by JAY WATTS III

For the bearded music dweebs who have no love of gigantic swashes of dissonance, instead preferring their acid freak-outs manifested in forms mammalian and forest-dwelling, there are pretty much two respectable figureheads in the game. The campfire wailings of Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear, who mine the rich sounds ’n’ lore of psych in a slightly more subdued manner, and have now found a home with, strangely enough, Warp Records. (That record, Yellow House, was just released on Sept. 5.)

For ample evidence, and some guilt-free downloading, Kingston bloggers B(oot)log offer not one but two sets from a BBC appearance earlier this year. The first is an acoustic performance in Brighton on Sept. 8, while the second is the more amped-up of the two, recorded a couple of days later, and features my personal fave “On a Neck, On a Spit.” The Brooklyn boys will be up here in the middle of October for a performance, where I assume super-fan and accomplice Owen “Final Fantasy” Pallet will be performing with them (he arranged some of the strings on the album, and has been acting as an online guerrilla publicist). The URL is http://bootlog.wordpress.com/2006/09/17/ grizzly-bear-bbc6-music-8-sept-2006bbc-radio-1-14-sept-2006/, but you should check out some of the previous posts, including an Ottawa set by Sunset Rubdown.

Http://bumrocks.com is the online equivalent of that cool, strange mixtape you found in your sister’s room after she left for college. Lacking any writing other than artists’ names and song titles, the daily mp3 posts produce, in me, nervous Googling after biographical details about some of the esoteric shit he posts. You can still take a look at the longer back catalogue for the site—noting the evolution from new wave and art punk to hip hop, to a more recent obsession with Italo disco that seems to have been superceded by afro-new-wave and pop hits, such as a more recent post, “Masimbabele” by lost-in-the-stacks Rough Traders the Unknown Cases, which is an ideal blueprint for the next LCD Soundsystem single.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN SONTAG goldkicks@gmail.com

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