Artistic syncretism counteracts the morbid effects of nostalgia. Sure, its everything-is-now dreamworld doesn’t really exist, but nor did the soothing/unchanging/irretrievable world nostalgia looks back at. Its pleasure is the promise that forgetting parts of the past and remembering others won’t hurt you — it’s not a symptom of denial or unfair ahistoricality, because anything sufficiently awesome can always come back.

So it’s a shame for one syncretist to resemble another, even if it seems ludicrous to let that affect my opinion about either one. Would I think this was a great record, rather than a good one, if it were less of a late stab at recreating Basement Jaxx’s Rooty? I can’t tell. Felix overrepeats his choruses, so I bet outside the dancefloor all of this will ultimately make me uneasy. And yet the guy knows what he’s doing.

I’ve now had conversations with several different people where I call something “emo” and they say “Oh, I don’t know what emo is,” with a very denotative tone. Like, not confused, not asking for information, just “I don’t have that information, Dave.”

This baffled me until I realized that when asked what emo is, even if I’m about to give a detailed answer, the first thing out of my mouth is “it’s hard to explain if you don’t already know”. Jazz famously has this kind of nebulousness in its mythos; with emo it’s not a self-aggrandizing group legend, I don’t think, just a weird detail.

And yet despite my friends collaborating to make me feel like I’m in the emo loop, the tag is more often my mental shorthand for why I *don’t* want to hear a band than why I do. Piebald, for example, never even registered on my radar, thanks largely, I guess, to observations about whose jackets their patches appeared on. If the only ones who like a local rock band are 17-year-olds, thanks, I can skip it.

Being wrong about that kind of thing is often thrilling; in this case, the record’s high points do make me want to go back and hear older Piebald, but it has filler which makes me wary. The genre touches which place it squarely into the emo realm strike me as neither good nor bad, though: the song titles (”Part Of Your Body Is Made Out Of Rock”, “Human Taste Test”), the mosh breaks (now so abstracted you couldn’t really mosh to them), the singer’s J. Church vocals. This ain’t the key to a kingdom of wonders I’ve been missing out on, and yet I’m glad to see that emo’s an on-ramp, not a dead end.

First thing: This band had already had their name for about two years on September 11th. They thought about changing it, then didn’t.

Second thing: Half the band, Dan Geller, used to run an indie label named Kindercore Records. Last year some kind of bizarre triangular power struggle between the label’s founders (Geller and friend Ryan Lewis), its manager, and its financiers ended with most of the label’s bands gone, the financiers assuming control and declaring that nothing unusual had happened, and the manager claiming to be homeless and destitute.

Third thing: The other half of the band, Amy Dykes, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s a few weeks ago as they prepared to release this album.

IATWTC make music totally unsuited to confronting any of this, as a result of which listening to them can be creepy. The world’s an unpredictably crappy place, and escapism qua escapism usually has a tone of desperation you can’t fully inoculate yourself against without toxic levels of irony. And yet the structure of pop culture is for everything to be a distraction from everything else — if a song reaches out to something outside itself, it has to be within the listener. If music doesn’t aim for the strange or tender parts of its audience’s innards those parts might as well not be there…

Taking it on its own terms, it’s a decent record. Amy has the post-Debbie Harry new-wave insouciance down and Geller’s slowly expanded the range of synth-pop bands he’s willing to steal from. By the end, though, I was thinking that I really prefer my meaninglessness a little more crafty.

Of the two Mclusky singles that came out last year I much preferred “Undress For Success”, which didn’t make it to this album. The one that did, “1956 And All That”, is indeed typical of the band’s current sound, but this album didn’t disappoint me as much as I feared…

There’s no room to relax here. Under close listening Mclusky seem to have wound their Fall-via-Jesus-Lizard thing even tighter, experimented healthily with changes in guitar sound, and called it a day. Good. But if the listener so much as exhales during a quiet moment, the record starts to feel impenetrably gnarled. Could be Albini’s fault, I guess, but he didn’t do this to Mclusky Do Dallas. None of these songs sounded steely and impassive when they were written, I’m pretty sure; how they got that way remains unclear.

I’m curious whether these will turn out to be great for mix CDs, or not quite suitable. Production questions aside, “Icarus Smicarus” cries out to be shared.

A track on Erlend Oye’s DJ Kicks mix tipped me off to the fact that Phoenix were French and possibly brilliant. Apparently a song on the Lost In Translation soundtrack did the same for many other people. But I haven’t seen that album in stores, and their major-label affiliation makes me oddly reluctant to mailorder it. (What good is the label oligarchy if it doesn’t deliver convenience? I don’t care how long it takes; I’m going to wait until I get the instant gratification of a retail purchase. Funny but not a joke.)

So Phoenix, for me, have the evanescence that nearly all bands did before the internet and before I had access to so many different record stores. That single I heard isn’t just a best-foot-forward thing; it IS the band.

I mean, when was the last time I entertained, even irrationally, the idea that I might never hear the song I had just heard again?

But now I have a second-hand copy of Phoenix’s Europe-only second album. The ProTools’ed guitar sound comes off as an imitation of Britney’s producer imitating Madonna’s producer, and it’s painfully clear that enjoying the French house/Stevie Wonder-isms of “If I Ever Feel Better” was not a sign that I could expect to like a song with nothing but that going for it.

Okay, disappointment, that’s another thing I remember from before the Internet.

They’re investigating at least five deaths of Iraqi prisoners in connection with abuse and torture.

When this scandal first broke, I heard that something like two dozen deaths were under investigation. Thought it was strange that didn’t get more press, but then, we didn’t have pictures. The article above says “twenty-seven of the abuse cases involve deaths; at least eight are believed to be homicides.” I’m not sure I understand what the other 19 cases are — certainly, people can die while in US custody without it being suspicious or blameworthy, but when an abuse case “involves” death, aren’t you talking about homicide? I’m also not sure what distinguishes the five cases given headline status from the other 22.

What we have, in at least one case, is not just murder but a cover-up: a prisoner was asphyxiated by an interrogator, and the surgeon’s report — “asphyxia due to smothering and chest compressions” — glossed only as “natural causes” by the Pentagon in their official statement. Though there’s no indication anybody on the inside was actually confused about what took place, I find it eerie that this means of killing someone was widely touted by the Lurid Violent Kids in my middle school (the ones who watched Faces Of Death and had ninja throwing stars) as ideal because of its untraceability. “Everyone will think you died of natural causes,” they said.

REM’s demos often have no vocals, making them almost useless to me. On the quarter of these which do, the interesting thing is how much Stipe’s vocals have the relaxed timbre of early REM. I wish he’d kept singing that way longer, though once Bill Berry left the band Stipe did kind of head back that way with horrible results.

Anyway, for such an accessible band REM are really very slippery. Hearing “Welcome To The Occupation” sound like a Fables Of The Reconstruction song made me realize how little I imagine them working like other bands whose creative processes I know about. I don’t have a conception of REM as radically different, just a gap where ordinarily I might envision a band changing gradually.

Five years? Man.

How this is NOT universally considered Bejar’s best work? He hasn’t moved so far from this album’s principles as to divide his listeners into multiple factions, and for melody and lyrics he’s never surpassed it. But it’s out of print or at least beneath the waves, and I rarely hear it mentioned.

I am a tastemaker and I kill things / I am NOT a tastemaker, and I kill things.

Oye gets a billing on about half of these songs, and his vocals appear unannounced on a few others, making it entirely Oye-y enough that the less distinguished other tracks, while mixed well, don’t all fit in. (Avenue D’s funky sex-patter novelty “2D2F”, on the other hand, is a perfect foil to Oye’s self-effacing image… bizarrely, though, I always think of the words to Wire’s morbid “The Other Window” when it comes on. Same rhythm, I guess.)

The beauty of Unrest was Oye’s vocal tone, always coming across as though singing along with a favorite song. It works almost as well when that’s the literal truth of the situation. But lately the best mix CDs — including this one — aspire to the condition of party, and how many times do you want to go to the same party? In rank collector terms one might have to think of it as a mega-single for the two new non-cover Oye songs to justify it, if one foolishly did not consider Oye’s experiments to lie in the realm of sublime pleasures not needing much justification.

How behind the times am I? I didn’t even know LCD Soundsystem had a female singer.

Musically Soulwax seem unexceptional — too easy to assume that they’re only good remixers and can’t “really” (ha ha) create anything de novo, but in any case, not remarkable. And yet here the music’s obviously just backdrop anyway… Whang’s vocals are expressive and unrestrained without being elaborate or showy, in every way the opposite of the Miss Kittin archetype this electro-synth-club revival grew up around.