Of course, now I've got to find my Game Theory comp which was not conveniently filed in the G section. It's probably snuggled up with a stack of other guitar pop in the nerdhole.

There's no need to go to all that trouble. A 15,000 word essay on it would do just as well.

Sorry I've been weird today. This massive editing project is eating at me, and it's been a pretty bad week overall. Today, I spent the afternoon feeling my brain implode from the sheer amount of data manipulation I had to do to come up with a reasonable faculty count. But the wife finished the second novel, hurrah.

Anyway, did anyone else get the More Like The Moon MP3s Wilco offered to people who bought Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? If so, why was "More Like The Moon" (the "title track" to the virtual EP) left off YHF and not recycled for A Ghost Is Born? I guess, moodwise, it doesn't fit either album. But it's damn pretty.

The iPod has been in a Wilco mood today.

OK, I sent Beach State Rocking to buffistarawk at gmail dot com

... to which I'd still like the password... someone? anyone?

Thanks, dw

Bicyclops rocks!

And I'm on the DVD documenting the tour.

I have that! Where are you?

Near the beginning of the DVD, you can see our dog Prince modeling the Loud Family t-shirt and giving Alison Faith Levy a doggie smooch. Later on, during the segment with the fan interviews, you can see Prince again sitting between Gil & me as I blather on about hearing Game Theory for the first time.

Hec, bicyclops - That made my day. Thanks.

Anyway, did anyone else get the More Like The Moon MP3s Wilco offered to people who bought Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? If so, why was "More Like The Moon" (the "title track" to the virtual EP) left off YHF and not recycled for A Ghost Is Born? I guess, moodwise, it doesn't fit either album. But it's damn pretty.

Yeah, I really like that song, too, as well as the alternate version of "Handshake Drugs."

Speaking of "More Like The Moon," I stumbled on the Pitchfork review:

"More Like the Moon", on the other hand, is an extremely straightforward purty ballad, with extended near-Flamenco picking lending the track a Chi-Chi's-style ambience. Yeah, it's somewhat moving and hardly faultable, but the bar is set too high now for Wilco to coast like they do here, restricting drummer Glenn Kotche to a first-day-of-drum-school beat and key-man Leroy Bach to gentle organ fills.

....

If you find the whole effort a tad bit underwhelming, there may be good reasons why ... More Like the Moon sounds like Wilco cleaning out their fridge, even though it's only 33% leftovers. It's not that the sextet of material here plants any seeds of doubt about the band's future trajectory-- road-tested tracks like "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" indicate there's plenty o' future to be excited about-- it's just that this release is less a tease for what lies ahead than an audit of last year's receipts.

But you can easily forgive More Like the Moon for being a bit of a dry-hump....

All the same, my drunken YHF ramblings stay retired, replaced by an even more ludicrous sermon about how The Rapture are going to reinvent indie music based around the mere two songs I've heard from their upcoming full-length.... Still, More Like the Moon is far too safe a play to keep that momentum rolling between full-lengths, and fails to rise above the fan-club gift bonus it is.

Sometimes I read Pitchfork reviews and wonder if this is what happened to the Soviet music press in the post-Cold War days. (The music reviews in the Soviet press were heavily influenced by what the party felt about the composer that week. Shostakovich would get blasted in the press for a symphony that was too "Western" and not "Russian" enough, then on the next symphony be chided for being too traditionally Russian. Sometimes they'd rip him in two papers for opposing things.) They really do have a party line.

And that's different from almost every other rock critic how?