So I’m having some technical times over here, and I’ll probably be down for a few days. I’m also thinking of moving over to another publishing platform thing, so wish me luck with that. Sorry for the interruption.

“Lorelei” (mp3) from the Cocteau Twins’ 1984 album Treasure (the early highpoint and still second-best record, after, of course, Heaven or Las Vegas), is the second part of the remarkable one-two that opens the album, starting with the lovely “Ivo.” “Lorelei,” if my sources are correct, was actually recorded in a castle made of ice [...]

Bloomington, Indiana, where I live, is a very politically and culturally progressive town. There are more Thai restaurants than Burger Kings, and the campus GLBT board protested until reggae homophobe Buju Banton got his concert cancelled two weeks ago. The presence of one of the world’s greatest music schools, coupled with the ethnic diversity [...]

This here is how a reluctant diva sounds. Niobe is the perfomative identity of Yvonne Cornelius, the German-born vocalist, and former Mouse on Mars collaborator. The rest of White Hats, aside from this song, is breathy, insular chanteuse-pop, like Beth Orton or Ricki Lee Jones’ “Last Chance Texaco,” which casts an interesting light [...]

It was only a matter of time, in retrospect, before Robyn Hitchcock would join the insular, rotating cadre of pop-rock session musicians who most recently released The Gun Album as the Minus 5. Sort of led by former Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey, the cadre can count among its dues-paying members R.E.M’s Peter Buck [...]

Mike Sammes and his backing vocal quintet The Mike Sammes Singers are best known, if known at all, for their session work during the late 60s, when their crystalline, virginal harmonies graced recordings from Shirley Bassey, Burt Bacharach, and Frank (and Nancy) Sinatra. They also somehow ended up supporting Ringo on The White Album’s [...]

The bridge from R.E.M.’s “Shaking Through” (mp3) comes at the 2:16 point of the song, and lasts until 2:31. It doesn’t come from the best R.E.M. song, and not even the best song on side B of Murmur. You’ll hear the for yourself here in a second, but allow me to tell you that [...]

“Andy” (mp3) is the second to last song on the second side of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s One Size Fits All. It’s also the second best song on the album, behind “Inca Roads,” but it has far and away the best individual moment, which starts at 4 minutes and 54 seconds [...]

There’s a friction here, between what this song seems to be striving toward, and how it actually ends up presenting itself. It’s aiming to mimic the chilly distance between (female) performer and performance that was achieved so perfectly twenty years ago by Kleenex/Lilliput, Delta 5, the Raincoats, and Siouxsie Sioux, and ten years before [...]