Regular readers know that I'll rarely say much without a musical tie-in, but I am saddened & outraged & I don't know what else to do. My old home, the place where I grew up, has eliminated all funding for domestic violence shelters.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, reflect for a moment and understand that by the time a woman seeks the safety of a shelter, she has exhausted all her other options. She often arrives with her children, and with nowhere else to turn. I spent Christmas & New Year's Eve of 1983 in a motel with my mother & my sister; we were lucky. My mom had a job. When I consider that mothers & sons & daughters without the means to get themselves into a Motel 6 might have to spend a night with their abusers after having found the strength to flee -- well, I wish I had a turn of phrase that describes what it feels like to think of people in such situations, but I don't. The state - any state - has a responsibility to protect its citizens. That is the function of the state. If it declines to carry out that function, then it is worthless.

Citizens of California & of the United States deserve better than this garbage, and I hope that readers of Last Plane to Jakarta will do whatever they can to restore funding to these most vital of services.

live-ensemble mid-tempo d'n'beat jazz that will make you see the ocean even if you've never seen it: absolutely crucial summer track

definitive summer tracklist tk as soon as it's too late since the whole point of summer is to recognize & revel in the feeling that it's too late

for anything

Really, you wouldn't know it to read Last Plane to Jakarta these days, but I've been listening to & loving a fair amount of new music. Too busy with other things to really properly describe what I've been listening to, not ready yet - never! never ready for that! - to just link to the artists or songs in question without saying something, anything, about why I think they're worth your attention. Because: your attention is more valuable than the present age would have you believe. It's the one thing you brought to this world that it didn't have before, and it's the only thing of consequence that you'll permanently remove from this world when you leave. You know? So when somebody sort of cavalierly directs your attention someplace without so much as a tossed-off phrase indicating why you should bother, then you ought, in my opinion, to regard such people/sources/tweets as emissaries of the dark Lord. To say that something "has to earn your attention" is false; one of the miracles of attention is that it sometimes yields the biggest dividends when it's given weightlessly, unmerited, on a one-way street. But that's not to say that attention is so light a thing that one can afford to shed it like dandruff. Our supply of attention is finite. That's worth remembering.

This is all by way of saying that Tiny Vipers sound possessed of an almost limitless darkness, one which she/they construct out of the barest tools available: finger-picked guitar & voice. There is no speaker from which Tiny Vipers' new one will leap out at you, no grocery aisle in which its audible solitude will sound at home. The whole world is too crowded for this record. The only place in which it can live is the confined space of an individual skull. I think it is incredible; I think lyrically it achieves something that lots of people aim for but few hit, i.e., the cusp of desolation. She mumbles sometimes with more weight than most people can scare up for their most carved-out enunciations: "It's not wrong/it's just a feeling," she seems to say at one point, swallowing the "g" in "feeling" and refusing to commit to the "t" in not. It's a heavy moment, because it shores up the insecurity inherent in even voicing such a sentiment in the first place. Which makes for something of a terrifying moment, one among many on the album.

Can't recommend this record highly enough, really. If this is the 2nd time I've mentioned it, sorry to repeat myself, but there are some of you - not all of you - who will respond as strongly to it as I have, and you won't regret having heard about it twice if that's what it takes for you to have heard it once.

"funny shapes of X-rays"

So according to sources, Irritate's Ten Stabs of Demented Violence was released on 24 December 2008, which took its chances of appearing on anybody's year-end list down to right around zero. Gotta wonder whether they did this on purpose because they hate you & wish you would die, or if they just didn't know how great their album is, or if (as the story indicated by the recording & mixing dates suggests) they were just eager to finally get the record released and get on with their lives. Anyway, it reminds me of Autopsy, which means "it sounds like one of the best metal bands of all time," and it's hitting absolutely all the right spots today. Mid-tempo & below death-doom-grindmash of stunning potency. The atmosphere, man. This is kinda exactly how it's done. What is it about Finland? Not all Finnish metal bands rule, but the ones that rule do so with gore-flecked, pitiless brutality.

You guys, it's two years later, almost, but the American Music Club's The Golden Age: somebody recently asked me for a best of decade, and I didn't think of this one, and today I'm listening, and I'm thinking: it belongs on that list. Because it does. Because it has that kind of power. If you listened and you didn't hear it, I can dig that. It's not always the exact thing. But if you haven't got it, you should get it, and if you've got it and you didn't quite get it yet, keep it around. Because some day you will. And you will remember me, on that day. And you will call me a few names, but I won't mind, because I know how it is.

It's kind of hard to get into the rhythm of podcasts - I am a person who often wishes he watched/read/heard things reliably at the same time every week; the massive onslaught of choices to be made in the digital age is possibly the worst thing about it, since the unforeseen (maybe unforeseeable) result of so many great things being suddenly available at all times is that the "at all times" part comes to meet "not at this time, probably, and maybe not at a future one, either." Remove the need of having to listen or read or watch at a particular moment, and the likelihood of the moment ever coming around at all drops sharply.

So I just this morning got around to listening to Rare Frequency's February podcast, which is a total doozy - everything that's good about a music podcast in one episode: variety with focus, rarity made freely available within a context that allows the no-longer-rare thing to retain what was special about i in the first place. If, like me, you're working at a laptop and listening to music, go grab this one and listen while you work. It will take you places. What more can a person ask for?