| OK now hold that last bit in your head. Last week, if you made it to the end of the piece, you may remember that I mentioned an album by Loren Connors, nee Loren Mazzacane Connors, on a label called Family Vineyard. Family Vineyard is cool in the same way Atavistic is cool: they occupy a particular corner of the music universe, serving up equal parts talent, ambition and pretension from people who don’t shrink from the word “artist” and who make honest, blood-leaking efforts to be worthy of the name. One thing they’d sent me recently was a great, great, great, great, great album by an act called O-Type, some of whose members are also in MX-80 (nee MX-80 Sound). When I was reviewing the O-Type album for another publication, it had made me remember that there was an MX-80 album someplace around the house, a record I’d gotten during that period of time in Chicago when my CD-acquisition problem had gotten the better of me for a while. I was pretty sure I hadn’t gotten around to listening to it back then, or that if I had, I’d given it no better than the once-through. It happens to us packrats. We have whole rooms full of books we’ll probably never read. We secretly think that our insatiable fetishistic consumerist appetites are somehow charming. |