you know I planned it

Beastie Boys - Ill Communication (listen) Hands-down the album of the weekend. I was taking my daughter and her friend out to breakfast and they were indulging my Rhapsody subscription with requests for "Weird Al" Yankovic songs, sweet sincere love for the funny, but after the the third request for "Eat It" I had to take the helm. "Sabotage" is used for one of opening scenes in the new Star Trek so I put it on and my parody fan daughter reverted back to drummer girl and shouted "SABOTAAAAAAAGE!" from the back seat. She was singing it under her breath as we walked to school the other day. So yeah, when we get our father/daughter band together, this is going on the setlist. Look out farmer's market! You can't stand it. You know I planned it.



Apollo Heights - White Music for Black People (listen) This group was introduced to me via a discussion board discussion about TV on the Radio, a band I want to like more than I do. Apollo Heights is the current incarnation of the Veldt, a black band among the swirly whiteness of 4AD records from back in the day, much as TVOTR is pigeonholed today. I saw the Veldt open for Coteau Cocteau Twins* in 1990 or so and honestly, they owned the show until announcing "We wrote this next one with Simon {what's his face] form Cocteau Twins" and it sounded exactly like Cocteau Twins. So anyway, Apollo Heights rocks it with the sharpest album title in ages.

Disco Lights - Apollo Heights

Lunar Testing Lab - Space Program (via OngakaBaka) Their Seashore Blvd. EP was my jam of the summer and this massive slab of low-orbit micro-throb bliss rock seems to be following suit. When I was a kid, my dream job was to be a radio astronomer, watching the array of massive dishes turn in unison toward a pulse in the outer Out There, and this is what that dream sounds like. Space nerds rejoice! You know I was just as into that pancake as my daughter was when she ordered it.

Papa M - songs from Live from a Shark's Cage, played live (via nyctaper) Live from a Shark's Cage, not itself a live record, is one of my favorite records ever. Slight in footprint but still with an indeterminable internal mass, it is post-rock, trans-mope, guitarist-ist splendor. David Pajo (Tortoise, Stereolab, Slint, Zwan (and hey, I liked Zwan. They should have kept that up until someone actually smashed a pumpkin over somebody's head)) is more famous for a lot of other things but this record is his true glory moment. NYCTapre has him re-doing a few of these songs live and wondrously. If only he could have dug up that answering machine for "Crowd of One"

* I originally mistyped "Coteau," which is a pretty common word in South Louisiana place names, meaning "cluster of homes." It made me want to start a swirly alt-rock Cajun band (we could deem it "shrimp boot gaze") called the Coteau Twins: accordion, washboard and guitar all fed through piles of delay, maybe find the most elfin of Cajun gals to warble obliquely about fais-do-do's and play the triangle. A musical joke with limited appeal for sure, but an idea I want to push out into the world. They would be huge in Lafayette.