Temptation to Exist
Andrew W.K., 2026
In these early days of a post-BrooklynVegan world, who knows how long it would have taken for me to catch wind of Temptation to Exist, today’s surprise release from your best friend and mine, Andrew W.K., but thankfully my buddy Smo informed me via text early this afternoon, and I was spinning said release forthwith. Ever since Andrew cancelled all tour dates and deleted his website and social media almost immediately after releasing his last album five years ago, I’ve frequently wondered why he vanished and what was next for him, and while I wouldn’t have guessed it would be a collection of cinematic jazz instrumentals, my fascination with the guy and his many idiosyncrasies runs too deep for me to have been shocked. It’s not the kind of thing I necessarily wanted from him, and I probably wouldn’t listen to it if someone else had made it, but of all the dumb things one might do after marrying into Hollywood, it somehow seems perfectly natural that Andrew W.K. should pivot from his trademark high-octane party rock to a series of compositions evoking a shelved David Lynch noir scored by Bernard Herrmann and Henry Mancini. These referents oversell the album, to be sure, but I could see it catching the ear of a certain kind of filmmaker, and it must be said that it’s a far more listenable outing than Andrew’s unmemorable prior diversion, 2009’s 55 Cadillac. And in a true up-is-down moment, the maximalist-in-chief even squeezes in an homage to minimalist icon Steve Reich! It’s not the euphoric thing a more traditional A.W.K. record might have been, but all told, it’s a weird and pleasant surprise.
More music posts
Hype!
The interviews get pretty repetitive in this rock doc about the post-“Smells Like Teen Spirit” feeding frenzy in Seattle, but they’re well worth sitting through for the film’s treasure trove of live footage of a ton of great bands from the scene who never hit the big time. Oddly enough, for as much as Hype! is about the Pacific Northwest, its most memorable moment for me is a bunch of Japanese rockabilly dudes with comically… See more →
Wrong
Look, I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, but a carefully coordinated effort by the international punk intelligentsia to keep me in the dark is the only explanation I see for why it took 37 years for this incredible album to find its way to me. Nomeansno has been on my radar since the early ’90s, when they appeared on Alternative Tentacles’ Virus 100 compilation, and their committed a cappella cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Forward to Death”… See more →
Jack
It bothers me that I can’t remember exactly when and where I met Jack. I’m usually pretty good about that. It was probably 2007-ish, probably at SXSW or An Event Apart. I was going to a lot of conferences back then, meeting all kinds of web people from all over the place, and Jack was a web person, though we didn’t talk about the web all that much once we found other things we had… See more →
V7: Say hello to my listening diary
Monthly reports of my most-played music, going back to 2005
After finally completing the gargantuan task of manually adding metadata to thousands of my old tweets so they could be more integrated with the rest of my site, I wanted to keep the momentum going. So I turned to the last large personal data source that was still missing from my site: Last.fm, a service for tracking and sharing the music you listen to. As of a few days ago, I’ve been a Last.fm user… See more →
Tortoise
My first Tortoise show since I very belatedly learned that Doug McCombs’s distinctive secret weapon is the unassumingly mighty Fender Bass VI.
Eno
It’s still a sad mystery how the Philly screening(s?) of Eno, a groundbreaking documentary about famed musician and producer Brian Eno, came and went early last year without crossing my radar. I’ve met the filmmakers, Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes, on various occasions in the past and would have loved to say hi and get eyes on Brain One, the generative engine they built for the film, with hardware designed by Teenage Engineering. As the… See more →
Murder in the Front Row: The San Francisco Bay Area Thrash Metal Story
None of the tunes and few of the faces and stories in this doc will be unfamiliar to thrash aficionados, but as someone who always felt a strong connection to the music and no connection at all to the beer-soaked mayhem that fueled it, I was most interested in the glancing references made to the adults in the room, some of whom were new to me. Metal Blade Records honcho Brian Slagel; Ruthie’s Inn proprietor/promoter… See more →