I'm still internetless at home. Today I drove a couple places (library, coffee bean & tea leaf) looking for internet until I came up empty handed and decided: Fuck it! Why am I wasting my morning getting all stressed over writing on this website when I can just save it until I get to work?

I spent my hour and a half before work playing Braid and beating it, which leads me to this bandwagon I have to jump on: Braid was awesome. Several times while playing I went, "Good lord, why am I playing this? It is so difficult!" and then I would feel satisfied having retrieved a particularly elusive puzzle piece but still, I would wonder, "Why am I playing this?" and then I'd pause for a moment and suck in the beauty of the art, the music, the way it's still pretty even in reverse and how even upon constant rewinding and near headache-inducing puzzle design the entire thing just feels so relaxing but still, I would wonder, "Why am I playing this?"

It wasn't until the very last level, when the 'story' that masks the deeper underlying story truly dawned on me and while I watched things re-ravel themselves in front of me I was moved, I was deeply moved. I stared at the screen transfixed and my eyes welled with tears briefly (but did not unleash them) and suddenly the whole journey made perfect sense, in that unexplainable way where you're sure everyone else will feel something different when they realize what has been underway.

I didn't mean to briefly review Braid in this entry but it's one of many indie games lately that combine excellent art design with excellent music to amazingly emotive means. Other examples: World of Goo (the only other game so far that is "on par" with Braid), And Yet It Moves (low on story but high on amazing platforming), and The Path (well,...).

I've liked this song for a while. I discovered Viva Voce through their album Get Yr Blood Sucked Out which opens with the great bluesy psychedelic stomp of Believer. (Which I am pretty sure I heard first on NPR way back when.) When I moved onto their earlier work, I discovered somewhat disappointedly that their sound is less rock and more dreamy electronica with slight psychedelic rock influences.

This song pretty much perfectly encapsulates the sound of Viva Voce's early work: it's dreamy, relaxing, and at times wonderfully intense, as if they're at the helm of a giant pressure washer that expels walls of bursting sunshiny sound right into your face. Big gushes of love, all over your face.

Song Note: I totally didn't realize I posted a Viva Voce song about a month ago until after I finished writing this up and posting it. Whoops. At least you get two songs that are near opposites of each other.

Kings of Leon are a curiosity: they're a hugely successful band who churn out albums that are experimental, diverse in the range they cover across them, and generally poorly reviewed even by the people who regularly listen to them, much less the critical community who generally eviscerates them, but still, when I saw them live, there were 7,000 women sing-shouting every word into the 5,000 bored looking boyfriends who made the mistake of accompanying their lady and (if still more unfortunate) their lady's friends to this little southern band's big rock show.

So what is it then? Is it because they're hot? I don't know.

Maybe if I was there at the beginning, when they were getting called "the Southern Strokes", a band that I am also somewhat familiar with (but don't like) that women seem to love that I just don't understand, then I would understand better.

When I listen to Kings of Leon I hear the same thing everyone else does: a valiant attempt at writing some fun rock tunes in the key of... well... can we cross U2 with Pixies with Nirvana with all sorts of other shit that I don't understand? On this song particularly you've got this kind of... well, what I just said, it doesn't need to be said.

But what is it? Why do women like Kings of Leon?

I told a girl friend of mine that I was going to see them. "Oh yeah?" she said, "I hear they suck ass live." Later, I invited this girl and some of her friends to a Local H concert and they ended up walking out after two songs. She listens to a lot of Neil Young and Led Zeppelin so I guess I could understand if she didn't like the grunge-cum-hard rock of Local H and I wasn't too offended.

A little while ago she called me excitedly to tell me, "I am going to go see Kings of Leon!!!! How cool is that!"

See!

What is that!

Life is unfair.

This is a band full of charmers, for sure, how else could they possibly amass such massive success based on the strength of a bunch of poorly constructed albums and songs?

All I know is that I saw them live and they were pretty hot. Then I went home and listened to a bunch of their music, and found it all really disappointing, but when people talk about them I have to say, "I was entertained and people seem to like them a lot," and maybe that's just it... people like them, so people like them.

Kings of Leon were relevant for a second some time in the past and they managed to exploit that second to the fullest extent they could and turned themselves into legends who play in arenas, they set a precedent and are totally ruling by it every day.

Good for them. I like this song. The rest mostly suck. Go see them live.

I got a call yesterday right as I got home from a number I didn't know. I don't normally answer unknown numbers because they're usually people who are trying to trick me into answering the phone (and I don't mean that in a "I may be schizophrenic" sort of way), but this time I did. I said hello, and then some girl did, too.

"Hi I'm at this Borders in Pico Rivera and someone called you a douchebag so I'm wondering, are you a douchebag?"

"What? Who said I was a douchebag?"

"I'm in the chick's bathroom at this Borders! Your number is written on a stall in here with the word Douchebag written over it. My friend shouted, 'Hey do you wanna call a douchebag?' and I said sure! So are you a douchebag?"

"Well that depends on who wrote it, I guess, I can be a douchebag sometimes."

"Hey!," she shouts to her friend, "He admits to being a douchebag sometimes so that's cool. Hey, you sound pretty hot by the way."

"Oh, well, thanks."

"Just putting that out there."

"OK. It's so weird, I don't know anyone in Pico who would put my number in a bathroom stall."

"How old are you?"

"24. How old are you?"

"He's 24! We're 18. My friend wants to know if you have a girlfriend?"

"No, I don't have a girlfriend."

"He doesn't have a girlfriend! She says that instead of 'douchebag' they should have written 'guy with a hot voice'!" we all laugh merrily.

After discussing where we were from we elected to trade myspaces through text and, well, 18 year old blonde girl with a baby. No way was this anyone that anyone I know could know.

I called the only person I know who knows a girl in Pico, and knows Borders employees, and after a little recon work on behalf of the Borders employees, it was discovered to be real. My phone number and the word "douchebag" is definitely in the third stall of the ladies restroom. Interesting.

It's almost comforting to think that it is someone random who I jilted in the past who is lashing out at me by writing my number on the wall. Someone from reality, maybe someone I burned somehow, maybe some ex-girlfriend was randomly in the Borders in Pico and decided to scrawl my number on the wall; maybe some guy friend snuck into the ladies room and wrote it himself as a joke; maybe one of my friends had his girlfriend do it. That's all very innocent.

But then there's the scarier side to the whole thing, the paranoid side, where you have to look at the internet and what it does to our privacy, not to start to sound like a nut, but when things like this happen to me I think about it this way:

With a simple WHOIS on any of my multiple domains you can find my contact information, including the phone number written on the bathroom wall and my home address. You can use Google to look up a street view and see what my house looks like and what cars are parked outside (and easily link up my mentions of driving a hybrid with the Prius parked outside). The internet turns people into beacons of light, especially when you're super active on it.

I'm not as cautious as I could be, I'll admit.

This morning when I walked out to my car I discovered that someone had keyed the entire passenger side straight across. It was then that I began to wonder, is someone following me on the internet and saw that their "douchebag" prank backfired (via my twitter, in which I chronicled the whole thing) in a funny/cool way and decided in a fit of rage to key my car?

Was it Mike Doughty?

More than likely it's this certain person I know who is of low intelligence (who is now married to a guy who threw mixed up hair dye on the hood of this same my car four years ago) and I can kind of rest easy: they're far too stupid to do something actually sinister.

In the end, it sucks that my car is keyed, but I've got so many dings and scratches and misshapen spots in it now that it hardly matters to me. I'm glad my tires weren't slashed. I know guys who have gotten bricks thrown through the windows of their cars by jilted exes and found their tires slashed outside parties full of people they've known for years.

I can only hope that I one day piss off someone that bad.

I can only hope that when I do, they'll fall on their swords.

I saw Mando Diao live with my ex-girlfriend (the most recent one). They played at the Troubadour, which already soured my expectations considerably because I have seen plenty of good bands sound completely awful at Troubadour (to list: Local H, The National, Mando Diao, We Barbarians) but to be fair I have also heard one really shitty band sound really shitty there (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) so I don't think I can blame the Troubadour for that one.

Anyway, the Troubadour sucks shit. The crowd that goes there sucks shit, and the sound quality at the venue sucks shit. The only thing good about the Troubadour is you can climb a staircase and get a decent aerial view of the band, it's just too bad that the sound is even worse up there.

Mando Diao, while not being at all my "cup of tea" (pretty sure, aside from Kings of Leon, this is the only concert that my ex picked out of all the shows we went to) because I'm not into the whole bouncey 66%-swedish crazy rock music The Mando Tokyo Police Hives Diao Club, were a lot of fun to see live.

The ladies all scream and the twiggy swedes in their skinny jeans gyrate their hips and wail intelligibly into their microphones and it's all very... rock 'n roll, like early Beatles, and I guess I can see the joy in that. It's fun, loud, and crazy, and the guys might not be hot really but they sure do know how to rock out on stage and fool everyone into thinking they are just by the power of stage presence.

So, good for them.

Also, fuck them.

I've enjoyed this song for a while but compared to how it sounded live (which, aside from this next peeve, didn't really sound like this at all) it always came through a little muddled in the recording. That was until I spent a near grand on a new sound system for my car and now it sounds fucking awesome. Like, really fucking awesome.

I've found that a lot of indie music sounds like shit through nice speakers. The Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, while being an amazing album that everyone should fall to their knees and worship, is one of the most horribly mixed pieces of shit I have ever heard. I've got a pair of Sennheiser HD-580s going through a custom built amp and it makes The Beatles sound like they're stroking your dick (or vag) while playing music only to you, but Neon Bible ends up sounding like the whole band is playing underwater. I guess maybe that's the point, lousy production, it's artistic, but you know what, I want to actually hear the instruments clearly if I have nice gear. An album shouldn't be mixed to sound like it's coming out of PC speakers right off the CD.

Sometimes it's just a lack of dynamics: I played The White Stripes' "The Nurse" through my new speakers because I figured there'd be a lot there to hear between the marimbas, the tape splices, Meg White's drum blasts, Jack White's nuanced vocal, but in actuality it just sounds kind of crap. Very dull, no real texture to the whole thing. I know they recorded the album on 4-track, but how many fucking awesome albums are there out there recorded on 4-track? (The Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle?)

So, thank you Mando Diao, for composing a track so lavishly layered with instruments and so expertly recorded and mastered that you make my new stereo sound like it's worth the money I dropped on it.

There should be a category just for "single songs by artists otherwise disliked". I could probably do a whole 'song a day' website just dedicated to 'one hit wonders in the mind of brad'.

I heard this on the radio, and when it quiets down at 1:40 or so I was simply transfixed. It's simple & sparse and builds back up nicely. It feels like a dream.

This album was pretty well reviewed back in 2003. Maybe you should listen to it.

I was going to write about how awesome I feel, but it's not really related to this song at all, so I guess I wont.

Go forth, it's Thursday.

Hey! This band broke up in 2007! Awwwww.

My god! I do not want to like this song but there is so much good about it that I can't help but listen to it. There is very little "pop-punk"/Jimmy Eat World sounding bullshit in my music collection (Green Day is the only other?) because for the most part it just makes me feel embarrassed, for myself, especially when I hear an actual (the only) Jimmy Eat World song out in public somewhere because I'm like "Hey this is catchy, wait! Is this Jimmy Eat World? OH MY GOD IT IS! AAAAHHH!"

But this is not Jimmy Eat World.

Did Jimmy Eat World write a song about eating disorders?

No, that was Silverchair.

We were driving back from San Diego, me and a group of three other friends, pretty late and tired, and I couldn't find anything on the iPod that satisfied the mood of the car. Musically we had a metal head who would like more kinds of music if he'd only listen to them, a raver who listens to The Arcade Fire, and a typical KROQ child of the early late 90's (NIN, Tool, etc). I figured that this song was already kind of a guilty pleasure, so I put on just to see what would happen.

It was perfect! It woke us up, everyone seemed to rock out to it (including the KROQ child air drumming the whole thing and the metal head going "at least these guys are good!") and it picked up the lazy tired pace of the drive (it's amazing how sometimes 80 mph can seem slow when you're doing it at the front end of an hour and a half drive back home) back up to optimistic highs.

Things I like about this song: the lyrics are great and emotive even if you don't know the song is about eating disorders (and is more enjoyable if you ignore that fact). The verse he leads off with is great: it's the easiest to understand and easiest to relate to. (Not only is it stupidly easy to relate to "I went outside and even though it was warm I was cold" but the tone of the song in the beginning is anxious and restrained and totally matches that sort of odd 'why am I not in tune with the world?' moment.)

"If you believe in something beautiful, then get up and be it!" makes me want to rock out and vomit on myself at the same time whenever it is sung. Inspirational music is for pussies! I'd prefer lyrics that go: "If you believe in something beautiful, then it's probably because you've seen it and it has left you behind while it has gone on to better things and now you spend all your time reflecting on how you will never be satisfied."

\m/ indie rock \m/

There's a lot of other stuff I like about this song (mostly dealing with his vocal and the various non-words he uses to great effect) but for the most part I just like that it makes me feel good. I listen to so much music that is kind of seemingly designed to drain you of energy if you're not paying attention to it, so it's refreshing to be slapped in the face by a song that is like "GET DRUNK, SKATEBOARD!" even though I don't drink or skateboard.

(The rest of this album kind of sucks. None of the songs have the variety of this one, which is probably why it's their 'biggest hit'. A lot of the songs seems to be constructed all around one single musical premise [like "this song has a cool beat" or "this guitar hits these three notes over and over again the whole song"] where this one was constructed around being an awesome song.)

I've been super skinny my whole life, just naturally anorexic levels of skinny and I'm pretty self-conscious about it (I won't say that I look at my skinniness as soul-crushingly as some people look at their fat, which makes sense because fat people are gross) and I'll never understand why someone would want to vomit or starve themselves to the point that they would be as thin as I am. I don't think it's attractive, but then again, I've never been fat, so I don't know.

Maybe one day I will be fat and I will be like, "Hey! Puking!"

It will be easier than diet and exercise I bet.

Site Note: Because all you people reading this are actually reading this, Google advertisements are absolutely useless. I removed them. Buy music from Amazon (even if I make nothing from it really) if you feel like stimulating the economy via my website.

One of my ever increasing number of exes told me once that she liked The Magnetic Fields so I tried to listen to them and didn't get very far. I think last Saturday I posted a song by them entirely different than this one.

Trent Reznor set up a blip.fm playlist dedicated to Magnetic Fields (available as of 4/20/09 and probably will be for a week maybe) and the selection of songs he picked is pretty good, so I went ahead and listened to Holiday and came away from it fairly impressed but feeling like I always do: none of this will really land in my mix of daily music because it just sticks out like such a sore thumb.

Between the genius lyrics, the Marvin The Paranoid Android vocals, and the syrupy 80's synth influence, where am I going to put that?

--

This song makes me think about how I probably made my ex feel sometimes.

You can watch a movie only once and remember what happens at the end, and you'd probably be able to recall many of the major plot points up to a year after you see it. Why is it then so hard to recognize the patterns in your own life? And what do you do when you do see them? How do you know that things can't change? Are we trapped by the circles that we travel within?

Is it true then, as the Philosophy of Time Travel describes, that we are lead by an Abyss-like water-tentacle through our lives and that our paths are set? But what if you see it! And then change it. Oh yeah.

Sorry. Back up.

Relationships are always difficult to analyze because there are two people in them and no one can possibly know what the other was really thinking the whole time. You're lucky if you've got one absolutely true and uncensored perspective, and you're extra lucky if that perspective is your own. (I don't really think I can trust my own.) Usually you just end up with a big mess: all this shit, so fucked up, boom. There's no data to extract from that usually but vague generalities: 'maybe I should be more careful', 'no more women who stick their faces into cats and smell them deeply as if they were fresh laundry', 'more women who stick their faces into laundry hot out of the dryer', 'asses don't have freckles, wear a condom', 'once upon a time i was falling in love, but now...'

Usually the players are equally fucked up, or there's one who is way more fucked up than the other, so when the same things begin to happen to the same person in a different relationship, it's hard to notice: it's the same story, every time, it plays out the same and it ends ugly and confused.

If you date outside of your regular demographic however you mix it up. You replace one of the players, keep one the same, we've done enough controls so now let's mix it up a little bit. It's obvious that no one else has gone on to have a successful relationship, so it's my turn, you know, to try to do something with someone swell, to try to do what no one else has.

And you know what, my head went to the same places it always does. I started to feel the same way about someone I had no reason to feel that way about. It's so routine now, the disintegration of... something. The disintegration of my appreciation? I don't know where this is from. This is new to me. I've always felt the problem was me, but now it's kind of clear.

It's clear that I'm beating myself up anyway.

I live such a busy routine every day that my days are exactly the same. The last seven months have gone by not so much 'in the blink of an eye' but more a slow yawn coupled with a stretch, and I just don't know what I'm doing. I think I said about a year ago that I wanted to spend some time just being happy for a while before I jumped back into the grind of hating my life, and, well shit, I guess I did that.

I think I need to break out of this routine. This time of year always leaves me feeling trapped, for some reason. (Maybe it's the change in temperature: I appreciate the 'cold' here in California, and then suddenly one day you wake up and it's 90 degrees and I want to fucking die, because I like my jackets, damnit, so I feel sandwiched between happy-coldness and the horrible approaching 100+ degree temperatures.)

There's no direction, that's all, I've got no direction. I've got goals but no direction. That's what I'm doing wrong. That's why this has happened. There was a reason after all!

Crap.

Thanks, internet.

This is the first time I've linked to iTunes, but I have no choice. I got this EP from the band directly, for free, when I saw them open for Mando Diao. The EP itself said they were supposed to release an album at the end of 2008, but it didn't happen. Now all there is this lone out-of-print now online-only EP.

When seen live, the music is kind of strained, and we couldn't hardly understand the signer for shit, but I attribute most of this due to the fact that the Troubadour has lousy sound and I don't know why bands play there. The crowd also always sucks. I don't like the Troubadour. Lots of bad experiences there.

We Barbarians are great, for some reason they remind me of this distant time when Radiohead used to actually played instruments and wrote traditional songs that were somewhat fun to listen to. We Barbarians doesn't necessarily sound anything like Radiohead, but the general vibe is kind of the same. You've got a bunch of white, sweaty, kinda twiggy awkward-looking intelligent guys playing their instruments and creating a tsunami of sound of which there is no escape from!

This is another one of those songs that has a cool shift part-way through it that feels somewhat like a dam breaking in your head somewhere. In my head somewhere. In our collective head.

I wish I would meet someone, some cool dude (ala "I Love You, Man") who would be like, "Dude, I should teach you how to play guitar, and then we can be a band that sounds like this, and you can sing and stuff or whatever, it would be rad!" and then he'd keep his enthusiasm even when I became discouraged and eventually we would be famous and awesome. Or at least content, you know, making music people write music blogs about.

I figure since We Barbarians gave me their EP for free, I might as well pass on this track from it to you. It doesn't look like there is anywhere else you can grab this on the world wide internets, so here you go. Happy Easter!

Download: http://staires.org/inthedoldrums.mp3

Someone next door is playing their radio really loudly and it's playing Evanescence and holy shit if there is anything on earth that should be wiped off the face of the Earth, it's this horrible bullshit. Amy Lee should choke to death on a leprous AIDS cock. Good lord.

I'm totally pissing away my repeat rules this month. I got kind of hooked on this song yesterday and decided that I absolutely had to post it or else I was cheating not only myself, but you, the pure innocent.

This song that perfectly transcribes one of those moments where you feel like you're absolutely overwhelmed by life and can't take it anymore and you sit down to write it out and it comes out into this tiny little list of inconsequential things and you look at it and think: Damn, that's a tiny little list of things... but... but my dog died last week!

So what do you do? You put it to some ridiculously awesome music via super-fast finger-picked guitar and vocals that teeter over into the realm of wailing and you got yourself a kick ass song.

If Frightened Rabbit writes songs about what it's really like to be inside a normal guy's head (and they do, for the most part), then The Dodos write songs about what it's really like to be inside the mind of an endlessly conflicted, hopelessly middle class, and irreparably melodramatic man-boy in his woman-battered and emo early twenties. Ben Gibbard, eat your heart out, you can never be this young again.

I also feel this song is an appropriate follow up to yesterday's song... though I can't remember what yesterday's song was, now. Weird. What was it... I posted Donovan the other day... Was that yesterday? No! It was John Lennon yesterday! Bonus track rants... Jesus, in 24 hours my whole memory falls apart. No wonder my conscience is so clear.

In the Amazon comments for this addition of Plastic Ono Band, someone complains about how the two bonus tracks have nothing to do with the record and actually distract from the overall flow. I have to agree. We need to stop with this bonus track nonsense.

Bonus tracks are great, especially when they come on a separate CD. They're there for you when you're done listening to the album and you feel like listening to someone else by the same artist. Sometimes they're cool demos and such. In the case of The Who Sell Out, they give you a whopping 9 bonus tracks, which is great.

Except that the first time I listened to Sell Out, I had no idea that only 14 of the album's 23 tracks were the actual album. I thought, "Man, this album is long, and why the weird reprise of Shaky Hands? And all the Coke commercials?" No one warned me that they weren't part of the album. There was no difference in labeling. I essentially corrupted my initial listen of the album.

What can we do? Can we petition Amazon and iTunes to start tagging bonus tracks with "(Bonus Tracks)" after the album title? When I buy an album and hit play, I expect to hear the album as it was made, not the album seamlessly flowing into a bunch of demos, b-sides, and oddities.

Bonus tracks should be packaged and/or tagged separately from the album. Please.

--

John Lennon's screaming at the end of this track is often attributed to the influence primal therapy, which runs rampant over the whole album. Lots of screaming everywhere. Lots of "bare emotionality" and "unrepentant navel gazing".

John was apparently big on saying God is the domain of the pained.

"Our pain is the pain we go through all the time. You're born in pain, and pain is what we're in most of the time. And I think that the bigger the pain, the more gods we need."

His [Arthur Janov's] thing is to feel the pain that's accumulated inside you ever since your childhood. I had to do it to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life - it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment.

As I realised this it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit...... Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it...... [It's] facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.

Sounds like John Lennon should have read Wise Blood.

The general opinion of Primal Therapy these days it that it's total bunk.

This is another one of those songs (like The Sylvan Screen) where it's obvious what the songwriter was doing when they wrote the song, as it starts off with "when I look out my window". (The Sylvan Screen starts off with "every day i sit and look through my window". Someone should compile a playlist of window watching songs. Maybe me.)

There was a time that everyone said that Jimmy Page played guitar on this track, but it's actually "Hurdy Gurdy Man" in which all of Led Zeppelin (excluding Robert Plant) play on. Kind of interesting.

There's a cover of this song on The Masked Marauders' one and only album, sung horribly by a mostly decent Bob Dylan impersonator, which is kind of ironic in an Alanis Morrisette sort of way. I think I listened to about a minute of it. Supposedly a Mick Jagger impersonator comes in on it at some point, too, but I couldn't last that long to find out for sure.

This is definitely a Fall song. When all the leaves are turning orange, you bust out the Donovan and relax in the cool breeze.

Every time I post a Nilsson track, I feel a little sad, because there are so many other Nilsson tracks I could post. If I don't allow myself to repeat a Nilsson song more often than all the others, then I'll only be posting four Nilsson songs a year. Four songs a year! It almost seems unacceptable. Maybe at some point I'll just do a "Nilsson Week" because it's clear to me that not enough people listen to him.

Harry Nilsson is a legend. A friend of John Lennon is a friend of mine. Yadda yadda yadda.

I like this song a lot. It's not a song that got me into Nilsson (that would have been all of Nilsson Schmilsson for sure) but it's definitely one of those songs that sticks with me.

I've joked about cutting out one of his "ALRIGHT!" shouts and having that as my notification sound when I get a text message on my cellphone but I think it would scare me probably just about as bad as this did when I had it set as my ringtone for a friend of mine:

[REDACTED]

Enjoy, internets.

I've got a group of friends who are addicted to going to raves, the cheaper the better, and they constantly invite me even though I didn't like ecstasy when I was 15, I don't dance, I don't like big crowds of people, I don't like stupid people, I don't like dance music, and I don't like bright flashing lights because they give me headaches and make me feel dizzy.

So of course, last night I decided to go the route of Yes Man and say yes and go.

We ended up at this Mexican nightclub that had free entry before 10pm. We got there at about 9:40 after driving all of Sunset and Hollywood trying to avoid traffic on the 101, so we were a train of three cars trying to navigate rush hour traffic together and it was a lot of fun. The whole time I was driving I was listening to Handsome Furs' Face Control. Cruising Los Angeles with Handsome Furs playing made me almost feel like I was one of those people who goes clubbing on the weekend, cool as fuck and chilling with no worries.

There were about 100 people in line, it was an all-ages rave so the line was primarily composed of awkward teenage guys and then underage jail bait wearing attire that made me feel like I was guilty of statutory rape just by looking at me. After half an hour we go up close enough to see that there was a handwritten door on the front of place that says, "NO ALCOHOL SOLD," and by 10pm the rave was going to be $10. We debated.

The owner of the club came up and talked to us, and told us that the venue had been ready since 7 and he had been trying to get the event organizers to let people in, but they were purposefully slowing the line (it was practically empty inside I guess?) so everyone would have to pay.

We left, and I used my phone to find another rave in Downtown. It was $5 but they promised cheap liquor, so we drove there, and it was in a dance hall attached to an apartment building. We paid the $5 to get in and walked in to discover they had a really awesome laser ball and a total of about 20 people in the place, nothing but wallflowers.

One of my buddies went and asked around for ecstasy pills and the first person he walked up to had red whales for ten bucks. Everyone with me at this point was pretty drunk. One friend, who came out from Arizona, started dancing like a robot and poplocking and it was so fucking hilarious, because he did it well and he looked like a muscled white construction worker.

I hung around for a bit and danced around a little bit (though all I could think about through all the dance music was how much I'd rather be listening to Handsome Furs) but then started to feel kind of ill so I went to my car to take my jacket off and ended up sitting it and calling my girlfriend. After being on the phone for a while I noticed that there was some guy standing across the street just kind of walking in circles aimlessly. He was wearing knee-high rubber rain boots and a full rain slicker with the hood pulled over his head. He kept looking at my car and slowly walking toward it, then walking back to the sidewalk, then he'd turn and pause, then walk slowly back toward my car.

I got freaked out and rolled out, sending my friends a text message that I got the wiggins and decided to leave. On the way home I listened to the Handsome Furs and decided this was one of the most fun albums I've heard in a long time. It's not my style, but it's so...

Sincere. Pitchfork's review says that in comparison to their first album (which I haven't heard), Face Control sounds like a band committed to their sound and craft, that the husband and wife team have achieved greatness, and I am inclined to agree.

Almost all the songs on the album are brilliant. Legal Tender is just fun to listen to; Evangeline sounds like it would be the perfect song to watch a woman do a striptease to; Talking Hotel Arbat Blues has a great sort of anthemic Bruce Springsteen vibe to it; this song I'm posting here is one of those songs that sounds immediate and familiar, like I was born with it in my head just waiting all these years to hear it; I'm Confused and the rest of the album just ooze polish and passion for the music.

Handsome Furs are definitely something everyone should be listening to.

~fin.

Happy Easter. Late post today as I was hungover and puking at the normal time I'd be posting here.

I am hungrier than I am wanting to write on my website. I could go eat, then come back, but why? I'm like a character actor, man, the real pain drives my artistic integrity! Hunger pains be damned, the people must have gibberish written for them, or else they will become restless.

There was some point last night when I heard this song, and I really don't know where or when. I want to think it was something cool, like it just happened to be on my friend's girlfriend's iPod's playlists, and I want to think I was like: Oh, wow, I am totally krunked and this song sounds so pretty, this night rules, and then I leaned my head back on a wall or a chair or something, but it's not likely. Maybe it was at 2nd Street Jazz in Little Tokyo, between the angry testosterone-fueled bar-grunge(?) band that was only mostly annoying & the all-girl group who sounded like what you'd get if Avril Lavigne and Hayley Williams (that bitch from Paramore) somehow fucked each other, then their child raped the bloated sagging corpse of modern pop rock (i.e. their own child rapes and murders both of them), and then somehow those raped corpses had five baby girls and when they grew up they decided to form a band. That is what they sounded like.

I don't think I heard this song there, either.

It was probably when I was driving home. Every now and then I hear a random obscure song off my iPod (usually it's some weird Michael Penn song or an Eels track) in a store or restaurant and it always freaks me out, but really, this one? I don't think so.

Going to go eat now.

Have a good Saturday.

Site Note: At some point today I'll be integrating latest staires! blog posts into this site somehow. In a sidebar somewhere. If you haven't seen mention of it before, go check it out, though I'm not sure if I'll bother updating it much on the weekend.

Twitter Note: If you're a twitter follower and reading this and feel like giving me your opinion, how would you feel if I just auto-posted staires! blog posts to the @staires twitter account? Would you be annoyed? Does staires! blog interest you as much as this shit here does? Does it not? What do you want? Jesus, I'm not a fucking psychic, for fuck's sake, I'm not a fucking mind reader!

It's true, I don't know what you do to me, but I like it a lot, so do it some more.

There's a review of this album that says: “Bogachiel Rain Blues” is the type of song you could definitely rock out to on the juke box. I don't know about that. I am inclined to agree, because the feel does feel kind of 'rocky' but how would you rock out to this? I have some mental image of some slightly awkward skinny white trash guy with a mullet trying to swivel his hips poorly (doing kind of a "Forest Gump" if you will) with a shit eating grin on his face.

Pitchfork reviewed it too and they said their typical excessively wordy middling appraisal of the album:

As such, listeners won't be surprised to note that the Moondoggies, like their Northwestern brethren in Blitzen Trapper and Fleet Foxes, take their cues from Laurel Canyon, circa 1970, imagining neighborly collaborations that may or may not have happened: Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonizing over Graham Parson's country-rock riffs; Crazy Horse's fuzzy, bloody knuckled blues mingling with the Byrds' psychedelic organs; the Band flying in from Big Pink to add some gritty Americana backbone to the Eagles' easy, druggy melodies.

How could I ever follow that? I don't listen to any of those bands. I don't even really listen to this album (though I am right now, at work, because it's relaxing and pretty), but goddamn. How many little bits of rock history can you drop in one paragraph? Damn you, Pitchfork. Damn you most of all for being right about the album.

Don’t Be a Stranger is a charming collection by a confident and competent group of musicians, but its drawback is its same-ness. Sure, these 13 tracks are a rollicking good time-- a soundtrack to the open road, a score for all the neon lit biker bars on the interstate, and an expression of the joy at returning home-- but there is little dynamic diversity between them. Almost every song is played at a hazy, stoner pace-- slow enough to allow for impaired motor skills, but fast enough to build a repetitive, jammy groove...

Today is blockquote day. This is a song I like that I don't have anything to say about, whoops.

Black Shoe off the album is funny, as it goes "Where you goin' with my black shoe" repeated over and over again and then suddenly breaks into an uproarious "ALLLL NIIIGHTT LOONNNGG" repeated over and over again until quieting back up. Interesting songwriting.

My work schedule usually doesn't land me in the office until noon, but starting today until a week from Monday, I'm working a morning schedule so I'll be writing these posts from work. If they lack in quality (or increase in quality), then you should start paying me hourly to write on this website so that I can quit my job and dedicate myself to entertaining you with my words. $15/hr will get you "staires! a song every hour!" seven songs a day, five days a week. Any takers?

This is my first official 'repeat' of an artist. I figured waiting three months in between artist repetitions will keep things relatively fresh without making me get super bored wading through the numerous 'one decent song wonders' in my collection.

The Dodos are one of my favorite artists (see my eljay best of 2008) and everyone I know seems to enjoy this song, even people who don't care for the rest of The Dodos' music. It's got a perfect mood to fit the lyrics.

In the past I probably would have written some long diatribe about my struggles with religion but nearly a year ago I realized that the whole believing in God thing seemed kind of foolish and now I try not to dedicate any thought to it because it seems like such a ridiculous waste of brain power.

I'm not going to loop myself in with atheists, because they seem so militant. It's like, even though they don't believe in God, they have to be so ridiculously enthusiastic about it that it's practically a religion to them. I don't want to stereotype atheists, as I'm sure there's probably a lot of non-outspoken atheists out there who don't try to peddle their anti-God shit in the same way jay-dubs try to, well, suck all the love and joy out of your life (and try to kill their babies/children by refusing blood transfusions).

Arguing religion is just pointless. An atheist arguing against god with a Christian are just two morons blowing air at each other. What's there to argue? One believes in something you can't prove (at all, no matter what) and the other believes that the other is a moron (which you can't really prove, either). What is there for debate? How is there even a debate?

Even Isaac Newton believed in invisible fairies that fought against gravity to carry a thrown ball. (But he was already kind of out there, and to be fair this was back when everyone thought alchemy was real science.) It's not wrong to believe the world is full of wonder and things we'll never understand (or see with our own eyes, or eye, for the cyclops in the audience), but to let something like that influence your life is absolutely silly. If you've seen Yes Man (which is funny and I recommend it, though "I Love You, Man" was more 'down to earth'/realistic) then you'll understand this comparison: everyone's got their own book, their own something to believe in. For some, it's the Bible, for others it's The God Delusion, for some (like me, I guess) it's the Principia Discordia. It's just such a shame when people take these things too seriously, unless it's the Principia Discordia, which you can never take too seriously. The Principia demands seriousness, as well as koala blood and the forcibly removed clitorises of African women, fnord.

Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!

A little over a year ago, while I was struggling through being madly in love with a girl who wasn't at all interested in me and somewhat drowning in open air, a friend suggested that I sit down and listen to Pinkerton after hearing that I hadn't tried to listen to it in about nine years. It's understandable that back when my musical diet was purely Nine Inch Nails, The Beatles, and Radiohead, that Weezer probably wouldn't have made much sense to me.

So I listened to Pinkerton, about a year ago, and it was wonderful. I listened to it a lot, probably at least 20 times, in the span of a week or two. My first couple play throughs it became clear: the last two songs on the album are totally expendable. Butterfly is a waste of time and Falling For You takes the relatively honest "I'm a guy and sometimes being a guy is hard and I want to sing about it" philosophy of the whole album and turns it into "I'm a giant pussy and a moron". IMHO, of course.

Pink Triangle annoyed me the most at first. The verses' ascending-descending motif totally fucked with my head, and to this day I still kind of feel like my ears are going to bleed during the verses, but the chorus eventually caught my attention after repeated listens. I like it mostly because while most choruses are just a sentence or two repeated over and over, Pink Triangle's chorus is a linear section that almost feels like a relief after the up-down coaster ride of the verses.

It's also so incredibly fun to sing along with. Let me know the truth, let me knoowww the truttth...

I was going to rant about how much I dislike Weezer, but I don't really feel like it. Their legacy sort of speaks for itself and while they're phoning it in people are still gobbling it up. Good for them. (I reference a Spin article a lot in defense of how much I hate Weezer, I actually found it. Here it is.)

My friend, who recommended Pinkerton, said that as a Weezer fan you're mostly listening in the hopes that there will be another Pinkerton. While I sat behind him and his brother listening to leaked Red Album tracks a while back, it was kind of clear to me that he was right. They were picking each song apart, comparing bits and pieces of it to Blue Album and Pinkerton-era Weezer, looking for parts of those albums in the new material. Even though they were listening to new material, they were reminiscing the entire time.

I'll reminisce when I listen to new Nine Inch Nails, like how "In This Twilight" off Year Zero almost sounds like it could have fit in somewhere on The Fragile (if you some how mixed the mood of The Fragile with the mood of The Smashing Pumpkin's Mellon Collie), but when the material doesn't measure up (With Teeth, The Slip) I move on (or do the smart thing and listen to the artist's good material and try to forget that the new stuff exists). I don't hold on.

So, I'm perfectly happy listening to Pinkerton and some of the Blue Album. I'll throw a little Hash Pipe into my rotation as well, but I don't want to be a Weezer fan. I don't want to be that sad.

This whole Twitter on television thing has really forced me to realize that the internet is far more mainstream than I like to think. I have to sit around and worry in a paranoid state that at some point, some day, someone I've met in passing will Google my full name and find this website (would have been worse in the past when I used to have public journals of five years of my life) and my twitter account. Maybe one of my co-workers?

I know a kid who got suspended from middle school because a friend's mother saw that his MySpace profile listed him as gay and reported it to the school's principal. Why would it even occur to her to do that? (And there's Dooce, of course, whose amount of 'daily' stuff makes me feel like a chump.) That's one reason why I worry.

But even still, there are people who I know, the most internet prolific out of the group, who never realized that you could put a fake email address into Apple's stupid email requester when you download iTunes. I know teenagers who use LimeWire and think torrents are scary places they don't understand, and we're talking slightly autistic teenagers who tested out of high school right as they turned 16, so this kid isn't dumb, and he hasn't lacked the time to delve into the computer.

To a lot of people, it seems like the internet, hell, PCs in general, are a scary place. You wander randomly to some untested area of the waters and you may get eaten by a shark. Or maybe a grue. Or, at the very least, you get some random virus by visiting the wrong website or infested with spyware. I understand now why the majority of IT divisions exist in companies: to scare stupid people into not clicking on random shit without thinking.

And it works. The workers bring it home to their kids, when they chide their children over changing the wallpaper or fiddling with their Windows Media Player, because last time they upgraded the computer they lost all their music because, from what it sounded like to me, they imported all their CDs into some sort of DRM-protected WMA that they can't play on their new computer, so she's just pissed off all over.

It's safe to say Microsoft doesn't really help the problem either, but what can they do? The problem is ubiquity, the problem is too much choice. Apple's horribly overpriced shit, that everyone lovingly calls the "Apple tax" these days, guarantees you a few things: a controlled environment, and independent developers who are also pretentious fuck heads, so they only want to design software that achieves Apple's high level of standards. Macs are a secret world for people with no other interests (or lots of money). On PC's the idea is to shovel out as much shit as you can.

I've been sitting on the internet for the majority of my days for a much longer portion of my life so far than I'm sure most of us would admit to, and I've never gotten a virus or a spyware infection. Am I lucky? I don't know. I just don't download things from random places. I know I let my dad lose on his user account once without any virus protection installed and within 30 minutes of porn-site browsing (ah, the internet habits of a 60 year old) my computer was so fucked up I eventually had to reformat. I don't know how he did it. I wasn't watching over his shoulder or anything. Gross.

It's a relief, then, I guess, that the internet is so scary to most people. They just assume the internet is equally as scary to everyone else. As long as I continue to work with old people, I'll probably never have to worry about any of them Googling my name and reading this.

So fuck ya'll!

Actually I quite like my job, so I don't really mean that.

Song Note: You can't buy this song anywhere, apparently.

When I was a teenager, my parents liked to hand me movies they watched that they didn't like, because there was this running joke (already, at such a young age) that I liked stuff that other people didn't like, just by default. Usually this was just because my parents don't like indie/arty cinema. I can't think of any specific movies, aside from Limbo, that I discovered this way.

To speak of Limbo is to spoil Limbo, and it's one of the only bad things about it (though you only run into this when trying to tell other people about it). What is it about? Well, it's about a lot of people, then it's about a small group, but if I tell you anything about what happens then it's going to kind of spoil everything. I shouldn't even tell you the first major plot point that happens, what the second half of the film is, because it's going to shift your concentration during the first half.

I was lucky enough to watch Limbo without even seeing the cover art. I mean, I knew who the lead actors were, but I didn't know what the movie was about at all. I was also ridiculously stoned, the kind of stoned that you got when you were a freshman in high school and smoking pot was still exciting and made things more interesting than usual (as opposed to just "less boring than usual" which crops up in the later years). I kept reading into it all these subconscious or subversive plot lines that didn't actually exist in the movie. I was transfixed, going, "Oh my god! That guy might kill that girl! What is going on! This is crazy! What the fuck, alpacas?" when in actuality there was nothing of the sort happening, though there is a discussion on alpacas at one point.

So, naturally, the first time I watched Limbo, it was kind of a trip. I watched it again the next day and sat floored at how poorly I comprehended the first part of the film.

Years later, I would show Limbo to my friend Flanders, who is quite a bit larger than me, who became enraged at the end of the film and stomped around my apartment nearly punching everything and swearing that I was lucky that he can control his Hulk-rage and not beat me up for making him watch it. Why was he enraged? See! I can't tell you, because that would ruin the whole thing.

I've showed a few girlfriends Limbo. One said she liked it, only to tell me years later that she only said she liked it to not hurt my feelings. I'm pretty sure one got bored and distracted me with sex so she didn't have to watch it. I think one actually liked it somewhat but you can never be sure with women.

I've read reviews on Amazon that range from utterly scathing to positively glowing. This is the true champion of being a purely "love it or hate it" film. There's no middle ground. Either you get it, or you don't, and if you don't get it you're going to feel kind of robbed. I've read that film professors have shown Limbo to their film students, for what reason I can't really recollect.

So do yourself a favor: don't look at the cover art, don't read the synopsis of the movie, just download it or rent it or buy it and watch it. It's completely self-contained and it makes perfect sense. I promise.

Furthermore, it's a beautiful movie. It's kind of a love-song to Alaska, if you will, so if you fancy yourself a fan of that state, then watch this. It's a shame that it doesn't exist in HD/Bluray yet as the footage in this film is uniquely beautiful.

Maid Marian Dubois from Kevin Costner's Robin Hood sings country music with a voice trained for opera and you can generally safely mute it whenever she starts singing, unless you really want to be a purest and suffer through it. This is also one of David Strathairn's best movies IMHO. Lots of sexy footage of him on a fishing boat, hauling trout out of net.

Song Note: I figured I'd try to force myself to jump between decades by posting a group and then posting a band that influences them that I like, so today you get Bruce Springsteen. Little did I realize that I am fucked up musically and ended up picking the most obtuse song out of Springsteen's whole collection (the only one that doesn't sound anything like yesterday's track). The Boss in falsetto for a whole song; he doesn't do this any other time does he?

You can download this song for free! by clicking on the album art.

It's lyric discovery time_!_ At 1:08 the lyrics go:

"He said I'm taking the farm out from under your knees / said I'm taking the air and ...

Taking the air and what? Here's what I got: "and the ? that you're leaning upon" so I'm just missing a word. I leave it to you, dear readers, what is he singing? Whoever guesses it can go update the lyrics on SongMeanings.

I missed so many good albums last year. I don't think I should do a "Best of 2009" so far this year as I am so slow on the uptake. My music discovery comes in violent spurts, where I ravenously devour gobs of music in a short amount of time and then wallow in it for a while until I feel that I need something new to catch my fancy. Sometimes it takes me a while to put my ear to the rail. I somehow missed all the hype in 2004 and didn't discover Arcade Fire until about this time of year in 2005. If I had a hipster badge, I would turn it in.

Would this song have ended up in my Best of 2008? Probably. Probably with a lot of other songs, too.

This is where I get to say something that I don't seem to often say about new albums: I quite like this one! It's split into sections by somewhat lengthy instrumental sections that are superfluous for the most part, but as a whole the album works quite well. You can download this song for free, but really you should buy the whole thing. Pitchfork's review says that it's a road trip album, and I suppose I agree. Just be careful, because if you turn the volume down too far, it loses a lot of its power and turns into a great bedtime album. (So it's like two albums in one!)

Most notable, of course, is the fact that the singer sounds like some high-pitched bastard child clone hybrid of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, who alternates between impressions of them, sometimes on the same song, jumping from Bruce Springsteen (like on this song) to Bob Dylan (like on Buenos Aires Beach, which has two of the most fun "oh-oh-oh-oh-oh" syllable stuttering parts I have ever heard in a song ever in my whole goddamn life) as if he was meant to do so his whole life. The music backing him up sounds roughly the same: it's familiar, as if you've got an E Street cover band playing shoegaze reinterpretations of the Boss' greatest.

Overall, this album is totes win. I'm totes hooked.

You can download this song for free_!_ if you click on the album art and grab it through AmazonMP3.

I heard this song for the first time a couple days ago when I twittered about a bunch of free indie samplers and I thought that it was so wild that I just had to download the album.

It's a shame, as I unfortunately so often say, that the rest of the album sucks dick. By that I mean that on every other track but this one (and even this one a little) the singer sounds like he's trying to do a poor imitation of Alec Ounsworth of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (who, in turn, sounds like he's trying to do an imitation of 'Neil Young slowly being eaten by cats and wailing furiously in fear and sorrow', which is in very poor taste, especially at a concert in which I paid money to hear someone actually hit a proper note on purpose, instead of just wailing through all of them hoping a decent one pops in there somewhere, good god I hate Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, their shows suck).

It's too bad, because the music is decently pretty, and people on Amazon claim this album is neo-psychedelia but I... really don't want to agree. I got bored a couple tracks after this one and started to become nauseated by the memory of seeing Clap Your Hands in concert, so I had to turn it off. This song will stick with me, though.

We're beginning to see a trend in indie music, and I blame Arcade Fire for this because it seemed that back in 2004 Arcade Fire really opened the flood gates for 'singers with high voices who can't quite sing' (and to give credit to Win Butler, he can sing, and quite well, it's just that it didn't become obvious until much worse vocalists came around), but in the last year or so the focus has turned to 'singers with high voices who can kind of sing but instead screech through a 1970's loud speakers'. If I end up posting The War on Drugs tomorrow you can compare and contrast (when, instead of a Clap Your Hands imitation, you'll get a vocal that is an imitation of what Win Butler, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen's kid would sound like if you could somehow get them all to fuck each other).

What I like most about this song is: when it builds into noise (pretty early on) over the rest of the song and then scrambles and breaks into sweet relief. It's really effective (if I may say so myself) and I think they pull it off beautifully.

What I like least about this song is: when it builds into noise at the end and then doesn't break away from it, instead it keeps going and they pop in some ridiculous bass riff and then, poof, the song ends. Shit like that is a total mellow harsher.

Also, Pitchfork loves this stuff, so you know it has to suck.

Cat Steven's Mona Bone Jakon was the first album I ever stole, I think. There was a used copy of it sitting on the shelf with the CD still in it, so I popped the CD out and slipped it into my back pocket. This was at a Blockbuster Music that used to exist over on Whittier Blvd; it's a Goodwill now. The woman I would later lose my virginity to was a manager there at the time.

I was listening to Cat Stevens before I even discovered The Beatles. I don't know how I had room for him in my musical pallet at the time since everything else I was listening to was industrial/psuedo-industrial. I would go from Nine Inch Nails, to Skinny Puppy, to some sort of EDM (Covenant, Project Pitchfork?), and then right into Cat Stevens.

I met a girl from OKCupid once who insisted that Phil Collins was a golden god and that Cat Steven's had a voice equivalent to nails on a chalkboard. I called her crazy. She had this funny habit of referring to the number of floors and bedrooms in the house of whoever she was talking about.

"My friend Steve," she'd say, "his house has 2 floors, 5 bedrooms, but he said that the movie was..."

"That guy Gary I was talking about, his parents house has 3 floors and 8 bedrooms and I'm like, omigawd, my house only has 2 floors you know?"

I drove her to a smoke shop (a Farmacy, which look pretty nice from the outside) in Santa Monica and she bought a bunch of ridiculously overpriced herb. I never hung out with her again. She kept talking about how she'd never been with a girl but was in love with this one girl but she had a boyfriend but she'd do the boyfriend too so who knows omigawd I am so scared you know but she's sooo hot. It's amazing how even a year or two out of high school, some people don't lose their high school mentality.

I should really start trolling OKCupid again just so that I have random fucked up girls to write about on the internet. I'll just try to meet people who I match exceptionally low with. "A 300lbs black girl who matches with me only 25% and has a bitchin' weave? Of course I'll meet you!" ... and then I'm never heard from again.

I didn't encounter April Fools yesterday until I got to a house full of kids under the age of 18. Prior to that moment, if it weren't for the internet, I wouldn't have realized it was the 1st at all.

"Brad, do you remember that thing we did last April Fools? That awesome prank we pulled?"

"No, I don't know, I don't think so, was I around?"

"Really man, you don't remember that ridiculous prank we did, man? It was fucking awesome!"

"No, man, I don't think so, that sucks."

"APRIL FOOLS! THERE WAS NO PRANK!"

Site Note: The March 2009 playlist is up.

We made it to April!

It's April right?

The shame about this song is that it's nearly perfect (there are parts of it I don't like) but it's nestled right in the middle of an album full of really boring shit. I ended up deleting the rest of the album off my iPod pretty quickly.

This blog wrote about this song and said this about it:

Rolling, garage-folk has never sounded so good. These United States sing a workman’s song in a cubicle world, and pull it off better than most could hope to do. Elegantly plucked and strummed guitar parts match up like puzzle pieces against wisely under-used trumpet bits and a melody that recalls classic blues standards without aping them. Someone call M. Ward and tell him he’s got an opener for his next tour.

Wisely under-used trumpet bits? I'm glad I don't write about music.

I can't even find lyrics for this song on the internet, not that you need them I guess.

This song reminds me of: Earn Enough For Us by XTC, which is a selling point. It also reminds me of These Boots Are Made For Walking (and I don't mean the AMAZING CRISPIN GLOVER VERSION omfg I have wanted to link to this FOR-FUCKING-EVER!)

Hey, I wonder if I can put that inline:

That's neat. Thanks, April Winchell.

Happy April Fools, not that I did anything to fool you.