I’m lit­er­al­ly drown­ing in new music, no thanks to the pub­li­cists who send me count­less emails to at least three email address­es and rarely deliv­er any actu­al music. I know that it’s passe to com­plain about pub­li­cists and that most peo­ple find ways around them any­way, but I feel that if bands knew how mis­man­aged their pub­lic­i­ty game is, they’d be outraged.

Yes­ter­day I enjoyed Fleet Fox­es’ Ragged Road and MGMT’s Orac­u­lar Spec­tac­u­lar very much, though both made me won­der whether dance rock was mak­ing its long-await­ed return, or if this is just ‘folk­tron­i­ca’ hap­pen­ing all over again. In any case, Orac­u­lar Spec­tac­u­lar remind­ed me just how long it’s been since the Flam­ing Lips burst back onto the scene with The Soft Bul­letin. It also taught me again that I real­ly need to lis­ten to these insane­ly hyped albums main­ly because the blogs describ­ing them tend to miss what makes them so hyped in the first place.

I don’t know if it was being out of the office twice last week on work-relat­ed ‘mis­sions,’ or if it’s real­iz­ing that after being faced with an impromp­tu inter­view with one of the best-sell­ing female artists of all time, but indie bands at SXSW should be pret­ty fun.

Are you going to be there too? Want to offer your pithy insights for an audi­ence who isn’t com­plete­ly sure what ‘indie rock’ is? Be in touch [email icon thingy in top left] and we’ll see if we can’t shoe­horn you between say the Raveonettes and the Mae Shi.

I spent Fri­day night [and a bit of Sat­ur­day morn­ing] here. More impor­tant­ly, E=MC2 may be big­ger than Eman­ci­pa­tion of Mimi.

So some­thing is def­i­nite­ly hap­pen­ing. I’m hear­ing E=MC2 tomor­row morn­ing, pos­si­bly inter­view­ing (but more like­ly just meet­ing) Mari­ah tomor­row night. I’ll add a short update here Sat­ur­day evening when I’ve recovered.

There are a few things we’ve been work­ing on that I don’t gen­er­al­ly share since they’re either busi­ness-relat­ed and there­fore a bit secret, or seem so impos­si­ble that I psy­che myself out that they’ll ever happen.

Well, on the day the R.E.M. inter­view fell through [could­n’t lis­ten to the new album any­way, thanks to the ridicu­lous water­mark,] I find out that I’ll be spend­ing some two hours with Mari­ah Fri­day after­noon to talk about her new album and what­ev­er else she’s work­ing on, diet­ing tips, pol­i­tics, what­ev­er comes up.