The reason I still like Suzanne Vega lies in moments like the chorus of “Night Moves” which — well, it’s really catchy, but also, it goes “Do you love any, do you love none? / Do you love twenty, can you love one?” The “twenty” could have been “many” and it would have been excruciatingly bad, but instead, using a number that’s just slightly too large to be right, she marks herself as fantastical instead of just flighty. Only one or two other songs make me regret not going back and getting this earlier, though.

I liked some of that AIDS benefit dedicated to him last year, but this is the first I’ve heard of actual Fela. I think. The horn player is apparently from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the few jazz outfits I’ve enjoyed. Pretty good (though kind of slow for the degree of energy his fans talk about him bringing to his music) but eMusic seems to have swapped the track names. How does that even happen? I swear they have employees whose job it is to break things.

Listened to this once, long ago, when what I really wanted was another helping of Momus’s Monsters Of Love. It wasn’t nearly Momus-y enough for me then, but now I find it pretty enjoyable. Helps to have heard Josef K in the meantime. A lot of things sound good if you have enough context.

The buzz is that this band sounds like the Pixies, and in a way they do, but let me back up… Remember when the Pixies went from being into death to being into aliens? Before that a lot of their press was about how dark and icky their lyrics were. Suddenly it wasn’t true. But, to their credit, most writers (at least, the ones I read at the time) didn’t try to shoehorn in any theory about how the band had changed, because they hadn’t much. They were still like the Pixies. Whereas (this is my point) McLusky may sound like the Pixies, but they’re not like the Pixies.

Anyway, I love a good arty-smashy record.

Callahan’s Wolfhounds sound slightly ahead of their time here, as they did when I got my first Wolfhounds record in 1999, but now there’s something dated about it. I can’t figure out whether that’s for external reasons — the epoch after the rise of angular British post-punk has itself ended, making Wolfhounds very much creatures of the past — or if it’s just that I don’t listen to the sequels and prequels of this kind of thing so much anymore.

I wasn’t going to write about this since, as a cheap promo copy of a third album by a band who had one song I kind of liked five years ago, it didn’t get more than a cursory disappointing listen from me. The thing is, I’ve seen a bunch of reviews of it now… somebody finds this record more interesting than their others, though maybe that someone is just their promotions person.

Totally awesome ba-ba-ba pop. The only problems are that the verses of “Damn You” lift their melody from that one Green Day song (don’t make me look the name up; I’ll just get it stuck in my head again) and the last track is the flimsy kind of sad twee Drive-In usually puts out. Normally I’d mind that the album was so short, but at under 30 minutes, it’s great for listening to twice in a row.

At some point I have to flag me down a sociologist and ask about this, because for all that American culture seems to be sexualized, it seems like very little is communicated. Nearly anyone who has a point to make about sex that isn’t entirely based on basic sitcom horniness-joke tropes gets to reap the very real benefits of breaking new ground. Even with those benefits, though, Peaches isn’t all that great, at least not now. If she had a point about sexual bravado being an effective or even laudable way to substitute for (or subvert?) standards of attractiveness, it’s been toppled somewhat by the fact that Peaches is actually kind of famous now, and it’s not news that homely-but-swaggery famous people wield sexual power.

Conventional (though catchy) except for the arrangements… my mind would probably glaze over when confronted with these songs if there weren’t little Hammond and horn touches on them, but I’m glad those little nudges are there. I’ll probably listen to it a fair amount but I don’t know that I’ll track down the first album, y’know?

It took me several listens to feel like I had quite gotten this record, even though its pleasures seem like they ought to be simple. Same thing with the first one, right down to the initial disappointment and eventual thrill. I find myself wondering idly if rock critics love this band so much because there’s really nothing to say about them.