In the liner notes to a Game Theory compilation, Scott Miller wrote “Leilani: I remember about when this was mastered someone told me there was a Hoodoo Gurus song called “Leilani” and I was petrified I’d somehow unconsciously stolen someone’s whole song. You never know when you write a melody if it’s not really some pre-existing tune that’s just far enough in the back of your mind you don’t know if you wrote it or not.” Now, I respect Miller a lot and I don’t write songs myself, so I’m willing to take his word for it that things like that could happen to well-meaning people. However, I’m kind of amazed that apparently nobody pointed out to Aberdeen — nobody in the band, no friend they played the demos for, nobody — how “Cities & Buses” was ripping off the Magnetic Fields’ “Take Ecstasy With Me”. The verses have the same melody and the same “We used to blah blah blah, we used to blah blah blah” verbal structure; the chorus melody is autonomous but the refrain “come back to me” matches the cadence of “take ecstasy with me” too closely. I don’t know, I would feel terrible if I were them. I’m sure nobody’s getting sued over this or whatever, but it gives me a gut-wrenching feeling that perhaps there are too many cookie-cutter indiepop records out there if this can go otherwise unnoticed.

Admittedly, I felt the same way about Eminem (again, maybe unconsciously) biting Rakim.

It must suck to be on the Chickfactor compilation and be one of the three or four acts (out of 21) who don’t get an honorific, unlike “london’s dreamiest trio the clientele” or “our lord stephin merritt”. Totally insufferable in attitude, but they do put together a mean compilation. More varied than I expected, too; despite having just listened to the whole Aberdeen album beforehand I didn’t get winsomeness fatigue from this disc at all.

Never been able to pinpoint why it is that one or two songs on every Holiday Flyer album have made my toes curl with delight. Normally, in that sort of a situation I feel bad buying new albums (out of a suspicion that I could enjoy a larger chunk of the old ones if I tried) but these are SO exquisitely good that I never fell victim to that compunction. The Sinking Ships sound enough like Holiday Flyer that I didn’t realize they share only a bassist until I checked… but anyway, same deal.

Bounty Killer’s inhumanly bad vocal technique is too good a fit for the thin, abrasive music that dancehall records require. Neither one has anything to play off of. Guesting on No Doubt’s big single, Killer sounded cool doing his throat-closed Muppet toasting, but combined with a backing track that has the same stretched-to-breaking-point quality (not emotionally, mind you, just sonically) it makes me claustrophobic. Sorry if this is elliptical, but I can’t think of a better way to describe what’s so fucked about Bounty Killer’s voice.

Possibly my favorite thing about some dancehall deejays, though, is that they’ll interpolate a few lines from someone else’s top 40 hit and keep going like nothing happened. Like, why does the bridge of “Just Dead” quote Carly Simon? There’s no reason. Atom And His Package used to do that kind of thing a lot, but not so much any more. On that count Bounty Killer still satisfies. It’s a bind, though, because hearing him and his buddies sing a line from “You’re So Vain”, kind of fitting it into the melody of the track and kind of not, has an effect proportional to the amount of time you’ve just spent letting Bounty Killer bang you over the head. Might be less effective if it happened in every song although honestly, I would buy that record more readily than the other half of this two-disc set.

Shamefully, shamefully, I always translated “Factory Record sound” to “New Order sound” in my head. Even though I knew better. It seems seeing the movie (24 Hour Party People) finally established the meaning of the former phrase in my head a little better, and it illuminates the side of Unrest that I always found pointlessly ratty before.

I bought all their records after the show on Saturday, but this new one, the source of the mp3 that put me at the show in the first place, is the only one I particularly like. On reflection I think the problem is that the band do not really write choruses. Mike Mogis’s production creates a backdrop against which the dynamics that are substituted for the verse/chorus thing actually light up. Or so it seems — I mean, they might also have just gotten better over time. Now they’re yet another new variety of music for Saddle Creek (a sad Letters To Cleo).

Another band with whom a high-school best-of purchase inhibited me from buying too much other material. This isn’t terrific (as in, I might never play it again) but even so it’s fascinating to think of them as an art-rock band who were only pretending to be paranoid Midwestern squares. I guess it makes sense; I can’t imagine the Stan Ridgway displayed in other WoV and solo records ever being 18, which logic indicates he must have been at some point. Always seemed the other way around, like they were doing ‘quirky musician’ to hide ‘hollow shell of human being’ instead of vice versa.

How does he make his voice so high? Was all this mid-tempo fuzz-pop recorded at dirge tempo and sped up? I really love the idea that Apples In Stereo secretly sound like bad Foetus in the studio. It sure is frustrating that I can’t tell Apples songs apart even now that I find one album vastly more entertaining than whichever two or three discs I heard years ago before I gave up on them.

I tend to complain about how cleverness in pop/rock lyrics is undervalued as compared to, say, rap but hm, I do also tend to hear clever lyrics over generic music as hypocrisy of some kind when it’s done by a bunch of guys dressed a little too hip for 20-year veterans of the fringe of alternative music. And that’s probably not fair to them. On the other hand, I didn’t like Jeff Davis much when he was in The Balancing Act either, before I’d learned to be smug about this sort of thing. His voice is nice, anyway — if this album had a cover of something other than “I Touch Myself” I bet I would lap it up.

Something’s missing from the first half of this disc, and I think it might be the loud cassette hiss I’m used to softening these early, slower versions of DCFC songs. However, it’s nice to own Chords in a format that I can’t accidentally destroy as easily, and the ten other rarities justify the whole affair. When their cover of “This Charming Man” came on, my officemate apparently mistook Ben Gibbard’s singing for Morrissey despite not recognizing the *song*. Hm.