I hadn’t planned on doing any record shopping during a one-day trip to Manhattan, but when the free Polvo/Obits show at the Seaport was moved over to the Brooklyn Bowl, I found myself strolling through Williamsburg with time to kill. I briefly visited Academy Records’ Manhattan location last fall during a similar day trip to NYC, but I don’t remember that location being anywhere near as stocked as this one. (If memory serves, I only purchased a copy of Faith No More’s The Real Thing for $5 on LP.) Perhaps bolstered by hipsters selling their LP collections for a given night’s PBR intake, Academy in Williamsburg had a solid array of vinyl, especially in the just-in bin. Pricing was mixed; bigger names like the Smiths, the Clash, and Joy Division tended to be overpriced, less iconic artists like those I purchased were reasonable, and lower profile records were downright cheap. I anticipate being down in the city (growing up a few hours north of NYC means that “the city” will always apply to New York, even though I’ve spent considerably more time in Chicago and currently live near Boston) a few times over the fall, so I’ll be sure to spend more time combing through their used bins for Adlai Stevenson speech compilation LPs.

I’d passed on a copy of Depths at In Your Ear in Harvard Square for $20 a few weeks back, so being able to get both of these LPs for that price seemed like a logical compromise. I put aside Squirrel Bait, Caesura, and Sonora Pine LPs, so if you’re looking for a copy of Sonora Pine II on vinyl, they should still have two.

108. Silkworm - Lifestyle LP - Touch and Go, 2000 - $8

Although I’ve made no secret of my affinity for Silkworm (or Midgett and Cohen’s current outfit, the similarly excellent Bottomless Pit), I suspect that I might have given Lifestyle the short shrift on this website. Placing 2004’s It’ll Be Cool in the upper reaches of my top 40 of 2000 through 2004 wasn’t a regrettable decision on its own regard, since that album certainly holds up and contains some of their finest songs (“Don’t Look Back,” “Xian Undertaker,” “Shitty Little Yacht”), but Lifestyle deserves similar consideration, if not a higher overall placement. (Especially since Do Make Say Think got three albums in the top fifteen.) I’ll contend that all of the post-Phelps Silkworm albums are a touch unassuming, since their style of power trio, classic-rock-informed indie rock preceded more hip applications of that era. Lacking the retro orientation and NYC swagger of the Strokes and the boozy Replacements homage of every Hold Steady song, the musical and lyrical sincerity of Lifestyle will never be mistaken for sexy, but classic? I’ll vouch for that.

Lifestyle is the most explicit classic rock album in Silkworm’s discography and not just because of the cover of the Faces’ “Ooh La La” that appears on its back-end. These twelve songs are instantly digestible and permanently resonant for a number of reasons—short running times, yearning melodies, Tim Midgett’s small town, blue collar lyrics—but foremost is the comparatively muted musical palette. It sounds like it could have come out in 1970. Lifestyle doesn’t feature any of Firewater’s dramatic guitar solos, doesn’t creep into the spacious confines of Developer’s quieter moments, doesn’t venture into It’ll Be Cool’s instrumental variety. (I won’t bother to compare it to the grunge-era bluster of the Phelps albums.) The album title is particularly a propos, since these songs feel so comfortable in their skin. Between Andy Cohen’s evocation of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Tim Midgett’s strangely romantic acoustic ode “Bones” (“We’re all gonna live a long time before we go”), Lifestyle touches upon the past without being limited to it. Side A outshines side B by a touch, since it features Cohen’s humorously touching “When you run into the night / Ain’t you ever been alone in your life? / Motorhead is coming for you / You gotta treat the new guy right” chorus in “Treat the New Guy Right” and Midgett’s affecting “Time’s passed / I’m becoming a man” realization in his Missoula memoir “Plain,” but listening to the album again dispels my notion that it suffers from a Developer-styled frontloading. All of these songs are above average and most are downright great. Its musical restraint is perhaps antithetical to the indulgences typical to 1970s classic rock, but Lifestyle simply feels classic in a way that few contemporary albums do. I can’t see it becoming dated in ten, twenty, or thirty years. I can only see it getting better and better.

109. Windy & Carl - Depths 2LP – Kranky, 1998 - $12

I enjoy Windy & Carl, but my existing stock of 1997’s Antarctica EP (their contribution to Darla’s Bliss Out Series) and 2001’s clearer Consciousness seemed sufficient for the last eight years. The epic title track of Antarctica garnered 90% of my listens, so why mess with a good thing? Yet given my increasing appreciation for ambient releases from Brian Eno, Last Days, and Kranky standbys like Stars of the Lid, Labradford, and the Dead Texan, I figured it was time to revisit W&C’s guitar-based drones, especially the heralded Depths.

I certainly got my money’s worth with Depths, with three songs stretching past thirteen minutes and all seven lasting for almost seventy. Two of the shorter songs, “Set Adrift” and “The Silent Ocean,” stand out, with the former’s guitar tones achieving supreme bliss and the latter’s submerged vocal melodies calling for excavation. I could do without all fifteen minutes of “Aquatica,” since it lacks textures interesting enough to merit its runtime, but the other six tracks certainly accomplish their intended aim of thoroughly zoning me out. I prefer the wavering, gauzy sonics found here over the occasionally crystal clear separation of Consciousness; while it’s nice to know what Windy and/or Carl is doing in a given song, I’d prefer not to be confronted with the specifics.

I was disappointed to learn that the Fremont location of Sonic Boom Records closed in February, since it had a vinyl annex that provided me with two Lungfish LPs in my previous trip to Seattle. The vinyl annex was divided up between the remaining stores in Capitol Hill and Ballard, which helped bolster this store’s stock. No jaw-droppers, but a number of nice finds. Bonus points for nice employees who played the Jealous Sound’s Kill Them with Kindness and talked about how they’d recently gotten into the now-disbanded Aereogramme. I wish the staff at Newbury Comics in Harvard Square played older records more often instead of their usual hip new bands, but I imagine you sell more records their way.

28. Don Caballero – For Respect LP – Touch & Go, 1993 – $9

Between Don Caballero and Thee Speaking Canaries, I’ve written quite a bit about Damon Che lately, but I hopefully haven’t exhausted my reserves of 1990s math-rock banter. For Respect is comprised primarily of short, forceful songs, many not passing the three-minute mark, which comes in stark contrast to their later efforts. I tend to prefer the longer tracks like “Well Built Road” and “New Laws” that stretch out and explore a few different moods, but the shorter tracks show some variety, like the aptly titled “Subdued Confections.”

What stands out is how “traditional” the guitars sound in comparison to what Ian Williams and Mike Banfield throw together for 2. I use traditional with no slight to the technical accomplishments here, but these songs use beefy chord progressions and more typical lead lines, not the finger-tapped leads, feedback bursts, and disorienting chord battles of their next record. (The air raid siren effect that begins “Dick Suffers Is Furious with You” is still terrifying.) In retrospect it’s amusing how long it took for other math-rock groups to make that transition, since For Respect, not 2, is the blueprint for most 1990s math-rock, but that’s why they’re the Don.

29. Bedhead – WhatFunLifeWas LP – Trance Syndicate, 1993 – $9

The subtlety and low-key nature of the Kadane Brothers took ages to grow on me, but after seeing The New Year open for Bottomless Pit last year, I was finally converted. I’ve been working backwards through their catalog, progressing from The New Year’s solid self-titled LP to their excellent The End Is Near (the anti-title track “The End’s Not Near” is astonishingly good) to their debut, Newness Ends, which I had apparently purchased on CD when it first came out. Taking the next step back to Bedhead was harder, since Transaction de Novo was my stumbling block for years, but I’ve found similar rewards with their releases. Transaction balances Seam-like indie rock (“Psychosomatica”) with their signature slow crawl (“Lepidoptera”) better than I remembered.

I hadn’t made it back to the beginning when I found this copy of their debut LP, but I didn’t know whether Touch and Go had recently repressed the vinyl or if this was a lingering copy of the original Trance Syndicate pressing, so I snapped it up for a cheap nine bucks. (Trance Syndicate ended around the time of the big Butthole Surfers / Touch and Go feud, but I’ve seen plenty of copies of the self-titled Trail of Dead LP floating around lately.) WhatFunLifeWas isn’t too far off from Transaction de Novo. It betrays a larger debt to the Velvet Underground, occasionally thrashes about (“Haywire”), and lacks some of their carefully arranged guitar patterns, but it’s a Kadane Brothers album through and through. The production sounds close to Seam’s gloriously fuzzy The Problem with Me, but it never comes off quite as wistful as Sooyoung Park’s group.

30. Mr. Bungle – Disco Volante LP – Plain, 2008 (1995) – $17

Fun fact: I remember seeing the original pressing of Disco Volante (with the bonus 7”) during one of my first trips to Reckless Records, but scoffed at the $18 price tag. Whoops. It rocketed up to $70 to $100 on eBay shortly thereafter. I’d waited patiently for this reissue to come out, so I gladly did my double-dipping duty when I found it in Seattle. Smart move, right?

Wait a second, there’s another pressing of this reissue LP with the bonus 7” included? That one’s colored vinyl, too. I can’t justify triple-dipping, even with a premier reissue pressing floating around. Screw you, Plain Recordings.

Disco Volante is certainly the most challenging Mr. Bungle album, veering between dramatically different styles and approaches, but it’s hard to call it my favorite. I have to be in a very particular mood to hear “Violenza Domestica,” for instance, whereas I can play California in most mental states. Hopefully that album will earn a vinyl pressing to coincide with the reissues of Mr. Bungle and Disco Volante, since I’ll gladly own all three.

31. Tar – Toast LP – Touch & Go, 1993 – $5

I was indirectly familiar with Tar because of their split single with Jawbox, in which they covered each other’s songs (Jawbox’s cover of “Static” appears on My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidents), but Tar’s history leaves little doubt to their aesthetic. Having released albums on both Amphetamine Reptile and Touch and Go, I expected aggressive songs with heavy, metallic riffs, pounding rhythms and monotone vocals and Tar delivers in spades. They even played custom aluminum guitars. The Touch and Go albums are unsurprisingly a bit more melodic than the AmRep releases according to Amazon reviews, but don’t think that Toast isn’t littered with handclaps and falsetto background hooks. This is muscular, abrasive stuff, like a harder-edged sibling to fellow Touch and Go band Arcwelder. This pressing of Toast is a picture disc LP with a blowtorched piece of toast on one side and the normal cover image of hazardous chemicals on the other. Inviting.

32. Dumptruck – D Is for Dumptruck LP – Incas, 1983 – $2

I’ve seen a few Dumptruck LPs in Boston-area record stores, but never for two bucks, so I snapped up this worn copy of their 1983 debut. A few of the songs sound like a less abrasive version of Mission of Burma, especially the great opener “How Come,” but usually they’re closer to the jangle of early R.E.M. than the art-punk of their fellow Massachusetts natives. Other dominant 1980s indie/college rock touchstones like the Feelies also apply, but there’s enough tension in the songwriting to let me look past the occasionally dry instrumental mix. I’d expected more of a jangle-pop sound, but the fringes of post-punk keep me interested.

This excellent article on Perfect Sound Forever relates the group’s label troubles: Bigtime Records tried to sell the band’s contract to a major label, despite that contract having already expired. The band and its lawyer reported this situation to the major, but Bigtime sued the group for five million dollars. While the band ultimately prevailed in court, being tied up in litigation sapped virtually all of their energy and killed any buzz from their successful 1988 album, For the Country. Its follow-up, Days of Fear, was recorded in 1991 but not released until 1995. Their first three LPs and a best-of have been issued on Rykodisc.

33. Joel R. L. Phelps & the Downer Trio – Inland Empires CD – Moneyshot, 2000 – $6

I’d talked about the wildly underappreciated Joel R. L. Phelps with a friend of mine prior to leaving for this trip, so finding a copy of Inland Empires, which she ranked as one of her favorites, was a nice semi-surprise. (Phelps is based in the Northwest, so I half-expected to find this CD.) I usually prefer Phelps’s more rocking, Crazy Horse–influenced albums, especially Blackbird, but Inland Empires proves that he's equally good at gut-wrenching ballads.

Inland Empires came out shortly after the death of Phelps’s sister, to whom the heartbreaking “Now You Are Found” is dedicated. The song traces the signposts of their relationship and I can’t fathom the level of care he put into the lyrics and performance. Fittingly, it’s the only Phelps original on the EP, accompanied by six covers of songs, including Fleetwood Mac’s “Songbird,” which is the second song from Rumours Phelps has covered. Silkworm recorded an enthusiastic version of “The Chain” for an early single during Phelps’s tenure in that group. The other five covers include excellent cover of the Go-Betweens’ “Apology Accepted” and songs by Townes Van Zandt, Iris Dement, and Steve Earle. I’d put off listening to this EP in its entirety for years, knowing the story about Phelps’s sister and how painful that song would be, but Inland Empires is a remarkably cohesive album for having six covers and one tremendously personal original.

Those interested in more Joel R. L. Phelps covers would be wise to track down the 2CD edition of Customs, which features a bonus disc with covers of Joy Division’s “Twenty Four Hours,” The Chills’ “Pink Frost,” and three others. Phelps also covered The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” on his self-titled EP and Comsat Angels’ “Lost Continent” on Blackbird, to mention a few highlights. I’d love to hear new material from Phelps, who’s gone into hiding since Customs, but even another batch of covers would be quite welcome.

41. The Art of Noise - (Who’s Afraid of?) The Art of Noise! - Island, 1984

Why I Bought It: I came across the Art of Noise’s first two full-lengths in the dollar bin and, barring any particular knowledge of their catalog, opted to buy both of them rather than purchase only the lesser album. Typically I can pull enough information from the album sleeves to determine which album to grab, but the Art of Noise tries their damnedest to dodge specifics. My only prior knowledge about the band was that Anne Dudley collaborated with Killing Joke singer Jaz Coleman on the 1990 world music album Songs from the Victorious City, but despite my Killing Joke fandom, I do not own that release.

Verdict: With one prominent exception, (Who’s Afraid of?) The Art of Noise! suffers from the technological stamp of its era. Whereas early hip-hop can overcome reliance on rudimentary sampler techniques on the strength of the rapping, central placement of samplers and sequencers only highlights the Art of Noise’s compositional and melodic limitations. Not that AON is alone in this quandary—early Pop Will Eat Itself sounds just as dated, for example—but songs like “Beat Box (Diversion One)” and “Close (to the Edit)” depend on their production techniques sounding innovative to qualify as avant-garde experimentation. (At the very least, they do not feature Max Headroom.) “Close (to the Edit)” features an infuriatingly familiar sample that kept just out of memory until consulting Wikipedia; its stabbing sample was pulled from Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” which AON member Trevor Horn produced. Anne Dudley’s fragmented vocals were later sampled for the Prodigy’s “Firestarter,” furthering this bizarre lineage. The samples featured on the other songs are harder to identify, but sound just as worn out twenty-four years later.

“Moments of Love” is the prominent exception to this rule. Presaging the late night grooves of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, the ten-minute highlight of the album tones down the jittery samples and trite melodies and focuses on supplementing its solid beat with tasteful keyboards and piano samples. Whereas a future generation of electronic artists could conceivably be inspired by songs like “Beat Box (Diversion One)” and “Close (to the Edit)” without actually sounding like them, the comparative restraint of “Moments of Love” allows it to act as both a structural guide and a sonic template for its progeny. The overall constitution of (Who’s Afraid of?) The Art of Noise! hardly encourages me to fast-track In Visible Silence in the RCR queue, but “Moments of Love” justify the two dollar expenditure on the albums.

42. Various Artists - Magic Eye Singles: Blue - Magic Eye, 1996

Why I Bought It: I have one other entry in the Magic Eye singles series, the aptly titled Gold (the titles are based on the vinyl color of the first pressing), which features Sonora Pine violinist Samara Lubelski, Team Xiaoping (Soo Young Park and William Shin of Seam), and Yesteryear. I bought that one a long, long time ago and can’t remember a damn thing about any of the tracks. This volume features the Sonora Pine, Zeke Fiddler, New Radiant Storm King, and Nord Express, so I grabbed it to hear the Sonora Pine song and to be able to say that I own something by New Radiant Storm King. The first single, which sadly I do not have, includes an exclusive June of 44 song named “1000 Paper Cranes.”

An added bonus, this single includes a photocopied postcard from David Berman of the Silver Jews. Responding to Magic Eye’s inquiry of his band’s availability for the series, Berman writes, “Thanks for asking but I think we’re monogamous with Drag City. Sure, we look at other labels on the street, every guy does, but we don’t sleep around. Good luck getting started.”

Verdict: Magic Eye states that their goal for the series was to “present unreleased songs that are different from those a band usually creates.” I read this tagline after listening to the Sonora Pine’s contribution, which features only Tara Jane O’Neil and Sean Meadows on guitar and the NYFD on sirens. This short bit of formless guitar squalor sounds nothing like either of the Sonora Pine’s albums, so they succeeded with the approach even if they failed to create an enjoyable song. The remaining three tracks are low-key attempts at stripped-down indie rock, with New Radiant Storm King taking an acoustic approach that saps their music of its energy. In a split-single context, I usually expect to gain a sense of what a band actually sounds like, so these four subpar tracks hardly justify subverting that proven approach.

43. Flying Nuns – “Disco Dancing Queen” b/w “Carousel of Freaks” - Summerville, 1992

Why I Bought It: In a surprising coincidence, I listened to the Flying Nuns’ Pilot EP on my way up to Mystery Train Records in Gloucester today only to discover one of their early singles in a bin of mid-1990s indie rock seven-inches. I’d even thought about how little I’d listened to “Carousel of Freaks” (120 Minutes where are you?) since it falls on the less-played side B of the excellent Pilot EP, Flying Nuns’ only Matador release (they were dropped after the infusion of support from Capitol Records), and voila, it’s the flipside of this single. I’d never seen another non-Pilot release from the Flying Nuns before, although I should track down their 1998 self-titled EP and their 2002 full-length Everything’s Impossible Now These Days given my fondness for their catchy and meaty post-punk.

Verdict: These two songs feature a poppier side of Flying Nuns, with higher register vocals and less force from the rhythm section. “Disco Dancing Queen” has a predictable lightness given its title and the Galaxie 500-citing “Carousel of Freaks” fits with this mood better than the urgent “Submarine” or “Frank” would have. Now I just need to track down their later releases.

44. To Rococo Rot + D - “Smaller Listening” b/w “Numbers in Love” – Soul Static Sound, 2000

Why I Bought It: The graceful melody of “Die Dinge des Lebens” from To Rococo Rot’s 1999 full-length The Amateur View skips through my head every few months, sometimes inspired by its usage as the background for Björk’s “It’s in Our Hands” single. Yet I’ve never picked up any of their other material, despite seeing their collaboration with I-Sound (Music Is a Hungry Ghost) in used CD bins across the country.

Verdict: Whoops. Credit with Soul Static Sound abstract electronic artist D with the direction (or lack thereof) for these two songs, since these whirring, anti-melodic tracks couldn’t sound less like The Amateur View. Typically I’m embarrassed when I can’t tell the proper speed for a single, but these songs gave me no instrumental clues and aren’t interesting enough to merit concern. After flipping between 33 rpm and 45 rpm on both songs, I settled on the former speed since it annoyed me less. “Numbers in Love” is slightly better than “Smaller Listening,” but I can’t imagine pulling this one out of my singles box any time soon.

45. The C. S. Angels - Chasing Shadows - Island, 1986

Why I Bought It: Silkworm’s cover of “Our Secret” led to my purchase of It’s History, a semi-legal reissue box set of the Comsat Angels’ Waiting for a Miracle, Sleep No More, and Fiction. Those three albums should be your starting point for the group, particularly the haunting post-punk of Sleep No More (which I finally tracked down on LP a few months ago), but former Silkworm member Joel R. L. Phelps’ cover of “Lost Continent” on Blackbird made me wonder about the group’s mid ’80s synth-pop phase. Phelps’ utmost sincerity and musical stoicism help his version of “Lost Continent” transcend its potentially cheesy lyrical content (“I’m looking for the same thing as you / The lost continent of love”), but tracking down the original on Audiogalaxy years ago only served to increase my appreciation of the cover. I couldn’t find the rest of Chasing Shadows online and stopped looking years ago after a picture disc for “Will You Stay Tonight” from 1983’s Land tempered my enthusiasm. Finding Chasing Shadows in the understock of Record Exchange in Salem, MA renewed my curiosity, so I snapped it up. After all, I own Killing Joke’s synth-driven albums—even the almost universally loathed Outside the Gate—so taking a chance on Chasing Shadows didn’t seem too preposterous.

Verdict: As it turns out, the Comsat Angels’ would-be sell-out synth-pop album is 1985’s 7 Day Weekend, given the inclusion of “I’m Falling” on the soundtrack to the Val Kilmer popcorn epic Real Genius. Chasing Shadows followed that record with a number of key changes—the group was forced to shorten their name in the United States to the C. S. Angels by a lawsuit from the Communications Satellite Corporation, dropped from Jive Records following a disappointing push to pop stardom with Land and 7 Day Weekend, and snapped up by Island Records at the behest of fan and snappy dresser Robert Palmer.

Yes, that Robert Palmer. He’s the album’s “executive producer” and contributes backing vocals for “You’ll Never Know.” Game over, right?

Not quite. Chasing Shadows lacks urgency and energy, but its dour moodiness does recall the pallor of their early post-punk records. The keyboards are minimal—hell, almost everything is minimal—and Robert Palmer’s guest vocal is barely noticeable. Whereas “Lost Continent” sounded out of place with regard to their earlier work, its teetering optimism is downright necessary on this album. Stephen Fellows seems worn down from the group’s troubles, singing “It’s a slave with a whip and it will beat you / Chasing shadows, running ragged, going round and round” on the title track, “I can’t wait for pennies from above” on “You’ll Never Know,” and “When every word fans the flames / All you can do is pray for rain” on “Pray for Rain.” Most of the eight songs linger past the five-minute mark and this nearly relentless melancholy grows tiresome by album’s end. Without the nervous twitches of early singles like “Independence Day” (although this is the Land version) or “Eye of the Lens” or the abbreviated hooks of their foray into synth-pop to vary the pace, the Comsat Angels get too bogged down in their atmosphere for their own good.

Chasing Shadows may not qualify as a true return to form, but it’s intriguing enough to justify the purchase. “The Thought that Counts,” “Lost Continent,” “Flying Dreams,” and “Pray for Rain” are individually solid blends of post-punk and moody new wave, but the band’s troubles fundamentally altered their constitution. The cover of the US version of Chasing Shadows has the “om” and the “at” in the band name scratched away, which seems apt given the missing elements of their sound.

One of my biggest concert-going regrets is passing up a Silkworm concert in Chicago back in November of 2004, less than a year before drummer Michael Dahlquist’s death from vehicular manslaughter the following July. While that tragedy could not have been anticipated, my fondness for Silkworm’s tremendously consistent catalog has grown by leaps and bounds since then, amplifying the ache of a missed opportunity. I’d also passed on my first chance to see Andy Cohen and Tim Midgett’s new group, Bottomless Pit, when I brushed off their opening performance for Magnolia Electric Company until the show had sold out. Had I known that their debut LP, Hammer of the Gods, would be such a revelation, I would’ve bought tickets long in advance. This time I took no chances; those tickets had been sitting above my laptop for months.

Former Codeine drummer and Come guitarist Chris Brokaw opened the show with a mix of acoustic and electric songs. I always enjoyed his vocal contributions to the latter outfit, especially “Shoot Me First” from Near Life Experience and “Recidivist” from Gently Down the Stream, so my attention was understandably piqued by a few of his more straightforward songs. Considering how frequently he’s played in town, especially at the nearby P.A.’s Lounge, I don’t have an excuse for waiting this long to see him perform. Next time I’ll yell out for one of those Come songs and pick up that limited vinyl pressing of his 2005 album Incredible Love.

My trip to the ATM down the block caused me to miss Brokaw sitting in with his fellow New Year members the Kadane Brothers, but the rest of the duo’s set was impressive enough without him. Despite owning Bedhead’s Transaction de Novo and having seen The New Year (with Silkworm/Bottomless Pit guitarist Andy Cohen) play a show with Crooked Fingers in Champaign, their music has never quite clicked, but I think this show finally won me over to their brand of melancholic minimalism. I credit a chair at the back of the Middle East Upstairs for allowing me to appreciate their subtle melodies and songwriting craft. I’m now planning on grabbing The New Year’s self-titled third LP when it’s released this fall.

During the Kadane Brothers’ final song, the members of Bottomless Pit (photos here) gradually ambled on stage and joined the melody of that song before seamlessly segueing to the excellent “Leave the Light On” as the Kadanes left the stage. Even without piano punctuation from its recorded version, “Leave the Light On” was a powerful opener, swelling with Midgett’s baritone guitar leads and Cohen’s nervous Telecaster twitches. Cohen’s “Dogtag” followed with its emotional “We saw our connection there / On the way down” chorus. The dynamic between Midgett and Cohen came to the forefront during the material from their new Congress EP. While each member usually takes the melodic leads on their own songs, Midgett’s exquisite “Red Pen” peaked with a dueling solo and Cohen’s “Fish Eyes” features similar interplay between the high-end of Midgett’s baritone guitar and Cohen’s Telecaster.

Even with a one-song encore, Bottomless Pit’s set seemed all too short. I needed more moments like Cohen’s raised voice on “Greenery,” Midgett’s enthusiastic delivery of “Sometimes you gotta take control” in “Reposession,” and Cohen’s pick-less guitar in “Dead Man’s Blues.” The consolation prize for such tantalizing economy was a copy of the Congress EP, which certainly merits its own post.

Here’s a heads-up for Silkworm/Bottomless Pit fans: Bottomless Pit has three new songs streaming from their MySpace page. All three are Tim Midgett vocals, which is a bit surprising given the even split of the four tracks from the band’s CD-R (and the usual Midgett/Andy Cohen equilibrium on Silkworm records), but hardly a detriment given the songs’ uniform excellence. “Leave the Light On” is my immediate favorite, a dynamic, emotional rave highlighted by a closing flurry of guitar, but “Repossesion” and “Winterwind” both bring back some of Midgett’s usual vigor. Think his peppier numbers from Libertine with more of an ’80s New Order approach. The forthcoming album, Hammer of the Gods, will feature eight songs and will soon be available for preorder on double LP (with two songs per side at 45 rpm), so keep an eye out for it. Given that I’ve heard seven of the eight tracks, there isn’t much mystery left to unveil, but these new songs solidify the album’s place in my year-end thinking.

In unrelated news, I hope to finally implement some long-awaited changes to this site in the next few weeks. This will involve a server change, so if the site is down for a day or two, there’s your explanation. After the server change, I should have “clean” urls for all articles, meaning that awkward page names like index.php?id=68 will be a thing of the past. Additionally, I hope to make the archives considerably easier to navigate by differentiating some of my lazy category headings (like the nearly 30 posts I have under “music”), adding a specific archive pages, and maybe, just maybe, giving my photography actual pages. Other hopes/dreams that will more likely not come to fruition: a new (or at least modified) site design, more ongoing memes like iPod Chicanery, an update of my best of the 2000s, and a personal top 100 of the 1990s.