Lights on the highway

Night Highway, Orvar Atli Thorgeirsson

Soft Soft War - The Hotel Alexis

This song has circled me (or I have circled it) for weeks since I heard it on Paper Thin Walls. Like a smiling wolf, like a charming serial killer (have I ironically watched too many Lifetime movies, or is there any other kind?) asking if I'd like a ride in its convertible. It's still an enigma, but my gut says the stranger's intentions aren't honest: Will she come willing/Or should I drag her down. But those sweet doo doo doos and that satisfied sigh of pedal steel -- they're warm, clean sheets turned back and I'm oh so tired. And the dream of lighted highways wreathing dark towns is a deep and perfect sleep.

Preorder Goliath, I'm On Your Side with coordinating t-shirt from Broken Sparrow Records.
The Hotel Alexis' Myspace.

Sheost - Theo Angell

No no. No menace here. Just boisterous games. Voices volleying like balls off handball court walls, colliding and repelling. Arms-out dash-and-grab tag on wide lawns. Bobbing matches of Marco Polo in indoor pools. Vast, reverberating and inarticulate as joy. The entire, very unusual Theo Angell album, Dearly Beloved (Amish Records, eMusic), is a shiny, messy magpie nest of appropriated and recontexualized folk sources: jittery bluegrass banjo stomps, sad acoustic guitar sobs, faux-innocent gospel gestures, sweetly sung trad-English airs. The above song isn't representative; each is its own rough, hand-carved figure.

And:

Some hahas in Bookslut's January issue: The worst book covers of 2006. (Why is it, I wonder, that awful book sleeves are almost always worse than awful album art, which can be very awful indeed?) And good news for Chicago residents/bookish types -- the reading series at the Hopleaf recommences January 17!