Aesop Rock produced nearly this whole album himself, and it’s a headphone monster — sounded great in the car, much less so on my mild desk speakers at work. The aesthetic this time around is the collage/bootleg/super-DJ sound that blew up last year; “NY Electric” in particular, with its dancehall beat and flute melody, makes it sound like Aes Rock probably owns a copy of fellow New Yorker DJ/Rupture’s “Gold Teeth Thief”.

But honestly, most of these tracks are even more fucked than that, with occasional use of video-game bleeps, chunky digital stutters, and an impossibly cheesy whooshing effect that momentarily turns the human voice into an IMAX movie trailer. If you can only catch a few of the sounds on a track — as with my work stereo — it sounds muddy. If you absorb the whole thing it’s intense and delicious. Reminds of me other musicians who’ve turned to self-production partway through their careers: a little primitive technically but much sonically thicker than what they did before. (The Loud Family’s Interbabe Concern, The Fall’s Levitate, et al.)

I don’t know which three tracks Blockhead produced, but I have my guesses. 70 minutes is a long album, so a little variation is welcome. What’s not welcome is “We’re Famous”, a track produced and “rapped” over by Def Jux top guy El-P. What can I say — normally at least his music is pretty good, but next to the huge step forward Aesop Rock has taken, El-P rehashing beats from The Cold Vein just isn’t that hot. (And, to be fair, the rest of the album is harsh and strange enough that I probably didn’t have a lot of patience for something different left when I hit “Famous”. It still sucks.)

No idea what most of the lyrics are about yet; one song drops a woman’s name over and over again in a way that reminded me unpleasantly of Slug’s obsession with “Lucy”, but I think it may have been a joke. His vocals always take a while to sink in — that’s why Labor Days took so long to grow on me — so I’ll give them time.

Coming out for real September 23rd; I can’t wait.

There are enough GBV fans that there’s always someone saying the new album is a “return to form”. For some reason, I always take these claims as meaning that, at least in the opinion of the writer, they’ve made another album that sounds like Bee Thousand. I know that’s unlikely and yet I keep thinking that at least that’s what people claim, and what they want. But the fact is they’ve been making albums with the mysteriously bland secret ingredient introduced on Mag Earwhig for about as long now as they were doing the heavily-fucked low-fi pop thing, and so I assume a lot of the people who still care enough to have opinions are actually recent fans and don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with the new stuff even if (in some cases) they like Alien Lanes better.

So, not too exciting, but by halfway it had broken through the ‘all songs sound the same’ thing to seem like it might at least get better with more listens.

I’m not immediately convinced that Mclusky know simple riffs and strong rhythms are what enlivens their “craziness” (their word for what the new album will have more of, according to Pitchfork), not an obstacle to it. The two decent songs on this EP strike me as looser (thus worse) versions of “Day Of The Deadringers” and “To Hell With Good Intentions” from Mclusky Do Dallas.

To add to the (mild) disappointment, while looking for more information on the new album, I learned that the line in “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues” which I always thought was “I’m naked from fucking too much” is actually “I’m aching from fucking too much”. I never looked it up in the liner notes, I guess. My version is so much better! Boo hoo.

This came mildly recommended as being GBV-ish and it is, I guess. It’s a little short of the line where I get excited about an album being on a label I know nothing about, though now that I look, Thick also put out Commander Venus’s album (pre-Bright Eyes). Turns out that Daily was the songwriter in Not Rebecca, a band I remember hearing when I was a DJ and wondering why on earth their CD had gotten made — not that it was bad, but that I couldn’t imagine anyone specifically wanting to sound JUST like that. This is similar… the less credit I give it for being a perfect manifestation of its creator’s intent, the more I like it.

I wanted to like this. The cover art suggested Beck; the early press suggested Basement Jaxx and other dancefloor blenderizers. Then, last night, I checked out their website and heard “Move Your Feet”. The insipid vocals and appalling fake horn dashed my hopes. Even so, when I walked into the record store this morning and saw it on sale for $8 (the standard “c’mon, why not?” teaser price these days) I thought it was worth a try.

And I was basically right, in that the single isn’t representative of the rest of the album. For the most part, despite their visuals, they lean heavily toward the garage-rock revival more than any kind of club sound — it’s fluffy, wannabe-block-party garage rock but garage nevertheless. One or two songs are even slightly good. I don’t expect this to actually appeal to anyone, though, unless there are people out there still wondering when we’ll see another artist with the professionalism of the Streets and the lyrical skill of, uh, never mind.

I only recently started using IM. Today, shortly before I was going to leave work, a friend who had just gotten my username from another friend wrote me to say, “I’m just making sure you know about Erin McKeown.” I didn’t, and my computer choked on McKeown’s web page, so mp3s were transmitted. And I just loved it. McKeown has a beautiful and engaging jazzy voice of the type I’ve been wanting to hear more lately (Mirah, Esperanza Spalding from Noise For Pretend, et al.) and the music’s sprightly and varied, the kind of thing I’m only used to hearing on records produced by Jon Brion. The record drags a tiny bit in the middle, but somehow I don’t find that reducing my expectations for the next thing I’m going to buy by her.

I hate to say it, but she may be ill-served by having a blurb at the top of her webpage from Dar Williams saying how unique McKeown is. When I saw that, I figured it meant she sounded like Dar Williams, which she does not.

My original point was that a lot of technology was involved in turning me so quickly into a fan. What I wonder is, should I start assuming that the good will out, and giving things less of a chance when they don’t grab me right away on the grounds that someone else will point out when I’m wrong?

I’ve been buying fewer CDs lately. Then yesterday my friend glenn wrote (see furia.com) about how he’d been buying fewer CDs too, but it was because he was newly in love and his entire life was changing. Not me; the underlying explanation of how being obsessive about music takes TIME rang true to me, but in my case, I’m running low on time less because overwhelmingly great things are happening to me and more because I’m running out of patience for things that aren’t overwhelmingly great.

When this showed up in my mailbox I couldn’t remember ordering anything recently, so before I even opened it I suspected it was something I didn’t need that I’d bought in a moment of boredom. Then I saw it and thought, man, I didn’t even like that last album much — why did I spring for this? The cover of a Cure song from around when I lost interest in the Cure? The “indie”, “DIY” idea of putting out three mailorder-only EPs? (The package was sent to me by Sony Music Fulfillment.) Feh.

But oops, the music doesn’t justify any of my cynicism. The cover is fantastic — it occurs to me that Folds could go far just doing other people’s songs, because he’s a consistently great performer even when his songwriting doesn’t keep up — and the other four tracks remind me of something I’d forgotten about: bopping around my bedroom in 1995, just absolutely LOSING my SHIT over how good that first album was.

After one listen, still guardedly cynical, I recalled Folds saying that the EP would have a mix of old and new songs. Checking the website, I found that the song I most suspected of actually dating back to his glory days (”Give Judy My Notice”) was “written last week”. Nice. So, call me a sucker, but I’m on board for the other two EPs.

(An interesting note about the cover… never having quite followed the story of “In Between Days”, I found the line “It couldn’t be me and be her in between without you” to perfectly evoke that type of complicated multiperson melodrama that seems to follow some people — maybe people like Robert Smith — around. When Folds delivers the same line, it’s the opposite, easy and quick, like someone who really doesn’t court that kind of situation but has been dragged into it anyway.)