Thanks to all and any for their welcomes! Please keep commenting - it makes it all so much better. :)

(Oh, and I would like to make a special mention of Matthew Fluxblog Perpetua. When I said, yesterday, that it was hard to blog every day, there's one person who seems to have met this challenge, head-on, with little difficulty, for almost two years (more?). And that's Matthew. Kudos, sir, to one of the very finest. [And yike! An outdated link to Fluxblog on the sideblog! Remedied!])

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LCD Soundsystem - S/T + Bonus Disc
When a CD with "Losing My Edge" and "Yeah [Crass Version]" is the bonus disc, you begin to question how reality could get this good. When I get down to "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House," I imagine it's like when Monica and her sis get down to that Ratatat song. I've got elbows and knees, I've got a head that throws back. I say things like "Ooh ooh yeah." But the best part of LCD Soundsystem is the diversity, the surprise. Pink Floyd seems to be doing "Never as tired as I'm waking up"; there's Junior Boys cool on "Too Much Love"; "Great Release" is a bending, rising singalong storm; and "Disco Infiltrator" makes me want to have a cold. It's a dance album for kicking dust with friends, sure, but it's also a record for big empty houses with big expensive stereos, for prancing the floorboards on your own, for loud and resonating frequencies, the head-bang bliss of those opening three beats. [buy]

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King Creosote - Sea Glass
--listen to "For the Last Time: Hello"
So I live in Edinburgh now. I arrived almost a month ago. We've found a flat, but I'm still looking for a job and trying to meet new faces. Whereas in Montreal I recognized the People To Know, I knew where to hang out and which boards to check, here I'm at a bit of a loss. Still, when I saw a sign for a King Creosote gig, last week, I figured it would be the perfect chance to get acquainted with the Edinburgh scene. It was the launch for a zine affiliated with K.C.'s label, Fence Records, with him and a few other bands. Out at some place in Leith. Trouble is, I've yet to visit Leith, and was a bit intimidated about going wandering out there myself. Since I'm an incorrigible nerd, I went online and posted a message on one of the relevant websites, to see if I could tag along with anyone to the show. The answer: "Do you have a ticket? Because it's sold out." I did not, and indeed it was, in the ten hours between my first visit to Avalanche Records and the second.

So I didn't go see King Creosote last week. Nor did I meet some cool and funny scottish indie kids. Instead I read The Human Stain.

But never mind that - here's some King Creosote. Sea Glass is some of the man's best tunes, recorded with a simpler, more oldfashioned sound. Squeeze-box, some guitar, bits of drums and backing vocals. Although it lacks the smart spark of Kenny and Beth's Musakal Boat Rides, it's a better album overall - modest and pretty.

King Creosote - "For the Last Time: Hello"
Such a melody on this one, whinsome and pure, like a letter than was long in the writing. It's a goodbye song. It's weary. And it's angry, although you might not know it. "Doesn't it show - how sick I am of this? Learn to read my lips. For the last time: Hello. ... Hello. Leave me alone." They're words that never ought to have had to be said; words that circle, once loosed - words to which you keep returning. And it's all caught in the thick lull of the accordion, that seductive sigh. [buy]

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Milo Jones - "Sandro and the French Guy"
This track comes to me purely and entirely via Stypod. What I know about Milo Jones comes from that post plus his website (where you can DL a whack of mp3s). And although I feel a bit funny reposting another (excellent!) blog's stuff, this is a Song That's Blowing My Mind. So.

This is a tune about Sandro, and about the singer. Sandro said he sounded like some French guy. Hell no, not Serge Gainsbourg. And although the singer knows next to nothing about Sandro, he thinks he's in love with him. That's the story - that's it. No drama, no tragic ending. But there's so much in the notes that Milo plays. There are a dozen memories in the gleaming theme which opens and closes the song; there are a dozen conversations leaning into Milo's sloppy slur, in those fat curls of guitar.

It's not hard to pretend that Milo Jones is singing gibberish. That the only real word is "Sandro," that everything else is a story told in sound. That "Sandro and the French Guy" is vowels and consonants, latenight wondering, soft pangs of heartache on a bench, in a park, in the spring. [buy]

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Okkervil River - "For Real"
The press release page for Black Sheep Boy, the new album by Okkervil River, had me excited enough that it made my day. And when I downloaded this tune - available free on that page, - it just about made my week. The band called Okkervil River is one of the greatest things in the world today, but recent EPs have shown that they can record lacklustre tunes.* You, like me, will be relieved to hear that "For Real (There's Nothing Quite Like The Blinding Light)" is one of the best things they've ever recorded, that perfect boom of word and sound, barbed yells and crushing blows. It's sinister but elegiac, scary but true. It's about murder and feeling, voices crying for sensation. "There's nothing quite like the blinding light / that curtains cast aside." The electric guitars are stuck through with spruce branches, with nails, with bits of eggshell. It's like the stamp in the middle of Wilco's "At Least That's What You Said," only instead of Tweedy's guitar solo there's the lamplight of a rhodes, the mounting panic of Will Robinson Sheff, and then a terrible tumble of drums, the searing chorus of pierced guitars, the knowledge that you're hurtling downhill, downstream, downtown, toward the smack and clasp that will make things clear. (The joke's on you though - you don't quite get there.) "Those blue bridge lights might really burn most bright / when you watch that dark lake rise. / If you really want to see what matters most to me / just take a real short drive."

April 10th can't get here soon enough. Said the Gramophone will write on Black Sheep Boy again.

[buy the For Real EP]

* The new EP, by the way, centered around this song, is an exception to the rule.

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Still to come this week: Van Morrison, Andrew Bird, and Beck.