Most of these songs would be a letdown if they were written by some other band and played over the PA as the lights came on after a New Pornographers show. I think hearing them come from the stage beforehand might actually make me upset.

Exceptions: “All The Things That Go To Make Heaven And Earth” and “Mutiny, I Promise You”, neither of which is life-changing.

So far I’ve liked every side project I’ve heard by members of TTC more than TTC’s own albums, and in fact this might be my favorite (except, of course, the trio’s unbelievable digi-krump guest vocals on Modeselektor’s “Dancing Box”).

Party was clearly made with the help of Ed Banger’s time machine, the one that only goes to 1982. Being limited in the scope of his genre pastiche seems good for Teki, though. Like some sort of top-40 Roomba, his single-mindedness and lack of judgment are very useful with the correct boundaries set. For example, there’s absolutely no excuse for making a song like “The Ish” unless it’s fun*; and it would be intolerable if it were any longer, boring if it were more sensible.

I take no position on how this will sound after more exposure.

* Chorus: “That shit is the ish, that ish is the shit / That ish is the bomb, that bomb is the weezy / That weezy is the wow, that wow is the wicki-wicki / That wicki is the whoop, that whoop is the wham-bam”. Maybe you had to be there.

The song’s other refrain is “White bitches with fat asses / Get in the tour bus now!”– problematic, but, like, do we really think Teki Latex has a tour bus? Or that if he tried to call a woman ‘bitch’ with a straight face, it would come out as anything other than “Have you seen my records?” Etc.

A short survey about those mixes I post every year… If your answer to the first question is zero, I’d still be pleased to hear from you, but skip any questions that don’t apply.

[survey_fly]

Recipe, adapted from here by tripling the amount of sauce:

2 (6 ounce) fresh tilapia fillets
1 teaspoon tablespoon spicy brown mustard [actually, we used Grey Poupon, the kind with seeds]
1 teaspoon tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon tablespoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon tablespoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon tablespoon fine Italian bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 375°F. Butter or oil a baking dish and bake the fillets in it for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, stir together everything else except the bread crumbs.

After 10 minutes of baking, spread paste on fillets and sprinkle with bread crumbs. Continue baking for another 5 minutes until topping is bubbly and golden.

Okay, so we tripled all the amounts in the topping because it seemed like even so it would make such a tiny amount of sauce. And it did! But man, it was more than enough. This had a STRONG flavor. Had we used the amount suggested, the layer of paste perhaps would have been thin enough to bubble or crust over; that didn’t happen, which may also have affected how it tasted.

Still, I liked this a lot. If cooking the sauce through is important, I would rather apply the paste earlier in baking than decrease the amount. On the other hand, I like food that wakes me up. The taste was complex enough that I think it would still be interesting for someone who made it as originally written because they wanted less punch.

Also, note that the only prep any ingredient requires is that the cheese has to be grated. This was very low effort for how interesting it tasted.

There’s something bodiless about these rerecorded versions of the songs from Get Him Eat Him’s three recent EPs*, something pleasantly unnatural. GHEH abjure ego, meaning– even that impulse toward basic self-definition most bands feel when naming themselves or designing cover art, an impulse widely believed to be sacred to the gods of Rock. And yet listening to them, you don’t find anything missing. In fact, the tracks are absurdly full of sounds and details, as though peeling off your skin just made a team of master muralists appear to cover you back up again. Highly recommended.

* The EPs were also fantastic, though only in one case do I wish they’d stayed closer to the old version: “The Coronation Show”, which went from ’sparkly’ to ‘last dance on prom night’. Given the choice between a heart-to-heart and a party everyone can go to, I’ll usually take the democratic romp.

Just about better than you can imagine, especially if your imagination is informed by the (true) fact that this box set was recorded in a month last November, with Smith writing an average of one new song per day. (Each disc has ten songs, three of which are covers or things he already had sitting around.) It sounds like some songs will end up on other albums eventually, but the albums Cyan and Yellow thoroughly stand on their own already, plus Magenta is pretty solid, and if you order all four together you get a discount plus a bonus live CD that hits several of the high points and has five or six other unreleased songs.

“Unreleased songs” seems like a weird thing to say, given that the other songs are BARELY released… I mean, how many people will hear any of these? But anyway, the bonus disc has some songs not on the other four.

Enough “Consumer Reports” apery, though. Graham Smith has developed the one skill crucial for anyone who wants to pull speed-writing stunts like this: he knows what to and what not to bother polishing. Nor are the unpolished tracks worse as such. If you’re capable of writing “Will It / It Will” at all, you can probably do it in half an hour; that makes it more impressive, not less.

Smith makes songs as if from found objects, only the objects are bits of mental clutter, familiar to the characters and meaningless to us. What do Frank Sinatra, Prefab Sprout and Dramarama have in common? I have no idea, except that one song’s narrator is irritated his girlfriend likes them all. The climax of the box’s best song goes “All right, all right, I’m writing it down / One four blah blah, Stuyvesant Town / I’ll be there soon”, like seriously, we all know zipcodes but who CARES about them?

Plus not nearly enough songwriters get simultaneously conversational and formal the way Smith does, with verbal tics like “and/or”, “albeit”, “by the by” seeming unnatural until you realize that actually, you talk that way too. Unless you don’t, in which case I won’t risk guessing whether you need CMYK as much as I turned out to.

I want to say something about how bitter many of these songs are, but nothing comes to mind. Caveat emptor, I guess.

This band were better as a near-total mystery… I was fiercely loyal to them after the first time I ever heard “Ice Cream”, but watching singer Tahita Bulmer dress and act sexy in their video for “The Bomb” is just embarrassing; not because she’s unattractive as such but because the whole idea so ill-serves NYPC that I just don’t care. In their music the band are a collective, and a tough one; they need to either all be out there gyrating and vamping, or all be intent on playing their instruments, keeping time with rigid little jerks of knee and head. To judge from the video, the latter’s what they actually do, but either way…

And for that matter, the album only falters on a few choruses, where Bulmer’s voice goes outside the fixed palette of idiosyncracies that made their three singles instantly unforgettable. The sing-song “Grey” and whiny “Hiding On The Staircase” burned through my patience much faster than I thought they could.

It’s the curse of the dance band: you have to make people forget everything so they can groove, but then distract them from dancing enough that they remember to buy your t-shirt at the end of the night. More, please, and hold the sprinkles.