TRACKLISTING
CD enclosed with the June 2004 print issue

1. The Walkmen—“The Rat”
2. The Gossip—“Fire/Sign”
3. The Mountain Goats—“Palmcorder Yajna”
4. Enon—“Shave”
5. I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness—“The Less You See”
6. The Books—“There Is No There”
7. The Buried Beds—“Camellia”
8. Beulah—“You’re Only King Once”
9. M. Ward—“Vincent O’Brien”
10. Papa M—“Flashlight Tornado”
11. Death Cab for Cutie—“Title and Registration”
12. Young People—“Ne’er Do Well”
13. TV on the Radio—“Dreams”
14. Tiny Hawks—“You Got the Right”
15. The Constantines—“On to You”
16. Ted Leo + Pharmacists—“Tell Balgeary, Balgury Is Dead”
17. Alec K. Redfearn and the Eyesores—“Mole”
18. Iron & Wine—“Jesus, The Mexican Boy”

In February I went to see the Gossip and Young People with a friend of mine named Steve, who had just gotten out of rehab, and who was wrestling with the soft, quasi-religious rhetoric of AA in order to control a very real and threatening addiction to alcohol that had made a hard friend of him in the past. He was nervous and reserved on the ride out to the club, wholly unlike the person I knew before, who spent his nights at rock shows, perpetually wasted, hooting and heckling between every song, making out with random people, breakdancing. I was relieved, at first, by his change in demeanor; I prefer to enjoy my rock with as little peripheral, unpredictable activity as possible, and Old Steve made this impossible.

We got to the show just as Young People were starting up, playing to a nearly empty club. Their latest record, War Prayers, is a collection of tense, semi-spastic hymns, as if performed by Patsy Cline, Thurston Moore, and the ghost of a Baptist preacher. Live, the songs took on a new urgency. Steve was impressed. When the first song ended, he shouted, “I like Young People! Bring the Rock!” again and again, pumping his fist like a trucker. The words sailed haltingly and erratically from his mouth—there was something forced in his delivery, like something synthetic and angular was lodged deep in his throat. He seemed interested in discovering whether he could still act up without being wasted, and, finding that he couldn’t, at least not with the same offhanded fluidity, he became frustrated and sad. He looked like he’d lost his arms, or the ability to smell. A couple people turned around, giving him a look. I felt the old conflict rising up in me. I wanted to defend his enthusiasm, the tireless work he did for rock, but I also wanted to hide behind the soundboard until the end of the show, or maybe the end of the decade. I mean, the rest...