All of which leads me to chastise the whole thankless lot of you for not taking the time to flesh out the marvellously complex records that my friend John Vanderslice makes. (Yes, “my friend.” I’ve said this before, but convention demands that I say it again: I write about records I like; I wouldn’t write about a friend’s record if I didn’t think it was great; some people have a hard time believing that, but such people are cynics; there is nothing anyone can do to make cynics happy, so there’s no point in trying. I should note, however, for the record, that I’m touring with John this November; and that if you think that my estimation of his former band’s output is somehow tainted by that, then you should probably stop reading here, and I’ll see you next week.) His output, as far as I can tell, consists exclusively of concept albums, and it’s been that way since he first started making records. I got on board the Vanderslice express around the time of Mass Suicide Occult Figurines, which was a concept album whose concept was palpable but unparseable (it has something to do with amphetamines and something else to do with obsession, which are the same thing in the end, I guess), and then pretty shortly thereafter Time Travel Is Lonely came out, which was a towering masterpiece of an album built around a story about a guy burning all his bridges and going off to live in Antarctica. This year there was Life & Death of an American Fourtracker, with whose title I gotta take serious exception — it should’ve been called Amitriptylene : lawsuits are good for business — but I can’t really comment on that one, since I wrote the lyrics to two songs on it. It is, anyhow, a song cycle about people who run to the end of the country, where one of them dies. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 [ next ]