[music] DON JUAN DRACULA - Young Debutantes II (Switch Off)

The idea of rock'n'roll as music for hoods occasionally seems to have taken root in a strange way in Scandinavia. The Caesars, for example, are now appearing in iPod ads but if I'm remembering right, the first album I heard by them began with a song about drinking gasoline and punching your girlfriend in the face. Something like that.

Anyway, I don't know what "Don Juan Dracula" refers to, but the first thing it brought to my mind was the Fonz, for what that's worth.

The record sounds like a lighter Faint, unravelling a bit into spaciness toward the end-- pretty good. During the faster songs I get a flickering sense that it might change my life, but I think I'm just sleep-deprived.

[mp3] even the fake ones have stopped calling

Jonathan Coulton - "Shop Vac" (post with mp3)

This guy did a folksinger-ized version of "Baby Got Back" that's apparently been all over the internet in the week since he posted it. After checking out most of his site I think "Shop Vac" is the winner: very, very hard not to sing along with and, come on, handclaps!

Coulton's use of repeated phrases and of alcohol as shorthand for misery make him sound like John Linnell sometimes, especially in this song and in "I Feel Fantastic", a song from the Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms EP that Popular Science commissioned recently.