The memory that I had once liked a radio single by Kon Kan, divorced from any memory of what they sounded like, led me to put them on my shopping list sometime last year. In retrospect I can see why I didn’t buy it at 14 — the cover art is confusing, and as a newly-minted music geek in 1989 I preferred my synth-pop to have a pedigree. I sensed that my musical sympathies lay in something that had happened ten years earlier and produced dance-pop only as a side-effect.

I was missing out, though, and probably didn’t perceive at the time just how much the laconic vocals of “I Beg Your Pardon” suggested some affinity on Kon Kan’s part for the little artsy touches that make this record so endearing to me now.

Plus, what’s with the uncredited borrowing of the melody from Blondie’s “The Tide Is High”? Lynn Anderson, Led Zeppelin and Nancy Sinatra (the last two quoted in the same song) receive credit, but not Blondie? And, for the matter, not whoever wrote “Tequila”?

I picked up the previous Indigo Girls album (used) because of my long-standing suspicion — sometimes more like a fear — that things which I’ve not only disliked but hated in a particular way are unusually likely to become intriguing sometime later. And indeed, I liked some of it okay, particularly the first song, “Go”.

My intense discomfort with the Indigo Girls had come from the songs I heard on mixtapes for years: “Closer To Fine”, “Galileo”, “Love’s Recovery”… For a song about getting your own shit together, “Closer To Fine” always struck me as way overstuffed with contempt. A lot of it, maybe, is self-directed, aimed not so much at people who see the world differently from the narrator as at herself for formerly buying into a system that messed her up — but that’s if I try to be reasonable; the song’s never SOUNDED that way to me.

Uh, moving on.

The point is, over the years I’d heard many times about how both Indigo Girls write songs and how beautifully they complement each other, etc. Somehow it failed to cross my mind that I might like one songwriter better than the other, or indeed be able to tell them apart.

I realized this, instead, 30 seconds into the third song on _Become You_, when I noticed that my tooth-grinding frustration at “Deconstruction” (which seems to be using its title to mean “destruction” but is so lyrically vague that I’m couldn’t swear it’s aliterate) had vanished and I was enjoying myself. And so I finally looked to see who wrote what.

Turns out Amy Ray wrote all the songs I’d liked, and Emily Saliers wrote all the ones that grated on me. Simple as that. My past obliviousness bothers me.

If the rumors that most of this band used to be The Yummy Fur are true — and I keep seeing it mentioned on the web as though it’s much more substantial than a rumor, but sitting down to try and find actual names of people who’ve been in both bands was a failed endeavor for me — it would explain the second of three studio songs on this disc. Based on the other two, though, I wonder if Bid and Lester from The Monochrome Set are also hiding out as members of Franz Ferdinand, because that’s whose influence I hear.

I’m pleased for this kind of music to be the constant Next Big Thing in England right now, even if it’s essentially on the back of Interpol’s not-so-deserved success.

Three things:

1. Standard thug coldheartedness has basically undermined its function by becoming such a standard trope that it now reads as obliviousness more than callousness. Callousness (of some kinds) can still bring an air of swaggery dangerous cool, but like, when someone of (say) Nelly’s approximate emotional range says he doesn’t give a fuck about something, does he ever really sound like he’s even thought about it in the first place?

Rascal manages to actually sound mean sometimes, which I guess is in fact a little cool; the utterly dead-inside “oh well” he repeats in “I Luv U” when told he got a girl pregnant stands out as an example. But it’s hard to keep that up, and too often it sounds like he’s just repping the nihilism of showbiz-style insincerity.

2. If the beats are supposed to be low-fi but basically functional, then I have to call bullshit on some of the hype this album got when it came out in the UK. If the sound is intentionally fucked, though, then Rascal may be only a few knob-twists away from the sonic world of deliberate chain-yankers like Venetian Snares. Hard to tell which it is. Most of the sounds hit like they have no relation to one another; at times it felt like the kind of thing that results from listening to sparse beat-driven music in the living room while my roommate has pop radio on elsewhere.

3. Including an uncredited, unfunny quote from an Ice-T skit (not a sample — it’s clearly someone different performing the line) at the beginning of “Seems 2 Be” says to me that Rascal’s style may be stupid rather than clever. For now, though, Dizzee Rascal’s holding the mic. If his next record is *anything* other than more of the same, I’ll be eager to hear it.

I wish Jamie Stewart would get over his fucking issues already. On Xiu Xiu’s breathtaking first album — and I know that word’s a cliche, but I’m talking about something that leaves you breathless INSTEAD of making you want to cheer or dance or whatever; it just sort of stalls you out while you try to figure out what’s going on — it seemed like the issues and the music were one and the same. Anyone who could make music so precisely harrowing, the train of thought went, must know the emotional anatomy of a gut-punch inside and out.

Xiu Xiu’s follow-up made me wonder, though, if Stewart and his bandmates actually meant to toy with us, keeping listeners constantly balanced on a knife-edge by meting out bits of melody and noise in alternation. It shifted gears, instead, into the kind of harsh music that people make when they think just putting their pain up on display will make them good artists. Vocal lines fell apart in the silences between notes, arrangements shrank to as few instruments as possible, Stewart screamed all the time instead of only when the listener got complacent, etc.

Fabulous Muscles has some great songs that bring back the Xiu Xiu I liked, the one I thought had seriously unprecedented goals in mind. But then there’s That Song.

Like, the album isn’t even out yet, and already everyone knows the title song goes “cremate me after you come on my lips”. Stewart speaks this line not once, but several times, in case anyone missed it. I’m sick of trying to figure out whether Stewart is gay, or just sees homosexuality as such a perfect metaphor for degradation and weakness that he wants to revel in the appearance of it, but either way, this shit is getting creepy. Perhaps clarification lies in some of the many Xiu Xiu lyrics that I’ve admittedly never paid much attention to, but you know why I haven’t? Because the genius was in the music. I just don’t think any sequence of words Jamie Stewart can string together will have the same effect as the Harry Partch-Joy Division-? And The Mysterians dynamic he sometimes sings them over.

To put this in perspective, you’d have been spared this whole thing if I wasn’t philosophically opposed to using the “skip” button. Good record. Really.

First of all, I have a couple other albums which used the weak-ass “you get to name the tracks yourself!” gambit to avoid coming up with song titles, but I think putting a tiny pen in the spine of the case gets Murs back to the aesthetic high ground.

Murs is such a sharp observer of social behavior that even when he gets a ways into objectifying women on “I Hate Your Boyfriend” it’s hard for me not to think, “Well, if my girlfriend DID act like that in that situation, I’d be pretty mad”.

That goes double for the oral sex song, which is devoted almost entirely to the importance of women swallowing when they go down on Murs. Murs’s most important skill is the ability to stay on one topic for a whole song without belaboring it, his tight lyrical focus always playing off his casual flow.

Time to pull up llcrew.com and buy the whole catalog, I guess.

Back when this new Fall album was called Country On The Click, before Mark E. Smith decided to cancel its release and rework it, a few copies were leaked to the internet. They sounded okay, certainly better than the band’s disastrous last album Are You Are Missing Winner, but I could see why Smith wanted to revise the record.

Or so I thought! The released, retitled version sounds much like it did originally, except that the most interesting song has been converted to thunky crud and a few other songs have different arrangements. One’s even an improvement.

Of late Mark E. seems to have forgotten what he once knew, which is that his eccentricities may drive his music, they may even be the POINT of it, but they do not CONSTITUTE music. (Consider the boredom of unadulterated MES in “An Older Lover”, the one dull track to be found amid The Fall’s strongest years to date.) When coupled with a band who can’t really play, as he currently is, he needs his top material; lately none has been forthcoming.

Given this, I don’t know why I bought the band’s Christmas EP but I’m glad I did, as its two revisions of album tracks and two new songs feel eccentric in just the right way. The package claims that it’s a CD/DVD hybrid, of which I’ve seen no sign, and yet it’s a pleasure to be fractionally ripped-off by people who know what they’re doing, rather than by those same people in their role as post-punk cult heroes staggering into senescence.

So, seriously, skip the LP and pretend The Fall had a slow year.

Khaela Maricich clearly loves perversity and obscurity in the presentation of her music, as demonstrated by the fact that she was just as happy with this band name as with her next one, the mysterious (and easily misinterpreted) The Blow. She’s also not tremendously well-known. I thus didn’t imagine any particular connection between this album being out of print and its quality.

But in fact, it’s not charmingly dorky the way the previous Look For It In The Sky; It Will Always Be There was, and it doesn’t yet have the sonic variety or eerieness of The Blow’s records.

Two compilations of covers by Matinee artists, one a Smiths tribute, the other a collection of songs already released on Matinee played by bands who didn’t write them as a festschrift on the occasion of Matinee’s 50th release.

While Matinee 50 isn’t unpleasant to listen to (is indiepop ever?) most of it passes in a blur, punctuated only by my noticing that both Lucksmiths songs covered get butchered and that Pipas and The Windmills seem pretty good, the former having some drum-machine that makes them stand out sonically but also an ability to express shyness vocally without sounding noncommittal about being in the middle of a recording session.

The Smiths tribute (is the title a lyric I just don’t recognize?) comes out better. I never thought Morrissey emoted that convincingly but almost NONE of these vocalists even come close; many of them sound as though they were raised not knowing words for death or disappointment and believe themselves to be singing about laundry in a quaint near-English dialect. While I’m trying to be colorful here, I’m not kidding; I remain genuinely unconvinced that The Pines’ vocalist realized what “the bomb” was, based on her performance of “Ask”. But, BUT, it doesn’t matter, because the attraction of tribute albums lies largely in hearing people sing songs that way, as if humming to themselves or trying to remind someone else of how That One Song went. Indiepop’s already good at that kind of informality, too. Just two negative thoughts: One, the Lucksmiths’ idea for how to cover “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” could have been brilliant, but the female half of the duet pushes so hard it’s embarrassing to listen to in places. And two, Jessica Griffin of the Would-Be-Goods, with her halting phrasing and icy delivery, has begun to resemble some kind of indiepop William Shatner, which I doubt she meant to do.

Having heard and hated “Digging Your Scene” in middle school didn’t dissuade me from embracing it when I rediscovered it in 2001. But though I then picked up all the Blow Monkeys albums I found secondhand, including this singles compilation, it never entirely dawned on me that I really like this band. Until now.

I also, yesterday, read for the first time a characterization of “soul music” that I felt like I could really start to hang other concepts on, which is nice, as it’s strange to have persistent vaguenesses in your understanding of the world (as I had with “soul” and still have with several other genres that I’ve never gotten too far into). I suppose these two things could even be related.