I usually write about things I understand or think I have some insight into. However, I’ve been learning to cook, so for a while I will also be posting about things I barely comprehend. Please be gentle.

1 pound steelhead trout fillets
1 medium shallot
15 grape tomatoes
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
salt
pepper
dill

I diced the shallot as finely as I could with my finite patience and sauteed it. Unable to saute it evenly, most of the shallot was looking kind of burnt by the time the rest of it looked brown; still, it smelled cooked, not burnt, so I set it aside.

I coated the fish with leftover shallot oil, adding a little more olive oil underneath so it wouldn’t stick to the baking sheet, sprinkled it with dill, and baked it for 15 minutes at 510 degrees.

While it baked, I chopped up the tomatoes, mushed them up a little, and added vinegar, salt and pepper. Less vinegar would have been okay. The oil around the fish began smoking partway through, which hasn’t happened before when cooking fish this way– maybe it had to do with the oil already having been cooked once? The fish wasn’t burning, though, so I let it stay. As usual, it seemed to need another minute or two after the timer went off before the fish was totally done.

The dill and trout didn’t go very well together; I’m not sure which of the two I would rather change next time. The tomatoes and shallots were sprinkled very sparingly over the fish and even so the flavors were almost too strong. I liked it, though. A thicker piece of fish might have avoided the requirement of carefully portioning out the toppings in each bite to avoid being overwhelmed.

Considering that it was more improvised than anything else I’ve ever cooked, I’m pretty happy. I think next time I’ll try it with salmon, less time in the pan for shallots, less vinegar and no dill.

Were I asked, I would have to say that I’m pretty white. My family is from eastern Europe on both sides, and I’ve never lived in any parts of the country where being Jewish is an impediment to whiteness. I grew up in Wisconsin, in an area that– well, it was Wisconsin. I listened to rap for a few months in high school because it was foreign and shocking, then stopped for about ten years, like many other white kids of my generation. And even now that I do listen to hip-hop, I live in Boston, where hip-hop audiences are sometimes even more overwhelmingly white than rock audiences. Plus, I began all this with “were I asked…” as though, what, I don’t have a racial identity until someone brings it up? More prime whiteness!

But none of this allowed me to get more than ten seconds into Nina Gordon’s excruciating Confused White Person rendition of “Straight Outta Compton” without a wave of horror washing over me. Nina used to be in Veruca Salt, which means she had a hand in one of the most underrated albums of the 90s, VS’s glossy sophomore Eight Arms To Hold You. (I have a soft spot for Eight Arms because supposedly one of its songs was going to be titled “With Game Theory” after a band beloved to both Nina Gordon and myself; when someone told her no one would get it, she changed the name to “With David Bowie” because while she wasn’t a big Bowie fan, she’d first heard Bowie’s older records at the urging of Game Theory’s singer, Scott Miller, so it all worked out. I have no idea whether this is true, though Gordon did sing backup on a Scott Miller album a year before Eight Arms came out.) Her recent lunge toward supermarket-aisle soft pop made me sad, but I had never thought she was a hack, until now.

“Straight Outta Compton” isn’t an easy song for a singer with a guitar to cover in the first place; gangsta rap’s origin was not a real melodic time for hip-hop, and the need to make up a tune means that from the beginning, Gordon hobbles herself with a weak melody built around folk cliches. But that’s not really the problem. She doesn’t have the emotional range to make the song sound mournful; there’s obviously a strong element of intentional travesty in the whole thing, fine, but the joke in wrenching a well-known song out of its original genre and changing the tone depends on how convincing you can make the new tone. Anyway, that’s not really the problem either.

The problem is that, in her desire to whimsically translate the song from one culture to another– for instance, the mp3 tag on the song says “Straight Out Of Compton”, which I guess is sort of cute– she pronounces the first word of “Niggaz With Attitude” so that it’s more “correct”. It’s too dumb to be offended by. But it really is mind-blowingly dumb.

I swear I’m not otherwise in a foul mood. This really is the worst thing I’ve heard so far in 2005.

Other people beat me to this point, but: Roots Manuva’s last album came out in 2001, when American hip-hoppers and critics didn’t care about British MCs, and American indie kids had just barely started to notice hip-hop. (No fronting implied; I include myself in the latter group.) Now, thanks to Dizzee Rascal, everybody over here that Rodney Smith might hope to reach with this record at least knows UK hip-hop exists.

Not that they sound the same. Roots Manuva writes with a heavy dose of world-weariness, but never jadedness, especially not Dizzee’s distinctly teenage jadedness. He has drifted toward grime’s fashionable sound in some ways, though; overall the music is classic Manuva, but the timbres of the individual sounds making up the tracks owe a lot to Dizzee Rascal, or to wherever HE got the sounds from. Combined with the more sweeping scale of Roots Manuva’s arrangements, a lot of Awfully Deep sounds like someone trying to recreate The Matrix’s booming orchestral score on a Game Boy.

Lyrically, I don’t know what happened. Same basic themes (thinking about stuff, stuff being complicated, life being kind of funny sometimes, it being funny how life is complicated and stuff) yet so far, nothing stands out. There could easily be more eccentricities waiting that I just haven’t caught yet, but “Sometimes I hate myself / sometimes I love myself” is a far cry from “Why there’s all these ugly mans on my TV screen? / I wrap my head with foil so I don’t catch them beams”. Even so, I buy Roots Manuva records for Smith’s voice, which still shines as he coughs out “Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em.” on “Pause 4 Cause” or incorporates the obvious reggae influence he’s always had into his vocals more. (The best example of that last, though, was on one of the b-sides to the recent “Colossal Insight” single, where he laid down a serious ragga-style verse or two.)

Plus, in complaining about a lack of eccentricity I’m skipping over the fact that Big Dada’s up-and-coming eccentric, Infinite Livez, struck me as cloying and inane on his debut album, while Roots Manuva is still more than idiosyncratic enough for song titles like “Toothbrush” and “Move Ya Loin” to barely seem worth mentioning.

[Comes out in the UK next Monday; no separate US release date has been announced. Thus I worry I will miss out on the deluxe edition with a bonus CD of remixes, alas!]

To my ears, this leak sounds unfinished, which I guess means not mastered, maybe not even mixed? It has no wild sound-level anomalies like the unfinished Radiohead tapes that circulated in 2003 but the balance between instruments is faintly… off. And nobody knows the names of some of the songs, but the ones with obvious names are at different places in the running order than in the announced tracklist. So.

Hard to say, then, whether Beck’s intentional alternation of “weird” albums with “quiet” albums has ended. Several of these songs sound like Mellow Gold/Odelay (not so much Midnite Vultures, which disappoints me; I want more songs about shopping mall sexx!), while others might be Mutations-style singer-songwriter songs, or they might just not be finished yet. Who can say?

Sticking to the finished-sounding tracks, though, it looks like the arrow of personal evolution points heavily toward maturity for Beck. “Che Onda Guero” = a more affable “Loser”, “Chain Reaction” = a less cloying “Where It’s At”. Those old Beck hits sounded like anthems for unidentifiable countries; the “slacker” tag never exactly fit because he didn’t sound comforted by dope and television. It sucks a little whenever a restless musician finally makes their first “yup, this record sure sounds like something I would make, doesn’t it?” album, but you can’t begrudge him some downtime when, on one level, his music’s been about wanting that for ten years.

Could be I’m just making excuses because I like this more than I’d expect.

Apparently the phrase “free love” dates much farther back than I had assumed. In today’s Salon, Christopher Ketcham writes, “Adding to doubts about Lincoln’s logic was his odd use of the marriage metaphor in explaining the concept of the union. He blasted the kind of marriage that the South had in mind: ‘The Union, as a family relation,’ Lincoln averred, ‘would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only as a sort of free love arrangement — to be maintained on what that sect calls passionate attraction.’”

Setting aside whether I agree with Lincoln about how marriages or confederations should work, I think a few years ago this metaphor would have sounded incoherent to me; now it’s stuck in my head. I guess I’ll wait until the next time I’m discussing either topic and see whether the analogy illuminates anything.

A friend of mine watched his logs on a certain filesharing network very carefully over the last few days, keeping track of what people downloaded from him. The results: twice as many people wanted Digital Ash In A Digital Urn as I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, the other of the two (fraternal) twin albums Bright Eyes release this next Tuesday. Twice as many! I don’t even know what to make of that. Early critical consensus slants the other way, if you trust Metacritic. But word-of-mouth among the self-selectedly fanatical Bright Eyes listeners apparently says Digital Ash is better.

Which is funny, because it is. Considering that Digital has contributions by Jimmy Tamborello of the Postal Service, and that Saddle Creek initially billed it as the ‘electronic’ album (versus Morning as the ‘traditional’ one), I expected it to sound JUST like the Postal Service. No shame in that; my fondness for Bright Eyes has never required me to think of them as original. Instead, the beeps and effects distinctly come off as leftovers from Tamborello’s drier project Dntel, or maybe persistent collage weirdos The Books. I don’t necessarily get the impression Conor Oberst’s been listening to Godspeed or Autechre, but that’s the broad direction Morning heads in, as opposed to “Emo kids [heart] the 80s too!”, as I had both feared and hoped.

I say “leftovers” only because none of the music could carry a track on its own. The shifting backgrounds actually seem to be what Conor needs to sound different. Getting too comfortable with your histrionics is the kiss of death for soft-loud-dynamic-based music (well, no, I guess it rarely is, but it should be), and it had started to seem that all those years of singing about what it was like to be Conor Oberst had finally made him feel steady in his own skin.

A word about that: Most, maybe all, of the people I hear bagging on Oberst for sounding overwrought and immature are, like me, older than he is. I sometimes find it hard to take too, but the guy’s done his growing up in public, so if you mistakenly think he’s emotionally stunted, or is staying screamy as a crutch against aging, you can just go to your shelf and CHECK. Okay?

Anyway, good record. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, in contrast, sounds basically like 2002’s Lifted, only (I think) shorter. The rut feels surprisingly deep for how few albums Bright Eyes have made: I dig the big swoopy songs, all the yowly solo numbers are lost on me. Hard to get excited. Credit is due, though, for final track “Road To Joy”, one of the swoopy ones; with its chorus based around “Ode To Joy”, Oberst can take a bow just for it not sounding stupid. I remain agnostic on the question of whether learning to make unironic Beethoven-appropriation the (enjoyable, actually) capstone to your new album is how I would advise a young man to spend six years of his life, but if you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Best albums:
1st STATUESQUE - Choir Above Fire Below
Few of my favorite songwriters have ever made a record I liked right away. But I tend to forget that, so every time I come home with a new disc by Scott Miller, Franklin Bruno or Stephen Manning it disappoints me at first, and when I grow to love it, I look back and feel dumb. These days, Manning is the only one of the three still actively making music. Which is why I’m overjoyed he hasn’t stopped, and actually seems to be getting more confident (if one can judge by the ease with which he does difficult things– the guitar-only “Safecracker” or any number of songs that have five hooks AND far more lyrics in the verses than you realize the first time around.)
http://www.125records.com/audio/choirabove.mp3
http://www.125records.com/audio/boysarelazy.mp3

2nd THE BLOW - The Concussive Caress / Poor Aim: Love Songs
The Blow would be here just for Poor Aim: Love Songs, a completely perfect EP (7 songs, 16 minutes) of blippy indie-pop dance music and frustrated desire, but The Concussive Caress (Or, Casey Caught Her Mom Singing Along With The Vacuum) came out at the very end of 2003 and its only real flaw was sprawling a little too much, which, in retrospect, making a perfect EP absolves her for.
http://www.statesrightsrecords.com/mp3s/Blow-Knowing.mp3
http://www.krecs.com/mp3/theblow_whattomsaidaboutthegirls.mp3
http://www.krecs.com/mp3/TheBlow_HowNakedAreWeGoingToGet.mp3

3rd SOFT PINK TRUTH - Do You Want New Wave, Or Do You Want The Soft Pink Truth?
Nine punk songs covered as tech-house dance cuts plus one Broadway tune, created by Drew Daniel of Matmos with several of his friends from the conceptual/low-art corner of the electronic music grid helping on vocals. The most academic AND most ass-shaking record I heard all year. In particular, it is delicious revenge to hear Minor Threat’s straightedge anthem “Out Of Step” (”Don’t smoke / Don’t drink / Don’t fuck / At least I can fucking think”) performed as pure sex by Dani Siciliano (the vocalist from some of Matthew Herbert’s albums). The label doesn’t have any mp3s to download, but you should really read the liner notes: http://www.brainwashed.com/spt/chart.html

4th THE KILLERS - Hot Fuss
This band was what made me stop caring whether it was okay that Interpol sounded like Joy Division or Hot Hot Heat sounded like The Jam or… it doesn’t matter. All these bands appropriating post-punk from 20+ years ago are made of people around my age, just young enough to have missed this music the first time. To me, this is the sound of discovering there’s something better than what’s on the radio– and having it all over the radio won’t stop that. Anyway, if Duran Duran had been more convincingly scruffy as well as much shinier they might have sounded like this. If you’ve only heard “Somebody Told Me”, be aware that the rest of the record is NOT all a ripoff of Blur’s “Girls And Boys”. I like the other tracks better, myself.

5th THE FUTUREHEADS - The Futureheads Which is not to say that dealing with bands’ debt to the past is not still complicated. I cannot stop thinking of XTC, Talking Heads, Wire and others when I listen to The Futureheads. Their music is just enough DIFFERENT from the sum of all those bands as to produce the kind of incongruity which all of the above thrived on. You can hear the first minute of every song at www.thefutureheads.com. (”Le Garage” and “A To B” are best to start with.

6th SAUL WILLIAMS - Saul Williams On Saul Williams’ first album, Amethyst Rock Star, it seemed like Williams’ cross between slam poetry and hip-hop had almost nothing to do with the Rick Rubin guitar squalls that obscured some of it. Turns out that was more or less the sound he wanted, though Rick Rubin’s execution needed work. Producing his own stuff Williams makes rap sound like rock and rock sound like rap. Occasionally falls down for a moment with nothing to offer beyond “I didn’t know you could do that and not suck” which is not so bad itself, but never mind, the high points are not just great but unique. You can hear it streamed at saulwilliams.com if you click on the fish and then on ‘The Work’. Try “Grippo” and “African Student Movement”.

7th AC NEWMAN - The Slow Wonder Newman is still a power-pop monster without the New Pornographers backing him, although I miss Dan Bejar’s occasional contributions.
http://www.matadorrecords.com/mpeg/a_c_newman/a_c_newman_miracle_drug.mp3
http://www.matadorrecords.com/mpeg/a_c_newman/a_c_newman_drink_to_me.mp3

8th GRAHAM SMITH - Final Battle
The guy from Kleenex Girl Wonder has stopped smirking. No, seriously. This is a great album. Smith’s still emotionally twisted and his stylistic range hasn’t increased (actually, it’s shrunk for now– no hip-hop or ambient tracks on Final Battle) but suddenly it sounds like he means it. The jokes are in service of the heartfelt parts instead of vice versa, and now every guitar riff and pissed-off lyric rings true. If I’d spent much of the last year feeling embittered, this probably would have been #1. March Records has “USHC Brand Men’s Jeans” for download, though the file isn’t labeled: http://www.marchrecords.com/mp3/files/38mp3.mp3

9th JOEL RL PHELPS AND THE DOWNER TRIO - Customs
Former Silkworm singer, tried setting the electric guitar aside for a few albums when he went solo, then plugged it back in once he had his Americana chops down. I can’t really sit still for an entire song by Neil Young or Will Oldham but I get the feeling if I could, I would say this was along those lines. “Kelly Grand Forks” isn’t one of the best tracks, but it’s what 12XU has for download, so I’ve also included a link to Phelps’ amazing cover of the Go-Betweens’ “Apology Accepted” from the previous Downer Trio EP.
http://www.12XU.net/audio/JRLP_DWNR3-kellygrandforks.mp3
http://www.12xu.net/audio/Joel%20RL%20Phelps-apology.mp3

10th XIU XIU - Fabulous Muscles
Think of Xiu Xiu as a cross between the emperor’s new clothes and the blind men’s elephant. There’s a lot going on in most of these songs, and each aspect, individually, is total bullshit. Self-hating homoeroticism as a metaphor for misery? Puh-leeze. Overwrought vocals? Yeah, joking about how you sound like Ian Curtis didn’t make it stop being true. Distorted, jarring music? I live an hour away from RISD; I hear plenty of that. SO WHY ARE THEY ANY GOOD? Well, the thing I forgot to mention is: they rule. You can download “Clowne Towne” from 5 Rue Christine’s page, but you should really go to xiuxiu.org and listen to the stream of “I Luv The Valley OH!”
http://www.5rc.com/audio/Clowne%20Towne.mp3

11th AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB - Love Songs For Patriots
I think of AMC as having a very specific sound, even though none of their albums actually embodies it– you can run down the discography as “This one is before they had it figured out, this one Eitzel was too depressed to really finish, this one was over-produced, this one is from when the band was on the verge of breaking up…” The first two-thirds of Love Songs captures everything I like about American Music Club as well as some things I didn’t know they could do. (I don’t think Eitzel’s ever written a third-person song nearly as gripping as “Patriot’s Heart”, with its ha-ha-ow opening lines “If you wanna see something patriotic, there’s a stripper / He don’t look that good, but he’s got an all-American smile”.) The last third is strangely subdued, though not terrible.
http://www.american-music-club.com/audio/Home.m3u
http://www.american-music-club.com/audio/Patriots_Heart.m3u
http://www.american-music-club.com/audio/Another_Morning.m3u

12th HAR MAR SUPERSTAR - The Handler
I don’t know how this could have been done better. There’s a limit to how much I can enjoy “Don’t you want to touch me?” dance music (whose ironic intent makes it worse, not better) with gorgeous production and catchy melodies, and that limit turns out to be listening every day for three weeks and then never pulling it out again except when making mix tapes. Little touches like the oddly square guitar solo in “DUI” and Sean Tillman’s (frequent) overestimation of how sexy his voice is are kind of charming, but the guest appearance by Northern State is almost unforgivable. Still, I got way more pleasure out of it before it got annoying than I did out of many, many other records.
http://tinyurl.com/6h3zt

13th ADD - Divider Why Are You Doing This?
This isn’t the first time I’ve put a record available primarily as a free download on my year-end list (that would be The Sleep Ward, found at www.furia.com/songs, whose title always makes me think of Russell Hoban’s second novel Kleinzeit) but it’s the first time I’ve picked an internet album that had to claw its way through a pile of other free internet music to attract me. This stuff’s everywhere now, and it seems to me like as good a deal, from the musician’s point of view, as being on most small record labels. Jeff Fal plays live occasionally, apparently, but his biggest skill is creating the irreal arrangements for his songs, which makes him seem like the archetypal good internet musician to me. Yow! Update: He’s taken the links to mp3s off his page, I guess as an aid to selling the actual album when it’s back from the pressing plant. Well, that sucks for my beliefs about the internet’s limitless potential. The old URLs for mp3s still work, but posting all of them seems obnoxious what with the links intentionally removed. Here’s the best:
http://www.actdead.com/mp3s/divider_03_burn.mp3

14th SMOOSH - She Like Electric
Two sisters, ages 12 and 10. You think you know what this sounds like, but unless you’ve heard it, you don’t. The older one’s voice occasionally sounds ghostly due to it being high-pitched without (to my ears) the kind of training and gloss you expect when an adult wanders into disturbing new octaves; beyond that they could be 30. RIYL Quasi, pre-craziness Tori Amos, post-craziness Cat Power.
http://www.pattern25.com/MP3s/smoosh_massive_cure.mp3

15th RATATAT - Remixes Mixtape vol. 1
I got sick of hip-hop for a while. I forget why. This past summer Ratatat got me back into it by taking some a cappellas (including some whose original versions I hated– Missy Elliott, for example) and remaking the backing tracks in their own image. Every single Ratatat song sounds like a cathedral.
http://www.turntablelab.com/real2/cds/dizzeerascal-fixup-ratatat.ram
http://www.turntablelab.com/real2/cds/raekwonghostface-cut-ratat.ram
http://www.turntablelab.com/real2/cds/missyelliot-wakeup-ratatat.ram
http://www.turntablelab.com/real2/cds/kanyewest-getmhigh-ratatat.ram

16th THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS - The Spine
High point: Linnell’s “Stalk Of Wheat” which sounds like an Erin McKeown song. Nobody believes this until I play it for them.

17th I AM THE WORLD TRADE CENTER - The Cover Up
I heard that Dan Geller and Amy Dykes broke up while making this album and then got back together. Which would be depressing if it were true! I would hate to think this acquired the emotional tug missing from their first two albums just because they were unhappy.

18th THE BRUCES - The Shining Path
As with Joel Phelps, I don’t know why the few “indie-country” acts I like are pretty heavily ignored in favor of stuff I can’t stand.

19th THE VELVET TEEN - Elysium
Like Radiohead before they were good, if they had been good. The best track is a mixtape-killing 12-minutes.

20th DESTROYER - Your Blues
The most willfully perverse record I liked this year (more so than Xiu Xiu!) but not quite consistent enough beyond the four or five songs I liked best.

Best album that didn’t come out in 2004 no matter if it feels like it: THE MITCHELLS - Hear Where You Are
I love them. Nobody else seems to find them interesting enough to even have an opinion on. This mystifies me! They sound like they’re from New Zealand, but they live in western Massachusetts. Anyway, for a while I was checking their website every few weeks to see if they’d made the promised new album yet. About two years ago I gave up. Shortly thereafter, it turns out, they actually made it; I first heard it this past summer.
http://www.themitchellsrock.com/Pet Theory.mp3
http://www.themitchellsrock.com/Stakeout.mp3
http://www.themitchellsrock.com/Vault Alarms.mp3

Best reissues: THE GO-BETWEENS - Liberty Belle / Tallulah / 16 Lovers Lane
I have no completist urge toward the Go-Betweens– if one of these were re-reissued tomorrow with a single bonus track, not buying it would be an easy decision– and yet on every single one of these double-disc reissues (the first three from a few years ago), the bonus tracks have deepened my attachment to the band. (And that’s both with b-sides, like most of the 16LL bonus tracks, and with demo/radio/live versions of album songs, like most of the Tallulah bonus tracks).

Best orphaned songs:
DOGS DIE IN HOT CARS - Godhopping
BT - Somnambulist (2003 release ringer division)
TV ON THE RADIO - New Health Rock
DYKEHOUSE - Chain Smoking
MARK VII - Spherical Rhymes
FRANZ FERDINAND - Darts Of Pleasure
DIZZEE RASCAL - I Luv U
JENS LEKMAN - You Are The Light
BLACK LEOTARD FRONT - Casual Friday
BEN FOLDS - Get Your Hands Off My Woman
MIRAH - We’re Both So Sorry (radio session)
THE ARCADE FIRE - Rebellion (Lies)
KINGS OF CONVENIENCE - I’d Rather Dance With You
NOW IT’S OVERHEAD - Wait In A Line
MR. LIF - Farmhand (reissue)

Best records available entirely for free on the internet:
GET HIM EAT HIM - Casual Sex: The Demo http://www.gethimeathim.com
MARK VII - Action Replay EP http://netilium.org/~mad/markvii/
TILLY AND THE WALL - Wild Like Children http://www.team-love.com/tilly.htm
MC FRONTALOT - the demo http://www.frontalot.com
ROBOTNICKA - Spectre En Vue http://www.robotnicka.org/eng/spectreenvue.html
THE NEW BAD THINGS - Freewheel! (reissue) http://www.freewheelrecords.com/sounds [CURRENTLY DOWN?]

“Colossal Insight” is the perfect candidate for getting remixed several times: Roots Manuva’s first single since Run Come Save Me came out 3+ years ago, thus highly anticipated, but a strangely unsatisfying song, thus ripe for improvement.

Royksopp remix: Proof that the song could reach greatness without changing much (and without ceasing to sound like Roots Manuva). I found it pleasantly nervewracking to listen to; Royksopp’s multi-component rhythm track has the body-seizing imponderability of a drum circle but none of the volume– it’s all wood block clacks, handclaps and cymbal ticks.

Part 2 remix: It’s a good thing I like Part 2’s stage name, because the few good tracks he produced as part of New Flesh are becoming insufficient antidote to all the times he’s bored me a little.

Jammer “remix & revox”: Great idea! Roots Manuva recorded a (completely different) vocal track for this remix. In other words, new song, same chorus. Jammer’s mix bumps slightly more than the original at the cost of having any inherent interest, but Rodney’s new verses kill. Off the top of my head I can’t think of too many other times he’s done this fast ragga-style rap, and he’s good at it.

Soft Pink Truth remix: Drew Daniel is a god. I guess at this point I should really go back to those Matmos albums and see if I like them better (not to mention Vespertine, the Bjork record that he and MC Schmidt did programming on). That said, only this remix sounds the way all remixes did 15 years ago: the parts audibly come from somewhere else and the jumps sound… jumpy. I don’t mind, I just didn’t expect it.

Someone I know pointed out that if you search for [ btvs tv ] on Google, in the search results “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” is bolded, as though that was literally what you searched for. If you search for [ btvs ] your hits all have to do with Buffy, but the full name of the show isn’t in bold.

This also works with [ lotr movie ], [ tmbg band ] and [ sttng tv ]. Some other trigger words exist too; [ lotr lord ] works, though it’s hard to see why someone would search for that. Failed attempts: [ kotor game ], [ tanstaafl lunch ], [ athf cartoon ] and [ sgctc cartoon ]. God help me, I cannot think of any common acronyms to check which aren’t at least somewhat geek-related.

I wonder if they plan to eventually have the search engine make guesses about acronyms. The feature doesn’t seem quite useful enough to bother with if a human has to tell it what things mean.

The Decemberists: music’s answer to Dickens (but without the ponderousness), Gorey (without the absurdity) and Lemony Snicket (without the smarm). They just really like writing songs about chimney sweeps, the ghosts of infants, and barrowboys. Maybe I should admit that I don’t know what a barrowboy is, though I do like the song about one on Picaresque. I’m just pretty sure we don’t have them anymore.

Starting with last year’s EP (their fourth release), I’ve told people how GREAT it is that the Decemberists have avoided getting terrible, then silently kicked myself for accepting such low expectations.

But see, they haven’t done anything to set low expectations, so I won’t accuse them of trying to sandbag me. All they did was get famous (well, indie-famous) with some high-concept music. It’s not their fault– nor, as it turns out, their fate– that many high-concept bands who break out get lost in a swamp of (a) not trying very hard and (b) discovering that ‘maturing’ your highly-stylized sound has turned you into Elvis Costello.

So anyway…

For the first time I feel like the band’s songs could definitely stand on their own as ‘compositions’. That’s not to say I’m dying to hear solo versions; the instruments still hold most of the weight, and it strains the unusual charms of Colin Meloy’s voice to isolate it too much. But in the past, when the shtick began to grate on me, the whole record fell to pieces. Picaresque, I find that I can approach with a patience born of finally giving a shit what a second-rate Decemberists song is like.

Back to the pitfalls of fame, though; the Decemberists sound like, far from hitting the traps I mentioned above, they try very hard but don’t realize amid it all that they’re a good band, and without that realization, their style (for better or worse) will evolve very, very slowly. One track (”The Mariner’s Revenge Song”) makes teensy motions toward the grand scale they toyed with in the 18-minute “The Tain”, but mostly “Revenge” racks up an epic-looking running time just by piling on a bunch of additional verses. I can appreciate a song that doesn’t bore me despite having eight stanzas. But eventually, the fact that part of the Decemberists’ stance is pretending that everything they do’s been done before will stop being cute and start being true.