I heard “soundtrack composer” and “soul revival” and “guest vocalists” a lot when I looked into David Holmes on the web. The main feature of this album seems to be crazy guitar squalls, though. I like the bass-heavy songs but mostly this sounds like that Blur album with the melty guy on it.

Does every generation find the most troubling thing about the men who come after it to be their facial hair? Three of these four guys have what I consider throw-the-deadbolt-and-pretend-you-aren’t-home beards, but they clearly just want a kind of Eddie Haskell edgy nattiness. As for the music: blah.

After nearly a year away from my Joni Mitchell rampage, I came back to this last record I bought before getting discouraged. It’s mostly boring, and astonishingly long, but with lowered expectations even one memorable song (”Talk To Me”) made me pretty happy. I’m sad knowing that Joni Mitchell became mostly inconsequential rather than getting stranger and stranger, but I’m resuming my slow survey of her career.

Even after it dawned on me that Tin Huey and Thin Lizzy might be different I had to look both of them up to be sure I wasn’t confused. So. Here’s the former band of the songwriter from The Waitresses. Tin Huey date to the late 70s but seem very unpunk — not out of attachment to the 70s image of rock stars, but out of attachment to the 70s image of NON-stars. From the artiest to the sleaziest, the people remembered as ‘being there’ when punk got going all had an element of defiance, of making records that, however unlikely it was for them to hit #1, could have been interpreted as a statement of purpose if they had. Tin Huey are a little modest.

Nice synth-supported scrappy post-punk, the kind of thing you’d expect the “electroclash” world to love if they lived up to what they say about their roots. The band seems really into this faux-biography they’ve got, though, and claiming that this is authentic 80s music rather than a 2001 rampage through the work of bands that probably weren’t listening to each other 15 years earlier deranges the nice little network of conflicting signifiers.

Polyrhythmic music made entirely from sampled copy-machine noises (though note that now with collating and stapling and so on, those machines make a lot more noises than they used to). Great in spots; gets old only about half as fast as you’d think. I put it in a boombox on repeat in the printer room last night, and while somebody turned it off before I got back to work this morning, I have reports that it was still clicking away in the wee hours.

I already had this song on Disco Not Disco, but I thought the remixes (by Pet Shop Boys, Felix Da Housecat, Danny Tenaglia, etc.) would make this an entertainingly varied extrapolation on various aspects of the song. Instead, it put me right back in 1989, when remix albums were always tempting and always worthless. Maybe on some level it’s stupid to buy a CD described as 10 versions of one song and not expect it to be like listening to that song ten times over, but current trends in pop music — trends this CD doesn’t partake of at all — had raised precisely that expectation for me.

A good pile of dance music, spread across two discs. This genre is standardizable enough that you’d think it would be easy to pump out good compilations, but the buzz on “electro” has made it profitable for other people to do a half-assed job, I think. So some credit is due Larry Tee there. However, including Mr. Tee’s remix of New Order’s “Confusion” was an iffy choice; dressed up in a new beat “Confusion” is neither better nor worse than the rest of the songs on this compilation, which makes it all seem like these electroclash kids have merely found a way to transmute various metals into lead. There are worse things than lead, you know, so it’s a valuable process. It just isn’t so impressive to a gold miner. Also, if the goal was to expose people to new artists, it’s well done (New Order, Bis, Ladytron and Felix Da Housecat are the only ‘names’) but I wonder how Volsoc and Vostok feel about being right next to each other.

On the border between ambient and laptop-pop. For some reason I don’t feel especially cheated by the long, featureless instrumentals; I don’t like them much, either, but the driftiness is so much the same aesthetic that drives the tracks with vocals that I feel okay about it. That’s how one should feel about half-enjoyable records, but I have a tendency to get resentful when a great electronica person withholds vocals. I tend to take that personally.

For a record so widely hyped that they made the hype part of the packaging (raves from various publications are printed right on the discs in Moulin Rouge-style fonts) this does a good job of exceeding expectations. The original nine-track album had one great song, two okay ones (including the Wire cover) and tons of filler. This adds three more songs and a remix of the hit, plus a DVD with videos (and they’re good!) and a huge number of remixes. I just listened to various people reworking “Emerge” for more than an hour and I wasn’t sick of it. I think the DVD even has a few more unreleased songs on it, but aside from the crisp video and the general sense of profusion, I don’t actually like navigating my music with a remote control…