I bought myself another copy of Nothing's Shocking.  I replaced the Grace that might still be stuck in your goddamn car stereo, even if you've made me never want to hear it ever again.  Those and the others, they meant more to me than you.  But keep them, fine, they're yours.

New Local H (myspace) album TODAY mfers.  After four loooooong years, Twelve Angry Months should be in stores and iStores near you.  You should buy it and rock the hell out to it and never let it leave your sight.

Local H - The One with ‘Kid'(mp3) (buy)

What's the matter?  Not LO-FI enough for you?

"‘Kid'" is the first track on the record, an introduction to the end of a relationship gone wrong.  I usually hate lyrics that rattle off names of other bands or songs.  Let's all just sing our myspace interests and iTunes playlists to make a cheap identity-grab, a secondhand attempt to associate yourself with other bands and their fans.  IMPRESS ME WITH YOUR RECORD COLLECTION.

But I could never hate Local H, and even when Scott Lucas is -checking stuff that might have his own fanbase holding ?s next to their !s (Interpol?!) he doesn't need anyone else's cred.  He's naming names because this break-up's become territorial and Kyuss ("You never liked ‘em UNTIL YOU MET ME!") is his Kamchatka.  During the dusty staredown that takes up the first two minutes of "‘Kid,'" Lucas juggles the urge to see his ex with the need to reject her, wonders what parts of his life are still his.  When it comes time to draw - winning is all that matters - the hangouts, the friends, his insides are Zeppelin CDs and ACDCs and that one Blondie twelve inch.

The second half of the song is ferocious cathartic jumparound fistpump stuff.  It's both a killer track and an assertion that this thing ain't over.  The relationship exhausted itself but the feelings have a whole year left to run.

Buy the record, and for cryinoutloud see them live.  In NYC their show this upcoming Sunday has been moved from the defunct Luna Lounge to Union Pool; the next night they'll be doing what I assume is a short set at Irving Plaza for Joey Ramone's Birthday Bash (tix).

That's all the short-sighted Trachtenbitch had over you?  Fuck, babe, I've watched three people OD today.  I've got a subscription to Watch People Overdose and Die magazine.  I've got the complete collector's set of "Choking on My Own Vomit" bubblegum cards, and some of them are stuck together (if you know what I mean).

Show, I'd heard you'd gotten fun.  Like, yawn.

And they don't have concerts in Queens.  I refuse to suspend my disbelief that much.

What I learned from American Idol tonight:

1. Apparently, it is morally wrong for a white dude with dreads to cover a song made famous by a black dude with dreads.
2. Apparently, it's perfectly okay for some horrid white teenager to turn Ben E. King's "Stand By Me" into a pile of soft poo.
3. Baba O'Reilly is apparently a power ballad.
4. The Civil Rights Movement, being in American Idol's Top Four, same dif.

I want them all to go home, and then I want to watch those homes burn down.

In other news, Neil Diamond loves his myspace friends very much!!!  <3!!!

There's a new free Nine Inch Nails record available for legal download!  My hard drive's full-to-bursting, so I made room for it by deleting the last free Nine Inch Nails record.

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The only album in the world that matters, right now, comes out on May 13^th.  Using Twelve Angry Months and the band's week-long catalogue-covering stand as an excuse, the new muxtape is something for which you've all been clamoring:  100% Local H.

It's not a best-of mix.  I erred toward poppier, lo-aggro songs.  Made sure that Michelle, Rita, and Heather all got their space.  Bob Pollard, too:  To observe mux's one track/CD rule (beyond a single conjoined pair) there's stuff pulled from demos and soundtracks and stuff.  "Congressman," hoo-boy that's old.

After the seven nights in Chicago (openers include Fig Dish (!) and the Smoking Popes' Josh Caterer), they hit the road.  Unless you hate life, you're going to see Local H (myspace) when they're in your town.  (If they're not coming to your town, life hates you.)

NYC dates include a confirmed appearance at Irving Plaza for Joey Ramone's Birthday Thang (tix) on May 19th and a May 18th Luna Lounge show that might have to be relocated (looks like tix have all been pulled offsale - c'mon, life!).

UPDATE:  The Brooklyn show has been moved to Union Pool.  No ticket info as of yet.

Rock and Roll is all about sex and drugs and the call of a comfortable couch.

There's this thing called the "Contrast Podcast" where a gaggle of music bloggers gather 'round a weekly topic and offer playlists and blather and such.  They're dragging their way through the seven deadly sins; this week's edition finally reaches sloth.

Which is the implied topic of the week every week here.

I was saddened to scan their selections and not see one of my favorite songs of all time.

Pedro the Lion - The Longer I Lay Here (mp3) (buy)

I'm a fan of form fitting function, and not only is this a lazy-sounding song - dig the solo that could barely be bothered - Bazan fearlessly embraces convenient metaphors.  "Laziness cuts me," he drawls, "Like... fine cutlery."  Well na na naaaaa, na-na naaa na-naaa na-na, to quote one enthusiastic Canuck.

But "Longer's" lovely the way laziness can be, taking time to give lines like "excellence, industry, diligence, naturally" their phonetic due.  He rhymes "ridiculous" with "lick this."  You're only going to come up with that sort of stuff after contemplating the ceiling for a good long while.

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Not Adorable Dept.:  Last night's Telepathe set-list.

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Tom Waits has named his to-be-announced-Monday summer tour after the critical reaction to whatsherface's covers album.  "Glitter and Doom," coming to a theater hopefully near me, hopefully actress-free, deets after the weekend.

While three long-promised final chapters languish in inspirational purgatory, this seemed an opportune time to regurgitate my Flickr account and do a bit of attic-cleaning.  Both to make room for the new - even with the Pool Parties and Siren TBA, recently announced schedules for this year's free shows at Summerstage, Celebrate Brooklyn, and River to River have some strong offerings (Deerhoof doing Rite of Spring!  Philip Glass doing Powaqqatsi!) - and because I had a couple choice Zap Mama pics I couldn't reasonably squeeze into the V. Weekend weekend thing.

Last summer I only got to a fraction of what I wanted to see, took my camera to a fraction of that.  Like, three shows.  In no order whatsoever:

Zap Mama (myspace), Summerstage, 8/12/07.  I'd thought this was an a cappella group.  But whatever they once might have been, ZM is now Marie Daulne's show.  And I remember the show, but not the music.

Daulne reminded me of the domineering mother in Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre.  She came out wearing a sort of military band jacket over what could have been a wedding dress.  Presence is poised, theatrical... but she was even scarier when she tried to drop her guard and went leaping about.  Stiff, rehearsed routines - there was a boys v. girls thing, a song where Daulne and her back up singers took turns seducing selected audience members - alternated with round robin jams, neither took hold for me.

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Mary Weiss (myspace), Atlantic Antic, 9/30/07.

She didn't do "Leader of the Pack!"

It would have been the coolest way to close out the summer if I hadn't had a 103-degree fever.  But I wasn't going to miss the first New York performance of the lead Shangri-La in (according to her) twenty years.

Her nineteen-song set focused on her new Norton record, Dangerous Game... which is fine, but not what everyone wanted to hear.  The melodrama she wore as a teen might not fit as comfortably in middle-age, but the crowd craved the opportunity to suspend disbelief.  The six ‘Las tunes included were all great.  It's cool to know my favorite is also hers ("Out in the Streets").  "Walkin' in the Sand" was magic, just magic.  (Also included:  "Easier to Cry," "Heaven Only Knows," "Train from Kansas City," and the original L-U-V song, "Give Him a Great Big Kiss.")  But - even if it seems silly or predictable, even if your sister might have been the original singer - you gotta drag out the big hit at the end when you've been away that long.

Weiss will be doing it outside again at the Seaport on July 18th.  Play "Leader of the Pack!"

Without Magnetic Field, will the Antic have a compelling music stage this year?

(more pics)

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Superchunk (myspace), McCarren Park Pool, 6/24/07.

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Les Savy Fav (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07.

So that's how you upstage Tim Harrington.

The "clean energy-powered festival" Citysol hosted a day-long Brooklyn Vegan-curated line-up in Stuyvesant Cove Park, home base of show-runners Solar One.  The park's under the highway on the east side, just south of 23rd Street, and it's not a bad space.  You're right on the water and the simple staging encouraged an intimacy the forbidding concrete amphitheater further down the East River doesn't.  It was a gorgeous day and the info- part of the ‘tainment was so nonaggressive that the whole thing felt like a comfortable, casual gathering of friends featuring decent-to-awesome bands.

Les Savy Fav is one of our very best live acts.  Harrington tears every set into something applicable and inappropriate and joyous.  This fest, he decided, was an opportunity to preach ill-informed ecobabble.  Some alternative energy suggestions:  Grow smaller dinosaurs that will fit right in your gas tank, make electricity by emptying water coolers into live sockets, mine footcandles from the heavens.  "When there's no light left in the moon, we're gonna go to Mars!"  Make sure what you're wearing is organic:  "This jacket is made of dreams, and my pants are made of inertia, and my shoes are made from nuclear stuff."

"I'm not a physical scientist.  I'm a physical philosopher," he explained.

He also took time to invent a new drink, the "My Little Pony"(one part bubbles, two parts Jameson's).  And mounted a parked vehicle so that, for half a song that Saturday night, there was a half-naked screaming crazy man on top of a van under the FDR.

And for the record, Les Savy Fav bassist/Frenchkiss Records owner Syd Butler only strapped daughter (Lila? Lily?  None of our business, really..) on for a single song, and won a ten dollar bet with guitarist Seth Jabour by doing so.

(More pics.)

Also there:  AllDayBuffet, Battering Room, Brooklyn Vegan, Etsy Garden, I Read Something the Other Day, Liam the Human Being, Mr. Mammoth, My Big Mouth Strikes Again, Product Shop NYC, Purely Recreational

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O'Death (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07.

When I saw these guys outside again during CMJ - After the Jump hosted them at The Yard, a perfect way to detox from a week of packed-room shows - I realized just how much walls and ceilings are a part of what would seem to be a natural back-porch band.  The unamplified group howls and David Rogers-Berry's drums need surfaces off which to echo.  Here it was better, because the stage had a back; at The Yard everything seemed to drift out over the Gowanus.

Of course it helps when you howl back, and I was too busy doing so to get the stunning O'Death pics I thought I should have.  (Lori Baily's Flickr set has some nice ones, though.  Mine are here.)

They'll be headlining the Music Hall of Williamsburg on May 9^th (tix).  Other tour dates at their myspace.  See them!  Looking forward to the new record.

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Bernard Lakes (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07. 

I liked ...Are the Dark Horse.  But it's more of a winter record, and this was too nice a day for winter record stuff.  (more pics)

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Land of Talk (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07.

Not a fan, but this was the best I'd heard them.  I think it's because the lead singer was a bit tipsy.  Every other time I've seen them she's been either stiff or otherwise uncomfortable.  (more pics)

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Tom Verlaine, Summerstage, 06/16/07.

This was billed as a Television concert, but Verlaine announced that "the band's guitarist" was in the hospital with pneumonia (Jimmy Rip filled in).  Thankfully it looks like Richard Lloyd is up and about again, so there's always hope, but for now I'll just have to settle for having seen each half of Television play "Marquee Moon" separately.

Its fluttery riff was the first thing I'd heard the previous fall when I got into CBGBs on that club's last night.  Lloyd had joined Patti Smith's band during a history-heavy set (which ultimately proved to be a warm-up for a covers album, but whatever).  There, and at a Southpaw performance where he traded licks with Cheetah Chrome as Peter Laughner's permanent replacement in the occasionally reconstituted Rocket from the Tombs, Lloyd struck me as someone who knew exactly where he should put his fingers. 

Verlaine, on the other hand, always seemed to be thinking.  Of things he could try to make happen, of how maybe this was a good time to try x, how maybe y hadn't worked out the way he'd hoped.  Thinking.

It would have been an honor to watch them playing together.

As it was, some drunken ninny near me decided "Marquee Moon" was the perfect time to strike up a conversation.  Ugh.  But he shut up for the show's real highlight, the band's first single.

Television - Little Johnny Jewel (Live in Portland 7-2-78)(mp3)

The idea of a ten-minute punk anthem is counter-intuitive.  Sometimes rules are good, sometimes they aren't.

The first time I lived in this city I didn't get to as many shows as I should have.  Some of that's because most of my time was consumed by school and work and moviegoing (which felt like it was part of school, then, too); some of that's because when I wasn't worried about being underage I was busy getting drunk; some of that's because my musical tastes were still too reliant on radio-friendly arena rock.  It's been nice, this time through, to grab at some secondhand history.  It's too easy to look down your nose at acts who've done great things at some time before this past Tuesday and toss around p'shaws about waning vitality or (ugh) relevance.  Shinynewhotnow! obsession's probably a reaction against don't-make-‘em-like-they-usedta conservatism, or a legit wariness re: nostalgia-fed cash-ins, but it's more desperate than the saddest old-rocker self-celebration.  By asserting that THISmomentourmoment is important at the expense of all others is to reinforce disposability.  Because moments pass.

Television's been assured of its place in the new indie canon, so I needn't get defensive... until that canon turns over again, right?  I was, like, four years old when Verlaine and Hell walked into CBGBs.  I would have totally gotten carded!  But humor me if I think of shows like these not as making a tourist stop at ye olde scene, taking a couple snaps, buying the shirt, but as observing the giant fat throughline of NYC culture.  As active elder-respect, not idle worship.

And yeah, the picture's not really in focus but I just wanted to be able to say all that.

The post-Chikezie team fielded on this season's American Idol does nothing for me, but come NEIL DIAMOND WEEK I couldn't not watch.  Long-time readers - well, all those have gotten frustrated and gone elsewhere.  But accidental click-arounders might know I've had a longstanding interest in Friends of Neil.

So:  Jason Castro, David Cook, Brooke White, David Archuleta, Syesha Mercado.  Friends, or phooey?

I'm surprised how much the entire Top 5 annoy me.  Castro and White started out refreshing, low-key counterpoints to the standard-issue overblown Idol archetypes.  Neither ever learned to play more than one note, though, and have been dully doing time. (When Starbucks announced it was retreating from the music biz, I was shocked those two didn't magically disappear.)  Mercado so consistently underachieves that it's hard to believe that 10,000 other women couldn't be taking her turn and doing a better job with it.  Cook, who might actually win this thing, has a good voice and some lack of complacency; he annoys because within the world of this show he's heralded as some sort of musical genius.

And David Archuleta annoys because he's Pure Evil Suck.  He is horrible music personified.  I can't wait until he's old enough to legally punch in the face.  I can't wait until he's old enough to light on fire and leave on a neighbor's porch while we ring the doorbell and run off and a crotchety old man comes out and stomps on him.  Legally.  Are those even sentences?  Maybe.  Whatever.  Jesus, that kid's annoying.

Each contestant got a chance to annoy us with two NEIL songs, tonight.  Somehow, Archuleta (who looks a little like E.T., but more like Cha-Ka) did not choose "Heartlight."  Instead he sucked the BUM-BUM-BUM out of the much-beloved/hated "Sweet Caroline," a song best saved for late Friday nights when teams of middle-aged women collectively seek refuge from loneliness and last call; and, in Idol's most panderiffic performance since Kristy Lee Yee-Ha sang "I'm Gonna Give Every Sailor in the Room a Handjob," ended "We're Coming to America" with a rousing, AT&Teetastic "Let freedom ring!"  Horrid.

[Speaking of phones, have you seen that ad where Meat Loaf recreates "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" - a song about negotiating your way into a girl's pants - with his son?  (Well, an actor playing his son.)  Is anyone else severely weirded out by this?  And why is Tiffany carrying a leg of lamb?  Does she plan on clubbing her incestuous husband and stepson to death and then devouring the murder weapon?  This all would never have happened were Phil Rizzuto still around.

GoPhone, the preferred handset of boys who want to fuck their dads.]

The only other interesting things about AI this week were how Brooke looked less comfortable than post-preacher Obama while singing "I'm a Believer," and how Future Paula Abdul started judging contestants' second performances before they happened.  (To move things along, the first efforts didn't get individual appraisals; the judges gave a sort of group summary from "notes" they had "taken."  This should have been Paula's chance to shine:  Instead of repeating the same bullshit praise for each person individually she could have dropped a single "You all look wonderful tonight.")

No one sang my favorite NEIL song, "Crunchy Granola Suite."  But you know Castro secretly wanted to.

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I know.  I KNOW.  Back off.

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Speaking of things crunchy and sweet, the recently activated Pitchfork.tv has decided to live up to its acronym and screen, for one week only, Film Threat staple G.G. Allin:  Hated.  I strongly suggest watching it, especially if you're at work.  Especially on your lunch break.  The scene where a naked woman urinates into G.G.'s mouth until he vomits cements this as a modern cinematic masterpiece.  Throughout the film, pretty much anything that can come out of a human body does, then gets shoved back in.  Perfect for Earth Day Week.

A couple friends of mine did crew time on the flick - easily Todd Phillips' funniest - and I hadn't seen it since its premiere (I think) at Anthology Film.  The scene at the NYU student center where Allin shoves a banana up his ass and chucks chairs at the audience was much tamer than I'd remembered.  Still, most acts these days only figuratively fling feces at their fans.

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I was going to do a big frilly post about Wanda Jackson, who rocks, but I think I'll just say that she does rock, that "Fujiyama Mama" (which you can stream at this tribute myspace) and "Hot Dog!  That Made Him Mad" and about a dozen other songs of hers are total classics, that this collection is a blast.

She's also included on the latest muxtape makeover, which is all short n' fierce early rock n' rollishness.