Normal Service Resumes As Temperatures Drop Below "Hotter Than A Shitting Bitch"

Hi Mom

Those of you who've been wondering where I've been for the last two weeks clearly don't live in Los Angeles; up until disarmingly recently it's been like Los Angeles had spent its high-school tenure shoving the sun in a locker, and now the sun was back to make us fill up the gas tank on its Maserati. Luckily for YOU, Exalted Reader, I elected to pass the time by holing up in my hysterically tiny, miserably underventilated apartment and listening to one ass-load of records. Let's explore those, shall we? No? Well, fuck you then.

Spoon, "Don't Make Me A Target" - There's a certain amount of lamentable glibness in comparing a band called Spoon to another band called the Knife, but I for one find the comparison irresistable and so here we are. I mean, okay, yes, so they operate in nearly antithetical musical idioms; they also both employ a dazzling array of studio wizardry in the production of their songs which doesn't necessarily jump right out and assault folx like me who aren't necessarily attuned to their M.O. as a band, so I say it just depends on where you'd like to place your focus. And I can say for a damn certainty that after spending two weeks nearly neck-deep in Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, that's precisely where my focus is staying these days; between all the weird little touches inevitably mentioned in every review of the record to surface yet (HAY GUYS DID YOU HEAR WHEN HE ASKED THE DURMMR TO RECORD HIS STUDIO PATTER GUYS) and the subtle, elegant manner in which so many of its songs come to a head ("Black Like Me", stand up), Ga^5 very possibly makes a better case for its own aesthetic than any album that's crossed my headphones since, well, Silent Shout.

More to the point, however, Ga^5, like Silent Shout, manages to unquestionably better its predecessors in at least one respect: including more than one instantly-appealing song. Sure Kill the Moonlight had "The Way We Get By" and Gimme Fiction had "I Turn My Camera On" - just like how Deep Cuts had "Heartbeats" - but the only effect either of those songs had on my actual experience with the album on which they could be found was to effectively render the rest of both into a really, really long EP. I'm certainly revising that opinion now that I'm relistening to their entire catalogue in the wake of Reign In Ga wising me up to a few of the finer points of Spoon's sound, but even the most ardent Britt Daniel defender should be able to admit that even the most artfully-conceived of his gestural production style can't hold a candle to the pure endorphin rush his undiluted pop compositions can set off.

For Can't Stop The Ga, however, Daniel wisely decided to wait until he had two sure-fire barnburners on his hands (not that you need to be told, of course, but I'm referring to "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" and "The Underdog") and people, let me get this off my chest: this album is a squillion times better for the tension created by those two songs. I can't begin to tell you how many playthroughs of I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ga have started with me thinking "Man, I could sure go for a nice dose of 'Cherry Bomb'/'Underdog' right about now", then "Aw fuck, might as well play both" as the first one gets two-thirds or so of the way into its playthrough, then "Shit, I'm already here and this album's only like thirty-five minutes long; I might as well give the whole thing a spin", and well here we are. Or, thanks to the two key songs not being totally dissimilar from each other - someone over on ILX described The Lexicon Of Ga as "Wire meets Billy Joel", which is more or less the most enviably elegant way of describing either of those songs as I've yet to come across - I'll come at the songs from a more combative perspective, attempting to ascertain which does a better job at the musical task they both seem to be attempting to accomplish. Either way, the result is the same: I end up listening to the album more and, unsurprisingly, discovering more stuff on it that I love just as unconditionally, if not as immediately. "Don't Make Me A Target", for instance, might well be my favorite Spoon song ever just for how batshit awesome that piano sounds (well, that and the sneering little chord change at the chorus and Daniel's acerbic yowl of the titular line and so on and so forth), but if it hadn't been for "Cherry Bomb" and "Underdog" sinking their hooks into my brain's fleshy tissue I probably would have just gone PFFT ANOTHER SPOON ALBUM YEAH WELL TIME TO WAIT FOR THE ONE GOOD SONG TO EMERGE. Now I listen to it more or less constantly - I even slotted it into a mix CD, something I can't say about either of its more accomplished siblings. Or at least not yet, anyway. If "Marble House" and "We Share Our Mother's Health" taught me anything, it's that there's the central duality of Lift Yr Skinny Fists To Ga ought to have an awful lot of gas left in the tank. (Click here to order Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga from Amazon.com)

Shout Out Louds, "Impossible" (Possible Remake by Studio) - Because I keep up with internet music trends in the most back-asswards unreliable fashion imaginable, I have no idea whether Studio have managed to attain the kind of critical currency I've seen people attach to their work or whether I just happen to post on the same messageboard as the eight people on earth in whose heads they seem to be setting off fireworks with astonishing regularity; my guess is the latter, but that the former's looming larger than folks might think. To be sure, there's something intoxicating about their breezy Balearicisms (not to mention the zeal with which they take aim at their aesthetic target - fittingly enough, Studio's sound is nothing if not admirably studied); unfortunately, up until this remix I just haven't been able to give their music enough of a shot to settle on a side of the fence on which to sit. Sadly, it really does come down to the lack of vocals; call me callous (NOT THAT) and uncultured (ANYTHING BUT THAT), but when it comes to music which self-consciously bills itself as the apotheosis of smoothness, there comes a point where my brain just cuts off the credit limit until the human element reveals itself, and in the case of Studio, that point tends to come around two minutes or so into their eight-minute orgies of nubile musical pleasantry. This remix, however, has vocals like a MOTHERFUCKING FUCKER OF MOTHERS - great vocals, rich in histrionics and effort and complete with all the rough edges a pop vocal track can handle before one starts assuming it had been performed by Ari Up - and boy howdy does it ever play counterpoint to the track's immutable temperance; as it turns out I'm hell of more easily sold on Studio's trickery when it's being put to a purpose - like, for instance, reshaping a track into a dead ringer for a lost Pet Shop Boys b-side - than when it's supposed to be justifying its own existence. Hopefully it's enough to get me over the hump with regard to checking out the rest of Studio's ouevre; I'd hate to think that I missed out on the Homework of the nu-balearic scene just because I couldn't sing along to it. Still, worst-case-scenario, this is still one hell of a consolation prize. (The Studio remake of "Impossible" has yet to surface for sale, but in the meantime, click here to buy the Shout Out Louds' latest album Our Ill Wills, or here to buy Studio's West Coast from Amazon.com)

Edit: Hi; so it's like four hours later, and I just got back from a walk wherein I listened to (among other things) the whole Studio album - which, naturally, is downright filled with vocal tracks (at least three out of the six!) That being said, there's a difference between tracks with vocals and vocal-driven tracks; their Shout Out Louds remix falls more under the latter category while their album tracks fall squarely under the former - the effect of the vocals is almost tantamount to what you'd expect from vocals on a dub reggae track. Still, point taken, and remember, kids - always do your research before sitting down to carve your musical opinions into the immutable monolith known as the internet. Yeesh.

Voodoo Chili, "Look What You've Done To Me" (Erol Alkan's Mustapha 3000 remix) - Talk about folks whose aesthetics you think you've got pinned down; it seems like every time I get all settled into thinking about Erol Alkan as a producer who enjoys exploring the hidden sinuous grace of tracks like "Boy From School" or "Golden Skans", along comes something like this track to utterly upend all of my presumptions. I mean, there's practically no grace to this of any kind; that pogo-y beat just sort of shows up, and then all of a sudden that sample starts reassembling like Robert Patrick in T2, and then all of a sudden it's a complete lyric, and then all of a sudden there's that world-erasing synth-bass flourish, and then all of it comes back at once. Part of me wonders if it might have been created at least partly out of a desire for a tool to mix into or out of Smith N Hack's unfuckwithable remix of Herbert's "Moving Like A Train", an Erol staple since like last year; certainly both tracks share a similar disregard for the audience's endurance level, although Erol's mix here features a wickedly slippery bassline rather prominently in the mix. In any event, it's a sincere and seemingly inexhaustible treat; as far as I can tell, the only downside to loving this song is that it makes the wait for my copy of Erol's mix of the LA Priests song to show up in my mailbox that much more arduous YOU HEAR ME ROUGH TRADE GODDAMMIT (Click here to buy the "Look What You Done To Me" single from Beatstreet)

ELSEWHERE
- MAN ALIVE BUT THE DFA GOT THEMSELVES ONE HELL OF A REST OF THE YEAR LINED UP. I have no idea how this escaped my attention until painfully recently (possibly due to negligence of Yer Mam - my brother from a British mother already did a far better job than I'm about to do of setting the table for the bounty Messrs. Murphy, Goldsworthy & Galkin have laid out for us), but apparently Dem Boyz have been trying to come up with the spiritual successor to Marshall Jefferson's "Move Your Body" since kicking off LCD Soundsystem's 45:33 with one of the single prettiest pieces of music in the DFA's catalogue, and now it's really starting to bear fruit. In addition to the Hercules & Love Affair 12" which apparently came out last week at Rough Trade and Rough Trade alone (and which I am forcing myself to avoid until I can listen to a version I personally ripped myself - seriously, GET A MOVE ON, MAIL CARRIERS) the next few months ought to see the monumental "Still Going Theme", hopefully an actual release of the Juan Maclean's "Happy House" (hands-down the best song to which he's ever been attached, take that shit to the bank), and even a CD version of 45:33 so's to make it easier for dorks with ideas such as myself to rip the first track and have fun with it - and this isn't even getting into Soulwax' recent remix work for DFA groups like LCD and Hot Chip (seriously, I am incomparably envious of anyone who's gotten to hear their remix of "Ready For The Floor", aka The Song Whose Title Refused To Stay The Same For Even Like Two Seconds Come On Guys I'm Strugglin' Here) or their remarkably consistent Death From Abroad side project (just go buy the Altz tracks off iTunes now and thank me later). And of course we are all familiar with my attitudes towards certain full-length releases on the horizon by Black Leotard Front and Hot Chip (short version: I am staunchly pro-both). Basically, they've conspired to reward everyone for not killing themselves out of sheer boredom during the fallow months; the least you can do is take a chance on a couple of unfamiliar purchases (or, if you're crazy like me, a lot of unfamiliar purchases).

- Finally, a tear-stained farewell to the sadly-defunct The Rich Girls Are Weeping (DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE!??!???!??!) and an elated welcome-home back-slap to the recently-returned Good Weather For Airstrikes, who apparently had the same come-to-Jesus meeting with Singles Going Ga that I did. SYNCHRONICITY~