Can you tell I just got a Teenbeat package in the mail?

From the little bits I’ve heard, The Sisterhood’s first two albums consist more or less of the same googly-eyed “zany” dinking around that made Rob Christiansen’s Viva Satellite records so unnervingly painful. The thing is, I’ve never gotten the impression that Christiansen was forcing his affect; listening to Viva Satellite’s “experiments in narrative” (I forget the exact phrasing, but it says something like that on the case) is like watching Welcome To The Dollhouse with earnest goofiness in place of awkwardness and alienation. It’s just there, whether or not its audience can stomach it.

A track on 555 Records’ 555CD55 made me wonder if the band had changed their stripes, though, and it seems they have; Rob’s wife and partner Jeannine Durfee sings unslickly and Rob’s arrangements bespeak a clear goofy streak, but it’s unceasingly warm and melodic. And the genre-hop to soul for “All You Want To Do Is Make Me Cry” charmed me, like to the point where I don’t know how I’ll keep myself from buying their old records despite the disappointment and vexation that I believe awaits.

Oddly, as Robinson’s design sense gets sharper and lusher, leading to album covers with six or seven different ideas colliding on them and pretty much never flopping, he seems to focus more and more on a musical minimalism that seems resolutely unwilling to play for higher stakes. I feel as though I should like this more than I do.

This remaster fixes the two big problems I had with Mass Romantic, which were that a lot of the lyrics were hard to make out, and that by side two I usually had listening fatigue (despite loving some of the songs found there — shit, “Centre For Holy Wars” and “The Mary Martin Show” are tracks 10 and 11 out of 12). However, it’s WAY too ‘bright’ for my usual stereo, on which this remastered disc crackles in places.

It’s also a mixed blessing to have all the instruments so clearly audible; the barely-concealed fact that the New Pornographers were trying their best to do everything at once helped make the record a hit, but their second album has since showed that they were capable of being even better if they calmed down a tiny bit, and this remastering job demonstrates that a little muddiness the first time around probably constituted a very desirable trade-off of fidelity for accessibility.

In the fall of 1995 I saw the movie Kicking And Screaming, which killed my nascent interest in being a film critic; I discovered while trying to write the piece in time for my editor not to kill me that, unlike with music, I didn’t have much to say about things I didn’t like.

I was haunted for days by a song from the movie, though; I think, in fact, that it was played over the closing credits. Eventually I found out that it was Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation”; I rushed out to get the disc and found that, while I didn’t like most of the rest of it to any great degree, “Bad Reputation” was as moving as it had been in my memory.

I got this when it came out, not much more than a year later, and from the start couldn’t decide whether to keep it or not. The first track has an okay melody but inane lyrics about shoplifting; the rest made no impression.

Today, once again, I found myself face to face with the disc, considering whether or not to sell it off in my huge ongoing purge. Thinking over my history with Johnston, though, I found myself confused about how I could have taken so long to identify “Bad Reputation”.

Then I realized that, though the web already existed in early 1996, there was not yet even a hint of the ability one has today to just type a lyric into a search engine on the assumption that someone, somewhere has transcribed an artist’s whole oeuvre at some point (and be right). Duh.

Having been supplied with that visceral reminder of how long I’d been holding onto this album just in case I turned out to like it, I plunked it right down in the sell pile, where it belongs.

I’ve read some reviews mentioning how strange it is that Murs would make the most ‘normal’ album in the Def Jux catalog; I guess maybe he used to be strange…?

When Murs is on here, his conversational flow is unbeatable. He sounds like he’s just shooting the shit, telling a story and rhyming accidentally, except that between his voice and his attitude you’d want to sit down and just chat with him anyway. However, some of the beats are weak and he doesn’t have such great choruses, which I suppose is the risk you take as a conversational rapper. Still, you want to like the guy and he makes it easy, whether he’s rhyming about collecting Star Wars action figures or apologizing in the liner notes for lyrics that he doesn’t agree with anymore.

For a long time I’ve been unable to get into the vast majority of music that sounds ‘too old’ to me. This feels stupid — after a certain age people look at you funny if you claim to like neither the Beatles nor the Stones, and probably won’t be soothed with a comment about the House Of Love song they’ve just reminded you of — but I already occasionally push my personal aesthetic limits with forced listening, and I have a sense of when it works and when it doesn’t. The rest of the time, I have to be guided by that moment of “Hey!” and if only Bob and Joni have ever caused that with a pre-1975 record, so be it.

Split Enz fall within the time period I usually cite as sonically acceptable anyway, but I can *hear*, listening to this, that some of it would have struck me as way too pre-punk at some point in the past. And yet I like it.

Not all of it, though… for a compilation as thorough as this seems to be, the sequence makes no sense; there are some blocks of two or three tracks from the same album stuck together, but it’s not even close to chronological overall.

I’m not sure if what I find appealling about the ocean of other Split Enz on here is the same as what I liked about the two songs I already knew: “I Got You” and “Six Months In A Leaky Boat”. Only now, though, did I catch the line about “the tyranny of distance” in “Six Months” — presumably where Ted Leo took his album title from.

This was the second album I ever bought with my own money, before I acquired the belief that if I liked one record, I needed everything else by the same performer.

As time went on, the other Erasure I heard seemed agonizingly cheesy and sterile. This retains the combination of awe and despair that I think I found simultaneously appealling and alienating at 13.

Hearing stuff I got this long ago and never *really* followed up on, even if I liked it a lot at the time, makes me think of all the different paths my life could have taken, except that the distance between then and now is to some extent an illusion — I could have gotten another record by Erasure (or The Sisters Of Mercy) at any point if something had made me WANT to.

This mini-LP (8 songs) continues Cex’s pattern of getting better with each release, though the improvement has slowed down, and he’s still — oh man — not living up to his potential. Between the title (say it out loud) and the reference to Nine Inch Nails’ _Broken_ in the liner notes I might have expected it to be as grinding and brutal as the harshest parts of the live show where I saw him play some of these songs in April, had I gotten either reference before playing the disc. Instead, while the songs are put together very much in the style of Trent Reznor, everything still kind of sounds like Cex.

The only two tracks that, on first listen, I particularly wanted to hear again were the last two: “Stillnaut Rjyan”, Rjyan Kidwell’s stab at a version of the “Major Tom” story, and “The Strong Suit”, which sounds like it was recorded for Being Ridden.

There’s a bunch of Wu-Tang solo albums in my listening pile. So far I haven’t ended up keeping many of them, despite having been excited enough about the Clan at one point to start picking them up. The stumbling vocal flow they all share puts me off now — I know it’s intentional, but combined with the sort of beats they favored it makes a lot of these records sound half-finished. I had higher hopes for this one due to the sparkly spine; not that I expected Ghostface to come out with a full-on glam style, but it seemed to promise something different. If I got something different, though, I couldn’t tell.

I’ve become a Belle & Sebastian listener without ever having been a real fan, and without ever finding any of the emotional resonance in their music that so many people do. Except for the accidental self-parody of “Lord Anthony” (or is it actually an old song of theirs left unrecorded until now?) this record offers me the chance to relate to Belle & Sebastian the way the band’s archetypal fan relates to life itself: once driven to cynicism by a parade of inexplicable horrors, I can finally relax and admit that I just want to sincerely enjoy something. Did I stretch that too far?