The few songs they had on in Amoeba Records (”Mellow Yellow”, “Epistle To Dippy”, “There Is A Mountain”) and the entrancing, almost sordidly-childlike photos of Donovan on the covers of his 60s albums made me think the guy had more to him than his fluffy reputation suggested. I imagined a songwriter who’d unlocked weird parts of the id with psychedelic drugs and yet for whatever reason called every last part of it ‘beauty’, and moreover put it all into peaceful, subtly threatening songs.

Well, yeah, nice thought, but listening to this retrospective I guess I just made it up from whole cloth. “There Is A Mountain” still makes me feel like something is sneaking up on me, though.

The new Piebald (which I fell for medium-hard before it joined all my other discs in a U-Haul last month) came with buzz about how the band had finally grown up. How was I to know any differently? And yet this previous album sounds both smarter and harder than its successor to me.

“King Of The Road” has a great lyrical switchback where “Thought I saw you on the road last night / I need to get my eyes checked / Can’t believe I love something as yellow as you” sounds like a kiss-off when you think it’s a former lover, then affectionate when the identity of the song’s true subject — a car — dawns on you. And “The Monkey Versus The Robot” rocks a 7-beat measure like nobody since Blondie. Okay, better than Blondie.

Starting today, I’m a newswriter for Pitchfork Media (.com) with stories to appear probably every Wednesday and Friday. So I may be posting less.

They aren’t opinion pieces (though opinions sneak in) and the published versions won’t be 100% my wording, thus not a good substitute for reading my blog if you find yourself dependent on doing so. I’m not completely shutting down, though, either.

To mark the day, I just went down to the record store and did possibly the least hip thing I have done in years, which was to exchange an Au Pairs CD for a copy of Incesticide and a Stevie Nicks solo record. Yes, the Au Pairs rule, but do you know what does not rule? Reissuing your second album twice with two different covers so that I buy it twice because I think it’s also the first album. That does not rule one bit.

I fear that in some cultural arena this album is unremarkable and I just don’t know it. I fear this, because I’m on the verge of getting really excited about Alex MacManus and I would hate to make a fool of myself.

Thing 1: MacManus’s voice. He has a Plains twang, not a southern twang, and I don’t know how often you hear that in music. He also sounds inexhaustible, even while, in most songs, he’s weary or resigned. Hearing him sing is like looking at a Herriman cartoon with its vital, ragged lines… he pours as much of his power into each word as is possible given the massive constraint that he must be able to keep it up forever without fail.

Thing 2: The music. Except for occasional overuse of echo (or reverb? are those the same?) these songs drift calmly through a forest of stylistic quirks without getting stranded anywhere too long. Weird jug-band backing vocals pop up briefly, or maybe some ratty horns punctuate one song, and MacManus graciously remains unbeholden to any of them. I mean, this isn’t a mashup-style IDM train wreck or anything; the framework for the tinkering is the same elegiac/rueful alt-country as on the last Bruces album. MacManus just seems to have gotten his ideas about music from the kind of irritating person who insists genre boundaries literally don’t exist, and then saved us all by applying them to the genre he understands.

Okay, I guess there are only two things.

At first I thought it was funny that A-Set’s new record label misspelled their own URL on the package. But having heard the record, picking nits would be like correcting the spelling on an essay found in the gutter… if there’s nothing of note behind the surface flaws and, as it happens, nobody cares in the first place, why bother?

This has grown on me. KGW albums have done that before, but I always felt like I was pushing past the bad production or rotten singing. This time I think there are actually depths requiring closer attention. Not huge depths, but depths.

That said, I’ve been staring at the back cover and I’ve realized what bothered me about it: it shows Smith’s room with Squarepusher, Elvis Costello and Parliament posters ostentatiously visible. (Plus maybe others I didn’t recognize.) The last time Graham Smith bragged implicitly about his breadth of musical vision he was saying “bling-bling” a lot and then, you know what? he turned out to be a fine rapper in addition to his bedroom-indie-rock stuff. Whereas namedropping Squarepusher or George Clinton with regard to this album is no more than the same fatuous trendiness that got “world music” mentioned in half of Entertainment Weekly’s music interviews in the mid-90s. You can’t even call it dilettantism if there’s no visible dabbling in the music itself.

Carl Newman seems serious enough about his craft that I’m sure this differs somehow from what a new record by his band The New Pornographers would sound like. But except for his co-songwriters’ absence I don’t know and can’t guess. I’m listening a little differently, having learned in recent interviews that Newman writes lyrics for sound as much as sense (I rarely knew what he was getting at, but thought he was trying and failing at something) and that he carries a book of Foucault in some of his press photos (right, it’s just a press photo, but I would have expected a copy of Odessey & Oracle and that’s it).

Unlike the NPs’ albums, though, this has weak spots. I’d happily trade the three weakest songs off Slow Wonder for three songs by Pornographer “secret member” Dan Bejar.

A summary of the Fall’s entire career — maybe the only one in existence, certainly the only good one; two discs long, selling for cheap. I would recommend it to anyone who didn’t already know the Fall.

But here’s how it could have been better… (1) Either break out of chronological order or use fewer songs from the band’s weak early period. (For reasons of continuity, I guess, the initial tracks focus on songs that prefigure what would come later rather than hitting 1978 high points.) (2) Don’t focus so much on the singles from the 80s; some of them deserve to be there, but “There’s A Ghost In My House” is disposable in every way when compared to even, I don’t know, “The Steak Place”. (3) Crib more from earlier compilation A World Bewitched’s version of the Fall’s 90s wilderness-slog; it’s impressive that this retrospective dries out and historicizes so much of the band’s massive discography, but AWB made those 90s records actually seem *good* by bringing out their strangest aspects.

Phelps has been sui generis (and almost totally unknown, even in the indie world) for so long that I *think* my mild disappointment, upon first listening, comes only from his various influences, for once, standing out so much that they distracted me.

That’s not to say he’s become more derivative (or that he used to be original, which he wasn’t — only unique). It’s more that he’s finally reached the point of uniting the things he’s wandered through over the years: the distended, powerful grunge of his Silkworm years; the lapel-grabbing acoustic plaints of his early solo records (how I always imagine Low would sound were they able to lie down without turning around three times beforehand, musically speaking); and the bits of alt-country he picked up along the way. It’s a neat process and whether I end up liking this record or not it bodes well for the future. But I just sat there and noticed it happening the whole time I played Customs, except for the harrowing ending of “Shame”, which I won’t describe here.

Early copies come with an EP of two JRLP songs and three covers, including the Chills’ “Pink Frost” performed, for once, with emotional heft. (Other two: Joy Division and Townes Van Zandt. Or wait, was it Van Dyke Parks? Is that a totally stupid question? I don’t 100% know which is which.)

Beautiful, beautiful EP of ambient piano intermixed with ‘found’ conversational vocals in several languages. Each track has a different speaker (or pair of speakers) accompanied by Appelqvist’s piano and other instruments. In places the people being taped are obviously performing, as when two Swedish kids break into a song in English; the label’s website says the vocals are mostly people telling stories, but I sure wouldn’t know.

What you can pick up without knowing Swedish, Chinese or German is the rhythm of speech, and how delicately the music follows along behind the speakers. If you’ve ever paused for a moment in your life to feel like the scene in front of you “feels just like a movie”, and then reproached yourself for how backward that was, you need to hear this… I’m not sure I’ve run into any music that gave the structural considerations of soundtrack/ambient music (foreground/background stuff, the occasional use of voice — I don’t know, I don’t like this kind of thing much generally) emotional weight.