I just have no idea what this is supposed to be or to sound like. I felt that way about them when I saw them on MTV in high school, but a lot of the bands I found baffling then turned out to just have sounded wrong coming out of my TV’s tiny speakers (like The Wedding Present) or been in some way too deep for me. But these guys feel the same as they did then.

I also downloaded Bird Wood Cage, the album with “Kansas” (the ‘hit’ from back then, and the only song on the compilation that struck me), and it was just another load of “huh?”

The whole phenomenon of mildly “cool” kids (especially in indie-pop) appropriating slang from hip-hop makes me want to claw my eyes out; it seems to get all its motive energy from the fact that, ha ha, we’re so white. One-off appropriations don’t even bother me — I’m sure some of these people do listen to hip-hop (via top 40, at the very least) and that’s what indie kids do, refer to songs. But when things like “mad skills” and “peeps” escape into the mainstream and become self-conscious signifiers of being “down” for far longer than they seem to have been active slang in their original contexts, it drives me nuts.

The music: good, but also annoying, and the latter outweighs the former.

Holing up with Greek musicians to record bouzouki-based (etc.) versions of American Music Club songs was a good idea. Sadly, Eitzel seems to have gone to TOO much effort to be tasteful with it, and while the results are good, reluctance to emphasize the novelty in the arrangements means you’re basically listening to Eitzel not singing as well as he used to, fronting a band that aren’t as good as AMC. I’m sure he didn’t want to get by on a gimmick, but pushing the Greek instrumentation to the fore more would have at least made it possible for this to not be a little disappointing.

I seem to be on a streak of disappointments; I’d better listen to something I know I like just to check I’m capable of enjoying anything…

I remember the Preachers’ first album being at the limit of how much glossiness I could stand, but it was aggressive, metallic gloss, and the press seemed to have kept describing them in terms of their urgency, so I thought at worst this would be too abrasive. But no! It’s bland britpop.

The Kent 3 put out a few singles and two albums while I was doing radio, and they consistently had at least one track worth playing. It was never quite what I wanted to sit down and listen to a while album of outside the studio, and it still isn’t, but there’s a heightened pleasure to hearing someone imitate The Embarrassment that wasn’t there when I already spent most of my free time hanging out in a record library full of folks that knew how good the Embos were.

I was disappointed when I opened the package these came in; the cover of the earlier disc wasn’t the blurry self-portrait I’d seen on the net, but instead a gross-out photo of blood and guts all over a sidewalk. Laaaame.

The first disc is largely generic drill’n'bass workouts, interspersed with tracks where Enduser’s stolen someone else’s vocals and laid them over one of said workouts, and considering how iffy the former started to seem after 10 or 15 minutes of brutality, it’s impressive how GREAT the vocal tracks are, including the remix of Redman and Method Man’s “Tear It Off” that opens the whole thing. (”Bounty Drilla” also deserves mention, for being exactly what its name implies but still managing to surprise.)

The second disc, of stuff done this year, is easier to listen to: smoother on the music side, and more consistently supplied with voices from what sounds like a variety of places. I have no idea if this is the tip of a subculture that as a general rule is totally hidden from the outside world, or if there’s just like four or five of these guys who send each other CDRs.

The first few moments gave me chills; it might seem backward, but whatever taint of lameness a wholehearted retro album might have to it is pretty much removed if you’re making music that sounds the way your heroes did to their CASUAL fans, the people who needed to be sold on the idea in the first place. And yet by the end of the 28-minute record, this seemed to have been going on forever.

Three of these guys died when their tour van flipped a few days ago, which is how I heard about them in the first place. I’m more sad to find it okay but ultimately disappointing than I would have been to just not like it.

Took a flyer on this after recently rediscovering early Wall Of Voodoo. I can’t decide whether it’s that he changed over time or that what I thought was so distinctive about those first two Wall Of Voodoo albums wasn’t actually connected to Ridgway’s strong personality as much as I had thought. Oh well.

Delicious music that belongs in a car ad (though who knows how much longer car ads will seem like the apotheosis of longing & melancholy’s ability to remain sincere even when utterly undermined by commercial intentions). I found out about her by browsing Sub Pop’s website, though she doesn’t sound anything like the Sub Pop artists that got me there. Pretty vocals; music redolent of nightclubs without sounding much like anything you’d hear in one.

I also got an EP she did with “improvisational electronic act” Elemental, which has a few good moments but mostly sounds like a more gadgety version of the generic gunk generated by people who think their band can’t really be described with genres, man… (It’s no surprise that people with that little perspective about their music wouldn’t be very good much of the time, but it is a little odd how many of those bands sound like each *other*.)

I’ve slowly acquired the six ‘classic’ Go-Betweens albums in near-chronological order over the past seven years, ending with this one. Somewhere along the way I heard “Streets Of Your Town” but was convinced it was an early b-side, not a track from this final, fabledly-slick record. This actually sounds more like old Go-Betweens to me than Tallulah did, though like Tallulah and Liberty Belle it seems to have a wide gap between two or three highlights and a lot of unmemorable songs.