[music] NEW BAD THINGS - Freewheel! (Candy Ass) [many years]

Freewheel Records (.com) is giving away many of their records, maybe all of them, as mp3s.

The NBT's debut is one of those great lost albums from the mid-90s' indie bloom. It is not remotely perfect, but it sounds like little else in its sphere-- certainly not Pavement, who any band with an audibly conversational male singer got compared to at the time. I wish I could put my finger on what's so brilliant about the horn player, but I think it has a little to do with the living-room production: the trumpet is so casually miked that it sounds like something really cool is happening, but next door.

Unfortunately, they do prove themselves slackers in the end; the two best songs are "Concrete" and "The I Suck", which happen to also be two of the three songs the band had recorded sluggish versions of years earlier for a 7" single. Making a habit of second drafts might have saved them from the particular circle of limbo that awaits bands who score their widest national distribution with a completely forgettable record (1997's Ennui Go; yes, they called it that).

[music] GRUMBLE GRUMBLE - Casual Sex: The Demo (grumblegrumble.net)

If that title/subtitle pairing is an intentional double-entendre, it's genius... but this is, in fact, a demo, and the mp3s sound kind of fizzy. Absolutely Kosher are selling these four songs on a CD, and will release the full album just as soon as it actually exists. I am totally looking forward to it.

Though the band rocks, the music is sometimes spacious and rarely quite 'rock', which may be how they ended up with AbKo (generally a haven for music made by people who've wandered all the way out to the trash fence but come to the conclusion that you can be experimental and still go verse/chorus/verse: call it post-post-rock if you like hyphens). But the vocals are unmanneredly calm; I'm drawing a blank on antecedents unless you count the guy from The Ocean Blue, and he only sounded that way because someone told him British people were mellow.

In fact, the whole demo defies categorization without being that strange. Every stylistic clue that I think might make it all click turns out to be a red herring, starting with the motto "DISCO IS THE NEW DISCO" on the band's downloads page. I can see how lovers of disco might end up making this music, particularly with disco's recent rehabilitation and the attendant absorption of other 00s sounds into its shadow. Yet the songs are so far from disco that the slogan is solely phatic.

If you're in a hurry, download "Not Not Nervous" and "Pardon My French" first.

[music] HELOISE - various mp3s (heloisemusic.com)

If anyone can tell me how these files came to be on my hard drive, I'd be curious to know. It looks like I downloaded them on August 6th, if that helps. I seriously have no idea; I had to do a websearch just to find out where I got them.

Us wordy music fans strained helplessly for about a year to come up with a defense of electroclash which didn't boil down to tantalizing idiocies like "sometimes worthlessness is valuable" or, more directly, "if it didn't suck so much, it wouldn't be so great!" Then time ran out and the music, by and large, no longer deserved a defense.

(I don't mean that it became unfashionable-- just that the good stuff suddenly dried up.)

Finding a decent electroclash song now has the benefit of surprise just like it did a few years ago when we were on the other side of the hill. Heloise has it down, with enough tricks (especially on "Odyle") that hearing this isn't purely a mini-nostalgia trip... but I feel curiously uncompelled to ignore the badness of the lyrics. The era's still gone.

On the ooooooooother hand, there's something beautiful about music celebrating venality being given away for free. That might outweigh the lyrics.