For a long time I’ve been unable to get into the vast majority of music that sounds ‘too old’ to me. This feels stupid — after a certain age people look at you funny if you claim to like neither the Beatles nor the Stones, and probably won’t be soothed with a comment about the House Of Love song they’ve just reminded you of — but I already occasionally push my personal aesthetic limits with forced listening, and I have a sense of when it works and when it doesn’t. The rest of the time, I have to be guided by that moment of “Hey!” and if only Bob and Joni have ever caused that with a pre-1975 record, so be it.

Split Enz fall within the time period I usually cite as sonically acceptable anyway, but I can *hear*, listening to this, that some of it would have struck me as way too pre-punk at some point in the past. And yet I like it.

Not all of it, though… for a compilation as thorough as this seems to be, the sequence makes no sense; there are some blocks of two or three tracks from the same album stuck together, but it’s not even close to chronological overall.

I’m not sure if what I find appealling about the ocean of other Split Enz on here is the same as what I liked about the two songs I already knew: “I Got You” and “Six Months In A Leaky Boat”. Only now, though, did I catch the line about “the tyranny of distance” in “Six Months” — presumably where Ted Leo took his album title from.

This was the second album I ever bought with my own money, before I acquired the belief that if I liked one record, I needed everything else by the same performer.

As time went on, the other Erasure I heard seemed agonizingly cheesy and sterile. This retains the combination of awe and despair that I think I found simultaneously appealling and alienating at 13.

Hearing stuff I got this long ago and never *really* followed up on, even if I liked it a lot at the time, makes me think of all the different paths my life could have taken, except that the distance between then and now is to some extent an illusion — I could have gotten another record by Erasure (or The Sisters Of Mercy) at any point if something had made me WANT to.

This mini-LP (8 songs) continues Cex’s pattern of getting better with each release, though the improvement has slowed down, and he’s still — oh man — not living up to his potential. Between the title (say it out loud) and the reference to Nine Inch Nails’ _Broken_ in the liner notes I might have expected it to be as grinding and brutal as the harshest parts of the live show where I saw him play some of these songs in April, had I gotten either reference before playing the disc. Instead, while the songs are put together very much in the style of Trent Reznor, everything still kind of sounds like Cex.

The only two tracks that, on first listen, I particularly wanted to hear again were the last two: “Stillnaut Rjyan”, Rjyan Kidwell’s stab at a version of the “Major Tom” story, and “The Strong Suit”, which sounds like it was recorded for Being Ridden.

There’s a bunch of Wu-Tang solo albums in my listening pile. So far I haven’t ended up keeping many of them, despite having been excited enough about the Clan at one point to start picking them up. The stumbling vocal flow they all share puts me off now — I know it’s intentional, but combined with the sort of beats they favored it makes a lot of these records sound half-finished. I had higher hopes for this one due to the sparkly spine; not that I expected Ghostface to come out with a full-on glam style, but it seemed to promise something different. If I got something different, though, I couldn’t tell.

I’ve become a Belle & Sebastian listener without ever having been a real fan, and without ever finding any of the emotional resonance in their music that so many people do. Except for the accidental self-parody of “Lord Anthony” (or is it actually an old song of theirs left unrecorded until now?) this record offers me the chance to relate to Belle & Sebastian the way the band’s archetypal fan relates to life itself: once driven to cynicism by a parade of inexplicable horrors, I can finally relax and admit that I just want to sincerely enjoy something. Did I stretch that too far?

Four years ago, when 69 Love Songs came out, I indulged myself all the way in the desire to be Part Of It. I got people together for a listening party, playing the entire thing through in one shot for us all to hear it first together. Over the next few weeks we made top 10s, top 23s, bottom 10s.

I don’t know what broke me, sometime between now and then, but a lot of little things helped: a disappointing album from one Merritt side project, and a downright awful one from another; interviews where Merritt’s contempt for indie music came through clearly, and then a New York Times piece by a writer who dressed up the same contempt as a sign of how Merritt was now becoming a serious artist; Daniel Handler’s cloying fame in the guise of Lemony Snicket.

But I was really just disappointed, not disillusioned. I still liked the old stuff, after all, and sometimes 69 Love Songs too. These four new Magnetic Fields songs undid the disappointment, even without being especially good. They make it sound like 69LS was a venture to the edge, a vision quest, rather than a turning point. The jumble of production ideas is reminiscent of other between-albums MF releases like The House Of Tomorrow and the “I Don’t Believe You” single; one song even shares “I Don’t Believe You”’s uncomfortable resemblance to what, I imagine, Merritt intentionally imitating Richard Marx would sound like. (Note: It wouldn’t sound like Richard Marx.)

So, I mean, we’ll see.

So, I bought this box set Hardcore UFO’s yesterday. When I get a box set like, for example, Hardcore UFO’s, I often don’t start listening to it right away; instead, I prefer to make a large chunk of time in which to listen to the whole thing. After all, why listen to only part of Hardcore UFO’s when you could listen to all of Hardcore UFO’s?

I did take a moment to look at the track list of Hardcore UFO’s, particularly the best-of disc, which is also being released separately from Hardcore UFO’s under a different name. I was disappointed to learn that a certain favorite song of mine was not included on Hardcore UFO’s — I had in fact had that song in my head all day. I’m not sure why this one song would be on my mind; I guess there’s no reason to expect any one *particular* song to be on a greatest-hits compilation like Hardcore UFO’s. And yet, as I’ve typed these two paragraphs that song has been in my head AGAIN. Must be a coincidence.

Interestingly, the best-of is sequenced differently for different audiences; the box-set version is chronological, while the single-disc version sold to (presumably) less fanatical listeners jumps around for more variety. I’m skeptical about so much of the band’s later output that I suspect the non-chronological sequence will actually suit me better; if you got the box set but want to hear the non-fan track order, you can program it like this: 11 - 24 - 30 - 20 - 31 - 4 - 27 - 9 - 22 - 21 - 1 - 7 - 13 - 19 - 15 - 28 - 2 - 25 - 17 - 32 - 8 - 5 - 26 - 16 - 18 - 6 - 14 - 23 - 12 - 3 - 29 - 10.