a day late: heatmiser

Yesterday I got no phone calls on my show, but played a bunch of Heatmiser for Elliot Smith's birthday. I never got into his solo stuff, but I dig his grunge band where he split songwriting duties with Neil Gust a whole lot, especially 'Dead Air,' that first record. A certain pretentious former professor chastised me over my love of that compared to the less heavy offerings that came later, but he also likes all that twee indie stuff so I'd venture to say he's wrong. None of the English major hipsters liked it either, my roommates were ambivalent, but I find myself coming back to these albums for a quick sonic sugar rush cut through with misanthropy.

 I don't know why this didn't get bigger, because the songwriting is solid, the guitars have a pleasing crunch that would have slid in easily next to both Fugazi and the Foo Fighters, maybe Gust's orientation was a bigger deal back then than now (considering that Torche has had a greater degree of success mining the same thematic territory).  No one else seems to share this opinion, but it is what it is. I prefer power chords to Beatle-worship I guess.

escapism

Ended up going to the movie theater with a couple homies last night to watch things blow up and see Fair Clevelandia laid waste by demigods. My sister laughs at me, because I never go to movies and hardly watch any but it was a good giant piece of explosive fluff and pleasantly undark, and we sat through innumerable previews making snarky comments and seeing the ads for the military inserted between shootemup summer blockbusters makes me realize how messed up we are as a country and I drive home more tired than I thought I'd be, trying to figure out the tangle in my brain, why it seems like everything seems to dead end so quickly..

The family's out of town, I've got some people coming over for dinner, and there's a part of me that feels a little nervy even though there's no reason to. Fits of extreme introversion always seem to come at such inconvenient times.