ing] like a serious man addressing a serious issue in a serious way" (via ThinkProgress).

At the same time, worm-tongued New York Times columnist David "Brooksy" Brooks was suggesting McCain might be "the candidate who is the most substantive, most mature and most consistent," Ezra Klein points out.

Best one-line response: "Just wait until his second term!" (Isaac Chotiner, writing in The New Republic's blog, The Plank)

On a more serious note (McCain's defense: I wuz joking-- WE KNOW! Maybe if you spent more time in a POW camp you'd understand the horror of war, or at least the negative foreign policy implications of acting like a total douche), somehow I only now saw the news of Flying Canyon frontman Cayce Lindner's untimely passing back in February. Sad and pointless. Why didn't you people listen to Flying Canyon's great self-titled album last year? Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy called it "an erudite haze that foregoes caricature and wardrobe changes in favor of melody, inventive instrumentation, strong songwriting, and an honest, riveting charisma." You can still grab an MP3 of my favorite song from the album, "The Bull Who Knew the Ring," over at Raven Sings the Blues.


Slam your body down and wind it all around.
Los Campesinos!: You! Me! Dancing!
signed, sealed, etc.

Elsewhere: K-Punk interviews Simon Reynolds. Fascinating stuff, but me being me, a quibble: I take issue with (only) one of Reynolds' complaints about rockism, namely, that "any approach that fixates on the song" is contemptible. I like songs, and I like tracks, but from an Arctic Monkeys fan it seems uncharacteristically purblind to suggest liking songs is inherently bad. I suspect he might rephrase this if asked again. It's just as ridiculous to suggest that the song is an inherently awful form as it was for rockists to say the same about dance music, rap, et alia back in olden times. Worse, it's pointlessly elitist: We music critics may have time and the free music to appreciate textures, atmospheres, whatever, but many song-weaned ordinary people don't, and I'm not sure that makes them worthy of Reynolds' contempt. DAMN, REST IN PEACE APOLLO CREED.

At the Times, Nate Chinen reviews David Torn's Joe's Pub show.