It’s Friday. This “week off” turned into really only one and a half days off. Not sure why that is. I guess I’ve just been doing this too damn long now that when I hear a song, like this one, that really makes me feel something, I just have to say something about it. Besides, I can’t really pass up all that hype machine traffic, can I? And what of this band, whoever they may be—it took me three Google searches to finally bring up their website—being deprived of you, listening to this song, right now? And what of you, not getting to listen to this song right now? (And what of me, not getting to dump all this on you?)

How can I do that to so many people? I just can’t. Not this week anyway.

Over on their website you can download this song for free, as well as listen to a few others which also sound just as good. Not sure what the vocalist is sending his voice through but it sounds pretty rad, and seems to actually heighten the emotion of his music. The other three songs they have up are pretty rad too. They really have kind of an Arcade Fire texture to their music. I like it.

Will eagerly look forward to future releases from this band. I’ll keep you posted as best I can.

I know it was just, like, a few days ago that I posted “Alligator Bop“, the first track off the debut album by A Great Big Pile Of Leaves, but since that posting I have fallen so thoroughly in love with this band that it’s pretty much insane.

In the last 9 days I’ve listened to this album over 15 times. I don’t think there’s a bad track on the album (even the meandering/filler instrumental “Race Car Driving” is simply a nice interlude, serving to pace the album) and I’m almost ready to declare that most of the songs are really really good. There’s a lot of good moments: the chorus to “We Don’t Need Our Heads”; the live audience cheering (“Wooo!”) right before “A Few Screws Loose” breaks back into the raucous revival of the chorus… the list could really go on and on. (“Dearest… pumpkin-innn… why do you have to leave?”)

The point I’m trying to make is that this is a damn fine album. If you enjoyed Ted Leo’s release this year I can’t imagine you wouldn’t enjoy this. Admittedly it took me about three or four listens to really get this album, but now that I have I think this is probably going to end up as one of my favorite new artists of the year and it’s definitely secured itself a spot in my Top 10 of 2010.

Please, please, please go to their website and download this album for free. I’m begging you. Do it. Do it now. I think I am going to buy one of their shirts.

What a damn good way to start off the decade, you know? 2010 is turning into one bitchin’ year for music, and it’s barely half way over. We still have so many great new releases to go this year…

I’ve always had a problem on the internet, and that problem has always been excessive honesty. It worked pretty well about ten years ago when I ran a different blog, and my honesty combined with my teenage angst created a torrent of traffic from other websites linking to me after I insulted them in some way. That’s always been my second problem: I’ve never really liked other blogs, personal/web/music or otherwise. I usually think most people should just shut up or at least turn their site over to someone with some design sense.

So of course, when I got an email from another music blog—the first in a year and a half—asking me to link to them, I was apprehensive. Most music blogs I’ve landed on, that aren’t already big and huge (like the word on the wall that the man made with the circle and line*), tend to follow these very specific guidelines toward being as garish as possible. It’s not enough to just have a link that says, “Hey, follow me on Twitter!” you have to have, like, eight of them, with a thing that bothers you when you first get there, plus some sort of bar stuck at the bottom. On top of that they can’t ever just have images that are a normal size, they must be huge, with sidebars so long they stretch on for thousands of pixels, full of other images and links to god knows what and it all just makes my head hurt.

I was right to be apprehensive as the site fit this bill exactly, complete with a title image so large you have to scroll even in 1280×1024 to get to the post content, and even then the images on the posts themselves are so large you have to scroll to read it after you see the title. I groaned and archived the email. There was no way I was going to link to that from this. (Though days later I’d bite the bullet and take one for the team.)

I don’t want to say this site here is uniquely attractive among the rather dreadfully designed standard that is the norm among music bloggers, but I don’t have to: we just know it’s true. Notice how I don’t have advertisements trying to sell you purses? I don’t have some weird “Twitter bar” that tells you how many people follow me and begs you to follow me at the bottom of every page. You know why I don’t have that? Because I don’t have advertisements, so it doesn’t matter all that much to me if you come back and click on them. This is also the same reason I don’t really link to other blogs (aside from that most hurt my eyes) and only just started recently. The ‘traffic’ doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is that you trust my opinion and enjoy what you hear.

I was thinking the other day about what makes music bloggers want to blog, and I had a small epiphany where I realized that, at least in my case, I’m writing about the music and trying to spread it to you because this is how I involve myself in the musician’s work in some minor way. When I thank someone for linking to my website, I thank them for helping promote the song they linked to, not for exposing my writing. In some way I am co-opting the song for my own self-esteem building ways: I like this song, and if I can make other people like it, then I’ve done something good for both someone else (the musician whose music gets heard) and myself (the person with taste who gets to feel like they made a good recommendation).

I’m really into music. When I saw Harvey Danger live, Sean Nelson prefaced this song, which I always assumed was about a girl addicted to cocaine, by saying that it was about “someone who likes music a little too much,” and then I felt really stupid listening to it and realizing that it is about that. The line about how “someone who takes what they make twice as seriously as they could ever hope to do” is at the center of it. Now, am I at that point? Maybe when I was 12 and had just discovered Nine Inch Nails and to be apart from my CDs was to be dead inside, but now? No, I don’t think so.

But it’s a romantic way of thinking about it: I post this music here because I have to. After doing this for as long as I have now it’s almost an automatic, necessary reaction. Look, I said yesterday that I was going to take the week off, and here I am, typing away at the internet about a song (and myself, natch, which is the true motivator here but shhh don’t tell anyone). This chocolate milk tastes like shit. This much is the truth, not the romantic notion of it all.

So when I see a website like Ohhh So Famous!, who I insulted for being ugly on Twitter and has since posted a rather incoherently snarky semi-rebuttal or something (the big joke of which seems to be that Parker is the same last name Spiderman has), which is covered in social media widgets, banner advertisements (which seem to revolve around telling women to be skinny and to buy purses, totally music related), images that are about 30x larger than they need to be, and centered post titles, I just kind of wonder what their angle is.

Is this person really a fan of the music they’re posting? They never really say they are. Who is this person, even? I don’t know. I can’t find a name or any personal info. Everything written on the site sounds like a re-worded press release or copy from the band’s website. I just don’t know the purpose of this sort of thing: if you just wanted to advertise the band, you could just link to their website. It doesn’t seem like there’s any passion, here, and I suppose maybe there isn’t. Maybe the banner advertisement gives the whole con away.

By regurgitating the same copy, posting huge flashy images and plasting social media widgets everywhere, it becomes pretty clear that the site is no longer a labor of love and fandom—and sure I guess there’s nothing wrong with that—but an attempt to gather advertising dollars. Link to a hundred blogs, and hundred blogs link to you. Post a hundred nondescript and unoriginal blog posts and you’ve got a hundred pages to post advertisements on.

But doesn’t this all seem rather disingenuous?

For a brief moment I had advertisements on here a little over a year ago, but then I felt dirty: I’m here to expose the music to people, not to make money off of it. The money should go to the musicians. So I took the advertisements down and I’ve felt better ever since (though, I do have an affiliate ID code on the Amazon links, and have made a total of $3 in the 19 months I’ve been doing this). I pay for this out of my own pocket. It’s a labor of love. I don’t mean to say that it being that way makes my website better, but at least I’m sincere. I shoot from the hip, even if it’s embarrassing.

And I will never, ever bother you to follow me on Twitter in a hover-over fade-in pop-up window thing.

I’m taking this week off because I’m emo. Also, I need to spend this week exploring more music so I have a fresher batch of stuff to share with you for the next month or two, because I’m starting to feel stale. Enjoy your week off. If you come across any sort of “leak” of the new Arcade Fire, burn it with fire. It’s probably some shitty low quality transcoded copy (with a mix worse than Neon Bible if you’re really unlucky) and you don’t deserve to have your heart broken in that way.

Speaking of Arcade Fire, he’s an Arcade Fire remix I picked up off a remix compilation and it’s pretty good, but it’s not good enough to dedicate to a full post and I can’t say anything about it (aside from, you know, how “No Cars Go” is one violin pizzicato away from being “River of Orchids” by XTC), so I’ll just put it here.

Take’r easy.

Another track from PDX Pop Now! 2010, which is also awesome. Man, I don’t have a lot to say about this song. It stands on it’s own, without needing any of my words to explain to you why it’s cool, or why it’s powerful, or even how it relates to me, because a song like this can relate to everyone.

Apparently Typhoon is a 17-or-so member band. Unfortunately I haven’t grabbed their album so I can’t say anything about whether this song is representative of what the whole album sounds like, but: Listen! How could the band that made this song not put forth an album full of awesome, awesome songs? I just don’t think it’s possible. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of shit songs by bands that made good songs, but not a song this good.

I’m really big on the hyperbole for these PDX bands.

THIS IS THE MOST AWESOME SONG EVER. It’s just as awesome as yesterday’s most awesome song ever, and the one before that. There’s just so much awesome in the world.

Last night I started listening to the PDX Pop Now! 2010 compilation and I’m utterly floored by how many good songs are on it. Normally compilations (especially label compilations) are full of crap songs, maybe two out of every ten songs is worth listening to. I don’t know why this is, it’s just that way. However, this PDX collection is awesome; just in the first twenty tracks there are twelve good songs I might end up posting on here. This one, so far, being the awesomest.

I’m not sure exactly how this song is so awesome—it’s a candidate for “Stuy wants to pick your brain and find out how you wrote this song” for sure, if I was ever to be famous and could, at short notice, interview any musician I wanted about whatever I wanted—but I am exactly sure that it is so awesome.

Namely I think the lyric “I know I can’t see you like that ’cause I know you don’t see me like that but tell me you see me like that because I see you like that-aht-aht-aht-ahht” is the most amazing thing I have ever heard in my entire life and I am so annoyed that I didn’t think of it first, and the way she sings it, her voice, it’s just perfect. This is pretty much an absolutely perfect song.

When I saw the name The Angry Orts I didn’t expect this song, you know. I expected something different. Something that sounded like, say, Paul Revere and the Raiders. I don’t know why, that’s just how it is. Instead I got this song that makes my chest feel all tight: I’m jealous of the lyrics, want to move to the music, and I fall in love with her voice every time I hear it. Does a song get any better?

Relationships are a funny thing. It’s only once you’re far enough removed from them that you start to see aspects of them in a different light. I thought I was on top of my last one as far as interpretation goes, that I was reasonably safe from fallout and trauma: I was the one who caused all the grief, not the victim so much, right? Everything went better than expected…

But after finding a good amount of my stuff cut through with scissors (thirty condoms, twelve shirts, six DVDs, two books, two jackets, one camelbak) a few weeks after she left my house, plus her continued insistence on showing up wherever I want to go (simple case of common interests, or her stalking me like crazy—my paranoia insists: it must be obsession), has left me feeling a little like I should have got the hint a long time ago, like, sometime around the time I dumped her the second time. It should have stuck.

(I find out later that she didn’t cut these things up right before she left in one last violent act of aggressiveness, no, she actually cut up things I wouldn’t notice while we were together. Since she lived with me she had a good survey of shit I didn’t ever touch, so when she’d get angry at me and running didn’t quell it, she’d take scissors to my things. I don’t know how long this went on for before she left, but it makes my “Please don’t stab me in my sleep” jokes I told her in our final weeks seem a lot less funny now.)

In the end a lot of my problem with her was just that she never gave me enough space, not in the relationship, and now out of it I still feel like she’s all up in my grill, clogging my pores. If I’m not masturbating over memories of our sex life, I’m getting angry in my head over what a rude cunt she is. My body can’t take this much stress, all this dissonance between mind, heart, and cock!

On top of that it’s complete bullshit that she’s the female in this relationship, with the tits and the ass, because when it comes down to it any mutual friends you made while together, especially if they’re guys or older single women (the “unmarrieds”, as it were, of the internet), are going to stick to the tits and the ass—familiarity and desire are two things a guy trying to get people to choose sides can’t possibly compete with. “Choosing sides” is obviously not the ‘solution’ but I don’t think there is a solution in these situations.

In the end, us men, we fight a losing battle. We’re doomed to failure to begin with, by extension of being men in this modern world—can’t look at kids without worrying people think we’re pedophiles; can’t look at women without worrying about being accused of sexism—so when it comes down to a social battle between you and your ex-special lady, we’re just screwed. The bitches will always win, and we’ll skulk off licking our wounds, declaring ourselves gentlemen because instead of showing up and making a scene, we took a powder, ran and hid, and just handed the whole world over to her.