Sneakily has become one of my favorite records. The Blow’s album, The Concussive Caress, has any number of good points but somehow it always hung around longer than I was ready to entertain it at any given moment. This 17-minute, 7-song EP has insanely good pacing as well as good songs; it feels much bigger in scale than it is, but not any longer.

Some songs: “Knowing The Things That I Know”, “Hey Boy”.

Five years ago I thought that too few people understood Stephin Merritt’s maxim that “lack of warmth is not the result of too much technology, but too little”, and that no other music would ever make me feel the particular way New Order did. Now the latter is commonplace and the former is apparently obvious to many bands who sound nothing like the Magnetic Fields (like this one). And–

Oh my god, I try not to make this too much of a blog-type blog, if you know what I mean, but there is a huge gnawing emptiness inside me that is sapping my will to live, which fortunately can be remedied by eating the delicious food that this world has in abundance.

Which is kind of what The Blow are like. Desire in amber, its fulfillability a moot question even though it would be a lot of fun to satisfy it and kind of sad if you couldn’t. I didn’t plan that. I do actually need to eat lunch. Love, Aaron.

The Chills’ Submarine Bells, like Blue by Joni Mitchell, has created false memories for itself. In the movies, they have to hold you down and poke you with an eerie contraption to accomplish this; in real life, I just need some records.

When I think of Submarine Bells I imagine myself at 16 (when, in fact, I first heard it). In my mind’s eye I am listening to the record in my hometown and remembering myself walking around Cambridge, which I had never done yet. And I have a vivid memory of listening to it in a college computer lab that as far as I can remember had no way of playing music.

So memory lies. Big deal! It also seals things more tightly than you’d ever guess, as happened with one song the band played when I saw them in concert (accompanied by a girlfriend who was technically too young to be there; we had all kinds of flim-flam planned to get her into the show if need be but they carded me and not her, so no problem). It was called “Bad Dancer” and I could still sing the chorus three years later when Martin Phillipps released an awful demo of it. I played that demo once, no more, but the song was STILL familiar after five more years, when I took this EP out of its flimsy packaging and skeptically put it on.

Phillipps never writes songs like he expects them to be indelible; if anything, he’s given the impression over the years that he considers genius to be measured entirely by how many songs you claim to have written that nobody else has ever heard. My attachment to the Chills feels sentimental but the sentiment is never ordered right. This record, the first new Chills songs in eight years and the first good songs in 12, is cozy right away but not pandering; I think it could really grow on me. It provoked poignant memories of the days when I used to skulk around Boston, pulling my scarf tight around my neck to compensate for my coat’s flimsiness, a book of poetry tucked into my pocket that I couldn’t resist reading despite the rain, thinking of an old love who’d reappeared in my life, looking for quieter streets to walk down.

Except that those memories were memories of how I had just spent my afternoon.

(Download it from 12XU Records here.)

The best thing about apologiesaccepted.com (aside from a Swede using the interjection “aight”, which was pretty great) is that every time I see a pointer to it, I begin humming this wonderful cover of a Go-Betweens song. I had thought nothing could make it more affecting, but while looking around the net just now, I learned that the EP it was recorded for (Inland Empires) was dedicated to his sister, who had recently committed suicide with an overdose of heroin. The song was never as hopeful as its title looked– the lyric is “I don’t know how long / I can wait to see if my / Apology’s accepted”– but addressed to someone who can’t ever forgive him it’s cripplingly sad.

If you’re a Go-Betweens purist and not interested in personal drama, I’ll instead point out that lyrics which were a touch aloof when Grant McLennan wrote them (”I used to say dumb things” or “I said, that’s ridiculous / There’s only one thing that precious”) become emotional lodestones as sung by Phelps, who is not normally this self-possessed when heartbroken and so seems to be holding back out of something grimmer and deeper than habit.

I didn’t realize at first that this album’s title is a reference to an absent song that would have fit right in: the Minutemen’s “Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Truth?” (Sue me, I never got into the Minutemen.) A few years ago I started naming mix CDs the same way– if the disc had a theme, I’d name it after a song that was relevant but which I’d decided to leave out. A mix CD isn’t an album, of course, even when the album consists entirely of covers, but I always like finding out when other people share the impulses behind my unexamined quirks.

If it helps convey the flavor of the record at all, here’s the “Circular Rationale Vortex” Drew Daniel presents in the liner notes:

Dissertation avoidance -> Suspended dialectics -> Aide-de-memoire -> Ruining sacred truths -> Would-be decadence -> Regressive fantasy -> Sweating to the oldies -> Reversing time -> Stopping time -> “The scum of history” -> Street credibility -> Cross marketing -> Distraction from political misery -> Escapist nostalgia -> Dissertation avoidance ->

One more thing: A web-search for “Jesus was a cocksucking Jew” (the opening line of Nervous Gender’s “Confession”) was not only useless for finding out more about the band (zero hits), it produced an assurance from Google that “we’re disturbed about these results as well”. I never knew directing people to information on homoerotic blasphemy was such a priority to Google; good for them, but it seems like they have a ways to go.

This may sound picky, but I hear a lot of people like Blackalicious enough to care, so bear with me.

First of all, it took me a whole month after hearing about this record before I wondered who “the Chief” was. Chief X-Cel from Blackalicious, duh. Okay.

That puts Ambush in competition not so much with Blackalicious or Latyrx (Lateef’s other gig) as with The Gift Of Gab’s solo album, this summer’s 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up. And any way you look at it, Gab gets worked. Maybe this is a better record just because Lateef is a more talented guy to collaborate with than the no-name producers Gift Of Gab enlisted, but I don’t think so. I’m not actually that into Lateef; he’s fine, but there’s no way he’s going to elevate an album in my esteem much. X-Cel is clearly carrying the weight here. If Gab had done as good a job on Rocketships as his partner does on Ambush, it would have partially redeemed the rotten production. Didn’t happen.

In some ways, Chief X-Cel’s production sounds better with a less distinctive rapper. That’s not to say Gift Of Gab needs his hand held; his guest appearance on a New Flesh single is the reason I started liking him, and his song (with Lateef!) on the Fela tribute that came out in 2002 was my favorite song of that year. And I still think Blackalicious are great, even if it now seems like when they’re together, Gab hogs the stage a little and X-Cel is too modest.

Probably no song from this record will ever become dear to me. I’ll just put it on for background as often as my self-image can handle the fact that I’m someone who puts on music for background.

Notes fragmentary because I’m lazy, not in imitation of the band.

- I always found it insanely cloying when authors writing blurbs for a colleague would say things like “one of our best”. Our? What’s with the tribalism in the absence of any definable other tribe? “Up with humankind! Go team!” Or, worse, did those authors have real factional rivalries they were alluding to? “Philip Roth is our best hope of defeating Saul Bellow.”

Well, call me Cloy Rogers, because while listening to this two-disc reissue of Pavement’s second album, I could not stop thinking “one of our best!” Pavement did this for us. But the question is, was it for us the way a gift is? Or does “for us” mean they did this so we didn’t have to?

And, obviously, who’s this “we”?

- Just like the first big Pavement reissue, this has an inexplicably pointless Peel Session. No idea why they were so dull when performing for the BBC.

- One rule of Pavement: you cannot tell on paper whether a song will be good or not. Take “Jam Kids”, during which Malkmus gives the impression that he thinks he’s leading Fairport Convention. Did you wince just now? Did you jut your lower lip out to indicate that it sounded like it could work? Doesn’t matter. I haven’t helped you guess whether you’d like it. (I did, as well as the Suicide-like “Haunt You Down” after it.)

- An almost Guided By Voices-level of unnecessary titling subtitling afflicts this release. Disc one, with the original album and released b-sides, is called “Back To The Gold Soundz (Phantom Power Parables)”, while disc two, unreleased demos and rehearsal tapes, is “After The Glow (Where Eagles Dare)”. Not to mention the subtitle the whole thing has tacked on, which I saw rendered on some big official site as “La’s Desert Origins”, re which: oops.

- “Hit The Plane Down”, the only song by Spiral Stairs on the album proper, makes me sad about what Spiral’s music sounds like now. Especially– man, the part at the end where they whoop “I’ve got two motives” makes me grin every time. Why the fuck did anyone make arguments against the legitimacy of low-fi recording? Sometimes noise sounds good.

- Impressive that this reissue quadruples the original album’s length, including some highly inessential stuff in the process, without feeling overdone. Yes, this is the sucker’s version of Crooked Rain, with maybe five songs out of 37 bonus tracks that are both good and not available elsewhere. (Disc two has many no-better-no-worse early takes of songs that showed up on the next album.) But it’s also the Library of Babel version, the Norton Anthology version, the thing that proves all the footnotes and false starts don’t detract at all from the original plus they’re there if you want them. And don’t you want them? The world’s a goddamn flea market and any time you start thinking it’s Sotheby’s instead, you could use some Pavement to set you straight. A little more won’t hurt. We are completists without shelf space. We are gluttons in tight sweaters. We like Pavement.

Download the full album for free here.

This album’s third track, “Let It All Burn”, absolutely KILLS. It sounds like The Postal Service remixing My Dad Is Dead, and if you don’t know My Dad Is Dead, I think MDID singer Mark Edwards is giving away most of his music for free too. (I was never the biggest fan, so I can’t tell you where to start, but go to mydadisdead.com.)

The title song is addressed to George Bush, as I think are some of the others. Fal’s indignation may sound wimpy, but for me it conjures up images of an action hero, sixty seconds before from the plot twist that will save his or her life, asking the supervillain a pointless question. “Why are you doing this?” The answer is never informative, but asking the question is a token of the hero’s goodness, showing the pilot-light of doubt that underlies the healthy variety of moral certainty. If you look for politics these songs are political, but Fal never sounds angry, just betrayed. He really believes George Bush could have done better, and that’s not a point in Bush’s favor– it’s the final strike against him.

Unless, as I said about American Music Club’s similar album, I’m allowing the charming obliqueness of the lyrics to make me overstate the amount that Jeff Fal agrees with me.

Sadly, I’ve recommended “Let It All Burn” to a lot of people already (along with “Flagwaving” and “Divider”, the best other songs) and as far as I know, nobody has found it nearly as compelling as I do. It could be the bedroom production or Jeff Fal’s voice, or just a matter of taste. I don’t begrudge people their opinions; I just, I suppose, cling to the illusion that much of the music I love would be widely listened to were the practical and financial barriers to finding and hearing it close to zero. Not so.

Forms an interesting comparison with her first album– which is sadder, the fact that the music industry manages to sell stuff that’s no good at all (like all of that first record save for “A Thousand Miles”), or that it sells stuff which is just barely good enough (like most of this record)?

The new single, “White Houses”, is less distinctive than “A Thousand Miles”, but that’s a small price to pay for being able to make it through the whole album twice without the skip button. There’s even a second song with “single” written all over it: “Private Radio”, featuring perhaps a little too much danceable pouting and a piano solo that saves the whole thing. Two more good songs after that.

I think I may just be impressed that she’s improved at all. I didn’t know pop stars were allowed to do that anymore.

Oh, and I lied about the skip button, but it only happened because I can’t stand U2 (whom she covers).

At Burning Man this year, I kept hearing this semi-awful dance track based on a short male vocal loop: “I’ll beat that bitch with a hit / I’ll beat that bitch with a hit / I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat / I’ll beat that bitch with a hit”. It sounded familiar, but with two total seconds of lyrics and a strong beat, things sound familiar the first time you hear them.

I just now decided this Miss Kittin solo album deserved a second try, no matter how quickly I had rushed to forget it after I got it this March. And lo, there’s the song I heard at Burning Man, with a guest vocalist doing the loop. I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat…

The album version is almost tolerable due to Miss Kittin’s bizarre interjection one minute in: “Excuse me, would you mind to… pump?” (Music drops out for a second, then in come the synths, etc.) Stilted provocation is her stock in trade, and whatever, I don’t think this song will actually make anyone beat anyone else. Still, I just can’t let the song into my good graces, and with the rest of the album largely being Kittin putzing around with chill-out music, I guess this is, in fact, as inessential as I originally thought.

I got Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe and found it an interesting foil to 90125: two different, and perpendicular, ways for a band with a complicated history to realize that no matter what it did, its time would end. I was ready to prefer ABWH; who cares if they were dinosaurs trying to relive past glories in 1989? It’s not as though now, in 2004, their 70s albums have suddenly become relevant again; it just turns out that I like them.

Didn’t happen, though; 90215 made me wince, but it also had flashes of greatness. ABWH just put me to sleep. Union, to my surprise, actually sounds like a reconciliation (even though, for the most part, some tracks are by one version of Yes and some are by the other). The key issues of the rapprochement seem to have been inoffensive ‘big’ production, and a timing sheet that looks marketable (14 songs, averaging 4.5 minutes; two subtitles, no roman numerals). But it’s less of an accomplishment for two nearly-separate bands to make a cohesive album together when mild dullness is the glue holding the album’s flow together. I could pull out two dozen 30-second snippets that would make this sound brilliant, but the actual record is no better structured than that batch of sound clips would be. Songs made up of four worthwhile sections, with distinctive and juicy quick-change transitions between them, never manage to build. Sounds which ought to be intrusive fail to correctly zot what preceded them out of existence. At the end of my first listen, I wanted to hear it again and yet I felt groggy and sore, like my mind had overslept.

I still haven’t heard ANY live Yes, so I don’t know if their concerts restored energy to stuff like this, or smoothed it out further.

“Miracle Of Life” may be the best song here. First time I’ve really felt the hippie/optimistic vibe, actually.