Fountains Of Wayne have made a career (now, a pretty successful one) out of being the kind of people that are entertaining at parties but whom you don’t actually like. The question with such people, I always find, is whether I’m running out of patience with them, or whether they in fact get more annoying as they go on. Fountains Of Wayne are apparently the latter, because this collection of b-sides and other non-album songs is GREAT, despite being every bit as lyrically smarmy as their LPs. I guess they only concertedly annoy me when they reach past the ‘A’ material to find something they can fill an album with…

If I put on my gender-consciousness hat (it’s right there on the shelf next to the indie-rock certifications), I could write a whole page about the bullshit encoded just in a couplet like “I’ll let you listen to Sugar Ray / And I’ll say I love you every day”. I mean, it’s not like the appalling parts are only there if you look for them; the band just reflect societal relationship garbage so blithely that it takes time just to unpack it all, and I’m not that patient right now. Sometimes they go even farther, as on “I’ll Do The Driving”– a gentle, mellifluous song about how stupid the narrator’s girlfriend is. Come on.

The deal with the power-pop subculture that FoW come from has always been not that they claim their juvenile attitudes are justified as long as the songs are good, but that they don’t think it matters anyway– their sexism is “tradition” or “no big deal; it’s just pop music”. Apparently I find this argument sort of convincing as long as the music is so much better than the lyrics that, okay, it seems like they really don’t care about the words, though as you can tell I have mixed feelings about it. I usually say I don’t believe in the idea of musical ‘guilty pleasures’– if I like the record, I’ll happily stand up for something embarrassing or uncool. But this compilation is indubitably a pleasure which I am irritated at myself for having. These are good songs; caveat emptor.

This exceeded my expectations by so much that I now can’t remember why I wanted to go in the first place. It’s in an unpromising location (the “scared of sushi? eat here!” spot in Porter Exchange, which a few other restaurants have cycled through in the time I’ve lived here), and what’s up with the name?

But I think I’d had a look at the menu once and decided to try it, back when it first opened. It turns out to be a fancy Italian restaurant with unusual (to me) recipes. The fried calamari, for example, came with rings of jalapeno pepper tiny enough to eat on their own without requiring masochism. I ordered a spaghetti dish with bits of grated frozen caviar (this turned out to be a good idea) that, uncharacteristically for a nice restaurant, had far more flavors in it than the menu advertised. It also managed to taste like habaneros without being excessively spicy, which confused us; we kept thinking the peppers must have been lurking in big chunks somewhere, which they weren’t. Out of our four entrees, the only disappointing one was M’s macaroni and cheese, which didn’t have much cheese; she theorized this was supposed to emphasize the mushrooms but it was just bland.

Anyway, the really amazing part was our dessert: a strawberry-balsamic sorbet with a spice cake and a strawberry cannoli. Every time one of us took a bite we would sort of tune out in bliss for a minute, and then upon returning take a few seconds to realize that there was MORE of it. (Repeat until dessert is gone.) We also got a chocolate creme brulee that I had no complaints about– actually, I liked it better than I usually like creme brulee, though that may just be because creme brulee is growing on me– but it could not compare to the devastating strawberry object. It may have been the best restaurant dessert I’ve ever had; at any rate, it was the first time I’ve ever asked the staff how long a dessert was going to stay on the menu. Their answer: until September. September! That was a very excellent answer for them to give. If the idea of balsamic vinegar and strawberry ice sounds at all appealling to you, come get dessert with me at this place sometime.

For a while it seemed like Robert Pollard’s estimation of whether a lot of people would want to hear one of his records matched my experience of how much I wanted to hear them, so I didn’t try too hard to hear this (a collection of tapes made by Robert Pollard, Jim Pollard and Mitch Mitchell in 1983 before Guided By Voices existed; double LP, limited to 500 copies, vinyl only, blah blah blah). But if you actively enjoy Pollard’s later interest in fragments and recordings with, ah, “documentary” sound quality, this isn’t bad. And if, like me, you liked the Nightwalker album, which toyed with the same menace as New Zealand bands like The Dead C and This Kind Of Punishment, then you might just enjoy this more than the 90% of other Fading Captain Series records that are easier to find. I feel creepy saying this, but I suspect that Pollard’s truly half-assed records are only good when pot is involved. Not so creepy, I guess, considering that I’m not saying he’s better high than sober– how would I know?– but rather, better high-and-drunk than just drunk.

(To give you some context, one of the high points is “Mongoose Orgasm”, which contains 20 seconds of faint rattling and squeaking, followed by someone rhythmically improvising with a rubber ducky as someone else bangs on what sound like cheap tympani but are probably overturned garbage bins.)

Very funny, Cex. Start messing around with long-form songs in concert, then release a taste of them on your shortest record ever: two bland instrumentals (beginning and end), three actual songs in the middle. The songs aren’t even a second too long, though, and they felt like the end of the concert I saw (when we had stopped worrying about whether Cex had actually turned into a hippie and were absorbing the tribal beats). History suggests we have pretty poor odds that Cex will still want to sound like this by the time he puts out another record, but I don’t remember that ever being a problem before. For once the guy has me wanting more.

Christmas - “Punch And Judy” (mp3)
Frank Tovey - “Sam Hall” (mp3)

Boston pop band Christmas might never have made it big; who can say? But if they ever had a chance, they destroyed it with their second album– not the music, which is good, but with the cover. Click here to see it. It, uh, kind of speaks for itself, but I’ll point out that the habit of spelling ‘the’ as ‘thee’ is strongly associated with Genesis P-Orridge and his band Psychick TV (as well as its outgrowth Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth), so even most of the people who thought on first encounter with the record that they knew what was going on probably didn’t.

Anyway, Christmas weren’t Psychick Gladiatorz; they were just a very, very capricious band playing slightly quirky music. Occasionally they hit on a brilliant idea, though, like casting the old folk song “Sam Hall”, with its unrepentant narrator and refrain of “damn your eyes!”, as a version of the Punch and Judy story instead. If you don’t know “Sam Hall”, Frank Tovey’s version is linked above as well.

Lead vocals on “Punch And Judy”, by the way, are by Liz Cox, known to Magnetic Fields fans as Miss Lily Banquette (the stage name she took when Christmas broke up and two members formed lounge band Combustible Edison).

[And indeed, Amazon is confused about which is the title and which is the artist for this record.]

Dislocation Dance - “You’ll Never Never Know” (mp3)

One of several reissues on Vinyl Japan (a British label, despite the name) that become hard or impossible to find, at least in the U.S., not that long after they appeared. Kind of frustrating, and I now see that I put off mailordering directly from the label for long enough that I can’t.

Anyway, Dislocation Dance were a highly charming British band from about 20 years ago, playing in a jazzy indiepop style that I’m not sure America ever got much of. (See also early Everything But The Girl records.) I had known that their trumpet player, a guy with the excellent name “Andy Diagram”, went on to play arty music in the Spaceheads and in the Two Pale Boys; what I had somehow not known until just now is that he was also a member of James. Funny.

[From Music Music Music, though there's also a version on The BBC Sessions, which I think is better overall if you're going to the trouble of tracking a DD album down in the first place.]

From the name I expected screamy Rhode Island kids, when instead Need New Body are… well, I’m not sure. In places it sounds like the work of relatively gifted improvisers straddling the line between “free jazz” and “next time let’s get high in Rob’s basement– he’s got all those drums and shit”. But there’s also terrifyingly bad fake funk, and some songs both complex and coherent enough to fall under the tag ‘hyperprog’ (as used by some of the Pitchfork folks). It shares with actual prog the ability to hold my attention with only sporadic vocals, and its suitability as background music. I have no clear idea whether I like this yet, but it’s more digestible than a lot of 5 Rue Christine releases, and more accessible than their website’s habit of writing in zillion-point letters would suggest.

The jump from first person to third for this second book of autobiography put me off initially, but it works. It works because the book is about a crush that gnaws away at Burroughs (or rather, at “Bill Lee”, his stand-in) and having a first-person narrator, I think, would inject the question of how the author Burroughs feels, now, about the subject Burroughs. Dodging the issue means that he can describe both level-headed and desperate emotions in the same reportorial tone.

More than in Junky, though, it trips me up to have so much trouble imagining Burroughs young. It matters to the plot that he’s older than many of his friends– but not THAT much older, not the gentlemanly cadaver in the hundred iconic photos you see of him today.

I’ve already started on The Soft Machine and discovered that the ‘radical fiction’ and cut-up experiments make a lot more sense knowing some of the slang and drug-culture customs. This was worth reading in its own right, though, as a portrait of unrequited affection.

From http://www.kitchengeek.com/2004/08/yushiang_whole_.html:

2 scallions
2 Tbsp pressed or chopped garlic
2 Tbsp ginger (the recipe said ‘chopped’, we grated it)
2 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp spicy black bean sauce (”available from just about any grocery store,” except not the one I tried, nor the first one M tried)
1 tsp hot sesame oil
1 tsp vegetable oil
1 tsp rice wine vinegar

1 Tbsp corn starch
2 Tbsp water (but see below)

1 lb. haddock

The recipe said to mix the corn starch and water together, then add the bean sauce, then dump all the other ingredients for the sauce in. I did it slightly backward (corn starch and water mixed separately, then added to a bowl with ingredients in it) and it came out thinner than it had been before I added the starch/water mixture. Can this possibly be the fault of the order I mixed things in? I am confused.

Anyway: oil the bottom of a baking fish and put the fish in, then cover the dish with foil, poking a tiny hole in the top for steam. Bake the fish at 350F for 15 minutes. Take it out and apply the sauce to it, then bake it again (re-covered with foil) for about 20 minutes. You’re done.

The sauce looked largely uninspiring– runny and comprised mostly of scallions. I spent a dispiriting amount of time just putting the sauce on gently enough to keep most of it on top of the fish instead of pooling in the baking pan. The results tasted good enough, though, that after only a bite or two I was making plans to retry it another time.

Using two different oils was the recipe’s idea, but the sauce wasn’t overly sesame-flavored, so next time I think I’ll just use one oil. (Maybe non-pepper sesame oil, as this batch approached my spiciness tolerance.) The scallions took over visually while barely tasting strong enough; not sure what to do about that.

The fish came out more evenly cooked than any fish I’ve made in a long time, and the texture seemed to please both me and M, who are usually somewhat far apart in how thoroughly we like our fish to be cooked. I was reminded that just because it’s easy to find bad whitefish around here, haddock is not inherently chintzy.

Freedom Cruise - “Sensational Gravity Boy” (mp3)

Sad to remember a time when finding rarities by Robert Pollard (the songwriter behind Guided By Voices, and then also Freedom Cruise, Nightwalker, Airport 5, Circus Devils, Go Back Snowball, Lifeguards, Howling Wolf Orchestra, plus if you include bands whose names seem to have been made up on the spot for one-time recordings there’s Meat Kingdom Group, Judas & The Piledrivers, the Judy Plus Nine, Approval Of Mice and CERAMIC COCK EINSTEIN, just to name a few) was exhilarating instead of the depressing chore it later became (see previous parenthesis). This is from Red Hot + Bothered, the ‘indie rock’ volume of the Red Hot series of AIDS benefits; the band are essentially Guided By Voices plus Kim and Kelley Deal.