Sneakily has become one of my favorite records. The Blow’s album, The Concussive Caress, has any number of good points but somehow it always hung around longer than I was ready to entertain it at any given moment. This 17-minute, 7-song EP has insanely good pacing as well as good songs; it feels much bigger in scale than it is, but not any longer.

Some songs: “Knowing The Things That I Know”, “Hey Boy”.

Five years ago I thought that too few people understood Stephin Merritt’s maxim that “lack of warmth is not the result of too much technology, but too little”, and that no other music would ever make me feel the particular way New Order did. Now the latter is commonplace and the former is apparently obvious to many bands who sound nothing like the Magnetic Fields (like this one). And–

Oh my god, I try not to make this too much of a blog-type blog, if you know what I mean, but there is a huge gnawing emptiness inside me that is sapping my will to live, which fortunately can be remedied by eating the delicious food that this world has in abundance.

Which is kind of what The Blow are like. Desire in amber, its fulfillability a moot question even though it would be a lot of fun to satisfy it and kind of sad if you couldn’t. I didn’t plan that. I do actually need to eat lunch. Love, Aaron.

The Chills’ Submarine Bells, like Blue by Joni Mitchell, has created false memories for itself. In the movies, they have to hold you down and poke you with an eerie contraption to accomplish this; in real life, I just need some records.

When I think of Submarine Bells I imagine myself at 16 (when, in fact, I first heard it). In my mind’s eye I am listening to the record in my hometown and remembering myself walking around Cambridge, which I had never done yet. And I have a vivid memory of listening to it in a college computer lab that as far as I can remember had no way of playing music.

So memory lies. Big deal! It also seals things more tightly than you’d ever guess, as happened with one song the band played when I saw them in concert (accompanied by a girlfriend who was technically too young to be there; we had all kinds of flim-flam planned to get her into the show if need be but they carded me and not her, so no problem). It was called “Bad Dancer” and I could still sing the chorus three years later when Martin Phillipps released an awful demo of it. I played that demo once, no more, but the song was STILL familiar after five more years, when I took this EP out of its flimsy packaging and skeptically put it on.

Phillipps never writes songs like he expects them to be indelible; if anything, he’s given the impression over the years that he considers genius to be measured entirely by how many songs you claim to have written that nobody else has ever heard. My attachment to the Chills feels sentimental but the sentiment is never ordered right. This record, the first new Chills songs in eight years and the first good songs in 12, is cozy right away but not pandering; I think it could really grow on me. It provoked poignant memories of the days when I used to skulk around Boston, pulling my scarf tight around my neck to compensate for my coat’s flimsiness, a book of poetry tucked into my pocket that I couldn’t resist reading despite the rain, thinking of an old love who’d reappeared in my life, looking for quieter streets to walk down.

Except that those memories were memories of how I had just spent my afternoon.

(Download it from 12XU Records here.)

The best thing about apologiesaccepted.com (aside from a Swede using the interjection “aight”, which was pretty great) is that every time I see a pointer to it, I begin humming this wonderful cover of a Go-Betweens song. I had thought nothing could make it more affecting, but while looking around the net just now, I learned that the EP it was recorded for (Inland Empires) was dedicated to his sister, who had recently committed suicide with an overdose of heroin. The song was never as hopeful as its title looked– the lyric is “I don’t know how long / I can wait to see if my / Apology’s accepted”– but addressed to someone who can’t ever forgive him it’s cripplingly sad.

If you’re a Go-Betweens purist and not interested in personal drama, I’ll instead point out that lyrics which were a touch aloof when Grant McLennan wrote them (”I used to say dumb things” or “I said, that’s ridiculous / There’s only one thing that precious”) become emotional lodestones as sung by Phelps, who is not normally this self-possessed when heartbroken and so seems to be holding back out of something grimmer and deeper than habit.

David Brooks’ column in yesterday’s New York Times is about a Tom Wolfe novel in which, I gather, a young woman goes to college and encounters a college culture that Wolfe and Brooks disapprove of. To both writers, this demonstrates something about the moral laxity of modern society. Brooks is prepared to be very smug about this; not having read the book, I can’t say if Wolfe is the same. But here’s the column’s big finish, the three sentences before the last-paragraph wrap-up:

Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone. And they find themselves in a world of unprecedented ambiguity, where it’s not clear if you’re going out with the person you’re having sex with, where it’s not clear if anything can be said to be absolutely true.

Those last two clauses are the most godawful use of parallel construction as a rhetorical scam that I’ve ever seen. And Brooks means it!

(In the name of intellectual honesty, here is the link if you want to read it, but seriously, it’s not worth it. If you do, Grimmelmann makes a good point about the column’s authoritarian motives.)

Years ago, as I browsed some airplane publication intended for airplane people (”our small country is the perfect tax haven for your business” ads &c.) a company offered to make a font out of my very own handwriting for me. They wanted $150 in return, though, which seemed a bit familiar of them (considering that we had only just met). I was forced to decline the offer, both because I don’t have $150 to give to a page in a magazine and because I had already gotten something more valuable than a font out of it: the list of words you had to carefully write in your own handwriting for them to generate the font from. Here it is:

adjoint bowman cyclops doughbit egtype forgiven grocery hydrodyke ionize jewfishes kagvels lysozyme mojxe novque oxyfobe polygyne quote rybema skyque toyjoke unfaxed vogue waywhips xylosse yachtque zigzag

On second thought, maybe I just didn’t want to send my money to anyone trafficking in jewfishes and hydrodykes.

I didn’t realize at first that this album’s title is a reference to an absent song that would have fit right in: the Minutemen’s “Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Truth?” (Sue me, I never got into the Minutemen.) A few years ago I started naming mix CDs the same way– if the disc had a theme, I’d name it after a song that was relevant but which I’d decided to leave out. A mix CD isn’t an album, of course, even when the album consists entirely of covers, but I always like finding out when other people share the impulses behind my unexamined quirks.

If it helps convey the flavor of the record at all, here’s the “Circular Rationale Vortex” Drew Daniel presents in the liner notes:

Dissertation avoidance -> Suspended dialectics -> Aide-de-memoire -> Ruining sacred truths -> Would-be decadence -> Regressive fantasy -> Sweating to the oldies -> Reversing time -> Stopping time -> “The scum of history” -> Street credibility -> Cross marketing -> Distraction from political misery -> Escapist nostalgia -> Dissertation avoidance ->

One more thing: A web-search for “Jesus was a cocksucking Jew” (the opening line of Nervous Gender’s “Confession”) was not only useless for finding out more about the band (zero hits), it produced an assurance from Google that “we’re disturbed about these results as well”. I never knew directing people to information on homoerotic blasphemy was such a priority to Google; good for them, but it seems like they have a ways to go.

This may sound picky, but I hear a lot of people like Blackalicious enough to care, so bear with me.

First of all, it took me a whole month after hearing about this record before I wondered who “the Chief” was. Chief X-Cel from Blackalicious, duh. Okay.

That puts Ambush in competition not so much with Blackalicious or Latyrx (Lateef’s other gig) as with The Gift Of Gab’s solo album, this summer’s 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up. And any way you look at it, Gab gets worked. Maybe this is a better record just because Lateef is a more talented guy to collaborate with than the no-name producers Gift Of Gab enlisted, but I don’t think so. I’m not actually that into Lateef; he’s fine, but there’s no way he’s going to elevate an album in my esteem much. X-Cel is clearly carrying the weight here. If Gab had done as good a job on Rocketships as his partner does on Ambush, it would have partially redeemed the rotten production. Didn’t happen.

In some ways, Chief X-Cel’s production sounds better with a less distinctive rapper. That’s not to say Gift Of Gab needs his hand held; his guest appearance on a New Flesh single is the reason I started liking him, and his song (with Lateef!) on the Fela tribute that came out in 2002 was my favorite song of that year. And I still think Blackalicious are great, even if it now seems like when they’re together, Gab hogs the stage a little and X-Cel is too modest.

Probably no song from this record will ever become dear to me. I’ll just put it on for background as often as my self-image can handle the fact that I’m someone who puts on music for background.

Notes fragmentary because I’m lazy, not in imitation of the band.

- I always found it insanely cloying when authors writing blurbs for a colleague would say things like “one of our best”. Our? What’s with the tribalism in the absence of any definable other tribe? “Up with humankind! Go team!” Or, worse, did those authors have real factional rivalries they were alluding to? “Philip Roth is our best hope of defeating Saul Bellow.”

Well, call me Cloy Rogers, because while listening to this two-disc reissue of Pavement’s second album, I could not stop thinking “one of our best!” Pavement did this for us. But the question is, was it for us the way a gift is? Or does “for us” mean they did this so we didn’t have to?

And, obviously, who’s this “we”?

- Just like the first big Pavement reissue, this has an inexplicably pointless Peel Session. No idea why they were so dull when performing for the BBC.

- One rule of Pavement: you cannot tell on paper whether a song will be good or not. Take “Jam Kids”, during which Malkmus gives the impression that he thinks he’s leading Fairport Convention. Did you wince just now? Did you jut your lower lip out to indicate that it sounded like it could work? Doesn’t matter. I haven’t helped you guess whether you’d like it. (I did, as well as the Suicide-like “Haunt You Down” after it.)

- An almost Guided By Voices-level of unnecessary titling subtitling afflicts this release. Disc one, with the original album and released b-sides, is called “Back To The Gold Soundz (Phantom Power Parables)”, while disc two, unreleased demos and rehearsal tapes, is “After The Glow (Where Eagles Dare)”. Not to mention the subtitle the whole thing has tacked on, which I saw rendered on some big official site as “La’s Desert Origins”, re which: oops.

- “Hit The Plane Down”, the only song by Spiral Stairs on the album proper, makes me sad about what Spiral’s music sounds like now. Especially– man, the part at the end where they whoop “I’ve got two motives” makes me grin every time. Why the fuck did anyone make arguments against the legitimacy of low-fi recording? Sometimes noise sounds good.

- Impressive that this reissue quadruples the original album’s length, including some highly inessential stuff in the process, without feeling overdone. Yes, this is the sucker’s version of Crooked Rain, with maybe five songs out of 37 bonus tracks that are both good and not available elsewhere. (Disc two has many no-better-no-worse early takes of songs that showed up on the next album.) But it’s also the Library of Babel version, the Norton Anthology version, the thing that proves all the footnotes and false starts don’t detract at all from the original plus they’re there if you want them. And don’t you want them? The world’s a goddamn flea market and any time you start thinking it’s Sotheby’s instead, you could use some Pavement to set you straight. A little more won’t hurt. We are completists without shelf space. We are gluttons in tight sweaters. We like Pavement.

Download the full album for free here.

This album’s third track, “Let It All Burn”, absolutely KILLS. It sounds like The Postal Service remixing My Dad Is Dead, and if you don’t know My Dad Is Dead, I think MDID singer Mark Edwards is giving away most of his music for free too. (I was never the biggest fan, so I can’t tell you where to start, but go to mydadisdead.com.)

The title song is addressed to George Bush, as I think are some of the others. Fal’s indignation may sound wimpy, but for me it conjures up images of an action hero, sixty seconds before from the plot twist that will save his or her life, asking the supervillain a pointless question. “Why are you doing this?” The answer is never informative, but asking the question is a token of the hero’s goodness, showing the pilot-light of doubt that underlies the healthy variety of moral certainty. If you look for politics these songs are political, but Fal never sounds angry, just betrayed. He really believes George Bush could have done better, and that’s not a point in Bush’s favor– it’s the final strike against him.

Unless, as I said about American Music Club’s similar album, I’m allowing the charming obliqueness of the lyrics to make me overstate the amount that Jeff Fal agrees with me.

Sadly, I’ve recommended “Let It All Burn” to a lot of people already (along with “Flagwaving” and “Divider”, the best other songs) and as far as I know, nobody has found it nearly as compelling as I do. It could be the bedroom production or Jeff Fal’s voice, or just a matter of taste. I don’t begrudge people their opinions; I just, I suppose, cling to the illusion that much of the music I love would be widely listened to were the practical and financial barriers to finding and hearing it close to zero. Not so.

I learned the word ‘intestate’ (meaning ‘without a will’, as in “he died intestate, leaving his kids to fight over the money”) this summer, and ever since then, I have been UNABLE to see ‘interstate’ without briefly thinking it’s a typo for the much less common word.