Counter-Currents
2,252 words
In rock ’n’ roll it wasn’t the winners but the losers who made for the most compelling stories. — English rock journalist Nick Kent
You’ve been chosen as an extra
In a movie adaptation
Of the sequel to your life.
— Pavement, “Shady Lane”
What exactly happened to rock music? Where did it disappear to, storming off like that? Maybe it’s just a function of age, and I associate rock with my youth, and so that explains my long-lingering affection. The wonderful tribal rituals of seeing bands and buying records, sitting with your mates in someone’s bedroom listening to Bowie or The Clash on a crappy stereo system, or piling on the train with the same mates to go up to town and see Floyd or The Stones. You hadn’t yet shaved, but you had seen The Who, Thin Lizzy, and Alice Cooper (the Welcome to my Nightmare tour, also in ’75, one of the best gigs I have ever seen).
One thing that could be said about ‘70s rock music is that it was a lot more affordable then. When I was growing up, inflation hit the British male working class hardest, with beer and football becoming disproportionately expensive. Later, the entrepreneurial class discovered a new revenue stream: live rock music. That was where the money was. And it still is, just even more so.
In 1975, aged 14, I saw Led Zeppelin. The ticket cost me £2.50, or $3.20 — the equivalent of £10.73 today, or a little under $14. It was my pay for two newspaper rounds on a Sunday. So, this is one of the most famous rock bands in history at the height of their powers, and that was what it cost a suburban London boy to see them live. If Zep were time-warped here today and played Earl’s Court or Madison Square Garden, do we imagine tickets would give us change from 15 bucks?
When Bruce Springsteen played his runs on Broadway five years ago, ticket prices actually dropped between 2018 and 2019 — yeah, dropped from $508.93 to $506.39. In 2020, it would have set you back an average of $337.43 to catch Lady Gaga’s act, should you have so wished. You would have been in pocket if you’d gone to see Metallica instead, who were charging a hundred bucks less.
Live music today is a financial orgy that would have made Peter Grant — Led Zeppelin’s thuggish manager who first got the idea that live music was a cash cow — salivate. Music magazine Loudwire gives an average price for “classic rock” gigs at $119.14 a ticket three years ago, and I don’t imagine prices have gone down since, despite The Boss and his two-buck, index-linked reduced tariff. Hail, hail rock and roll — if you can afford it. When I was younger, we could.
One morning in 1992 I awoke in a Brighton apartment (that’s the Brighton on the south coast of England, not the one on Coney Island). It was my apartment –always a bonus waking up there in those days — and I found myself conveniently ready-dressed for my busy day. Going through the detritus in my pockets from the night before, I found a crumpled ticket (sadly, I forget the price) to see a band playing at one of the little beach-front venues that night. Why had I bought this ticket? Who on Earth were Pavement?
You can buy J. A. Nicholl’s short story collection Venus and Her Thugs here.
Pavement formed in 1989 in Stockton, California with founder member and singer/guitarist Steve Malkmus having been something of a jock at school rather than the bookish existentialist you might expect from his lyrics. He cited Hendrix and punk as his initial influences, and school friend and co-founder Scott Kannberg agreed on the punk and added a love for electronic music to the band’s dynamic.
After their first EP, Slay Tracks: 1933-1969, got good press, Pavement were briefly the bright lights of indie rock. To give a perspective on their standing then (if you are old enough to get the references), they were on the 1995 Lollapalooza tour with Sonic Youth, Beck, Hole, Cypress Hill, and the recently deceased Sinéad O’Connor. Pavement made five studio albums and various EPs, had a chaotic but charming live act (if a rock band can be charming), and were quite neatly summed up by the LA Times at the time: “While Nirvana introduced punk to the mainstream with pop, Pavement meshes catchy melodies with experimental noise for the average kid who didn’t attend art school.”
Malkmus drifted around middle-class pursuits in the ‘80s, reading a history degree, working as a radio DJ, and writing lyrics for unwritten songs until he met Bob Nastanovich, and Pavement were born after some early prototypes. Malkmus cites his influences then as REM, New Order, and Echo and the Bunnymen, whose song “The Killing Moon” they have covered.
There are a few bands I have fallen in love with the first time I saw them, and knowing nothing of their music before seeing them. The Stranglers, Echo and the Bunnymen, A Hawk and a Hacksaw all qualify, but Pavement had a goofy lo-fi charm which worked on me straight away. They looked as though they were quite happy to be there, playing for a few dozen students, but hadn’t really prepared and hoped we didn’t mind. The song “Type Slowly” typifies the band, sounding as it does as if they were making it up as they go along. At one point during the gig, a girl next to me was eating toast. I noticed the drummer leaning down to the floor — sometimes even between songs — and giving slices out to the audience from a toaster he had by the drumkit. I never got any but, as the young people say, I totally got the band.
Pavement received a $1,500 advance from New York’s Matador Records for their first album, Slanted and Enchanted. They parted company with drummer Gary Young (he of toast fame) on good terms, albeit due to his erratic and drunken behavior (he would often get up from his drum-stool and go missing during gigs), and their critical response waned as their indie fame rose following their rightly acclaimed second album (and one of the best titles of any rock album), Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Also, no American band is complete without a feud with another band — take Lynyrd Skynyrd and Neil Young as your starting-point — and Malkmus chose Smashing Pumpkins, whom he referenced in the country-tinged single “Range Life”:
Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins.
Nature kids, well they don’t have a function.
I don’t understand what they mean
And I couldn’t really give a fuck.
The always irascible singer of Smashing Pumpkins, Billy Corgan, was not amused. Although I liked the Pumpkins’ album Siamese Dream, and they were a great live band I saw at Brixton’s Academy, Corgan probably envied Malkmus’ lyrical expressionism, and a don’t-care attitude his own band — riven as many bands are by heroin — and his own lyrics could not match.
Malkmus’ lyrics are generally woven from a string of non-sequiturs from which a story occasionally emerges. Here are my top ten Pavement songs, with sample lyrics for your delectation:
From their first album, Slanted and Enchanted (one I played all that summer), Pavement were still raw in sound and technique, but Summer Babe from the album gave them their first indie hit, and their off-kilter lyrics made each song a little mystery:
I’ve been crowned the king of id,
And id is all we have, so wait
To hear my words, and they’re diamond-sharp.
The song opens with what sounds like the band unsuccessfully tuning their guitars, then stumbles into a grungy riff that might have come from 1970s psychedelia. It’s a jaded, faded lyric, teen angst seen from a skewed angle:
Come on now, talk about your family.
Your sister’s cursed, your father’s old and damned, yeah.
Silent kid, don’t listen to
Your grandmother’s advice about us.
The nearest to punk the band came, this perversely begins with a folky, scratchy electric guitar madrigal and a lyric concerned with what happens “when the world starts encroaching on your plans.” It is quite close to being lyrically understandable as it really is about embassies, as Malkmus explains that:
I wanted a visa
I bought off a geezer.
This very English phrase shows Malkmus’ fascination with the old country, and there was always a very obvious influence from The Fall, who I covered at Counter-Currents here. Mark E. Smith, The Fall’s much-missed (by me, at least) leader, was less than charitable when the English rock press made the comparison between Pavement’s sloppy sound and The Fall’s clattering chaos. “They can probably play all of In a Gadda da Vida,” said Smith dismissively, referring to a notorious 1968 prog-rock album by American band Iron Butterfly. Malkmus’ lyrics, like those of Smith, are tangential, and you have to tease out a storyline:
I need to get born, I need to get dead.
I’m sick of these forms, I’m sick of being misread
By men in dashikis with their Leftist weeklies.
Colonized wrath their shining new path.
The converted castle of Moorish design,
If you want to stay the weekend, well, we wouldn’t mind.
This song and “Newark Wilder” are slow and strangely sentimental, not a combination any of the grunge bands ever really achieved.
But your vulgar display caught me off guard.
Cold cold boy with American heart.
Gonna run in and lock up the shots again.
But Ann, don’t you cry.
It’s a love song with more than a touch of bitterness.
This is from the band’s third album, Wowee Zowee, which was panned critically, and I tend to agree. Malkmus said it was the first time he had written lyrics in the studio rather than driving around Stockton in his mother’s little German car singing along to his own demo tapes. The song noodles around in standard Pavement style until lurching into a lazy metal riff which is as close to a sneer as guitar music gets. It is also one of the few rock songs, I would imagine, ever to reference golf:
Loose like the wind, from the rough we get par.
Sleet city woman waiting to spar.
“Unfair”
This song is out of control from the start, my favorite type. It’s the perfect encore song, one after which the band could cheerfully smash up a guitar or two, although Pete Townshend of The Who set the bar for that particular act very high indeed. The lyrics are a curious tourist guide:
Up to the top of the Shasta Gulch
To the bottom of the Tahoe Lake.
Man-made deltas and concrete rivers.
The south takes what the north delivers.
It’s one of those thrashes that just takes a band over, careering to a halt not because it wants to end but because it has gone everywhere it can.
This drops you into some strange war zone, and features an outro which is pure Pavement, kiddie-chords played on two strings but building to a rackety crescendo.
Got struck by the first volley of the war
In the corps.
Never held my service.
Send ‘em a wire, give ‘em my best,
‘Cos ammunition never rests.
No one makes coffee.
No one wakes up.
One of Pavement’s goofily uplifting singles, along with “Carrot Rope” and “Range Life,” this still makes space for the lyric:
Show me a word that rhymes with “Pavement”
And I will kill your parents and roast them on a spit.
The video linked is like all Pavement videos, amateurish and dumb, and purposely so. This is a band who made a feature of crass slacker ideology.
“The Hexx”
I recall a conversation around 1980 in which a fellow student told me that the English band Bauhaus were “genuinely frightening.” What codswallop. Bauhaus were goth drag queens who relied heavily on singer Pete Murphy’s cheekbones to save them the bother of writing any songs. The single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” has somehow been elevated to an indie icon, when it actually sounds like a third-rate Joy Division covers band tuning up.
Pavement’s song “The Hexx,” on the other hand, is a frightening song and I can never quite put my finger on why.
Architecture students are like virgins
With an itch they cannot scratch.
Never build a building till you’re 50.
What kind of life is that?
The song, with its haunted guitar chimes lapsing into a sleazy, hoary old rock riff, also features the line that heads this piece;
You’re standing on the freeway in love,
Motion, you were destined for the pauper’s grave.
I have written about a number of bands here at Counter-Currents, but they have all been English. I like American post-punk rock and no mistake. Patti Smith, Television, New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, The Ramones, Velvet Underground, and later, Afghan Whigs, Come, Idaho. But on some days you’ll even catch me going back in time and listening to Neil Young or Creedence. But Pavement have always had a special place in the pantheon for me, ever since I wandered in to see them over 30 years ago. I love many rock bands, but with Pavement the love is tempered by a genuine affection. I’m glad I didn’t lose that ticket.
Pavement are most assuredly not everyone’s cup of tea, and if you like your American indie rock you will doubtless already know the band. If not, my recommendation is that you follow my practice: I listen to Pavement if I am either in an odd mood or want to be in one.
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22 comments
What an odd and interesting choice for a topic! Music itself has declined in not only monetary importance but also in the popular imagination. We will never see another mega rock band like the Beatles or Zep or the Stones, not to mention the excitement they generated. Yet another casualty of multi-culturalism (at least partially).
I liked the small handful of Pavement songs I heard as a young college age buck in the early 90s (although I liked the Pumpkins better, dammit). You mentioned the Afghan Whigs, which are my 2nd favorite band of all time (after Zeppelin, of course). Greg Dulli is a very predictable shitlib, but I love his music. Would love to read any articles you’ve written about them.
I met Greg Dulli a few times around 2002 when he was trying to put the moves on a girl I was dating who managed a nightclub in downtown Portland. He was one of the most abrasive and unlikable people I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting. He told me I looked like a serial killer. I agreed and told him that was the reason he’d better not push it. He didn’t push it.
Having said that, I’ve never heard an Afghan Whigs song, at least not consciously, and I’ve long felt that hard rock died long before the 1980s started. All of that “alternative” crap just sounds like whining in a blender. While I can appreciate the first couple Led Zeppelin albums, my heart will always be with Slade.
I met Greg Dulli a few times around 2002 when he was trying to put the moves on a girl I was dating who managed a nightclub in downtown Portland. He was one of the most abrasive and unlikable people I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting.
I’ve heard that about him, which is why I’ve never once opted for the “VIP” meet n greet option when going to a show of his. Never meet the artists you like.
I was eighteen when Mr. Bungle came to Omaha and was excited at the prospect of meeting Mike Patton. I went to the venue(The Ranch Bowl) promptly after school just to see if I could get the chance to see him. He was pushing a speaker past me and gave me a look like “Don’t even FUCKING think about it” and I wisely held my tongue. Definitely one of my top five shows of all time, but I think that may have been different if I had triggered a nasty reaction from him.
Dulli was notorious for being a pussy hound. Who wrote that song “No Thank You Mr Dulli? Was it Teenage Fanclub? he tried to chat up every bird he met. He tried to chat up the singer’s gal.
I for one would love to see you write about your musical interests, Mr. Goad. Or anything you like for that matter, not just the things you despise, though I suppose the former would be a rather more limited topic than the latter. I feel your writing would be wasted if it’s only spent on all the filth of the world.
On my weekly show “HARDBALLS” on Censored.TV, I do a segment called “Musical Justice” where I cover artists that I love but don’t feel got the attention they deserved. It’s a subscription-only site, but if you use the code “goad” to subscribe, you get a slight discount and it sends a message to keep the show on the air.
“What exactly happened to rock music? Where did it disappear to, storming off like that?”
My two cents’ worth (two penn’orth) . . . In the sixties, rock was the soundtrack accompanying the emerging counterculture. Revolution was in the air; taboos were being broken.
In today’s conformist zeitgeist, whites are reduced to listening to the din of the black ghetto to get a vicarious taste of rebellion. (Liberals subconsciously share the same ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ attitudes as we haters, so sub-Saharans are given a free pass to be crude. No-one seriously expects them to abandon their predilections for boasting, misogyny and violence.)
One thing that cannot be overstated is the demographic change of our youth.
While there have always been some white kids interested in rap, black kids rarely listen to rock.
Their race votes as a block, and they listen to music as a block.
Hence, whites split between hard rock, rap, pop, country and indie rock. And other minorities simply enjoy rap and rap-related pop, with the occasional Hispanic or Native American metalhead.
Great piece and great topic.
I love Pavement. They’re like a smarter, lackadaisical Weezer that are more consistent and melodic.
I only disagree with your assessment of Wowee Zowee, which I love.
Grounded, Grave Architecture and Kennel District are fantastic. And the aforementioned Rattled by the Rush is basically slacker Dancing Days.
If I have to pick their best song, it would be a toss-up between Frontwards and Gold Soundz.
You must be a musician. Dancing Days has exactly the same third to second you mention. How can you know this?
No, just a lover of early 90s rock.
That’s amazing that you got to see Led Zeppelin back in the day, and the ticket actually was affordable! Treasure the memory, sir.
Today’s musicians, unfortunately, are pricing themselves out of the market. There’s a vocalist that I like – her music isn’t my style, but she looks like an angel, and I’d attend just for that. The problem is that nosebleed seats to her concerts are $750 each. There are other things I’d rather do with that kind of swag.
Rock music was promoted by globalistic Jews and Leftists to destroy Western civilizations from within, to introduce drugs and promiscuity, to turn Western youth against their parents, and so on.
Pavement were very much part of indie culture where you ‘pay your dues’ on small record companies before getting big (if ever). The snooty culture certainly didn’t make concessions to mainstream trends or pressures to conform to any zeitgeist dictated by the media or politicians. Of course, this is completely the opposite of modern times. So I bet that many acts of that era, now in their 50s-60s, are not ‘woke’ in the least, even if they might be uncomfortable having a write up here. Pavement’s music is totally white. Describing it that way sounds horribly racist to many people, but should it? Nowadays the identity and political views of an artist are as important to many listeners as the music. Was Crass ever listenable?
You might expect Pavement listen to black artists doing something interesting (I do), but at one of their shows I don’t see them groveling and saying, now were going to do Sam Cooke covers because we’re against racist structures and the ghastly fortunes we’ve (not) made because of it.
The early Pavement releases owe a huge debt to the Fall, but they shifted direction some and carved out their own niche that wears its influences while also doing their own thing. Maybe Conduit for Sale sounds a bit too close to New Face in Hell, but more bands ought sound like the Fall anyhow. At least a couple of Pavement members went to UVA, a school pushing back on the excesses of woke better than many. Malkmus was a DJ there and was exposed to all sorts of music not embraced by the mainstream Kulture. Their legacy is based on merit and originality, a seemingly outmoded concept. Even if they weren’t so hot as a live show, their albums have enduring charms.
A few anecdotes might have some life-lessons buried in them. Their initial drummer, Gary Young, was a twice their age guy who recorded their early material in his studio amidst alcoholism. He was apparently unreliable and eccentric to mental and eventually sacked, ala Pete Best, for someone more with it (e.g not doing attention grabbing onstage handstands while the singer does a sensitive-guy ballad). The band took a little bit of the high road saying he quit but Young told other tales. Ironic that the first album and subsequent EP Watery, Domestic remain their best work. Some of the other band members struggle to make ends meet, too, and residuals from being cult heroes and occasional reunion shows doesn’t replace having a steady job.
If the band made cryptic insults to Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots in the Range Life, when heroin-addled Pilots singer, Scott Weiland, died young a few years back, Pavement issued an apology of sorts. Nowadays the Kulture demands excessive apologizing but that one seemed right. Those lyrical insults weren’t necessary and marred an otherwise perfect song. And at least Weiland was less sanctimonious than Sinead O’Connor.
When Pavement moved from an atom-sized to micro indie, Matador records, the old label begged for them not to leave. Malkmus explained, ‘they have a fax machine’, to which the old label pleaded we’ll get a fax machine! Don’t take anyone for granted.
My favorite is Malkmus discussing his teen life in a pre-Pavement punk band opening for hardcore icons, Black Flag.
“I was backstage before the show and all those guys, they looked so scary, I was afraid of them…Like, Greg Ginn was mixing up this stuff in a glass. It was probably just protein powder or some healthy drink, but I thought it was heroin or something.” Observing Henry Rollins squeezing a cue ball to pump himself up, Malkmus compared the Sisyphean ritual to smashing your head against a brick wall. “That’s what I thought punk was, you know. That’s when I knew that maybe I’m just not punk enough.” (from Option and Pitchfork)
An amusing take on that good advice to figure out what you are naturally good at. Don’t try to be something you are not. Look at the world around you and see how this advice is regularly ignored or if not verboten.
Is rock music dead? No, but its not mainstream. There are still good bands out there but you won’t hear them on the radio and you will have to seek them out in small venues. You pay a lot less than you would to see a long past their prime Rolling Stones show staged after the get their blood transfusions. Maybe Wet Leg will save the west from its declining birth rates, young women who embrace sexuality rather than empty political posturing. We may have favourite music from years past, but rummage through a used record bin at an antique shop there is much evidence that there has always been plenty of mediocrity and we just remember the exceptions. True now, same as it ever was.
Great comment.
The problem with new rock music is that the good stuff is indie and female-centric, such as Wet Leg or Alvvays.
We need good, heavy rock music. Something masculine. Something with teeth.
Socially, the usual suspects will tell you that rock is dead, men are over… Of course we don’t buy it. There may also be biology at play. It’s been said that when you turn 40 it becomes harder and harder to digest new music, especially a new genre. And every decade the past 80 years there arrives a new generation who complain that there just isn’t any good new music. And yet new classics and new genres regularly appear. The song “Losing My Edge” is an amusing but so true telling of the anxieties we all have (or will) when younger generations come along with their own ideas about what is hip, cool and relevant. Even if there were ‘golden ages’ of film, tv, classical music, jazz, rock, there have always been great works that arrive late and out of step with the times. Think “mid-century modern(-ism)” in classical music… and there we also find Prokofiev’s stupendous Fifth Symphony.
If I have $150 bucks, I think it wiser to take my chances at several up and coming band shows at $15-35 bucks each rather than blow the wad at an overpriced arena for an act whose live show peak was 20+ years ago. If I had seen them twenty years ago, you would have paid $15-35 for a way better show. If you saw Jerry Lee in ’64, the Stones in ’67, the Grateful Dead in ’69, or Bruce Springsteen in ’75, I’m envious. But if you saw them in the ‘90s you were too late and probably missed Stereolab. If I saw Led Zeppelin in 1975, I would be saying, “Does ‘Dazed and Confused’ really need to be 45 minutes long? What year will punk rock start?”
Maybe Wet Let won’t be any good in a year or two, but maybe they can displace many of the Sinead aspiring activist bands who take themselves way too seriously. Hey Pussy Riot, you’re not Solzhenitsyn. Turn that shit down – I’m trying to read a book here.
But here’s a tip to young guys (and me if I should be single again). I recently saw a show by woman who had made a name in her own country and was trying to break out here. Unpretentious country rock ballads, great performance, and the audience was like 90% women wanting to drink to songs about recovering from romantic loss. Generally, if you happen upon that sort of lopsided female/male ratio you will be in hostile terrain like an angry women’s march or a lesbian bar. A retro-facing Holly Golightly has grown up and is a great modern version of Wanda Jackson, but she appeals more to guys than women.
Put as Ezra Pound put it, “Make it New”. I think there is still excellent ‘masculine’ heavy rock music, but not as common as before. I’ve seen a lot of great shows by looking at the local calendars and quickly screening various bands on the web or music apps. Also, indie record labels have lower overhead and aren’t totally obsessed catering to current trends to make big profits. Find a label who has similar tastes and see who they are putting out. But if a band describes themselves as ‘emo’… avoid at all costs (at least in 2023).
And without selling any prized possession you can see Fontaines DC (Ireland), Shame (UK), Rolling Blackouts (Australia), or Metz (Canada). Australia has a long lineage of ‘boy bands‘ who play bracingly granite rock.
None of us can imagine what it would have been like for someone raised on Glen Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” to receive the jolt of Ralph Nielsen’s “Scream” in 1962. The modern equivalent might be bringing a random guest to the live apocalypse that is Lightning Bolt (USA). None of us got to see the audience riot to Suicide in 1978, but there are still bands that make rock music sound dangerous again. No movement is dead unless we collectively up on it.
Live shows used to be promotions for selling records and they were accordingly less expensive. Incomes, especially after tax, were much more equal in the sixties, seventies and eighties too and people over thirty, who had the money, would rarely be interested in attending. Now recorded music is a promotion for the live shows, which people of all ages crave, perhaps as a substitute for the communal experience of a well-orchestrated church service.
This is a great point, I’d like to see it expanded into a feature. Sorry, sounded like a school marm there. But you are spot on. The script has been flipped and the revenue stream between live and recorded has followed the money.
I think it’s worth mentioning for CC readers that Malkmus was a Silver Jew.
It’s always a treat to see articles about punk and indie bands here on Counter Currents. Mark Gullick’s writing is full of life and energy, and I was surprised last year to see his article about The Fall. Enduring the daily onslaught of anti-white derision across the cultural landscape can be fairly exhausting, and as a lifelong fan of all types of punk / rock / indie / hardcore / post-punk / etc., it’s refreshing to know I’m not the only one who appreciates this music while also having rejected the mandatory self-abasement all white people are instructed to embrace. Punk and indie are implicitly white culture, and if we ever reach a point of widespread positive white identity, perhaps the pioneers and seminal bands will be celebrated instead of condemned for their racial ancestry.
I also appreciate that the tone in Mr. Gullick’s articles (as well as much of the Counter Currents library) is not mired in hatred and animosity towards others, but instead keeps a level head in its rebuttal to the hatred directed towards us. Regarding Pavement, they’re undoubtedly a fixture in the Indie Rock Pantheon, so there’s not much more I can add. (I met Malkmus at a pinball museum in Las Vegas of all places, and he was plenty friendly in our brief interaction.) If you’re a fan of Pavement, I strongly recommend checking out Guided By Voices, who were Pavement’s labelmates at Matador. With a similar whimsical lofi approach to summoning the Ancient Spirits of Rock, the records “Bee Thousand” and “Alien Lanes” are brilliant slices of mid-90s Gen X “slacker cool.” If you’re new to GBV, start with “Alien Lanes,” even though most consider “Bee Thousand” to be their magnum opus. Fair warning, their catalog is endless and inconsistent, spanning 4 decades(!), but there are so many gems hidden within that it’s well worth exploring for any indie rock fan.
“Mark Gullick’s writing is full of life and energy”. I wish Mark Gullick was. Do you know I pulled a muscle the other day while sitting down? In a rocking-chair. You must be psychic because Alien Lanes is a favourite album of mine. The song Always Crush Me has to feature in a movie some day. Unless it already has. I will make listening to Bee Thousand a priority.
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