Is this an impossibility? Now that I’m back living at home, I find myself increasingly having to defend my taste against the assaults of my father and brother. They both approach it in different ways: my dad goes for the gentle mocking, while my brother seems to take personal offense at the fact that I’m listening to sine waves or industrial clatter or what-have-you. And I’m growing increasingly frustrated with trying to put into words why, say, free jazz is a good thing and not just a bunch of drunk guys blowing kazoos on New Year’s Eve (which, I shit you not, is how my dad described this Albert Ayler album I had on just recently). Or, even more challenging, explaining/justifying my recent fascination with the Erstwhile catalogue and electroacoustic improv and noise in general. Not that I need to rationalize this stuff, and more often than not I just shrug it off with an offhand “I just like it, OK,” but it does make me think.

What is it that I like about this music? As a reviewer, it’s ostensibily my job (responsibility?) to describe what I like about music, and I find that sometimes I am happy with how I get those sentiments across in writing, but I can seldom translate my passion about a particular piece of music into a coherent spoken conversation. Maybe it’s just that speech is so much less formal than the written word, so much less receptive to the kinds of overblown descriptors that comprise the majority of my musical writing. Whatever the reason, I have a very hard time vocalizing my love for music in a way that will get through to other people.

I can’t help but think that this links back somehow to some comments in Joe Panzer’s hilarious top ten from a while back, about some awkward conversations of a similar kind trying to explain music to his roommates. Maybe I’m just a hopeless dork. Whatever.

…Not to completely change directions (OK, so I am), but there’s a song on the new The Blow album that’s just completely great. It’s called “What Tom Said About Girls,” and it’s quavering pretty close to hip-hop for an album released on K Records (not that Murder Inc. has anything to worry about, mind you). It kinda reminds me of that hip-hop-type song that Kyle Fields did on the last Microphones record, except done really, really right. It takes away the slight tinge of ironic “heh heh we’re mocking hip-hop” vibe that I got from that song; instead, this is just plain fun and a true celebration of the style (albeit it with staunchly rock instrumentation). The beatboxing rhythms are great, the cutesy girly K vocals sound both ridiculously out-off-place and somehow totally appropriate. It’s a great track, regardless of what you classify it as (it’s certainly not hip-hop, but not really rock either). And though the album has a few other charms worth mentioning, I think I’ll leave that to another time and another place….