I found reasons why i could not find some of the albums yesterday. One is not released until next week. Two were slightly misplaced (Neu! & Teflon Monkey.) The rest are still unaccounted for though, damn it. I spent the whole day browsing record shops. It would have been easy to do more, but with me with nothing to do yet, i hate to explore the city without her. It seemed as if it would be fun, but suddenly i felt starkly alone, and the only way that i knew how to rectify that without sitting in the house being an unadventurous bastard was to hang out in record shops. Until Lou is free, or i can think of things to do that i would not regret doing without her, i’d like to find more shops to browse. The telephone book doesn’t look promising.
Neu! Mine! Mine! Mine! that first track blew me away. I apologize for slamming poor Julian Cope yesterday for doing a perplexingly bad MC5 aping in his latest single (by the way, this ILM thread on the recent overuse of critical mentions of MC5 & the Stooges is most interesting, but if you heard the single, it’s appropriate,) but now i can see how well he can do Neu! The instrumental tracks off of Jehovahkill were dead on recreations, and i still love him for it. I know that recreating the music is not th same as understanding it, but i have a weird feeling that Cope does understand Neu! better than, oh… Stereolab. I like Stereolab, but they are so cool that they often leave me cold. Neu! doesn’t leave me cold. They are groovy. Yeah, i’d better stop there.
Mojo related article comments, so some of you may want to zip on outta here now… In the Mojo Collections, there’s a funny little piece by Kevin Shields on his mixtape for innovative sounding music, and one he gets so carried away that he writes how Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa overthink music. This is from Kevin Shields! Come on! Laugh! It’s peculiar that the rest of his choices were even more backwards looking, towards early blues. I didn’t realize that Kevin Shields was such a rigid traditionalist who believes that innovation in popular music is over. It didn’t seem linked to rigid perfectionism. It almost seems a link to the guy from the La’s, who seems even more paralyzed by the past.
And in the new Mojo (i bought the Muzak Beatle cover just for you Damien,) there’s an interview with Super Furry Animals that has me finally hostile to creation. I’m not sure if anyone was aware that the reason why i was soft on Poptones and Alan McGee was solely because Creation was the home of SFA. I still truly like some of the Poptones stuff as fluffy summer music, but now i have an actual statement that Creation screwed the SFA in favor of Oasis. It was obvious (to everyone else,) but i felt like i needed to read it in print anyway. I was excited to see the piece in there, but felt shortchanged, because as much as i love the Beatles, i’d rather read coverage on what else the SFA had to say about their influences and their contemporaries, or about their record label. Instead, it was about how drunk Ringo got in the ’70s. too much… and i’m someone who owns a number of solo Ringo records.
Oh, and i bought Teflon Monkey. Great. And no, he doesn’t sound like Nick Drake. I cannot put my finger on it, but it sounds older, ancient even.
Is he allowed to do this on NYLPM? It’s scary. Tom, make him stop. I liked the all Cure Freaky Trigger better.
Does anyone really want to take the chance to wait 20 or 30 years to see whether the earth warming up is a natural cycle? What if this guy is wrong? You get 20 or 30 years more of SUVs, and then a dead earth.
The Swedish mooning went as planned. I’m so proud of them. I’m actually self-conscious of being an American in Wales right now, because i don’t want to have answer for anything that twerp has said or done. It bugs me that the American news is casting Europe’s righteous displeasure in an unfavorable light, going as far to call people anti-capitalist for disliking Bush. It reeks of propaganda. All of these secret meetings between world leaders get to be called democratic dialgues, and protests of these anti-populist policies are declared treasonous. Ugly.