Guided By Voices' Human Amusements at Hourly Rates is the kind of compilation every house should have. It's got everything you could want in a GBV best-of, except maybe It's Like Soul Man, but I'll cope - considering the back-catalogue of songs, it's a surprisingly good cross-section. It rocks, it's quirky, it covers the lo-fi days and the "produced" days. I bought one for my sister already, Just To Be Sure. I'm not obsessed or anything. Honest.

In a completely different world, there's a very nice new Sakamoto compilation out, which has a bonus DVD featuring 5 tracks. 2 or 3 of them were from live performances back in the 80's, around the Neo Geo period, when he still looks so young - compare to now - what happened in the past 15 years? At what point did he start to look his age? Somewhere around Beauty (which seemed to be the basis of all the Japanese music used in Japanese Story, I noticed)? When I bought the CD in Basement Discs, I mentioned to the woman behind the counter that I regretted missing his 1996 Melbourne appearance. She told me how it was during his blond hair phase (so it was), and while playing Forbidden Colours he almost looked like David Sylvian. How curious.