NEVAR FORGET

Black Leotard Front, "Casual Friday" - Sigh; it looks like the dream may well be dead. You really can't imagine how much I was looking forward to Delia & Gavin's first album (hopefully of many) as Black Leotard Front - posting "Casual Friday" may be as superfluous a gesture at this point since everyone with even the littlest lick of sense in their heads already has DFA Compilation #2 by now, but I'll be damned if I have another gesture of any worth at my disposal for the task at hand, namely eulogizing (for now, at least) what really should have been the best album of the year. And I fucking love that new Knife record.

"Casual Friday", for me, is one of those songs where I can tell you exactly where and when I first heard it. It's a shitty non-anecdote, of course - driving back from a movie at about one in the afternoon; HANGIN' IN A CHOW LINE GOOD TIMES indeed - but it speaks right to a central truth about the song, namely that it really does come out of nowhere. I mean, it's not many songs where you can actually sit down and list off the ways in which it refutes a preconception, but "Casual Friday"

• is arguably the most "normal people"-friendly song the DFA have yet to put out (and if it weren't fifteen minutes long, you could knock that "arguably" right off)
• is arguably the least DFA-y song ever to come out on DFA - I mean, "Casual Friday"'s all gentle, sunny claps and bounce; it's about as far from "Yeah" or "House Of Jealous Lovers" as you're ever going to get
• is inarguably the least "Delia & Gavin" song I've ever come across, including that impossible-to-find two-minute thing from some artsy coffee-table book
• etc.
  

So yeah, quite the little song to come bounding out of some speakers. And the timeframe's important, too - remember that for a lot of people (or at least a lot of people I know), DFA wasn't a household name until 2005; when Compilation #2 came out in November of 2004, folx like me still had our tiny pea-sized brains working overtime to come up with some sort of conception of a DFA aesthetic - and here came "Casual Friday" to blow all my attempts away, and be crazy fucking fun for Teh Dauncing to boot. What's arguably even more impressive, though, is the way it continued to confound months - hell, at this point, years - after the fact; I mean, it wasn't until I had my Days of Mars episode that I really got a feel for how violent a break "Casual Friday" was for Delia & Gavin, and that wasn't until late summer of last year. It really did just about everything you could hope a song would do.

And, for once, it managed to do all that without fucking over the album. Obviously, a little bit of this has to do with the fact that unless you count the dub version, "Casual Friday" represents the entirity of Black Leotard Front's output, and it's a lot easier to create lofty expectations when you don't even have a second dot to connect. But I really don't think that gets to the heart of the matter, namely that "Casual Friday" bored clear through my expectations to the point where I'm not sure a second single (even one frontloaded with a title as buck-fuckin' crazy awesome a title as "Hey Coach (I Read Your Diary)") would have convinced me that I had any right to expect the album to sound like, well, anything I expected. And really, that's just about the most ideal situation conceivable in today's musical climate - I mean, the way music works out these days, you can hop on yr filesharing network of choice and have gigs and gigs of undiscovered - hell, unreleased - music at your disposal without even really trying. These days, you're only ever exactly in the dark as you want to be - except, as it turns out, when you're dealing with a group that doesn't give a fuck about their fans (in the most benign way imaginable, of course) and only release stuff when it's done.

And God, now I wish I didn't find that approach to music so painfully attractive, because I seem to have screwed myself out of an album. Now that they've apparently traipsed merrilly off to Germany to look after their visual-arts careers (side note: they actually had like a two-month exhibition here in L.A. which, since it was art and I was stupid, I missed completely), all I'm left with is the possibility for...well, something. Something really awesome, and something that I couldn't possibly predict. And it's just killing me inside; I mean, their album could have been one lonely woodblock beat for seventy minutes and I still probably could have found a way to enjoy it, because that's what the fucking band is for in the first place - to give snooty art fuxxx an outlet to have fun in ways that, for once, don't involve being correct about anything. It's just my stupid luck that it'd work like a charm on me, too. (Click here to buy DFA Compilation #2 from Amazon.com)

Manic Street Preachers, "So Why So Sad" (Avalanches remix) - One makes an effort to keep from posting things available on other blogs - or at least one doesn't if one wants to avoid looking like some high-schooler (apparently "chronically bitter overeducated-on-bullshit mid-20s hipster" is vastly preferable, although I couldn't begin to tell you why). Still, every so often one runs across something that borders on transcendent somewhere else, as I did with this remix of the Manics' "So Why So Sad" by the motherfucking Avalanches courtesy of Blogs are for Dogs; ordinarily I'd just point you at the link and tell you to get goin' (especially since it's such a fine little blog on its own merits), but since the file was YouSent in the first place, I figured more people needed to hear the Avalanches pulling arguably their finest sow's ear transmogrification job to date. I am, shall we say, Not So Much With The Manic Street Preachers; outside of "Picturesque", I see absolutely no reason to fuck with a band that I can't put on without instinctually thinking that I've accidentally downloaded something by Travis. Except, of course, for when the Avalanches get their antipods on one of their songs and come back with a magnificent little interpolation of "Ticket To Ride" - in other words, they've somehow managed to successfully make the ideal Britpop song where everyone else failed. Granted, it's a little overlong, but I've come to accept that that's pretty much par for the course with Avalanches remixes - there's always about a minute more stuff than you ever really need. I just figure that they're just giving you that much more time for your brain to confirm what your ears are screaming. God knows I need all the help I can get with those guys. (Click here to buy the special edition of Forever Delayed with the remix of "So Why So Sad" on the bonus disc used from Amazon.co.uk)