As close to glam/hair pop metal as I can stand to get before I stop having a good time. Even so I think I wouldn’t have liked this without several intervening years between me and it guaranteeing me that my world wouldn’t be besieged by people who took the glossiness on the Preachers’ savagery to mean nobody would blame them if they screamed more and gestured more vigorously in the direction of thinking without doing so. I mean, that happened anyway, but it wasn’t the Manic Street Preachers’ fault.

Liked Morphew’s song on the Brassland compilation Alec Bemis put out six years (ugh) ago. I think, though this may be a false memory, I even caught the last few songs of his set when he was opening for someone or other. At all these times I recall his hat, his southern origin and possibly other things lending credence to mumbling about how he was a real country musician… far from taking it as a grab for authenticity, I just thought warm thought about how independent musicians of all stripes could find common ground, open-minded music utopia, blah blah blah. But now, like, this could be a Sentridoh record.

In 1993, when Schmitt last released a record, I didn’t yet think of power-pop as a parochial, sexist dead-end. That eight years later anybody was eagerly awaiting Adam Schmitt’s third album only proved me to me further how inbred the scene was. By focusing on the circumstances, though, I distracted myself from the fact that Adam Schmitt’s at least SORT OF interesting on his own.

So I like the record, but between him having a narrow palette and my never listening to Illiterature too closely, it might as well be a reissue with different song titles.

Early in Amelie, it’s mentioned that one character likes turning around in movie theaters to see the faces of people behind her illuminated in the flickering light. I turned around. Everyone was watching the film. I looked in front of me to see if anyone was peeping back at me. Not a single other person had taken their eyes off the screen. Am I impressionable or what? Maybe I ought to postpone that John Dahl marathon.

Genius lies in taking what’s always sat beneath the surface and bringing it to light so that you can directly adapt it for a new time and place. The Twelve Caesars, then, are geniuses of assholedom, writing lyrics which seem cliched yet somehow embody the ugly misogyny and cruelty of generations-old rock-lyric tropes in a way that’s much harder to ignore than usual. Might be nice if they were doing it intentionally, but signs suggest otherwise.

VERY catchy, though, and ultimately more similar to the Strokes than to Smashmouth, the latter of whom I thought they were ripping off during the ten minutes for which “I’m Gonna Kick You Out” was a perceptible radio presence in 1998.

(Is “Astralwerks” secret code for “Sony” these days? I can’t keep up with that stuff.)

Heard it in a store, bought it, loved it. All my other thoughts on the record center on my own ignorance: since I’ve never really heard of them before, how big can they be? If they’re as big as the web says they are, why aren’t there hundreds of imitators making equally complicated dance music? Or are there hundreds of imitators I haven’t heard either?

Part of the answers might be that I know fuck-all about dance, and there was (is?) a dance genre called ‘garage’ that’s dominated England for years, or so I’m told, but never really landed here. I’ve had otherwise reasonable British people explode with fury and scorn when I asked them about it, as though garage combined all the worst aspects of Barney the Dinosaur, the Strokes and Star Wars Episode I; I was a philistine for asking and an imbecile for needing to. If this were that, it would explain quite a bit.

To this theory, the web says: maybe. And now I want more.

I’ve always hated No Doubt — too pouty, too smarmy, too LAME. They haven’t really addressed the poutiness or smarm, but with all the added substance on this record I find myself able to get over it. And I’m not talking about intellectual substance, just the fun-substance their image has always advertised them as having a supply of. Some tracks even come close to the terrific, buzzy, clubby single “Hey Baby” I bought it for.

Oh, man. So it turns out the bad thing about Elastica is NOT that they lifted riffs from everyone else, but that they apparently needed a lot of preparation just to do so — these sessions don’t even have the gleeful energy of collage artists wearing shiny new guitars, and that’s what I listen to Elastica for.

LA again. Damn. This’ll take more listens before I know what I think of the lyrics (I’m at work), but the music suits and one of the MCs sounds a little like an American Juice Aleem.

Plus, I’m still at the stage with hip-hop where finding good-not-great records helps me get my bearings.

The sound quality’s not perfect, and iTunes, the software controlling it, is engineered for people whose entire collections will fit on one iPod (about 80 albums). However, it’s also the cutest, lightest, bestest music-playback gadget I’ve ever seen. Find someone who has one and make them show you — Apple’s “1000 songs in your pocket” slogan is an understatement.

Like any headphones toy it brings the danger of narcissism. Still… music’s a mind-altering substance, so it’s good to have this big a selection on hand at any given moment. Ida for walking under a clear night sky, ABC for dancing to work the next morning.