Hüsker Dü

Emusic recently got the rights to the Husker Du catalogue which I’m pretty sure was also previously not available on iTunes.  Who do they think they are, the Beatles?  Anyway, good news even if you have to DL entire albums, can’t cherrypick songs, which disappointed me because I always saw Zen Arcade as a bit [...]

Music Roundup: Franco, Jay Reatard, Pains of Being Pure at Heart…

A few things I’ve been listening to…
Modest Mouse, “3rd Planet.”  This is from Modest Mouse’s major-label debut The Moon and Antarctica (2000), their third album, which didn’t really make too big of a splash at the time — their commercial breakthrough came with the next album and the big Pixies-ish hit “Float On.”  One thing [...]

Juliana Hatfield memoir

I got around to reading the Juliana Hatfield memoir When I Grow Up.  I read the Dean Wareham one recently (Black Postcards) too. The two books feel like they constitute a minor wave of memoirs of 1990s semi/almost rock stardom.  Wareham (of Galaxie 500 and Luna) and Hatfield both had comparable experiences as indie stars [...]

Mountain Goats in Bloomington

Went to see the Mountain Goats.  If you don’t know them, the Mountain Goats is John Darnielle, a literate Pitzer College grad, former emergency room nurse, who used to record very primitive songs on boom boxes but since 2002 or so has been producing more polished, “produced” (even orchestral) music.  He tends towards the ambitious [...]

Ian Curtis/ Kurt Cobain

Watched the Anton Corbijn biopic of Ian Curtis (Joy Division’s singer who committed suicide in 1980 at age 23), Control.  Enjoyed it a lot.  The musical performances, all recorded by the actors, are pretty uncannily good and Sam Riley is a dead ringer for Curtis.  If they toured as the Unknown Pleasures, a Joy [...]

Lux Interior R.I.P.

Lux Interior (born Erick Lee Purkhiser), who formed the “psychobilly” combo the Cramps with his wife Poison Ivy in 1973, is dead at age 62.
I didn’t know that he grew up on Akron, OH. Were the Cramps at all part of the whole 70s Akron scene (with Devo, the Bizarros, Rubber City Rebels), or [...]

Neko Case “People Got a Lotta Nerve”

Neko Case is offering a free download of the first single, “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” from her new album (Middle Cyclone, due out March 3), and her record label is donating $5 to Best Friends Animal Society for every blog that re-posts it.  So, I am doing so: you can download the song [...]

My Father, My Attack Dog

David Berman of the Silver Jews (Pavement-associated indie rock group, basically just Berman) has announced his retirement from music and followed the announcement up with this remarkable anguished confession:

My Father, My Attack Dog

Now that the Joos are over I can tell you my gravest secret. Worse than suicide, worse than crack addiction:
My father.
You might be [...]

Fated to Pretend

New Pazz and Jop Village Voice rock critics’ poll.  I contributed to this for years and was always thrilled when the editors chose a couple of my elaborately-wrought witticisms/quips for inclusion in the commentary section.  The only one I remember is something I wrote about Pavement “giving the Badfinger to the rock and roll singer,” [...]

Love is All “Last Choice”

Love is All are a punky Swedish pop band led by Josephine Olausson, who has a somewhat Bjork-like presence and warbling singing voice.  Amazon tells me that people who buy their second album A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night also buy Los Campesinos!, so I guess I’m predictable in my affinity for Western [...]