okkerkil river is one of those rare bands that makes me rethink my position regarding country music (as in, i hate country music). there are more bands out there that could easily prove the hypothesis but they are not worth the time and effort, nuh uh. and it's not that i consider okkerkil river to be country, any more than i consider the elected to be so, but there's a certain influence there. i liked last year's stage names and i am very much looking forward to the stand ins and enjoying lost coastlines for now.

i love polyvinyl records in more ways than i can count, even if they use such cringe-inducing expressions as "paradigm shift". sigh, i guess it's better than "out of the box". i especially don't mind it if they use it to describe their release of the new of montreal album in seven different packaging formats. yes, seven! cds, lps, tote bags, t-shirts, wall decals, button sets and even a paper lantern for christ's sake. it would take a band as spastic as of montreal to pull this off so i'm glad they're doing it. even without all the variety, the packaging on their last one is one of my favorites (i still love the origami paper in mono's a thousand paper cranes best of all though).

i might have to stick with the classic here and get it in vinyl because it comes with the horsie in the picture (which is not to scale btw, that horsie's supposed to be a 3x4 foot poster). paste has all the details.

i'm finding it a little hard to keep track of boy-girl duos. it's all very boy meets girl, boy and girl relate and make sweet sweet music together. boy and girl go on tour to promote said music and it all goes to hell. of course i mostly know nothing about how these bands come together and grow apart, just that they do. that there are new pairs popping up everywhere and they seem to disappear just as easily. one day you are listening to georgie james thinking, yes, i could grow to love this and the next there goes john davis and his new title tracks, there goes laura burhenn out on her own.

jona bechtolt left khaela maricich alone with the blow quite some time ago but together they did manage to craft together come on petunia off of the police's every little thing she does is magic. it's been stuck in my head since too early this morning.

a little onion goes a long way sometimes.... the united states of sad bastards. i chuckled. i also thought, i would like that button indeed.

i don't know what kind of person wishes they could live in a pre-fab house but i do, i do! the modular ones are beyond fascinating if not as simple or ready-made as their name would suggest. that the moma has a whole exhibition devoted to it pleases me to no end. now it's fairly hard to say, from where i'm standing, if it's worth it but the journals are pretty interesting and the time-lapsed installation videos even more so. if only they had some collaboration, say chilean architecture with german engineering! i wouldn't know where to go from there...

plus, speaking as someone whose japan airlines fork, knife and spoon (circa 1989) still comprises her favorite cutlery set, i love that the micro compact home has lufthansa crockery for table-setting. and a nespresso machine to boot!

cannot believe i never took the time to read the cursive message board before. that g-mail account is the best thing since chocolate chip cookies.

if it feels like love you just drank too much!

i've never been to the pacific northwest but it's not the atlantic northeast so how bad can it be? portland is after all home to my favorite booming music scene. such diversity!

there are the folksy folks from bark hide and horn. i read somewhere they were inspired by early national geographic issues and it's really not that far-fetched. treasure of the everglades and trumpeter swan are oh so sweet. and yes, they do have horns and the occasional trumpet. i'd have to check their stance on cellos but the portland cello project's got the instrument covered anyways. hands in pockets with laura gibson makes me think for a second that maybe having a cello playing roommate wasn't all that bad. that we didn't have to inadvertently kick her out. but just for a second.

we've also got doubledutch, who sometimes remind me of ratatat with girl vocals (see mermaider) and at others come off like a much more subdued metric...i compare them to other bands, a bad habit, i know, but they do have a sound that's very much their own. sugar is yums but the whole thing is streaming/downloadable here. the band's just two kids but between them they have the better part of the boy gorilla records roster covered.

now if you do download anything from the label (and really, what's stopping you?) you might as well make it the black black black's elizaburt. it has diamond in the rough written all over it. at least have the decency to wait for the minute and fifteen seconds mark before you write me off.

if there's ever a reason to splurge on an issue of wallpaper its annual design directory is probably it. i would never do this to my records but i still find the yuri suzuki sound chaser amazingly cool:



A train-style record player. Users connect the chipped pieces of records together to make new tracks. The records pieces are from cheap records bought at jumble sales or used record shops. This record player revives forgotten, old records.

of montreal has a new song up for download and i think that pretty much says it all (or at the very least the song can speak for itself). id engager.