The Strokes

Golden Dawn Arkestra, “Mama Se”

Any time you hear the word “collective” in relationship with a band, you know you’re in for something. Golden Dawn Arkestra are one of those, from Austin, and are inspired by Sun Ra, trying to do the whole cosmic exploration stuff. Some funk, jazz, Afrobeat, whatever else occurs to them gets thrown in the blender. It’s a lot, and I don’t know, it seems a little unfocused to me. I only have this one record, and I think as a drop-in here, it works, but the whole album is a bit exhausting.

Calexico, “Fake Fur”

The Black Light is the album where Calexico became CALEXICO. The dusty desert aesthetic was in full flower on this album. The recording is soaked in reverb, there’s tons of space for the atmosphere, and it’s just a lovely experience. It’s not their best album, because they would marry this sound to better songwriting on later records, but this is still a fun album.

Elvis Costello, “Crawling to the USA”

This comes to us from the bonus second disc from the This Year’s Model reissue. The bonus material on a lot of these types of reissues can be pretty dodgy, but Costello’s songwriting in this period was so strong that even the leftovers are pretty darn good. I mean, this is an excellent tune!

Mostly rock today.

The Strokes, “When It Started”

Every so often, rock “comes back”, brought back into cultural relevance by some release that critics declare revinvents the genre. Meanwhile, of course, rock never goes anywhere between these “breakthrough” albums, mainly because old boring people never shut up about it.

(cough)

Anyway, most of the time, these albums are often pretty darn good. Is This It, for instance, is a pretty tasty album! It doesn’t break any ground, not really, but it’s energetic and plenty fun.