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scorning or ignoring him all the while I lived in Austin -- a shaggy pop dude with an amplified acoustic guitar playing Pixies-ish (once and always: fuck the Pixies), no thanks. Listener's note: Series of Sneaks, which has some of my favorite Spoon songs, sounds like comparative shit, blame producer John Croslin or give even more credit to Spoon drummer, Jim Eno than you already should. Not only does Eno swing like a monster (a rarity that), but whatever he's doing in his home studio, he should be strongly encouraged to do more it: both Girls Can Tell and Kill The Moonlight sound fantastic, a fact which makes soaking the floor and multiple towels in sweat pedaling absolutely fucking nowhere a slightly less enervating way to spend 35-40 minutes (once in rare while an hour) a night.

Speaking, slowly, slowly, slowly and rather softly as well, of enervation, lemme say a word or umpty-three about Stars of the Lid. Make that The Tired Sounds of the Stars of the Lid and let it not be said these guys don't have a sense of humor. Anyway, the last straight job I worked in Austin was in the classical department at Tower. Besides getting to bullshit music and play cds all afternoon and night (for a princely wage of $5 hour), the best part of the job was the girls -- what better, easier way to talk someone up than to listen to and enthuse about the orchestral works of Anton Bruckner or Frederick Delius, Handel opera or Franz Schubert and the sublime? I can't recall, it could have been Schubert although not the west Austin nanny/Shakespeare-at-Winedale gal (she played Stephano in The Tempest). I fell in love with the moment she started humming me the second movement from Schubert's piano Trio No. 1 in B flat major. In any case, this girl was blonde and pretty and didn't seem to think it overly weird I was reading Ezra Pound and studying ancient greek at the register, it turned out she'd studied latin herself, right on. One the great fleeting sorrows of that fall was that while I managed to get her number, almost as soon as I did so her boyfriend and a pal of theirs also showed up. (Uh-oh.) I cooled it somewhat in disappointment but learned that one of them dudes was in Windsor for the Derby or Stars of the Lid or fuck knows what band.

Six years later: it must have been Stars of the Lid because how else could I have been so goddamn startled to see a triple lp by the band on a hot and hazy early summer afternoon? I had no idea what the hell it'd sound like but anything that could so quickly remind me of that blonde latin gal, her brown corduroy pants and green cardigan sweater, scuffed up boots, so yeah. I'll bite and... and... and... uh, well, it's six sides of mostly soft, sweeping moodscapes that don't resemble Schubert in the least. Satie maybe a little and in spirit, Morton Feldman maybe a little more. It's quite accomplished and if you listen very closely, it's not nearly as soothing as it first seems. Song titles like "Requiem for Dying Mothers," "Austin Texas Mental Hospital" and the charming "The Lonely People (Are Getting Lonelier)" suggest some of the tumult that lurks between

Spring 2003 29

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