Tommy Bartlett Update

Tommy Bartlett said nothing to actively piss me off in today's Wednesday Morning Download. Well, except when he said he finds Usher "entirely unexciting as a singer, a songwriter, a dancer and, yes, even as a sex object." Which doesn't anger me as much as it just makes me shake my head, like an older, wiser sister or aunt who's just waiting for him to pull his head out of his ass. Ah, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy. It's a good thing we plebeians have you! Otherwise we might be stuck in a world of fun music that we actually enjoy without having to be snobby about! Thank you for saving us from ourselves, for being such a guiding light of taste and sensibility and intelligence.

Best. Week. Ever.

Check this shit out, yo:

Rufus Wainwright at the Vic 10/13
Death Cab for Cutie at the Riv 10/14
Interpol at the Riv 10/17

And I've got tickets for all three! So exciting.

Poem?

I love Michael Barrish.

Offensive Celebrity Statement of the Week

Just when I was starting to not begrudge her her fame, happiness, and success, Gwyneth Paltrow lets this kind of garbage fly out of her mouth in Entertainment Weekly, re: the MTV Video Music Awards: "When you're covered in spit-up and you're kind of overweight, the idea of having someone blow out your hair and putting on a good outfit sounds nice. . . . But I just feel like an impostor now going into that world. I have to remind myself that I've got to go be Gwyneth Paltrow. And I don't even know what that means."

Kind of overweight?

A good outfit?

I don't even know what that means?

**sigh**

My circuits are jammed trying to get my head around how many levels of WRONG are embedded in there.

Gwynnie, we short, chubby, low-20K/year single urban gals wearing Old Navy salute you.

Grab Bag

Cintra, sometimes I hate you and sometimes I love you. Right now, I pretty much love you.

Thanks for the laughs, Kittenpants!

Billboards have started popping up all over the city for the new UPN show Kevin Hill. Whereas that shouldn't merit any notice under normal circumstances, this show happens to star Taye Diggs. Which means, Taye Diggs has started popping up all over the city. **swoon** The show sounds like it has an unbelievably retarded premise, but, my God, if that man isn't just this side of physical perfection. . . .

And in other billboard news, there's one on the north side of Chicago Avenue just east of Franklin (in the empty lot next to Bar Louie) advertising the tenth anniversary edition cover of Chicago Social magazine--featuring Adrien Brody. I nearly dropped my bag of Thai takeout when I saw it for the first time.

I Could Travel Just by Folding a Map

I know I should probably be writing about my continuing thoughts on Medulla* or how I've recently fallen in love with Ted Leo~ or how I was mildly disappointed by We Don't Live Here Anymore^. But . . . all I really want to talk about right now is how amazing Transatlanticism is.

I know, I know, I'm a little late pulling my chair up to the Death Cab for Cutie table. And I'm sure a zillion fans who've loved them since waaay back when will be more than happy to get on my case about how much better and more sonically interesting their early stuff is (I burned a copy of Giddy's We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes, so just hold yer horses; I'll get around to listening to it eventually). However, I've been listening to Transatlanticism intermittently at least since early July, and it's still surprising me with new corners to get lost in and new connections to make in order to climb back out of the confusion.

First, let's talk about the fact that the album makes a complete loop on itself. Is this widely acknowledged by the fans? Have other albums by other artists done this before and I've just never known about it? Regardless, Chris Walla, you're a genius. The feedbacky hum that ends "A Lack of Color" is the exact same noise that begins "The New Year," so if your CD player automatically replays the disk from the beginning once it reaches the final track, there's no interruption. It makes a seamless transition. And I don't think it's just a clever parlor trick. It's like an aural literalization of the lyric, "I wish the world was flat like the old days/then I could travel just by folding a map." Which makes complete sense, since that lyric (and the lines that follow it: "no more airplanes or speed-trains or freeways/there'd be no distance that could hold us back") is the album's Rosetta stone.

It took my now-regular weekend road trips out to Indiana for me to realize that Transatlanticism is all about distance, using transportation symbolism as that theme's (pardon the pun) vehicle. When you're alone in your car, doing 80 miles an hour on Route 30 early on a misty Sunday morning, phrases like "in the back of my grey sub-compact" and "from the passenger seat as you are driving me home" tend to lodge themselves in your brain. The album itself almost seems like it wants to fight how much it talks about transportation; aside from the glorious "Title and Registration," there are no direct references to travel in the first half of the album. Then, you get a hint in "Tiny Vessels" and "Transatlanticism" (the former's vacation in Silver Lake and the double meaning of the vessels of the title, the latter's overjoyed people who took to their boats), which eventually leads into the deluge of the final four songs. At which point, of course, you get kicked back to the beginning of the album again. The rush of imagery is both like acceleration and like the kind of verbal diarrhea that comes from repressing an emotion or preoccupation too long--at a certain point, you just can't stop yourself from talking about it and you unwittingly start to reveal the complex, interlocking infrastructure holding your neuroses together. Which is maybe why that image of folding a map is so potent for me: what at first seems like a magic trick that will bring you closer to your heart's desire actually reveals itself as a Mobius strip, keeping you locked in a cycle of obsessive memory.

But what prevents all this from feeling self-serving or self-pitying is the sweeping, epic romance of the thing. Ben Gibbard keening "I need you so much closer" is quite literally the heart of the album. Nestled near the end of track seven (of eleven), it's both the voice of the child in us who never really grows up, murmuring a repeated phrase to lull himself to sleep, and the voice of the frantic lover, chanting a sweaty, desperate prayer against the darkening night. The question then becomes, would it have been better for that prayer to go unanswered?

The fragile perfection of "Passenger Seat," the very next track, starts off in a moment of sublime, peaceful happiness, his wish granted. Then, inexplicably, he starts pondering a crash ("do they collide?"), perhaps suddenly realizing that sometimes far apart is close enough and that sometimes celestial bodies would do best to keep their distance in the interest of avoiding a violent, fiery demise at each other's hands. And yet that dark little cloud in the perfectly clear sky of that moment doesn't affect his capacity for grand gestures of chivalry: "when you feel embarrassed, then I'll be your pride/when you need directions, then I'll be the guide" (note, again, here the map/travel image). But that relationship's ultimate inability to be sustained gives way, not to a spectacular flame-out, but to claustrophobia: the smothered romance of "Death of an Interior Decorator" and the cramped and airless quarters of "We Looked Like Giants," where the desire is intoxicating but choked with doom.

The sound of waves crashing on the beach at the beginning of "A Lack of Color" feels expansive here, and the sweet harmonies lacing the lines "I should have given you a reason to stay" are far more wistful than regretful. The repetition here reminds us of the repetition of "I need you so much closer," this time signaling sorrow, but also resignation, if not necessarily acceptance. After all, the whole drama gets played out again when the album restarts itself.

I am, obviously, just completely entranced with how breathlessly, intricately beautiful this album is. I think it’s telling that the last CD I listened to and found essential to do a close reading on in this manner was Bjork’s Vespertine. And why haven’t the critics been up to the task? Pitchfork’s is one of their retarded concept reviews. Rolling Stone’s is pleasant enough, but not exactly in the proper amount of awe. Typically, The Onion's review is perhaps the only one I've read that agrees with me and is, therefore, right. (Is this sarcasm? I dunno; is it?)

Go, go listen to this album now.

1

It's started to kick in for me, but the question that's keeping me up at night now is, is there any reason for cuts like "Triumph of a Heart" or "Who Is It"--commonly known among reviewers, fans, and other proselytizers as "the more accessible tracks"--to exist specifically in the a cappella style? It seems that they could have just as easily fit in to an album like Post with more traditional electronic orchestration (leave it to Bjork to force me to use a phrase like "traditional electronic orchestration"!). They just don't seem as inextricably linked to the all-vocal mission of this album the way "Where Is the Line" and "Mouth's Cradle" are, and that kind of bugs me, mostly for the sake of trying to defend her to her detractors or to those who've lost their faith in her infallible brilliance.

2

Ted! Ted! The Tyranny of Distance knocked me on my ass! What a gorgeous album!

3

Seriously, Pete and Mark, there wasn't enough money in the film's budget to get you guys some frickin' razors and shaving cream?

Arg! Arg! I Hate This Guy!

It's like pressing a bruise, the fact that I keep reading Salon's Wednesday Morning Download just to get angry with Tommy Bartlett. (I know the byline he uses is Thomas Bartlett, but it's just so much more emotionally satisfying for me to refer to him in the diminutive, especially since that's also the name of two cheesy-ass roadside attractions in Wisconsin: Tommy Bartlett's Robot World and Tommy Bartlett's Sky, Ski, and Stage Waterski Show.) This week's rage-making offense comes from the fact that he starts his last free download description with another "full disclosure" statement: "Full disclosure: Sam Amidon is my best friend, so you could say that I'm not an unbiased judge of his work." Get a grip on yourself, Tommy. We're not interested in you and your friends and your life. We want you to act as a sieve for us, filtering out the good downloads from the bad; we don't want you to use this column as an excuse to foist your own taste on us. You already have a blog; why do you need this platform, too? Are you that much of an egomaniac?

Artistic Ovulation

I'm convinced that Bjork's new album Medulla just made me ovulate. I swear to God, it's comprised of the most fertile sounding music I've ever heard in my life. I'm nowhere near ready to launch an analysis in print just yet, but I couldn't let the week end without some mention of the fact that it hasn't left my CD player. After all, as the cute pierced guy at Borders said, "Ah, the release of the new Bjork album. It's like a holiday, isn't it?"

Also, Jacques Tati's Playtime is similarly stuffed with ideas--miraculously, without causing sensory overload. Had the extreme pleasure and privilege of catching it at the Music Box with CTA last eve on the big screen, the way it's meant to be seen. (As Jaime N. Christley said of Playtime in his "Great Directors" entry for Tati at Senses of Cinema Dot Com, "Playtime on video is the same as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Lawrence of Arabia on video: the television monitor cannot possibly suffice.") Again, I'm not exactly feeling up to the challenge to deal with it in print, but I'll just leave you with my thought on how the movie was divided: the first part of the movie says, "you may not be ready for the city," but the second part says, "but the city's not ready for you, either." Which inevitably leads to the most beautiful kind of breakdown, chaos, and improvisation.

More Journalistic Doublespeak

But this time, it's not about Dubya.

Though I appreciate the service he provides with his Wednesday Morning Download column, I hate Salon's Thomas Bartlett with a white-hot, flaming passion.

"What is it that you're in a snit about now?" you may ask.

Well, when he says, "Full disclosure: I appear on the compilation [Barsuk's Future Soundtrack for America] as the keyboardist in Mike Doughty's band," it is the most thinly veiled example of self-aggrandizement I've seen in print perhaps since my days dabbling at my university's weekend entertainment magazine. "Full disclosure"? Come now. You're not exactly revealing this deep, dark secret about your personal, political, or professional affiliations that exposes an unfortunate but unavoidable conflict of interest for the sake of journalistic integrity. No, you just want everyone to know that you're this hipper than thou indie fuck making a few extra dollars (and a whole boatload of street cred) on the side playing keyboards in a handful of obscure rock bands. Believe me, no one gives a rat's ass. No one thinks you're cool, no one thinks this makes you a better or more informed or more interesting writer. In fact, your own musical ambitions might actually make you a worse writer/critic since professional jealousy is more likely to cloud your judgment (e.g. his needlessly spiteful criticism of Bob Pollard and GBV's swan song). You can't have it both ways, Tommy. You can't be both Lester Bangs and Chris Walla. Sure, Richard Meltzer fronted a punk band and wrote lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult, but he's a dickhead, too.

The Best Show on Television

Ooh, between the end of last season and now I'd forgotten how much I loooooove The O.C.!

Musings on the Names of Atlantic Storms

The Great Benji Kelnardo writes:

Lately, with way too much time on my hands, and with the arrival of the apex of the Atlantic storm season, I have been thinking about the names given to these storms. For some quick background info, there is an actual council (seriously) that convenes every five years to name the Atlantic storms; sounds like a great job to me. There are four main rules. First, there must be a name for every letter of the alphabet through W, so that the first tropical depression of the year begins with the letter A and goes down the list. Second, the names must alternate between a male name and a female name. Thirdly, the names must reflect the languages of the countries that the storms hit, meaning, the names are equally English, French, and Spanish. Lastly, after a major Hurricane hits that name is permanently retired. Therefore, there will never be another Hurricane Andrew.

However, I have been baffled by many of the choices of these names. Hurricanes or Tropical Storms should have names that strike fear into the hearts of people. After all, last I heard Hurricanes are scary. Let's review the names of a few of the major Hurricanes that have hit the United States in the past twenty years. Four come to mind immediately: Hugo, Floyd, Gilbert, and the recent Charley. Are you kidding? I went to high school with a Hugo and a Gilbert and guess what--in gym class, when teams were being picked, at the end would be Hugo to my left and Gilbert to my right. Floyd? I know a puppy named Floyd. Charley? It may be a different spelling, but the most popular Charlie I know of is mocked by his own dog.

If this so-called council expects anyone to take these storms seriously maybe they should give them serious names. Can't you just see these jerks sitting there laughing about naming these storms? Is it any surprise that there is always a huge amount of people who refuse to evacuate? Oh no! Here comes Gilbert! What am I to do! Can you seriously imagine being frightened by anything named Wilfred? No joke, if we get to a W, the storm's name will be Wilfred. I concede that finding a W name that's scary is not easy, but why not Warren, for example? I'd rather be frightened by a storm named after a Hollywood cad than some old actor selling oatmeal.

There is hope on the horizon. Saturday, Tropical Storm Gaston hit South Carolina. Now that's a name. Say it--Gaston. Now close your eyes.............
Did you envision a thick-necked Frenchman with a bad attitude and cigarette? Well you should have. "Haw! Haw! Silly American! That will teach you to rename your snacks Freedom Fries!" You try to tell me that when you are in the path of something named Gaston that you wouldn't leave in a second.

This all brings me to a single conclusion. I know one thing to always be true--the one thing that brings Americans together like nothing else is xenophobia. So there is the answer: no English names at all, only foreign names. Think of the effectiveness! Everyone hates the French, even the French hate the French. Gaston--need I say more? More Spanish names. I don't know about you, but the first thing I think of when I hear the name Roberto is a switchblade (was that a line? did I cross it? I didn't really mean to offend). We could even expand it to other languages. Can you imagine how people would react to Hurricane Osama?

I am calling on the public to join me in this call to action. Maybe we, the humble citizens, can begin to demand more accountability of our Atlantic Storm Naming Council. Why are the Presidential Candidates not talking about this? Is Florida not a battleground state? An absolute outrage. The safety of our citizens now rests on our shoulders, and if we do not take it seriously the consequences could be devastating.

Alternative Sources of Energy

Suck on this, Green Party!

"I'd Rather Live in St. Paul."

Oh, Garrison, how I do love thee.

1-55652-552-4

Doug Crandell, author of Pig Boy's Wicked Bird for Chicago Review Press celebrates his literary debut in a poignant and permanent way. Publishers Weekly rewards him with an outstanding review (They say, "Richly anecdotal, the work leaves no detail unexamined, whether physical or ethereal" and "Crandell addresses everything…with poetry and imagination") as well as making him part of their Pictures of the Week feature.

Resource

Oh, fuck me, this is gorgeous!

I've been a fan and casual reader of Senses of Cinema for at least a couple of years, but now that they've redesigned the site, it's much easier to use. I was tooling around and discovered this amazing resource, which, I'm assuming has been there all along, but I'd never really noticed or appreciated since the links were kind of difficult to make heads or tails of. Go, read, enjoy, be enlightened.

Peekaboo

Main Entry: (1) peekaboo
Function: noun
Date: 1599

: a game for amusing a baby by repeatedly hiding one's face or body and popping back into view exclaiming Peekaboo!

Main Entry: (2) peekaboo
Function: adjective
Date: 1895

1 : trimmed with eyelet embroidery a peekaboo blouse
2 : made of a sheer or transparent fabric; also: revealing usually small areas of skin
3 : offering only limited display or disclosure especially of a teasing sort peekaboo publicity

Garden State

It was inevitable, wasn't it?

There's no way that the actual, full-length version of Zach Braff's Garden State was ever going to live up to the beauty of the preview. And, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, if nothing else, that means Braff was able to come up with about three minutes, total, of extremely evocative images during his first time out as a director. Which is more than I can say of Van Helsing or King Arthur. That preview is its own work of art, visual poetry as pure and stunning as anything we're likely to see in 2004.

Within the last year, the sensitive filmgoer has been treated to Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Before Sunset, three extraordinarily powerful and devastatingly romantic films dealing with similar themes of rootlessness, memory, and longing, so Braff had a hell of a lot to live up to if he hoped to make an impact on the kind of audience that's likely to see such films. But, what a compliment in and of itself that Garden State can even be mentioned in the same breath as those contemporary masterworks. (I'll spare you the pain of additional comparisons to The Graduate and Harold and Maude since, outside of acting as inspiration for the lonely-boy protagonist and the general quirky aesthetic, those films shouldn't automatically be classed with Garden State. And, as with Igby Goes Down and its Salinger nods, Garden State's relative merits shouldn't be confused with the merits of its referents and it shouldn't be blindly praised just because the filmmaker has the same good taste in movies and books that you do.)

Perhaps I'm being too hard on Garden State. It was certainly lovely. I laughed out loud several times, was genuinely touched by the moment when Large hugs Sam's mother, and have decided that no one's doing barely contained anger on camera these days like Peter Sarsgaard. If I'd happened upon it randomly, divorced from the unique brand of indie-hype that it's spawned, I probably would have wholly embraced it as one of "my" movies. (If you've seen the DVD shelf at my apartment, you know what I mean.) But. (But.) There is (however adorable) a bit of baby fat clinging to the writing, and the general sense that, for all Braff's talent and resources, my friends and I, if we were working at the top of our collective games, probably could have come up with something comparable.

Atkins in the Workplace

So, my managing editor is currently completely obsessed with her Atkins diet, and today during a project meeting when we were discussing the fact that the author of one of our books was sending us a bunch of crappy scans on disk, she said, "yeah, more than half of the images were, like, 72 dpi, totally low-carb, um, I mean, low-res."

Sex and Dating in the 21st Century

Screw volunteering to register voters in swing states; the good people of Alabama need vibrators! Who's with me?

This makes my standard carbon monoxide detector excuse seem pale by comparison.

Open Letter

Dear Shaggy-Haired Hipster Boy Who Made Eye Contact Twice, No, Three Times with Me on the Bus This Morning:

It's amazing how we can sniff each other out, isn't it? How we're able to locate another person in a crowd that we know we'd probably be friends with if we had the chance? I'm sure you were listening to something interesting on your iPod; should I hazard a guess? Death Cab? Iron + Wine? Or something vintage, like The Clash or Iggy and the Stooges? I admire your boldness for going with that neon orange messenger bag. It was just like Kate Winslet's hoodie in Eternal Sunshine. Did you glance my way on accident? Were you just looking back behind you to see if there was an empty seat available or a better place to stand? Or did you notice something in me that you thought was interesting? My spiky hair with the fading purple streak, perhaps? My black plastic frame glasses? Were you wondering what I was listening to? (Alas, I can't afford to plunk down for an iPod right now, but it was Kurt Elling's Man in the Air in my trusty CD player. Are you surprised? Were you expecting Guided by Voices? The Mountain Goats? Gang of Four?)

Hipster Boy, I know I looked stressed out, and that's because I am. Aside from the fact that I'm not, and never have been, a morning person, and that my schedule was thrown off kilter because one of my roommates decided to take a shower at an unpredictable time while I was still in the midst of going through my prework routine, I've got a lot going on in my life right now. My poor little family is falling apart and I'm wondering what's going to happen to all of us. I had trouble falling asleep last night (a combination of the loud, beautiful thunderstorm and just too much on my mind), and I was feeling vaguely nauseated this morning, which is fairly typical of how my body processes undue amounts of stress. That's why I was scowling on the bus. I would have smiled at you, I wanted to smile at you, but I just didn't have one in me today.

I'm pretty assiduous about keeping to a regular schedule, so, if you are as well, there's a good chance we'll be seeing each other on the #66 again between 8:15 and 8:30 on weekday mornings. I hope things won't be awkward between us now that I've opened up to you like this. You probably just thought I looked like a girl you went to high school with, and I've gone and blown things all out of proportion. But I just wanted to say hi, and that I appreciated that you paid a little bit of attention to me. These days, it's the little things like that that make all the difference.

allison

Inspired Casting

Will someone finally PLEASE cast Owen Wilson and Renee Zellweger in a movie together as brother and sister? The blonde hair, squinty eyes, lemon-pucker lips, raspy Texas drawl? It's bound to happen eventually, and it will be beautiful.

Even She Can't Completely Ruin Writing This Good

Entertainment Weekly reports in its July 30 issue that Heather Graham will be joining the cast of Scrubs this fall, playing a psychiatrist at the hospital. A line of dialogue from her debut episode: "Show me a well-adjusted, successful man who wants to settle down and have kids and I'm not interested, but find me an alcoholic in his mid-30s that still thinks his band might make it, and just tell me where I can show up and buy him dinner."

I Know How He Feels

From Already Dead by Denis Johnson

"My life is strange," I told him.
"I don't like it when you cry."
"I'm not making it out there, Bill."
"No. Nobody is."
"What do I do now? What do I do?"
This got him going. "Hey! I've taken stock, I've made an assessment, I've done the thing sitting out here counting my fingers and toes and actions. And I got the truth on one side and my lies on the other, the nutty stuff and the stuff that's real, and we've convened, me and the trees and the spirits, and I got it calculated that the only thing I ever did right was buy that oak flooring for the cabin when they tore up the bowling alley in Point Arena. That's it, the oak flooring."
"It's very nice."
"I can't advise, is what I'm saying."
"I understood you."
"I mean everything else is on the failure and insanity side."
"But what a floor! Something to envy."

Two Quotes and a Definition

"A movie, I think, is really only four or five moments between two people; the rest of it exists to give those moments their impact and resonance."
--Robert Towne, screenwriter, Chinatown

"A man's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink."
--W. C. Fields

Main Entry: spam
Function: noun
Etymology: from a skit on the British television series Monty Python's Flying Circus in which chanting of the word Spam overrides the other dialogue
Date: 1994

unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses

Ad Hominem

Ouch. The rage didn't have to be that violent, or that squarely aimed at the man instead of his writing, but I definitely understand the impulse to really lay into Chuck Klosterman. I only made it halfway through Sex, Death, and Cocoa Puffs before discarding it with a sneer and a snort. Why this guy has been lauded as much as he has really makes my head hurt, and I no longer just think it's professional jealousy. Cintra Wilson is often just as wrong-headed as he is, but at least she's consistently funny and interestingly wrong-headed.

Fahrenheit . . . Fe(26)?

From Publishers Lunch:

Why Is Reading Really at Risk?

Because of things like this, dateline Cedar Rapids: "A church's plan for an old-fashioned book-burning has been thwarted by city and county fire codes."

Under the you-can't-make-this-up header, district fire chief Brad Brenneman objected because, "We don't want a situation where people are burning rubbish as a recreational fire."

One ever-helpful fire inspector "suggested shredding the offending material," but the minister behind the idea, "Said that wouldn't seem biblical."

Because, in Essence, That's Really Just a Knick-Knack

Giddy and I were both 100 percent sober, I swear, and having a discussion about broken bones.

A: But why didn't we evolve so our bones are no longer breakable? Wouldn't that make more sense?

G: Well, yeah, but then that would mean our bones would have to be made out of something different. The elements don't change. It's not like you're going to find a lizard made out of gold.

Truer Words, Part II

"Will find nice sensible boyfriend and stop forming romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workoholics, sexaholics, commitment-phobics, peeping toms, megalomaniacs, emotional fuckwits, or perverts. Will especially stop fantasizing about a particular person who embodies all these things." --Bridget Jones's Diary

Truer Words . . .

"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush,' 'Dick,' and 'Colon.' Need I say more?" --Chris Rock

Music News, Part II

Check out the new design on All Music Dot Com. I use the site for everything from settling bets among my roommates at home to fact checking manuscripts at work, so I'll be curious to see how much this redesign throws me. . . .

Music News

So much good music news to greet the morning (and the week) with!

McSweeney's and Barsuk, like peanut butter and chocolate, two great tastes that taste great together.

A fair and balanced review of Divine Comedy's Absent Friends (on Pitchfork, of all places!!!), made all the more noteworthy by the admission in the final sentence that someone other than me also regards Fin de Siecle as Hannon & co's finest hour.

Bjork being all freaky and gorgeous, talking about her forthcoming vocals-only disk, Medulla.

Colin Meloy and his Decemberists are heading into the studio soon to begin work on a new album, with a little help from Chris Walla, no less!

Inspired By (No Guarantee of Actually Being Inspired, Though)

OK then. So, inspired by the list of summer albums on Nerve I linked here yesterday, here's my own Top Five summer albums list.* Forgive the nostalgia factor. It's a list-making inevitability.

Sophie B. Hawkins, Tongues and Tails—-This album is all sexy, late-night humidity. When the sound of the train on the tracks rumbles through your ears at the very beginning of "Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover," then oozes into that fat, synthy groove, it’s 3 A.M. on dark back roads with the car windows down, no matter where you are or what time it is.

Rufus Wainwright, Poses—-Rufus made this album at the height of his own self-destructive decadence, and, as such, it has a hazy, lush vibe tinged with a melancholy awareness of one’s own mortality. It’s the ideal soundtrack for throwing caution to the warm, summer wind in that moment right after you ask yourself, "but what does it all MEAN?"

Barenaked Ladies, Maybe You Should Drive—-Yeah, yeah, yeah, how tragically unhip are BNL? Whatever. Listen to this album while driving through a cornfield with your best friend in the dead heat of late July in Indiana sometime, then get back to me.

Duncan Sheik, Duncan Sheik—-Depending on the night, this album is either a chilled glass of white wine that will get you just high enough to fall deeply in love with everyone around you, or it’s an air conditioned room where you can hide away from all the inflamed passions that have scorched everything you thought was beautiful in your life while you weep one salty, art-directed tear.

Mos Def, Black on Both Sides—-"Well, from my understanding people get better when they start to understand that they are valuable. And they not valuable because they got a whole lot of money or ’cause somebody think they sexy; but they valuable ’cause they been created by God. God makes you valuable. And whether or not you recognize that value is one thing." A declaration of independence for a glorious summer in the city, sorely needed after making it through yet another Midwestern winter.

* For a continuation of this topic and to see several other examples of Top Five Summer Albums lists, please go here.