Tapped out

So yesterday when I posted about that Mars Volta I was a little tapped out, as it was the end of the day on production day and I had just read the review while waiting for my pages to go to the printer, so here's what I forgot to mention: my favorite sentence of the review:

"Now, I dig indulgence when it's done well (see: Finnegans Wake, that skinny guy who wins all the hot-dog eating contests), and what got me through multiple listens to Frances the Mute was the album's overall ludicrousness, that weirdo King Crimson corn-dogging."

Here's what's just brilliantly ridonkulous about it: he manages to join, by the virtue of excessiveness, James Joyce and Takeru Kobayashi. That's the kind of "charter member of the hipster club" card flashing I can appreciate. There's something about his odd choice not to even bother mentioning Kobayashi by name (which, let me tell you, takes about 10 seconds to find on Google) which just screams I care, but I don't; I'm in touch with popular culture, but above it enough to have read Finnegans Wake (which I can absolutely guarantee you he hasn't--no one has). It's just the kind of world-straddling ennui that's apparently a prerequisite for rock writing these days, an "I've seen it all and can tell you when it's good and when it ain't" attitude that just seems faintly ridiculous when you get down to it.

I mean, put Finnegans Wake, a tape of Kobayashi highlights and a copy of the new Mars Volta in a time capsule and tell me that if someone opens it in 100 years they'll find Joyce and Kobayashi equally satisfying and find Mars Volta lacking on some kind of universal scale of over-indulgence.

Enough. I'm listening to a disc by a guy named Charlie Mars, who's supposed to be Southern rock meets U2/Coldplay or something, but really just sounds like James Blunt. I can't really hear the Southern thing going on here at all, at least not when compared to Drive-By Truckers or My Morning Jacket. Hell, he doesn't even sound as Southern as Band of Horses. I'm pretty sure when they recorded this album, they plugged in the machine with the big button that says "Embiggen." It's a perfectly cromulent sutdio technique, I assure you.

In good news, I got a copy of the new Huge Rat Attacks as well, although my office stereo (and I use the term "stereo" loosely--$30 from Best Buy, y'all) apparently hates it and will not play it. It just spins dangerously fast. Maybe those scientists in Switzerland working on that underground particle accelerator would be interested in it.