Actually, the website called it a Bright Eyes album, and Conor Oberst does a modest majority of the singing, but the case is wordless, and the liner notes credit 17 Saddle Creek musicians in alphabetical order.

Anyhow, I can’t believe I like this. Christmas always makes me want to chew my own ears off. It’s a funny world.

I’ve loved this album for years, despite thinking that it sounded a little too gooey. I didn’t realize it had been released first on a small folk label, let alone that the original back cover had Jennifer and Jonatha in Cyndi Lauper-esque clothes instead of coffeehouse black. The used store I found this at also had a copy of the Elektra version, so I compared liner notes. As I was hoping, the production credits were slightly different; when they moved to Elektra a “Co-produced by Alain Mallet” appeared.

Now, I could swear this sounds crisper than the major-label version, but pulling out both discs and playing them side-by-side suggests that the difference is small if it even exists. I don’t have the patience to check further at the moment, but the internet is no help.

Defenses of meaningless music seem to focus on escapism as the excuse for listening to it, or worse they fall back on “it’s good for what it is”. This record is good, i.e. enjoyable; it just happens to have a notable lack of anything else that could make up the difference if it had fallen short in the basal beat + melody type of worth. Thus Kylie and gang are cutting it close. We might think them spoiled or smug not to put a larger buffer between themselves and suckitude, and yet none of this impeaches this particular record.

Catchy enough, but there’s no swearing! Wasn’t I supposed to buy this because I liked the TV show? Hm. I also hear this horrific distortion on the cymbals; it sounds like certain usually-smooth parts of the cymbal sound were crossed with a bronchitic cough. I’ve been hearing that sound on a lot of CDs lately, and because it resembles the distortion you get with mp3-encoding, I had been wondering whether I was losing my mind or my hearing. Could it instead just be the result of overly-harsh compression meant to make the disc sound louder on the radio? That would blow my mind. I’m not an audiophile. I don’t catch stuff like this.

I would have thought by listening that this owed more to arty creepies like Tracy + The Plastics (except with real beats), but the bio on their website portrays them as wankers carrying out goth-metal by other means. With the exception of “Hooker Leg” this is not quite weird or tight enough for me not to care about their intentions. And yet I’d buy a full-length on sight, because they’re clearly capable of striking exactly the balance I want.

A great title for a single.

The press kit says “Wire, Soft Boys, XTC” but I hear Pavement, Archers Of Loaf, Grifters — the most recent big wave of arty/loose/cryptic guitar rock. The music’s varied enough that one could argue about that, but the vocals date it right to 1994. Anyway, a friend of mine raved about them for quite a while, and I ignored it all until he played them for me because, as it turns out, I was thinking of Warm Jets. Now I have to admit that my friend was right; it’s not that this band should be huge, just that more music geeks should know about them.

I remember their cassette album VERY fondly as a sort of Death Cab For Cutie + Minutemen thing. This doesn’t have the same nervous energy, but it does feature a high-pitched (baritone?) guitar, which makes me wonder if that original tape just made me constantly think it had been sped up. I should check, loath as I am to dig out my tapes too often.

The big problem with a lot of “story” songs and/or “joke” songs is that they sacrifice one of pop music’s advantages: the way it encourages re-listening. I hate it when songwriters thoughtlessly crush the rhythm of a song just because their lyrics were really written for a prosy, one-time-through kind of reading. Anyway, Rat Cat Hogan don’t do that. These are stories with the narrative shape of songs. Extra nice. Chris Walla’s production gives it a good finish, too, though I wouldn’t spring this on anyone who was too into ‘fidelity’ lest they wig out when the singer blithely honks out a note far below his range.

I had to buy it! It was only five dollars. That’s how mailorderworks.

I don’t know how many Revolutionary Hydra records I have. It might be three. But as long as I was doing radio, they were destined to stay in the ‘maybe’ pile. Now that I don’t hear three albums a week that sound like this it makes me feel kind of warm. Maybe not on its merits, except for the last track (since even before college radio, I was a sucker for alternating boy/girl vocals).

Three full albums of Stew music came out this year, and the best one is the CDR, fans-only thing he sells from his website? Weird. Admittedly this has the advantage that, containing a mix of new songs (five, I think), demos and live tracks it can hit the high points of past records, but these are *good* revisions. This came in the mail with Rat Cat Hogan (see below), restoring my interest in short stories and cute little details.

Stew and the Negro Problem no longer remind me at all of the dull power-pop loved by the people who first introduced me to them. Not sure what they do sound like, though. I’ve had decent luck turning non-record-geek friends on to them, so I imagine some of the comparisons I’ve read to late-60s mainstream sorta-psychedelic ornate pop are valid. Maybe?