I am in information overload. The relentless war coverage is beating me down – sure, it’s terrific that we have unfettered access to such a wide variety of news sources, but with that comes the knowledge that none of these are giving you the whole picture. The days of naively believing what you read are gone, so if you want a complete picture you have to absorb as many POVs as possible, being sure not to fully believe any of them, and hope to assemble some facsimile of what’s going down. And I can’t do that anymore. How do you separate fact from propoganda? When each side states that they’re winning and you know both are lying, where do you turn? It’s only been a week, and I can’t take anymore. Everwhere I go online, people are debating every aspect of the war, linking to articles, news bulletins and conspiracy theories about Bush, Cheney, Haliburton, Sadaam, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Sharon, Bin Laden, et al. I *want* to read them all but I just can’t. It’s just too much. Even the satire and jokes that are coming out of this are losing their ability to take the edge off. I’m not a head-in-the-sand type by nature, but if the alternative is being bombarded Clockwork Orange-style by a shitstorm of half-truths and carefully doctored “slices of the war”, then I’m going to join the ostriches for a while.

So after almost a decade, I am finally warming to Pavement. Slanted & Enchanted – Luxe & Reduxe took a little while to get into just because of the sheer breadth of material, but I like it a lot now. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is like visiting with an old high school buddy because, well, that’s what it is. I had a copy of the album on tape in grade 13 and I played it a fair bit. This was during that strange juxtoposition of pop, rock, alt and indie back in the early 90s that actually saw bands like Pavement charting on MuchMusic, a phenomenon the likes of which I suspect we’ll never see again. Maybe one of the reasons I shied away from Pavement back then (besides Malkmus’ perceived smugness) was the insane guitar work. I was just starting to play at that point and was trying to absorb ideas from anything I listened to, and Pavement’s ultra-precise sloppiness was impossible to wrap my head around. It’s ironic that now my playing is often straying into the Pavement-defined nether realm of weird, angular pop, at least when left to my own devices. But anyway, I suspect that the last three Pavement albums will be working their way into my collection soon enough. SM and Spiral Stairs have finally won.

My friend Dave down in Virginia is extolled the virtues of Baxter Drury to me. I can’t find anything by them to sample, can anyone offer some testimonials?

np – Sigur Ros / ( )

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