Comparing Losing Political Situations to Hotel California is Superior to Calling Them Quagmires

Chris: We should go out and have mai fucking tai's this weekend

Sent at 1:41 PM on Friday

Girls Hellhole Ratrace
JJ My Hopes and Dreams
Tanlines New Flowers
The Deele Body Talk

Well, it looks like my weekends going to be spent with a pack of fashion magazines and Style.com, but it's probably going to be good to get some brain-work in before the physical work-out and flurry of activity that is Pop Montreal begins, sparing no liver or ear-drum or bank account. So, some bits and pieces, then...

...And I thought I had a fucked up childhood dealing with Pentecostal Christians and post-60s California paranoid communal living (it creeped up the West Coast... Joan Didion's selection of essays, The White Album, is one of my favourite books and also chronicles the intense disconnect and anxiety that not just followed the Haight & Ashbury period, but was at the core of it). Girls' Christopher Owens had it way worse than I, growing up in some backwards universe in a Children of God family and emerging from it with a demo and a supremely solid album of music that, on first listen, sounds like Elvis Costello fronting Spiritualized, with lo-fi digressions.

Swedish super-secret-studio creations JJ you probably already know about, but if not, the back-story is the absence of a back-story. From their album on Sweden's Sincerely Yours label, also home to The Tough Alliance, Air France and other similar-minded Nordiques.

Tanlines also on the bill with Plaza Musique and Os Mutantes for Pop Montreal. Saturday, October 3rd at Le National. Don't sleep on that.

A new album by Chromeo is due next summer (too long!), but in the mean-time, check out their crate-digging skills on their recently released DJ Kicks compilation, which includes songs from long-time Goldkicks favourites Kano and Carmen (Time to Move, rather than Throw Down - difficult choice). If you register on the K7 site, they'll send you an mp3 of Chromeo's cover of the Eagles' I Can't Tell You Why. And yes, a vocoder harmonizing on the chorus is way better than Glenn Frey and Don Henley.

A couple of years back, Chromeo put together Le Mix for Turbo Recordings, which included amongst a number of high-lights (I can name at least four DJs who play Chemise's She Can't Love You, sing along to it and do weird hand-gestures regularly, to say little of my general peer group's love for Gino Soccio) The Deele's Body Talk, which I've posted above. Babyface was in The Deele. BABYFACE!

Is The Chronicle of Higher Education predicting that roving gangs of high school drop-out meth-heads may soon take a page from Mao's Little Red Book and attack the cities from the countryside, taking specific aim at the previously departed "achievers" and "high fliers?" Let's say yes. The next Khmer Rouge may be North America's poor white underclass.