PINE*am is awesome!!! / Exodus Damage and the shock

Secret: I used to be a big jpop fan, and when a publicist asked me to go see PINE*am, I popped over to their website and listened to a few tracks and said yes, expecting to be at best, not totally disappointed. Let me tell you something people - after my USE conversion, I think that I've come to a new understanding about jpop, and PINE*am are a great new find in my listening world.

Yes, they played the show in matching outfits and yes it was hard to tell who was the most tangibly adorable. But, then they played - and sounded like a more energetic, happier and downright funkier New Order or like a damn chic Delta 5 - rad little retro keys, samples, live bass and guitar and all three sing, including the call/response with harmonies that might be the best part of the best kind of pop music. The only song that disappointed me was the one where I told my friend 'Satie should sue them for this,' later to find out its name is " Gymnopedie 0.1." Ach, crossover?!? Anyway, they'll be in Portland and then Seattle later this week, so if you're out that way, go see them damn it.

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Listening to John Vanderslice's new album, Pixel Revolt, which has a great track, "Exodus Damage." It starts of sounding like "Atlantic City," for a second, then gets kinda new wavy with some Radiohead synth, and the first lyrics are "I'll see you next fall at another gun show...," which is probably the first ever mention of going to a gun show in a pop song that I know of. Anyway, the chorus starts with this amazing Rhodes sound and the words "Dance dance revolution." Second verse: about the world trade center. So the second plane fell at 9 o 2. Saw it on a hotel t.v. talking on a cell with you... - jarring. "Dance dance revolution,all we're going to get unless it falls apart, so I say go, go go down. Let it fall down, I'm ready for the end." Hardly the Rising.

(9/11) weird that reverberations only start sounding as sense now. Like with Daniel Givens' new CD - in my interview with him for Grooves he said he wanted to capture the sound of souls going up all at once in that horror, that was the sound he thought about when sitting alone in his room in Bushwick at 3am. He too mentioned the dance dance revolution, ticking Le Tigre for ignoring their New Yorkness in all of the horror. Funny, because I was supposed to interview Kathleen Hanna that day, the day the towers fell. I kept calling their publicist after it happened because I guessed I would have to cancel my interview - I was too shocked to understand the magnitude. Listening to this song is like that shock, a little - oh ya, you know, this shit just only happened, people still think about it every day. Like my landlord's daughter, who works at the airport while she could make more money elsewhere, but she believes that by being a package inspector for commercial air shipping is her way of doing good as tribute to people she knew who died that day.