I usually give a daily glance to the most trafficked blogs; Gorilla Vs. Bear is slightly worked up about Tapes N Tapes backlash from the un-free NY Sun site. Tapes N Tapes is as middlebrow as they come — I can think of 46 outfits at the same talent level, 4 with the same played-out alt-country-via-Talking Heads sound — and I was surprised that my discarded little mp3s by TnT had gained so much significance.

Cansei Der Sexy: electroclash is over, isn’t it? I’d say buy a Free Kitten album album instead, but most of those stink too.

The leaked Thom Yorke solo tracks have to be doctored loops or some other purposely ruined versions of the real thing to come. They’re awful. There’s more interesting noise in a block of melting ice.

So what’s to like? The new Xiu Xiu single, “Boy Soprano.”

And I’ve been playing PIL’s “The Flowers of Romance” for the hip hop kids here at the job; blown minds, epithets, nonplussedness, seizures. It’s all fun. Never realized how Rotten has pretty much wholesale stolen his singing style from the pitch and note melismatics of meuzzins’ calling people to prayer. Really. Compare the two sometime. It’s probably something he heard in the mid-seventies UK, reverse immigration being the end product of imperialism, and Rotten loving such ironies.

There’s also some today-love for the The Fucking Champs. Wish they’d called themselves the Frikking Champs, though, funnier to see that on TV, if they get there. Not sure I need an album’s worth of them, and the following track does first come off as useless metal instrumental, but wait for the double kick drum, and raise the devil sign high, young evil one. If Out Hud can do what they do, with dub, Fucking Champs can do it with metal. And I love that song title. Metalhead humor. Might it be a Spinal Tap quote?

The Fucking Champs – Andres Segovia Interests Me