Alphabeat “Fascination” – Alphabeat’s music has got very little to do with the real world. They are fantasists, and on their album, they’ve built a familiar and incredibly inviting alternate universe built from the scraps of teen movies, young adult novels, WB/CW tv shows, and several generations of pop hits. They’re the Josh Schwartzs of Euro pop; the creators of fully aware, exquisitely crafted escapist fluff that gains its power from its sincere appreciation of the idealized artifice and simplified narratives of pop storytelling. Alphabeat pretty much spell it out for you in the lyrics of “Fascination”: “Passion is our passion,” “We love this exaltation,” “We live on fascination.” In other words, they believe in magic, and they’re going to do everything they can to nudge their fantasies into reality. At the very least, they’ve made a nearly perfect album of songs that sound like a bright, colorful world of humor, beauty, extreme joy and drama, and the sort of sadness that can be reversed in the span of a single montage sequence. (Click here to buy it via Alphabeat.)

In Flagranti “Grand Central Shuttle” – If you’re not familiar, the Grand Central shuttle goes back and forth between Grand Central terminal and Times Square all day. (Well, actually, it doesn’t run late night, but you get the idea.) It looks and feels like a regular subway train, but it’s just hitting those same two stations over and over. It’s a fitting title for this song, which seems trapped in a similar loop of movement. More so, it seems to indicate an emotional snag that keeps a person from progressing beyond two points — a dull, eternal present, and a vaguely traumatic recent past. Every time we seem to get to some sort of resolution, we’re right back to the start. (Click here to buy it from Turntablelab.)

Trabant “I Love You Why?” – Outside of a particular strain of pop music, does anyone on earth actually pronounce “c’mon” as “sh’mon”? Maybe we should, and it ought to have a slightly different meaning. “Sh’mon” is more desperate, and considerably less assertive than a simple “c’mon.” It’s very appropriate for this song, which lingers in a lurching, incomplete groove that hovers around the general territory of sexiness, but can’t quite make contact. It’s all about the frustration of being sooooooooooo close, but not being able to make it happen, and not knowing who to blame. Maybe it’s her, maybe it’s you, maybe it’s everything. You’re definitely clueless, you don’t know how to read the signs, and you’re just stuck in a holding pattern. Why? (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Wild Beasts “Assembly” – Hayden Thorpe has one of the most bewildering voices in contemporary music, in part because he himself sounds utterly bewildered each time he opens his mouth. He comes across like a person who has somehow crossed over into a better, more romantic version of the world in which even the grime and the guts and the gore have a whimsy and charm that seem out of place, and out of time. Thorpe sounds particularly enthused on “Assembly,” a jaunty little romp that indulges in silly slapstick while painting a portrait of an eccentric stumbling through a decaying, decadent society. As with nearly all of their songs to date, the band hit upon a delicate, magical balance of elegance and shabbiness, especially as Thorpe’s voice wavers between masculine and feminine extremes like an old-timey hobo convinced that he’s Maria Callas. (Click here to buy it via the Wild Beasts official site.)

Be Your Own Pet “Becky” – Teenage girls break up their friendships every day, but somehow, it’s always the end of the world. Nevertheless, even though that sort of thing is very commonplace and fraught with ridiculous drama, the topic seems to be rather under-represented in pop songs. Be Your Own Pet run with the scenario, and play it for laughs by emphasizing the mundane details of high school life, and pushing the situation to a silly extreme by having the story play out as a bloody revenge fantasy. Jemina Pearl absolutely nails the tone — on one hand, she’s mocking this sort of overblown manufactured drama, and on the other, she is totally respecting the anger and the bitterness, and letting out some candy-colored bile. Her vocal performance is the center of the piece, but the song is made by the backing vocals of her male band mates, who shout the name “Becky” with a funny mix of anguish and frustrated rage. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Meanwhile, on Fair Game: I recently convinced Andrew W.K. to write and record a new song based on a batshit insane bit of tape from the McLaughlin Group. It is extremely catchy and absurd, and you can download the track and listen to the segment in which Andrew presents the song to Faith right here.

Cadence Weapon “Tattoos and What They Really Feel Like” – “Am I talking about something else? Well, I usually am.” No kidding, Rollie. The song starts out sounding like it’s going to be all about tattoos, but really, that’s just a MacGuffin — this is really about emotional exhibitionism, and a desire to hold on to ephemeral pain. The guy spills his guts to his tattoo artist (“you’re a cheaper shrink and you put something on me”) even though he knows it’s an empty verbal exchange, and he’s just unloading on a stranger who isn’t equipped to do much more than put some kind of reminder drawn from his personal iconography on his flesh. It doesn’t take too long before Rollie says exactly what’s on his mind: He can’t get over some girl who doesn’t like him, and he’s simultaneously excited and repulsed by his desire to win over people who have rejected him. Maybe it’s the thrill of the chase, maybe it’s a narcissistic need for drama, maybe it’s a manifestation of self-loathing. It’s probably all of the above, and at the end, he knows it, and he sounds sick to his stomach. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks “Elmo Delmo” – There’s something in Stephen Malkmus’ voice that keeps him from sounding morose, depressed, or even angry. His songs approach those feelings, but there’s something about his personality and the very sound of his voice that downsizes negative emotions or dilutes them, leaving just an insidious trace of fear, doubt, and longing. He sounds as if he can shrug off anything, and for all I know, he can. I’m not sure if I’d cast Malkmus as an optimist, per se, but he seems entirely incapable of approaching the worst in life without levity and perspective. This may be the root of why I identify with his music so completely — the subtle emotional gray scale of Malkmus’ body of work comes closer to feeling like my baseline state than any other music that I know.

Malkmus’ unflappable, well-adjusted everyman persona is exactly what makes “Elmo Delmo” one of the scariest pieces of music that he’s ever written. The song starts off sounding rather epic and heroic, with language and dynamic shifts that emphasize a sense of courage and strength, even when he’s talking about a purple puma and a meta grotto. That takes a turn after a few verses, when we finally get a sense of what he’s up against: “I’m one with the grid / it turns me into a double form / I risk dissociation at every turnpike.” Immediately after that reveal, the bottom drops out, and an extended instrumental passage takes us on a guided tour of the darker corners of our hero’s mind.

And then it begins: Elmo Delmo. Elmo Delmo. Elmo Delmo. Elmo Delmo. Elmo Delmo. Elmo Delmo. Elmo Delmo. It’s total gibberish, but it burns a hole in his skull, and the mindless repetition beats his brain to pulp. It’s the onset of madness, the break from reality. Elmo Delmo is a cute, cuddly abyss. The worst traps seem innocuous at first. In the end, he rebels. He pulls against the tide, and swears to seize his life from Elmo Delmo, and the song goes out on a fight, but there’s no resolution, just this ambiguous cliffhanger. (Click here to buy it from Buy Early Get Now. You’re kind of a fool if you buy this record any other way.)

The Kills “Cheap and Cheerful” – At first blush, the Kills seem like rock-oriented “fashion people,” which is basically a more elite version of what Mike Barthel calls “rock people.” If you never cared about them, this may be the reason why — their music is devoid of tweeness, and their detached, debauched persona can be off-putting if you’re the type of person who has trouble connecting with glamor or irony. But here’s the thing: While there will never be a shortage of skinny, good looking people going for the “sexy fucked-up rock star” look, very few of them will ever make compelling music that both dissects that image and lives inside it in the present tense. To an extent, the Kills have already accomplished that on their previous two records, but their new album Midnight Boom is where it really comes together, and the aesthetic and emotional tensions at the heart of their work escalates dramatically.

All of the songs on Midnight Boom are at the intersection of nostalgia and invention. Every track is informed by the nagging feeling that everything in your reality is wrong, and not quite good enough, and that at some point, things were much more exciting and romantic, but you missed it, and therefore must fabricate your own version of it in your own time. The songs aren’t about living out a fantasy, they’re about trying to force your life into one. It’s about recognizing the way fiction often sets the parameters for reality, and attempting to take advantage of it in order to escape a life of endless quotidian boredom. It’s the struggle between perception and fantasy, and living with the awareness that even after reinventing yourself, the world isn’t going to change all that much with you. Reality can be tampered with, but it won’t ever fully bend to your will.

More than anything, the Kills are aiming for a state of extreme romance, and so the songs that charge headlong into relationship drama (“Last Day Of Magic”) or indulge in excessive nostalgia (“What New York Used To Be”) are the most desperate and urgent. In those songs, and a few others, the dynamics become queasy and uncomfortable, and simulate the feeling of the mind moving faster than the body can handle, or vice versa. Much of this comes down to Jamie Hince’s skill for crafting tracks that emphasize visceral sensation, and are full of synthetic effects that make standard guitar moves sound just a bit unreal. His tones echo the general theme of fabrication — guitar parts are meant to evoke the sound of, say, scuzzy punk circa the early ’80s, but there’s no attempt to hide the digital patina, or take the listener out of this moment in time. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

Cloudland Canyon “Krautwerk” – Really, they couldn’t have called this anything else. It’s as if they had been arguing in their practice space about whether they wanted to play a cover of Neu!’s “Hallogallo” or Can’s “Halleluhwah,” and compromised by figuring out a way to play them both at the same time, with a few nods to Kraftwerk and Faust along the way. Question: What is it about this type of music that always sounds totally rad, even when it’s a straight-up genre exercise and there’s not much more to it than aping the sound of records from 30+ years ago? Is it an issue of exoticism and relative scarcity? It’s not as if I’d be so pleased if I just heard some random band jamming on generic blues riffs. (Click here to buy it from Kranky.)

Todd Barry “Fridge, Audience Member’s Tab, Best Celebrity Sighting” – Barry’s dry, low key delivery is ideally suited to this sort of gag, in which he takes a pretty standard stand-up joke — “Hey, you know what totally mundane thing fills me with irrational anger?” — and flips it into an unbelievable scenario that highlights the ridiculousness of unreasonable pet peeves. Bonus: This mp3 answers the question “What magazine would the bass player of the Spin Doctors read on a park bench?” (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Meanwhile, on Fair Game: Yesterday I talked with Faith about “Mt. Rapmore” and Journey’s new lead singer.

Lykke Li “I’m Good. I’m Gone.” – Lykke Li is on her grind. She wants you to know this, so she wrote this song, which tells you just how hard she works for your adulation, and to err, make butter for her piece of bun. (In Sweden, butter is very expensive, and families are known to split buns between up to six people.) The track has a steadiness and intensity that says “hey, I’m working hard over here, pal,” but it shifts into a chorus that floats above the mechanical thwack of the groove to evoke a sense of sense of cool confidence and a feeling of distance and perspective. It’s not a moment of relaxation and reward, but rather a few seconds to envision the desired outcome of her work, and of her life. She holds that image in her mind, walks around inside it for a bit, and then gets right back to work. (Click here to buy it from Lykke Li’s official site.)

Pacific “Sunset Blvd.” – Optimism is easy when you feel as though you have opportunities. Then it just seems to fall into place somehow — as Pacific sing, it’s a natural high when you just get it right. And why is it right? Why do you feel so alive? Because you really don’t care at all whether or not you fail, but you’re in it to win it. “Sunset Blvd.” sounds just like this weird emotional balancing act in which the most joyful sensations are felt, but are kept in check by reason, maturity, and patience. (Click here to buy it via Pacific’s official site.)

Basia Bulat “Before I Knew” (Single Version) – The version of “Before I Knew” on Basia Bulat’s debut album is extremely brief and disarmingly intimate, a tiny, gorgeous sketch of a person looking back on their first love with equal measures of embarrassment, regret, and nostalgia. This full-band take is nearly triple its length, and leans heavier on the nostalgia. Maybe it’s the perkiness of the rhythm, maybe it’s the context of additional lyrics that pull the song into the present tense, maybe it’s the way the recording has a vague Christmas-y sound to it, but even when Bulat is singing “I always find a way to fall apart,” she sounds totally at peace with her reckless romanticism. (Click here to buy the album from Beggars.)

The Magnetic Fields @ The Town Hall, 2/22/2008
California Girls / I Don’t Believe You / All My Little Words / Come Back To San Francisco / Old Fools / Xavier Says / Walking My Gargoyle / Too Drunk To Dream / Til The Bitter End / The Night You Can’t Remember / I Thought You Were My Boyfriend / Water Torture // Lovers From The Moon / I Wish I Had An Evil Twin / Give Me Back My Dreams / Grand Canyon / Papa Was A Rodeo / Drive On, Driver / The Nun’s Litany / The Tiny Goat / Smoke And Mirrors / Zombie Boy /// Three-Way / Take Ecstasy With Me / The Book Of Love

Despite the loud sound of their most recent album, the Magnetic Fields remain an extraordinarily mannered live act. Their concerts are seated recitals, and are almost completely devoid of rock show conventions. Though some may grumble about a lack of power and physicality, I think this plays to the strengths of Stephin Merritt’s songs, and his ensemble. In this context, the audience have no choice but to focus all of their attention on the nuances of the melodies and the lyrics. Even without the sharp between-song banter (mainly provided by the lovely Claudia Gonson), the emphasis was consistently placed on the wit of Merritt’s words, and so the feeling of the show was closer to that of a musical revue or a comedy performance than any sort of indie rock or singer-songwriter gig.

The Magnetic Fields “The Nun’s Litany (Live on Fair Game, 2/20/2008)” – Two days earlier, Stephin Merritt performed a short session for Fair Game, which will air later this week. This isn’t exactly how the song sounded in concert — here, he’s accompanied only by his ukulele, and in the show he played a bouzouki and was assisted by at least two other players — but the important thing is that he’s singing the song, and not Shirley Simms, though she sang on several other tunes. The humor becomes more obvious — it’s pretty hilarious to imagine the small, Eeyore-ish Merritt as a Playboy bunny — but the sadness of the song is deepened. Whereas Simms’ version comes across as a tongue-in-cheek interior monologue of a desperate single girl, Merritt’s take sounds like a gay man who longs for the options of that desperate single girl, wishing that it could be so easy to attract the attention of handsome men. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Excepter “Any And Every” – Half euphoria, half nightmare. It sounds like you’re walking through an extremely loud and crowded dance club with severe vertigo. You can barely tell where your feet are, the sounds blur so that it sounds less like music, and more like shapes of sound swirling around your head, and nudging your movement. You might feel paranoid if you didn’t feel so passive. The beat holds you down like an enormous thumb, your brain feels like a squished cherry tomato at the bottom of a shopping bag. (Your face feels like the shopping bag.) (Click here for the official Excepter site.)

The Ting Tings “Great DJ” – The best thing about this song is the way it seems like this knowingly futile attempt to hold perfect, ephemeral moments in the mind, to just live in them for a couple seconds longer, at the very least. It’s there in the way the indie guitar chords just sorta hang in the air, and the dry, quasi-mechanical repetition in the chorus — the drums the drums the drums the drums the drums the drums. In a way, it’s about that failure, that acknowledgment that the human mind is a terribly flawed recording instrument, but also respecting/loving the way nostalgia can transform a somewhat mundane evening into something far more magical. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Meanwhile, on Fair Game: Here’s that full Yelle segment with the other song!

Duffy “Mercy” – Things to listen for:

1. Duffy’s instruction to “hit the beat and take it to the verse now” only five seconds into the song. I like to think that without her direction, the keyboard player would have vamped on that part indefinitely, and the rest of the band would have just sorta stood around with slack jaws.

2. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” repeated in the general direction of Amy Winehouse, with a bit of a knowing smirk.

3. That sure sounds like a farfisa organ on the chorus! Farfisa is always welcome, but it sounds particularly good in contrast with the colder, more modern rhythmic keyboard part from the start of the song.

4. A bit of giggling at the 1:27 mark — it’s either a direct response to the notion that someone would be so foolish to have someone on the side whilst dating Duffy, or some girl just being a bit silly in the studio.

5. 1:35 mark — “Yes, I do!” You have me, Duffy. I’m sold. This is one of those magic moments that make a song sound real and alive, like a person that you could know and love.

6. Suddenly she’s overlapping: A quiet, coy quasi-rap laid over the top of her most insistent vocal for maximum contrast. It comes up to the edge of not quite working, but somehow she pulls it off. If it was possible to drop a few dollars into the tip jar of whoever it was that mixed this track, I’d totally do it.

7. Oh, hey, by the way, there’s some strings in this thing. Better yet, they sound like a strings setting on a keyboard, which actually suits the balance of warm and cool textures than something that came across more “live.”

(Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Yelle @ The Knitting Factory 2/19/2008
Tristesse/Joie / Mal Poli / 85A / Dans Ta Vrai Vie / Je Veux Te Voir / Jogging / A Cause Des Garcons / Mon Meilleur Ami // Je Veux Te Voir (heavy “rock” version)

1. You might be thinking, “oh, I bet she probably just sang and danced around to some music on a laptop.” Well, she did sing, and she did dance, and there was a laptop on stage, but this was very much a full-on, athletic concert, complete with live keyboards and a kick-ass drummer. There was no fucking around, just 50+ minutes of bubblegum pop crossed with quasi-rock French dance music. It was rather intense.

(Photo courtesy of Trent Wolbe.)
2. Also intense: The audience. Despite being packed into a tiny, oversold room, the crowd flipped out to almost every song, but most especially “Je Veux Te Voir.” Seriously, I have been in many audiences, but only a few shows match this room’s level of collective enthusiasm. If you were on the floor, and you were losing your shit during this set, I just want to say that I love you. And I envy you — I was stuck in the balcony.

3. Yelle is a joy to behold. She’s one of those performers who makes it all look so easy, as if any skinny, pretty girl with a Chicks On Speed frock and an album’s worth of ridiculously catchy dance pop songs can get on stage, shake it up, make some rock faces, do a bit of air guitar, and pull it off. If only the world was overcrowded with people like her, my job would be so much easier.

Yelle “Tristesse/Joie” (Acoustic version for Fair Game, 2/19/2008) – Speaking of, Yelle recorded a session for Fair Game only a few hours before this show. It was a mellow, acoustic performance — in other words, the radical opposite of the relentlessly up-tempo dance show at the Knitting Factory. “Tristesse/Joie” has an entirely different character in this arrangement — if the album version is like a collision between two distinct strains of modern French pop music, this take owes more to the Francophone pop of the ’60s and ’70s. It lacks that glorious, euphoric kick at the end, but makes up for it with a lovely, muted melancholy. The Yelle segment is set to air on the show on Thursday — a different song with be making it into the broadcast, but I’ll let it be a surprise. Please tune in, or get the podcast. (Click here to buy Pop-Up from Amazon.)

The Ruby Suns “There Are Birds” –
MCP: this is the other one I think I’m doing for tomorrow
RZLY: listening
RZLY: i dig
MCP: what is your impression?
RZLY: airy and drony are words that come to mind
RZLY: but that’s ’cause all words i think of to describe music end in “y”
RZLY: reminds me of broadcast
MCP: if this song is a person, how would you describe that person?
RZLY: a little depressed, but honest and earnest
MCP: who would this person date, what is her love life like?
RZLY: probably a lot of different people, each for a very short period of time. wants commitment but can’t quite get it. too complicated
MCP: (I ask cos I kinda have an idea)
MCP: see, I had the other idea
MCP: to me, this song is like a person who has been in a relationship with one person for a really long time and just wants a bit of space, some privacy, some tiny bit of time when she’s herself, and not part of a unit
MCP: (did you just describe yrself btw?)
RZLY: haha. umm… maybe.
RZLY: god i project a fucking lot
RZLY: but the person i pictured was a lot prettier and sadder than me
MCP: okay, so…RZLY = not as hot, but more chipper than the girl in the song
(Click here to buy it from Sub Pop.)

Avenue D & Phiiliip “Totally In Love” – Avenue D spent the better part of this decade trading in raunch, but here they are, sounding more like smitten schoolgirls than over-the-top porn starlets. Nevertheless, even when they were playing faux-naïf, they couldn’t help but to push things to the extreme: This is so incredibly cutesy and twee that it borders on the ridiculous. That said, the girls convey a very genuine crushed-out affection in the song that cuts through the song’s thick, syrupy irony. (Click here to buy it from Avenue D.)

Goldfrapp “A&E” – What happens if you feel desperate and alone, and you go about doing the things that your culture suggests that you do to correct your situation, and you still can’t make it happen? You can’t get him to call back, you derive no pleasure from going out, and the drugs just make you feel worse. You come in late from another boring night, and everyone you know has paired off, but you fall into your bed alone. You lie there half-awake as the morning light floods your room, and you’re still clutching your cell phone, hoping for some impossible moment of affirmation and affection. You start to wonder how it is that you came to need someone so badly, and if the person you’re pining for means much of anything, or if he’s just another arbitrary attachment. There’s no answer, no reasonable explanation, just this immense void of longing and doubt, and this horrible fear that things will never change. Other people can connect, other people can be loved, but all you can do is crumble and weep. It’s not fair. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Beckett & Taylor “World Of Me” – The grooves seem to be orbiting some central point, but that point has no fixed position. Maybe that’s the point — the “me” is always changing, and so the world around it must always shift, even when it’s spiraling around an empty space. The music mutates, but the character remains the same — “me” may be hard to define, but it’s there. It’s a knowable thing. (Click here to buy it from Bleep.)

Hercules & Love Affair “Hercules’ Theme” – When I was on my way to work yesterday, I was standing in a packed subway car about two feet away from a girl who was really, really, really loving the music she was listening to on her iPod. She was not being obnoxious about it; she was not trying to make a show of herself — it came across like a natural, perhaps involuntary response to whatever she was hearing. Her eyes would flutter, her hand occasionally tapped the metal pole as if to play chords. Her neck would arch back slightly, and she’d sway to the beat just enough not to knock into the next person over. A few times, she just smiled this huge, beatific smile that seemed totally out of place in the context of a densely packed train at 8:30 in the morning. Given that I was basically locked to a position opposite her for about eight minutes, it was hard not to look at her, but still, it can take some effort not to notice someone who appears so totally joyful. I actually felt a bit self-conscious, as though I wasn’t enjoying my music well enough. I wondered what it was that she could be hearing — it had to be something kinda groovy and cheerful, that much was clear from her body language. Maybe it was something like this Hercules & Love Affair song, something that struts along without a care while still seeming grounded (tethered?) to reality; something that seems to say “I can’t ignore my problems, I can’t ignore this world around me, but most of all, I cannot ignore my own pleasure.” (Click here to pre-order it from Amazon UK.)

Hey, NYC Readers! Yelle is playing a show at the Knitting Factory on Tuesday!

The Violets “Co-Plax” – It’s hard to pull the Violets outside a few points in time — early ’80s Siouxsie, early ’90s industrial alt-rock, early ’00s post-punk revivalism — but the band triangulate their influences nicely, resulting in dynamic pop tunes with a thin, shiny veneer of flamboyant gloom, like an M&M coated in black nail polish instead of a candy shell. “Co-Plax” in particular is more sweet than sour, and its visceral rhythmic shifts seem deliberately athletic, as if it were meant to be the soundtrack to a goth workout tape. (Click here to buy it from Amazon UK.)

Envelopes “Freejazz” – Just so you have some advance warning, this song isn’t any more free jazz than Bette Midler’s “The Wind Beneath My Wings” would thrash if it had been titled “Scandinavian Death Metal.” Even the bits that approximate horn skronk are far too composed — the title is kind of a self-deprecating joke at the expense of the band’s casual indie-rock-circa-1994 catchiness. This is not to say that Envelopes are playing it straight here — the hooks are plentiful, but every other moment knocks things a bit off-kilter, particularly when the singer seems to be attempting to make it sound as if her voice is being played in reverse. The song sounds active, playful, and curious, which suits the lyrics just fine: “Make things happen…PROVOKE THEM!” (Click here to buy it via the Envelopes site.)

Meanwhile on Fair Game: We had Michael “Ben Linus” Emerson on the show yesterday, and it was very awesome.

School of Language “Extended Holiday” – Whether he’s with Field Music, or effectively recording as a solo artist on the School of Language album, David Brewis’ meticulously crafted music gives the impression of being on the inside of a tightly-wound psyche. There’s joy and pain in the songs, but it’s mostly washed out by neuroses, and a nearly paralyzing level of self-awareness. This isn’t a complaint, mind you — the beauty lies in just how accurately Brewis can convey these muted emotions, and the thrill that comes when he pushes back on them, and attempts to escape the narrow confines of a super-socialized, overdeveloped super-ego. “Extended Holiday” is one of Brewis’ finest structures, but the song is at its best when his voice lifts up and threatens to knock it all down, as if to say “I know I have an id in here, somewhere!” (Click here to buy it from Thrill Jockey.)

Elsewhere: I wrote a “premature evaluation” of the forthcoming R.E.M. album Accelerate for Stereogum.

Meanwhile, on Fair Game: I totally forgot to mention last week that we had Bob Mould in session. Sorry about that.

Tall Dwarfs “Nothing’s Going To Happen (Wall of Dwarfs version)” – This is song is a small battle in the war against inertia, but it’s a fight the singer doesn’t really want to win. The words are a self-fulfilling prophecy, and even when he sounds like he’s trapped, panicked, and flailing around, there’s no sense that he’d ever try to break free of this monotonous situation. By the time the full band kicks in, it seems like a full-blown celebration of limitation and futility. It doesn’t even matter what is not going to happen — escape, success, love, sex, an epiphany, a creative breakthrough, the apocalypse. It’s just not going to happen, and that brings a certain safety and peace of mind. (As far as I can tell, pretty much the entire Tall Dwarfs catalog is out of print. That’s kinda ridiculous, don’t you think?)

Elsewhere: Marcello Carlin wrote a terrific review of James Rabbit’s album Coloratura. Seriously, you should get a copy.