No reason to drag this one out: Charlie McAlister has new songs up on his Myspace. We who've been following Chas for years are still having trouble getting our heads around the idea of Charlie having a Myspace, though it's kind of rad when you consider that saying "Myspace" now evokes the same prematurely-birthed nostalgic twinge that saying "Friendster" did circa 2007. All that's beside the point though, the point being, dude's got these five new songs up, and they're all better than all that stuff some of you people keep calling good or interesting when it's neither which you know as well as I do, by the way, and especially the one "Let's Go Out To Eat," first up on the page, song of the year easy, if you have a straight face and/or dry eyes at 00:52 then I don't know what to tell you other than "you aren't a human being and must be exterminated for the greater good of the planet," how can you tell when LPTJ is happy, by the comma splices, why do you ask.

1) had fairly ornate little paragraph about James Blackshaw's The Glass Bead Game, you'll love it, it's lovely
2) haven't slept enough to really be handling complex machinery, or even squirrels-could-handle-this interfaces like Moveable Type
3) closed wrong window
4) wondered if it was 1994 and I was actually just learning to use a computer
5) where is new entry? ah, but where is anything that is no more?
6) listened some more to James Blackshaw because it is just the thing

I have to say, Brandon Stosuy's Show No Mercy column at Pitchfork has become one of the most reliably enjoyable online metal reads. We don't often agree about a whole lot (though he seems to like Magrudergrind, of whom I am inordinately fond - how can any human alive not love a band called "Magrudergrind"?); he's very into USBM, about which I don't care much beyond liking Absu, and he's big on Xasthur, about whom I have contracted with myself to not say anything at all if I can't say anything nice. (In fairness to Xasthur, that stuff's fine and all and sometimes even really good, but in the I-also-listen-to-stuff-that's-not-metal world, theres's been an elevation of Xasthur above many as-deserving similarly-minded acts to a sort of "he's-our-kinda-people" status, and it's kinda grating.) But the preceding complaints are a parentheses; Show No Mercy deserves praise for coming off like an online version of a decent A4 zine, one with a coherent vision. I always enjoy reading it, and since it's longer & more detailed than a lot of stuff online, I thought I would mention that people who share my interest in metal ought to take a look at it. Of course, Last Plane to Jakarta reserves the right to say, this time next year, that Show No Mercy was totally better back in the old days, when it routinely denied that USBM was mainly a bunch of MBV fans slumming. We hope that when that day comes, Show No Mercy will take the backlash as all subgenre backlashes ought to be taken, i.e., as an act of pure and selfless love.