The ineffable packaging promises everything the album doesn’t have: the liner notes are hermetic, allusive and eccentric. Maybe Mark Robinson’s growing powers of design have blinded him to the fact that what he does IS still unusual and fascinating and thus not such a good fit for self-absorbed lite-pop of unclear inspiration. The Boggle song rocks a bit, though.

Less gauzy than their first album. They still try to revive new wave as though it was only fictional the first time around, a task whose impossibility sheds light on other equally impossible, but less absurd, acts of revival we see going on around us all the time.

The record also strikes me as particularly good, but I’m afraid to recommend it because (this is silly) I’m worried that the band’s name will create idiosyncratic expectations in other people, and if I can’t guess what those expectations are I just shouldn’t get involved.

Tim Quirk’s vocal rhythms don’t seem to change at all from song to song. Now that I think about it, this habit lurked in the background from the very beginning of Too Much Joy’s recorded career, but he plays around with everything else here. Disappointing.

If only this had gone back into print a year earlier, maybe Vinyl Japan wouldn’t have put out such a baffling Jazz Butcher compilation. This overlaps with that disc (Cake City) a lot, but it’s filled out with a more coherent selection of other early JBC album tracks, instead of the rarities that Cake City somewhat hesitantly stuck on after covering a bare minimum of hits.

I eat my words: recapitulated like this, Tullycraft’s history is pretty good, sometimes even great. No question they were in a decline before their most recent album, though, and the New Order cover sounds like it barely wasted any more of their time than it did of mine.

Fake! Fake fake fake. It still surprises me that anyone can listen to Tom Waits without feeling condescended to. I don’t need any hobo mystique supporting my mild musical experimentation. But then, I imagine anyone still listening to Waits knows what they think — except me. I got these from my EMusic subscription and figured I might as well. Blood Money’s definitely a bit better.

Tributes generally turn out poorly, and I’m not even a fan of the blissy school of Japanese indiepop that I suspected these bands followed (correctly, as it turns out, with one or two exceptions). I’m glad to have heard it, though, because unlike most other bands, New Order never seemed especially good at what they were doing. I loved the results, but couldn’t help wondering whether Bernard and crew would be shown up instantly were much of anyone else to have a go at their style. So, these covers are mostly bad, but they’re bad in ways that I never realized one could be while playing New Order songs — and it’s the variation, not the disappointment, that makes me appreciate the real New Order more.

I got Cotton Mather’s Kon Tiki, resented it, sold it, and then bought it again a few years later when I realized one song from it STILL drifted through my head on occasion. I failed to factor in, before buying this, the fact that disliking things is frustrating, and if it takes two years before I take this for anything other than semi-zappy power-pop, it may not end up being worth it.

Only knew about this from a review — of Breakbeat Era, I think — that said “much better than similar bands like Solar Twins, recent Everything But The Girl or Lamb”. That was all the encouragement I needed to grab this from a clearance bin. Indeed, it’s pretty good car-ad music, right down to the completely rootless cover of the Clash’s “Rock The Casbah”. I never liked the Clash anyway. They deserved to be sold as scrap for fashionable dance-floor welding.

Sounds like mature 1990 post-punk: the Feelies, Big Dipper and Great Plains. I’m not too much part of the cult of Burma, so even in the wake of seeing their reunion tour I didn’t have detailed-enough expectations to find this disappointing or thrilling or anything.