Certain albums grow on you, and some, unfortunately, wear off. Here’s what I can’t stand already: Cat Power: The Greatest. I love ya, Chan, and we go back to Myrna Lee, but you gotta write songs. Or more than two. The New Pornographers Twin Cinema:When you’re just a pop band, more of the same isn’t […]

For the past few weeks I’ve been digging The Ex, a wonderful 20+ year old group of Marxist/agitpop/Dutch/squatters/artists/postpunkers that at times could eat the likes of politico-rockers Fugazi or the Mekons for lunch. And they’re the only bunch who ever put an Elizabeth Bishop poem to music and made it happen, long before corny movies […]

If you had Dan Bejar’s voice and Neko Case’s phone number, would you bother singing your own songs? I’m all for vocally-limited male singers with exceptional songwriting skills (Leonard Cohen, Colin Meloy, Serge Gainsbourg, Luke Sutherland, Mark E Smith, Steve Malkmus, Lee Hazelwood, maybe even Tom Waits) as long as they seem aware of their […]

Where the Sound is raw and eager, the Comsat Angels are focus and space, like a clearer but brooding little brother. I tend to like them more than the Sound, and unlike the Sound, the Comsat Angels were able to drop three dynamite records from 1980-1982, subsequently fall off for the rest of the eighties […]

So yeah, some nifty crap did drop 1980-82 (Gang of Four debut, etc), of course, but my generalizations remain true, dammit, for generalization; and those examples that we think of are those still sung in critical psalms to this day. Frankly, I’m old enough to be getting bored of those records. Know how some records […]

1980, ’81 and ’82 aren’t seen as a glorious period in popular music. Punk was dead. Punk’s second wave was dying. Ian Curtis had (rightly, in my opionion, and that’s said with love) hanged himself. Most legendary American (post)punk bands were in the infant stage, if born at all, releasing scintillating but inchoate slabs of […]

The Knife, the Knife, the Knife, blah blah frikkin blah. Fuck the Knife. Boris! Boris – IbitsuBoris — Ano Onna No Onryou Have beer.

Why am I seeing young subway readers digging into Melville? Who told these people that Moby Dick is anything more than (the cliche is true) a whaling manual bookended by 50 pages of fiction? Did Brokeback Mountain inspire them to check out Billy Budd? Just rent Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. That’s all the Melville you […]

Is it obvious to anyone other than me that Dick Cheney was probably hammered when he shot a guy on his ‘hunting trip?’ Like golf, most ‘hunting’ is an excuse to drink in public without inviting a summons or having to drive home. And you don’t really need to be sober to hunt a fat […]

Flaunting the spirit of this blog, I don’t have anything to hate today. I’ve been sick and ornery, but today the virus skedaddled, so I actually spaced out in the shower and tried to come up with something. No dice. Although this morning someone asked me whether I watched the Grammys or not the other […]