Someday I gotta sit down with the whole Frank Black pile (I think I have them all, despite having acquired a few in the middle there so offhandedly that I can’t remember) and see if he vanished all at once, or slowly changed his sound to something I don’t like, or what.

Has anyone written some serious aesthetic inquiries into the nature of *following* an artist — having expectations, aging alongside your idols, whatever? I don’t continue caring about Frank Black records just because I assess the chance of my liking the next one as being higher than most of the rest of the record store; I want him to make *another* great record and thereby redeem my love for the Pixies. This next great album doesn’t need to sound like the Pixies, even if, were it not for the Pixies, I wouldn’t be waiting for it. Perhaps that distinction explains it; I don’t know what I’m hoping for.

Devil’s Workshop comes very close. The songs are catchy, so much so that the years of uncatchy songwriting preceding them are pretty clearly cast as intentional changes in priority. A couple more *really* good bits (which I might discover on further listens, I guess) and I will start trying to figure out how to convince people they should hear it.

Black Letter Days puts me back in that state I can’t stand: Is this bad? Am I just not getting it? Maybe thinking about it isn’t a waste of effort, but worrying is.

Several “mixes” (two of which are really covers, by most definitions) of a glitchy ambient song that puts Ben Gibbard’s vocals to much better use than the whole last Death Cab For Cutie album. Apparently the album this single was taken from has a lot of other guest vocalists — nobody I like as much as Gibbard, but I still might have to check the whole thing out.

The novelty of almost never using more than two instruments at once (even if those instruments change over the course of the song) held my interest for about half the album and then fwoomp, I noticed my perceptive apparatus was slowly going numb. Maybe next time.

If Stephin Merritt just spent his spare time doing something completely different from the Magnetic Fields, it might not be that hard to set aside expectations. But it’s always seemed, instead, like all the various names he records under were just a joke or a personal cataloguing system, not a legitimate informational tool for the buyer. The Future Bible Heroes records have always been right on the line for me; disappointing next to the Magnetic Fields or the Sixths, but plainly partaking of the same aesthetic.

So, though I hate Claudia Gonson’s voice as a general rule, I’m happy that Merritt has her singing all the vocals here; makes it easier to start judging the record on its own merits (of which there are, I don’t know, an okay number).

Mostly instrumental, seemingly improvised, pointless background music from people who can do better. This doesn’t even sound like it was fun to *make*.

Certainly makes for some sad post-punk fun, which is about as much as I was promised, but the singer’s tiny expressive range scuttles some otherwise-reasonable attempts to expand their sound. I didn’t actually find the Joy Division resemblance too strong.

It used to be that Conor Oberst was at his best when he sharply felt his own defectiveness. Now he’s used to it, though, so when he scrapes bottom with another solo-acoustic-guitar (plus howling) song I just shake my head sadly. His constant connection to the most tedious kinds of awfulness hasn’t kept him from experimenting more successfully with orchestral pop, alt-country, vaguely Radiohead-y atmospherics. I suppose that, as usual, he’s worth the effort.

Sounds so much like early (i.e. good) Comet Gain in places that I hit the web to see if in fact some singer or songwriter had gone underground for a few years and then joined Comet Gain. Results inconclusive. KMB also started sounding like Too Much Joy later in the record, but I’m pretty sure there’s no biographical reason for that.

Or perhaps it’s grebo!

The Chesterfields recap most of the stylistic threads represented on the famous C86 compilation (which had a lot of variety on it, despite its name later coming to mean a particularly narrow branch of British mid-80s indiepop). Some jangle, some artsiness, some Ron Johnson-type hectic funk. It’s inspired me far more than the music alone might (okay, “should”) because I’d written this sort of thing off a few years ago as territory I’d already explored more than enough. Sometimes knowing a genre well helps you enjoy music; sometimes you need to back off a bit to get it.

Like Portishead, but emo. In both cases, above-it-all vocals and beyond-it-all music make each other seem pretentious to me, but I know a lot of people loved Portishead more than the fundamentally jovial Massive Attack. Go figure.