Interesting side-effect of this cold I’m getting over – I can no longer taste anything. Dinner last night was nothing more than a collection of textures. I’m not really happy about this.

RIP Paul Sutherland, creator of Once Upon A Hamster. My first hamster’s name was Hammy.

The East Bay Express finds out what everyone else has always wondered – Why are the writers at Pitchfork such assholes sometimes? From The GPC.

Maybe I should be offended, but Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle looks like one of the funniest things I’ll see all year – or at least I hope it is. Anything that’s advertised as starring “The Asian guy from American Pie and the Indian guy from Van Wilder” – their words, not mine – has got the right idea. I mean, really – when was the last time you saw an Asian guy, named or not, in the lead of a Hollywood film? Hell, I’m just amazed that it’s not James Hong.

As promised, Ted Leo has posted mp3s of works in progress for his new album. Go to the media/audio section of his site to grab em. Only two are new songs, though – “Congressional Debcision” is from his Rx/Pharmacists debut. Do the information tags for “Me and Mia” and “The Angels Share” come up with the artist listed as “The Homsars” for anyone else? Cute.

Metric will be doing a sort-of-homecoming show (if you consider Toronto their sort-of-hometown) July 14 at the Mod Club. I’m going to be out west that week so I won’t be in attendance, but be advised they put on a pretty kick-ass show.

The new Big Takeover is out now, or will be very shortly. Stereolab get the cover story.

np – Ride / Waves

Okay, so I hadn’t gone outside for about 27 hours between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon. Apparently, sometime during that time span every tree on my street decided to burst forth into foliage. Seriously. I stepped outside and I thought I had gone through a time warp two months into the future – wonderfully sunny day, glorious shady trees… God bless Springtime. I am feeling better today and am back at work. Freebasing vitamin C can do wonder for a body.

You can get a sneak preview of some new Rilo Kiley material here, with live video performances of the title track from the forthcoming More Adventurous, out in July, and “Emotional”, another new one that may be on the record. Rilo Kiley grace the cover of the new Under The Radar where they talk in-depth about making the history of the band and the new record.

Not content with simply releasing her third solo album Whiskey Tango Ghost on July 27, Tanya Donelly is already making plans for the next record:

“I have a crazy plan for the next album. Gary just opened a small club/studio in VT, and I want to record the next batch of songs there, live and with an audience. Gary wants to meld this with a mini-Rockingham-type thingy. The idea, in it’s infancy at the moment, is to play two recording shows, and then a bigger show with other artists. The days we have in mind are the last Friday and Saturday in August, with the recording shows being Friday night and Saturday afternoon, and the bigger show on Saturday night. This might change in detail, but the dates and concept are pretty much a certainty.”

She also does guests vocals on “Falling” – a track from the new Mission Of Burma record ONoffON.

More music in video format – Nellie McKay wrote some new songs for VH1’s “Best Week Ever” show – which I have no idea what it is (and I’m pretty sure that phrase was a grammatical capital crime – as this one probably is. Okay, cut bait and run). You can see/hear her odes to the the show, William Hung and P-Diddy here. From Stereogum.

Neil Gaiman has graciously posted the entire script to The Sandman 24, or part 3 of “Season Of Mists”. You know, for those of you who prefer to read your comics without the pictures. In script form.

Thanks to the good folks at Heavy.com for sending me a couple samples of their monthly Heavy compilation CDs. I’ve got volumes 22 and 25 and am pretty impressed. Production values are ridiculously good – dig the DVD-style case and fancy artwork – and the music is also tops. I’ve only gone through them a couple times as yet, and nothing has jumped out as contender for ‘new favorite band’ but I don’t doubt that there’s lots of stuff worth investigating. Subscriptions cost you only the cost of postage ($3.33 USD a month), if you’re interested.

Oh hey, did I just sell out?

And finally… GO FLAMES!!!!

np – Centro-Matic / All The Falsest Hearts Can Try

Well, reports of my convalesence were greatly exagerrated. I managed to be productive for the first bit of yesterday at work, but my condition deteriorated enough that going home again at lunch and sleeping was a pretty good idea. I’m irritated, because I usually don’t get sick to the point of incapacitation. I’m feeling a little better today but think I’m going to give myself one more full day of rest before forcing myself back to work again.

One of the pluses of being laid up at home is I’ve been watching movies. Since I’ve gone into work for a little while the last couple days, I’ve been able to stop in at the video shop before heading home. First, I saw the original The Italian Job. I liked last year’s remake but for some reason, I thought the original was more serious. How wrong I was – the Michael Caine-starring original was a seriously lightweight caper. It was fun and had a lot more ineffable coolness, but the remake (a very loose term – it basically borrowed some names, the traffic jam heist and the mini coopers and that’s it) was actually much more solid in terms of plot and characters. Think about that for a minute. It also had Charlize Theron in a nightie. That counts for a lot as well.

Next up was The Cooler, also pretty lightweight. By its very premise – William H Macy is bad luck incarnate and is hired to “cool” off customers winning too much in a Vegas casino – it can’t be taken very seriously. Macy is good in the ultimate sad-sack role that seems custom-written for him, as is Maria Bello as the woman who changes his luck and Alec Baldwin as the casino boss who needs to keep him unlucky. The film falls a little short in the execution, however, and I thought everything could have been a little more fleshed out. It gets by on its peculiar sort of charm despite multiple William H Macy bare-ass shots (ugh), but could have been a little better.

The Toronto Star finds that Jeff Tweedy is feeling much better now, thanks for asking. And Doctors Without Borders would like to thank the JustAFan.org movement for raising over $10,000 USD from Wilco fans. That’s bloody impressive – if you donated, give yourself a hand.

Old 97’s have some songs from Drag It Up available for you sampling pleasure on their website right now to tide you over till July 27, when the record is released. You can also get a gander of the album artwork.

Hayden fans may be interested to know that he’s playing an exclusive and intimate little show at the Gladstone May 25 and you can win tickets or other prizes by entering this contest. To enter, you have to complete the following statement in 50 words or less: “My favourite Hayden song from Elk-Lake Serenade is ____________, because …” Thanks to Chris from Waste Your Days Away for the tip.

Metric have finally redone their God-awful website. Much better now. From For The Records.

Have I really already done 23 of these silly 24 commentaries? Sweet fancy Moses. Okay, who else cheered when Sherry got punched out? And who cheered when she got plugged? Sickos. I guess she won’t be back in season four. All she ever wanted was to be Mrs David Palmer again. And really, isn’t that what we all want? Jack was pretty badass in threatening to put Saunders’ daughter in the hotel – I think it’s a testament to Keifer Sutherland and the writers in general for having written and portrayed Jack Bauer so well to this point that you really believed he’d do it. That’s impressive. However, with one hour left to go I think season three will be staggering to the finish line. There’s really not much left in the way of surprises they can throw at us with just an hour left to go without it coming off as a desperate last-minute curveball (not without precedent – see last season). I won’t close the book on season three just yet, but I don’t have great anticipation for the season finale next week.

np – Sea Ray / Stars At Noon

Feeling better today, which is good becaues another day sitting at home would have been pretty dull – I’m out of DVDs to watch. You would not believe how hard it’s been to find the first episode of Alias season two on Kazaa or Bit Torrent. Anyway.

The Metacritic reviews for Graham Coxon’s new album Happiness In Magazines has me intrigued. Phrases like “riddled with glorious pop songs”, “album of straight-up, dazzlingly well-realised British pop” and “A great lost Blur album” are not what I would have expected. Coxon’s contributions in Blur were easily my favorite songs in their ouvre, but his solo material has been decidedly more experimental and difficult and certainly reactions against what he was doing in Blur – I had his first couple solo records but sold them recently in a CD collection cull. But still, curious from the reviews and the fact that the new record was produced by Stephen Street (who guided Blur through their best albums), I grabbed the new record off Soulseek to give a listen (it’s import-only in North America so odds of finding it any other way to sample are slim to none). Initial impression? It’s pretty good. Certainly not as painfully introverted as The Sky Is Too High nor as spastically aggreessive as The Golden D, it sits pretty well in the middle of the only two reference points I have. There’s a lot of bashy rockers that hearken back to old Kinks but with a stronger pop sensibility than Coxon has seemed willing to allow into his work before. There’s even stuff in the vein of his Blur tunes – lead single “Bittersweet Bundle Of Joy” is definitely cut from the same mould as “You’re So Great” and “Coffee & TV” and “Don’t Be A Stranger” is delightfully loopy. It may have taken five albums for Coxon to find the right balance between all his disparate muses, but it seems like it’s finally happened and that bodes well for his future musical output.

The New York Times has more pop music commentary from Stephin Merritt. Interesting comments on Morrissey – “You Are the Quarry (Sanctuary), demonstrates more than ever that the best lyricist in rock, Morrissey, still surrounds himself with dull musicians incapable of properly filling out his introspective kitchen-sink dramas”. While I would debate (though not that vigorously) calling the Moz the best lyricist in rock, Merritt is spot-on in his criticism of every band Morrissey has worked with since the Smiths. They’ve all been horribly bland rock outfits, right down to the beer commercial guitar tones. Maybe if he ever had the vision to work with musicians he didn’t find down at the local pub I could get excited about his work. As it is, I’ll continue ignore anything post-Strangeways and not feel any poorer for it. From Stereogum.

I’m not the only one befuddled by the ongoing Moz revival – the BBC is also wondering if Morrissey is still relevant. From Largehearted Boy.

Also from Stereogum – Jon Stewart’s commencement address to William & Mary University’s graduation class of 2004.

Fans of the late, lamented Wonderfalls may be interested to know there are at least three unaired episodes circulating around the internet in bit torrent form. You can find them on Suprnova.org, but there’s a catch – at least two of them are at a frame rate that Windows Media Player doesn’t like. So while they’re DVD-quality, they’re also all weird and jittery. Anyone who can tell me how to fix that will get my undying gratitude. Well, that’s not entirely true – I’m pretty sure that my gratitude will die with me, but you know what I mean.

The Beach Boys’ long-lost album Smile will finally be coming out this Fall on Nonesuch. NME reports a September 27 release date for the UK, which should mean a September 28 release date for North America. I’ve never heard any of the bootlegged versions of this record, so it’ll be all new to me. Is it possible that it can live up to the legend? We’ll see.

Some out-of-town concert news for my neighbours up the St Lawrence – Wilco is making the most of their Lollapalooza days off with shows in Ottawa on August 4th (Capital Music Hall) and Montreal (St Denis Theatre) on the 5th before coming back down to T.O. for their Lollapalooza show on the 6th. I’m envious – I’d obviously rather see them do their own show in a good venue than an outdoor festival.

A couple quick notes – the “Chicks With Attitude” tour (shudder) coming through the Kool Haus August 28 will indeed feature The Cardigans as a whole band on the tour – not just Nina Persson. There was some confusion about that.

It’s come to my attention that the Ben Kweller show that had been scheduled for June 10 at the ‘Shoe has mysteriously vanished from all listings. Laika & The Cosmonauts are now pencilled in on that date.

Also, it is indeed NYC’s Ambulance NYC playing Lee’s Palace June 11 for NXNE. That doesn’t mean anything to you? Chart has a profile on the band.

np – The Sundays / Blind

Sick today. Back tomorrow.