What I Love and What I Don’t Like

I had a sort of crappy end-of-day at work. I tend to internalize my frustration and play out phantom conversations endlessly. This tendency gets exacerbated by the fact that I don’t talk to friends very much. I drive home from work, IM with my wife for a few minutes to find out how she’s doing and see when she expects to get home from work, then take the dogs for a walk usually about half an hour or so.

Rufus & Otis are great, but their conversation skills are lacking, so I tend to keep talking silently to myself and letting these frustrations fester. The weather’s so lovely this evening that I it would sooth my soul, but I kept slipping back into little tirades. I should’ve called one of my old pals, but it’s just not in my nature anymore. Don’t know when that changed.

got in and fed them, checked work e-mail and some other work-related stuff, which only fuels my nonsense. Then I decided to go downstairs to my library sprawl out on the couch, and read the new issue of Love & Rockets. And that’s when I got out of myself. Jaime Hernandez’ stories in the new book flat-out transported me. The moment young Perla saw the girl-mechanic on the parade float, I had a grin from ear to ear. My heart was broken after the story of her brother. I lost myself in his amazing storytelling, and I’m thankful for that.

(I also may be the last reader of theirs to realize that Beto Hernandez is this generation’s Russ Meyer.)

In other news, Barking, a new Underworld record, came out yesterday. I love a lot of their music, but I’m just befuddled by this new stuff. I gather they used outside producers for the first time, and the result is really . . . pedestrian. Which is a funny term to apply to dance music, but there it is. It’s almost like reading a serial comic book with a new creative team that fails to Get It.

To me, Underworld’s best music is like having drug-crazed nanobots devouring the language and motion sections of your brain, so that words don’t really make sense and you’re possessed with an urge to dance/thrash. This new record, on the other hand, has a lot of shimmery keys, banal disco beats and sensical lyrics.

Worst of all, the decision was made to have Karl Hyde sing, despite the fact that he doesn’t have much of a singing voice. Oh, and there’s a ballad. Except it’s not absurd/surreal, like Good Morning Cockerel, a song from their previous album, Oblivion With Bells, about which I’m rather ambivalent. I’ll give this one another try or two, but it’s a very disappointing record.

So that’s a little of what’s going on. I also spend a lot of time thinking about Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad.