This seemed slightly expensive for a 7-song b-sides collection, but there was the official price (in yen), printed right on the spine cover! I wonder why that’s standard for books in the US, but not music. Most stores don’t charge the suggested retail price, so maybe the same labels setting outrageously high wholesales prices and high MSRPs avoid advertising them to the people who shop at real record stores instead of the mall. No, that doesn’t quite make sense.

I like pop music. This means that, like most other pop geeks I know, I like buying records and listening to them. Ask how many of us like making mix tapes and maybe some of the hands will go down, but you’ll still have too many to count. How many pop geeks like singing along to their records? How many like singing along in a crowd? How many like meeting new people and discovering they have some of the same favorite records? How many get a thrill out of knowing about a band before their friends, but even more of a thrill if their friends wholeheartedly get into said band? Pretty much everyone, right? Close enough to ‘everyone’ that if I say this kind of thing characterizes pop geekdom it’ll be boring and obvious, as opposed to revisionist or exclusionary?

I can’t figure out why albums of covers fare so badly, drawing critical dismissal even if the performers don’t end up creating the expected train wreck. One theory is this: if you already know most of the songs on an album, they will be more distinctive. You won’t be able to give in to the natural tendency to forget bad tracks in favor of the ones that made a good impression on you. I think this explains a lot, and yet the dullest sets of covers are often the ones that draw from a repertoire you aren’t familiar with. I’m having that problem here. Erasure-ized songs lose just enough of their original vibe that I haven’t learned anything about the duo’s influences here, and I’m not grooving on just sitting and listening to the songs, either. This isn’t like listening to the radio or talking to my friends about music. Something is wrong. Covers albums aren’t a bad idea, nor even a bad idea occasionally redeemed with skill; they’re the near the heart of what music is about for the millions of people who listen to it as opposed to the few who play it. Hm.

As revisionist track-order controversies go, the one this album settles is pretty minor… I was as big a Mendoza Line fan as one can reasonably be (had all the albums, actually read the rambling personal diatribes they wrote detailing all the disagreements and sometimes romantic breakups within the band that occurred during a given album’s creation) and yet I had no idea there was any controversy at all.

Nor do the rambling liner notes of this CD explain much for those who don’t already know. The band put out three albums with Kindercore which seem to be out of print now; this CD is two-thirds of one (Poems To A Pawnshop), half of another (Like Someone In Love), none of the third, and three or four unreleased songs. These aren’t demos, as far as I can tell: they’re the same tracks released by Kindercore. What’s interesting is how effectively Kindercore parcelled the songs out to make the band seem less versatile on each record. Tim Bracy’s notes say none of this, though, only that Kindercore was very 60s retro at the time and they weren’t into it.

This turns out to be a very good record, so I guess brazening through it all, forgetting the past and getting it back in print as the apparent predecessor to 2000’s We’re All In This Alone makes sense. Still, there’ll be a few people like me who read the “lost album!” press release and thought we were at least getting different versions of these songs.

No doubt their next album will have a song about all of this.

I think collectibility is a coherent (and important) aesthetic value, though I don’t have any deep analysis of how it works or where it comes from. I used to buy a lot of Anticon records, and then whoomp! I just stopped. I don’t feel any desire to have all of them. I probably liked this album better than many Robert Pollard-related discs I’ve picked up and yet those didn’t discourage me much, and this doesn’t encourage me much, despite some pretty good production by Alias. Perhaps, aside from the collectibility issue, the problem has to do with what the promo sticker calls Sole’s “emo-honest” rapping. By straining my imaginary ears I can see how singing with Sole’s intonation would make one sound on the verge of tears, instead of half-indignant, half-pouty.

The clerk asked what the Delgados sounded like when I bought this; I didn’t have a good reply, particularly since I’ve liked them less and less with each record. I keep remembering the shy passion they had when I saw them play a few years ago, though, and as they seem to have been cultivating it in their recorded sound (moving away from their early, spiky pop days) I felt like giving them yet another chance for their songwriting to catch up to what seemed like a viable musical direction.

Then my friend Marco saw the disc on my desk and said, “There’s a band who’s listened to a lot of early Radiohead.” Quickly, sadly, I realized he was right. However good their first singles were, and however good their concert at the Cambridge VFW was, they’re steadily and consciously reaching toward the kind of blobby grandeur that a lot of generic Britpop has, and which always pushes music into the background for me. Even Emma’s vocals, which still exert some very specific pull on me, don’t change that. I’ll listen to this one more time, more closely, to see if the venomous lyrics form an interesting juxtaposition with the music or if they’re just a case of a dreary band protesting too much but then, in all likelihood, that will be it.

Odd. I’ve grown to love the album this single is from a month before said full-length comes out, thanks to a stray promo copy from a friend. The EP makes no sense as a teaser, though: one (fine) song from the album, one lukewarm b-side, and two covers of Postal Service songs by other Sub Pop artists. Using covers as EP padding instead of remixes or live versions is *wonderful*. I hope it becomes a trend. This EP just seems to be a violation of what I had always assumed were the guidelines for whether you release a single before or after its album: this isn’t as good as the album, and though I imagine a lot of people are looking forward to the Postal Service, it’s not anywhere near the level of popularity where teaser EPs create a shower of free publicity from MTV and so on.

The best (and most Charming Hostess-like) of the records I’ve heard by former Charming Hostess members. I almost didn’t buy it because the track times printed on the back made it seem outrageously short for the price; turns out that half of the track listing was just hidden under the little Tzadik spine cover thing. Oops.

Any musician with a taste for variety is going to come out sounding like a self-conscious “eclectic” in Tzadik puff blurbs but that’s clearly not Kihlstedt’s fault. She has a cellist and percussionist backing up her violin (and voice), which is enough bulk to go and try lots of things without overspotlighting the violin. This is a good (artier) companion to Rasputina’s terrific covers EP, which was reissued today with a few more tracks than its original fan-club version had.

Or is it lame that versatile female musicians with string instruments playing in a semi-rock idiom remind me of each other?

I hadn’t realized how different Laika’s three albums (to date — they’re still together, and the cover of this compilation optimistically says “Volume One”) were, but the “best-of” disc here has three songs from each and it works only as a sampler. I liked the rarities disc, though; while I’m not constantly disappointed by Laika or anything, I do often suspect their dubby post-rock trip-hop thing would be improved a little by the readdition of some of the abrasive edge lost when Margaret Fiedler left Moonshake behind to form the new band, which edge I think I hear in the various b-sides and remixes collected here.

Satisfying alt-country from Canada, though I like it in the atmospheric way I like Ida and the way I try to like Low, not the way I like “real” alt-country like Richard Buckner or whoever. The one thing they really should not have bothered doing is covering New Order’s “Love Vigilantes”. Like the Oyster Band, they noticed that the song was kind of traditional-sounding and I guess that was all the justification they needed; I always thought the song’s narrow claim to worth was the distance between the style and the arrangement.

I can’t say I like it much, but I didn’t expect to; with all the hype I was still curious to hear it once. Sounds very much like an Elephant 6 (neo-psychedelic) songwriter recording in super-lo-fi. Banhart’s thing for funny voices definitely combines with the low fidelity to irreal effect.