How To Buy Stuff

Snowfight in the City Centre, "No Light Left"
The Long Blondes, "Fulwood Babylon"

I used to think of downloading as the last refuge of the digitally retarded, but my habits in consumption seem to have brought me to a point where I either nut up and buy a turntable (or as I like to think of it, a one-way ticket to debtor's prison) or grit my teeth and start paying for ones and zeroes. Frankly, I'm still not all that comfortable with the situation - when you've had hard drives die the way I've had hard drives die, you learn the value of owning the physical product - but I don't really have any better options; the internet may lead to a lot of stuff getting covered which would have otherwise fallen by the wayside, but that doesn't mean that there's not plenty of wayside-fodder waiting to take its place, some of which I happen to take a particular interest in for whatever reason. Obviously, a shift like this doesn't happen overnight; sometimes it takes a particular event to hep you to seismic shifts you might have otherwise overlooked. Fortunately, between the batch of singles I bought online and the batch of physical singles that finally showed up yesterday, I think I found two.

See, I really do like buying actual singles - hell, considering that I've only ever been able to buy CD singles, I 'd stack my allegiance to the format up against anyone else's on earth. But buying actual singles - o mah jesus get ready for that some of that crazy-ass James-esque profundity - isn't the same game as buying digital ones; when you're dealing with physical product, after all, you have to ask yourself a whole host of questions that don't necessarily have anything to do with the music you're ostensibly buying, stuff like "Do I want this enough to let Piccadilly tack another pound onto the shipping charge?" or "What are the chances that I'm going to come out of this transaction with something unspeakably dire on my shelf?" or, most centrally, "Am I ever going to give a shit about having a physical backup of this song in the first place?" That last one, I might add, is the real silent killer - I can remember passing on the single of the Pipettes' "Dirty Mind" simply because I'd just come out a rather underwhelming spate of purchasing any single whose press release mentioned 1960s girl-group pop in any way, and every time the vastly inferior album mix of the track pops up on my iPod I die a little more inside. Meanwhile, this piece of shit stays with me to this day. It's hard not to see the whole enterprise as something of a fool's game.

So you would think, then, that I'd be all kinds of gung-ho about downloading stuff - it's just that you'd be wrong. The thing about all those extraneous, extramusical issues is that they do give you some semblence of investment in the music, no matter how petty that investment may be; when you take them all out of the equation, you can frequently find yourself in posession of a whole bunch of songs you don't give a shit about and which don't sound half as good as the press releases made you think they might, and when you trade in stock as (let's face it) flimsy and ephemeral as indie pop, it's really easy to wake up and find yourself staring down the barrel of a whole bunch of songs on your iPod with a star rating of three and a playcount of one. And that sucks; few things on this earth infuriate me as reliably as spending money on music I'm never going to listen to again, no matter how accomplished it is (this, incidentally, is why I'll never own any Air album outside of the first one, but don't go tellin' folxxx).

Fortunately for me, then, one of the singles I picked up yesterday was "No Light Left", the debut single from the lamentably-titled Snowfight in the City Centre. I mean, it's not like I haven't bought some fine singles in the minute and a half that I've been buying stuff digitally - q.v. my flipout over that very very very good Sunny Day Sets Fire song last week - but they'd all been pretty predictable; when you've been catering to your tastes as specifically and for as long as I've been, eventually the finish gets burnished off the potentialities of both feast and famine when you're dealing with ground as familiar as "jangly indie-pop" (or "Just Blaze-produced club bangers" or "Trentemoeller remixes" or or or). "Mopey, Smiths-y, post-U2 indie-pop", on the other hand, is less of a familiar bailiwick, mostly because (1) I don't need any help being a mopey bastard and (2) the prospect of someone firing the Smiths, U2, and the complete discographies of both bands directly into the hottest part of the sun only makes me smile; as far as I'm concerned, and I say this with the full force of someone who's paid more than a few bucks to reach this conclusion, it's just a way some people make music. It's just that some people are really good at making music that way - case in point, Snowfight, although longtime readers might be less surprised to hear me bubble over on their behalf upon learning that most of the band's core used to make up Olde-Tyme GP Favez Lisa Brown. But BOY are they ever good at it, or more specifically at carrying your attention along before getting to the bits that you actually want to hear; it's noteworthy enough that a band can induce two or three minutes of full-on tweed-blazer chin-stroking Music Appreciation mode in me without earning my eternal ennui, but in all the leadtime to The Big Moment that happens about two and a half minutes into this song, I never once held it against them. And it goes without saying that The Aforementioned Moment is pretty damned great - the whole song just up and takes flight on yr ass. It's quite excellent.

But it wasn't until I tore into my Piccadilly's mailer that I got any perspective on the subject. See, I'd made the foolish mistake of placing my order right before the Fourth of July holiday, meaning mail service was even less reliable than usual (and boy let me tell you what, when we're talking Los Angeles mail, that's some doin' right there), meaning I had to sit around in agony for two full weeks waiting for a bunch of stuff to show up when I could have just bought it online and been done with it. And first among that stuff was my copy of "Weekend Without Makeup", the most-recent single from Nu-Skool GP Superfixxxations The Long Blondes - or rather, my copy of "Fulwood Babylon", the Erol Alkan-produced b-side which I'd seen getting insane hype around a few boards. I really don't know if I can begin to tell you how excited I was for this song without employing, I dunno, hand gestures and traffic flares and marching bands and stuff; after all, it's just a collaboration between one of my favorite bands and one of the most reliably awesome dance producers (who'd never produced a song for a band before, no less!) right at the moment when both seem poised to take their acts to, well, if not the mainstream, at least a wider segment of it - THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of situation that sets my Spidey-sense off with tragic predictability. So I get it and...it kinda sucks. I mean, I keep waiting for it to just push off into the stratosphere, to drop the whole coked-up jitter in favor of the kind of volcanic chorusmongering I'd learned to expect from the Blondes after songs like "Lust In The Movies" or "Separated By Motorways", and it just flat-out doesn't. It just kinda simmers...and simmers...and simmers...and don't get me wrong, it's a hell of a little song, but CAN WE PLEASE GET PAST THE SIMMERING PART AND GET TO THE ASSBEATING PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.

Well, long story short: I'm an idiot. I woke up this morning and immediately turned on "Fulwood Babylon"; right before I stepped in the shower I ducked back over to the computer to make sure the track was set to repeat - hell, I practically had to write all that stuff about Snowfight from memory, since "Fulwood Babylon"'s been the only thing on my iTunes since I sat down to write this out. It's a hell of a song, very possibly one of the elite indie-rock tracks of the year and almost inarguably one of the best songs the Blondes have yet to record; frankly I'm nearly stupefied by their decision not to release it as a single (although it bears remembering that the Blondes have arguably the finest pedigree out of any band of their generation and genre when it comes to b-sides, but I digress). And every time I listen to it, I can't help but wonder what if I'd bought it online like I kept finding myself tempted to do - well, actually, I don't wonder at all; knowing my fickle, mercurial ass, I'd probably have written it off forever and moved on to whatever breezy Swedish single came right after it in my purchase order. "Fulwood Babylon", in other words, isn't anything like what I wanted or even expected to hear (which is more than a little ridiculous since it's about as Long Blondes as you're going to get in terms of content and about as Erol Alkan as you're going to get in terms of sound, if not expansiveness), and if it weren't for the frenzy I found myself whipped into thanks to a confluence of hype and the continued, near-heroic slothfulness of the Los Angeles post office which made me so determined to give it a chance even if it had absolutely nothing to do with sating my own personal tastes, I might have just let it pass me by.
So thank fuck for that, then.

Like I said up top, I'm pretty sure that buying singles online is just going to be a way of life from now on; for the first time in my life I seem to have found myself with a job that allows me to waste money on stupid shit like singles without compromising the money I have budgeted for car repair/health insurance/weed, and it's far too tempting a toilet to keep from flushing my money down now that I've figured out how to go about doing it effectively. But at the risk of sounding like a small-town sportswriter, there'll always be a place in my heart/wallet for the real things - digital singles may get you the music you want, after all, but physical product teaches you about what you want in the first place. Put differently, when a song makes you go "Oh man, I want to hear that", you might as well go with iTunes and save on shipping, but when a song makes you go "Oh man, I want that", you really ought to go with an actual copy. You get the point. I could go on forever. I'm sure I will.

(Click here to buy the "No Lights Left" single directly from High Voltage, the label)
(Click here to buy the "Weekend Without Makeup" CDS directly from Rough Trade. Alkon-spotters might also take note of both the 7" versions of the single, each of which feature exclusive b-sides also produced by Alkon)