i’m like slim thug, i do it for you p-town

Thoughts on Select Tracks of Disc One of the PDX Pop Now! Comp 2005, in real time:
* The Minders‘ plan, to undercut themselves before the haters can, is especially disarming on harmonic thirds. The tune is measured, the vox reigned in, but I can see them pounding 17 Pabsts each at a bar in SE Portland after they shut down the four-track.
* On this song by The Blow, she doesn’t feign sex in her voice like some electro-vampers on that deep dish glitch (someone’s been listening to grimetrax?) but she’s proprietor of a literary, kinda Erica Jong ish you might miss if you pay yr whole libido to the sub-bass.
* You don’t know Nice Nice. “Uh-Oh” is what I think they do best–stutturing robo-dub w/megaphones–and I think you are sleeping because you haven’t seen them live. Also Jace Clayton-approved, so what do you think?
* Please Step Out of the Vehicle does not sound like Bratmobile even if you think they’re going to ’cause of the primitive tom/surf intro. It’s more like well the slackermeister boybands from the mid-’90s Merge catalogue. Butterglory? Politely angsting and lumbering for about a minute-twenty.
* He doesn’t sing about it in this song (“Evil Falls”) I don’t think, but Emil from Holy Sons was Minding the Store before Pauly Shore ever even thought about making a reality show about it. Emil totally worked the door at Pauly’s mom’s comedy club in LA like, 7 years ago and has some good stories about Pauly, chicks and weed. Anyway I think we know which one has the talent in this scenario. (Hint: IT IS THE ONE WITH THE VOICE LIKE A FRESH PIECE OF CILANTRO TICKLING THE NUB OF YOUR NOSE.)
* Yacht: HOMEY! Track is called “Daydreams with Daffodils (the Stepperz Remix)” but the “Z” in “stepperz” connotes its total dissociation w/Chicago, other than a kinda 8-bit glitch-malfunction cover of R Kelly’s “Ladies Night,” and the fact that stepping to it is basically impossible.
* I sometimes think Glass Candy exists solely to piss people off. “Lovin Machine” is a good example: a distant electro track that kind of bored-postures, in one handclapped place, shifting only to stamp out a cigarette, for seven minutes. But wait! Ida No is actually singing the lyrics to “Iko Iko”! Leave it to GC to turn a once-political song into a vamping yet completely distracted fuckathon.
* PERSONAL NOTE: From 2000-2001 I was in a band with 2/3 of 31 Knots called “Is This OK?” (It was my band and I named it thankuvmuch.) It was me on guitar & vox, Joe on drums and vox and Jay W. on bass. After our first show, my friend Brad Adkins told me in that cynical smacker tone of his, “It’s like 31 Knots, but with a girl.” What a dick! I would never write a lyric like “Cavalier of arms, I covet thee!” That is pure Joe, a man who collects antique statuettes of Roman gods and spent an entire summer dressing like he was on a minor league baseball team in 1936. (But then I am the woman who named our subsequent band “The Ghosts of Women Who Haunt Cliffs” and totally ripped off Satoko Fujii.)
* If Is This OK? was the chick 31 Knots, Alan Singley is the boy Mirah–his voice can do that real swoopy dippity-do it dipthong whatever you call it, a pretty tumbler slide from note-to-note, and make it sound swoony not strained. Sample lyric: “We’re just passing around the guitar singing country songs and the place is jumpin’!” ?? Campfires are not normally what I would characterize as “jumpin” but I lead a charmed life and this song is called “These Trees are for Resting.”
And as for Spooky Dance Band, “Chemical Reaction”–I owe more than this. It’s transcendant and it is devastating and it’s been two years and hearing Orion’s voice again is breaking my fucking heart.
Miss, love, thinking about you. I will write more again.