"You Gotta Believe ....Hey ....Hey"

My hyper-literate monthly of choice, The Believer, has just issued their 2007 music issue the with an accompanying CD featuring some rare & exclusive tracks from Lightning Bolt, Magik Markers, Aesop Rock, No Age, Grizzly Bear, and many others. There are also articles aplenty: a search for reclusive folkie Bill Fox, a conversation between Khaela Maricich of the Blow and Miranda July, a rethinking of the famous & oft written about false dichotomy "Beatles, or Stones?", and the story of rock's rarest instrument - the Birotron - an offshoot cousin of the Mellotron keyboard made from nineteen 8-track decks.

The magazine also features a center fold-out lovingly chronicling every-metal-band-name-ever (!) beginning with the letter R. Excerpted the forthcoming book "All Known Metal Bands", which promises to be a "poetic document of the continual collapse and renewal of civilizations", this list brings up as many endlessly debatable questions as it answers. Who would have known, for example, there would be 21 "Requiem"-s and only 10 "Rigor Mortis"-s? 30 bands beginning with "Rotten" and only one "Roadkill Sodomizer"? This had me alternating between mind-blown disbelief and hysterical fit this past weekend as I lay floating in a canoe, flesh burning off from lack of suncreen, in the middle of Lake Pinecrest.

The thing that got me most excited however was this new song from Zach Condon who is the principal entity behind Beirut. They have a newish EP called Lon Gisland and one amazing LP entitled Gulag Orkestar that is everywhere by now and you should feel ashamed if you haven't listened to it. Most of the album sounds like it was recorded with a gypsy folk marching band (really just Jeremy Barnes from A Hawk and a Hacksaw & Neutral Milk Hotel-fame) but there are a few other songs featuring cheap synths and drum machines sounding like they are plugged directly into a four-track. This feeling is revisited here with a solitary trumpet line & Condon's multi-tracked vocals swooning over a synthscape straight out of Music Has A Right To Children.

Zach Condon - Venice

Oh, I also forgot to mention that I have an extra copy of the magazine complete with CD for one lucky reader (the one who write to the email address at the top of the screen first).