A few years ago I started telling people that My Bloody Valentine and their ilk were a much bigger influence on post-rock (and its then-meager offshoot, indie-electronica) than anyone realized. Nobody cared. Then Pitchfork named Loveless their #1 album of the 90s, and Morr Music found an entire disc’s worth of people to cover freakin’ Slowdive songs and I was like, damn it, I was right all along.

Having not been a shoegazer myself, I will refrain from passing judgment on the majority of these tracks. Mike Dykehouse wears his melting-candy influences on his sleeve (Lush/MBV/etc.) and makes no effort to transcend them, but his past incarnation as an even less inventive IDM artist gave him a few interesting sounds to play with. I can’t tell if it’s good.

But the big song, “Chain Smoking”, fascinates me. It’s that particular mix of good and awful which subverts how I usually listen to music — the same blend that so many radio hits have. The awkward lyrics give way to one smooth (if bland) line in the chorus; the chords resolve right on time. It’s supposed to be funny, but not as funny as it is: the “frown”/”upside-down” rhyme that comes right off the bat is a fuckup, but it’s not the kind of banality I usually associate with weak Jim Reid imitations. (Doesn’t sound funny? Okay, trust me.) I even think the under-catchiness of the chorus makes it better.

The betrayal and irritation that I often feel when listening to this kind of mutt-pop stems from whether I think the creator is pretending to be something they aren’t (irritating!), or something that doesn’t even exist. Ultimately, the Dykehouse of “Chain Smoking” is the latter, which makes the song disposable but great: we’re fooled into thinking that Billy Corgan (”1979″ only), the guys from Jesus & Mary Chain and Kevin Shields (in his role as music supervisor for Lost In Translation) could all be rolled up in the same lonely (and dumb) teenager, but only because so many real humans embrace all those things at the record store. The synthesis is only conceivable as pop music, which also makes it okay for it to only WORK as pop music.

You can’t say Denver Dalley (or his label?) doesn’t know good from bad. There are only two memorable songs; one (”Hours Felt Like Days”) is reprised from the Statistics EP, and the other (”Reminisce”) is free for download from Jade Tree’s site. (Here.)

On Pitchfork I said that Statistics sounded kind of like a bunch of Saddle Creek bands (many of whose members have collaborated with Dalley) and kind of like some decade-old shoegazing material. After hearing “Reminisce” again I think in reality he may just want to be the Foo Fighters.

I bet if I got a cappellas and compared Gab’s vocals on this thing to his vocals with Blackalicious, they’d be about the same. But it’s like an optical illusion… with the crappy production, Gab no longer appears to be made out of concentric circles.

Some tracks actually sound screwed up; there are digital chirps which resemble the effect I got on mis-burned CDs back when I first got a burner. I’ve been assuming these beats were just made on a laptop and never listened to very closely, but maybe my headphones are busted.

I don’t hear all that much chart hip-hop these days, so there’s no way to be sure that what I think of as “weird” is even slightly unusual.

Kanye West’s distinctive production quirk — sped-up samples, especially from what sound like soul numbers — doesn’t get any less weird on repetition of these particular songs. Maybe if everyone’s doing it this sounds unmarked to its primary audience. But I doubt it. Kanye also likes to sing and in places brings in kids to back him up. The magic’s in how he keeps all this from being sugary, I guess.

The other thing I found weird, which I fear might not be at all, is his massive hostility toward education. I’d heard the background: West dropped out of college after a year to follow his dream in the music world. Since it worked out, he’s not long on patience for people who told him it was a bad idea at the time. Okay. Fine. Okay.

But what comes out on The College Dropout is just CRAZY… through the mouths of skit characters, West reveals that he thinks “learning” and “being smart” are pure fictions constructed by academics to justify their existence, and to trick people out of pursuing important goals like making money. You won’t hear hip-hop called “science” or “knowledge” on this record. It’s work. The world contains a lot more legitimate beefs against the educational system than would fit on a single hour-long album (even with scary motormouth Twista on one track) but none of them make an appearance. This isn’t about contrasting street smarts with book smarts; knowing things makes you a herb. Period.

The doubly weird thing, then, is how down-to-earth West can get about all that money that real men spend their time earning. He’s got mixed feelings on greed and glamour; off the top of my head, the only *use* for money I remember him approving of is leaving it to your kids so they don’t have to be drug dealers.

P.S. Take out one song, and all the skits, and I like this a bunch.

I heard a song on the radio (not to keep you in suspense, it was the title track from this record) and over the course of a few minutes went from being irritated — in addition to not liking nu-metal, I had thought that the local alternative station made a big deal about a year ago over how they were renouncing their recent shouty-man style and restoring the format they had had until about 1999 — to being fascinated. The vocals use metal tropes that I guess are not too unusual (dimestore opera swooping, overwrought but raw rather than technically confident) except that in place of the usual Cookie Monster voice, they use Kermit. And it turns out Kermit has somewhat more stylistic range.

I don’t think I could listen to this twice, but I do really like the guy’s voice. And the bombast feels oddly detached from the lyrics: I do not feel exhorted to take the horse flying over a great bay any more seriously than I would have otherwise; I feel exhorted to take Serj Tankian’s feelings about the horse seriously, which is fine with me. If he can get me to listen to an entire metal album even once, he’s entitled to a fair hearing for his beliefs on horses and, uh, prisons and things.

Sprawling. Arty. Sonically inventive but based around “songs”. I should love this –

Eleanor Friedberger’s vocals are perpetually thin; her accent and intonation sound hokey to me, but are in the end so undistinctive that they’re probably just how she sings rather than pretense, which makes me feel bad for not liking them but doesn’t make me like them. And the lyrics… skimming the (huge) lyric sheet, I’m intrigued. When listening, though, the only lines I catch are faux-blues gooferisms and the occasional jarring reference to Dairy Queen.

This record manifestly requires several listens to appreciate. But the scent of bungled ambition puts me off sometimes, and I’ve largely broken the habit of listening to records only because I think I ought to. I sure will be damn impressed by this if I ever turn out to like it much at all, though.

In which most of the bad things anyone’s said about Dilated Peoples come true (rigid flow, weak beats) and the results are stolid and mediocre, but not humiliating. Hearing Evidence land the occasional good rhyme is like effortlessly catching a stray disc as you walk past some kids playing frisbee — it feels good, like all the little things in life have the potential to work out, but imagine sitting around and waiting for that.

In a recent trip to SFMOMA, I spent some time in the reading room. One of the books there was a giant Taschen volume on women in contemporary art. Almost every page I flipped to had work that was both new and interesting to me.

One artist that struck me was Ana Mendieta. Her bio commented that the morbidness in her work eerily prefigured her early death, caused by a fall from a tall building in New York. The book gave no other details.

But this rang a bell with me. In high school I was a devotee of Scientific American math columnist Martin Gardner, whose books I still think would make a fantastic supplemental course in math for kids who find that just accelerating the standard school curriculum isn’t repaying the mathematical impulse they feel.

Anyway, in his later years, Gardner digressed more. A column of his led me to the OuLiPo, for which I feel a substantial debt. At another point, he spent *two* months of his column tearing into minimalist sculpture, particularly the work of Carl Andre. (Google image search.) Andre, I recalled, had been accused of pushing a girlfriend out of a window to her death. I didn’t remember Gardner saying anything about the girlfriend in question being not only an artist, but a serious artist with an aesthetic totally different from Andre’s.

But it turns out, of course, that she’s the one. I find it creepy that Gardner didn’t mention Mendieta’s accomplishments (or have I just forgotten?) and the Taschen book alluded to her death being violent but glossed it in as un-violent a way as possible, even though it seems to have been either suicide or murder. (Andre was found innocent of it in court; he said she had committed suicide. This seems to rule out it being an accident.) I can understand not wanting to be sensationalist, but I find euphemism and cover-up a lot more lurid than just stating the (admittedly unpleasant and enigmatic) facts of a case like this.

It’s free stuff week here, isn’t it?

Mountain Goats fans aren’t the fistfighting type, but when John Darnielle went from recording on a boombox mic to putting his shit together in a studio, a sadly predictable dynamic appeared: some people didn’t like the new sound, some did; new fans; accusations of either disloyalty or elitism directed at disillusioned old fans.

I wish I were a good enough critic to verbalize why the new Mountain Goats albums haven’t rocked me. I am, however, a good enough listener to be sure they don’t. On the other hand, this Peel Session (four new songs, multiple instruments but not a string quartet or anything) renews my interest in the Mountain Goats about as much as one short recording can. I never thought Darnielle’s shift to bigger arrangements was a sell-out, or a marker of artistic decline. I just didn’t like most of the results I was hearing before.

Perhaps the reason I’m so excited about the current post-punk-revival is that the sounds being revived didn’t originally flare up and burn out fad-style; there was a whole decade of this stuff, in one form or another. Revivals, of course, are often shallow than the thing they measure themselves against, but in this case there’s plenty of room to expand into. I can’t just say this Futureheads record sounds like XTC, Wire and Gang Of Four; I have to specify that it has XTC’s stutter, Wire’s sideways fury and — well, now I can’t remember what reminded me of the GoF. Maybe the bass.

On first listen, I got that all these borrowings had been infused with an appeallingly original melodic sense. On second listen, though, I think the primary modification the band has made to their roots is of the harder-faster-more variety. XTC’s Andy Partridge was “eccentric” or “quirky”; when imitating him, F-heads singer Barry Hyde is more often driven or twitchy. Definite danger of this becoming my favorite new band.

Turns out it was produced by the Gang Of Four’s guitarist, Andy Gill. Ha! I’m awarding myself a little gold star for that.