Thumbing Through Music Lust

Thumbed through at the library this afternoon, and thumbing through is exactly the way to experience this book. The author, Nic Harcourt, is the amiable host of KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic, the sturdiest bastion of inoffensive yet usually engaging performance and intelligent interviews with the up-and-comers in the cafe-society pop scene. You will never get SunnO))) melting the monitors or The Nels Cline Singers pushing needles slyly into your brain, but I listened to the podcast of The Clientele a couple times in a row last week and it served as a cocoa butter balm to my soul.

This is part of a x-Lust series of books of which I was previously unaware (in fact, I grabbed it because I mistakenly thought it said Music Slut, and I thought Perfect! Book! Title!) and while he rarely gets in a lather enough for lust (for instance The Barenaked ladies and Siouxsie and the Banshees come up a lot more than seems fitting for the truly lusty), its one-page categories like "Sisters" and "O, Canada" are perfect little conversations, peppered with band names in nice tidy bold print. I walked away wanting to check out some music I'd neglected to listen to/fogotten all about over the years (I know I've listened to Teenage Fanclub Bandwagonesque a number of times over the years, but I'm drawing a blank when trying to recall it, so off I go) so in that alone, it is highly successful music writing.

I usually strive for Don Quixote (the character, not the book) zeal in my music writing, but here he is the post-stoner uncle with the amazingly comprehensive record collection and the ability to point you to the right Dandy Warhols or Kitty Wells or Plastic Bertrand record for that precise moment.