In Defense of "Current Resident"

Insane Records lives! Sorta.  Less Quality and Cheaper forever. 

The Twee List pulled a retcon on y'all, too. Sorry, Dan - I see a lot of the people you were spamming and they never bring up Go Bananas!. (Maybe they don't know that I own the only copy of "I'll Jack You in the Back of the Head" in NYC. . .)

Dude, fix that misused "it's" in paragraph 3. The ultimate peeve.  

So. My tape. Just because I half-assed the j-card, you omit the tracklist? C'moonnnnn. In any case, this came during my Minneapolis stint though based on what Dan's commenting on, the shoegaze/nu-gaze period I went through while I was up north didn't reflect on what I was putting on Dan's mixes.

"Tell that Girl to Shut Up" actually came out in the late 70's and I stole this little stunner off of one of the legendary Rhino Records DIY comps.¹ That makes this power pop (not indie/twee pop) and I get the feeling that this song, like a lot of power pop tunes from that era, probably blew every motherfucker in the room through the back wall  when Holly et al played it live, but was recorded in the same sorta lukewarm way that ruined a lot of other great PP tunes. (Seriously, find a Shoes live recording and listen to those songs just fly out. . .)  Fuck it, I think this song has balls to spare, and it's gonna be stuck in my head the rest of the week.

And c'mon. . . hooks make it possible for total morons to write "Louie Louie" and change the world. They're totally the ends/means/alpha/omega amen. Our favorite guy ever Andrew WK writes the stupidest/hookiest songs ever, and the only reason they sound urgent is that they ARE catchy and loud and fast but the urgency is sorta. . . mystifying. Corollas write songs just as good as ambulances, man.

"A Letter to the Coach" is. . . Karl Hendricks Trio (on S'chunk's label). In retrospect not that great, but that's a killer riff. Their records tended to be pretty dull, though. And for fuck's sake, did I really put a Promise Ring song on yr mix? You better tell 2000 Tom I'm gonna beat him up. (See? Catchy!)  What the fuck was I thinking? Oh wait. That song's pretty tight.

Idlewild is kind of a frustrating case - great tunes, great live act, great taste (covered "Everything Flows" on an EP!), great B-sides - but the dude's (Roddy Woomble - best name ever) lyrics often fall over their clumsy pretension. This song is off their "Hope is Important" record - an early record with sorta goofy Dischord bits in it. Also, one of those bands who got hyped before they should have, got signed when the labels were falling apart, and then was stuck in that awkward corporate "middle" between being a real major label band and being a semi-popular indie rock band. Eh, I guess they did just fine in the UK. The follow-up to this record ("The Remote Part") is pretty great.

About a month ago I was trudging to the train across an empty, wide intersection on the business end of a late Saturday night's beers and some bike punk rode by singing Small Factory's "If You Hurt Me" and it was so perfect and beautiful that I shouted the next lyric down the street as he rode by. Phoebe fuckin' Summersquash. 

I'm not sure how Dan and I can talk about music so much and he's relatively unfamiliar with Sloan, a band I've been obsessed with since, yikes, probably just about the beginning. Well, the "Smeared" record. . . which means over half of my life. Eeep. Anyway, Dan, I highly recommend starting with "Navy Blues" as it's probably more your speed, and then work away from that to the two adjacent records ("One Chord to Another" and "Between the Bridges"), and so on, though their last two full-lengths have been spotty at best. "Twice Removed" is by FAR their best release, and apparently a lot of Canadians think so too. In general, it was sorta depressing to see the band get all up in their rock asses and stop writing songs that had more meaning and heart versus great pants and cool stage kicks, but all in all one of my favorite bands ever. 

C'mon, I like to pride myself on my transitions - or at the very least, trying not to put songs that sound like each other next to each other. One of the nicer things about CDRs is that this is a LOT easier. . . but yeah, where's the romance?

Speaking of things that I was obsessed with in 2000, check out Buffy and The Rock in Southland Tales. The best and worst movie I've seen in forever. Deserves a special award for making Jon Lovitz a crooked badass cop. Also I think I like a Killers song now.

Saxophones have a place in rock. This is the best song ever written. 

¹ Now out of print and EXPENSIVE on eBay, probably because they meant as many to others as they did to me, despite their prevalence in the average Wal-Mart's 1.99 bin).