Today was supposed to be the day I’ve been waiting nearly two years for. Today, one of my favorite bands of the New Millennium (even though they’ve been making records since the tail-end of the last decade of the last Millennium) was supposed to releases their ninth studio album. I’ve been looking forward to it since the day in November of ‘06 that I got my hands on an advance of their last album. It’s safe to say that it’s my most anticipated release of the year. And I’m pretty bummed it couldn’t couple with Deerhoof’s Offend Maggie and make October 7th a high-water mark for Indie music in 2008 like it was originally set to.

The album in question is of course Skeletal Lamping, the new full-length from Athens, Georgia-based Indie-Pop troup of Montreal, and while I’m displeased that it’s not hitting store shelves today after all, I’m pleased to report that it lives up to all my expectations. If you’ve been paying close attention you might recall their last LP Hissing Fauna, are You the Destroyer? shared “album of the year” honors with Don’t Give Up from Chicago’s Serengeti & Polyphonic last year. And of Montreal happens to be second only to Hot Chip, another band I’ve praised in this space numerous times, in listens out of all the music in my digital collection according to my Last.fm page. Those numbers may not be the most accurate, but I know how much I love the band and how much I listen to their music. To put it plainly, they had a lot to live up to, and not only did they, they did so and then some.

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This week could have proven one of the best weeks of 2008 for “Indie” music lovers. Two of my favorite groups, who happen to be a couple of the genre’s most consistently exciting and envelope-pushing bands, were scheduled to have new albums out Tuesday. And I was souped that even in a year like this, blessed with an abundance of stellar releases by some of my favorite bands and numerous talented newcomers from every corner of the “Indie” landscape, a single day could have held the prospect of so much more aural pleasure for me and people like me.

I’ve been anticipating one of the records originally set for release this week (more on that tomorrow) for almost two years. Which is, incidentally, almost the same length of time it’s been since I first heard the last album from today’s featurees, Bay Area-based Noise-Pop outfit Deerhoof. It wasn’t until a few short months ago however, that I became aware they even had a new album on deck. It was one of those coincidental incidents that seems to happen to me all the time; one day I was thinking “gee, I wonder when Deerhoof is gonna put out something new” and checking the internets for information, and the next I was reading a track-listing for a forthcoming LP, titled Offend Maggie, and marking an October 7th release date down in my calendar.

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Writing about one-man British pixel-Punk band Sportsday Megaphone yesterday, and noting several qualities he shared in common with Mick Jones‘ post-The Clash group Big Audio Dynamite, inspired today’s choice of random record. Well, first it reminded me that I was supposed to put B.A.D.’s 1995 album F-Punk on m. Cody’s iPod, but after that it provided the impetus for me to revisit an earlier release from the group in today’s blog post.

The album, a 1988 release titled Tighten Up, Vol. 88, was the third LP from the band which had formed in 1984 as a partnership between Mick Jones and Don Letts. Jones had recently been fired from The Clash, and his longtime friend Letts was an influential DJ who was credited with the fusion of Punk Rock and Reggae, a film-maker who had been an early documentarian of the Punk sub-culture, and the one-time manager of The Slits, an all-girl Punk band whose lead singer Jones had dated. The band they founded would stretch the boundaries of Punk, even the open-minded brand made by The Clash, by incorporating even more obvious elements of Pop, Reggae, R&B, Funk and electronic dance music, making extensive use of sampling, programming, drum-machines and synthesizers in it’s retinue. Tighten Up, Vol. 88 finds the band in an unflinchingly joyous mood, giving rise to a collection of songs that draw from the history of popular music, entwining the sounds of early Rock&Roll, Rockabilly, Punk, New Wave, Synthpop, Electro and Hip-Hop with then cutting-edge electronics a pure ’80s Pop sensibility.

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In my write-up on Chairlift’s new album from Tuesday’s “shuffle” post I shared a glimpse of the lack of awareness of my own music collection that I sometimes face. What’s even more absurd than realizing I’ve been regularly listening to a song all my friends have been asking me to find them for months though is hearing my homeboy Emeyesi play a song on our radio show (now podcast) and asking him “what’s this” only to learn it’s a song from an album I own.

I’m embarrassed either happens at all. And while neither happens often the latter occurs more frequently than the former. In fact, something like this happened just last week. A springy track with 8-bit synths, chunky drum sounds and lyrics about a couple who leave all manner of human excretions coating every surface of a borrowed flat popped up on Emeyesi’s playlist, prompting me to inquire as to it’s origins. When he told me it was Sportsday Megaphone, a.k.a. London-based bedroom musician and singer Hugh Frost, an artist whose album, So Many Colours / So Little Time, was sitting on my desktop at the time, I felt a pang of disappointment. How could something I’d enjoyed listening to on my own suddenly sound unfamiliar just because somebody else was playing it? But the self-chastisement wouldn’t last because he quickly explained how the tune, titled “Young Lust,” was in fact a non-album b-side to the “LA” 7” single.

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Circumstances beyond my control — but which have much to do with my bank account — have been filling my days with a lot of stress lately. Relaxation and enjoyment of personal time have been at an all-time minimum. Even the fire alarms in my apartment building, which went off last night well after midnight, seem to be in on the conspiracy to keep me on edge.

Of course “at the end of my rope” is not my ideal way to feel. So it was with a desire to chill out and ease both my mind and my soul that I reached for Out My Window, the sophomore full-length from Canadian DJ, beatmaker and singer Koushik, this morning. The artist’s 2005 debut, a collection of his previous EP releases titled Be With, was one of the records to signal the Stones Throw label’s stylistic expansion which would culminate in the release of a record like James Pants‘ Welcome earlier this Summer. Out My Window is both a big step for the artist as an individual and another milestone in the label’s growth as well.

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For those not “in the know,” it will be Rosh Hashanah, or “Jewish New Year” as it’s known to the Gentiles, until sundown tomorrow.

Since I don’t currently have the cash to serve the usual meal of BBQ beef brisket, roasted red potatoes, carrot tzimmes and challah that my family has historically partaken in to celebrate I decided I’d use the occasion to do something a little different here at Blogarhythms.

So, instead of the usual one or two features I normally give you every day, today’s post will be a compilation of a number of random items that I’ve newly acquired, have been enjoying but just never got around to covering, or have been utterly neglecting ’round here.

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My friends and I ascribe to a little known doctrine called “The Dreadlock Theory” which states that any rapper who rose to prominence while sporting dreadlocks will, should they ever cut their locks, lose their artistic vigor. It’s far from scientific, and I won’t name any names, but an examination of the history of various bedreaded Hip-Hop heroes should be evidence enough to support our hypothesis.

Conversely, we hadn’t put much thought into the opposite; that a rapper not known for their knatty locks who suddenly grows some might in fact suffer similar reversal of artistic fortunes. That is, we hadn’t thought about it until one of our favorite emcees — Los Angeles native, member of the Log Cabin crew, 3 Melancholy Gypsies, the Living Legends & Felt, and founder of the Paid Dues Festival, the Mighty MURS — grew dreads. And not only did he grow them, he recorded a song about them as well!

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It was more than a year ago, during Summer ‘07, that I first had the itch to switch up the Records at Random posts I’d been doing every Friday. I own a ton of vintage vinyl, but I have even more CDs (they’re smaller and take up less space) in my collection, and I download a whole lot of music. As such, a good deal of my digital collection is made up of old-school classic, rare records ripped to MP3 and reissues or represses of albums. And last Summer a whole pile of crazy reissues happened to fall in my lap, inspiring me to do something I hadn’t originally intended to, add anything from my music library, whether it exists corporeally as discs made of black wax and shiny prismatic plastic or virtually on my hard drive as a series of 1’s and 0’s.

One of the albums I was tempted to write up at the time was the groundbreaking 1982 LP Big Science by avant-garde performance artist, poet and experimental electronic musician Laurie Anderson, which was re-issued in a fancy new edition by the Nonesuch Records label in June of ‘07. Far removed from the sort of breakbeat-overflowing (though it has been sampled a number of times) dancefloor-igniting crate classics and vinyl oddities I usually editorialize, Big Science was inspiring because of how it prefigured the future. And I know, it’s not unusual for people to describe electronic music as “futuristic” simply because it’s made using synthetic sounds and robotic rhythms that elicit visions of the smooth architecture, animated neon-glowing cityscapes, computer-integrated lifestyles, cybernetic technology and gravity defying floating vehicles of sci-fi films. But Big Science, much like the work of electric visionary Bruce Haack, doesn’t just sound like it originates from some not-too-distant date in the future, it quite literally predicted it, and in an almost shockingly practical way.

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If you live in the United States and were watching television last night chances are good you caught the address outgoing President George W. Bush gave on the state of the US economy. And if you saw his fumbling, uneasily delivered speech you’re now fully aware of the financial Armageddon that’s apparently lurking on the other side of his tenure as commander in chief.

Assuming your name isn’t John McCain you were probably all-too-familiar with the stark realities of our country’s economy already. I know I am. I have been for quite some time. I already lived through a foreclosure. I’ve known the score on predatory lenders and the way financial institutions deal in debt for over a decade. I’ve been homeless. I’ve seen schools and libraries in my city shuttered for lack of funds. I knew, and still know, how it feels to be so broke you don’t know if you’re going to be able to cover the cost of bills or the basic expenses of life any given month.

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Since my club-going career started when I was about thirteen years old I probably have about a thousand anecdotes similar to the one I trotted out in yesterday’s post. But the sad thing is, since the incident in question, which occurred close to two years ago, I’ve been “clubbing” only a scant few times.

Perhaps it’s just old age setting in, but I only rarely seem to have the time, the money or the companionship on hand to make a night out happen these days. Then there’s the whole issue of finding nights I actually want to go to; where I’ll hear interesting music, the DJs aren’t self-important douchebags and I might actually meet some people who aren’t vacuous morons. One of the few occasions I went out since the “commercial for the death machine” incident that wasn’t to hear my good friend DJ12XU spin was to a short-lived Electro night at a club in nearby Northampton. They flip-flopped between a few different venues in the town before abandoning the Pioneer Valley altogether and setting up shop at a nightclub in some town I couldn’t locate on a map of the state if I tried.

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