ALLOW ME TO REINTRODUCE MYSELF

I know I've been a little lax on the blogging these last few weeks, which sucks seeing as how people are actually starting to read this sprawling textual monstrosity now; all I can do is blame the fact that my life seems to have basically fallen to shit in a spectacularly varied range of ways recently, and it's been hard enough to get out of bed without walking straight towards the cutlery with evil on my mind, let alone come up with reasons as to why you should be listening to that Spank Rock album (which, incidentally, is really fun). However, today is Valentine's day, and I'm a violently self-loathing blogger all by himself; today may as well be my Super Bowl (or Waterloo - guess we'll find out). I will warn you now that this will be very, very long.

Ahem.

ABC, "All Of My Heart" - Sometimes in life you meet girls; other times you find yourself face to face with destiny. This especially tends to happen when you're fifteen and your conception of history takes its framing from stupid, ephemeral shit like pop music, which may well have more emotionally curative powers than I'm willing to give credit for in public but for DAMN sure doesn't do any favors for your perception of the passing of time; life can seem a lot longer than it actually is when an album like The Bends (again, fifteen) achieves old-and-bustedness in the space of a few months. Profundity is a cheap commodity when you're young; everything has the potential to be profound when you're experiencing it for the first time, and since, well, everything's happening for the first time, well, it's easy to get mixed up about what matters.

And then there was Veronica. She lives on the other side of the country now, and as far as I know she doesn't read this blog (although I'm still not using her real name), and I've probably spent a grand total of something like two days' worth of time in her company over the course of my twenty-four years of life, but all that's immaterial; for all intents and purposes, she was the most significant figure in my life in terms of how I came to understand the world up until I went off to college, to the point where I still get aftershocks from her split-second participation in my life years after the fact. I mean, ten years later I can still remember the very first thing she ever said to me ("nice socks"), and ten years later I still have no idea why she said anything to me in the first place - all I knew was that I was staring into the future, and for the first time in my miserable existence the future looked good.

Obviously Veronica was an absolute, utter, abject fox; it was like God had been snooping around in my brain and came up with something lithe and gorgeous specifically to distract me at the summer program we both attended. But if living in Los Angeles has driven two points into my head, it's (1) that beautiful girls really are everywhere, and (2) that appreciating said beauty really isn't any sort of meaningful interaction, regardless of how enjoyable it is. Of course, when I was fifteen, I was living in North Carolina, seemingly exclusively the domain of horrible bitches who could get away with making my life a hell on earth by virtue of the fact that they were attractive and I was pathetic and underinformed about the world. You can probably guess that Veronica deeply wasn't like that - somehow we seemed to mysteriously hit it off immediately, since she wasn't just as much of a weirdo about stuff like movies and music and the internet as I was back then (hopefully she's not in my league of dorkistry these days, if only for the sake of her own mental well-being). To steal the same line from Nate Patrin twice in two weeks, it really was like Springfield Milhouse meeting Shelbyville Milhouse, with the only minor difference being that this particular Shelbyville Milhouse happened to be poured into an arrestingly yellow pair of pants.

As you can probably guess, absolutely nothing happened. Most people would say that this was due to me being an extraordinary coward, which I suppose is probably true, but in my defense I at least want it on the record that I meant well by my pathetic nature; I genuinely did think that my making a move on her would have only ended in my somehow traumatizing her for the rest of her life, and that's the kind of guilt I'm not particularly great at handling. Looking back now, of course, I was clearly retarded; not being clairvoyant I can't/don't want to say that I was somehow blind to her being as soul-consumingly into me as I was to her, but I feel pretty secure in my memories of a couple of instances where I unavoidably failed as a man by not at least pursuing other possibilities (especially a few years later when she convinced her parents to drive hours out of their way during a trip up from Florida in order to come visit me, let alone two years ago when she looked me up while she was out in LA and actually hooked up with some most-assuredly-worthless DJ douchebag* literally right in front of me , NOT THAT I DWELL ON THESE THINGS OR ANYTHING). But, fuck, I was fifteen and utterly incapable of wrapping my mind around the idea that these kinds of things could happen for someone like me; at the time, and even somewhat to this day to a distressingly acute degree, pining away seemed like a perfectly valid alternative to losing the best thing I had going, uneventful or not.

Maybe now you can see why I can't help but think "All Of My Heart" must have been waiting with the long knives out specifically for me to come along. I may have mentioned before that ABC's The Lexicon Of Love is generally my response these days whenever the topic of Favorite Albums Ever Ever Ever comes up, but if I haven't, there it is, and "All Of My Heart" was the song that got me to check it out, mostly because it's just one of the least-arguably great songs ever; it's as sure a bet that "All Of My Heart" is in the moment of meaning something really significant to someone somewhere in the world right as I'm typing this sentence (and again as you're reading it) as it would be for Led Zeppelin's entire discography, with the notable difference being that "All Of My Heart" is actually fun to listen to. At the dirt worst, it's "one of" the greatest songs I've ever heard about pining away for a girl (although if I'm not trying to be measured and objective, it's far more likely to be number one and the best on that list), and not just due to Martin Fry's paralyzingly insightful lyrics - "All Of My Heart" sounds like pining away feels in much the same way that the Exploding Hearts' only album sounds like youthful rock'n'roll exuberance or Music For Airports does for tranquility. It's just all right there.

Pining away may look passive on the surface, but anyone who's ever done it with even a modicum of determination can tell you that that's sure not how it feels inside your head. I can still remember with frightning vividity how easy it was to filter damn near every aspect of my existence through the lens of Veronica; the inside of my head might as well have been a silent movie for all the melodrama I put us both through in there. It's the kind of mindset that informs every second of every day until it passes, like having Mr. Moviefone living in your skull, except instead of helpfully providing information he's spending part of the time screaming at you not to act on your impulses and the other exponentially-larger part describing fictional little moments of future nostalgia in painfully thorough detail. And really, if you're doing it right, by which I mean doing it from a position of sinciere emotion and concern rather than BOY I WISH I COULD PUT MY DONG IN THAT CHICK-itis, it should be insanely maudlin stuff - after all, seeing as how most pining has its roots in piddling little real-world moments where you're the only one sensing any significance at all, it makes a damning amount of sense that the fantasies you create would be just as mundane, only in your head you're both blissfully aware of what's happening. Take it from a guy who's spent an alarming amount time dreaming about shit as stupid as sitting on a couch with a girl - it may not look like much, but it's pretty violently unmissable from the point of view of the person going through it.

And that is why "All Of My Heart" is so perfect: it's chintzy and schmaltzy and painfully, aggressively melodramatic-sounding by virtue of both Trevor Horn's unparallelled knack for downright theatrical production as well as Fry's poisonously precise lyrics and, just as importantly, his tortured howling delivery - and it's dead on the fucking money. Of course pining away should sound like a Barry Manilow song pushed to the margins of infinity; I mean, you're forcing yourself to not pursue a girl - are you really going to turn to Gene Simmons for that? Wouldn't you rather have the least rock'n'roll song imaginable, the kind of song so profoundly unrocking that it practically doubles back on itself and rocks just by virtue of its accuracy? I mean, I know I only have my own experiences to go from here, but "All Of My Heart" even gets the little shit right; it syncs up with my feelings like Dark Side of the Moon does with The Wizard of Oz, right down to the way it just keeps on going even after it stops being compelling - I mean, you've got my word that that's exactly how stuff plays out in real life. (Click here to buy the deluxe edition of The Lexicon of Love from Amazon.com. You will be making the wisest purchase of your life.)

*Seriously, homeboy's game mostly seemed to consist on lecturing everyone in attendance on the comparative virtues of a wide range of breaks records. Keep in mind that at the time, Hybrid may have been my favorite production outfit in the universe, so I was pretty acutely aware of this dude's overpowering fullness of shit and I still had to sit there and listen to him ramble on inanely about the virtues of records I'd been done with for years. It was like losing your dream girl to Ryan Seacrest. Stupid fucking world.

Tiga, "Far From Home" (DFA Vocal remix) - And by way of thanking you for affording me the chance to vent my emo bullshit, I figured I'd just nut up and post this remix despite my earlier misgivings. Having lived with this song for a few days now, I have to say that I'm not listening to it nearly as compulsively as I was a few days ago, but if anything it's only gotten more impressive the less interested I am in how it hurls me around a room than in how insanely intricate a piece of work it is. Obviously this is most clearly manifested in Those Drums and the way they turn into Those Other Drums later in the track, only to turn into Those Other Other Drums even later, only to drop out entirely as the song turns into this near-tangible psyche buzz. But really, it's worth listening to this song just to pick one element and follow it throughout the song - so much stuff seems to happen to so many things in here that it's just incredible. I seriously think it's one of the most remarkable things to come out of Camp DFA so far - it's as impressive a departure from their weird-ass norm as "Casual Friday" or that Britney track that surfaced a while back. I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU AREN'T DOWNLOADING etc., even if it's just to take the load off Maxcar for a minute. (The "Far From Home" single hasn't been released yet, but you can click here to buy Tiga's Sexor or here to buy the immortal and immaculate DFA Compilation #2 from Amazon.com to tide you over)

ELSEWHERE
- HEY! BadmintonStamps brings that straight-up old-school fyah inna Guillemots stylee, both in the form of "We're Here", their most recent single (which, as you can imagine, is quite good) and more importantly in the form of A RELEASE DATE FOR WHAT CAN ONLY BE THE GREATEST ALBUM OF THIS AND POSSIBLY ANY OTHER YEAR on May 1st. Hopefully I'll have a job/won't have hung myself by then, because lord knows that's got to be the most personally essential album since Rachel Stevens pwnd the whole ignorant world. Also, note that the Guillemots are offering up four tracks for free via their website, all of which I will be downloading as soon as I post this enormous wad of text.

- FOUR PAGES!