THE BIG DIG BEGINS!

The buried treasure? A home of our own!

GETTING PUBLISHED = FILTHY, MEAGER LUCRE

Call it inevitable or call it karma, but Prodigy won’t be gripping a piece again any time soon.



Daniel and Schmidt have always been interesting; now we know they’re equally capable of fun.



As an unguided tour through NIN's sonic palette, the set works deliciously; as a cathartic, fist-pumping exercise, it falls flat minus Reznor's vein-straining angst. The Slip--which arrives as a free online download three scant months after Ghosts--does a far better job of hitting those big-rock marks, even if it doesn't recall the futuristic dystopian mind-fuck of 2007's Year Zero.



Whether Picture is a perspective-consolidated, first-person Winesburg, Ohio or a digital-age blues-folk touchstone is irrelevant--it's as lovingly crafted and comfortable as an old, worn pair of shoes.



Debt Dept is actually fun, even if its politics are as murky as its sonics.



Third doesn't even attempt to meet the expectations set heretofore, and that's a damn shame.


Remember the late 20th Century?


Drastic urban renewal, she believes, is the key to our selfish malaise, noting that life expectancy is higher in cities than suburbs and that city living encourages people to “share energy, share transport and share space to a degree that is inconceivable in any other situation”.

WE DON'T NEED NO SIP-CUPS!

Yesterday, Nodin taught himself how to use a cup equipped with a straw-spout in a short period of time. Which is awesome, and means that we can do away with all of those old, worn, battered sip-cups. Want 'em?

Coming soon: abandoning pacifiers!

Orphaned Blurbage

Brooding yet propulsive in execution, gothic yet definitively Krautrock in presentation, France's Turzi bears down on listeners like an evil, haunted steam-engine - all constant-motion dread, bruising guitar jackhammering, ice-chipping synths, relentless arrhtymic drumbeats, and an overall impatient atmospheric oppressiveness. Frontman/vocalist Romain Turzi ups the discomforting ante by feeding sputtering, multi-lingual mantras into the complex machines on 2007 debut A like a man beset on all sides by insistent delusions or imaginary insects; it's as though he's being eaten alive by the music, his mutterings trampled to a bloody pulp. For the sake of comparison, imagine a decidedly more claustrophobic Electrelane or Kraftwerk and Neu! Performing together at their respective peaks - while on crack. Yes: Turzi is that amazing. Yes: you're doing your ears a disservice if you don't catch 'em live.


An amazing, unexpected fate befell Kimya Dawson earlier this year: this squeak-lunged, anti-folkin' woman-child hit the big time. A fresh-faced crop of admirers may've gotten hip to Dawson's affectingly unvarnished warble recently by way of the Juno soundtrack - and bodyslammed her with more MySpace friend requests than she could handle - but she's been on the indie grind all decade. Dawson and fellow absurdist Adam Green performed together as the Moldy Peaches before putting the group on 'hiatus' and going their separate, solo ways in 2004. Since tracking her earliest, post-millenium recordings, Dawson's bounced her rudimentary songwriting Super Ball between ragged, devastating displays of over-empathy, snotty eff-Bush, eff-bullshit activist polemics, precocious/profound familial asides, gushing paens to friends, and the kind of nursery-rhyme-ish kindergarden anthems adults can relate to. How - and whether - this proud mom and notoriously shy and generous performer capitalizes on her present visibility is an open question, but let's hope she can finally deliver an album-length statement that fully crystallizes her so-open-hearted-she's-bleeding appeal.

Another Week, Another Fistful of Dollars, Soon to Be Scattered to the Four Winds

Doesn't this beat a real post? :)

Have yourself a great weekend (this weekend and every weekend)!

GETTING PUBLISHED IS AWESOME, PT. 42,341

Furthermore, Malkmus' level of vocal engagement reaches its lowest ebb yet. Often, he sounds as though he's sleepwalking through the emotional motions here, pacing cadences in time with central melodic motifs, allowing them to hoist him aloft like a crowd surfer until the inevitable Jam Moment arrives.

On a deeper level, though, the book registers as an indictment of modern North American life, as the hopes, dreams, and delusions of a test-tube dude ultimately sound no less ludicrous than those of real people living real lives in a country that's going to pieces at an ever-accelerating speed.

So, go ahead, lob your darts: it’s international minstelry, it’s theft, it’s plainly synthetic. But in the musical sphere writ-large, what isn’t?

More importantly, who cares? Hit play again.

Your average rock outfit peppers its catchy rapture with gnarly rupture.

This is the region where Kunstler resides; much of The Long Emergency was spent recounting his forlorn drives through all-but-withered towns where industry was on the wane and farms were selling out to developers dead-set on building McMansions the locals probably couldn’t afford.

“I’m sorry that I wrecked that tour for us/The drugs left me wigging out on the bus,” Bemis apologizes to his bandmates on the herky-jerky mea culpa “Sorry, Dudes. My Bad.”

All is not uplifting though: Black teams playing in white regions, according to the book, require police escorts to and from games.

All but invisible before, their bitter voices are heard here.

"I wore leather pants and suede cowboy boots — to high school — had hair down to my ass, knew grown men with names like Trashy and Freak, sold out nights at Hollywood's storied venues, such as the Roxy, Gazzarri's, and the Troubadour," Williams brags. "I wrote songs that made dozens of people sing."

Every race on Earth — and a few, like Merpeople, that aren't legit — comes in for a psychopathic revisionist-historical drubbing here.

Swapping files between Michigan and California, this Wire-worthy, Never-Never-Land Hanson cobbled together a freak-folk mystery blissfully impervious to patience, logic, and sobriety.

"A" IS FOR APRIL, "A" IS FOR AWESOME!

NODIN IS AWESOME! NODIN LEARNING TO REPEAT WORDS AND TAKING A FAIRLY INTENSE INTEREST IN HAVING PEOPLE READ TO HIM IS AWESOME

BUILDING A HOUSE? AWESOME

5INGLES SEEING SYNDICATION? TRIPLE-FUDGE AWESOME! (ALTHOUGH I DON'T GO FOR TRIPLE-FUDGE ANYTHING AS A RULE)

NEW THURSTON MOORE X-TREME NOISE ALBUM (SENSITIVE/LETHAL)? AWESOME INNA EYES-GLAZED-OVER STYLE

THAT NEW GEICO AD WITH MRS. BUTTERWORTH, YOU KNOW, WHERE SHE'S ON A COUCH WITH SOME SUPPOSED GEICO CUSTOMER AND SHE'S ALL "OH MY GOODNESS, SOMEONE HAS PLACED A LOGO OVER MY FACE"? YEAH, THAT ONE? AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AND ALSO A SIGN OF HOW OUR AGE IS SINKING EVER-DEEPER INTO A PARADIGM WHERE TWO OR MORE BRANDS ADVERTISING TOGETHER ISN'T WEIRD, JUST UTTERLY NORMAL, BECAUSE THE TERRORISTS AREN'T WINNING AND UNITED WE STAND AND DIVIDED WE FALL, ETC.

BARACK AND MICHELLE OBAMA HAVE A DAUGHTER NAMED MALIA; AWESOME! BECAUSE IF NODIN HAD BEEN A GIRL THAT'S WHAT WE WOULD'VE NAMED HIM

TYPING IN ALL CAPS SO IT SEEMS LIKE I'M YELLING AT YOU OVER THE INTERNETS: DISTRESSED METAL-FONT AWESOME

SKIMPING ON PUNCTUATION AND IN SO DOING LEAVING THINGS SORTA OPEN-ENDED IN TERMS OF MOOD EMPHASIS: AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME

THAT TINA FEY/RACHEL DRATCH FLICK ABOUT MOTHERHOOD LOOKS LIKE IT'LL BE AWESOME, SO STOKED, I'M SO THERE

RIC FLAIR GETTING BEAT BY SEAN MICHAELS AT WRESTLEMANIA 24 AND FORCED INTO RETIREMENT: AWESOME, DUDE WAS HELLA OLD AND I WAS ALWAYS SCARED HE WAS GONNA DIE IN THE RING

THE EVER-LENGTHENING WAIT FOR LIL WAYNE'S THE CARTER III? NOT ESPECIALLY AWESOME, BUT WHAT CAN YOU DO RIGHT PLAYA

MARLEE MATLIN ON DANCING WITH THE STARS AND GENERALLY? AWESOME

AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWESOME

1 OUT OF 10 MUSIC EDITORS HATE VOGUING TO DANZIG

I won't say where these were supposed to run, but I will say that assigning reviews and then acting like you never got 'em when they're submitted is bullshit. Needless to say, my days of scribing for NAME REDACTED are pretty much over. Not even a frickin' killfee! Or an email wondering where the reviews are or anything. Come on.

Beach House
Devotion
(Carpark)
Two years removed from its captivatingly cozy epymonous debut, there's something slightly different about Baltimore's Beach House. To be sure, the duo hasn't altered its core tactics: those lobotomized organs and guitars coast along on stoned cruise-control, those rattles and tambourines jangle blithely on occasion, and sombulant vocalist Victoria Legrand eks out dreamy relationship complaints and concerns as though she's on the verge of passing out on some opium-den couch. Yet Devotion feels slightly less passive, less drift-like in execution, more assertive: Legrand means it now, pushing up on figurative elbows to set her voice above the langourous fray, while the slo-mo drums hit harder and the woozy-snoozy melodies pop in the mix. For all its Sergio Morrocine overtones, "Gila" lives and dies on a sweet, loop-de-loop keyboard hook - not to mention Legrand's stretched, unsexualized "oh-oh-oh-oh" refrain. On "Wedding Bell," Alex Scally's ax figures register as dull buzz-saw roars as Legrand uncoils kalediscopic organ spools, drops. light-gobule keybs, and comes across as, well, happy. Creamy, reverb-soaked organ-balm "D.A.R.L.I.N.G." even deigns to ramp the Beach House pace up to a weak trot and indulge in a multi-tracked chorus that spells out the song's title; who'd have thought these two would ever have anything in common with Fergie?--Ray Cummings

The Whitsundays
The Whitsundays
(Friendly Fire)
You wouldn't believe it to listen to them, but the Whitsundays hail from Edmonton, Alberta - not the United Kingdom. That's somewhat surprising considering the influences this group's self-titled debut brings to bear: Clinic's sterile-yet-gritty garage revival chic and the Zombies' gloomy British-invasiveness. Whitsundays frontman Paul Arnusch - on leave from his drumming gig with post-rockers Faunts - clearly digs on the Walkmen and the Strokes, too: guitars jab gamely or stagger like a hungover sailor on Sunday morning, romantic quandries are drolly dissected and reassembled, warm vintage organs abound, and Arnusch maintains a practiced, above-it-all disinterest throughout. "Falling Over" is the sort of protracted, please-don't-dump-me appeal to some lovely young thing that inspires restraining orders in real life; as a pair of pealing guitars tease out a lightly grooving, retro melody, he wonders "If your feelings of love have truly gone, gone/and you can't find the strength to carry on, on/Or what to do, or what to say, say/Just tell me where to go/I gotta know." "The Ways of the Sweet Talking Boys" fairly bubbles over with gleaming strands of Fender Rhodes as multitracked gangs of Arnusch surf a darkly jealous wave. Given the mood here, "Antisocial" makes for a leftfield shock - tasteful, three-chord punk ala early Blur. As bygone, earnest pastiche goes these days, the Whitsundays are moderately enjoyable, at best; maybe, given the myriad options available, that's enough for now. Originality can wait. --Ray Cummings

NODIN'S TOP TEN ACTIVITIES, MARCH 2008

1. Pulling packing boxes, pillows, and Mr. Blankie off of Dad's head when Dad has hidden beneath them in a silly attempt to, in the process, amuse or startle Nodin.

2. Losing his pacifiers while sleeping, causing him to half-awaken in a whiny huff.

3. Being chased around the house by Dad, who is grunting "DUR! DUR! DUR!" is a comic-threatening manner. (Mom's variation on this theme: "Gonna GETCHA! Gonna GETCHA!")

4. Eating breakfast sausage! This kid loves him some breakfast sausage. Like, if there's sausage on the scene, those bits of pancake or biscuit or whatever aren't gettin' eaten, no sirree.

5. Having books read to him, sometimes the same books several times per day. Nodin's especially partial to On The Day You Were Born, The Very Hungry Catepillar, and one about the Wiggles that's supposed to teach kids about reading and setting clocks. It's rewarding beyond words to watch his face light up when he's handed you a book and you've opened it and started reading; he doesn't totally understand what's being read yet, of course, but something about the combination of familiar sound constructions and familiar voices just seems to invigorate and temporarily fascinate this eternally curious/mobile little boy.

6. Trying so, so very hard to talk and sing. He's almost there, and none of us can wait for him to arrive and start shouting out statements at the least opportune moments possible.

7. Climbing stairs! (with adult supervision, of course)

8. Grabbing, toying with, and breaking everything he can.

9. Opening and closing doors. Cabinet doors, oven doors, and closet doors - but not front doors or refrigerator doors (yet). He isn't supposed to open any doors, of course, but it's fun to pretend that no-one's telling him not to do this stuff.

10. Absconding with Mom and Dad's waterbottles and dropping them into the living room waste basket, because he can.