[music] I AM THE WORLD TRADE CENTER - The Cover Up (Gammon)

First thing: This band had already had their name for about two years on September 11th. They thought about changing it, then didn't.

Second thing: Half the band, Dan Geller, used to run an indie label named Kindercore Records. Last year some kind of bizarre triangular power struggle between the label's founders (Geller and friend Ryan Lewis), its manager, and its financiers ended with most of the label's bands gone, the financiers assuming control and declaring that nothing unusual had happened, and the manager claiming to be homeless and destitute.

Third thing: The other half of the band, Amy Dykes, was diagnosed with Hodgkin's a few weeks ago as they prepared to release this album.

IATWTC make music totally unsuited to confronting any of this, as a result of which listening to them can be creepy. The world's an unpredictably crappy place, and escapism qua escapism usually has a tone of desperation you can't fully inoculate yourself against without toxic levels of irony. And yet the structure of pop culture is for everything to be a distraction from everything else -- if a song reaches out to something outside itself, it has to be within the listener. If music doesn't aim for the strange or tender parts of its audience's innards those parts might as well not be there...

Taking it on its own terms, it's a decent record. Amy has the post-Debbie Harry new-wave insouciance down and Geller's slowly expanded the range of synth-pop bands he's willing to steal from. By the end, though, I was thinking that I really prefer my meaninglessness a little more crafty.