Alphabeat “Fantastic 6” – Though the lyrics of “Fantastic 6” may register as being a bit odd at first, the song is so thrilling and camp that it’s pretty easy to just tune out the words and just go along for the ride. It sounds like the midway point between Bis and Abba, and the song effortlessly pulls the listener into its spirit of cartoon superhero triumphalism, leaving you feeling both silly and invincible by the time it’s over. The lyrics, as it turns out, mirror the sound of the song perfectly. The band are singing about some sort of international police organization that monitors our every move from outer space via sophisticated omnipresent surveillance, and protects us all from evildoers. (Part of the chorus is sung in German, and that’s where it’s all spelled out for you — they refer to “weltpolizei,” which translates to “world police.”) There are two ways to interpret the intention of this song: Either Alphabeat are being sarcastic and they are off on a “who watches the watchmen?” riff, or this is an unironic celebration of the notion of a quasi-fascist international police regime. I’m inclined to think that it’s definitely the former, but either way, their command of propaganda kitsch is potent and undeniable. (Click here to buy the inferior UK/European version of the album from Amazon UK.)

Melee Beats “Distraction” – I’m very fond of the way this track implies a depth of field within its range of sounds. Listening to the song is like watching a 3D movie — keyboard parts recede drastically behind the beat, and overlap with these cosmic Kraftwerk parts that pop so much that they seem surreal and slightly disconnected from the thumping bass line. The singer seems somewhat passive to the sound, as though he’s just sort of passing through these amazing electronic textures in a simulated physical space, just like the listener. (Click here to buy it from Melee Beats.)

Jean Grae & 9th Wonder “Don’t Rush Me” – Hip hop has a long tradition of artists who present their persona as an absolute thing, as if the construction of their identity and reputation is the only thing they can truly own and control. In this track, Jean Grae discusses her identity as a work in progress, and speaks openly about her insecurities and attempts to improve herself without sacrificing the proud swagger of a sharp MC. Grae’s verses critique her flaws and reflect on her moments of doubt, but there’s an optimism and confidence in her words and delivery that keeps the song from seeming overly defensive or defeated. If anything, Grae sends the message that if you’re not doing what you can to mature and reconstruct your own character, you’re the one who ought to be pitied. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

I hope that you appreciate the fact that I very seldom post more than one song from the same album at once, but this is rare case in which I think the songs — which segue into each other on the record — work too well together to be considered on their own.

Shannon McArdle “Leave Me For Dead”

Shannon McArdle “I Was Warned”

“Leave Me For Dead” and “I Was Warned” are essentially the same story told from different angles. In the former, McArdle is telling a recent ex on no uncertain terms “You can say that it’s over, but I’m not finished with you.” She seems a bit manic, and the music bears that out with a cocky groove and a saturated organ texture that seems a bit bold and rude. She’s flirty and pushy, and her attempt at a double-entendre in the last verse comes out sounding like clumsy pornography.

If “Leave Me For Dead” is acting out on drunken impulses, “I Was Warned” is the regretful, depressive hangover, complete with an odd scraping sound that simulates a distracting headache. The song hovers and drones as she dryly reiterates her ex’s critique of her behavior: “No one goes for that kind of talk…brash and balls out, an aversion to subtlety.” The song is lost in an emotional limbo, somewhere between her self-pitying side ceding his point, and wanting to tell him to fuck off for asking her to behave in a manner less threatening to men. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Catcall “August” – This song is a state of post-traumatic shock rendered in super-saturated synthesizers and a beat that keeps on moving, but only seems to pace around in a circle. As the music expresses numb confusion, the vocals convey a slightly muted form of anguish. At some points in the song, Catcall’s voice recalls Courtney Love at her most vulnerable, and that association serves the song well. After all, Love always excelled when we could hear her tough facade disintegrate into raw grief mid-track. (Click here to buy it via Catcall’s MySpace page.)

Sonic Youth @ Battery Park 7/4/2008

The RZA (featuring Rev William Burk, Crisis & Thea van Seijen) “Good Night Kiss” – Digi Snacks is a long, long, long away from the RZA’s best work. Lyrically, he’s not giving us anything we haven’t heard him do before with more energy and inspiration. Musically — well, I’m going to be very charitable and suggest that his efforts amount to an experiment yielding mixed results. All of the tracks on Digi Snacks, including a handful of cuts not produced by the RZA himself, have a sparse, zoned-out sound that feels mellow and relaxing when heard a track or two at a time, but taken as a whole, the music begins to feel disconcerting and vaguely uncomfortable. He’s especially obsessed with these keyboard parts that seem to hover slowly in mid-air, seemingly disassociated from the other elements in the arrangements. Like all of his work as Bobby Digital, the sounds on the songs have an unreal crispness to them, like the musical equivalent of digital animation that dips into the uncanny valley. The overall effect is more chilling than chill, at best evoking the mindset of a deeply medicated person who has become slightly removed from reality, and at worst like having an aggravating itch while incapacitated in a coma. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

In recent months, I’ve been complaining a lot about this seemingly infinite wave of faceless, deeply unimaginative indie bands and their tired, worn-out influences. Thankfully it seems as though we’ve mostly cycled through the whole Joy Division/”punk-funk” thing and that the “we’re playing cheap Casios, lolz 80s!” aesthetic is on the wane, but we’ve still got a glut of limp psychedelic folk, faux-Animal Collective bullshitting, and lame-ass attempts at mimicking the Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. I’m sure you can think of some other sounds that you’ve heard too much of in the past eight years.

In particular, the nu shoe-gaze stuff has got to stop — it’s dull, lazy, transparently dumb, and aside from Deerhunter, virtually everyone doing it does not seem to grasp the ambiguous sexuality that made My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless an interesting record in the first place. It’s a classic example of hacks latching on to an easily aped stylistic element — in this case, foregrounded rhythm guitar and buried vocals — and tossing out every bit of thoughtfulness, character, and subtlety that made that style work in the first place. I’m not necessarily opposed to the shoegazer sound, but I am very depressed that so many people have opted to beat a simple idea into the ground instead of following My Bloody Valentine’s example and finding their own distinct ways of expressing non-traditional eroticism in music.

This is the problem we’re facing: We’re stuck with a generation of young indie musicians who are more interested in fitting into pre-existing genres and aesthetic communities rather than developing their own concepts, sounds, and styles. Yes, there are definitely still some maverick artists doing their own thing, but they tend to be non-American and/or in their late 20s/early 30s, and they are increasingly marginalized by indie culture in favor of safe, predictable acts whose work will never challenge their audience’s taste or intellect.

We need change. We need to get away from the anti-intellectualism of this horrible era. We need to acknowledge and then subsequently reject the insidious, often unremarked-upon sexism that dominates 00s indie rock culture. We need to move on from recycling the work of the same old “safe” artists, and abandon the comfort of familiarity, and get back to embracing novelty and innovation. We need new artists with new influences.

So what do I want to hear? It’s hard to say, really. I want something new, I want to be surprised. I want artists with strong personalities that don’t conform to traditional expectations of rock/pop/hip hop stars. That said, I can offer some tips, and point in the direction of artists whose work ought to be reconsidered, and records and songs that may be worth mining for musical ideas. In the coming months, I’ll be offering up New Influences on this site, and who knows, maybe someone out there will find themselves inspired. The artists and songs I plan to spotlight are generally well-known, and many will have something of a legacy, though usually restricted to their particular genre. I don’t ask that people clone these songs, but instead give thought to what makes them tick, and apply that to their own work.

Here’s my first suggestion.

Janet Jackson “Miss You Much” – I’m recommending three things here: Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ collaborations with Janet Jackson in general, Rhythm Nation 1814 in particular, and this song in specific. There’s quite a lot to take away from Rhythm Nation 1814, but of its seven brilliant singles, “Miss You Much” is the one that epitomizes the distinct aesthetic of the album, balancing out the harshness of its title track and “Black Cat” with the giddy, girlish hooks of “Escapade” and “Love Will Never Do (Without You).”

Like most every song on Rhythm Nation 1814, “Miss You Much” is built around a huge, dominating beat. In fact, if you just casually listen to the song, it’s unlikely that you’d come away from it thinking of anything aside from its rhythm and Jackson’s lead vocal. Aside from her singing, melodic and non-rhythmic elements in the arrangement have a somewhat subliminal effect on the listener, guiding and emphasizing dynamic shifts without distracting attention from its primal hooks. As the song approaches its climax, it gradually adds more textural elements without crowding out its abundant negative space and emphasis on percussion. (As far as I can tell, there is no guitar in the song whatsoever until its final minute.) Jam and Lewis’ track is a masterpiece; a virtuoso performance that achieves an immediate, forceful physical effect via subtlety and nuance.

I suggest that musicians focus their attention on the arrangement of “Miss You Much” rather than Jackson’s vocal performance or persona, but I would be remiss not to mention that her presence is essential to the success of the piece. Her voice effortlessly transitions from a rhythmic toughness to soulful emoting to a flirty softness without overselling any aspect of her performance, lending the song a continuum of emotions and attitudes that add up to the impression that we’re listening to the expression of a fully-formed human being with contradictions and complexities. (Click here to buy it from Amazon)

Addendum: More thoughts and clarifications of intent are on the tumblr. Also, I hope that you do understand that the title “Your New Influences” is a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Tricky “Puppy Toy” – I’m on Tricky’s side, and I always have been, but he doesn’t make it easy. (Indeed, it is very tricky to be a Tricky fan.) Since the late ’90s, he’s spend most of his time either distancing himself from the sound of his best-loved work, or trying in vain to reconnect with the inspiration that yielded Maxinquaye and Pre-Millenium Tension. Though it’s unlikely that he’ll ever make another classic album, it’s important to note that he is still capable of producing good work. Every Tricky record has at least one great song on it — for example, I highly recommend “For Real” from the otherwise dire Juxtapose — and for some reason, he’s intentionally relegated a number of strong tracks to total obscurity. He’s a perverse guy, and because of that, I don’t trust his judgment at all.

Knowle West Boy, his first album in five years, is probably his best album since Angels With Dirty Faces, but it’s still a mess. A solid third of the record is tainted by his consistently terrible taste in male vocalists; another third of it is kinda formulaic and neither here nor there. The successful tracks are the most dynamic– his solo “rap” turn on “Council Estate;” his twisted approximation of new wave pop on “Far Away;” the feminine aggression of “Veronika” and “Puppy Toy.” Though Tricky is clearly still trying to find the perfect Martina Topley-Bird soundalike, the vocalists on the latter two tracks do well to avoid the sleepiness of previous faux-Martinas, and play up the tone of sassy defiance that made Topley-Bird so compelling in the first place.

“Puppy Toy” actually comes closer to sounding like “Together Now,” Tricky’s collaboration with Neneh Cherry on the Nearly God record, than anything he ever made with Martina. The song applies the soft-loud-soft dynamics of ’90s alt-rock to a song that alternates between skewed lounge jazz and rock n’ roll cabaret. It’s a bold, bombastic number that contrasts some fine sonic detail — layers of humming electric guitar, fluid acoustic bass, a string arrangement — with a huge chorus that tramples everything in its path. (Click here to buy it from Domino Records.)

Beta Satan “666” – Beta Satan is the new incarnation of the Danish pop band Tiger Tunes, who have been featured here at least three times before. There are a few differences in terms of personnel, but the most significant change is that they’ve married their quirky pop sensibility to hard-driving, super-dynamic rock, resulting in catchy tunes that often match the gut-punching intensity of the late, great McLusky.  “666,” the band’s most brilliant track to date, pairs lyrics expressing severe yet trivial anxiety about a girl to a ruthless mechanical stomp that is simultaneously violent, visceral, exhilarating, and hilarious. I can’t help but imagine that there’s at least a couple million people out there who would absolutely LOVE this song — seriously, just trying listening to that depth-charge beat without picturing a mob of maniacs moshing in a muddy field — so if you like this one, I strongly encourage you to pass it around.  (Click here for the official Beta Satan site.)

Seelenluft “La Concierge” – This arrangement starts off grounded with a firm dance beat that carries through much of the track, but as the song progresses, it eventually drops out, and the music begins to float away like a helium balloon. The airy lightness is with the song from the start, but that untethered feeling at the end is lovely, especially in the way Seelenluft simulates a slow, graceful ascension into the clouds. (Click here to buy it from Juno.)

High Places “Sandy Feat (7″ version)” – It can be hard to hear the songs on Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes without thinking “wow, if only they had made a really nice version of this in a studio, it’d be amazing!” Of course, those records have a deliberate aura and charm, and it’s not some accident of laziness. They are the result of a fully-formed postmodern aesthetic, and even though they may have often sounded better in concert, they always feel more special and magical in their unfinished form. This isn’t really the case for High Places. They write some very nice songs, but as far as I can discern, their records sound like extremely thin demos, and that’s that. If there is any postmodern intentionality, it’s not apparent. Like too many young bands from this era, nods to lo-fi, drone, electronic music, shoegaze, ambient, and “world music” seem like default decisions rather than considered aesthetic positions. The duo have a knack for simple, ingratiating melodies, skipping beats, and audio texture, but they don’t yet seem fully formed as a band. Which is fine enough, don’t get me wrong — they’re just starting out, and this is normal and healthy. They’ve got promise; I’d love to see them follow through on it with their next record, even if I’m worried that they will continue to follow their worst Animal Collective-esque impulses. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

The Dead Science “Monster Island Czars” – This is very unusual. The Dead Science are part prog, part modern classical, part no wave/noise rock. The singer not only sounds quite a bit like Craig Wedren from Shudder To Think, but Wedren actually has a guest appearance on the album. (Katrina Ford of Celebration also turns up, and there’s certainly some similarities to her band as well.) A majority of the lyrics are either about comic books or the Wu-Tang Clan. (The album is dedicated to the Wu-Tang Clan, and when you open the gatefold of the packaging, it reads “It’s Yourz.”) The music is jagged, violent, dramatic, cinematic, and perversely romantic. It draws on all these things that are familiar to me, and yet it still sounds somewhat alien. “Monster Island Czars” is particularly compelling in the way it slashes, collapses, rises, and burns through so much ground in less than four minutes without sounding the least bit disjointed. (Click here to buy it from Constellation Records, and here for the Dead Science’s official site.)

Pearl Jam @ Madison Square Garden 6/24/2008
Hard To Imagine / Save You / Why Go? / All Night / Corduroy / Faithfull / Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town / Down / Unemployable / Given To Fly / Who You Are / Whipping / 1/2 Full / Even Flow / Present Tense / Daughter / Do The Evolution // Love Reign O’er Me / W.M.A. / Leash / Spin The Black Circle / Wasted Reprise / Porch /// No More / Crazy Mary / Comatose / I Believe In Miracles (with CJ Ramone) / Alive //// All Along The Watchtower / Indifference

I’ll have a different, more show-focused review of this concert over at Stereogum later in the day, but for now, I’m going to be indulgent. (It’s up now, with lots of great photos by Maria Tessa Sciarrino.)

This was my first Pearl Jam concert in a little over ten years. That last show was a brief festival appearance, and so it’s really my second full Pearl Jam gig, the first being a stop in Connecticut on the No Code tour back in 1996. Looking over this setlist, three things come to mind:

1. Wow, I got really lucky. They played my favorite rarity right at the start, and then threw in “Faithfull,” “Corduroy,” “Whipping,” and “Unemployable,” all of which would be near the top of my personal wish list. (“Wishlist,” however, was not, but that’s not really a comment on the quality of that song.) Aside from “Even Flow,” which you’re definitely going to see no matter what, Pearl Jam setlists are very random, and really, any song from a pool of about 200 could pop up in any given show. Sure, they didn’t do “I Got Shit,” “Grievance,” “Not For You,” or “Breath,” but I think I made out pretty well. Bonus: They did not play any songs that I actively dislike, like, say, “God’s Dice.”

2. I kinda wish I could send 13 year old me a letter telling him “Hey, be patient. You’re going to see Pearl Jam play “Hard To Imagine” in 15 years, and it’s gonna rule. Also, believe it or not, they’re actually going to do “W.M.A.” too, but with a slightly different arrangement.”

3. The teenage version of me would’ve known a little over half of the songs played in this show, i.e. all the songs written and in the group’s known repertoire before 1997.

I wasn’t sure what to expect to feel at this show, but I’m glad that what I did feel wasn’t just a lot of distanced nostalgia. I may have significantly toned down my Pearl Jam fandom over the past 15 years, but it never really went away. I may not listen to the band with any sort of regularity now, but I never stopped loving any of those old songs, and I never lost interest in their newer material. I felt very present at the show, and part of that comes down to the intense, unanimous enthusiasm of the audience, and most of it comes out of the fact that the band are effortlessly compelling. Eddie Vedder has got his showman tricks, but he doesn’t lean too hard on them, instead just sinking himself deep into the songs, and letting his natural charisma do the rest. Their show is totally no-frills — standard lighting, no real backdrop. It’s just the band on stage, playing songs for nearly three hours. It sounds so simple, but how many bands can pull that off in a room of that size, pretty much anywhere on the planet, and have pretty much every single person in the room totally pumped and singing along the entire time? It’s extraordinary.

Pearl Jam “Hard To Imagine” (Live @ Van Andel Arena Grand Rapids, MI, 2006) – This is wrote about “Hard To Imagine” three years ago…

When I was a teen, I was very obsessed with Pearl Jam, a condition that was exacerbated by the intense fandom of many of my friends at school, some of whom had been buying cd bootlegs featuring unreleased songs that the band had been playing live. At that point, half of the fun of being a Pearl Jam fan was being amazed by how much excellent material the band was willing to relegate to b-sides and soundtracks, or just not release at all. I had a live version of “Hard To Imagine” dubbed to a cassette from my friend Steve’s cd, and I would listen to it over and over again, totally baffled as to why the band would just abandon what was clearly one of their very best songs. I’d dub copies for friends, and talk it up with any Pearl Jam fan who would listen, totally confident that the band would put it out on their next record. Vitalogy came and went, and I rationalized – it just wasn’t right for that record, it would obviously pop up later on. When the tracklisting for No Code was announced in Ice, I convinced myself and others that the song “Present Tense” HAD to be a retitled version of the song. I mean, isn’t it obvious? The chorus is “things were different then, all is different now” – like, it’s the present tense!!! But no. Though I liked No Code and still do, my interest in Pearl Jam fell off sharply around 1997, and has only dimmed with time.

A studio version of the song was finally released in 1998, tossed off to the soundtrack of an obscure movie called Chicago Cab. At that point, it was hard for me to muster much enthusiasm. I never bought the soundtrack, and eventually just downloaded it from Audiogalaxy. It’s a lovely version of the song, though not quite everything it could have been. It still sounds lonely, nostalgic, and majestic, and the guitar at the beginning still evokes wet snow on the ground and the scent of smoke from wood burning stoves mixing with crisp air (probably just my sense memory from when I first heard the song, but whatever). I maintain after all of this time that it is certainly one of the best songs the band has ever written, and when I was looking at the band’s recent setlists a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but to feel extremely jealous of the audiences who’ve seen them play it, as it has become a semi-regular song in their rotation following the release of their b-sides collection, Lost Dogs. I’m pretty sure that there was one show in Canada where they played this, “Breath,” “I Got Shit,” “Not For You,” and “Release” all in the same set, something that would’ve totally blown my mind when I was sixteen. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Oh, by the way, maybe someday I’ll tell you all about the Vitalogy book I wanted to write for the 33 1/3 series. Not today.

Architecture In Helsinki “Hold Music (Max Tundra Remix)” – Given the explosion in remixing over the past decade, I reckon we’re at the point where something like 98% of all remixes are totally unlistenable and awful. The bad remixes are usually either glitchy, self-indulgent garbage that amounts to some idiot making some terrible new composition out of fragments of the source material, or someone taking the source material and finding a way to dumb it down or otherwise strip it of its original appeal. Max Tundra’s Architecture In Helsinki remix is one of the 2% that get it right. His somewhat cartoonish style is immediately apparent, but it doesn’t eclipse the personality of Architecture In Helsinki or their song: The two aesthetics blend harmoniously, as if they had collaborated on writing and arranging the tune from the start. Tundra did nothing to change the basic structure of “Hold Music” — pretty much everything that worked well in the song is intact — but he adds more color and bolder dynamic shifts to the arrangement. The result is bouncy and restless, and filled with a nearly overwhelming variety of textures. Better yet, Tundra makes some sense of the title by setting the chorus sections to bits that actually sound like hold music. (Click here to buy it from Polyvinyl Records.)

Sloan @ Bowery Ballroom 6/20/2008
Believe In Me / All I Am Is All You’re Not / Don’t You Believe A Word / Everything You’ve Done Wrong / I’m Not A Kid Anymore / The Dogs / Sensory Deprivation / Burn For It / Ready For You / Witch’s Wand / I Am The Cancer / Ill-Placed Trust / Emergency 911 / Down In The Basement / Something Wrong / I’ve Gotta Try / Living The Dream / Take Good Care Of The Poor Boy / Friendship / The Other Man / Money City Maniacs // Flying High Again / Who Taught You To Live Like That? / Deeper Than Beauty / She Says What She Means / The Good In Everyone

Elsewhere: I was on NPR’s The Bryant Park Project to talk about Girl Talk’s new album.

R.E.M. @ Madison Square Garden 6/19/2008
Living Well Is The Best Revenge / These Days / What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? / Bad Day / Drive / Hollow Man / Ignoreland / Man-Sized Wreath / Leaving New York / Disturbance At The Heron House / Houston / Electrolite / (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville / Driver 8 / Harborcoat / The One I Love / Until The Day Is Done / Let Me In / Horse To Water / Pretty Persuasion / Orange Crush / I’m Gonna DJ // Supernatural Superserious / Losing My Religion / Begin The Begin / Fall On Me / Man On The Moon

* OMG “Disturbance At The Heron House” and “Harborcoat”! I actually don’t even have anything to add to that, it was just a really lovely fanboy experience to get those two songs in the set.

Glam Chops “Tell Us, Are You Ready, Eddie? (Eddie, Are You Ready?)” – Following the apparent dissolution of Art Brut, Eddie Argos has re-emerged as the frontman of Glam Chops, a band that sounds more or less exactly like Art Brut, but with a horn section and back-up singers. As you could’ve guessed by their name, there is a thin “glam” conceit to the new band, but obviously, it’s glam as applied to Eddie Argos’ shtick. Basically, this is a song about a guy who has been self-consciously toying with a glam aesthetic, but has come away from the experience feeling extremely neurotic about what other people think of him, and insecure about his masculinity. In other words, it’s all backfired on him, and in playing the part of a sexually liberated rocker, he feels even more pathetic and repressed than ever before. Of course, this being Eddie Argos, it’s rather low on angst, and high on silly, self-deprecating humor. (Click here for the Eddie Argos Resource.)

Wild Beasts “The Devil’s Crayon” – Given that the main attraction of the Wild Beasts has been the distinct singing voice of their frontman Hayden Thorpe, their latest single “The Devil’s Crayon” is something of a curveball: It’s a duet between Thorpe and his bandmate Tom Fleming. Thankfully, Fleming’s voice only serves to enhance the band’s ragged yet enchanted aesthetic. In contrast to Thorpe’s femine affect — the last time I wrote about him, I described him as singing like a hobo who is convinced that he is Maria Callas, and I stand by that — Fleming presents a heroic, elegant masculinity. The song is yearning and romantic, and plays out on a grand scale that suggests that despite their inherent weirdness, the Wild Beasts may eventually be well-suited to large venues. (Click here to buy it via the Wild Beasts’ official album site.)

Be Your Own Pet “Black Hole” – When it was announced that this song was cut from the American edition of Be Your Own Pet’s second album out of concern for the violence in its lyrics, it was more than a little bit confusing, mainly because it’s so hard to imagine that anyone could hear it and not immediately grasp that Jemina Pearl was not being very serious.  Make no mistake: “Black Hole” is 100% over-the-top adolescent hyperbole. It’s about being bored, and wanting to devour junk food, and cause some mischief. It’s specific to post-50s America, but I suspect that it’s tapping into a universal human impulse to goof around and fuck shit up. The band express this impulse with remarkable clarity and style — the guitars stab and slash, the beat hurtles forward, and Pearl’s lyrics hit this ideal balance of idiocy and brilliance: “Eating pizza is really great / so is destroying everything you hate!” Yes! Yes, that’s true! (Click here to buy it via Be Your Own Pet’s official site.)

R.E.M. @ Jones Beach 6/14/2008

So, yeah. This was kind of a disaster, but thank goodness, the show went on. I don’t want to get too much into whining about the weather, or gnashing my teeth about how the rain delay forced the band to cut several songs that I desperately wanted to see them play. In spite of everything, this was a pretty amazing show, and Michael Stipe in particular was very on. All of the new songs were exciting, and the performances of “So. Central Rain,” “These Days,” “Ignoreland,” and “Let Me In” were outstanding. That said, I’ll be writing more about the actual concert later on, so for now, let’s talk about Accelerate.

If the links in the setlist above were not enough of a hint for you, I want to make a point of mentioning that I’ve nearly completed my Pop Songs R.E.M. discography project. (I’ve finished about half of the albums now, and I’ve got about nine or ten more entries to go as of this writing.) If you haven’t been reading it, I humbly ask that you look it over, especially since it was designed as an argument for the band’s work directed to lapsed fans, and people who never gave them much of a shot despite their canonization. (I’m looking at you, North Americans Under The Age Of 26.)

Wire “One Of Us” – Even when writing a straight-forward pop song about the messy dissolution of a relationship, Wire can’t help but seem entirely cold and dispassionate. It’s actually easier to hear this as being a song about the end of a professional partnership, and not simply because Bruce Gilbert has apparently left the band. Colin Newman betrays very little emotion in either his lyrics or his voice, aside from perhaps an eagerness to tidy up loose ends and cling to some semblance of decorum. In the chorus he sings “one of us will live to rue the day we met each other,” and despite his apparent grievances, I’m inclined to think it’s going to be the person on the other side of this song. (Click here to pre-order it from Wire’s official site.)

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists “The World Is In The Terlet” – This song was written and recorded on the June 3, 2008 episode of the Best Show on WFMU. Basically, Tom and a few of his listeners came up with the lyrics, and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists put it all together and recorded it before the end of the show. It ought to be a fun curiosity, but it actually might be one of Leo’s best tunes. The song is essentially a string of punk cliches with lyrics about some sort of hipster apocalypse, but it all snaps together so nicely that it’s like hearing all the old tricks for the very first time, especially when the songs collapses into a racket after Leo announces that “the western world will perish in fifteen years!” (Click here for the official Ted Leo site, and here for the Best Show On WFMU.)