First listen: At least it sounds more like Automatic For The People than like Reveal. It sounds like the few songs on AFTP that I never paid much ATTENTION to, but that’s okay. However, I’m writing this the morning after listening to the record and I remember nothing except that there were some faster songs in the middle. Or maybe not faster, but louder. My expectations for this album are so, SO low that it will be hard to disappoint me. I did predict in print that it would sound like “Bad Day” and it doesn’t– wishful thinking? Second listen: Okay, I think I see what happened. I heard the album was ‘angry’, then misinterpreted that. It does sound like Stipe is mad, but the band is deep into VH1 territory and the vocals don’t really stray. In an interview, Stipe talked about how everybody needs fluffy pop music, and (if I remember correctly) gave “Aftermath” as an example of how radio pop had influenced him. It’s my favorite song here, so far, but it’s not intense enough to be fluffy pop music. Taken individually, these songs’ middling tempos are each reasonable, unlike with some of the plodders on Reveal. But they still aren’t writing in a mode where that tempo feels *natural*, and so over the course of the whole album, it’s like, dude, wake me up when something happens. Next time I’m actually going to pay attention to the words. That may be what seals my opinion. Third listen: Tried to pay attention to the words and kept tuning out involuntarily. Sorry. I think this one needs more salt. It has the tone I’d been missing in recent REM, but that was enough to make me believe it could be good, not enough to make me like it.

Sometimes I have to hear something’s antecedents to stop being annoyed by it. I like Tori Amos, but I don’t like everything about her; some of her quirks, though, became more palatable to me once I heard Kate Bush. Her early records were SO obviously the context for some of Tori’s idiosyncracies that my opinion of both shifted once I made the connection. Context almost always dissipates annoyance.

So, I’ve never heard a Beach Boys record; this is my first, if it counts. And it’s wholly an exception to what I just wrote: its similarities to, say, the Elephant 6 style just bother me more. And that lolloping piano rhythm! It won’t stop!

I gather this recording is, to some extent, of recent vintage, but honestly, the most irritating aspects are things that sound familiar from the Beach Boys singles I’ve heard over the years. I feel grumpy.

I thought I had given Yes a try at some point– a favorite musician of mine, Scott Miller, stood up for them years ago, before trends in post-rock made it even slightly fashionable to talk about liking prog. My memory of trying Yes, though, is that I expected them to be kind of like this and was disappointed that they weren’t. Even though, clearly, they are!

So, okay, “Cans And Brahms” I can live without. There’s one other wholly-instro track (”Mood For A Day”) that I kept expecting not to like, as I have no special interest in monochrome acoustic-guitar noodling, but didn’t mind hearing. The rest is nice! I like the changes, and while some of the individual instruments are VERY cheesy, in combination the novelty totally outweighs the cheese. What lyrics I made out seemed inoffensively stupid (something about an eagle); my impression from hearing people talk is that, if anything, the other lyrics get less sensible while still throwing around new-age tropes, which works for me.

The glosses I saw on prog for years were, “Sure, if you want to hear an 11/8 guitar solo, a synthesized flute, and lyrics about Mars, you could listen to prog.” And the arid excess that implied– look, Ma, my music is hard to play and requires a lot of exegesis!– had little appeal to me, particularly with the 90s undergrounders who leaned in the direction of 8-minute songs and odd time signatures being so hard to take already.

But this is catchy and elaborate at the same time. It’s entirely possible I wouldn’t like more DIFFICULT prog. Who knows? As with Zappa, I miss vocals if they’re entirely gone but a long song with only little bits of singing at the beginning and end is fine; I actually like the tension that creates.

I’ll be thrilled if this leads to my enjoying all those Yes albums that are $2 online or $9 for the remastered version in the discount bin at the record store. I will be less thrilled if I find myself liking “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” at all; that would be the point where the joy of liking something unexpectedly shades into fear that I’ve just kind of lost my bearings.

I don’t get it. This has been drenched in hype from reasonable people, but the beats are thin and way too smoooooove for my liking; the MC doesn’t have a distinctive voice or anything to say (though, full disclosure, I didn’t exactly latch onto every lyric).

Rapper Phonte is in the same crew as 9th Wonder, the guy who got lavish praise for his reasonably competent production on Murs’s last album. I want to be generous and say that I must be missing out on something subtle, but this seems more like empty hype to me.

Sometimes there’s little to say, but I have a story.

Four years ago The Fan Modine released a vinyl 7″ that I played a few times on my radio show. At the time, to me, the idea of a Stephin Merritt imitator was strange and fascinating. It wasn’t my absolute favorite record that year, but it won a piece of my heart.

Now the idea of someone ripping off the Magnetic Fields is all too easy to conceive of, and anyway, The Fan Modine probably have some other influences that I’m just not sensitive to. It’s moments like this when I can understand how some fanatics structure their whole cosmologies around the idea that we live in a fallen world. Sometimes things seem lustrous and true, and then when the reality of them comes through later, you don’t exactly feel FOOLED… I mean, this song still has all the qualities I remember it having in 2000. It’s just deeply mundane to me now.

(The song is “Pageantry“, downloadable from the label. The rest of the album, which finally came out this summer, is varied and pleasant but never even as memorable as that.)

First of all, SAUL FUCKING WILLIAMS. I didn’t know this was coming out until Monday, and now I have it. That’s a treat.

Williams said in an interview that he was trying to write ’songs’ this time rather than setting poetry to music. In a few places this is blatantly not what happened, such as the album’s overture “Talk To Strangers”, a poem read calmly over iffy ambient music. The rest of the tracks are more clearly conceived of as songs, but not always structured that way, as Williams builds pressure over the course of the whole track instead of letting everything out in the chorus.

The standouts are next to each other in the middle of the record, and about as different as possible. “African Student Movement” calls back to the verbal style of Williams’ classic manifesto “Coded Language”, whose climax was (just) a list of names read with increasing urgency. Okay, list poems can be lazy. This one is not; the simplicity of the unexplained juxtapositions tie it together exactly as it needs, as do the slow dancehall beat and Williams’ murmured repetition of “tell me where my niggas at”. Right after it comes “Black Stacey”, songlike and autobiographical.

I keep expecting Williams to sound like he did on “Twice The First Time” (RealAudio link to, frustratingly, only the first half of the song). That isn’t where he’s headed; “Twice” talked about removing the urban element from hip-hop, and it did, but that isn’t Williams’s whole mission.

Like Tricky and Mos Def, Saul Williams sees the idea of rap-rock as something worth saving from the mob of goons that have it now. His idiosyncratic self-production makes a better case for it than Tricky’s, I think. (Haven’t heard any of Mos Def’s experiments in that vein, just read that he tried.) There’s power in that brutal guitar screech. Still, I prefer his even stranger effects, like the Radiohead woob-woob noise in “African Student Movement”.

Anyway, I like this record. Can’t tell yet how much.

If you want to hear the least typical track, Matthew Perpetua has blogged “Grippo” over at FluxBlog.

This is the most interesting bad album I have heard in a long time.

TV On The Radio have a lot of cachet right now, as they should; their EP (Young Liars) and album (Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes) are great and unusual. I hadn’t even heard of this full-length demo until they used a track from it for a b-side. Once I knew it existed, though, I consulted that great font of things which exist, the internet, and arranged to hear it.

These 18 songs are mostly terrible, but in a stunning variety of ways. The worst track proves to be ineluctably boring before the first minute has elapsed, which is too bad, since it’s 17 minutes long. There’s the a capella “Buffalo Girls”, which combines weak (and sleazy) lyrics, sped-up voices, and squeaky beatboxing. Everything sounds like it was recorded inside a medicine cabinet, which I sometimes like and in any case shouldn’t be held against the band, except that if your demo is fated to be this tinny, you might not want to include harmonica and whistling.

You also might want to edit out some of the wrong notes, but I can see how, three-quarters of the way through making this, getting high and leaving the mistakes in would have been a viable alternative.

After nearly an hour of increasing awe (on my part) at TV On The Radio’s former gleeful ineptitude, I heard a synthesized computer voice say, “I could not help but notice / All these robots fucking in the middle of the mini-mall” and I just kind of lost it. I can just barely, out of the corner of my eye, see how the same things that motivated two guys to make this demo tape would motivate them later to make dead-serious knife-edge atmospheric soul-vocaled semi-rock. I have no idea just how widely this tape was ever meant to be circulated. However, it is great. It’s not great music, and I don’t want to listen to it again, but it is great SOMETHING.

Oh! And I forgot the part where– actually, never mind.

I just noticed that I go up my house’s stairs in two (RIGHT left RIGHT left) but I go down in three (RIGHT left right LEFT right left). I wonder if it’s the same on staircases I’m not familiar with, or if it only happens when I’m confident enough to descend the stairs quickly.

This may be boring, but it’s the kind of boring I usually miss out on.

(Download “DUI” from Har Mar’s website.)

One of my favorite album covers is Craig David’s Born To Do It. It’s basically just David in headphones, with his eyes closed. With the title, though, it’s a double-entendre; he was hyped as a musical prodigy (he was 19, I think) and as a sex symbol. In the photo he’s concentrating on the music, but his face has just a hint of sensual rapture on it, and his absorption is complete: he could be thinking about sex as easily as snare drums in his oddly hermetic world.

The tropes of mastery for music composition and for sex are so wildly different that the tension is always there to be played with, at least if your audience thinks– or can be convinced– that being a studio whiz is cool. But Sean Tillman of Har Mar Superstar has never come anywhere near it before, despite being a songwriter who wants people to think he’s sexy.

His other two albums (the first one on Kill Rock Stars, the second on Warner Bros.– not a completely unprecedented sequence, but still a strange one) came off like a big joke, which is what I still assume they were: pudgy, balding, hairy little white guy plays radio-ready R&B with arrogant, shallow lyrics. Ha! I haven’t listened to them much, so they could be great, but I’ll stand by the perception that Tillman thought it was about as much of a joke at the time as his many critics did.

Now he seems like he’s really doing it. The lyrics are still goofy, and you never get the sense when he tells the imaginary crowd to shout “Har Mar is so sexy!” that he, Sean Tillman, will take the results as a personal compliment, but he’s at home enough to adorn the album with a flat, direct photo of himself leaning on a massive Rhodes keyboard, and to pick a title that’s either quietly confident or unspeakably lame. (See Craig David, above.)

To like the music you have to like electronic soul, but you also have to like indie-kid vocals, oddly-square guitar solos, and all sorts of other touches that we used to think were only cool if the music that went with them was somehow individualistic or primal. This isn’t, yet Tillman’s half-trained voice works just fine for me anyway. No, nobody would actually mistake this record for Justin Timberlake’s latest, but nobody mistook Jonathan Richman for Mick Jagger, either, and one does not look for aesthetic guidance to people who were disappointed about that.

Catchy, exuberant, consistently good, and only kind of dumb.

(Memo to Warner Brothers, though: Nobody will play your CD on the radio if it doesn’t have a goddamn track listing on the outside. Putting it on a sticker outside the shrinkwrap doesn’t count, because I, like many humans, throw away loose pieces of cellophane after unwrapping purchased items rather than using them to feather my nest or filing them alphabetically for future perusal.)

Not a Nelly fan, but I had to borrow and play them once, mostly to see if (not having read anything about the double-release except the titles) I could tell the difference between the two records.

And okay, I can. Sweat is the Jock Jams record, opening with one of those freaky songs that’s supposed to get people worked up at the club or the stadium but sounds frothingly more grandiose, as though its use at a coronation were the one concession made by court advisors who convinced Nelly to declare himself merely God’s chosen monarch, and not an actual god-king made flesh.

Suit is the R&B crossover album, which I enjoyed more except for the desperate need to skip ahead that I developed around the third verse of every song. Which is too bad, since it often took that long for me to realize how bizarre a given song was– like how “Pretty Toes” is indeed all about Nelly’s foot fetish, or how the familiar-sounding sample in “N Dey Say” is oh god not Luther Vandross or Lionel Richie or whatever I would have guessed at first, but rather… Spandau Ballet.