Remembering David Foster Wallace

DAVID Foster Wallace's life was brilliant, tormented, and short -- cut off by a 2008 suicide. Because your humble blogger was going through complicated matters of his own -- an incompetent gnome had just crashed the newspaper I wrote for, hundreds of colleagues and I were soon out of work -- I never entirely engaged with the sudden death of the man who is likely to stand as the greatest writer of our generation.

D.T. Max's Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, gets into the novelist's life and death, as well as the ideas that animated him and his times. The tale comes across as a classic generational journey between theory and irony on one hand and sincerity and... something else on the other.

HERE is my long Q+A with Max, on Salon.

Let me put in a plug, by the way, for a lively, recent anthology of work about DFW, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, which includes pieces by novelists Don De Lillo, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, etc., as well as DFW's editor at Little, Brown.

I also asked Max a question we did not have room for on the Salon interview. Here it is:

ST: What kind of long-term impact do we expect Wallace will have? My guess is that he opened the door to a certain kind of literary voice: Would we have gotten Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's empire without him? Anything else, generationally, culturally, or otherwise? Where do we see his influence?


DTM: Wallace definitely broadened the idea of what the "literary" could be in American fiction both in terms of the sentence and the novel itself. How many young writers today pattern themselves after him? But I think literary styles change and what is of the moment today is going to be passe tomorrow. in some ways we are already seeing a backlash. Where DFW continues to grow stornger is in what you might call almost-literary writing, on the web, on blogs, in journals, where he liberated a generation to write more the way they thought.

Indie Rockers Finding Second Wind

IT seems, sometimes, that every awful band from the past is back together again for a lame-ass shed tour. And it's also started to seem, at least since the heavenly Go-Betweens reunion of about a decade ago, that some of the groups reuniting were not only good, they were better -- or close to it -- the second time around.


How can both of these things be true at the same time? It took me 2,000 words to figure it out.

For a story that just went up on Salon, I look at the awfulness alongside four bands that never had time to go bad -- Spain, the Feelies, Mission of Burma and the dBs -- and are now back in force.

And I try to make sense of the whole never-say-die phenomenon. Why did bands used to break up when the time was right, but then began staying together for years, or getting back together, over and over again?

Lovers of Spain, the LA "slowcore" band of '90s fame, should be aware of their August 28 show at the Bootleg Theater.

Wondering: Who are your favorite -- and least favorite -- reunited bands?

Spain mach 2, Photo Steven Dewall

Simon Reynolds Goes Retro

HAS the end of cultural history ever been so much fun?

Your humble scribe has been reading Simon Reynolds since his work was a well-kept secret of the British music press. (He was also, during the ‘90s, one of two rock-crit Simons in the Village Voice, the other being the code-cracking rock sociologist Simon Frith.)

He’s written with insight and intelligence about rock n roll, subculture, shoegaze, “post-rock,” electronica and rave culture. His biggest hit stateside has probably been Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984, published in this country in 2006. (Due to Henry Rollins plug for the British edition, I had my Manchester-dwelling sister drag one home for me for Christmas one year.)

Reynolds’ latest book – which arrives about a year after his move to Los Angeles – is Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. The book concentrates on popular music, but it stretches to include all kinds of related subjects, among them memory, hipster retro culture, the psychology of the collector, the "big in Japan" phenomenon, commodity fetishism, YouTube and digital means of recording and storage.

I read nearly everything I find by Reynolds, but this book taps into several longtime passions of mine: In college, as I tried to make simultaneous sense of postmodern theorist Frederic Jameson and the emerging sample-madness of hip hop, I wrote an essay called “Pop Will Eat Itself” which laid out some of the issues that would continue to fascinate me for the next two decades. But I only scratched the surface what Reynolds gets into here. (I also had no idea how much of a retro cat I would become as an adult.)

Now please allow me to slip back to my Vox tube amp, collection of ‘60s jazz records and stash of prewar noir novels: Here’s Simon.

When did you realize that it had gotten this bad? That we were not just living through garden-variety nostalgia but might be poised to swallow our own future?

Shortly before deciding to do the book! Which would have been 2007 or so. But the feeling had been creeping up on me for a while, I’d been blogging stuff with retro themes for quite a while.

The book comes out of this mounting sense of bemusement at the phenomenon of retro that built up over the Noughties, and from a feeling of alarm at what it seemed to herald for the future – which is to say precisely an absence of future, the repetition of the already-heard.

It also comes from curiosity about how things had gotten like this, and how far the roots of retro could be traced. Because as soon as I started thinking about the subject in depth, during the writing of the proposal, I realized that retro had been this spectre on the periphery of my consciousness going way way back. There is a piece I wrote in a fanzine in the mid-Eighties, when music seemed to be stagnant and deadlocked, where I mention en passant that there’s been a glut of reissues and retrospection and that hasn’t helped the situation! So one of the things the book is showing is that retromania as a phenomenon is not an overnight development, it’s something that’s built up over a couple of decades.

What happened in terms of the swarming, ever-expanding digital archive of pop culture that has accrued over the past decade — filesharing, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc etc etc — that was the fruition of tendencies and directions that go back to long before the Internet. So part of the book is also an investigation of the history of retro; I’m looking back at pop’s own looking back, the history of revivalism and what I call “timewarp cults’.

You open the book describing the 17th century origins of the word “nostalgia." For how long have human beings longed for the past? Did Cro-Magnon man pine for the days when he was pushing the Neanderthals aside?

I think looking back to the past and venerating it is something that runs through the entirety of human civilization and is almost certainly part of every culture on the planet. The idea that things were better in the some glorious earlier time, that the ancestors were wise and just and existed in some kind of perfect state of equilibrium, but that at some point things went awry and the current situation we inhabit is fallen or lesser...  this is a near-universal way of seeing things. And on the individual level, we are all prone to nostalgia, I’m sure. Certainly daydreaming about my personal past, feeling wistful about lost moments, is a big part of my make-up.

Nostalgia in the sense of nostalgia for the popular culture and everyday trappings (food, clothes, transport, how stuff looked and was designed, etc etc) of an era that you personally lived through...  I think that is a relatively recent development, though. It seems like a 20th Century thing. That kind of nostalgia is inextricably linked to how fast fashions, entertainment, and so forth, change: they’re two sides of the same coin. And that cycle definitely got faster and faster as the 20th Century proceeded. Hence there’s more to be nostalgic about.

That kind of nostalgia is different from antiquarianism or an interest in history or the olden days. When I was very young I wanted to be an archaeologist and that impulse is to do with the thrill of treasure seeking (I had a very naïve idea of what being an archaeologist was like, which was shattered when I attended my first dig) and a fascination for how differently people lived in olden times. There are many ways of being interested in the past that don’t have anything to do with nostalgia. People who form Early Music ensembles aren’t nostalgic, I don’t think. They don’t want to go back to the days of bubonic plague and petty criminals being drawn-and-quartered.

But retro is something a little different from nostalgia, right?

In the book I talk about retro in two ways. There is a sort of vague use of “retro” as an umbrella term for anything to do with phenomena that have some relationship to the past; usually it’s a derogatory or slightly mocking use of the word. 

All the things that get loosely described as ‘retro’ are dealt with in the book: nostalgia, reunion tours, heritage culture, rock museums, revivals, reissuing, remakes, etc. However ‘retro’ actually has a more specific meaning that actually has little to do with nostalgia as an emotion of genuine loss and longing towards the past. Retro in this narrower, precise sense refers to a cultivated appreciation of past styles, usually with a sense of irony as opposed to anguish. Retro aesthetes are charmed by the quaintness of things from the past, but they don’t want to go back in time. This “pure” retro is much more aestheticized and style-oriented. In a non-pejorative sense, just a simple statement of fact, it is superficial: it attends to and delights in the surface properties of the style.

That’s why ‘retro’ in this sense first manifested in the world of fashion and graphic design. Then it gradually spread into, or emerged within, music. And initially it was a rarefied, sophisticated sensibility, and in the rather earnest context of rock culture in the 70s, it was cutting edge. The pioneers of it in rock would have been figures like Roxy Music, or later the  B-52s. Art school and/or gay musicians.  Nowadays it is really widespread in “post-indie” music culture and a lot of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking operators currently active approach the past as this gigantic flea market of sound and style and imagery through they sift for style signifiers to play with.

Haven’t cultural critics decried this kind of thing before? Paul Weller and company went retro decades ago, and I recall a 1986 Esquire article calling the ‘80s “The Re Decade.” What’s different now?

It’s a recurrent complaint that’s emerged at moments of seeming stagnation in music. In the Seventies, journalist and cultural pundits noticed that there was a lot of revivalism going on, particularly the Fifties revival that was big in rock but also took in things like American Graffiti and Happy Days, but I think there was also in the Seventies a bit of Twenties revivalism going on and probably some other decades got dabbled with too. 

In the Eighties postmodernism reached the music and youth press as well as mainstream magazines, so I’m not surprised to hear about that Esquire article; I can remember pieces in The Face about ‘The Age of Plunder’. There was recycling going on all across from music (with so many Eighties pop groups referencing Sixties soul) to Swatch watches with their use of Constructivist and Suprematist imagery. In the early 90s I wrote a piece whose working title was actually ‘Retromania’ for the Guardian and it talked about the reissue explosion and also two then-new rock magazines, Mojo and Vox, that had a very pronounced orientation towards the rock past, collector culture, and so forth.

As I say this has been building for years, but I think what makes it different now is the scale and intensity, and how it’s been affected by digital culture, how that has induced a state of atemporality. Also this current stagnant, directionless phase has gone on much longer than any previous lull: it’s been like this for about a dozen years, where no new major movement or genre in music has come forward.  Indeed, tying in with what I said about digiculture, I think you can loosely time the onset of the current malaise-without-end-in-sight to when broadband kicked in and a whole bunch of things to do with the Internet took off and started pushing us towards the Cloud and the state of perpetual connectivity.

If someone wrote a book this year about the dangers of pollution, or overpopulation, or global warming, I don’t think anyone would say, “oh we’ve heard this before, there were lots of scares about environmental issues in the 1970s, or people were worried about the ozone layer back in the early 90s...  ’. 

Someone in the UK compared Retromania to An Inconvenient Truth.  I think there’s some truth to that in so far as the problems I’m examining didn’t come about overnight and at various points people have remarked upon these syndromes before and expressed alarm about them.

The advent of recording and photography made retro possible. How has technology – which we associate with the future – quickened the process?

Well I go into this in some depth in the book, obviously. It’s a BIG topic. To keep it short, I will say that we’ve seen in the last twenty years a bumpy but implacable transition from the Analogue System to the Digital System, with things like CDs and iPods as transitional formats and technology that will disappear as all culture becomes subsumed as the Cloud.  The Analogue way of experiencing culture involved dearth, distance, and delay: there was a limited number of cultural artifacts that most individuals could afford, these took a solid form that had to be physically transported (in the case of magazines, recordings, if not radio and TV, although the latter were limited by broadcast range), and that involved waiting (for things to be released or published or broadcast). The Digital way of experiencing culture is organized around super-abundance, post-geographical proximity, and instantaneity/immediacy. There are no limits. Yet human beings remain stubbornly analogue entities and as many many people are discovering there is a lot to be said in favour of limits.

This can’t be good. What does it tell us about Anglo-American society in the 21st century, that we’ve become -- as your subtitle has it -- addicted to our own past?

Well, it could be telling us lots of things. That we’ve become victims of our technology. That we bought into the ideology of convenience as a supreme value. Or could it be that old stuff seems comfortable at a time characterized on the one hand by mind-blowing technological changes (the aforementioned digiculture stuff) but on the other hand characterized by an anxiety-stoking sense of political-economic deterioration/deadlock/instability. The past seems alluring because the present is a mess and the future is hard to envisage in positive terms. “Better days” have become something it’s more plausible to project backwards in time rather than forwards in time. 

The Return of the Archers of Loaf

WHEN the band filed at the Troubadour the other night, I wondered if this might be an Archers of Loaf cover band -- a Chapel-Hill-meets-'90s nostalgia version of Beatlemania. But despite the fact that gawky, bespectacled Eric Bachmann has transformed himself into a lumber jack since the band's late-'90s breakup (don't rock musicians usually waste away?), this was the Archers of old -- all the hummable melodies, modern jazz-meets-Sonic Youth-inspired harmonic weirdness, the onstage jumping around, and those unforgettable songs like "Web in Front" and "Wrong."

This was one of those reunions I never thought I'd see, and I certainly did not think this North Carolina band that never got its due would make it to the West Coast. (They ended up with two sold-out nights at the Troubadour to kick off a whole West Coast tour.) I went to school in Chapel Hill in the early '90s, so this is a band I've been seeing for a long time -- real pleasure to see their genius undiminished.

HERE is a Spin piece by my Raleigh-based colleague on their reuniting. The tour still comes through New York, Chicago, Atlanta, DC, Phil, NC, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.

The band's albums are also being reissued by Merge.

All hail the Archers!!

LA Band Spain, and a Celebrity Fan

THE other night I was lucky enough to catch a short, hypnotic set by Spain, the Los Angeles "slowcore" band that's now back together and starting to appear in low-key shows around town. (The last time I saw them they played at tiny but wonderful Origami Vinyl in Echo Park.)

In any case, the show itself was both completely gripping and without any surprising jolts: Mellow songs with a brooding shimmer, the ghost of country music evident in some of the chord changes, incisive guitar lines, and about evenly split between darkly romantic songs from the band's '90s heyday and new songs including "I'm Still Free," recently released as a single. (We were especially impressed with "I Lied" the band's last song, "Untitled #1," from its first album, though it made us wonder how much better the song would be if it had a real name.)

The Misread City is a longtime fan of this group -- here is some of what I've said before about this band, headed by Josh Haden -- so we were delighted to see that despite the poor showing of this barely publicized gig, one of the great arbiters of Southland music was rocking to the show in dark overcoat: Actor Jack Black.

Black, of course, is married to one of Haden's musical sisters -- they are all descended from great jazz bassist Charlie Haden -- so maybe this was family obligation. But somehow I don't think so.

Your humble blogger has far too good manners to approach a Hollywood celebrity who has strayed into a public place, but his appearance made us recall his peerless role in High Fidelity, one of the great rock music films ever made.

In this scene, Black's character Barry gives a clueless customer a brisk musical lesson, and continues on the record-shop owner played by John Cusack. As you can tell from this clip, Black's taste is quite exacting: A major vote of confidence indeed for the band Spain.

One note: Silver Lake's The Satellite, where the show was held seems to be quite similar to Spaceland, the club it replaced. This is no complaint: The place falls into the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it category. Long may it thrive, under whatever name.

Versus Tours the West Coast

I MUST admit, I'd forgotten how good a live band the New York trio Versus could be. Last night's show at the Echo -- part of their first full-scale tour in a decade -- was devastating, reminding me both how strong their playing is and how bogus the notion that indie rock is wimpy.

In some ways Versus were typical of '90s indie bands in their use of jangly guitars, strong melodies and distortion. But they always seemed to the closest thing to the Pixies -- with their sense of menace, wild swings of loud-soft-loud dynamics, their incongruous bits of quiet beauty amidst the noise, the male-female vocal trade-offs and perhaps leader the hint of surf guitar in Richard Baluyut's playing. Some of their songs have such evocative fragments of imagery to them that they could suggest entire novels.

Tuesday night -- with what I think of as the original lineup, plus the addition of a keyboard/violin player -- all their best qualities were out in force for a small but devoted crowd. The show had a nice balance between old stuff and new songs from their latest, On the Ones and Threes, more proof that the people running Merge have the best ears in the business.

After a slightly too long period of sound checking and what Richard called "uncomfortable silences," the show started with a kick and kept its force all the way through: Two highlights "Circle" "River" from the band's full-length debut The Stars Are Insane, but I was struck during the whole show by how good this band is at generating drama in its songs and in giving each one a sense of shape.

Here they are playing one the best on the new record at a show in Brooklyn.

Mostly, this was a great, bracing time-machine show without any huge surprises. One thing was different: The old laconic, slightly surly Versus has warmed up, and even sometimes-fearsome vocalist Fontaine Toups was playful and joking with the crowd. The whole show took the sting out of having missed Gang of Four the night before.

They're on to San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.

Social Network Producer Mike De Luca

From the outside, The Astaire Building, the early-‘90s structure on the Sony lot where Michael De Luca Productions is housed, is about as rock ‘n’ roll as the dancer which lends the edifice its name.

But De Luca’s office – which includes the usual neat stacks of scripts on the desk, scattering of books, and LCD television – shows that something a little more personal is at work here.

          

The mod rug that evokes the work of Charles and Ray Eames, crisp Mad Men-style couch and framed black and white photographs – selections from California pop artist Ed Ruscha’s photo-doc of the mid-‘60s Sunset Strip – suggests that this guy has style. And maybe some taste, too, for classic modernism’s austere intellectualism and sharp edges.

“I like those clean lines,” says De Luca, who once lived in a sleek modernist house above Sunset Plaza when he was the bad-boy production head of New Line. “My wife doesn’t, though, so we’re living in a Cape Cod-style house in Brentwood right now. This is an homage,” he says with a little smile, neither boastful nor embarrassed, “to the bachelor pad I had to give up.”

A lot has changed for De Luca -- and the industry -- since indie’s heyday, when he developed American History X, Menace 2 Society and Boogie Nights – and helped convince the ambitious little studio to put aside unprecedented sums for The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Or has it? Industry buzz has De Luca, now 45 and father of a 2-year-old girl, on the verge of a comeback, or the early stages of roll of great movies. The Social Network -- directed by David Fincher, whom De Luca helped break with Seven – has become the most talked about film of last year, showing off a half dozen great performances and one of the most admired scripts in memory. 

Here is my Hollywood Reporter Q+A with De Luca, who talks about past, present and future.

Nada Surf at the Troubadour

The Brooklyn band Nada Surf are one part '90s indie, one part chiming power pop, one part '60s songcraft, and last night they melded all three styles in a loud, forceful Troubadour show that left my ears ringing. The tour -- which continues tonight at the same club -- supports their new record of idiosyncratic covers, If I Had a Hi-Fi.

The show, of course, wasn't perfect, with a few songs that didn't entirely connect, and I'm not sure about the bassist's dreadlocks. But generally this is one of the most exciting bands in indie rock and I'm particularly impressed with their unpredictable way of engaging with music history.

Case in point: While most of the show was given over to their very fine originals, an early highlight was their cover of The Go-Betweens "Love Goes On." Pop-savvy readers of The Misread City need no introduction to this brilliantly wistful and now sadly defunct Aussie alt band, but many audiences do. Nada Surf gets major props both for bringing their names up and for hitting this bittersweet song even more squarely than the its originators did. (A fan handed lead singer Matthew Caws the CD of a Go-Betweens tribute record -- I'd love to hear more about this, which I see here.) Anyway, "Love Goes On" and Bill Fox's surging "Electrocution" were highlights of the show as well as the new album, which drops June 8.

And while it took the band a minute to get the groove right, they played what may be their best song -- "Blonde on Blonde," which captures a retro kind of music love better than anything I know since Philip Larkin's "Reference Back," the anthemic "Whose Authority," their early "The Plan," and "Happy Kid." (I cant stop trying to get the meloody "I'm just a happy kid, stuck with the heart of a sad punk," across on my guitar.) I would have liked to hear the bic-lighter-inspiring "Inside of Love."

Nada Surf, of course, are part of a small but proud cadre of formerly major label bands that went on to thriving artistically on indies. (Spoon and Velvet Crush come immediately to mind.) Their early (and, in retrospect, slightly annoying) mid-'90s hit "Popular," made them seem part of a cynical and "ironic" turn in alt-rock, but they band was soon dropped and has done its best work since on records like Let Go and Lucky. (The new album is very fine, if not as consistent as I'd like: They do manage the musical alchemy of turning out a pretty good version of a Depeche Mode song, something I would have judged impossible. And the album's production may be the best of anything they've recorded.)

I could talk about this show all day but must switch off because the band is about to go onto a KCRW/Morning Becomes Eclectic performance. Let me close by mentioning that besides Caws' skill on the Les Paul (and strong vocals), the band also included Ira Elliot, one of the most inventive drummers in indie rock, and guest axe-man Doug Gillard of Cobra Verde and Guided by Voices. (Gillard's record with GbV's Robert Pollard, Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department, is by far Pollard's best "solo" record.)

Here's an addendum: Drummer Elliot will be part of an indie supergroup of sorts, including members of Cat Power, Maplewood, and Moby'd band, in Hamburg to mark the 50th anniversary of the Beatles arrival there. Elliot, like my friend the top-shelf writer/musician Mark Rozzo, is also a member of canyon-rock revivalists Maplewood. (The group will be opening for soft-rock heroes America on some dates this summer.

New Editor at Paris Review

I've been hearing about the legendary Lorin Stein -- a hip young editor at Farrar Straus and Giroux, probably the coolest of the major houses -- for years now. So I wasn't alone in cheering when he was appointed the new editor of the storied Paris Review.

Stein -- who has edited novels by Denis Johnson, the press's translations of Bolano's Savage Detectives and 2666, and three of the five National Book Award finalists from 2008 and, more recently, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask and Elif Batuman's The Possessed -- takes over the job held for decades by George Plimpton and most recently by Philip Gourevitch.

(I recall meeting Plimpton at the LATimes Festival of Books a few years ago -- it was the most starstruck I have ever seen my then-girlfriend/now-wife.)

I've corresponded with Stein a few times and been struck by both his serious commitment to literature -- he is a burning advocate of the twisted poet Frederick Seidel -- and his highly developed Gen X irony. (Will the next Paris Review offer long interviews with Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, Lois and poet David Berman? The Misread City would not object.)

I spoke to Stein in '07 for THIS story in response to Granta's '07Best Young Author's issue, which included many foreign born authors. (The piece also includes interviews with then-Granta editor Ian Jack and critic Laura Miller.)

He talked about the days, as recently as the mid-'90s, when a literary review's author list could still enrage people:

"I'm not going to be able to walk into a party, or a bar, and get into that fight now," he said. "Because that discussion is over. The readership has fractured, and reads less, and spends more time e-mailing. And it makes less sense to talk about novelists now -- the really creative writing is being done in other genres" such as the personal essay, reportage and criticism.

"The novel has become like landscape painting," he said. "It's the 'top' genre, but not, in real life, the main one."

Here's looking forward to where Lorin Stein takes the Paris Review.

"After the End of History"

IT'S the kind of phrase, however memorable, that the speaker probably wishes he could take back. when francis fukuyama responded to the fall of berlin wall -- the close of the cold war -- by calling it "the end of history" it seemed to make sense, and it fit into an argument by postmodern scholars -- fredric jameson especially -- that we were living in a context-free epoch that had no use for history either in its literature or popular culture.

but history continued to happen, and this week the berlin wall moment is back in the news. i'm also reading an intriguing new book in which samuel cohen, an english professor at the university of missouri, argues that history did not disappear from our literature either. cohen sees the 90s -- the period between "the end of history" and 9/11's "end of irony" -- as "an interwar decade," and looks at six of the best novels the period produced and two that came right after.

those novels are by thomas pynchon, philip roth, toni morrison, tim o'brien, joan didion, jeffrey eugenides, jonathan lethem and don delillo, all hefty books well worth the study.

i know cohen only slightly, from speaking by phone for two stories on updike, here and here, and i like his gen-x perspective. updike himself doesnt much figure in the new book, but he offers this delicious epitaph from "rabbit at rest": " 'i miss it,' he said. 'the cold war. it gave you a reason to get up in the morning.'"

so i'm enjoying cohen's tightly and clearly written "after the end of history: american fiction in the 1990s" -- and not just because it's the kind of study i might have written had i stayed in the academy.

The Glorious Sprawl of Built to Spill

I KNOW i'm not alone in considering built to spill, the boise band that sometimes offers three guitars blaring in a kind of rough counterpoint, to be one of the key bands of the alt-rock heyday of the 90s. unlike a lot of those groups, they've managed to grow in feeling in each record, even if their style has not changed massively in 10 years or so.

they are also one of the greatest live bands in indie rock (that may sound like damning with faint praise.) but anyone who has seen their extroverted shows, including their recent replay of '97's "perfect from now on" lp knows what i mean.

here is my LATimes interview with singer/guitarist doug martsch, who i describe as a noam-chomsky-and-pickup-basketball kinda guy. i also talk about how they break from the neo-puritanism of the indie aesthetic: they are not remaking 60s songcraft or taut post-punk models.

the new record, "there is no enemy," is getting mixed reviews so far. i'll agree that it is not a huge step forward for them, and perhaps it is less concise than their previous few lps. but it extends the warm, dreamy, sprawling sound to often powerful effect. i love the songs "hindsight" and "life's a dream," for instance. (here is an early bts classic, "in the morning," and the more recent "carry the zero.")

though it wasn't part of their original tour schedule, there is now an L.A. date -- an oct. 29 gig at the echoplex. can't wait.