This EP is the last Silkworm record; drummer Michael Dahlquist was killed before they could finish the album it would have been. And knowing that, it was hard not to get stuck on the beginning of opener “Bar Ice”. All you hear for the first stanza is Dahlquist’s drum and Tim Midgett’s voice: “We held a seance / In a parking lot / Called up the dead”.

But, two things. First, the song appears to be several years too old to be about Dahlquist’s death– at least, there’s a song of the same name on a solo EP that Midgett did in 2002. (Frustratingly, I haven’t heard it and can’t find a copy.) Second, as sometimes happens, I was singing along with the lyrics for a while before I really paid attention; it sounds like it goes “Called up the dead / Ghosts of the last time we talked”. The ghost of a conversation; is this about bringing back something that’s gone, or just trying to establish at one remove that it ever existed? Well, the record ends with these two lines from Dylan’s “Spanish Harlem Incident”: “I got to know babe, will you surround me / So I can know if I am really real?” But then, THAT song’s performance can’t be informed too heavily by how the band ended, since Dahlquist picked (and sang) it for a concert with Stephen Malkmus years ago.

All this context aside, Chokes! is still the best thing Silkworm have done in almost 10 years. But yesterday and today, I’ve been listening to it while saying goodbye to the house that I’ve lived in for three years, which has been a big part of my life for about five, and in the end, I find most impressive the fact that Midgett and Cohen somehow wormed their way out of the mental loop that makes tributes to the past grim and sad, like the artist thinks they’re doing someone a favor. Silkworm have always been happiest as sinners, and that’s the edge in their elegy. As Midgett says of the seance in “Bar Ice” just as the guitars finally kick in, “We knew it was wrong…”

The Brokerdealer - “The Last Ones Up Become Lovers” (mp3)

Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, over a Kruder & Dorfmeister-esque backing track (actually provided by a Twin Cities producer named Matt Arnold). This was done around when Lifter Puller split up, and it still sounds weird today. When Finn is in a rock band, his characters seem to have little pockets of significance following them around: they may or may not be the star of the show, but the camera is always on them*. It’s that kind of obligatory attention from the listener that makes excess seem glamorous sometimes, and this song has none of it.

It helps that my drug of choice in high school was sleep deprivation. Despite the other chemicals Finn’s gang take in this song, the feeling it focuses on is the same one I remember from a lot of Saturday nights just staying awake, when around 4 AM your body temperature plummets and everything seems to be made of glass.

[From the first untitled Brokerdealer EP, recorded in 2000.]

* Which I think is why it’s so creepy when one of them really manages to take him/herself out of the picture. There’s a Hold Steady b-side called “Hot Fries” with the stanza “I went to your party and your party got clever / I put a milkcrate on my head and surrendered in the corner / Some borderline whore asked me how I’m liking California / I just cried”. It always freaks me out a little.

It turns out you DO have to work to be as annoying as Infinite Livez was on his previous album (Bush Meat). On this semi-improvised album, his perversity is usually just intriguing, although one track nearly made me sick: “Right Here, Right Now” features the frequent recurrence of some noise that’s probably a micro-sliced vocal sample but sounds to me like a person about to throw up. Three or four minutes of that had me genuinely queasy. I couldn’t guess whether that was Livez’ idea, or some post-production by Swiss electronic duo Stade.

On second thought, it may be characteristic of me to find all this less irritating than Bush Meat which was… not mainstream, but clearly recognizable as hip-hop. Whereas this could easily have been put out to fulfill some bargain the gods of Artsiness demanded of Big Dada in return for them getting to sign street-accredited rapper Wiley. (Which they did.)

This band sound just enough like Go Sailor for their name to be awful, but not enough for their name to be offensive. They also sound so much like early Rilo Kiley that I was *surprised* to learn LGS singer Shana Levy played keyboards with them on Rilo Kiley’s first album.

And this album seems plenty good enough to listen to, but not quite good enough for the aforementioned facts to matter.

Mark E. Smith and Mouse On Mars. Someone jog my memory– has MES done an album-length collaboration with anyone else before? Because this is slightly perfect. The backing tracks seem more aggressive than what I remember of Mouse On Mars, too.