[mp3]

Dislocation Dance - "You'll Never Never Know" (mp3)

One of several reissues on Vinyl Japan (a British label, despite the name) that become hard or impossible to find, at least in the U.S., not that long after they appeared. Kind of frustrating, and I now see that I put off mailordering directly from the label for long enough that I can't.

Anyway, Dislocation Dance were a highly charming British band from about 20 years ago, playing in a jazzy indiepop style that I'm not sure America ever got much of. (See also early Everything But The Girl records.) I had known that their trumpet player, a guy with the excellent name "Andy Diagram", went on to play arty music in the Spaceheads and in the Two Pale Boys; what I had somehow not known until just now is that he was also a member of James. Funny.

[From Music Music Music, though there's also a version on The BBC Sessions, which I think is better overall if you're going to the trouble of tracking a DD album down in the first place.]

[music] NEED NEW BODY - Where's Black Ben? (5 Rue Christine)

From the name I expected screamy Rhode Island kids, when instead Need New Body are... well, I'm not sure. In places it sounds like the work of relatively gifted improvisers straddling the line between "free jazz" and "next time let's get high in Rob's basement-- he's got all those drums and shit". But there's also terrifyingly bad fake funk, and some songs both complex and coherent enough to fall under the tag 'hyperprog' (as used by some of the Pitchfork folks). It shares with actual prog the ability to hold my attention with only sporadic vocals, and its suitability as background music. I have no clear idea whether I like this yet, but it's more digestible than a lot of 5 Rue Christine releases, and more accessible than their website's habit of writing in zillion-point letters would suggest.