Note: This album doesn’t seem like it’s going to be available on Amazon MP3 until September 29th. I don’t know why.

I’d say it’s really hard to describe what Will Cullen Hart’s second Circulatory System album is like, but it’s not hard at all to give you an example just by posting the title track. Signal Morning the song is like a condensed version of Signal Morning the album, complete with charges of static pulling the song in different directions, if not just plunging the whole affair underwater. It seems Hart’s experimentation with songs 60 layers deep in ProTools on the first Circulatory System has given way to not only experimentation with layers but with a variety of effects and other gibberish—and I don’t say “gibberish” in an insulting way, just that it is new and sounds great but there’s no other word for it but gibberish.

And then, on Gold Will Stay it seems like Hart decided to try to craft the creepiest thing he could using the psychedelic techniques he’s pioneered over the years (in, you know, Olivia Tremor Control), and dang, he fuckin’ nails it.

I feel bad posting these two songs as some sort of introduction to the awesomeness you will feel listening to the actual album itself. This isn’t a record you can pick and choose songs off of, but a solid 46 minute experience. There are songs on this album—The Spinning Continuous sounds like a real song, maybe even an Olivia Tremor Control song, and it’s fucking awesome and I’m an asshole for not posting it here; This Morning (We Remembered Everything) is song-esque—but it is definitely about all the other in between stuff, the manipulated freakouts and shifts in static and reception.

As an aside, Paul Westerberg’s 49:00 owes a lot to Circulatory System, especially the last section of the album where he statics himself through a variety of songs and covers.

This is White Rabbits’ second album, and it’s produced by the guy from Spoon. You know what his name is, don’t you? I don’t need to say it.

I’d be posting three songs, because this was my intention, but you can listen to Percussion Gun over on the birthday mix, I think. Oh, no, it’s over on hello, my ghost. Honest mistake.

I listened to these three songs on loop for about half an hour while driving around and thought about how great they were and how I had to share them all with you. So, now I have.

I got nothin’. The rest of the album is pretty cool (I mean, come on, it was produced by that guy from Spoon), but nothing that blew my head off like these three songs.

Twice so far I’ve written “Waiting on the Staires” and had to backspace to fix it.

This is one of those 2007 albums that I somehow missed out on. I don’t know if I would have liked Pela’s Anytown Graffiti back then anyway. I didn’t listen to as much music back then as I thought I did–I’m pretty sure I spent a straight month spinning Year Zero on repeat—and what I seemed to enjoy the most was merely the bands I felt belonged to me. I wrote a little rant here about hating Radiohead fans a lot when I was a teenager and how I still hate them because all Radiohead are douchebags, but I erased it.

Pela makes me think of something like The Airborne Toxic Event passed through a Built to Spill filter. I’m probably way off (I usually am, you can tell me), but the Airborne Toxic Event comes through the most on this next track, Drop Me Off

I’m the devil, of course, for using a newer band to describe an older band, but I don’t mind that so much. What’s cool about this song is that you know what it’s about but if you actually listen to the lyrics they don’t make any damn sense at all. I guess that’s a testament to the strength of emotional instrumentation, ’cause I’m pretty sure this song is about knowing that fucking is sometimes a bad idea.

Maybe I’m just projecting.

The rest of Pela’s Anytown Graffiti is pretty damn good. There’s one song where the vocal makes me skip it. If I were to post a third song it would be Rooftops because it, too, has a really powerful slightly emo mood and simple but effective guitar and… Oh, damn, I’ll just post it, too.

I’m such a pushover.

I’ve been stuck in 2007 lately, because I guess there was a shit load of music released back then that I somehow missed. According to something I wrote back in 2008, I already thought 2007 was an incredible year of music. I don’t disagree with many of my choices back then (though most of what I say about everything is retarded), most of the bands have become definite favorites of mine since then (though Jesca Hoop and Christine Fellows were both fads motivated by women that have since faded into the ether so my interest in both of them has waned considerably). Now I find that there’s all this other great stuff, by bands like Pela, Andrew Jackson Jihad, Ha Ha Tonka, David Vandervelde, Tulsa, Liam Finn, and now, finally, Holy Fuck.

The best thing I can say about this album is that, and I’m sure this would be far more pronounced witnessing the dual drummers and stage full of stuff, when you listen to them you can’t help but utter the band’s name at least a couple times.

A friend and I went on a minor road trip around the rural and mountainous sections of Lower Upper Southern California (that twilight zone where Anaheim never seems to end no matter how far East you drive and then it ends but there’s nowhere else to go but back to Anaheim) and the entire time, while fluctuating between various levels of sobriety and sanity, we looped this album. There was no reason to put anything else on, because Holy Fuck’s LP matches the mood of probably every evening. We explored abandoned houses, stood alone on the top of mountains, and every step of the way Holy Fuck was there to score it for us, keeping the mood high and the air charged with the desire to adventure.

Click Here To Listen

I had the pleasure of being at Harvey Danger’s Los Angeles show of their final Farewell tour. Since I was young–say, when Flagpole Sitta came out in 1998–I was the ripe old age of 13 at the time, and later when I was 15 and finally sat down to listen to Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? and was immediately floored by Vertigo homage Carlotta Valdez and saddened by Jack the Lion I’d like to say I knew then that Harvey Danger was a band that was going to stick with me and effect my life in ways that The Presidents of the United States of America could never have dreamed of back when I was a brooding middle schooler turned high schooler but no, I wasn’t aware then, but I knew I’d found a band that I finally had something in common with, and that was Vertigo, and I had Vertigo in common with absolutely nobody I knew personally.

So, Harvey Danger and I bonded over Vertigo. In later years we’d bond over other things, like my discovery of their second album, Kings James Version, which I had been searching for for what felt like years until I finally listened to it at the beginning stages of what has since turned into a full blown addiction to music, at 19 years old, and I dug their energy. I didn’t get a lot of the slow music on the album at the time, my taste was more about Sad Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Authenticity and not so much The Same As Being In Love.

In 2005 they released Little by Little for free on the internet and even before I downloaded it and listened to it, I bought the pre-order package they offered. I think it was for $20 you got a copy of the CD, a bonus disc, a t-shirt, a sticker, and a set of pens. It was a tremendous offer, and even though the shirt is this color of baby blue that matches my car in the most unfortunate way, I still cherish the pens and the CD, thoroughly digitized within the bowls of my laptop, sits on a shelf, feeling the love the MP3s radiate out toward it every time they spin across my iPod’s hard disc.

Little by Little, at the time, seemed like a refined mission statement by Harvey Danger, as if they were saying, “Yes, we’re going to write smart songs, and we’re going to play them smartly, and behave smartly about them, and maybe all those other people desiring of smart music will listen to us and we’ll all be smart together.” That’s not to say Harvey Danger has ever been smug about Sean Nelson’s incredible songwriting (that I am not biased in support of at all…), but on Little By Little the emotion of the music isn’t supported by loud guitars (though on Little By Little B-Side “Picture, Picture” they still paint one hell of a–oh fuck, I have no words!) but by marvelous vocals and ingenious songwriting.

I don’t care about how hyperbolic I’m getting: I’m going to miss Harvey Danger.

And I’m going to bring you down with me. If you can listen to this whole thing and not immediately want to listen to all three of their albums in sequence–and you will want to, because Harvey Danger is one of those rare bands that doesn’t have bad songs–then I have failed at life, and I deserve no respect or love.

Click Here To Listen

Because this is all one artist I am not going to let you download it, sorry.

I’m making up for lost time, or something–I’ve got a backlog, actually, a ToDo list of songs I need to post for you all, and internet is so scarce that as I have it right now (and am frantically downloading stuff from SoulSeek) that I figure I might as well just get a lot of music off my chest.

I had the pleasure of listening to The xx this morning while I did some laundry, cleaned my room, and contemplated my existence. I’ve been reading Pitchfork too much, and it shows, because most of the things I can say about The xx echo sentiments expressed by Pitchfork in their review.

The xx is notable because the album is a consistent level of good all across it. No song really steals the show, no hook is so infectious that you can’t help but sing it (though I think Infinity is pretty close, and, I think, the song “for me” if I was pressed to find a song on the album that really spoke to where I’m at emotionally) when you’re not listening to the album.

Each song has subtle moments of brilliance, where you can’t help but stop what you’re doing and really listen to what’s going on. Unlike a lot of the releases I’ve been listening to lately, xx is full of silence. Lots and lots of silence, the entire album almost feels like it might be swallowed by all the silence surrounding all the performers. I don’t know what it is, really, but I like it a lot.

Also, I would like to make fuck to this album, but I feel like that about just about every album I listen to lately, but I think this one is special.

I’ve covered it before, but I care relatively little for people who say things like, “This song sounds like this other band! What a bunch of fucking rip offs!” With a lot of the music I like, I encounter a variety of older people clinging desperately to the sincerity of the bands they liked in the 70′s claiming that bands who pay homage to such groups are undeniably simply aping their styling for their own nefarious purposes. What nefarious purposes? I don’t know. Apparently being in a band that sounds like The Beatles means you’re a fucking asshole.

I disagree! I think being in a band that sounds like The Beatles and a variety of other bluesy rocky 70′s acts (but mostly The Beatles) makes you pretty awesome, and that’s why I like Dr. Dog, despite the fact that their name actually prevented me from listening to the band years ago (“Dr. Dog? That’s gotta be some sort of rap artist, right? I don’t think I’ll like that…”).

Hang On doesn’t really sound like the Beatles, but that doesn’t stop Pitchfork from tearing it, and the rest of the album, a new asshole. I like Pitchfork, I tend to agree with them, even when they’re tearing an album I love apart, and much the same I can’t argue with their points on Fate except to say that their opinion is wrong, that they could align their perspective in some other way and enjoy an album that is purely, uh, enjoyable in so many ways… But no, they don’t want to listen to me.

My Friend is the song that really sticks with me. It’s got that, uh, Beatles-esque two part song thing going, and the second part really, really, really rocks my face off in that bouncy sort of ELO-cum-uh-Beatles sort of way. I love it. I wish I could just loop the second part over and over again and put it in a little earphone in my ear and carry it around with me all day. Like with all of their songs, I don’t care that the lyrics are pretty much rubbish, what matters is the emotional response I have to the music, and that is one of awesomeness.

The only spot on the album I don’t like is Army of Ancients which is mostly useless. Otherwise, good stuff!