[music] MIRAH - C'mon Miracle (K)

I'm seeing more good reviews of this album than I expected, and in more PLACES than I expected; Mirah's headed for the next level of success, or already there.

I can't rave about it, because too many of the songs refuse to stick in my mind. Mirah has gotten better at doing the things which make her distinctive as compared to other musicians, but an album doesn't work unless the songs sound distinct from each other as well. Here she manages it maybe half the time.

Making it easier to carp: Mirah's good songs still bury themselves so quickly and deeply in the flesh that they seem to have always been there. I shouldn't take them for granted, especially not intriguing album-centerpiece "We're Both So Sorry", which I heard her perform straightforwardly two years ago... the recorded version has so many quirks and tricks you might think it was a gimmick rather than, at its heart, the most beautiful melody on the record.

[music] THE HOMOSEXUALS - The Homosexuals CD (Morphius)

Some artists, and some listeners, cherish obscurity for its own sake. Others embrace it even as they find it bittersweet, like John Darnielle couching liner-note messages in dead languages on his early, low-audience records.

But obscurity is like, so obscure, you know? The Homosexuals changed aliases and bandnames when it suited them, turning their backs on songs when they were done with them. The liner notes to this collection suggest that when The Homosexuals LP came out in 1984, the three band members' relationships were in no state for them to agree on anything, except that, since NONE of them cared what happened to the songs, Recommended Records was able to put a collection out, however briefly.

As a post-punk artifact perpetually on the cusp of being forgotten, that LP took on the properties of record-collector obscurity: arid, secretly influential, revelatory for those lucky enough to hear it.

Unfortunately, that's a terrible way to describe the music itself. The Homosexuals' obscurity is the other one: an obscurity of chaos, distraction, ambivalence, a deep engagement with the present moment. With this CD, Morphius and ReR have pulled the curtain back on the band as much as possible, getting a third-party account of the Homosexuals' history from Ed Baxter, reprinting the only published photos of the band, painstakingly outlining what was released when and what restoration processes were applied to the fragile master tapes and so on -- even, somewhat primly, retitling "Soft South Africans (1st. version)" and "Soft South Africans (2nd.)" to the clearer "Soft South Africans (slow)" and "(fast)". None of this illumination shadows the songs.

It may, in fact, improve them. As timeless relics, screams from space, The Homosexuals can't compete with Entertainment! or Chairs Missing (and I say this despite the HUGE lyrical timeliness of the Gang Of Four's first recordings). They belong to a messy world of confusing, transient pleasures: reason enough for them to have wanted their masters burned when they broke up, but also a reason that they lose none of their fundamental obscurity in the course of being brought out of practical obscurity.

Archival label Hyped To Death is putting out a 3-CD set any day now called Astral Glamour which will contain more or less everything on this single disc. Too much? I suspect the Homosexuals are invulnerable even to oversaturation, but I can't be sure.