In which Andrew actually reviews stuff for a change.

I may rework some of these later, but at least they're off the list. I should ideally have listened to some of these recently, but I've been without headphones since my London Adventures, so fuck it.

Haha, maybe I should use "computer games" as the Andrew's Other Stuff section. I probably think about them as much as anything else.

ABC - The Lexicon of Love

This is really great stuff. Is this "the" Trevor Horn production? It simultaneously jumps out at you as "this is an eighties production by one of the most eighties producers (surely him vs Quincy Jones)", while not getting in the way of Martin Fry. Despite being Hit After Hit After Hit (Poison Arrow, The Look Of Love, All Of My Heart, the songs I didn't know so well still stand up.

Scene Creamers - I Suck On That Emotion

Indie rock supergroup/The Make-up side project make garage sludge. Ian might enjoy this.

The Majesticons - Beauty Party

Undie hip-hop supergroup make bling sludge. Ian will not enjoy.

Mull Historical Society - Loss

Lovely misery from a guy from the island off Scotland. I have an infinite appetite for this sort of stuff. He reminds me a lot of Badly Drawn Boy: he has his ear for a perfect tune, but also his tendency to sabotage the result, usually by letting the song spiral off for a minute or so too long.

The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee

More beauty from John Darnielle. The songs about love and hate sound sharp whatever bit of the spectrum they're on.

The Thrills - One Horse Town

An enjoyable countryish single (over which inevitably hangs the ghost of Stars Of Heaven), and a pair of nice B-sides.

Viktor Pelevin - Homo Zapiens

This is an odd little book. It stars a Russian Advertising Exec who started at about the same time that those words started to mean something in that order. He drinks a lot, he takes drugs, he has visions of a Babylonian deity that may be running Russia, and he goes to work for an enormous quasi-government agency that may be doing the same job. Er, the end. Apart from a few pages in the middle where Che Guevara's ghost starts dictating memos on the meaning of advertising. I suspect (for no good reason) that that was a nod to the similar "sandbagging the plot" sequence in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which it has other similarities to (though obviously not the same lightness of touch: this is Russia for god's sake). It's far from an unpleasant read, but it's all over the place

Steve Erickson - Days Between Stations

There's a line from the trailer for Knockaround Guys where John Malkovich's character, an old-school gangster complains that "there used to be a way to do things, and things got done, and now everybody's feelings are involved". I was thinking about this as I was passing the Screen the other days, looking at the movies being shown: The Hours, Frida, Moonlight Mile, The Hours, and thinking about how these films are all all about the feelings (and fair enough). The point being: Steve Erickson's Books are all about the feelings as well. He takes his characters (only three for most of this book, though there are a pair of twins in there as well), and bangs them off each other, then sees how they stick, and shamelessly exploits coincidence to realign them and whack em together from a different angle. And when two of them stick for a while, in a couple of pages one off the other characters will arrive in a way they didn't expect, and oh, there they go again. None of which is to belittle the incredible skill that he wields. And honesty too: they situations are blatant manipulations, but there are real truths in there, and a sense that all he can do is trap escaping characters and decide how they come back in: once they're in the scene, they do as they will.