Remem­ber how I said The Fad­er was more or less worth­less, except for the awe­some pic­tures they take and then I post­ed some­thing they did about No Age at SXSW? It’s still true. On the oth­er hand, when Ben Ratliff talks Ocril­im, Black Dice and No Age in the pages of The Times, it’s com­plete­ly amazing.

[Always keep an eye out for Ratliff. Sure San­neh is the peo­ple’s favorite and a fine writer, but Ratliff writes about all the weird stuff I love, except mak­ing the recent Stooges gig sound like the Sec­ond Com­ing, which it total­ly could­n’t have been, since the Stooges pret­ty much suck now. Last­ly, check out the cor­rec­tion. What’s even more amaz­ing is that I always think that Mick Barr is in Hel­la. It’s refresh­ing to know that he’s not.]

Kurt Von­negut, dead at 84. I’ll amend this post lat­er when I’m not scram­bling out the door for work. I won­der if it did­n’t occur to him to write an epi­taph on his kitchen wall in feces.

[Spe­cial thanks to my 10th grade Eng­lish teacher Phil Rep­ko who sur­rep­ti­tious­ly intro­duced me to Von­negut. Upon hand­ing me Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons he told me that if I were appre­hend­ed, that I nev­er to admit that I’d got­ten the book from him. Boy­er­town had moments where book ban­ning seemed like­ly, and Von­negut would’ve been tops on the list.]

Pitch­fork contributor/Paper Thin Walls editor/gmail chat bud­dy Bran­don Sto­suy asks Excepter what they do 9–5. Stere­ogum’s “Quit Your Day Job” is sort of like a Works Progress project doc­u­ment­ing indie rock employ­ment culture.

That Arcade Fire record every­one’s going on about, myself includ­ed, should be pret­ty well split between Spring­steen and Echo, right? Wrong. Carl Wil­son at Zoilus noticed that things are swing­ing in the Boss’ direc­tion and that it’s now cool to reclaim him for us, whomev­er that may be. You’ve seen the Spring­steen trib­ute con­cert pho­tos, right?

[I’ll admit here in the open that I’ve been guilty of this for some time. I like The Riv­er and Nebras­ka. And “Bril­liant Dis­guise.” I chalk it up to a grad school cri­sis, but it stuck around for rea­sons unknown to me, but I attribute it to the pow­er of the music. Radio does every­thing it can to undo it. When­ev­er I ride in the car I find myself reach­ing for the pre­sets when Bruce comes on. His ver­sion of “San­ta Claus is Com­ing to Town”? The worst!]

Lis­ten: Björk — Earth Intrud­ers [via Idolator]

It’s been twelve years since I first heard her and I still can’t get over her voice. [Longer than that maybe? Did I catch a Sug­ar­cubes video at a friend’s house as a kid? Was it dur­ing a hos­pi­tal vis­it as a teenag­er? That might’ve been it: I was lying in a bed, more or less total­ly still, eyes wide open, enraptured…with an IV jammed deep into my arm.] There’s some­thing so mag­i­cal about her vocal range and her will­ing­ness to try dif­fer­ent things, or maybe more dar­ing, the same thing she did years ago, the fer­al cat or del­i­cate wood­nymph come out to play.

With “Earth Intrud­ers” I feel like she’s doing laps on a fig­ure eight track, criss-cross­ing ter­ri­to­ry she cov­ered some time ago. Char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, old­er ele­ments sur­face, hel­ter skel­ter: snip­pets of “Human Behav­ior” emerge for a moment before sink­ing into the spas­tic col­lage and the mil­i­tan­cy she exhib­it­ed on Post is there too! Then again, these, plus the con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion of celebri­ty guest spots, could be the hall­marks of her midlife cri­sis record.

Don’t take my word for it. Trust Mike Pow­ell at The Agen­da. It’s not a con­dem­na­tion of Vol­ta, by the way, just a healthy dose of skep­ti­cism. After Ves­per­tine and Medul­la, Vol­ta seems a lit­tle hard to believe, much less take seriously.