favorite nuclear squadrons

There has yet to be a movie made about nuclear brinksmanship that quite equals Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, released back in the sixties, but if eventually someone does (maybe a propaganda work, to be commissioned by the North Korean leaders), the filmmaker would do well to consult the latest Black Dice album Repo for soundtrack assistance: the waves of paranoid load-blown dissonance; the terse handiwork of industrialized subterranean sounds; raw, roughened electro-textured twitches rubbing up against a seabed of itchy-bitsy radio-sampled histrionics distorted beyond recognition (or actually, the other way around instead). Going nuclear, in other words; writing on The Guardian, Creation Records founder Alan McGee calls Repo "a grand statement of visceral intent". All aboard the Black Dice bandwagon then.

Also: I am pretty excited about the upcoming Dirty Projectors LP Bitte Orca, their first on Domino Records. I am sure some of you guys would have heard the brilliant lead single "Stillness Is The Move", which is as appropriate an anthem for today's token recessionists as any, and some of the other Bitte Orca songs are just as good. I've never been the biggest fan of their totally messed-up previous concept albums, including the critically acclaimed Rise Above in which frontperson Dave Longstreth imagines himself rewriting Black Flag's seminal Damaged, but this new one has the band going into a more pop direction. Judging by the track record of kindred bands like Black Dice, Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance that have done the same recently, I can't say it's a bad thing for Longstreth.