X-Cel’s tracks don’t bounce the way they used to and Gift Of Gab is starting to sound like a bad Del The Funky Homosapien. What’s going ON? If you’d asked me last year, after each of them put out a solo album, which one track from those records most foreshadowed Blackalicious’s future, I wouldn’t have given the right answer: the song on 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up where Gab quoted “Puttin’ On The Ritz”. Ugh.

Usually a musician going “back to their roots” is just a marketing ploy, but no– Sean Paul has made a record that could be mistaken for any number of other deejays’ competent, unexciting dancehall records. Even hearing it blasted over the record store’s speakers, which usually makes music sound better than it is, didn’t make me reconsider.

My Favorite - “Go Kid Go” (mp3)
My Favorite - “Absolute Beginners Again” (mp3)
My Favorite - “1986″ (mp3)

My Favorite just broke up.

I got tired of their preciousness a few years ago; in 1996, I appreciated their self-conscious sincerity, but now– okay, check out this portion of the “Secret History of My Favorite” posted at their website:

Their gesture remains in its own way quite fierce, as though toughened by the days spent transversing a barren landscape of signs and memories. The art project has become the most dangerously beautiful pop band in the world. The cult heroes have a cult. They are desperately needed. They have become their dreams.

A minute ago, I started to write something nicer about them, more apologetic about no longer being able to appreciate what they offered. I always thought the best My Favorite songs were the half-dozen tracks they committed to vinyl in the 90s before releasing their first CD; when the disc (Love At Absolute Zero) came out, I disappointedly learned they had re-recorded all those songs with less fuzz and more gloss. Still, they seemed like basically the same band. When they disbanded, several years and several limited-edition EPs later, they still hadn’t alienated me.

Then, this morning, I went to their website and looked for a list of those early singles. No such thing. It didn’t happen. The discography and the lyrics archive both begin in 2000.

Well then. If they want us to distinguish between the two versions of My Favorite, the new one was unredeemedly pretentious, syrupy, and vapid, while the old was buzzy, perspicacious, and not yet a victim of the belief that having people listen to you makes you more interesting. The three songs above are their debut EP, 1994’s The Last New Wave Record. I think this was what convinced me that the A/B1/B2 format for a 7″ was just as morally sound as the usual A/B.

Everything that comes out of my computer’s speakers right now sounds like it was recorded on John Darnielle’s boombox– hissy, and with some kind of compression effect turning the highest and lowest tones into warm static. This isn’t intentional, but I’ve been told that my office is replacing this computer soon, so I’m living with it. I’m almost scared to find out how this record sounds when played correctly; with my misbehaving computer reinventing it, it seems to be a colossal dance-pop album, mostly unmarred by ballads. Even figuring that Stevens’ voice is meant to be more conventionally pretty, I suspect this is better than, say, that last Kylie album.

I came to it with no context at all (someone said, “Hey, you have to hear this!”); apparently Stevens used to be in a pre-fab British band enigmatically named “S Club 7″. I mean, the Internet would probably tell me where the name comes from, but I prefer to assume that, like the “Q Mart F” on Highland Ave, it is an alien plot.

[Out in the UK October 10.]

Salt Licks - “Lights” (mp3)

I think I was just fuzzy enough on who Will Oldham was when this came out in 1996 that seeing his name in the liner notes (he’s not in the band; they just covered one of his songs) didn’t put me off the way it probably would now. This song always sounded to me more like a stripped-down Tindersticks than any kind of alt-country.

[Amazon thinks it came out in 2000, but it's the same disc.]

The Virgin-Whore Complex - “Stay Away From My Mother” (mp3)

Virgin-Whore Complex singer Spats Ransom has a sort of blandly pleasing voice, which works with the music; it’s his co-vocalist Deb Fox’s blandly annoying voice that usually causes trouble, but in this song she isn’t annoying enough to pass as the singer’s mean, oblivious mom. The whole thing seems canned, like the theme song to a sitcom a little too bleak to get produced.

During their brief existence, the band tried to cultivate an air of mystery. Unfortunately, this was around the inception of the internet as mass medium (one album in 1996, this one in 1998) and their label’s website was genuinely scanty, so they kind of vanished without a trace. (Appropriate, but kind of too bad.)

[Out of print; Amazon wants to sell it to you for a penny.]

I have just one serious complaint: Franz Ferdinand don’t know how to name songs. “This Boy”, “Walk Away”, “What You Meant”, “Fade Together”, “You’re The Reason I’m Leaving”… Would you buy this record if that was all you had to go on? Fuck no.

Where I found FF’s first album comforting for somewhat arcane reasons (they sound like a handful of bands from 25 years ago that I never expected to hear heirs of on the radio), the same elements make this record unnerving. Hearing the Monochrome Set turn angry or raucous, which is what about half of You Could Have It So Much Better amounts to, is like finding pictures of your grandparents drinking and smoking in the 1930s. I would support it wholeheartedly except that I’m not sure I can apprehend it wholemindedly.

The band must realize this– the lyric that jumps out at you in track #1’s first verse is “What’s wrong with a little destruction?” ‘Destruction’ is a huge overstatement, but if that’s what they think they’re doing, it seems to have worked out okay. [Out October 4.]

I hesitated to say anything, because you have to figure, anybody that works in a record store, they’ve heard every dumb thing a customer might come up with attempting to be friendly. But I really meant it…

“It seems like seriously half the times I walk in here, the Donnas are playing.”

“Really?”

“It’s happened at least four times recently, and my memory doesn’t go back all that far.”

“Not a fan?”

“Eh, they’re fine. Not a huge fan. I just thought it was strange.”

One day not much later, they started playing this record just after I showed up. The guy at the counter seemed genuinely shocked when I bought it– it begins with several great power-pop songs in the vein of Veruca Salt’s second album and ends before it becomes an issue that the rest isn’t fully as good. I’ll write it all off as coincidence unless they start in with Wilco next week or something.

So this angel walks into a bar.

And she walks up to the first cowboy and she says, Hey… how do you people tell each other apart? You all look so much alike. And this cowboy turns to her real slow, and he says, “What makes you think we can tell ourselves apart?”

Facts: Second phase of post-punk revival. Sounds like Hot Hot Heat, Interpol, Bloc Party in that order. Verdict: Temporal continuum still in danger. Stock up on canned goods!

I give this credit for standing up to several listens so far, though it seems more like mixtape material than a life-changing album-as-album*. Got to wonder, though, why the first track is named after a Yellowman song (”Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt”). At no point does one hear a reggae influence or suspect that the singer is about to mention his seven-foot wang.

* That was also what I said about the Postal Service record. They now have a guy posted full-time around the corner from my house to point and laugh at me when I go by.