I recently complained in Pitchfork about lazy critics comparing bands to Sleater-Kinney for superficial reasons. What I avoided saying was how much I also disliked lazy bands pulling tics from Sleater-Kinney, for fear that I am, deep in my heart, one of those lazy critics.

The Quails break new ground only in technique, which would be more than enough if their generic touches (basically sorta you know kinda Kill Rock Stars late-90s stripped-down rock) were executed modestly. Instead, one of the two singers does That Voice all the time. The one that’s probably supposed to sound like Corin Tucker but instead sounds like the Wicked Witch.

I like Sleater-Kinney, though not as much as I used to, and I still feel that some evil, somewhere, is further vanquished every time someone comes up with a song title like “Your Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of A Fist”. I don’t know why this record makes me suspend my recent realization that, all other things being equal, I shouldn’t listen to music that annoys me.

Morrison was the first Vertigo writer I developed a serious personal attachment to, which also makes him the sole reason that my renewed teenage interest in comics survived the realization that I didn’t like The Sandman anymore. In the years since then, the flaws in his work have gradually trashed any loyalty I felt toward the guy, but I still usually like his stuff.

He scales his flights of fancy to the size of the story he’s writing brilliantly, which may be part of the reason I keep giving him second chances. The first few issues of The Filth gave the impression that he wanted to rewrite The Invisibles in 12 issues and had actually figured out which parts he needed to drop to make that work. The middle section of his time on X-Men, where he started introducing his own new characters, had perfect balance between establishing the new folks and keeping up with the core X-Men (whom some readers exclusively cared about). And Seaguy bristles with ideas that would fall apart if expanded beyond a three-issue miniseries but are genius within it.

Except Morrison can’t write endings. I’m not sure he ever could, and once he found what became his essential themes– systems of control, meta-universes, conspiracies– the temptation to end every story with a thin update of the old “it was all a dream!” copout became irresistible.

I have no idea how many times Morrison goes over his scripts, but regardless of what’s behind the curtain, his best ideas have a similar spark to good improv. And one of the rules in improvising which he’s sadly never twigged to is that you don’t say “no” to your own existing framework for a cheap laugh or a cheap freak-out. If you’ve set up that your mother is coming over for dinner, when the doorbell rings it could be your mother, or a policeman telling you something has happened to your mother, or an unexpected friend who has to be dealt with before your mother shows up, but it can’t be the Wolfman, who– oops!– you turn out to have sent email to instead of your mother because, you know, people make mistakes.

Fantastical frameworks make it easier to take bizarre left turns in a story without denying what’s gone before, and I don’t have a problem with that. It’s on the other end of the spectrum of self-unraveling blunders that Morrison gets into trouble: when one character is omnipotent and manipulating another character, plot is meaningless.

The first 90% of Seaguy is absolutely worth reading; Morrison’s usual inventiveness gives us the horrifying kids’ show Mickey Eye and a world left peaceful by the defeat (years earlier) of the malevolent Anti-Dad, but he breaks new ground with the painfully sincere Seaguy himself. Morrison has said that he wanted to vitiate the comics industry’s obsession with tough guys, but Seaguy is neither a wimp nor a self-aware pacifist. What he is is simultaneously treacly and calm, a 1950s Buddha pressed into service as a ruined hero. With only minor lapses (a stray reference to Alzheimer’s felt out of place) the dialogue does what it intends, giving every character a distinct sound without ever giving the impression that they understand each other. But geez, what a letdown at the end.

Another spot-the-influences band, but with different influences: Oingo Boingo (mostly in the vocals), Big Country, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and middle-years XTC. They don’t salvage the XTC nods quite as awesomely as The Killers handled their rendition of boring-era Psychedelic Furs but, just like the Killers, they have enough else going on.

Every time I hear one of these postpunk-revival bands it becomes clearer that it’s a trend which transcends any particular sound, and so harder to defend against charges of being “nostalgia”. But that’s okay: were we done with it the first time around?

Pop music lives to reuse its own past, and based on how the last ten years have gone, I think I’d rather see it do so openly than be forced into a corner by the cult of Perpetual Newness. These days, “new” too often means harder! faster! more! But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Franz Ferdinand, the Killers, Hot Hot Heat and Dogs Die In Hot Cars seem fundamentally unserious, unlike their idols. This wave of bands is the best of the 80s underground repeated as farce, and I’m glad it took long enough to happen that we can sit back and enjoy.

(These particular guys maaaay not have had a whole album in them yet… the amazing “Godhopping” can be streamed from the band’s Flash-ugly website, and along with “Pasttimes & Lifestyles” it makes a better case for the band than the album as a whole does.)

(Second postscript: I’m placing a pre-emptive curse on the head of the first music writer who I see referring to individual members of this band as “Dogs”.)

It’s unreleased Pastemob rarity time here — a review I wrote as an application to Pitchfork in January. They never ran it, and I forgot I hadn’t written about the record at all here until a few days ago.

Some musicians can embrace their flaws and have their fans follow suit. Robert Pollard, for example: his devotees (myself sometimes included in that category) don’t like all the records; nobody’s standards are that low, no matter how quickly they claim to have worn out the grooves on “Some Of The Magic Syrup Was Preserved”. Doesn’t matter, though, because the lack of restraint becomes part of the charm.

Mr. Lif, though, always appears to be on the other side of the line, one of those unlucky folks who has to overcome his flaws because they don’t get more endearing with time. He never strays from the dual topics of (1) his skill on the mic and (2) politics — which is admittedly twice as many subjects as a lot of perfectly good, relentlessly egocentric rappers cover — and despite being an unrepentant music geek himself, he hasn’t found a consistent music style that suits his raps. (Sampling lines from Gang Starr and BDP doesn’t count as a ’style’, though more on that later.)

Rarities collection _Sleepyheads_ goes chronologically from Lif’s very earliest days as an MC (the first cut, featuring some unmemorable battle rhymes, is dated 1995) to an outtake from 2002’s _Emergency Rations EP_, then tacks on two final early tracks. Those last two, a freestyle session from NYC radio and the formerly-cassette-only “Target: Gristle” show off the young Lif’s skills so much better than the stuff from back at the beginning of the disc that you have to assume Lif did it intentionally to prove a point.

What you get first out of watching a stop-motion Mr. Lif grow up over the course of 46 minutes is that he loves KRS-One; he quotes KRS multiple times, regrets the loss of the boom bap, and on “Farmhand” his everready DJ Fakts-One speeds up a sample from BDP’s “The Style You Haven’t Done Yet” to match the hilariously funky banjo loop anchoring the rest of the track. You also see him, gradually, figuring out the details of what’s become his personal mythology: when he battles other MCs it’s by devouring them or crippling them with disease, first with powers that he gets from the sun, and later in DEFENSE of the sun as “the god with the black locks” takes his place in the firmament to defend all that is good from humanity’s worst (i.e. corrupt politicians and wack MCs).

If it sometimes sounds like Lif needs to set down the Playstation, though, as a performer he never really seems to lose his perspective. Even the early single “Elektro”, riddled with semi-sequiturs and propped up by a lightweight creepshow beat, reaches a perfect peak at the end of every verse, when the hyperverbal Lif suddenly holds his breath for two beats and then utters the title like he was Big Daddy Kane asking for Rosebud.

The thing that sinks in on repeated listens is that, no matter who Mr. Lif wants to be (and, though I’m biased having never liked KRS-One much, I think Mr. Lif long ago overmatched his hero), his lyrics had already gotten rock-solid before he put out his first EP on Def Jux in 2000. From then on, his songs rise or fall on the production, and both _Sleepyheads_ standouts, “Farmhand” and the _Rations_ outtake “Day Of Power”, were produced by none other than Lif himself.

Lif’s own clear, peculiar beats give him a finish nobody else’s do; “Day Of Power” crackles with the same half-dancehall thrum that animated most of the brilliant _Rations_, and “Farmhand” — shit, it’s not just the banjo, or the fact that he makes KRS-One sound like Porky Pig. It’s that, like the liner says, it’s fun. The guy’s already living the b-boy dream of having his rhymes ring in thousands of ears; if only this compilation had more of the energy that he brings when he’s making the beats too.

Like a metal band singing songs in the voice of oppressive authority figures, Lif’s best expression of his political consciousness lies in him facetiously reenacting the abuses that he skewers governments for. Check out the goofy “Farmhand” once again: after taking out a kid who fronted on him and dropping him in the ER, Lif M.D. tells the orderlies to “Jack this nigga for his digestion / Plus his identity and thus his pension / Suggestion: make sure my name is never mentioned.” For any other MC it wouldn’t seem right for the funniest, and maybe the smoothest, lines in a vault-clearing disc like this one to come with an implied critique of unaccountable government, not to mention the utterly un-hype word “thus”. Lif’s his own man, though, and when he’s not trying to be someone else, his formula is a framework for godhood.

If that title/subtitle pairing is an intentional double-entendre, it’s genius… but this is, in fact, a demo, and the mp3s sound kind of fizzy. Absolutely Kosher are selling these four songs on a CD, and will release the full album just as soon as it actually exists. I am totally looking forward to it.

Though the band rocks, the music is sometimes spacious and rarely quite ‘rock’, which may be how they ended up with AbKo (generally a haven for music made by people who’ve wandered all the way out to the trash fence but come to the conclusion that you can be experimental and still go verse/chorus/verse: call it post-post-rock if you like hyphens). But the vocals are unmanneredly calm; I’m drawing a blank on antecedents unless you count the guy from The Ocean Blue, and he only sounded that way because someone told him British people were mellow.

In fact, the whole demo defies categorization without being that strange. Every stylistic clue that I think might make it all click turns out to be a red herring, starting with the motto “DISCO IS THE NEW DISCO” on the band’s downloads page. I can see how lovers of disco might end up making this music, particularly with disco’s recent rehabilitation and the attendant absorption of other 00s sounds into its shadow. Yet the songs are so far from disco that the slogan is solely a gesture.

If you’re in a hurry, download “Not Not Nervous” and “Pardon My French” first.

[ Editor's note: The band were formerly called Grumble Grumble, but changed their name after a band called Grimble Grumble threatened to sue. The name and URL in the header have been changed to reflect that. JJRJ 9/27/04 ]

If anyone can tell me how these files came to be on my hard drive, I’d be curious to know. It looks like I downloaded them on August 6th, if that helps. I seriously have no idea; I had to do a websearch just to find out where I got them.

Us wordy music fans strained helplessly for about a year to come up with a defense of electroclash which didn’t boil down to tantalizing idiocies like “sometimes worthlessness is valuable” or, more directly, “if it didn’t suck so much, it wouldn’t be so great!” Then time ran out and the music, by and large, no longer deserved a defense.

(I don’t mean that it became unfashionable– just that the good stuff suddenly dried up.)

Finding a decent electroclash song now has the benefit of surprise just like it did a few years ago when we were on the other side of the hill. Heloise has it down, with enough tricks (especially on “Odyle”) that hearing this isn’t purely a mini-nostalgia trip… but I feel curiously uncompelled to ignore the badness of the lyrics. The era’s still gone.

On the ooooooooother hand, there’s something beautiful about music celebrating venality being given away for free. That might outweigh the lyrics.

Freewheel Records (.com) is giving away many of their records, maybe all of them, as mp3s.

The NBT’s debut is one of those great lost albums from the mid-90s’ indie bloom. It is not remotely perfect, but it sounds like little else in its sphere– certainly not Pavement, who any band with an audibly conversational male singer got compared to at the time. I wish I could put my finger on what’s so brilliant about the horn player, but I think it has a little to do with the living-room production: the trumpet is so casually miked that it sounds like something really cool is happening, but next door.

Unfortunately, they do prove themselves slackers in the end; the two best songs are “Concrete” and “The I Suck”, which happen to also be two of the three songs the band had recorded sluggish versions of years earlier for a 7″ single. Making a habit of second drafts might have saved them from the particular circle of limbo that awaits bands who score their widest national distribution with a completely forgettable record (1997’s Ennui Go; yes, they called it that).

A friend pointed me to the lyrics of this song. Plenty of great pop songs have lyrics that look dumb on paper, so I won’t hold the general mawkishness against it without hearing it first (and I won’t be going out of my way to hear it). But I’m fascinated by the sudden left turn from bland inspirational lyrics to, as far as I can tell, unintentional outright blasphemy.

Or is my ignorance of contemporary Christian thought showing?

This year’s Indestructible Object EP showed TMBG trying to change their sound somehow. With about 20 years practice maintaining a coherent style despite the constant appropriation of, like, everyone else’s shit, that could have been hard, but here’s the thing: in all that time, they’ve consistently laid each song out pretty clearly for the listener. The vocals have almost always been clear, the weird instruments kept out of each other’s way. This makes some people find them “too obvious”, while some of their ickier fans mistake clarity for simplicity and write eye-stabbing moronic exegeses for TMBG websites.

This EP, however, is the first time I’ve listened to a TMBG record and really not known what to make of it. It’s over-the-top in places, and I initially thought they were covering for a lack of material. Not so. This sounds more like a batch of demos that were herded through the finishing process differently (as did Indestructible Object — I mean, nobody’s going to be confused about what band this is underneath it all).

I’m all for that, though the price is outrageous for a 10-minute CDR with minimal packaging. Cheaper, and maybe more in keeping the with the band’s intentions, if you just pay TMBG to download official mp3s.

Douglas Wolk has been posting mp3s to his blog every day or two — all out-of-print singles from the past 20 years of underground music, and all by permission of the artists involved. At first it leaned toward the noisy and spacy (maybe those bands just answered their email faster) but the past few weeks’ worth, still available on the front page, brought back my memories of being a 90s indiepopster while reintroducing me to two songwriters I’d heard but never before, you know, liked. (Those are Honeybunch and Andrew Beaujon — both mp3s recommended.)

It all feels very unassimilated; these songs don’t really match the caricatures of indiepop which its critics pushed at the time, nor the positive caricatures popular now in the age of Belle & Sebastian.

I’ve listened to that Andrew Beaujon song twice more while writing this and it’s amazing how the guitar soloing is both wimpy and huge.