[music] CHRIS BUTLER - The Museum Of Me (Future Fossil) (after five listens)

Plenty of filler; Butler's experiments with antique recording technology (Edison cylinders and wire spools) take a few plays before you can even tell if they're good or not (mostly no) and the normal recordings aren't totally consistent, so... maybe half good. And yet, my only other post-1983 Butler experience was the record- and tolerance-shattering "The Devil Glitch", a 69-minute which met some Guinness Book-related standard for non-repetitiveness while simultaneously, in reality, repeating itself so badly that I yearned to turn it off well within the first 4 or 5 minutes.

Anyway, before he made deracinated aesthetic disasters, Butler wrote songs for the insidiously great Waitresses, whose "I Know What Boys Like" was only the tip of the prog-influenced Ohio art pop miceberg. So I had to give him another chance when I found this cheap.

The great songs here are the longest ones, and those succeed due to great arrangements and a nice understanding of when to throw in a new song-section to shake up the verse-chorus-verse. Those two qualities in ANY measurable quantity might have fixed The Devil Glitch. Ah, okay, enough. I just hated to see an underappreciated songwriter flop, and I hate it more now that I know he was still capable of doing better when he did.

[finder] quiz for Lovecraft fans and others

Name the entity or entities described here.

"As forgetful and irresponsible as he was, he forgot to take his worst works to the grave. [...] He who never should have been born has died."

( Click for the answer. )

[music] NELLIE MCKAY - Get Away From Me (Columbia)

Whatever else may be wrong with jazz-pop songwriter Nellie McKay (more on that later), she isn't the fatuously perspectiveless genre-exploiter her own publicity makes her out to be. Here's the promo sticker from this, her debut album:

"Draws comparisons to two of pop culture's polar opposites, Doris Day and Eminem." - W Magazine

and

"A whiz-kid teenage songwriter, plays piano and riffles through styles from Tin Pan Alley to hip-hop." - The New York Times

So what you're telling me is that she's down, right? I mean, maybe she doesn't do battle rhymes, but she can rhyme, right? I mean...

( Cut purely for length. You should click even if you've never heard of Nellie McKay. Really. It'll be fine. )