Okay, so I’m making get-out-the-vote phone calls to voters in swing states. This one guy asks who I’m calling on behalf of. I tell him. “Badnarik? Is that what you said?” he asks. I say no, and repeat myself. “Badnarik is the Libertarian candidate, isn’t he?” the guy responds. I reply that he is, but that’s not who I’m volunteering for. “Oh, sure, Badnarik, I’ll support that. That’s fine. I’ll go with him, Badnarik.” Et cetera.

At the time I thought he was just hard of hearing and had developed the habit of being agreeable to political callers in the hope of faking his way through the conversation faster. After I’d had a moment to reflect, I wondered if instead this was some intentional pro-Badnarik tactic. I’m curious whether there’s a Libertarian blog somewhere that has convinced its readers the way to get visibility is to play dumb in political phone calls and then say “Badnarik” a lot. “Remember, you’re pretending to be an average voter. Act like you aren’t sure what his name is to throw off suspicion, but then say it over and over.”

At Burning Man this year, I kept hearing this semi-awful dance track based on a short male vocal loop: “I’ll beat that bitch with a hit / I’ll beat that bitch with a hit / I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat / I’ll beat that bitch with a hit”. It sounded familiar, but with two total seconds of lyrics and a strong beat, things sound familiar the first time you hear them.

I just now decided this Miss Kittin solo album deserved a second try, no matter how quickly I had rushed to forget it after I got it this March. And lo, there’s the song I heard at Burning Man, with a guest vocalist doing the loop. I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat I’ll beat…

The album version is almost tolerable due to Miss Kittin’s bizarre interjection one minute in: “Excuse me, would you mind to… pump?” (Music drops out for a second, then in come the synths, etc.) Stilted provocation is her stock in trade, and whatever, I don’t think this song will actually make anyone beat anyone else. Still, I just can’t let the song into my good graces, and with the rest of the album largely being Kittin putzing around with chill-out music, I guess this is, in fact, as inessential as I originally thought.

Asked if he was making any special preparations for election night, my officemate said, “Well, I figure I’ll buy one nice bottle of red wine… and one bottle of cheap vodka.”

The New Democrat Network has a great musical ad about George Bush here. Two non-political comments on it:

1. I can’t stop thinking of the Monty Python sketch about llamas toward the end of the ad, and I promise that I am well past the point in my life where everything reminds me of Monty Python in some way. I think it’s the juxtaposition of a cheery melody with “danger!” flashing on the screen. But it could also be…

2. The translation is terrible. I’m sick of seeing people content with painfully awkward English subtitles; it’s not always a big deal, but I find it depressingly reminiscent of the way that in movies, people from other countries just speak broken, accented English. Who decided that “sin tener que estudiar” should become “without the need for the books” instead of “without needing to study” or geez, I don’t know, anything else that a competent speaker of English would ever say? Fluid, cogent Spanish should be translated as fluent, cogent English. Unless I’m missing the point here, which perhaps, knowing little Spanish, I am.

I got Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe and found it an interesting foil to 90125: two different, and perpendicular, ways for a band with a complicated history to realize that no matter what it did, its time would end. I was ready to prefer ABWH; who cares if they were dinosaurs trying to relive past glories in 1989? It’s not as though now, in 2004, their 70s albums have suddenly become relevant again; it just turns out that I like them.

Didn’t happen, though; 90215 made me wince, but it also had flashes of greatness. ABWH just put me to sleep. Union, to my surprise, actually sounds like a reconciliation (even though, for the most part, some tracks are by one version of Yes and some are by the other). The key issues of the rapprochement seem to have been inoffensive ‘big’ production, and a timing sheet that looks marketable (14 songs, averaging 4.5 minutes; two subtitles, no roman numerals). But it’s less of an accomplishment for two nearly-separate bands to make a cohesive album together when mild dullness is the glue holding the album’s flow together. I could pull out two dozen 30-second snippets that would make this sound brilliant, but the actual record is no better structured than that batch of sound clips would be. Songs made up of four worthwhile sections, with distinctive and juicy quick-change transitions between them, never manage to build. Sounds which ought to be intrusive fail to correctly zot what preceded them out of existence. At the end of my first listen, I wanted to hear it again and yet I felt groggy and sore, like my mind had overslept.

I still haven’t heard ANY live Yes, so I don’t know if their concerts restored energy to stuff like this, or smoothed it out further.

“Miracle Of Life” may be the best song here. First time I’ve really felt the hippie/optimistic vibe, actually.

I’m a recent convert to Fafblog, a gently ludicrous political blog written by the modest Fafnir, the high-handed Medium Lobster and the brutal Giblets. It’s like a cross between Pogo and Get Your War On. Here’s Fafnir:

There are seventy thousand dead in Darfur an I’m watchin TV. “Mary Cheney gay,” says TV. ‘Gay Cheney gay. Gay gay gay gay gay gay gay. Tesesa Heinz. Gay lesbian gay.’ Which is a valid point. Mary Cheney IS gay which is pretty important when you stop thinkin about it.

Today’s entry took me a second reading before I got it. But here’s more Fafnir, from last month:

“A llama is neither a sign nor a portent!” says Giblets. “It signifies nothing but llama!”
“Then we are helpless before their power,” says me. “Their power to mean stuff.”
“There is nothing to do but wait an watch,” says Giblets.
“Watch television,” says me. “It is rich with knowledge an advertising.”
“Advertising is a sign AND a portent!” says Giblets.
“I’m gettin the pizza,” says me. “The bear can have mushrooms on its half.”

Bright Eyes are releasing two albums in January, one ‘conventional’ and one ‘modern’. After a few years away from press releases and other indie-industry innards, I’m once more surrounded by advance descriptions of albums that turn out, in retrospect, to have been total bullshit– like how REM’s new album was supposed to be “angry”, remember that?– and so it’s a relief that these two pre-album singles (one for each, natch) are in fact different from each other, and different in the advertised way. They could be garbage and I’d still be glad I could tell them apart.

If these EPs are any indication, then Digital Ash In A Digital Urn will be genuinely novel and totally half-assed. No way will you catch me criticizing Conor Oberst for going all Postal Service; it’s a good sound and it audibly has the potential to take his songwriting in directions it hasn’t gone. The three songs on Take It Easy just sound like Oberst realized his new bag of tricks meant he could get away with using his second-string material, and was about 60% right.

Lua features the Bright Eyes we already know right down to the increasingly baffling divide between well-arranged rockers and the suicidal teenage poetry coleslaw; the album (I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning) apparently has several guest spots by Emmylou Harris, but it’s not like this preview shows the band going full-blown Nashville. The title track is the only awful song and the only one that’s actually shared with the album, though, so who knows? I’m sure some people like those rubbed-raw songs Oberst does with just voice and guitar. If I liked them, I bet I would find that they were the most direct and succinct evocation of the desperation and paralysis that lies at the heart of every good Bright Eyes song. Buuuuuuut those songs suck, every one of them, and so I am disheartened that Oberst has recorded another one and plans to inflict it on us twice. The three full-band b-sides on Lua are much better.

So hell I’ll probably end up with both records. I just hope Conor knows that putting out a dual album like this in 2005 means you’re following the footsteps of Nelly, not of Bruce Springsteen.

Though I have followed through on my promise not to post every single time something I’ve written runs in Pitchfork, for the last few weeks I’ve gotten just over half of the cover stories (despite being much less than 50% of the news staff). So I just thought I would toot my own horn a tiny bit and mention that if you go over there now and click around, the ease of finding things by me will be higher than usual.

And if anyone wants to be my concert buddy, here’s what I’m probably going to in the next few weeks:

TONIGHT - Plan B For The Type A’s @ Middle East (featuring the sister of a close friend; all-girl punk, downloadable at www.planbforthetypeas.com)
11/4 - Futureheads @ TT’s
11/7 - American Music Club @ Middle East
11/12 - Arcade Fire @ TT’s *or* The Blow at an undisclosed location (ugh, tough choice; I like The Blow a little more, but I’m not as sure that they/she would be good live)
11/14 - Sufjan Stevens @ Middle East

My threshold for going out has risen substantially this year. These are all shows I expect to be very worthwhile.

I never could follow Matmos to the musical places they wanted to go; they seem too arid, too unmelodic, too artificial. (None of those three things is inherently a dealbreaker, but together they sum up my problem with Matmos.) Drew Daniel, half of Matmos, solved my middle problem with his first Soft Pink Truth album, but gripes #1 and 3 remained unfixed, which meant I never found myself wanting to listen to it much.

This album of covers removes some of the aridity too. I don’t know most of the original songs, but none of the tracks sound like only commentary; they sound like music. I have no idea what I’d think of Minor Threat’s “Out Of Step” were this the first I’d heard of it: Ian MacKaye’s “I don’t smoke / Don’t drink / Don’t fuck / At least I can fucking think” is now so iconic that hearing a technical, beepy cover of it, with none of the original’s punk rage, is like staring through layer after layer of stained glass with broken mirrors in between. You’re acutely aware of experiencing several things at once, and the mechanism by which they’re all superimposed is more or less obvious, but it’s exhausting and pointless to fix your attention too closely on any one aspect of what Daniel’s doing.

But it’s kind of fun if you let it pull you along for the ride. I’m assuming that even the most obscure songs covered here (Angry Samoans’ “Homosexual”, Teddy & The Frat Girls’ “I Owe It To The Girls” and “Kitchen” by L. Voag, formerly of the Homosexuals) were mutilated on Daniel’s laptop as if they had been treasured anthems from his youth (and maybe they were), because they all have that same dense, crystalline feeling. If it weren’t for the artificiality of the sounds that have been collected and pressed into service as Daniel’s building blocks, I would be recommending this unreservedly to anyone who I thought might listen

(which I admit is not all that many people)

but as it is… well, it’s good in small doses.

Here we are. “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” sounds very different having heard most of the Yes albums that came before it, sure. But it doesn’t sound thoroughly different; the bombastic guitar and ridiculous whooshing that always bothered me about it still bother me even though now I can understand what it is they’re overlaid upon.

The rest of the album has several more songs I would love to hear recorded by a classic Yes lineup, if they could be produced by someone who knows that his shoes are made of more than shoe polish. It’s possible with familiarity I’ll come to like them as they are, but let’s be clear: Yes was startlingly, wonderfully unfamiliar to me three weeks ago. The flaws in this album, on the other hand, are not unfamiliar; they’re what I grew up thinking all music sounded like to a greater or lesser degree. I’m not giving up yet, but expecting an extra helping of Trevor Rabin’s jackass guitar to win me over would require optimism of a particularly blinded sort.