BULLETIN

The Breeders’ Mountain Battles is their second best album, and the Breeders are sexier, less grotesque, and zippier than the Pixies. That’s all for August.

I’m sick of being misread: Stephen Malkmus

The solid musicianship and songwriting on Mirror Traffic force me to ask: does Stephen Malkmus suck now or did I forgive his annoyances? I started to notice them when he wrote a song called “(Do Not Feed the) Oysters” in 2003, a gormless metaphor draped over a raucous hook. Please note the cute parentheses too;

CCR: “jam band”?

I had an argument today with a guy who called Creedence Clearwater Revival “the ultimate jam band,” a conclusion that not only appropriated the language of VH-1 but was dead wrong. Have you actually looked at the running time of CCR singles? Average length: just over three minutes. “Don’t Look Now,” to my ears their

Happy Sunday

More or less ten years since her death. RIP.

Back to life!

A two-year hiatus and about as many months enduring my cutting remarks ended last week when Thomas Inskeep resumed updating Rock Me Tonight, his outstanding run through the number one R&B singles of the eighties. As far as I can see no rust either, as the blurbs on Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life ”

Singles 8/26

Never in my time reviewing for The Singles Jukebox have my tastes so closely aligned with consensus. In the same breath, I’ve also never so vigorously dissented from the consensus either. I found “Video Games” a bore on first listen, and it didn’t change on the sixth. On the other hand, “Love Done Gone,” the

Libya vs Iraq

The extra- and unconstitutionality of the Libya episode bugs the hell out of me; only eight years ago I cheered the fall of another dictator who was on the short list with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Milosevic as most ruthless butcher of the twentieth century. But Libya and Iraq, whether as countries or synecdoche,

Whoo! – The Rapture

I won’t know until December whether I’ll play The Rapture’s In the Grace of Your Love as much as Pieces of the People We Love, whose release if I remember occasioned some snickering and didn’t cause half the impact of the second album and its putatively epochal but okay “House of Jealous Lovers” (a sound

Doubting Thomas

I am no lawyer but I probably should have been because I am a pedant and can argue any side with conviction. But I’ve read enough fiction and history to know that what legal scholars call “originalism” is a load of codswallop. If I were to argue in an essay for a literature class that

Lovebuzz: Thurston Moore

Finally catching up with the Thurston Moore solo album Demolished Thoughts, released a couple months ago, I was first struck by how well producer Beck Hansen, shaping the best corrective to his own soporific Sea Change, arranges the kind of string arrangements which can rumble like thunderclaps, accompany a melody line played by Moore’s acoustic

Where the 1990’s go to die

I wish musicians would stop spreading the fallacy that the nineties were, according to Stephen Malkmus, “a weird dead zone.” Further: “‘The ’90s had the Internet, great. I don’t know what really traumatic thing happened in the ’90s. It’s probably going to seem like this ideal time to a lot of people, eventually.’” Yes, yes,

Happy Sunday

One of my favorite Yoko performances. Enjoy.