BO11: "Kaputt" by Destroyer

What has pulled me into the orbit of Destroyer time and again is that voice, the keening timbre of that sometime New Pornographer Dan Bejar, bard of beers and slinger of songs, offering up missives from the misanthropic yet again. Except now it’s less David Bowie and Robin Hitchcock filtered through indie haze, and more Al Stewart circa “Time Passages” and Avalon-era Roxy Music and other early ‘80s touchstones, replete with swirling saxophones and languid grooves.

Given that veneer, it’s hard to see how Kaputt made it past the hipster radar unshelled and free of attack, with the tailored arrangements evincing a smooth MOR sheen more often than not. Then again, the long tail of time v. criticism is a slow focus that keeps the image gauzy and opaque until, by sheer luck and endurance, center stage clarity slips into view. So maybe this type of music, made by a Bizarro blend of Christopher Cross and Syd Barrett, has whipped back around into favor, albeit of a self-aware tint in this 21st Century iteration. I only know that I played it and played it, charms eliding past flaws, until it became both a modern piece and contemporary to the past, of an era and up-to-the-moment, no irony required or needed.

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"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...

The Natural's Not In It

For nearly seven years on the button, Courtney and I lived on Perch Lake, just outside of Gaylord. Right next to Perch Lake was The Natural Golf Course, eighteen holes that twisted and turned through the best nature that the 45th Parallel could offer. The picture above is the view of the first green, and if you left the wooden bridge to the right and briefly ambled through the woods and over a rusted metal fence, you'd get right to our old driveway. Every now and again, an errant golf ball would appear at the edge of our property, like a single egg laid by an itinerant duck. Of the three major elitist sports -- golf, tennis, skiing -- I golfed because the barrier to entry was pretty low and the interest in golf on my Dad's side of the family was high, from playing the sport to watching it on television on the weekends. As spare clubs were abundant and my growth spurt had yet to overwhelm statistical norms, my grandmother would take prepubescent me to the Roscommon driving ran...

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