Over the course of the title track Williams exhorts his undefined audience (more on that in a second) to do the rudebox, to shake their rudeboxes, and to avoid messing with him lest he rudebox them. A dance? A body part? An act of violence? The most likely explanation, I guess, is that he’s improvising lyrics Miss Kittin-style and covering the gap with repetition and personality: “A-D-I-D-A-S, old school cuz it’s the best (yes!) / TK Maxx costs less (yes!) / Jackson looks a mess (yes!)”.

But you can watch the video on YouTube and see that the Rudebox is actually a sibling of the Matrix, a form of computerized confinement within which the gifted few can perform amazing physical feats. (The dancers use elements of krumping and of breaking, but it looks far smoother than most examples I’ve seen of either one. Some of the best moves just look like TRICKS; I mean that in the best way.)

About that audience: “Rudebox” has standard “hey girl, dance for me” tropes, and standard “hey boy, I’m cooler than you” lines to go with them. And yet, the female vocalist sounds like part of his posse, not the second-person object of his cajoling. Williams spends more time ‘teaching’ the listener how to do the Rudebox* than taunting anyone. We’re all in this together, even if only because Robbie Williams is easily distracted.

[*] Scare quotes because he barely describes the dance. More often, he sounds instructional but is only listing the right clothes to wear. Or blind-quoting the Beastie Boys.

Baby Ray - “Sorry” (mp3)

This song is in 6 time, though even that feels like sleight of hand– the vocalist and band are running down different tracks often enough that I keep expecting to find a beat missing, but no, it goes along at a steady rhythm for the whole song. I think.

Similarly, the lyrics are straightforwardly bitter (I think), and yet the guy sounds conflicted. This band has always made me slightly uneasy.

[From 1998's Monkeypuzzle.]

Shameless worship of the Postal Service. It’s kind of nice to know Ben Gibbard has saved some lives, though you kind of wish he’d finish saving them so that The Age Of Rockets had fewer lyrics like “I think I can / can taste blood in / in the back of my throat”. That’s the only real problem with The Drive Home: nothing wrong with loving the Postal Service, you just need to have the skills to deviate from the formula or the wisdom not to try. What gaps exist in the singer’s Ben Gibbard imitation do not manifest pleasantly. (Actually, the one screamy song isn’t bad.)

But let’s not dwell on that, not when the weirder points of contact with Gibbard and Tamborello’s style are so cute! There’s oddly-ahistorical attempts to put mundane details in long-term perspective (”I’m waiting for the dinosaurs to return / And ravage the traffic of morning commute”), unforced references to nuclear war*, samples that sound like warped 78s, and, of course, lots of cars.

It feels illegitimate to like this, knowing it would be nothing special if the Postal Service had more imitators. On the other hand, if campfire singalongs are culture– not just paltry stopgaps people resort to because they don’t have enough technology to listen to ‘real’ music– is this so different? Mimicking someone famous because you want to follow them into the spotlight has all kinds of problems, but doing it because it’s what you and your friends want to hear…

* I was thinking of this in the sports sense: “unforced errors”. But either way is okay.

Outside the world of dance music, people rarely like everything on a compilation. You aren’t expected to. But most compilations have more than ten songs; this one, adhering faithfully to the running order of the original Ten Plagues, doesn’t. We get one track of grime; high-art dirges from Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson; a Stephin Merritt song about lice that sounds like a demo (that’s not a criticism); Rufus Wainwright, unwisely slotted right after Scott Walker, who makes Rufus look like a chump; and so on.

That said, while it’s not eerie enough to cohere entirely, the musicians do tend to get across the idea of plagues as inexplicable horrors rather than a cartoon hand coming down from the clouds and smiting things. Imogen Heap’s song, for example, would be banal if it were about werewolves, but the familiar lycanthropy tropes– lost memory, I’m not always like this, stop me before I kill again– become newly unnerving as details of a person who turns into a cloud of locusts.

And it’s out just in time for the Passover season!

Years ago when I was doing radio, we got a compilation containing a song credited to ‘Get The Hell Out Of The Way Of The Volcano’ whose singer sounded kind of like the singer on a 12″ we owned by ‘Mirah’. I’d been unclear on whether Mirah was a band or a person or what, so I pulled out that record (the Storageland EP) and discovered most of it was made by someone with the unlikely name Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn. Get The Hell Out Of The Way Of The Volcano, on the other hand, was credited to one Khaela Maricich. I was unsure whether these were two different people.

By the time a year passed, I had found an album by Khaela Maricich called Look For It In The Sky, It Will Always Be There and one by Mirah called You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This. The similarity of the titles’ cadences fed my suspicion that one of the singers was fictional, but I reserved judgment.

MUCH later, after Mirah had put out a second album and become indie-famous, I stumbled on an EP by the Blow and learned that Khaela and Mirah were not each other, but did help out with each other’s records. Which I guess made more sense.

Anyway, in 2004, Khaela collaborated with a laptop guy named Jona Bechtolt to make a Blow EP for a tiny label named States’ Rights Records. As luck would have it, it was one of the best things any two members of the human race have ever done, and not many people heard it.

This is where you come in. K Records, the larger indie label who’ve put out the Blow’s other records (and who will put out the new one, Paper Television, later this month), are offering that perfect EP as a free download. Go to their website and click on “Poor Aim: Love Songs” in the top news item. Then you will be happy!*

* Happiness may not be available at all locations. Consult your local listings for details.

Dan Bejar’s songs are pretty good. The songs that I thought were Carey Mercer imitating Spencer Krug but which are actually Spencer Krug are pretty good. Carey Mercer still annoys me. Those Canadians like working together but they don’t seem to rub off on each other much.

(N.B. Dan Bejar is in the New Pornographers and Destroyer. Spencer Krug is in Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown. Carey Mercer is in Frog Eyes and Blackout Beach. They like yelping.)

Should I have been relieved that this was good, rather than excited? No. But let’s blame Showtunes for that and move on.

Stephin Merritt contributed one Gothic Archies song to each audiobook made from accordionist Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. For people who avoided “Lemony Snicket”’s writing because it seemed like smarmy Edward Gorey pastiche– you know, if you (ahem) happen to read the blog of anyone like that– the only obvious connection here is the first track, “Scream And Run Away”, in which children are instructed to avoid Jim Carrey Count Olaf while Handler pumps away on his accordion. A little research suggests the other songs do correspond to story elements, but this fortunately feels like a Stephin Merritt album, not a profit-maximizing tie-in. The bleakness is kind of pasted on; despite songs about gargoyles and cannibalism, this doesn’t come anywhere near matching Merritt’s website description of the Gothic Archies. (”What makes this band different from The Magnetic Fields is that any glimmer of hope is absolutely extinguished.”) That doesn’t both me much; a lot of 69 Love Songs might have sounded equally conceptually flimsy if not for its overall theme of miscellaneity (nice trick, that). Then as now, a good Stephin Merritt tune with a comfortably weird arrangement doesn’t need much excuse.

When i. came out, though, I said, “I’m not convinced that playing chameleon can take him where he’s trying to go.” Now… I think for whatever reason, this is exactly what Merritt wants to do: write songs for projects with a fixed external context that he’d be accused of schtickiness for trying to generate on his own. And hey, whatever works. I just don’t like the nagging sense that I may have been gravely confused ten years ago when I attributed so much emotional heft to the Magnetic Fields’ more deadpan adult misery.

In which the Killers indignantly point out that they’re not trendhoppers, they’re dilettantes.

This is growing on me, but I initially loathed it, so that’s a limited recommendation. It sounds as though the band wrote it trying to pander to a segment of rock critics that have okay taste but are terrible writers; “soaring choruses” (which is not to say ‘affecting’), “meaty hooks” (which is not to say ‘catchy’), etc. Trying to work backward from cliches, the Killers generate something not cliched but not distinctive.

It’s unclear whether the threatened “concept album” has taken place. Several songs on Hot Fuss apparently had some story running through them, and I listened to that a dozen times without noticing. Who knows?

And did you know that Killers singer Brandon Flowers is a Mormon? I did not.

I just found this recipe. I apparently made some notes without ever posting it, but it was tasty enough that I still remember liking it, so here it is. (It was, in fact, the first homemade Indian food I’ve had that tasted like restaurant food, whether or not that’s a good standard to use.)

750 g fish fillets [we used a tiny bit more - 1.75 lbs]
lemon juice
1 ts salt
1 ts black pepper
1 ts ground turmeric
oil for frying
1 lg onion, finely sliced
1 md onion, roughly chopped
1 ts chopped garlic
1 tb chopped fresh ginger
3 fresh red chilies [we used 1/4 of a Thai chili pepper]
2 tb blanched almonds [we used cashews]
1 tb white poppy seeds (optional) [we left this out]
2 ts ground cumin
2 ts ground coriander
1/4 ts ground cardamom
1/4 ts ground cinnamon
small pinch ground cloves
1/4 ts saffron strands [we left this out]
2 tb boiling water
1/2 c natural yogurt
salt to taste
2 tb chopped fresh coriander [we left this out]

Wash and dry fish, cut into large serving pieces [we used smaller pieces] and rub with lemon juice, salt, pepper and turmeric [we combined those things first]. Heat oil in a frying pan for shallow frying and on high heat, brown the fish quickly on both sides. Lift out on to a plate. In the same oil fry the sliced onion until golden brown, remove and set aside. [As printed, the recipe never puts the onion back in! I think they must have meant "remove pan from heat" here, not "remove onion from pan".]

Put chopped onion, garlic, ginger, chilies, almonds, poppy seeds into a blender jar and puree. If necessary add a little water. Add ground spices and blend once more, briefly.

Pour off all but about 2 Tbl oil from pan and fry the blended mixture until colour changes and it gives out a pleasant aroma. [There was no excess oil in the first place, so we used 2 Tbsp of new oil. They're not kidding about the aroma, though; it suddenly smelled good after a few minutes' frying.] The mixture should be stirred constantly while frying and care taken that it does not stick to the pan and burn. Add 1/2 cup water to blender container and swirl out any remaining spice mixture. Add to pan.

Pound saffron strands in mortar and pestle, add boiling water and stir, add to mixture in pan. Add yoghurt, stir and simmer gently for a few minutes, then add fish pieces, turning them carefully in the sauce. Add salt to taste. Cover and simmer for about 10 minutes, then sprinkle with fresh coriander and serve hot with rice.

(Posted to TNT - Prodigy’s Recipe Exchange Newsletter by “I. Chaudhary” on Apr 27, 1997.)

I got flak from a friend last year for saying what the Hold Steady did was “not much like songs”. They ARE songs, unquestionably, but they weren’t LIKE songs. I didn’t consider this a value judgment.

So I hesitate to say that Boys And Girls is “more musical”, because that usually carries the unstated implication that things are ipso facto better when more musical, which I don’t mean. (Ask me what I think of the new Mountain Goats album sometime.) I think, though, the melody and songiness do a lot for this record. The world has more slaves to catchiness than to difficulty, so I’d be worried about becoming one of the former too, if I wrote lyrics as densely as Craig Finn does; still, hooks and ideas are better together than separate, if you can manage it.

Oh, the lyrics. I spent half an hour in bed the other night* just thinking about the first punchline from “Stuck Between Stations”: She was a really cool kisser and she wasn’t that strict of a Christian / She was a damn good dancer but she wasn’t that great of a girlfriend. The ‘that’ in the first line instantly locates you as somewhere in one particular social sphere, as well as framing the song with a dicey (and familiar) gender narrative where the boy tries to “get” as much from the girl as she’s willing to “give”… and yet a ‘cool kisser’ is something else entirely. ‘Cool’ is for performances or forms of expression; you couldn’t take “a good lay” or any of its relatives and swap ‘good’ for ‘cool’ without changing the story. ‘Damn good dancer’ works similarly, placing the dance more as something done in public, when out partying together in a gaggle of friends, than as a stand-in for “man, she had a great body” or whatever else ‘dancer’ might represent to a callous ex.

I’ll have to listen to this a lot more, or at least read through all the lyrics, to know what I think of the gender stuff. The refrain of “You Can Make Him Like You” made me uncomfortable: If you get tired of your boyfriend’s things / There’s always other boys, there’s always other boyfriends. The second time through, though, I noticed the sting at the end sounded more like self-reproach than like Finn cutting one of his own characters down to size. For the whole song, he weaves together dependence on drugs and dependence on boys, but then subtly suggests the two are opposed, not parallel: They say you don’t have a problem until you start to do it alone / They say you don’t have a problem until you start bringing it home / They say you don’t have a problem until you start sleeping alone…

But then, John Berryman (who The Hold Steady pay tribute to, and approach to The Dream Songs could well have influenced Finn’s handling of recurring characters) was kind of weird about race, to contemporary ears, and one deals with it.

* (I would rather have spent less time thinking about it, by the way; the whole thing happened because I couldn’t sleep. Tough luck. Right now I probably would have gone on with a comparison of “Chillout Tent” and the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” did I not need to eat lunch, so that balances it out.)