Oh, Right, I Have A Blog

It's been a long time; I should'n'a left you/Without a dope beat to step to

It's kinda funny - well, okay, it's not really funny at all, but editing is for pantywaists: At the beginning of the year, I had between three and five writing commitments, depending on who wanted what from me when; now I have one, you're reading it, and as you may have noticed I kinda sorta suck balls at updating it at this point. I have no excuse; this is simply all I have, and I beg of you not to use your chloroform. All I can offer in recompense is a post full of absolute, insouciantly insistent motherfucking BANGERS. To wit:

Breakbot, "Happy Rabbit"
Isosceles, "Get Your Hands Off"

I'm certain that I'm not the only American left who still buys stuff from Rough Trade, which therefore means that I'm also not the only American to run into the legendary shop's seemingly-Sphinx-like attitude towards responding to emails. It's hard to hold it against them - years and years of record-store patronage have taught me nothing if not to expect anything other than palpable indifference on the part of the store clerks - but it's still a somewhat galling experience to wait around for like fifty bucks' worth of records coming your way without even the most basic information about the sale (like, say, which records are actually coming - although I'd probably be a lot less sensitive to this had I not been spoiled by Piccadilly's order-reporting system) in your possession. Recently, however, Rough Trade came through in a monumentally huge way with one of those customer-service experiences which damn near gets you excited to spend money with a business again, and today, we shall all gather around and bear witness. This will probably be a boring read for most of you, but as a noted poet and scholar once pointed out, "I don't give a fuck about these white people."

A few months ago, I had a birthday (it happens), and my friends decided to get me an assload of gift vouchers from Rough Trade, an outstanding idea for a present marred only by the fact that Rough Trade's gift vouchers can't actually be redeemed online. After placing a rather substantial order, I went through literally months of agonizing over how to get these things spent, at one point even contacting D. Wreck during his London excursion to see if I might be able to mail him the vouchers and have him redeem them onsite, until I eventually just kinda sighed, gave up, and made a note to myself to visit London again someday so that I could actually get these consarned vouchers out of my apartment. And then a few weeks ago, without any prompting on my part, I got an email from a RT honcho informing me that not only had they been putting my order together for like three months waiting for a few straggling items to show up, but that they'd actually gone ahead and combined it with another order I'd placed to save on shipping, and that I could expect a ludicrously overstuffed pack of records in the mail in the coming weeks. To say that this worked out well would be a heroic understatement; miraculously, even though I'd figured my earlier order had gotten lost in the mail and had reordered some items from other shops, there was only one instance of overlap in the whole order (the rather lamentable single by the Sigma - o Young & Lost Club, why hast thou forsaken me?).

More to the point, it worked out in fantastic fashion thanks to the huge-box-o-stuff format, unequivocally my favorite way to receive stuff in the mail. Call me a crazy-ass pleasure-delayer ("YOU'RE A" oh fuck it), but if you're someone who's affected by the context in which you hear a record, I just can't believe that a better option exists - after all, given the relative age of some of the singles in my order, they might as well have flown in from Neptune. Breakbot's "Happy Rabbit"/"Summer Party" disc, for instance, probably would have sounded downright egregious had I received it during the summer - pleasant, mind you, but pretty strikingly derivative of songs like "Phantom Pt. 1" or "DVNO". By getting them now, however, all that context has been stripped from the songs like bark off a tree; now the aspects of the Ed Banger set onto which everyone seems to have glommed is the abrasive noisiness of the affair rather than the mellifluous poppiness (which, having spoken directly to Certain Folks Who Would Know this morning, is as critical an aspect to Justice' craft as whichever other aspect seems to be most violently fashionable at the moment), leaving "Happy Rabbit" as a nigh-unto-relic of this summer's theme of abrasive prettiness. And really, "Happy Rabbit" is kinda hysterically pretty in a summer-jam way - if anything, I wish it had more of the dur-dur-durrrrrr theatrics that have dominated Banger-a-like tracks for the last few months just to give it a little extra dynamism, but I can have a hard time taking a song to task for simply and steadfastly following its melody through to its logical conclusion.

The Breakbot track, however, only made an ancillary point about how anticipation and context (and, I guess, more concrete phenomena like "shipping") really work - a fine point, to be sure, but one which pales in comparison to the main point made by the Giant Box-O-Stuff format, namely an elegant illustration of the extent to which Rough Trade has their stock situation in check. It's not just a matter of them having two copies of everything - although boy do they have everything; thanks to them I'm one of an ass-few people with a hard copy of that Hercules & Love Affair single (complete w/ misprinted "33 RPM" label; clearly my future will include a Scrooge McDuckian swimming pool full of gold coins once I flip it on eBay) - so much as them having a level of insight as to their stock which vastly outstrips that of most folks who aren't trying to get you to pay them for stuff. I mean, every major indie record store in England made a point to stock the Isosceles single, but the only one to throw it nearly front-and-center in their store and go UH was Rough Trade, and thank God for that because it's an absolute burner. The first verse & chorus are more or less musically unimpressive, true, but then all of a sudden the most gloriously ungracefully bloopy synth in the history of grace or bloopiness pokes its head out like WAZ SUP FOAX; it is at this moment that your narrator realized that he'd be making an entry on this blog as soon as the world would permit. I mean, what an effect - it's honestly not even much of a surprise that the song runs maybe a minute or so long, since I for one will admit that if I'd stumbled over such a Hammer of the Gods-ly little indie-pop flourish, I'd probably find restraint a little unattractive too. And, again, out of all the major retailers that I checked, Rough Trade was the only one to hear this and make a big deal out of it - or at least a big enough deal to convince me to whip my credit card out, a meaner feat than you might think. And now, as a result of their diligence and enthusiasm, I get to introduce someone to their favorite song of the year - I have no idea who that person's going to be, but in light of the virtues "Get Your Hands Off" encapsulates, if you read this site with any regularity, it may well be you. And yes, I'm pointing at you through my monitor right now.

Anyway; my ultimate point is simply that Rough Trade deserves to be credited for their radness, so, uh, do that. Other record stores may handle other aspects of the music-buying procedure more smoothly than they do, but in this increasingly commoditized musical landscape it's important to remember that you're not just paying for the label when you pick a record store; you're also paying for their accumulated knowledge and capacity to carry out customer service without being obtrusive or pushy, and as I learned courtesy of one big-ass box, these happen to be categories at which Rough Trade has few peers. Maybe I should be thanking God that they haven't adopted Piccadilly's order-processing system yet; they're making me broke enough as it is, although lord knows I'm grinning like a Cheshire cat all the way to the poorhouse. Or maybe that's just from all the monolithic blooping going on in the background while I walk.

(Click here to buy Breakbot's "Happy Rabbit"/"Summer Party" 7" from Rough Trade)
(Click here to buy Isosceles' "Get Your Hands Off" 7" from Rough Trade)

The DeVonnes, "I'm Gonna Pick Up My Toys" - My iPod crashed (AGAIN) during my extensive and illustrious absence, so I have no way to tell just how close this guess is to the truth, but I would guess that I've probably listened to "I'm Gonna Pick Up My Toys" somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven hundred thousand million billion squillion times over the last three or four weeks, and if anything, that's a low estimate. I'm certain that a lot of this has to be chalked up to the incomparably full-bodied piano driving the song. I'm equally certain that just as much has to do with the production at work on the track, although you may need to break out your sickest-ass headphones to pick up on everything since all the subtleties seem almost accidental; the mix itself keeps most of the instruments pretty balanced throughout the song's duration, and so it's up to the individual musicians to just start giving their parts that extra oomph to make them jump out (and boy howdy do they ever - if you listen carefully enough, you can almost hear the aforementioned piano player pounding away on the ivories during the chorus in a way he/she never really bothers to do during the verses). But really, though, those are just my own personal prejudices coming into contact with a song which happens to address them directly; given how well "I'm Gonna Pick Up My Toys" stacks up to, say, any world-conquering pop touchstone by ABBA or the Bay City Rollers (two artists whose greatest-hits albums will nevah evah evah leave my collection no matter how much shit I catch), right down to the way loss and heartbreak plays out in near-euphoric fashion. Of course, unlike those two groups, this is (unless the internet is lying to me) the only song the DeVonnes ever recorded, and given its pedigree* I'm a little flabbergasted as to how it managed to cross my eardrums in the first place. Oh well - at the end of the day, I'm just glad it did, and that's all that matters. (Click here to buy The In Crowd, a top-shelf Northern Soul compilation featuring "I'm Gonna Pick Up My Toys" and a boatload of other worthy tracks, from Amazon.com)

*Northern Soul, for those of you who have lives, was one of the most cloistered and purist-minded dance-music idioms in the history of pop music; as a genre, it existed solely to glorify obscure soul records with the kind of popping, clapping beat found on songs like Dobie Gray's "The In Crowd". Unfortunately, there came a point where the DJs had literally mined the past bare, necessitating inventive groups to make new "classic" records just to keep the scene alive. As you might expect, an enormous number of these records are cloyingly self-conscious about the tropes they revive, possibly because they draw from referents whose novelty has long since been worn away but more likely because most of them just kinda suck.

Grandadbob, "Hide Me" (Al Usher remix) - And finally, Al Usher, or as I've spent the last three weeks learning how to call him, "Al 'Motherfuckingly Assfartingly Christpunchingly Doghumpingly' Awesome Usher". Having heard pretty much everything he's remixed or released on his own in stunningly short order after stumbling over his stupidly great remix of Amy Winehouse's "Tears Dry On Their Own", it's just kind of striking to hear how far he's come since co-producing electro-house remixes with Ewan Pearson - I mean, on the scale of understudies leaving their masters' tutelage to explore the aesthetics of disco, I'd honestly be willing to rank Usher above Fred Falke at this point. Granted, Usher's a lot more pop-minded than most of the folks to whom he'd be compared by that rubric; his remixes tend to be anchored to their vocals, and frequently play just as effectively as pure pop treats as dancefloor murderers, and we all know how far such measures go in winning over Yr Boy. But even taking that into consideration, Usher's arguably better at pop songcraft than Falke (or any other suitable comparison) is at disco; his take on Grandadboy's "Hide Me", for instance, sounds leaps and bounds more organic than Falke's take on Hot Chip's "Colours" (an excruciatingly fun track which, it must be said, undeniably gives the impression of having had the vocals shoehorned on top of the preexisting mix). It's also, I assume, a killer song to dance to; all those little interlocking tropical synth lines give the song a paralyzingly infectious lilt, while its airy, nonconfrontational melody makes it incredibly inviting (and a natural end-of-night track too - I'd love to hear Prins Thomas put it to the test). It's really pretty much one of my favorite things on which Usher's ever worked; I'm not sure if I'd put it above the Amy Winehouse remix (and if you haven't heard that yet, uh, seriously people), but it's certainly not too far behind, and it's just as certainly miles and miles ahead of lots of praiseworthy stuff. (Click here to buy the "Hide Me" CDS from a GEMM verified seller)

ELSEWHERE
- A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Blog Fresh Radio to contribute a segment or two to their ongoing blog-music-oriented radio show, and given the murder's row of contributors, I happily accepted. I've already done two episodes, so if you've ever wondered what I sound like when I'm devoting %95 of my concentration to not saying "fuck" and %5 to talking about the Paper Cranes' fantastic new album (hopefully I'll have more on this in my next post here, which at the current rate should be coming sometime around the time that Chinese Democracy hits stores) or Pacific!'s magnificent laid-backitude, now (and now) would be your chance. (You'll definitely want to listen at least long enough to hear the host pronounce "Green Pea-Ness", however - it's still not the best instance of hearing someone confront my clever arrogance [that title belongs to the poor Belgian DJ who interviewed me about Soulwax' show last year without realizing how my site's name was pronounced until we were live on the air, prompting a hilariously hurried address to his listeners in panic-stricken Dutch], but it's always a treat to hear, and easily the best justification for saddling my site with this stupid name in the first place.) Anyway, I apologize in advance for my godawful voice; much like my face, it was made for the internet and nothing else.

- Also, long-time readers may remember Middle Distance Runner, still one of the very best bands to introduce themselves to me via my inbox; apparently, they've been signed and are embarking on their first real tour, and since my ears are still calling their debut album "awfully fun", you should maybe oughtta think about checking them out if you're in any of the following cities on the following dates:

Oct. 3 - Harrisburg, PA - The Abbey - (http://myspace.com/indieabbey)
Oct. 5 - Norfolk, VA - The Boot - (http://www.insidetheboot.com/main/)
Oct. 6 - Baltimore, MD - Lo-fi Social Club - (http://www.lofisocialclub.com/)
Oct. 7 - Pittsburgh, PA - Garfield Artworks - (http://www.garfieldartworks.com/)
Oct. 9 - Hoboken, NJ - Maxwell's - (http://www.maxwellsnj.com/)
Oct. 10 - New Haven, CT - Cafe Nine - (http://www.cafenine.com/)
Oct. 11 - Cambridge, MA - Band in Boston Podcast Session - (http://www.bandinbostonpodcast.com/)
Oct. 11 - Cambridge, MA - T.T. The Bears - (http://www.ttthebears.com/)
Oct. 12 - Troy, NY - Revolution Hall w/ The Cliks - (http://revolutionhall.com/)
Oct. 13 (Steve's Birthday!) - Hartford, CT - Shag Frenzy @ Sweet Jane's - (http://www.sweetjaneshartford.com/)
Oct. 14 - Villanova University, Villanova, PA - WXVU in-studio 89.1 FM - (http://wxvufm.com/)
Oct. 14 - Philadelphia, PA - The Khyber - (http://www.thekhyber.com/)
Oct. 17 - New York, NY - CMJ - Indaba Artist Discovery Stage - (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=268+Bowery,+New+York,+NY+10012,+USA&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=addr&om=1 )
Oct. 17 - New York, NY - CMJ Showcase @ Fontana's (http://www.fontanasnyc.com/)
Oct. 18 - New York, NY - CMJ - The Musebox Presents @ The Delancey (http://www.thedelancey.com/)
Oct. 20 - George Washington University, Washington, D.C. - WRGW In-studio (http://www.gwradio.com/)
Oct. 20 - Washington, DC - The Black Cat (OUR DC-ONLY EP RELEASE SHOW!!) - (http://www.blackcatdc.com/)