are you down with the zest?

Living the LUNA Life at The Mugwump Corporation

so slow to find the good stuff but I found this

Kill For Love by Chromatics

Label: Italians Do It Better

Release: March 26, 2012



I’m going to preface this by admitting that I know next to nothing about Chromatic’s previous oeuvre except for a couple songs, like the excellent “Hands In The Dark,” so I’m no expert on the Portland band’s progression to get to where they’ve gotten on their latest album, Kill For Love. What I do know is that this album is fucking awesome, which is a word that gets overused to death but the first gut feeling that comes to mind when I think of this collection of sounds really is awe (and indigestion from the Spicy McChicken I just ate). If “ominously joyous” is an oxymoron then fuck you because that’s the current running through Kill For Love like said McChicken through me. Relentless beats that, refreshingly, aren’t in-your-face electronica, lush and spooktacular keyboard arrangements, gritty guitar sparks, pop-adelically obscured vocals of both the feminine and masculine persuasion. Stuff for going out and looking at people, before bed quiet time, during bed loud time, hangover cures in a dark cave. Anti-anthems like the title track and “Back from the Grave” sound like clever Cure/Human League/New Order/Crystal Castles/David Byrne-on-Percocet mash-up records. Which means: wow. Fuzzy instrumentals like “Broken Mirrors” and “There’s a Light Out on the Horizon” are testaments to better and darker adventures than you’ve ever had with people you wish you could meet. The album’s best song, “These Streets Will Never Look the Same,” (perfect for driving to a keg party in a sparsely populated forest region) represents one of the few acceptable uses of Auto-Tune in recorded history. And I know I mention David Bowie in every post but there are more than a few hints of The White Duke lurking like a coked-out specter on the fringe of the tracks, especially the sanguineous “A Matter of Time,” which doesn’t really sound like David Bowie at all. I guess all I’m trying to say is do yourself a favor and check Chromatics out. And if you see me nodding at you on the Subway, it’s not because I’m acknowledging your presence as a distinct, hardworking and respectable member of society, it’s because I’m jamming out to “Lady” and trying desperately to free myself from the confines of the banal, joyless world you call home. Also, there’s a pretty sweet Neil Young cover.

welcome to the end times

Had a couple reviews come out last month -- J.A. Tyler's "A Shiny, Unused Heart" in The Brooklyn Rail and George Williams' "Gardens of Earthly Delights" in Prick of the Spindle. Both of these guys are in my top 8 books of 2011, so check 'em out, now. Actually, now that I mention it, I should just share my top 8 books of 2011. Why keep you anxiously salivating? And why 8? It was my number in baseball and water polo and I'm too lazy to think of 10. Boom. 

1. Look! Look! Feathers by Mike Young (Word Riot)

2. A Shiny, Unused Heart by J.A. Tyler (Black Coffee Press)

3. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo (Scribner)

4. Gardens of Earthly Delight: Stories by George Williams (Raw Dog Screaming Press)

5. The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals by Rae Bryant (Patasola Press)

6. Us by Michael Kimball (Tyrant Books)

7. The Blue Tower: Poems by Tomaz Salamun (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

8. Animals by Janey Smith (plain wrap press)

Also, I was going to announce to the five people that read this sporadic attempt at bloggery that I would be taking a more or less complete hiatus from posting for the next several months because of my involvement in two top-secret projects. However, one of them, a movie-related thing, has fallen through as those things tend to do. So my list of covert projects has been reduced to one, a kind of online literary monstrosity, a collaboration with novelist John Reed that is so totally sweet that the coolest hipsters are already checking it out before it exists. So needless to say, I will still be posting, probably with alarming frequency. I'm sorry. 2012 is the time to step one's proverbial game up (and to get pumped for Ridley Scott's ancient aliens-influenced Prometheus). Let's do it.