JUSTICE VAMPIRE WEEKEND LEONA LEWIS LIL WAYNE SOULWAX MSTRKRFT KENNY LOGGINS

WELCOME TO THE LOGGINSPHERE, FOOLISH HYPE MACHINERS

Dinosaur, "Kiss Me Again"
Dinosaur, "Kiss Me Again" (version)

WARNING: IN BIG-PERSON 320K

But seriously, folks: out of every word that I've ever written in the three-ish years I've been doing this stupid thing, the only ones I still consistently get specific mail about are the ones I used right cheer the first time I wrote up "Kiss Me Again". Naturally, most of the mail comes down to "d00d u should totaly send me that shit y0" in varying degrees of eloquence, but I kinda find it hard to fault them; this song is a stone-cold, unyielding, zero-shades-of-gray classic, and frankly it's more than a little ridiculous that some folks' enjoyment of it is entirely predicated on my mercurial ass taking action. Therefore, this time I'll be leaving it up until I get a takedown notice, at which point you can all look forward to my impending perpetration of a blisteringly self-congratulatory verbal wankfest at having ACCOMPLISHED~ something through my WORDS, MAN, WORDS~ and so on. Oh man, that's gonna be great. You're gonna be forwarding it to all your friends under the subject line "Check out this hipster douchebag". I'm gonna be the next this guy. Can't wait for that.

BUT I DIGRESS. As I scramble to regain the point, please enjoy this vastly superior rip of "Kiss Me Again", lovingly encoded with EAC and LAME (and actually cleaned up before exporting) instead of negligently entrusting this masterpiece to whatever stupid spyware-ridden junk I had on my old computer. I hate to belabor the point but it makes the rips I posted before sound like they were recorded through a kangaroo's pouch by comparison. I honestly feel like apologizing; here is a picture of a baby seal. Look at that while you listen to this single, both sides, all thirty-ish minutes of it, even if you got it last time; for reasons which are completely lost to me, the stylus gods decided to smile on me when I put the needle on the track this night, and this shit came out right this time. There's so much going on here that it's almost embarrassing to listen to it the whole way: you already feel like a burglar way before the running time hits double digits.

In particular, make sure you get the b-side; this time it's such a revelation that I'm going to subject you to an entire rambly, stoned paragraph of utterly pointless explication which you'll care about even less after you've read than you do right now (BELIEVE): the story of my mom seeing The Wizard of Oz. My mom, you see, (1) is from Louisiana and (2) was born after 1939, and was thus unable to see The Wizard of Oz on the bigscreen, and had thus only ever seen it on television (this being back when TV sets were black-and-white and had screens dwarfed by the iPhone's), and had thus always thought the whole thing was completely in black-and-white, which meant that, when my dad unknowingly took her to see it on one of their dates, she practically went apoplectic when Dorothy walked out into Oz in color. To hear my dad tell it, she was on the verge of causing a scene simply from sheer shock; she just had no idea what was coming.

YES YES GREAT STORY JAMES, right? Well I shit you not, that's exactly the experience you're in for with the flipside of this track. All of a sudden, what was once an incidental curiosity - I mean, I've called the original version of this the best song I've ever heard on prior occasion - is unequivocally the definitive version; I'm honestly at a loss for words to describe what you're in for if you're into sonic details and all that shit. The rough sound of the track alone takes on entire new dimensions; you can practically hear pieces of the track being taped together, especially during the stupefyingly "new" verse when the vocal tracks start doubling up. Hell, during the breakdowns, you can literally hear traces of vocal performances which bled onto the tracks chosen for the final piece; it's downright... I mean, "breathtaking" doesn't even begin to cover this song, people. You are in for a treat.

Anyway; as stated up top, to the best of my knowledge, the closest this song comes to "available" these days is at the conclusion of the Optimo Psyche Out mix from a few years back, so I suppose go buy that (n.b.: this is not the only reason to buy this mix). In the meantime, please to enjoy these rips and to suggest to your likeminded friends that they follow suit. This song is way too good to survive as literature. (Click here to buy Psyche Out from Amazon.com, or click here to browse used copies of "Kiss Me Again" on GEMM)

The Zombies, "I'll Call You Mine" - Look, you people know me by now; if I were to like a song by the Zombies - the "Tell Her No"/"She's Not There"/"Time of the Season"-ass Zombies - then obviously it would be off their "unreleased" album which nobody except the least lifeful of the lifeless (ha-cha-cha) have ever even heard of in the first place, I KNOW RIGHT? YEAH, TOTALLY BRO, except for the fact that as it turns out "I'll Call You Mine" really does crush everything else that's ever been presented to me as a Zombies song of consequence; it practically jumps out of the speakers and unfurls a bedroll in your head. It's also conspicuously undated in the way only truly great power-pop can ever be; it sounds distinctively not from the present, but never ties itself to any specific era (aside from those momentary flirtations with classicism, but since they never derail the song I figure hey). I mean, to my ears, it's a short hop from this to the Names' "Why Can't It Be" or one of like ten Big Star songs; this is really good company to keep.

Anyway my point - YES, MY POINT - is that I am not an obscurantist twat, or at the very least not one who engages in twattery which doesn't bear results. This song being one of them. (The Zombies' unreleased album can be found on their box set, which unlike most box sets really is the way to go - you'll probably end up passing over the rarities disc, but all three of the other sets are all completely compelling in their own right, PARTICULARLY the covers disc at the end; click here to buy it from Amazon)

The Mystery Jets, "Young Love" (feat. Laura Marling) - And now for a sentence which I never would have forseen myself writing: OH MY GOD THE NEW MYSTERY JETS ALBUM JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE. I mean, it's neck-and-neck between that and Portishead on top of my albums chart; I like it even more than the new Long Blondes album, and this is saying that. I honestly don't even know how to begin assigning credit for it - do you start by crediting Erol Alkan with somehow getting the Mystery Jets to settle down and stop cramming four songs into one? or do you start off with the band for writing an entire album's worth of reliably rewarding songs? I do stress that phrase "reliably rewarding"; 21 isn't a compelling album, or at least not the way Through The Windowpane or Funeral were. But "consistently rewarding" fits it like a glove: every time I go back to it, I'm discovering new inroads, new wrinkles - new reasons to listen.

Except, of course, for "Young Love", a song which needs absolutely no depth whatsoever to present itself as eminently deserving of your attention. And really, on this one, points have to go to the band; Alkan does a great job of keeping the rhythm section reined in (and that little shimmering flutter during the chorus is grin-crackingly awesome), but this is all about the song itself being catchy enough to signal the end of the world. Interestingly enough - and I am about to reveal myself to be hell of lame here, people - it's also eerily similar to some stupid song they came up with for that terrible Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore movie, a song written for the purpose of serving as an example of what audience-appealing pop music sounds like; the fact that the borrowed melody is used to such riotous success here feels almost strikingly appropriate. (Oh, I'm sorry - you're still wondering what could have led me to watch that stupid-ass Drew Barrymore movie? ME TOO.) (Click here to buy 21, the GREEN PEANESS DOT ORG ALBUM OF THE YEAR SO FAR, from Amazon.co.uk)

Isosceles, "Watertight" - Finally, I was passed this single early and encouraged to post it by the label on account of my rabid fandom of Isosceles' first single, and as it is quite the little nugget of Scottish indie-pop I am only too happy to oblige. I can't summon the same vehemence that I did for "Get Your Hands Off" if only because the song is so much more dialed-down; the band seems to have traded monolithic bleeping for streamlined Franz Ferdianism, and it's hard not to mourn the loss at least a little. Not too much, however; "Watertight" is deceptively good, at least as good as anything the aforementioned FFs have put out since "Darts of Pleasure", and yes I will go there thank you very much. It's one of those songs which always gives me the urge to fast-forward when it shows up on shuffle (SORRY ISOSCELES, TAKE ME BACK), but then out of sheer slothfulness I can't decide whether to fast-forward or not by the time the chorus hits, and by that time I'm more than on board enough to let it play to the end, bruising my back from patting it so relentlessly the whole time (see? practice makes perfect!). God, I don't even know if that's a compliment or not; fortunately I'm certain that the sheer volume of playtime this song gets unequivocally is. (Click here to visit Isosceles' MySpace and here for Art Goes Pop's MySpace. Also, AGP's supposedly putting out a new Findo Gask single in the near future, so keep an eye out for that, obviously.)

ELSEWHERE
- So I finally took the plunge and started up a MySpace; come and bask in the warming glow of what will surely go down as the least-attended-to corner of the whole socially networked internet. Ditto for Last.fm, too.

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/)