FCK DN CRLSN - Close To The Squirting End Of The Entering Piece

Time piles on like a heart attack, making it hard to feel anything anymore. I lie down and let the music float overhead now. The brain makes a fucking racket. It would be a lot worse if I didn't admit the best moments of the past few months have been in single-shots rather than full-lengths and the ability to deal with it all seems a whole lot better when your head's on the floor next to the phone cables.

If we lived in a more exciting future, for example, of subterranean psychedelic presidents and transcendental space gospel, Tripping Daisy spin-off The Polyphonic Spree would replace the world's religions. Taken out of context from the disappointing Beginning Stages Of..., "Soldier Girl" sounds better than ever: Pixies meets Brian Wilson's fried mind on a day-glo interstellar sabbatical to a planet built on lust, loneliness, military romance, and the regret-encrusted Technicolor bones of The Soft Bulletin and every song that came before that tried to write a three-line lyric powerful enough to make you pledge confessional devotion to the one that's too far away.

I enjoy it for the same reasons I enjoy "Elephants" by Japancakes. A song I've been tracking more now than on its release three years ago. It has the complexity of art-rock (sculpted, epic sounds; emphasis on performance/musicianship) that satisfies the nerdish side of the ear and the eagerness of home-made children's music (saucer-eyed excitement; ego-less experimentation) that satisfies everything else. For Japancakes, intellectual/emotional combinations are made from the vantage point of a road-trip passenger-seat --> it's hard not to like the alt.country curls of cellos, violins, and single-chord slide guitar and the feel of fresh wheat on the fingertips that fuse for a quarter of an hour of ambitious changeless drone-pop.

It reminds me of surf music. I'm not entirely sure why. Man Or Astroman? used to be heard on every episode of 'Space Ghost Coast to Coast' and they once did a cover of the opening theme to 'Mystery Science Theater 3000.' They also made "A Simple Text File," which put a mic on a dot-matrix and hijacked a click/glitch carpool of technozoid genius, undermining the entire IDM back-catalogue in one printed page.

Revolutions can be whispered and not totally suck ass, the ceiling says.

There's this click of hardware in the middle of "New World Hors D'oevure" by hardcore math-punks Victims Family where the music shuts off completely and you can hear a badly-produced rustle and a frightened, "Oh shit!" It's the sound of someone, someone very young, accidentally recording over their favorite cassette on their very first tapedeck and realizing it across the room. It's an instantly recognizable/identifiable fan-ish moment. Audio snafu as a kind of collective memory regenerator. I can't tell you how much this sound means to me.

Also?

Probably not enough people have mentioned Mark One & CB's "Amazon," unless I missed communities and cover-spreads popping up over mentalist soca-garage rave/carnival breakstep white labels sanity-warped by Prodigy's rejig of "Ghost Town" by The Specials.

The room's about to flood.

Ms. Dynamite's "It Takes More" = casually brave enough to find out what a three-way stomach-lurch of 12 Monkeys, 'Inspector Gadget,' and the Anti-Pop Consortium felt like in a world that gave her a Mercury Prize for her age.

Schizo Fun Addict's "Backwards Grace" = 63-second reply to the Pollock-reversed b-sides of The Stone Roses that was released for one week through their website on Mp3 and/or '89-obsessed hyperbolic spirituality as pop statement, with guitars.

None of this, mind you, is as liquefyingly brilliant as The Streets, even here in throwaway b-side form. Mike Skinner's compassion for DIY computer-bass and microscopic observation is the heart of "Give Me My Lighter Back" -- a hungry, humping, very funny thing of ska-walking 2-step that soldiers around harbored suspicions of pub etiquette and pinched friendships. Skinner concludes, "For James Hyman. Thank you very much the X-Box. I've been fucking killing that Halo game."

As far as fashionably crapping all over a single, Suede's "Positivity" makes it surprisingly easy. Comprised of always-segueing soft-rock and a sub-popist chime of guitars, with Brett Anderson's voice out-performing his work on the past couple of LPs thanks to a deeper, more rounded, hyper-natural tonality, it's not a logical choice for a comeback. I'm tempted to make light of the cardboard strings, the chorus that doesn't punch like it should –- then I'm sparked by the "And the cars crash for you" image-seed that suggests that Suede know what they're doing even if it seems like nobody has the facilities to notice anymore.

The shimmering trance pastiche of "Star Guitar" from The Chemical Brothers is already aging well. Escalative like a pornography addiction. Seven minutes of huge jacked-up sun-robot psychic energy and little tinkly bits that make you smile on birthdays, cherry-topped with one of the best videos in the history of the world.

Speaking of which, the sky is opening -- raw-like.

I think I shall go for a walk.