So You Used to be a Surfer in Huntington Beach

Holy Casey Royer, punk man, D.I. is back! Well, Ok, maybe it's just their smack-sodden spirit, but here it is, the music of my formative years played enthusiastically and with great vigor by four young dudes from, wait, that can't be right- New York? I could have sworn this came straight outta Huntington, what with the apocalyptic nuclear annihilation lyrics and the wannabe ghoulish guitar that sounds like a Fullerton mini-mall  and those singalong background vocals on the choruses and Johnny's got a problem and he's outta control and note the poor punctuation as we swing back on the pendulum to the dumbass music of our youth that gave us so much pleasure and led to so many bad decisions (dagger earring, I still love you) and no matter how hard we feign maturity by putting unplayed jazz records on the shelves, that old bitch hippocampus speaks to good buddy amygdala and sense memory meets emotion and here come the images of the PCH at night, stopping for twelve-packs of Schaeffer and a slice on the way to some horrible venue where Social Distortion, The Adolescents, Doggy Style, Youth Brigade, and fourteen other crop-haired young bands would get on stage and snarl and prowl and otherwise act all punky and we in our deep intoxication would smash into one another at high speeds and fall down and then wallow in the brotherhood of that outstretched hand and up we'd pop for the next tour and boy did I have to fake any connection to these people but release sweet release and sometimes the band would find it and by miracle they'd be in tune and, well, memory lane can be a funny old street.  Any band that delivers a time machine to that video arcade where the pock-marked acid dealer offered 14 hours of reality variety is a band worth keeping in the keep pile.

Just because

Missing Monuments- Painted White

Missing Monuments is the new King Louie thang, and it's a pleasant romp through ten pop songs, but   there ain't no 'Gypsy Switch' here, so it's a bit of a letdown. For those not following at home, his majesty put out a record several years ago called Memphis Treet with one killer song on it (and several excellent ones) that trumped anything I'd heard from him on the pop tip (The Persuaders and Kajun SS being whole other things) and hopefully not everything to come. He's a big boy, and I hope he takes care of himself, cuz great pop writers don't come around the block every hangover morning. Anyway, this is fine, but nothing really gets you singing along or tapping your toes with any urgency.  I root for the guy- his voice is endearingly underdog.  But most of these riffs are, in the inimitable words of Lars Ulrich in Some Kind of Monster, stock.  It's nice background music for your coffee and Halloween candy before another day at the gulag, but I doubt I'd pull it out for the late-night shriekalong, and I don't catch myself humming along at odd moments of the day.

Total Control- Henge Beats

Eddy Current is arguably my favorite new band from the last five years, and that the guitarist is breaking out in such successfully divergent ways is akin to what happened after the Oblivians split- even more great music and from different angles. Total Control is channeling influences probably too obscure for my rock-heavy shelves, but snatches of Gary Numan and  Joy Division  and Kraftwerk, with a healthy helping of several eras of Wire, make this sound sketchy on paper, at least if I were reading that description. It's a whole 'nother thing in the air, though, as this dude and his friends make it work, no matter how many left turns they take in mood and style from song to song. It's synth-heavy, yea, but the boy has groove in the blood, and if you dug some of the more atmospheric stuff on the last ECSR, this offers fascinating strands expanding in unexpected directions. Gloomy Curtisian atmospherics, OK, but with the right parts to keep things moving through the existential angst.  Old tricks made new again- that's a good thing when it works.

OBN IIIs- The One and Only

These guys sound like they discovered Back to the Grave and Aussie punk at the same time and had a hell of a party while they tried to channel their influences into a Texas  free-for-all. What a good time this record is- plenty of variety and plenty of hooks to go with the p-time energy.  Singalong choruses! Signature breaks! Collect 'em all! I want to leave for Austin in the morning, where I once fell in love with a girl on the street and as she glided away into the dark Texas night I could see my youth evaporating in her wake.  This record sounds like the moment before she left, when possibility still hung in the air like the cheap lying dream of a better day.

Hipster City- Portland, Ore

I took the fam with me for a 4-day biz trip to Oregon. I came away really impressed by the Beaver state. People are nice, the beer is AMAZING, and Portland is a fun town. In between business meetings, Liz and I hung out in the Pearl district with our girls. The neighborhood was crawling with foodie shops, brew pubs and 20- somethings with scary tattoos. I also hit an amazing small record store called 2nd Avenue Records filled with great vinyl. I bought a Bobby Fuller live lp and and a Them record. Both are excellent garage-y, guitar-driven things.

On the way out of town we passed a #Occupy Portland protest. I am really excited about this movement, so I hopped out of the car to take this pic. In the two minutes I was gone, a traffic cop almost ticketed me for being in a police zone and having expired license plates. Amazingly, though, he let us go. Such a cool cop tempered my stick-it-to-the-man ethos and made me like Portland even more.

Mott the Hoople- the Hoople

I've always rooted for Ian Hunter. I don't know why.  Second-rate rock stars evoke something in me I'd prefer not to explore, the recesses of those parts of the psyche holding uncomfortable mysteries no man ought to ponder, especially eight drafts in.  I was buying Ian Hunter solo records before I knew who Gene Clark was. I used to lay on my dorm room bed with the lights out listening to "Reckless Youth" without irony.  Maybe it's that glorious head of hair, which can only elicit something like awe in those with the baby-thin strands of an early combover contemplator.  Perhaps it was the early Bowie obsession, the hero refusing "Suffragette City" but generously offering "All the Young Dudes," bestowing fame upon minions with the wave of his glittered wand.  Maybe it was that fleeting crush on Corey Hart. Needless to say, no abode of mine has ever been without plenty of Hunter-led records, but I didn't have this one, which, upon multiple listenings, has not exactly left me aurally bereft. Like all 70s rock records, your hits lead each side ("The Golden Age of Rock 'n' Roll" and "Born Late '58"), and Ian and his foppy laddies even manage one more, the album-closing "Roll Away the Stone," deep questions of sin and redemption never far from a mind that once penned the anthem, "Jerkin Crokus." But that's mostly it. A second-rate Mott is a pleasure, albeit a minor one, like Sierra Nevada or calimari. I wouldn't say no in the desert, but this is the rain forest, gentlemen.