Psy­chic Para­mount. I can only sum­mon a holy wow every time I see them play out, which has been now 2 or 3 times [I’m devel­op­ing a Pazz ‘n’ Jop mythol­o­gy about the num­ber of times I’ve seen them, I guess.] Even through earplugs things get a lit­tle dizzy, but maybe that’s just the delay ped­al con­cate­na­tion that’s blow­ing my mind.

Zom­bi and Trans Am were both firsts for me. Some­how I missed the fin de siècle dot com pleas­antries of Thrill Jock­ey and the Gob­lin-esque synth rum­blings that Relapse have had on offer for a few years now. The for­mer was by choice, the lat­ter by acci­dent and now in the hazy pre-dawn of ’07, nei­ther seems to be what they were. Sure, Trans Am are still tight metal­lic slum­lords, but it’s just so rote. And now that actu­al met­al is back on the scene to the books and glass­es crowd, it’s not as high falutin’ as it once was either.

Zom­bi were a sor­ry dis­ap­point­ment in their cur­rent incar­na­tion. Too bad because I real­ly liked one of their records that we used to play at the video store when we were on a Gob­lin binge around Hal­loween and we’d decid­ed that it was­n’t exact­ly kosher to throw an impromp­tu Argen­to ret­ro­spec­tive on the store mon­i­tors with the sound on. I’m not say­ing we did­n’t ever do it any­way, but we were at least clear that it was­n’t kosher no mat­ter how edgy we were expect­ed to be. And seri­ous­ly, most of the edge came from Star­bucks even if cus­tomers liked to tell them­selves that movie store clerks are twitchy, impo­lite savants for whom self-right­eous­ness is their stock-in-trade. Now Fulci…