Winter Hibernation.

Apologies to any of you faithful readers (ha!) who have been left with a tremendous void in your lives the past few weeks due to your inability to get your daily dose of snobbery & bickering on the WMUA blog. Eric's been MIA for awhile (perhaps preoccupied with listening to MIA) & I was on a self-imposed hiatus for two weeks, hoping to give someone else a turn to monopolize the blog. That plan kind of backfired on me though, so it's now 2008 & it looks like this lady is going to be flying solo here for awhile. Maybe Eric will come out of hiding long enough for us to finish squaring off the victims of our Best of 2007 Brackets, considering we're halfway to February now.

It's been all too easy for me to slack off on my blog duties, as winter generally means that Western Massachusetts becomes a ghost town in terms of live music & the avalanche of new recorded jams has considerably slowed down at the station. However, on the subject of the latter, I'm pretty keen on the new Bonnie "Prince" Billy EP, Ask Forgiveness, brought to you by Drag City. I don't know if Will Oldham covering Danzig's "Am I Demon?" is more awesome than Aerial M's cover of "Last Caress" by the Misfits, but it's pretty close. I'm kind of disappointed that in terms of R. Kelly covers, Bonny Billy opted for "The World's Greatest", given that one of my favorite show-going experiences was seeing him cover "Ingition" in Houston wearing nothing but short shorts & talking about how he was messed up on lean (if you don't know what lean is, you're probably not from the South; big ups of authenticity to Mister Oldham for namedropping H-Town's drug of choice the way hair metal bands would yell "Hello Cleveland, are you ready to rock?!"). To compensate for the recent lull in posts, I'm going to raise the hipster factor up a little bit here: Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "No More Workhorse Blues" video, directed by Harmony Korine (thanks for inspiring pretentious would-be cinephiles to extoll the virtues of Julien Donkey-Boy to me ad infinitum, dude).



I'm hardly a Harmony Korine fan, but I have been finding myself lately wishing that I hadn't passed up on so many copies of the Kids soundtrack in various dollar bins, because all of the sudden I really, really want to listen to "Natural One" by Folk Implosion (see: many posts about '90s indie rock nostalgia).