The Batlord

Tell me you can't get down with "Margaritaville" or "Cheeseburger in Paradise" when you're drunk in a bar in the summer. Especially if there's a beach in your line of sight. Jimmy is just so inoffensive that you can't actually hate him, and in the right mood, it's relaxing, feel good music, like watered down reggae for crackers who don't like reggae.

As opposed to other dad not-rock like Elton John or Billy Joel, who have no place or time for the most part.

That's pretty much what I'd call Jimmy Buffet TBH: not-reggae for white people who aren't dreadlock-wearing stoners.

I can never make up my mind up about this album. I was listening to it last night, and I can dig it for that first track, cause there's that pulsing, cascading rhythm that's oddly beautiful, and there's always something new happening that catches your ear, before dying a quick death, only to be replaced by something else in your other ear (when on headphones). So for a while it's... I won't say great or anything, but at least it's engaging (even for a Philistine like me).

But I can only focus on it for so long, and then it just starts making me feel claustrophobic. About halfway through the second track (forty minutes or so in) I had to turn it off, cause it was making me feel genuinely queasy. I like music that can provoke non-positive emotions, and even psychosomatic reactions, but I can only take so much of it, depending on the reaction. (That's actually the only the reason I can take Merzbow on the odd occasion I can quasi-enjoy him; the mid-nineties stuff I've heard from him is so sonically all-consuming that it overwhelms the thoughts in your brain, both conscious and subconscious, somehow quieting your mind, almost like reverse meditation.)

Still, I'm happy that Metal Machine Music exists (much like almost all of Diamanda Galas' music). In a way, it's actually more intense than a lot of Merzbow, just because so much is happening at any one time, and even though it kind of bleeds together, if you're actively listening to it, it never seems to repeat itself.


Edit: I think I might start my own Love/Hate kind of thread, just for recs of avant garde stuff that I would otherwise never listen to. Give me all the **** that Trollheart tells people not to send him, regardless of whether or not you think I might enjoy it. You and Grindy would get your evil thrills out of it, I imagine.

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