this post took three hours to write

(It shouldn’t have.)

Well, I’ve moved to Atlanta, the bustling cul­tural cap­ital of the south­east. There have been shows galore: Sufjan, Band of Horses, (smog), Ladytron, etc etc. I’ve seen none of them. Since I’m without a car for the moment, the com­mute to GPHQ is a bit of a bitch, too. I can imagine how awful it must be for Niina. Joel is busy and still hard at work on his July mix, which ought to be a fucking rev­e­la­tion. Mike… well, we haven’t seen him for months and there’s this odd smell coming from his corner of the office. None of us have worked up the gump­tion to look over his cubicle wall. Maybe he just left some French cheese sit­ting out.

So, despite having an unprece­dented amount of time on my hands these days I’ve all but become a ghost on the old girl­pants (ghost­pants?). Why is this? I could hardly say. There’s def­i­nitely been a dearth of inter­esting new music for the last month or so. Maybe it’s just that every­thing I hear lately pales in the shadow of the new of Mon­tréal album. Seri­ously, what a stroke of genius that thing is.

Anyway, a couple of records have man­aged to break through the funk. They aren’t Hissing Fauna–level rev­e­la­tions, but they’re catchy enough. I guess. One of them is (…And You Will Know Us By the) Trail of Dead’s new album So Divided. The other is the Per­nice Brothers’ new one, Live a Little. Both bands are coming off of some­what dis­ap­pointing last albums (Worlds Apart and Dis­cover a Love­lier You, respec­tively).

So Divided (pre-order) expands on the oper­atic prog ambi­tions of Worlds Apart while mostly ditching the over the top quasi-Egyptian choral chanting stuff that gave me so many gig­gles. It also ditches a lot of the more straight ahead rock (like the tit­ular “Worlds Apart,” which was a damn great song despite its ridicu­lous lyrics) for more expan­sive and exploratory noodling. The jangly, vaguely 60’s-ish “Eight Day Hell” is about as poppy as it gets, and while they take it down a notch for “Gold Heart Moun­taintop Queen Direc­tory” (a rather unex­pected Guided By Voices cover) the majority of the album is com­prised of sprawling, mul­ti­par­tate (there’s a SAT word) rock suites.

The Per­nice Bros., mean­while, haven’t really made any great styl­istic leaps with Live a Little (buy). If you’ve heard one of their records before, you’ve pretty much heard this one. With a lot of bands, that’d be if not a neg­a­tive thing at least a note of cau­tion. But the Per­nice Bros. make such pleasant music that it’s hard to crit­i­cise them for sticking with what works. “Cru­elty to Ani­mals” is at least as catchy as any­thing from the last few albums, and album-opener “Automaton” is the most Zombies-ish song I’ve heard since the last time I lis­tened to Odessey and Oracle.

Niina and I have just hatched a plan for a megamix to get us back on track, so keep checking back for that one. I hear the sounds of mid-90s mid­western emopop coming from Joel’s cubicle, so maybe we’ll get a mix from him soon, too. See you later, and stay sweet.