And While I Won't Give the Album a Full Review...

...I will say that Them Crooked Vultures is the kind of album that makes you pop open a Miller High Life and rock the fuck out to it. And saying that may be the truest review there is.

I've Gone Crazy! With the Music! And the Listening! MMGLAVIN!

Must be an end-of-the-year/start-the-blog rush, but I've been buying tunes like a record executive this last week or so. Here's what I've acquired since Christmas:

• The aforementioned Them Crooked Vultures (vinyl)
• The aforementioned Dr. No's Experiment (CD)
• Muddy Waters' Electric Mudd (CD)
• The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' It's Blitz! (CD)
• The rest of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (iTunes)
• The All My Friends EP by LCD Soundsystem (iTunes)
• LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" (iTunes)
• Two tracks from Zero 7's Yeah Ghost (iTunes)

If I had any intention of being as trendy as these selections indicate, I'd promise to blog about them soon. As it stands, I'll get to them when I bloody well feel like it.

Happy new year.

I Can't Wait For the Decade to Pass...

...so the hipsters will finally go away.

So My Crazy Music Blog led me over to POPSENSE led me over to the Hipster Wife Hunting blog, and I'm about ready to hurt someone. Or make rude pictures all 4-Chan style. I got Photoshop Elements today; I'm not afraid to use it.

Memes apotheosize lameness and mental masturbation.

Now get off my lawn.

Did Jack White Punch Someone at the Spin Office?

I'm kind of curious what causes a particular magazine to start a vendetta against a band. I mean, was there something actually wrong with Icky Thump, that Spin let loose Brian Rafterty for a whiney, B- half-hatchet job two years ago? What manner of nerd hears the delicious boogie of "Rag & Bone" and dismisses it as something "he could have written while slumbering away on his color-coordinated pillow" (completely unacceptable in garage rock, don'cha know)? For my part, I don't consider myself a "die-hard Meg fan," but I don't really have a problem with "St. Andrew, the Battle is in the Air," because 1) it essentially builds off of "Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn," which immediately precedes it, and indeed functions as an outro to that song, and 2) it's short. The whole review reads like a mass of projection: Raftery woke up pissier than a bladder stuffed with Boone's Farm and decided to send in his hangover reaction as a review. In the same issue, some genius decided that he could be dismissive by pretending that it was relevatory to link Jack White's guitar style with that of Jimmy Page (so how does it feel to get scooped by Guitar World?)

Of course, when year's end came along and the damn thing had peaked at #2 and spent 32 weeks on the billboard 200, they decided Icky Thump belonged on their Top Ten albums of the year, calling "Rag & Bone" in for particular praise. Because they're a bunch of whores.

So why on God's Green do I bring this up now? Because When it came time to cobble together this year's Top 40 (Kiss? Really?), they couldn't let Dead Weather's album by without snarkily insinuating that "Jack White is just trying to distract us from the fact that the White Stripes have faded to black." Oh, they have? Is that why they're releasing a live box set from their '07 Canadian tour this month? Is that why they're tossing out Beck-produced EP's? Are they really expected to poop out a new record every brace of years just to keep you from going all "so five minutes ago" on them?

I mean, I realize you're riding the tail-end of a Merriweather Post Pavilion - inspired electro-folk frisson, but that's no excuse for deciding that garage rock suddenly sucks. The Stripes haven't changed, and probably never will. If you dweebs weren't so busy riding the music-industry double-helix like the Rebel Yell at King's Dominion, you'd know that.

Full Disclosure

Like a lot of people who enjoy the ebbs and flows of popular music, I've read and subscribed to my share of music magazines, and learned to find them all more or less tedious. Rolling Stone mixes its unreflective leftism with equal parts pretension and onanism; Spin performs its namesake to its wheels not being as cool as it wants to be; Magnet bores; Maximum Rock n' Roll flails. Each one is ridiculous for its own reason.

That said, I still pay attention to them, because I live in the suburbs, and they closed my local Record & Tape Traders, and I need some way to keep my ears to the underground (whatever that means). So whatever excrable things I say about mags like Filter, I still use them to guide my purchases, as yesterday, when I ordered the Them Crooked Vultures album and the latest by Oh No. Or last week, when I snagged No Age's Nouns on iTunes. Or any of the buys I've made over the last year or so.

Which means that economically speaking, they've done their job on me as surely as any trendhumping teenybopper. And if pop culture class warfare was a goal of mine, I'd suppose I'd feel bad about that. But since I'm way more interested in finding good stuff to listen to and urinating on the hysteria that surrounds it, it actually works out nicely.

So thanks for the tip, Filter. Now stop being a bunch of hipster doofii.

Guess Who's Still Alive?

Each of these, inexplicably, has a top 100 album on Amazon right now.

• Rod Stewart (He pooped his pants, though)
• Darius Rucker (Regrettably, the album is not called "Learn to Live With People Thinking Your Parents Named You Hootie")
• Tom Waits (For No Man *rimshot*)
• They Might Be Giants (Shouldn't we know by now?)
• Yo-Yo-Ma (I can't make fun of him. He's a cellist. There's absolutely nothing funny about cellists. They're like actuarial tables or Whoopi Goldberg that way)
• Lyle Lovett (No, really)
• Barbra Striesand (Looks like she's been to Cher's plastic surgeon, though)
• Whitney Houston (Bobby's college money is still not for bail, though. She ain't playin')
• Kris Allen (Who?)

It's Official: The Flaming Lips are Your Old Favorite Band

I distinctly recall my first exposure to the Flaming Lips: It involved orange hair, the words, "I know a guy," and a great deal of laughter. It later became one of Beavis' best music video rants (would someone tell Mike Judge that the videos were the best part of watching B&B? The episodes are just bare and peurile without them).

Somewhere 'twixt then and now, the Lips became America's answer to Radiohead, the kind of band whose every album meets with the kind of critical rhapsody that smells of the hungry sense of record-industry zeitgeist (I'm sorry, I meant "rebellion and creativity").

I'm basing all this on the fact that The Soft Bulletin occupies a Black Hole in my iPod: its density is the result of the thick faux-gravitas of the overarranged and excessive elements, not out of the layers and structure. I've been trying for near two years to attempt to figure out what's so mind-blowing about it, but I never get there because my mind keeps getting blown away by the desire to listen to "Canadian Idiot" again.

So when Filter decides that hey, the new FL disc is a return to form, full of "a grittier energy one would expect from a band just starting, as opposed to one in their third decade," let us say that I am sceptical. There's return to forms and there's return to forms. Is this going to be Beggar's Banquet or is it going to be Guero? Any artist is allowed to make a Guero every now and again, to go back to square one and pretend you haven't already written those songs. Beck had to do this so he could get to Modern Guilt. But since I never gave a damn about "She Don't Use Jelly," let alone any song from Yoshimi Hits to Death the Pink Mystics, or whatever, this particular return to form just sounds like a bunch of gueros doing the same thing.

Have You Been Living Under a Rock For the Last Forty Years?

Completely unaware that there was this popular rythmn group called the Beatles (clever, I know)?

Devoid of the necessary affluence to slowly buy the Beatles albums you like on CD at somewhere between $12-15 a pop?

Missed the thousandfold re-issues? The album of their No. 1 hits? The soundtrack to the movie based on their songs, which contained tribute versions of their songs? The various albums of tribute versions of their songs?

Fear not, my antideluvian friend. You too will be spared the agony of seperation from the loving embrace of Beatles fandom. All you need is $175.

Casting Around the Blogosphere...

1) The aforementioned Andrew Earles has a book out about Hüsker Dü. I pretend to like Hüsker Dü, so I'll pretend I might buy this. Maybe If I had something other than Zen Arcade, or if I felt the need to listen to Zen Arcade more than once a year, and that out of an obligation similar to what Lester Bangs felt for The Who's Happy Jack, I could maintain that pretense through a paragraph. Nevertheless, I wish him good sales, as this is the sort of project a writer goes into with reverence.

2) A quick scan of Fluxblog yields the following knowledge:

• Charlotte Gainsbourg working with Beck is an "enigma in itself."
• Anxiety comes in two varieties, good and bad.
• A member of Portishead has a side project called Beak.
• For the Fiery Furnaces to perform crowd-pleasing rock shows is abnormal.
• Bands that are about to get all over the coming wave of 90's nostalgia are giving themselves appropriately Zen-bizzarre names, like "Boat."
• People are fixating on R. Kelly yodeling in a song.
• I can't read anything about a band/artist named Gigi. It just sounds too stupid, no matter how many laudatory adjectives are sprinkled like M&M's in it.
• It is possible to say that a band that consists of "super-hard working veterans" has put on "a very enjoyable rock show" and yet worry about being condescending to them.

3) A woman who looks like one of the members of Monty Python in drag can record an album of all covers with a tautology for a title, and it can become #1 on Amazon.

Longest. Lull. Ever.

Ultimately, if I really really wanted to never post here again, I would have deleted it. Since I don't want to do that, I am bowing to reality.

I have been thinking about a Music Blog for a long long time, even to the point of considering putting down cash money for a unique URL. But before I lay down cash money, I have to be willing to write.

Two things convince me that I can:

1) I'm working on a Master's Degree in Professional Writing. So I'm kinda laying down cash money already.

2) It's the most useful thing I can think of doing when I'm not working.

So the Notion, my first blog that I got bored with, is now the Place wherein I shall write about music. I will pose many a query here, such as:

• Why the hell doesn't Magnet update Andrew Earle's column on the website when its the best thing about the Magazine?
• Why is Andrew Earle's blog so boring?
• Is my complete indifference to Lady Gaga a sign of my withdrawal from awareness of modern music or my new willingness to stop saying "that was so much better twenty years ago, when it was called __________________. Now get off my lawn."?
• Why do I suspect Adam Lambert to be a cyborg? And one of the 600 Series, at that?
• If I listened to Death Cab For Cutie from now until the Second Coming, would I ever care?

Send angry emails to bobama@whitehouse.gov