Psyched up by the reissues (speaking of which, there must be something to this remastering thing since, Forever Now’s great bonus tracks aside, it’s the most likely explanation for why those discs inspired a level of fandom I didn’t feel about the Furs before) I bought this and, well, it’s good as live albums go. The rhythm section are into being tight; Butler sounds like he’s sung all these songs too many times before, and though he’s not bored of them yet, the things he does to them to keep from being bored don’t always work.

My first Fall record, borrowed from a friend. It’s been 9 years, I’m now a Fall completist, etc. I don’t think I’d played this disc since getting any of the others, and I’m struck by how glossy and tepid the production feels… until the last few songs, when 1988’s “Big New Prinz” heralds a return to the band’s pre-Brix roughness. Not that I knew this back then.

I was impressed by how good the mix on pt.2 was considering that they cleared every single track, but this “promotional use only” record is 50 times better. An hour-long bastard pop mix you can actually sit down and listen to for fun! Imagine that. I am this close –> <– to buying Sandinista! to find out whether “Magnificent Seven” has such a funky bassline in reality, even though that doesn’t seem promising.

A musician who means to archly appropriate another genre will often take the corner too tightly and just make a mediocre record in that genre (even if they continue to think they’re above doing so). I’m not sure exactly what the opposite pitfall is, but this record falls into it. Sean Tillman has an unhealthy genius for reminding you of bands that he doesn’t sound like.

I guess I don’t keep up with the kind of R&B that he’s (sort of) imitating, but I was surprised that the backing tracks were so harsh. Maybe Warner signed him to get in on the “electro” thing. Wait, is he supposed to be the male Peaches? A male, chubby, suburban Peaches?

Most varied Ruins yet, and that’s a fine thing. Half the joy of listening to Ruins, though, is having other people walk in so I can watch “What the hell is this?” change to “This kind of rocks!” on their faces over the course of eight or ten frantic bars, so how much I end up liking a given album is almost totally dependent on social contingencies.

Great poppy collage techno-goofery that actually keeps a beat. The man clearly has no attention span, yet he manages to treat his source material as music rather than just sound.

A song-by-song account of my first listen is here.

This sat on my to-buy list for so long that I forgot what it sounded like except that it was a combination of something. I like combinations of things! Unfortunately, it’s German-style post-rock with reggae vocals (mostly), and while I support the wholesale restoration of vocals to IDM and post-rock and every other damn subgenre of electronic music, most of this is not much.

I see that I never wrote about the experience of playing Oneida’s new album Each One Teach One and having it cause physical agony. After about three minutes of the quarter-hour pulsing, looping, droning, pounding first track, my skin felt prickly, my head weightless. My back started to hurt. I felt nauseated. Music doesn’t usually do that (nor makes my head feel tiny and my back numb, etc.) but depressingly this wasn’t transcendental at all.

It turns out Oneida have progressed a lot since this first album — they’re a whole lot tighter and shinier now — but “A Place…” does have a 12-minute jam that threatened to fuck me up, so I skipped most of it.

Curiously hookless, though as deeply evocative of early new-wave as it clearly wants to be. Are these folks big in Japan, or is the oddly fawning line on their website about how happy they’d be to help promo people with interviews the result of a very retro faith in the harmlessness of careerism?