I enjoyed Richard Hawley's mp3s so much I ordered 2 albums from amazon, but of course the mp3s were re-recorded especially for the website and they're wonderfully sparse and his voice gets drawn out a bit more than on the album versions. Never mind. Lowedges is still nice enough, and Coles Corner should be showing up sometime real soon, along with a couple of other things.

Jens Lekman is playing at the NSC on March the 11th, which might interfere with some peoples' reformed-Dinosaur Jr aspirations (though you could always see them the next night, too). I didn't make it to The Willard Grant Conspiracy last night, being at a group dinner.

I also finally received a copy of The Fall's most recent one, Fall Heads Roll - there's still a bit of energy in there, though I've heard better versions of Blindness - one courtesy of The Wire, another from an mp3 blog (probably SVC). None of it gets me going as much as, say, Mountain Energei did from the previous album, but I Can Hear the Grass Grow may yet...uh...grow on me.

You've probably already heard that Scott Walker has a new album called The Drift coming out on 4AD in May, leaving us another few months to wonder how it will compare to Tilt.

I got my (hot pink, as it turned out) FM3 Buddha Machine a few weeks back from Synaesthesia, but haven't yet spent enough time with it to say anything useful about it - it's kinda good to listen to while you work, though I felt I was kinda cheating by using the headphone jack.