Other Musings: pt. 2

Another day, another oter musica spree. As you may or may not know there is a Junior Boys show occuring on Dec. 7 with Morgan Geist at Studio B in Brooklyn, NY. After plundering the used section, two Pavement CD's! two!, I realized tickets were being sold there. "Why not?" I said to myself "I like Junior Boys, I like to drink things, I like shakin' my tight little butt." No seriously, I said this out loud.

The lady behind the counter was surprised I think but sold the ticket to me and handed me a clever morsel of 12" single. She also checked out my butt as I retreated, my ticket clasped between sweaty fingers and 12" being held soft, carefully, like a half melted stick of butter, hot and sticky.

but really none of that is true. If I could squelch sex out of my pores like that in Other Music, I would. Most of the time I'm silent. Contemplative. Terrified that someone will jab a Can CD in my face, thrust a scantron sheet in my hand, and point to a little desk in the corner. " I ... I don't listen to krautrock...."

I would emerge, shamefully, with the collective auralgasms of several patrons and employees oozing down my face, a music snob bukkake.

Tangent. okay.

The 12" single I recieved from the pretty lady behind the counter was "In the Morning" one of our favorite little fingersnappin' beats on "So this is Goodbye." An Alex Smoke remix of "In the Morning," the B-side is "The Equalizer", and a remix of "The Equalizer" by Morgan Geist. It was like going to the rich kid's birthday party and getting the goody bag with tiger electronics and andes chocolates instead of plastic clown heads and loose Mike N' Ikes thrown in all higgledy piggledy.

I, of course, have no end of praise for the new Junior Boys album. It might not be as interesting as the last one, but there sure as hell are a lot more tracks I don't have to sit and wince through. "In the Morning" is a classic with its descending pinpricks in quintuplets being thrown off kilter with a 4/4 beat, fuckin hott. and "The Equalizer" second track on the new album, Bootyliciouser than anything off of their last album (I mean, come on, dancing to "High Come Down" would look like a cat trying to jerk its way out of a coke machine).

The remixes on the two songs are growing on me. Alex Smoke's rethinking of "In the Morning" is a lot more subdued than the original. Mostly constructed of beats, the song takes my favorite hooks (ie. the hacksaw bass and the descending pinpricks) and softens them into a scavenger hunt for similarities. I didnt like that at first. I was expecting a bigger, more booming remix; this sounds like the original song heard from the bathroom in a club. Its subtleties won me over though; I was just looking at it from the wrong angle.

The Morgan Geist remix of "The Equalizer" I like a bit less, simply because it reinvents the melody into something a little less catchy and a lot more note-octave, note-octave, note-octave. Its the oldest trick in the electrobook and the same one that The Faint has made a career out of. Also this: the "you'll never feel so sure again" sped up like a squirrel, or (the obvious simile) a chipmunk, is rediculousy. I don't hate this remix; the toothbrushing-in-a-can sound at the end is pretty sweet. Its passable but lags behind the other remix by quite a bit.

There aren't any MUST HAVE remixes on here. Stick to the album, the single is a rental.