I finally found an IDM artist as consistently hiccupy as I wanted. One or two of these tracks bring to mind Stephin Merritt’s advice that “Lack of warmth is not caused by too much technology, but too little” but that great leveler, the human voice, is sprayed over most of the songs. Experience has shown that I can’t share my enthusiasm for this sort of thing too well; people who like the abrasive rhythms of non-syrupy IDM don’t seem to care one way or the other about microsampled voices.

I got this because the best track on Erlend Oye’s solo album was by a member of Royksopp and, I was told, Royksopp didn’t generally use vocals on their own records. Not bad, but the music doesn’t contrast with the vocals as much as on Oye’s thing. This is now the earliest case I know of where a performer put someone else covering them on their own album. It must have happened before, though… I’ll start looking.

At the tail end of my Anticon binge two years ago I picked up Vertex, but you know how binges of canned goods go; I don’t think I listened to the whole thing until the other day. Buck’s everything I liked about Anticon: dreamy-not-dreary music punctuated by thoughtful rhymes and some very nice scratching and sampling — all a one-man show. On Vertex he sounded a lot like Eminem, which I’m guessing embarrassed him because on his next album he raps like an unjoking tenor version of Humpty Hump. Whereas for me, hearing someone with Eminem’s flow and voice not being obnoxious redeems having liked Eminem in the same way discovering these records makes me feel better about some of the more mediocre Anticon slabs I accumulated in 2001.

I can’t say why I like this, since the nearest sonic comparison I can think of is Rufus Wainwright’s voice over a nice but disposable indie-alt-country (aaargh) band. Marco walked in here with a CD to lend me but, recognizing the label as one that had a deal with eMusic, I promised him I could listen to it without him depriving himself of the disc for the afternoon. Neat.

I never know what to say to people who ask me about the Aislers Set; they always say it conspiratorially, like digging the Aislers Set is a sign of our shared indiepop culture. The problem is, they’re nudging the wrong person. If I had more invested in the band I’d be disappointed; instead, enh. There are some nice bits. I miss the skull-scraping pop of Amy’s old band Henry’s Dress and the actual melodies of Go Sailor.

The idea is that the Majesticons (rich, blingy, shallow hip-hop robots) made this album, and their rivals the Infesticons, whose statement of intent came out three years ago, will come back to deliver the coup de grace for the third album in the trilogy. Given that, and the fact that the humans behind the whole thing are Mike Ladd (previously Infesticon #0, now Jay Wakowitz Esq.) (which last bit may not be anti-Semitic but it’s kind of fishy) and his friends, I expected this to be outre arty hip-hop with lyrics about ice. Instead, it’s a good enough simulacrum of what it’s criticizing that at least at first listen, it negates what I *thought* was the point of the Infesticons record: being smart and clever and creative can be more of a big party than relentless social-climbing and image-building is. So I don’t know what’s going on. Ladd may have backed himself into a narrative corner where this album was under pressure both to be entertaining and to be soul-deadeningly suckful. I’m not sure it’s either.

I got this last summer because it was warm and crackly and why not? Over time I came to find it grating and meaninglessly glossy; I do have the unpleasant feeling that some of my objection to the vocals may be the singer’s marked accent, which stilts his delivery of the English lyrics substantially. I’d probably prefer that they write lyrics in their native German, though there’s no way to know…

Anyway, this domestic reissue has three bonus tracks, which for some reason I decided I wanted. They turned out to be instrumentals. I’m full of resentment and self-loathing.

Some of the shoddiness about this album is clearly intentional (a third of the 71 songs not having titles because they were “lost in a fire”), some may or may not be (the liner notes have a page repeated and another one missing) and some clearly is not (the label website’s tendency to be “updating soon”, though there’s still a PayPal link for you to buy the things whose identity you don’t yet know). And yet, it’s a near-masterpiece. 7 years ago, when this was recorded, Graham Smith was unknown; I suspect making a 71-song Guided By Voices ripoff (and expecting anyone to care) was as much hubris then as his irritating claims of superstardom are now. It also wasn’t as clear back then, in the era of Bee Thousand, that Guided By Voices would ever stop being brilliant and retroactively make other low-fi records animated by GBV’s fragmentary spirit seem so appealling.

It looks like you can buy this for $8 from moci.us. If you used to like Kleenex Girl Wonder… if you found Ponyoak mysteriously exhausting and Smith unbearable, as though Graham Smith wanted to make a long album but had forgotten why… I think this is why.

(I got mine as part of the “MOCi Preview Pak” so it had an awful EP by the Scissors and a decent but forgettable low-fi rock album by the Heralds with it. The combo was worth what they were charging, but it makes me deeply skeptical of the jump to $25 for the next installment. I also have no idea if they really expect anyone to drop a c-note on a year’s supply of their products. Their half-assedness suggests to me that maybe there’s a thriving scene in Illinois and they’re really marketing to people they see all the time at shows, etc. I don’t know.)

Interesting that it gradually builds over an hour (despite being divided into “songs”) but the second half is just barely jumpy enough to get my attention, while the first half is way too boring. I assume that like all boring things it’s supposedly subtle, but I’m more in the mood to be met halfway with this kind of thing.

It’s dawning on me that Ad Frank’s never had a great band backing him, nor does he now. The Fasy Easy Women are at least different, though; their rinky-dink sound defangs some of the uptempo songs but it makes the slow numbers much easier to listen to, fixing the problem I initially had with Mr. Fancypants. Fancypants eventually became a favorite of mine, though, and I suspect this one may always irk me a little bit. Actually, no, odds are I’ll listen to it so much that I’m hardly hearing the record anymore and forget all about my irritation. That Ad, he’s hard to stay angry at.