Fall Out Boy - “The Music Or The Misery” (mp3)

This summer I excitedly told several people about Fall Out Boy, always adding the disclaimer that they were on a major label and so, for all I knew, were huge and overplayed in some places. None of these people I was accosting knew, as I didn’t know, that Fall Out Boy had already been toward the top of the Billboard charts for a month or two. This struck me as weird; yes, I’m not 15 anymore, but I do tend to have heard of things. The “uh… whatever” face my little brother made when he saw the song on my mix CD confirmed that my new temporary favorite band were painfully unhip.

Although hipness being what it is, I can’t use this in my defense when people accuse me of being overly hip. It’s weird.

This song is from the Japanese version of From Under The Cork Tree. It’s named after a line from High Fidelity, for crying out loud. Standard structure for Fall Out Boy: ABCABCDC. If every rock band in the top 10 habitually used four different melodies per song, this stuff would be rehabilitated by critics faster than you can say “Kylie Minogue”.

I just played through an adventure game by a designer I usually like. Halfway through I started to suspect the worst, and indeed my fears were borne out: it was yet another game where the twist is that you’re dead but you don’t know it yet.

Since I didn’t think the designer in question would do something so predictable, it didn’t take the tension out of the game; right up until the end, I held out hope. And the whole thing was very well done for what it was. But…

Is this only a trope in games, where the first-person aspect of it makes the premise that much creepier, or do I just play mediocre games more often than I read mediocre fiction?

Oh hey, it’s actually a soundtrack. Those Swedes! So literal!

I should have guessed, since nothing says “our bouncy dance-pop is completely sincere and uninflected” like a promo photo that depicts you as a gymnast and coach giving the camera your best serial-killer blank stares.

Oh look, Olof is smiling in this other highly natural-looking photo. Kind of.

I guess I was onto something with that Fischerspooner comparison.

Like Fischerspooner said, I get excited when I get confused. [Out March 2006.]

Funny how these “serious” MCs have exactly the same vocal cadence as “joke” MCs Goldie Lookin’ Chain. Dear Audio Bullys: We know there are actual rappers in England, because some of them have started selling us music. Your album is a little too weak for the fact that you don’t bill it as hip-hop to excuse your dullness.

Even worse, the beats have just enough edge that the listener occasionally perks up, expecting something interesting to happen, which it doesn’t. Well, that’s “worse” from my point of view right now. I’ve willingly gone dancing to more awful music than this; I can think of situations where I’d be happy for this to come on. Oh, but that’s really just the other side of the same coin– the misguided identification with Audio Bullys that makes me resentfully think I’m the target audience (though I’m patently not, since they do sell records) is the same thing which would make me not just relieved, but pleased, if this replaced John Cougar Mellencamp on the PA at a pizza place. [Out in the US on Tuesday.]

Owen Ashworth’s voice always has the inhuman sniveling quality of someone who’s about to start weeping, even though mostly he deadpans his lyrics. This is creepy. It also makes him sound like Fozzie The Bear doing a Moby impression.

Ashworth’s new fancy production does him some good, though don’t misunderstand– the arrangements aren’t any fancier; CFTPA is still only him and things that beep, with occasional guest vocals. The good songs (this time around we get four or five) are so intimate and cutting that the bad songs feel like a betrayal instead of just a disappointment.

Every sad lo-fi musician has been accused of putting style over substance at some point, but Ashworth OUGHT to be immune. He needs surprisingly few lines to lay out one of his stories, and he would have to sell another 100,000 copies per record to accumulate fans that found his voice annoying rather than expressive. Either he’s not even trying, or he doesn’t know his own strengths. [Available March 8. An EP, already out, contains the best album track and a decent rendition of Prince's "When U Were Mine", rapidly becoming an indiepop standard.]

The same kind of spacious renovation on indie rock that The Velvet Teen and (recently) My Morning Jacket perform. Bonus points for steeldrum or thumb piano or whatever they play the intro to “Smoke And Air” on. I always think I would like this kind of thing more if it were easier to tell one song from another, though this skirts the edge of being good enough to give a free pass. Tracks like “Caledonia” raise the possibility that their next record will sound like Out Hud, or else that their previous one already did.

For reasons not entirely clear, Download.com is offering all of American Music Club’s amazing Everclear for free. This was one of my favorite records in college; Mark Eitzel had just reached the level of success where people start bringing in inappropriate ‘name’ producers, and the massive amount of echo applied to everything on this album has divided fans ever since. I think it’s perfect; the echo creates a feeling of being in some particular *place*, but just where is never clear. I could never pick a favorite between this and Mercury, but Mercury is both funnier and more pained, with black humor used to push deeper into misery. Everclear is sad but content, luminous even in the corner of a dive bar.

[Download here. The first track, "Another Morning", is from a different record; the other eleven are posted in the right order, though they don't have ID3 tags, so you may have to recreate the running order yourself.]

HNIA issued several great tracks from Detrola on various obscure records last year, though for some reason it didn’t occur to me they might be previewing songs intended for wider release; I just thought Warn DeFever was too perverse to care how many people heard him re-enter the realm of genius.

New singer Andrea sounds like Karin Oliver, the ghostly voice of His Name Is Alive’s first couple albums, and the degree of sonic horsing around has also gone back up a bit. I guess all those preview records did their job: I feel as though HNIA have been this good for a long time, even though actually they started to slip 6 or 7 years ago and then went silent altogether for a long time after 2002’s Last Night.

I still don’t understand quite where the band’s name comes from. The official story is that it came from DeFever’s high school history class, during the unit on Abraham Lincoln– doesn’t explain much. I see that CD Universe, under the same confusion as most people encountering HNIA for the first time, lists Detrola under “contemporary Christian music”. [Out January 24.]

The Faint - “Dust” (mp3)

From a 2001 vinyl single by The Faint; they covered Sonic Youth’s “Mote” and then added this cleverly-titled b-side for thematic unity. “Dust”’s electro bounce might have sounded out of place on Danse Macabre, but it’s still odd that they left this song in obscurity. Dance songs with pedal steel in them deserve more attention.