Hello World.

Dinosaurs Fucking Robots is pretty fucking awesome.

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I, however, am not.

Welcome to Less Pop More Fizz, a new blog which, while it will still contain much musicblogging, may contain other things as well. New Domain, New Start, etc. etc. Those of you subscribed to the old indiekids.org feed and reading this, it’s because I’ve used feedburner to redirect the feed. You don’t need to do anything, unless you want to update your bookmarks. Or, y’know, tell someone else I’m blogging again at this new URL. Hope you like the new digs. Expect some growing pains as I try to get everything here working.

The first such growing pain?

I can’t seem to get the recent links items to show up in the main RSS feed. they seem to have their own but I can’t make Feedburner combine them. I suppose I could use something like Pipes to do this, but I’ve done so much mucking with the feeds already, it’s a house of cards I’m afraid is going to collapse short of just creating a whole new feed, which I want to avoid because work I put into trying to redirect the old feed as it is.

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O’Death - Jesus Look Down - O’Death have garnered a lot of attention in the past year. Primarily for their wild side. See Adelita, below. But others have done the ‘punk-rock-jug-band’ thing before. Hell, just take a look at most of the Bloodshot records catalog, and they’ve all dabbled in that turf before. But O’Death, in spite of their firmly New York roots, or perhaps, because of them, seem to have an authenticity that many of those others lack. The thing about spiritual music is that at it’s best, it does not so much cry out or praise or rouse, so much as it simply aches for salvation. When singer Greg Jamie calls out to an ‘angry god,’ he sounds wrecked and beaten, desperate for direction, for authenticity. The relation between man and god is one of supplication, desperation, and it seems, there is even a touch of resentment here. Even as Jamie calls out for salvation, it seems clear that he does not so much want to be saved as he wants to no longer need to be saved.

O’Death - Adelita - As promised, the other side of O’Death. Wild, boistrous, exuberant. Full of stomp and swagger and soul, it’s something of a maniacal sonic mirage, the sound of exuberant denial of pain and loss.

Buy Head Home from Insound.com

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Spearmint - First Time Music - There are songs that tell stories. And there are stories that find themselves placed inside of songs, where the music becomes little more than wallpaper. Pulp were masters of this, and it seems to be a distinctly british method of songwriting - there are Americans who have done it, but never quite as well. Spearmints story, of meeting a pair of women on a hot summer night in Paris, writing dreams on playing cards, not having sex, serves as the pull at the start of Paris in a Bottle. It’s the albums longest track, and it’s least catchy, but it serves it’s purpose. It creates a charachter for a sequence of songs about falling in, and out of love. Britpop, tinged with disco, vocodered singalongs. Oh yes.

Spearmint - Psycho Magnet - First Time Music is about finding someone. Psycho Magnet is about finding the one. It’s a love at first sight sort of song, full of bounce and shimmer. the basslines slither in and out, synthesized strings provide that veneer that you can only have in that intoxicated moment when everything seems right. It doesn’t have to be. But then and there, nothing else matters. There may not be any such thing, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting to, desperately, believe in it.

Amazon.com wants a criminal 34 dollars for this album. Nonetheless, I can’t find it on sale to Americans any cheaper. Brits should be able to find it with their usual suspects as it isn’t an Import title there.

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