The Altoids mint gum is patently from the future– featureless white ovoids that, if you breathe through your nose at all while chewing them, make you feel like your sinuses are illuminated by some kind of alien super-flavor technology. The coworker who introduced me to it was up to two pieces at a time by the end of his first tin.

For some reason, the apple gum has a different texture; the first time you bite into it, it breaks into three or four pieces in sort of a wet, crumbly way. Ick. The sourness is as devastating as I hoped, but with my tongue burnt from a tea mishap last night, that turned out to be excruciatingly painful. Verdict: mixed.

Velocity Girl - “The All-Consumer” (mp3)

One of those bands spoken of breathlessly by indiepop kids and mostly unknown elsewhere. The story in “The All-Consumer” is pretty complex– enough that even though this song still makes me feel wistful every time I hear it, I’ve never unpacked the lyrics thoroughly enough to connect it with any breakup from my own life. It’s just like that.

What I love, though, is the twin lead vocals, with both Archie Moore and Sarah Shannon having a few phrases that they sing separately, but not in a “Don’t You Want Me” he-said-she-said way; the song is about a couple agreeing on what’s wrong, not reeling off parallel irreconciliable lists of complaints.

[You can buy it for ten bucks from the label or for cheap from Amazon.]

Basically taken from this Epicurious recipe.

1 large sweet potato
1 medium onion
1 celery heart
1 large apple
1 banana
1 pint vegetable broth
1 cup heavy cream
1 tbsp unsalted butter
1 tsp salt
1.5 tsp curry powder
chopped chives (sprinkle on top)

Chop the fruits and vegetables and simmer in the broth, covered, until very tender. Stir in cream, butter & salt, and curry powder and heat until hot. Put it in a blender until it is soup.

Our soup came out a little gritty, either from not blending long enough or from not softening the vegetables enough. I think cutting the curry with something else (other Indian spices?) would have been nice, although it was tasty anyway.

I don’t like celery, and while the celery heart didn’t make the whole soup taste like celery, I’m wondering if it’s the source of the “cafeteria soup” flavor that I could never identify, since this soup had it and, now that I think about it, that flavor is sort of like celery. Any suggestions about what one could substitute?

By the way, this soup is thick. Even in a relatively small saucepan, I had to simmer for a while and then moosh the vegetables around some more before I could even pretend they were all in the boiling water. I love dipping bread in soup, so ‘thick’ is okay with me, but next time I may use more broth.

I’d barely heard any Moby before this, and none of it contained his singing. Has he always had this strangled, nervous voice? It sounds, as odd as this is, almost exactly like Ben Kingsley in Death Of The Maiden, where he played a creepily unreadable doctor that may or may not be a rapist and government torturer. Not exactly pleasant, but it sharply separates Hotel from the soothing car-ad music that Moby’s last few records seemed to be.

Otherwise, this apparently means to emulate Depeche Mode circa 1990 and U2 circa 1991, both of whom repulse me. Without the pomposity of Violator or Achtung Baby– Moby’s aforementioned eerie singing has exactly as little swagger as his self-effacing blog, just less bland– I kind of enjoy the nostalgia it produces. I guess in the end, I have as little idea who would really like this as most of the critics beating up on it claim to, but man, that voice.

Been wondering why the mediocrity of the new Beck album (coming out tomorrow) weighs on my mind at all– I never had an emotional attachment to the guy, and in fact I don’t remember caring much that Sea Change didn’t appeal to me. Yet I keep chewing on it. Sorry if I’m mistaking my own fixation for a sign that anyone else cares what I think.

I think the problem is that Guero, if I liked it more, would fit right in with the other music I’m excited about right now. Every few days I hear another new magpie-like group that I want to learn more about (most recently: Architecture In Helsinki and Brazilian Girls), and Beck’s had that flea market trick down for ten years. Then when I’m not checking those out, I’m wallowing in the fact that several people I’d nearly written off have good albums coming out soon which either show them rediscovering their experimental subtlety after a period of wobbly attempts to break out of old ruts (Stephen Malkmus’s Face The Truth and The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree) or else finding the killer songs that finally justify going back to what they’ve basically always done (Ben Folds’ Songs For Silverman and Mike Doughty’s Haughty Melodic). Beck could step into either of those narratives or both of them except for the crucial part where I like the record.

On the seventh hand, little of the press Guero’s getting mentions my favorite song (”Que Onda Guero”) at all, so maybe I just slept through a crucial briefing at some point.

The Wolfhounds - “Anti-Midas Touch” (mp3)

The dirtier side of shoegaze, like Moonshake and Th’ Faith Healers, never really made it to America in the early 90s when Lush and My Bloody Valentine had their day. This always struck me as strange, if only because it seemed to have the same vibe as the wave of British comics authors who stormed the US at the same time (Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan).

Dave Callahan wrote and sang 2 3/4 albums with Moonshake (on the first album and EP he split creative duty with Margaret Fiedler) on which his persona was every bit the Vertigo Comics hero: urban, distant, pessimistic but idealistic. Before then, though, he played in the Wolfhounds, a more straightforward rock band that started off jangly. I hate to exaggerate, but hearing his distinctive yowl on this song, which could otherwise pass for the Bats or the Wedding Present without much trouble, felt to me like learning that Thom Yorke used to sit at the back in orchestra class mumbling into a digital effects box and for some reason nobody noticed.

[You can buy the Wolfhounds' best-of from Amazon.]

Frank Tovey - “Bridge St. Shuffle” (mp3)

Frank Tovey released this cross between “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” and Robyn Hitchcock’s “Sleeping With Your Devil Mask” in 1988, several years before Hitchcock brought his own Dylan thing to center stage. “Shuffle” has its own place in my heart separate from those two songs because of all the bloinky instruments that turn it into a dance number, as well as those metallic squeals left over from Tovey’s industrial-music past in Fad Gadget– as “industrial” goes, Fad Gadget fit somewhere between scary monster experimental music like Einsturzende Neubauten and present-day bands just playing watered-down synthpop like Night:Faith:Skin:Lake or Punitive Regression.

[This is from Civilian. Of the solo records, Tovey's later folky stuff is pretty easy to find; this album and Snakes And Ladders much less so. Amazon UK has a few.]

This finally came out yesterday, and while listening to it last night, I realized I’d been wrong about something– the barrowboys and mariners jump out on first listen, sure, but Picaresque also has songs set now, or within the last few decades.

It sharpened my feelings on the record. When dealing with safely distant material, Colin Meloy’s stylistic veil preserves the distance, so you say, “More of the same, which isn’t bad if you like this kind of thing,” and, “Oh, he’s just like that.” Hearing him sing about spies and disappointed high-school athletes instead, empathy starts to break through, and all the mannered Decemberists style begins seeming like a shield from emotion, or at least, a shield to keep the emotions in a song and the actual emotions of the performers from mingling.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence I liked hearing Meloy sing Robyn Hitchcock songs so much. If you didn’t write the song, it’s safer to put your heart into it… right? But this is good, if it’s the kind of thing you like.

The Moves - “T. Knee” (mp3)

A few years after the last time I heard anything about The Moves, I saw bandmember Sara Cooper (all three of them traded off instruments and songwriting) working at a local coffeeshop. She looked annoyed with the world, and I wasn’t sure my enthusiasm for the band had decreased to the point of not being irritating, so I didn’t say anything. A few months later I saw her there again, but she was smiling and singing along with my favorite Joni Mitchell album, so I said hi and enthused for a minute.

I think Cooper is the one singing here; she has a complex and interesting voice. Last year, in an art gallery near my apartment, she did a live set of morbid fairy-tale acoustic drone songs– better than it sounds– for which I guess her voice was more appropriate, but her ability to do “gleeful” and “ambivalent” at the same time made The Moves occasionally, briefly, amazing.

[This is from the Magneto Single-Fire 7", which, like their one album, came out in 2000 and is now out of print with the demise of Mr. Lady Records. That album regularly goes for five bucks on Amazon.]

Milky Wimpshake - “Clicking It” (mp3)

Everything about Milky Wimpshake (but, okay, especially the name) seems intended to defy a punk orthodoxy that Milky Wimpshake has largely outlived, which makes it doubly sweet that the band’s website now gives out those early seven-inches as mp3s.

It seems like far more songs about good first dates than just “Clicking It” should come to mind, but I have trouble thinking of any. Some great low-fi records have been made where the sound quality suggests dust, hidden knowledge, an antique shop. This song, like everything Slampt! Records put out, goes way in the other direction: low-fi as a sign of vitality, community, spontaneity, and all that other stuff which singer Pete and Slampt co-owner Rachel exult in their rock band Red Monkey. (Pete and Rachel have last names, but I didn’t know them until I looked them up just now, which on reflection seemed like a good reason to leave them out.)

["Clicking It" is from Milky Wimpshake's first seven-inch, 1994's The Deviancy Amplification Spiral. Tons more stuff and a colorful chronology are here; if hurried, skip to "Cheque Card", "Itchy Feet On A Tuesday Night" and "My Heart Beats Faster Than Techno".]