There’s a track from the new Rainer Maria EP, Ears Ring, available for download on the Polyvinyl website. It’s surprisingly aggressive and tough-sounding – their past stuff was never wimpy but it had a more distinct naval-gazing tone than this new track. Part of it is that Caithlin De Marrais has found a lot more strength in the lower registers of her voice, there’s more oomph in what was once a thinner, more wavery voice. It’s an unexpected development but not unwelcome.

The new full-length is called Long Knives Drawn and is out January 21.

Finally dumped a load of tracks off the BR-532 and into Cool Edit Pro 2.0 for some mixing and effecting. They’re just short instrumental fragments, but still sorta fully realized and let’s be honest, I’m not doing any more work on them so I may as well mix them down, mp3 them and put them up for others to hear so I can free up the disk space for other stuff. I also added a phased/delayed slide intro to my other song, which I am still ostensibly working on. NOW it’s just short of lyrics and vocals… but even after more than a month, I still like the tune – that’s just unprecedented. Usually the stuff I write has a shelf life of maybe a week before I decide it’s crap and wipe it from existance.

Playing with the effects plug-ins on CEP2, I realized that I really have no idea what I’m doing. Too many parameters, not enough clue. My approach is to just turn knobs (figuratively) until it sounds interesting.

Some music news of the alt.twang persuasion…

Word is a new Wilco EP will be released in the Spring. Not sure if this is going to be a pared-down DecibelsPerMinute, or a wholly different release. ADDENDUM – Here’s the skinny on the new EP, and the DVD for I am Trying To Break Your Heart is out on Februrary 18th.

The Jayhawks are back on April 1 with Rainy Day Music. I *think* this is Marc Olsen and Gary Louris playing together again, but I’m not certain. Either way, since they’ve fired most of the band I expect a more stripped-down offering than Smile or Sound Of Lies.

It looks like March 11 will be the release date for the three Uncle Tupelo reissues of No Depression, Still Feel Gone and March 16-20, 1992. I can do without the remasters but the bonus tracks mean that I’m a-gonna have to have the Columbia reissues sitting alongside my Rockville original editions. Someday someone will beat some sense into me, but until then… I just hope that their live version of “I Wanna Destroy You” shows up. And some official news on the release of Not Forever, Just For Now – the legendary recording of the last Uncle Tupelo show, would be nice.

Ryan Adams puts out Love Is Hell in Februrary. We’ll have to see if he follows an opposite pattern to Star Trek movies… odd numbers good (Heartbreatker, Demolition), even number bad (Gold, Love Is Hell?). Hope not, but we’ll see.

Other notes… The Tweedy/Kotche/O’Rourke project Loose Fur is out in January. The Minus Five’s Down With Wilco is out Feb 25. Mojave 3 drops a new one in March and Sparklehorse in April.

Got my Longwave EP in the mail today, Day Sleeper. It’s brief, but pretty impressive. The instrumental title track is epic, with touches of Mogwai and Mercury Rev – no missing Dave Fridmann’s touch here.

np – Starflyer 59 / Easy Come Easy Go 1994-2000

Got a super-cool tip for Mozilla users out there (and by extension, Netscape 7, Phoenix, et al).

Go to this directory:

C:\WINDOWS\Application

Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\xxxxxxxx.slt\

where ‘xxxxxxxx’ is a random string of characters. Create a text file and put the following lines in it:

user_pref(“nglayout.initialpaint.delay”, 0);

user_pref(“network.http.pipelining”, true);

user_pref(“network.http.proxy.pipelining”, true);

user_pref(“network.http.pipelining.maxrequests”, 100);

Save it as plain text as “user.js”

Close Mozilla and restart. Bam-o, a fast browser is even faster. Do it now and watch your quality of life improve. You hair will become shinier, your teeth will become whiter and your sex life will improve.

And if you’re not using Mozilla, why the hell not?

This tip comes from, who else, resident geek-o-matic Vic.

np – Echo & the Bunnymen / Songs To Learn And Sing

Yeah yeah yeah, another entry bitching about technical issues. Access to my site is slow from anywhere I can try to access it from. Pings and tracerts were timing out and my hosting company said everything was normal… Support from them had been very good till this point so I’m wary to start cursing them out, it could well be something out of both our respective controls, but it doesn’t alter the fact that IT SUCKS ASS. Things are fast again now, so I’m taking advantage of it while it lasts.

Not that I have anything interesting to say right now.

“Wuzzle wozzle”.

np – Versus / Let’s Electrify!

So I’ve somehow managed to fix Nucleus. Actually, I didn’t fix jack – I just recopied the original install files over the offending apparently corrupted files, and booyaka, cookies persist again. Now just how these files managed to corrupt themselves, I have no idea. Some lowlife web app lurking around my /lib directories offering them candy and cigarettes.

My ultra-slow connect times to my site are specific to my ISP (Rogers). This morning it was running ‘fast’ again, and I got ping times of 330 ms. Come into work and it’s 52. Somehow, that one last server on the route from home is mucked up and there’s nothing I can do about it – is there? I have the ISP of that server, any way to send the equivalent of a smack upside the head to that box?

np – Elf Power / Nothing’s Going To Happen