This might not make it to America– Moloko’s last two albums didn’t. I like it better than Statues, though, which was remarkably successful at executing its huge concept (preserving Moloko’s creepiness in a real-instrument setting, with string sections, etc.) but didn’t have such great songs.

Ruby Blue’s production is by Matthew Herbert, who specializes in microsampling live sounds and arranging them carefully to create music that’s organic but unnatural; it’s not that the record is perfect, but the pairing nearly is, since Murphy’s progression as a singer has gone from highly stylized to “pretty” singing with some seeming uncertainty about how to preserve the former’s interesting idiosyncracies.

(I was pleased to discover some of Murphy’s comments on the way she sang when Moloko started: “I was 19 when I made Do You Like My Tight Sweater? and I knew I was pretending, but if I tried not to, I’d still be pretending. Now, I know myself better.” So, no more awful croaking.)

Anyway, this record has kind of a Bjork feel, which makes sense; Drew Daniel, who’s worked on Bjork’s last two records, has mentioned Matthew Herbert as a big influence on him, and Murphy shares Bjork’s gleeful insularity if not her voice.

The Student Teachers - “Looks”

This feels upside-down to me, though I guess it’s not–

Mike Doughty (formerly of Soul Coughing) covered “Looks” on his first solo album, which floated around for years on Napster before being released, so, no liner notes. I think he said he actually didn’t know much about the band or the song. But like all humans, Doughty has a blog, and he recently noticed that the Student Teachers had a webpage now, with three out of the eight songs they ever released (plus two live recordings) posted for download.

It’s a really nice song, though the original goes on a little too long. Though not explicitly about high school, it feels worth putting on my mental list of great high-school songs written by people still in their teens or very close.

I can’t remember whether I ever posted this or not– I know some people are reading this through RSS, and for a long time, music posts were the only thing I had a functioning RSS feed for. Now RSS works for everything; use http://www.pastemob.org/blosxom.cgi/index.rss to see all posts, interposing the relevant name (e.g. jj, portia, heel, et al.) after the last slash to restrict things by topic.

Go Sailor - “Long Distance” (mp3)

When I started doing radio, the other DJs at the time scorned anything ‘poppy’, and since they revered plenty of other stuff I liked, I focused on that instead. Then I heard one of the few indiepop DJs play this and felt a crashing wave of regret about all the great stuff I must have been missing out on.

To me it sounds like the guitar– that great, tireless jangly guitar– is perpetually a little ahead of singer Rose Melberg. This might be the result of sloppiness (Melberg’s previous band, Tiger Trap, had a prominent place on the list of early-90s bands that proved enthusiasm was more important than technique) but it’s still wonderful; singing along with this song provides the same kind of fidgety pleasure as clicking and unclicking a ballpoint pen.

[Go Sailor's three 7"s were compiled onto a self-titled CD, released, incongruously, by Lookout Records, who now offer it in their "Low-Price Punk" line.]

EDIT: Molly, who has better ears than I do, says the syncopation is clearly intentional.

Beatnik Filmstars - “You Can’t Fake Sadness Like This” (mp3)

The Beatnik Filmstars are a very rare example of a band that got substantially more difficult over time, eventually making one of the most prickly albums I ever remember hearing in the Guided By Voices “AM radio from Mars” style. This, anyway, is much earlier, with a faint Stone Roses influence but still a lot of fuzzy guitar. They put out a truly huge amount of music for a band that was only active about five years at the most.

[From Laid Back & English, not hard to find a used copy of on Amazon.]

I have no idea what Alan Astor’s deal is– this album’s bonus tracks are remixes by hipsters Restiform Bodies and Drop The Lime, so it’s tempting to think he’s not as obliviously mutton-headed and blissed-out as I had guessed from the song titles (”Fantastic Fantasy”, “Astral America”, “I Couldn’t Have Survived Without You”), but he’s largely insipid even if this is intentional camp. Take a hack who wants to be Peter Gabriel, feed him up-to-the-minute data about the Postal Service and the soundtracks to the Matrix films, and you still have a hack.

I keep listening to “Fantastic Fantasy”, though. A stop-start breakbeat runs through the entire song, but it doesn’t feel jagged; it just feels like the music is cheesily dropping away to emphasize Astor’s voice, and doing it every single measure. If this actually were a cheap remix of a top-40 ballad, which is what it sounds like, I would be too sharply aware of the awfulness of both the original performer and the remixer to enjoy it, but as things are, I get a kick from it. Can’t fault Astor’s judgment in making it free at his site.

A new eight-song record by Yoni Wolf, also known as Why?, and his band, also also known as Why?. He’s dropped the mild formlessness that made it seem– was the ONLY thing making it seem, it turns out– like his last few records might have been made from a hip-hop perspective. Now he sounds like a combination of Atom & His Package and Jon Brion, though I have the nagging sense that this also sounds like a lot of ‘funny’ ‘alternative’ bands who got played twice on MTV in 1995 and then vanished from sight.

But never mind that! I’m incredibly fickle about music, in that it usually takes only one bad record to scuttle my expectations no matter how much goodwill a musician builds up with me beforehand, and it only takes one good record to put someone back on my list. I remember that 24 hours ago, I thought of Why? as just another one of those yutzes on Anticon (though slightly more distinguished, as a member of cLOUDDEAD), and listened to the mp3 from his new album almost perfunctorily. And yet now that I like this, it feels like much longer ago.

[That mp3 is here.]

Slant 6 - “What Kind Of Monster Are You?” (mp3)

Despite their horror-show image– they named their second album Inzombia and toured with fellow daguerreotype-y bands Stiffs, Inc. and Jonathan Fire*Eater– Slant 6 were actually pretty straightforward, a retro rock band from a few years before it became a Deeply Symbolic Act to try reviving the spirit of 60s rock in new clothes.

[From their 1993 first single, added as bonus tracks to Soda Pop * Rip Off.]

This weekend I rediscovered an excellent sentence by the philosopher Thomas Nagel from his 1969 essay on the concept of perversion, and remembered that the essay is available online here.

Nagel gives intuition a large role in his philosophy; he figures that if most people have a concept of what ’sexual perversion’ is, even if they disagree about it, then such a concept is probably meaningful, even if most people are wrong about it. This does give the essay an odd tone, especially since he only clarifies at the very end that he has no particular reason to think there’s a moral difference between perverted and unperverted sex, nor that avoiding perversion is preferable for any other reason. He also seems a little confused about S&M, though he admits that he may be wrong in his description of it, and (interestingly) concludes that if S&M sex were perverted according to his analysis, it would be a perversion of a person’s ordinary sense of themselves, not (as I think most moralists would say) a perversion of a ‘natural’ way that one should relate to others.

Anyway, much as I usually like Nagel, I don’t even come close to agreeing with every aspect of the essay; I just love this sentence:

“Hunger is not merely a disturbing sensation that can be quelled by eating; it is an attitude toward edible portions of the external world, a desire to treat them in rather special ways.”

Automaticans - “Audrey” (mp3)

As far as I know, the Automaticans only ever released this one song, sometime in 2000 while songwriter Tamala Poljak was in between her former band Longstocking (who were amazing) and the Infinite X’s (also pretty great).

At the time I remember noticing that they weren’t the only queer-identified band from the Pacific Northwest articulating their self-image in terms of robots, but despite the appearance of a third similar band shortly thereafter (Tracy + The Plastics), I never thought of anything remotely intelligent to say about that fact.

[The 7" is still for sale at Chainsaw Records.]