Second: there’s something to be said for actually updating regularly. I make promises on this count far too often for my word to mean anything, but using WordPress is such a huge leap over the (very old version) of MovableType that I was using that writing in it is almost–dare I say it?–fun.

Third: I’m currently having trouble importing my old content into the new format. Apparently, I’m going to have to go through the old stuff post by post and replace the quotation marks and the formatting. This qualifies as a pain in the ass. But it should be done by the end of the month.

Anyway, welcome back to the site. I mean you by this, dad.

Since the opening of Satellite Ballroom and the renaissance of Starr Hill, Charlottesville music lovers have been a little bit spoiled. Big acts come to town with alarming regularity now, and it seems like we all take it for granted. That big Peaches show? Oh, I’ll just get tickets the day or two before. Of Montreal? Again? It’s easy to forget that just a few years ago there was a huge drought of shows here, with poor students forced to drive two hours to DC to see any band big enough to not fit in the basement of Tokyo Rose. It’s easy to remind yourself, missing a show, that someone else will be here within a few weeks, and you’ll probably want to see them more anyway, and man, that bank account sure is suffering right now.

But Yo La Tengo is different. Yo La Tengo is special.

The seminal indie-rock band has been here before, but not in almost seven years. That means Clinton was still president, the dot-com market hadn’t yet crashed, and I was still a senior in high school: in other words, it was ages ago. Last Thursday night, they returned to a sold-out crowd, a packed upper room at Starr Hill, and plenty of resentment from those who weren’t able to get tickets.

The Rosebuds, from Raleigh, NC, played an excellent opening set that even managed to get a few crowd members (and we’re talking old school, cross-your-arms-stand-still audience members) moving around on the show floor. Playing as a five-piece band (they’re nominally a husband-and-wife pop band along the lines of Mates of State), they kept the songs coming fast, nice, and poppy in a genial tone. It was decent, competent indie pop, the kind of thing you throw on while cleaning your room to keep you going.

But then it got awesome. About halfway through their set, the lead guitarist and vocalist (Ivan Howard) switched positions with the keyboardist (Kelly Crisp), and the band laid into the bass line for a song, “I Better Run,” off their new album. Heavier than the songs that had come before, with the bass and the drums turned up, the song had an strong 80s feel to it–you could practically feel the spirit of a new wave haircut descending on the room as some people–gasp–actually started to dance.

The rest of the set sounded excellent–even if the band never quite recaptured the intensity of “I Better Run,” that was mostly due to the surprise at the change in sound. Ivan put down the guitar and started shaking percussion instruments, even during a sweet, twangy duet that revealed their Merge record roots. It was a solid set, and their sound matched well with what was still to come.

Half an hour after the Rosebuds left the stage, Yo La Tengo came out to surprisingly less applause than one might think. The floor was so packed with people it was hard to see the band’s entrance. It didn’t take long to get the crowd going, though. “Sudden Organ” lived up to it’s name, as Ira Kaplan came out with a huge amount of energy, playing the keyboard with his entire arm, and within two minutes was going crazy, looking like he was playing with his entire upper body. Even stretching “Flying Lesson,” from Electr-O-Pura, for fifteen minutes couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm–though it helped that James McNew didn’t miss a note on the bass.

The band from Hoboken kept its banter with the audience to a minimum, preferring to spend more time just playing music. It seemed to be what the crowd wanted–the merest hint of a hook to a song was enough to elicit cheers and whistles from the floor. But as the night went on, and they went deeper into their more recent catalogue, the show seemed to suffer a bit. “The Weakest Part,” sung by Georgia Hubley, was the first song not to get a rise out of the audience–a shame, since it’s one of the prettier songs on I Am Not Afraid of You . . . That they followed it up with a couple of other quiet songs didn’t help; as often happens at Starr Hill, the quieter songs became drowned out by people chatting at the bar, and the energy that they had carried in from the first few songs dropped away.

Mr. Kaplan promised one more quiet song before starting to “rock it out a bit,” and that brought the crowd back around. The spacey guitar hits and swirls seemed a little out of place–leading one audience member to shout, “My God, where are they?” But then it all came back together: Ira was playing the opening chords to “Sugarcube.” They stayed faithful to the album version, with some extra craziness thrown in the middle. After a quick guitar change, they started playing “Tom Courtenay,” causing a reaction as loud as “Sugarcube” but driven by about half as many people.

Afterwards, the band backed away from the major hits again, though the crowd stayed united this time around. As the show came to a close, they began playing “Nuclear War,” their cover of the Sun Ra tune. Beginning with Hubley keeping a steady, syncopated beat, Mr. McNew helping out on drums and singing the vocals, and Mr. Kaplan playing the keys again, they cycled through at least a couple versions from the EP. “Nuclear War” showcased everyone’s ability to shift roles in Yo La Tengo–everyone sang the lead vocals at one point, and instrument-switching (one of those things I really miss about the late ’90s) kept the sound constantly changing. A long noise instrumental died down into quiet, spoken lyrics–in my notes, I wrote “outro” as Kaplan kept a call and response going: “Kiss your ass / Goodbye, Goodbye.” Surely this was the end of the show, but no–the music came up again, and I had to cross out “outro.”

Yo La Tengo left the stage, the crowd cheered, they came out again–you know this bit. Then they played the only song from And Then Nothing Turned Itself Out of the night, “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House.” I desperately hoped they’d play “Autumn Sweater,” but it turned out instead to be “Burn Out the Day”–a cover of the Blue Oyster Cult song that probably could have been a little bit more powerful. Finally, after nearly two hours of playing, Yo La Tengo ended with their cover of “Yellow Sarong,” from Fakebook, drawing still more cheers and rewarding everyone who came out to the show (and, apparently, followed proper song request protocol).

After nine years of waiting, I finally got to see Yo La Tengo live. Because Yo La Tengo is different. Yo La Tengo is special. Yo La Tengo thinks nothing of playing almost two hours, essentially non-stop, trying to cover as much of their catalogue (stylistically, at least), as it possibly can. Yo La Tengo thinks nothing of making otherwise sane men utter the phrase, “nuclear holocaust of a show.” Yo La Tengo may very well be back in the semi-near future, because it’s Charlottesville in 2007, and you never know what big band’s concert is going to be announced next. Please, don’t take it for granted.

This article originally appeared in The Declaration on 15 February 2007.

Make no mistake, President Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office. It is all but inconceivable that Iran will accept any peaceful inducements to abandon its drive for the bomb. Its rulers are religio-ideological fanatics who will not trade what they believe is their birthright to great power status for a mess of pottage. Even if things in Iraq get better, a nuclear-armed Iran will negate any progress there. Nothing will embolden terrorists and jihadists more than a nuclear-armed Iran.

Isn’t that sweet? While the small-government fiscal conservatives and the big-government social conservatives are busy chewing their own arms off, trying to figure out how that one-decade-stand could possibly have gone wrong, the neoconservative movement is sticking to its principles, and its guns. Because its principles, as far as I can determine, are these:

10 Bomb the shit out of something.

20 Call anybody who disagrees with them “anti-American.”

30 GOTO 10

It amazes me how few ideas the movement actually has left. Sure, Mr. Muravchik mentions that America needs to use its diplomatic prowess more than just military force. Specifically, he mentions aiding Mideast moderates in a new fashion that is somewhere between useless and making them look like “American stooges.” But that doesn’t work, because any group in the Mideast that isn’t an American stooge is, by their definition, not moderate. Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, instead of being engaged through diplomacy and slowly transformed into non-combatant political groups, such as the progress with the IRA and S”nn Fein over the past fifteen years, are cut off from any geopolitical process entirely. You could try to influence the Arab street, driving them towards more “moderate” parties, but if you could tell me which party that is in, say, Palestine, that would be awesome.

At some point, you have to swallow the bitter pill and sit down with groups that make you nauseous. You have to find some bit of common ground, however small, that both parties can agree upon. You have to have full faith in the dialogue in order to make it work–it can’t just be a series of show summits en route to a shock and awe campaign. I mean, come on. Iranian officials want to speak to the US. Syrian officials want to speak to the US. But nowhere in Mr. Muravchick’s “comeback story” does it actually mention sitting down and talking with these rogue governments tyring to come back in from the cold. The diplomatic corps is looked at primarily as a weapon to combat–you guessed it!–anti-Americanism, by utilizing talking points and telling people how great the West is. In moderation? A fantastic idea. Sign me up. But on its own, with no tangible dialogue taking place between the US, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, it cannot be a successful policy. Without it, all we’re doing is taunting these countries, occasionally waving a 500-pound-bomb-stick. The only carrot we offer is not to impose more sanctions than we already have, which isn’t really the most powerful incentive. Even Reagan sat down with the Soviets.

Inciting simple dissatisfaction amongst the people is not the way to go here. These regimes have already held on longer than the former Soviet Republics, so mere resentment will likely not be enough to overthrow their regime. And hopes that new media will overwhelm state-run channels, prompting rebellion, are hard to justify when Iranians have access to the internet and email already. Most don’t like the regime, either, but you don’t see them rising up to throw the mullahs off.

The best weapon that we have to fight anti-Americanism, jihadism, extremism–whatever the hell you want to call it–in the middle east is the weapon we’ve been loathe to use: talking with them. Opening up diplomatic channels, instead of acting as a giant bully, is the key to minimizing the threat of rogue states. Leaving Iran and Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah, North Korea and so on, to stew in their own juices only makes them more likely to lash out. That’s bad. Failing to speak to them means that America is neglecting its duty as a world leader. And neglecting the country’s role as a world leader is something that everybody–especially Mr. Muravchik–can agree is the worst of all possible options.

I kid, I kid. Yesterday was like Democrat Christmas, with the Party Formerly in Exile returning home to the House and hopefully the Senate as well, Rummy resigning, and a reinvigorated, “Is that thumpin’ without a G” Press Corps. Somehow, after two months of freaking out about encroaching fascism and vote manipulation and the endless abyss of evil that is Diebold, the American people did the right thing and threw the bums out of office. They revealed that Bush and Rove’s certainty that they would win the midterms wasn’t so much evidence of wrongdoing as it was of ignorance. It’s enough to make me jump up and start singing and dancing. But I don’t want to gloat too much. That’s for Republicans to do.

And did you see the photo of Santorum’s kids crying? Schadenfreudtastic!

Sorry. I’m done gloating. Seriously.

Up after classes: what the Dems need to do to hold on their majorities in 2008.

There’s a couple of reasons I pulled the site in the first place. First, I had my hands full working on the Dec, which didn’t leave a lot of time for writing on my own. Second, there wasn’t nearly enough schoolwork for me to procrastinate. And third, I needed to take a break after the disaster that was the year surrounding the 2004 election. It’s really the third that drove me off the internet, though.

I mean, think back to a year and a half ago, to the apocalyptic imagery that was getting tossed about on both sides: the fear of a draft, the fear of a totalitarian state, the fear that Bush was going to do something really crazy, like attack Iran and start World War III–and all of this had absurd religious overtones. Even the atheist, hard-core lefties were throwing out arguments with the certainity of the true believer. Shit, the Red Sox winning the Series felt like it was predicted in Revelation. (It was after the locusts and before the seas boiled.) The undercurrent of religion–and, along with it, the imminent end of the world if things didn’t go exactly your way–wound up being so strong that you would drown if you tried to struggle against it.

Well, I was drowned. I think it was the Schiavo case that was the final straw. I finally threw up my hands, withdrew into the sanity of alcohol and friends and just getting my two jobs done. And then that lead to me working myself into the ground last fall, finally coming up for air a few months ago and wondering what had happened.

I didn’t wind up dropping out of school and owning a record store. I didn’t wake up to find myself living on a beach in the Caribbean, working menial jobs at a hotel to pay the bills. All I’d done had been to watch a lot of TV, not to do any writing beyond a few short music and book reviews, and to learn how football worked. Oh, and got three credits closer to graduating. Woot.

So it’s 2006 now, I’m doing all right, and you can breathe in without getting all that crazy apocalyptic dust back in your lungs. Sure, there’s a lot that’s wrong at the moment–the Teflon Administration, the torture that Congress can’t put an end to, people still listening to The Killers–and I’ll get to that stuff, eventually. But The Rapture’s back to being a too-trendy band and a bar downtown, instead of being right around the corner. That’s something I can live with. That’s something I can puzzle fight.

Maybe it’s the nostalgia. Maybe the primary colors fried our brains. Maybe we’re hiding from a geopolitical order in which everyone acts like they’re six-year-olds by remembering our six-years-old selves. Or maybe it’s the realization that we can’t play these new-fangled games with their four shoulder buttons and their analog sticks and their three-dimensional gameplay. For whatever reason, the original NES has been experiencing a cultural revival these past few years. Sure, the scope of that revival has ranged from the dorky (Nintendo controller belt buckles) to the kitschy (an emo band named after the Konami code). But the best part is all the attention being paid to those 8-bit soundtracks of our youth.

Because let’s face it: those songs were good. Limited to such a small range of options to make the background music—a handful of Midi tracks, and that’s it—the composers of the 8-bit era managed to make songs that the geekier among us still hum from time to time. Take the Mario theme, or the opening track from the Legend of Zelda. Awesome, right? Those short melodic hooks work so well that they’re still influencing game music today, even with the 32-bit sound that the Playstation and Xbox can throw out.

So what the Advantage do is take those songs and cover them with a live band. They’re not the only guys that do this; the Minibosses, from Phoenix, do essentially the same thing, have been doing it longer, and cover Ninja Gaiden. The difference is that The Advantage cover everything from Mario to Contra to Metroid to Double Dragon III, and they’ve got the guitarist from Hella (though he plays the drums). The Minibosses are a wee bit looser in their songs, giving their tracks a bit of a punk rock, let?s-crowd-surf-with-our-power-pad vibe; the Advantage replicate the songs more faithfully, with a couple of weird time signatures and a math rock accuracy ’cause, hey, it’s the dude from Hella.

Given that math rock is essentially making Nintendo songs with stranger time signatures, it’s amazing it took until last year for The Advantage to release their first, self-titled album. That one focused on the games that everyone played: the Mario themes, the Zelda dungeon (they had the decency to leave the overworld theme—quite possibly the best video game song of all time—well enough alone). The new album, Elf-Titled, takes quite a few of its tracks from obscure games you might not have played. But that’s fine, since the songs are still awesome. “Batman—Stage One” doesn’t sound like any of the Batman movies, but the bassline is so rocking that you won?t care. You probably never played The Guardian Legend (but you should), but “Corridor 1″ hurtles you through space just like it should. And I swear that “Duck Tales —Moon” was ripped off by Slash for “Sweet Child O? Mine,” but that’s probably all in my head.

Sure, the element of nostalgia counts for a lot—it’s great to suddenly hear the Kraid boss music from Metroid, for example, or level five of Double Dragon II. But that alone wouldn’t make this a good album. The performances are amazing, but good musicianship doesn’t make an album, either. It’s the songwriting that makes it rock, regardless of how much time you spent in front of the TV with a controller in hand.

The one problem with the album is that, depending on the mood you’re in, the songs might get a little repetitive. But it’s a testament to the quality of The Advantage that that rarely happens, even when the theme they’re drawing from is just ten or fifteen seconds long. And much more often, it creates the trancelike state that you used to hit with these games. It’s good for paper writing. Or for dancing like an idiot. Or for playing old-school video games with the TV on mute. Nostalgia for 8-bit music only goes so far.

Some animals are more equal than others: At first blush, one might think George Saunders’ new novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, is just a political allegory for early twenty-first century America. There’s the vaguely fascistic despot, Phil, who (a) speaks best when his brain is removed from his head, (b) responds to violence with greater violence, (c) takes the presidency of his country by undemocratic means, (d) enforces loyalty oaths on his constituents and (e) steals every last resource of a bordering nation. There’s the populace who follow his every decree enthusiastically, eating up the drivel he spouts about their great nation. And there’s the “media”—three guys with bullhorns—who try desperately to report on all these actions, but instead have a case of ADHD and like to talk out their anuses. Sound like any country you know?

Like that other political allegory against totalitarianism that you might have read back in high school, Saunders uses simple language and distinctly inhuman characters to get his point across. Where Orwell used animals to obvious effect (the animals most in favor of the socialization of the farm are, ahem, the sheep), Saunders characters don’t even seem alive. One Inner Hornerite consists of a tuna can, a belt buckle, a blue dot and some connecting parts; another resembles a bald letter C with antlers and side vents to breathe. The Outer Hornerites are as odd, with a presidential advisor who is just a mirror with shady eyes.

The plot is just as insistently abstract. Inner Horner is completely surrounded by the nation of Outer Horner, and it’s only big enough to hold one of it’s citizens at a time. The other citizens wait outside, in an area termed the “Short Term Residency Zone.” When Inner Horner shrinks, stranding the occupying citizen in Outer Horner, all hell breaks loose. The Outer Hornerites tax the Inner Hornerites within an inch of their lives, there’s a coup, and everything the Inner Hornerites do is suddenly interpreted as an attack.

Considering how weird all of this is, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is probably Saunders’ most immediately accessible work. The language is simple and the characters seem to have a fairly one-to-one relationship to reality. There are no ghosts, no children with memory implants that speak in a denatured English—just what appears to be a simplistic allegory about the state of democracy in America today. There’s nothing as seriously challenging as the stories in Pastoralia or CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. The entire book can be read in about forty-five minutes, and re-read faster if you’re on deadline.

But as the story continues, it starts to resist these easy comparisons. Saunders writes conclusions to his stories that do more than simply resolve the plot, happy ending or not. He often includes a twist at the end—not a “Finally I can sit and read all of these books oh no my glasses broke!” type of twist, but a more subtle one that forces the reader to reconsider his or her assumptions about what has come before. Slowly, the one-to-one correspondence between Phil and that guy about ninety miles from here falls apart. Another nation, Greater Keller, is introduced: Greater Keller launches an attack to force regime change in Outer Horner; they measure their national wealth through a statistic called the National Life Enjoyment Index Score. Sound like any country you know?

Unfortunately, if you’re reading for the politics, this will probably be a case of too little, too late. By this point, we’re already two-thirds of the way through the book. Saunders’ blurring of the lines doesn’t really add anything to a reader?s understanding of the characters, who remain mostly interchangeable. It doesn’t affect the plot at all, since an even bigger deus ex machina is soon in coming. What it does do is change the point of the allegory considerably: The book’s not against totalitarianism (well, yeah, okay, it is), it’s not against communism or capitalism or anything so crass. It’s an argument against partisan violence that?s as true in this country as any other. Every satirist is an idealist at heart, after all.

There’s a problem with all of this, however. It’s that reading The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil as allegory is so reductive that it erases everything someone should be reading fiction for. The allegory’s just there to enhance the humor, really: when one realizes that the media folk have a mouth by their ass, it’s so over-the-top that one can’t help but laugh. When Phil wins over the Outer Hornerites by a “stentorian” speech after his brain falls out, the chuckle that follows is just as involuntary. The novella contains a comic universe that’s only funnier because of its odd intersections with reality. (Which is really the definition of satire, after all.)

It helps that Saunders is able to free his prose from the constraints of reality, too; there’s nothing to keep the words on the page, and it flows from laughter to anger to just pretty in a matter of a few sentences. On an uninhabited part of Outer Horner, he writes that it was “a lush verdant zone where cows’ heads grew out of the earth shouting sarcastic things at anyone who passed, which, though lush and verdant, was unpopulated because the cows’ sarcasm was so withering.” There are illustrations, too—always a little odd in an “adult” work of fiction—by Benjamin Gibson, but they suit the story quite well. They help the reader imagine the very odd characters that Saunders envisions, and at the same time have an odd beauty all to themselves.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is a sharp little book—a quick read that won’t change your mind on any of those pressing political issues that divide the nation, but it will keep you chuckling as you go along. It’s not Animal Farm (and thank God for that). It’s a satire that keeps stretching at the boundaries of what satire can do, far more than a condemnation of Bush or Hitler or totalitarianism. Because even if all allegories were equal, some would still be more equal than others.

Unless, of course, you bring together a brilliant producer who doesn’t get the respect he deserves and a rapper who tends to get respect from the “wrong” quarters–the English majors, the jazz fiends, the backpackers. The Mask and The Mouse, in which Danger Mouse and MF Doom collaborate in just the first of the huge collaborations of the fall, could have turned into a horrible, syncophantic whorish enterprise, destroying careers and sullying–nay, negating–the name of Adult Swim in our hearts.

Sure, Danger Mouse has caught flak for being gimmicky. But The Grey Album was another one of those totally-obvious-in-retrospect ideas, and was the perfect vehicle to showcase his twisted pop genius. This is a man who can find the pop in everything from reggae beats to opera arias. Here, his beats are much more tense and compressed than most of his earlier work. Danger doesn’t know when to stop at points. Drumlines, violins, guitars, flutes and (the has-to-be-a-reference-) accordion get layered over one another until the whole thing threatens to break, and that he keeps it from the brink of cacophony is a testament to the man’s skill. There’s, like, four different drumline mixed together on “The Mask,” with horn stabs and soft synths trading off on top of it. “Perfect Hair” uses a flute solo to sound light even with all the complexity going on beneath it, while “Mince Meat”–one of the simpler songs on the album–still keeps morphing underneath Doom’s steady flow.

Because what Doom does here is dominate–nay, destroy: presented with a beat that morphs instead of the sudden jazzy shifts that marked Madvilliany, the man goes all English major on us. People expecting the same inventive wordplay and absurd rhyme schemes that have marked his career so far won’t be disappointed, though the similes have been turned down a notch. Doom doesn’t so much ride the beat as use his flow as its counterpoint. Watch Doom dodge and dart around the beat: on “Bada Bing” he starts by perfectly matching the rat-a-tat pace of the early song before coming unhinged and just loosely staying with the beat like a jazz soloist: “And Doom, [breath], maybe it’s him. / Called up my lady and said baby, it’s Slim. Make me up a margarita; I need to take a swim.” Chiasmus, effictio, blazon: this is the vocabulary one reaches for to describe Doom’s lines.

The specific Adult Swim content is hit or miss, though. Songs revolving around Harvey Birdman and Sealab 2021–for all of Doom’s previous success sampling cartoons–fall flat. It’s at it’s best when the characters have contributed something new to the album. Shake’s phone calls begging onto the album actually stay funny, and Meatwad performing “Beef Rap” off Mm..Food–that’s another one of those obviously-brilliant-in-retrospect ideas. The Mooninites make an appearance on the surprisingly not-childish “Vats of Urine.” Space Ghost shows up, not with Ghostface on “The Mask,” but to proclaim that, “America’s craving some Doom.” Lord knows it should be.

Fortunately, he has said all he has to say about them, quickly establishing that he’d rather let his creative abilities speak for themselves. And his abilities are ample; Herren’s technique for crafting beats differs greatly from most other producers. Unlike an RJD2 or a DJ Shadow, Prefuse 73 doesn’t allow cohesive samples. There’s no sped up soul samples on a Prefuse 73 track, no beat grabbed from a funk hit–or not, at least, anything you’d recognize. Instead, Herren chops everything up into tiny little pieces, letting the rhythm and melody and harmonies arise from the interplay of short, one or two beat samples. Sounds distort, become something apart from even themselves when he throws them together into this fashion. Even on the larger scale, he keeps the same plan, and blips of staccato notes suddenly bite into fuzzed out cacophony. Vocalists and guest instrumentalists typically find themselves just one more element for Herren to play with, and might find their contributions chopped up or, at the very least, worked low in the mix. The result–odd, considering how layered and complex the rhythms are on most tracks on the album–is that these incredibly dense songs wind up evoking wide-open landscapes. Surrounded by Silence does, in fact, drown the listener in a soundscape rather than propelling him forward.

The collaborating artists get more airtime on Surrounded by Silence than on past albums: almost every track has a guest vocalist of some sort. Ghostface, El-P, Aesop Rock, Masta Killa and GZA all contribute raps. Ghostface and El-P’s “Hideyaface” winds up being one of the best songs of the year so far, all Ghostface free association (Why does he mention the Newark Star-Ledger?) and El-P free aggression taking on–who else?–the biters. The Masta Killa- and GZA-driven “Just The Thought” runs around one of the more straightforward beats Prefuse 73 has put together, a bouncy concoction that doesn’t last nearly as long as it should. Unlike in the past, their vocals are mostly untouched; it seems that Herren who “didn’t want to record rappers rapping over a beat” on his first album, Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, has come to terms with just how damn good it sounds.

But the other tracks–based around work with Blonde Redhead, the twins Claudia and Alejandra Deheza, and Tyondae Braxto, amongst others–find him chopping samples again like a sushi chef,* doing what he does best. Listen to the swelling horn on “Minutes away from you,” the way he keeps holding off the high point from the listener until just the right point. Listen to the looping strains of “love” on “Pastel Assassins,” the way he holds the song in stasis, refusing any sort of release for so long. Scott Herren knows what he wants, and he’s willing to work for it.

So why worry about the biters? They only push him to the next level, only make him focus on the vocals and his ability to produce a beat as much as his ability to create abstract landscapes, only force him to put himself on the line. The truth of the matter is that Scott Herren needs the biters, as much as he doesn’t want to admit it. He’ll never really be done talking about it, and that’s probably a good thing.