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/)

Album Review: Voxtrot, s/t

I did manage to find the cover art for Voxtrot on their website, but I'll be damned if I kick off my 200th post without a picture of one pissed-off cow-cat

Voxtrot, "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, & Wives" - Anyone who's ever taken the time to listen to Voxtrot - a demographic which, I assume, includes everyone reading this post - will be roughly as surprised to learn that Austin's second-finest musical byproduct came up with a really good debut album as they would be to see Oprah on the cover of O (FINALLY AN OPRAH JOKE ON GP). The question, then, becomes "how good is it", since albums demonstrating the kind of singularity-within-a-multitude which courses through Voxtrot like blood through a vein obviously need to be catalogued, poked, prodded, probed, plumbed, perfectly calibrated to fall into place along one's party lines. By "the question", of course, I mean "the question I will absolutely not be answering here today"; I barely even care where Voxtrot ranks among my top-five albums of 2007, let alone yours (having said that, it's probably my third- or fourth-favorite full-length of the year). I am far more interested in "how it's good" than I am in "how good it is", and not because Voxtrot is some masterpiece of album assembly or musical vision or what-have-you. It's not. It's just a good album - a really good album - but it's important to remember that there's just as much to learn from simple, non-insistant records as there is from show-stopping earthquakes rendered in shellac. In other words (and at the risk of my musical-Yoda-only-with-dick-jokes schtick wearing even thinner than it already has), Sound of Silver may have taught me more about what kind of music I like, but Voxtrot's already taught me more about how I like it, and I've only had the record for like three weeks.

The point of reference to which I keep returning is Midlake's* The Trials of Van Occupanther, which is a little ironic since Midlake's 2006 opus is pretty much exactly the opposite of what I'm talking about when I refer to the nebulous concept of a "good album". Van Occupanther proudly features between three and five of my absolute favorite songs from all of last year and organizes the album to deliver them in an incapacitatingly satisfying fashion, but anyone who describes it to you without using the word "flawed" is straight-up lying to your face; no album as absurdly front-loaded as Van Occupanther can lay claim to any ideal of perfection, and it's such a simple proposition that I don't even have a clause to wrap that statement up tidily. There are songs on Van Occupanther that will bore you, interludes over which you will skip with unflagging regularity, attempts at singles which will steamroll you into a state of hipster ennui ("Young Bride", I poop upon thee) - and yet, over the course of a year's worth of thinking "Y'know, I think I'd like to listen to 'Roscoe' on the way to In-N-Out tonight", I found myself coming to anticipate these lesser lights, warts and all. That's not to say that I'm running around throwing "Van Occupanther" or "Branches" on mixtapes willy-nilly; they're still tedious songs, no matter how productive the tedium they generate happens to be. But I definitely grew to be thankful for the way they spaced out the experience of the album; I'm supremely confident that I would have strangled every ounce of pleasure "Roscoe" or "Head Home" have to offer before summer ended if I hadn't forced myself to develop an affinity for another way of consuming them which had little if anything to do with my own musical prejudices, and Midlake did a heroic job of making that task as easy on me as possible, even if I don't necessarily run around extolling the virtues of their incomplete successes like I'd stumbled over some lost triumphant moment. Regardless of the circumstances, learning to adapt to situations is an indelibly good thing, and good albums have precious few lessons to impart with more lucidity than those pertaining to the way we adapt to them. After all, great albums are a piece of piss to approach on their terms; that's kind of the point. Good albums simply are what they are, and it's up to you to find value in them.

Which of course brings us right back to Voxtrot. Unlike The Trials of Van Occupanther, Voxtrot has little to no downtime; some might even be compelled to describe it as a model of consistency on all musical fronts, from influences cited to song structure probably down to even the level of major keys employed from track to track. Unfortunately, one could just as easily describe it as a catastrophic misstep by a band who not only made their name on the backs of a few singles, but actually managed to rise to commercial prominence on the basis of three EPs for god's sakes; in the age of single-song consumption, you're just not going to see too many bands cultivate a rabidly devoted audience on the backs of products with the kind of barely-perceptible value which defines the EP as an artform. For a band, in other words, who amassed their fanbase by going HEY HERE'S THIS ONE SONG and these two other songs which are kinda pretty good BUT HEY REALLY SERIOUSLY THIS ONE SONG to come along and deliver an album as devoid of standout singles as Voxtrot, then, would at first glance appear to be career suicide; where exactly is their audience supposed to discover the pristine immediacy of tracks like pre-album single "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, & Wives" on a record which steadfastly refuses to break stride just to exalt any single song? That's not to say that Voxtrot is some radio-hostile dirge-a-thon, of course - you could probably set your iTunes to shuffle it on repeat the next time you have all your friends over to flaunt your ironic t-shirts and stroke your calculatedly unshorn scruff while picking over Grindhouse and just wait for the "hey, kickin' party mix!" platitudes to roll in. Hell, "Kid Gloves" alone is probably going to dominate any club serving PBR on tap to an extent unseen since everyone woke up to the fact that they really only like, like, two Clap Your Hands Say Yeah songs, tops - and Voxtrot STILL refuses to cast a spotlight on it beyond putting it in the "designated hit" slot on the running order (i.e. it's track number two). Some might use the word "galling" to describe the sensation of encountering an album which operates so counterintuitively to the way you want it to work, and I would count myself among their number.

But here's the thing: that's exactly why I fully expect to still be dropping Voxtrot into my player months from now, if not outright years; even after just a few scant weeks of listening time, it's already apparent that I like a gang of songs off this album, with more emerging every time I give it another playthrough. Obviously I'm no soothsayer (although I am within three thousand copies of being a soothsayer) and as such can't really speak to my future with this record, but I feel pretty confident that it's going to take a long time for me to wear my enjoyment of its pleasures down to a bloody nubbin precisely because I can't listen to it the way I want to (or at least not yet - ask me again in a few months once I'm familiar enough with it to point out my fourth-favorite chord change). Instead of flooding my serotonin receptors en masse once or twice and then filing the album away forever, I'm giving myself over to its uniformity and, in the process, constantly stumbling over a new couplet or a squirrelled-away flourish in the background. And while I'm not worried in the least about whether or not I'll find records I end up liking more than Voxtrot over the course of the year, I'm not worried in the slightest about whether or not they'll diminish my ardor for it; my appreciation for Voxtrot has nothing to do with anything other than the record those crazy kids managed to make, and world-conquering single or not, that's one hell of an accomplishment. Voxtrot comes out on May 22nd; I suggest that you buy it. In every sense of the word, it's a keeper. (Click here to pre-order Voxtrot from Amazon.com)

*Midlake, I presume, would be Austin's third-most-successful musical export, although even the aggregate of enjoyment derived from numbers one through three aren't enough to make up for the city's hand in the unholy popularization of the fish taco. NO, NOT THAT KIND OF FISH TACO.

Slow Down Tallahassee, "So Much For Love" - Anyway, who needs albums to deliver singles while we've still got England? Slow Down Tallahassee's "So Much For Love" showed up in my mailbox in with a grip of other random sevens I'd ordered on whims from Rough Trade and has been kicking my ass ever since, album-generated context be damned; in a better, fairer world, "So Much For Love" could and would stand on its own against any competitor in the field of sparkling little indie gems married to a chugging Jesus & Mary Chain beat and fuzzed-out wanna-be Nuggets reject in triumphant fashion. Admittedly, most of this has to do with their stumbling into one of the most infectiously hooky melodies indie-pop's yielded in recent months, but don't overlook their girl-group chops - the harmonizing on those "Whoa-oh-oh-oh"s have a way of sticking in my head in ways most bands have to pay out the ying-yang to achieve, and let's not even get into the brutally urgent effectiveness inherent in the way the vocals kick through the ceiling to a higher register during the chorus. It's a damn shame South Park has conditioned a generation of movie viewers to expect any and all montages to be at least somewhat ironic in nature, because you won't hear a track this year better suited to soundtrack three minutes' worth of comic misadventures as some non-descript nerd attempts to whip himself into dateable shape for some unattainable princess at the behest of his smouldering drummer friend who becomes hotter than the fires of hell as soon as she takes her glasses off; one can practically hear the silhouettes of awkward Karate Kid poses against the backdrop of a setting sun in every passing moment. And I absolutely mean that as a compliment. (Click here to buy the "So Much For Love" 7" from Rough Trade)

The Draytones, "Keep Loving Me" - Like the View, this year's Sensational British Band Of The Rapidly-Receding Moment, the Draytones came out of the blue on 1965 Records; unlike the View, the Draytones have at least one inarguably awesome song to their name. That song is, of course, "Keep Loving Me", a doe-eyed love letter to the Kinks and the 13th Floor Elevators and all those other bands whose names have inexorably devolved into shorthand for critics too uncreative to find accurate ways to talk about really-not-very-good songs to which they clearly feel some sense of obligation since the songs came their way for free. I, however, am stupid enough to fly this shit over from England on my own dollar, so you can believe me when I say that this just fucking rocks; "Keep Loving Me" is loud and fuzzy and joyously devoid of subtlety in ways which belie a genuine enthusiasm for the idealized form at which they're clearly taking aim - you get the feeling that if the Draytones made minimal techno, they'd be beating up the genre's framework to find a way to incorporate the unrelenting skin-bashing and searing guitar tones that define their signature track. Fortunately for us, then, they've settled on nakedly revivalist pop as a vehicle, meaning that instead of being forced to look for an entry point into "Keep Loving Me" we can simply throw this song on our iPods and wait for that moment when we're able to share in the joy of lead singer Gabriel Boccazzi's shaky glee at coming back for MOARRRRRRR. If you're anything at all like me, it won't take you too long to get there, either.

ELSEWHERE
- Bloc Party may edge closer to pole position on the list of my contemporary bete noires by the moment, but I'll be damned if their stuff doesn't reliably make for some awesome remixes; fortunately the always-dependable Derek over at Good Weather For Airstrikes doesn't share in my hostility towards them and as such dug up two overpoweringly awesome remixes of "I Still Remember", Bloc Party's latest whiny opus about repressed bisexual leanings or Bush's foreign policy or the plight of the titmouse or what-the-fuck-evrrrr. The Sebastian one is incredibly great - like "Man, I've really been missing the boat on this Sebastian character, haven't I?"-type great - but if you only download one MP3 this week, make it Lull's Music Box & Tears remix, a legitimate contender for the throne of "most cosmically graceful thing I've heard since that live version of 'Heartbeats' hit last year". You are doing yourself a profound disservice if you're listening to anything else.