PLASTIC LETTERS

I'm pretty good in the will power department. And for the rest of the day I'm gonna try awful hard, as Butters would say, to not call Bush a worthless turd on two legs who's also the worst occupant of the White House ever. Instead I'm gonna think good thoughts. Plastic Letters are a band I went to see last night at the Knitting Factory. Greatness!

My favorite songs for a while have been by Doves. A couple months ago I got to see them play. They were able to reproduce all the songs from the first album and the third (new) album just fine. But when it came to their masterpiece, THE LAST BROADCAST, oh, dude... I wanted to just go home. And that's the album with "Pounding," "Satellites," "There Goes The Fear," "Words"... songs with over 100 plays on my iTunes. But they were produced so incredibly that the band just couldn't live up. I was so bummed.

Plastic Letters sounded pretty different from their record too. Peter Case did a masterful job producing them, bringing out all the melodies without compromising the incredibly enlivening energy. But live they were just as good, albeit really different. It was exhilarating. Not just exhilarating because they rocked so hard and so tight-- which they did and which it was-- but exhilarating because they weren't even thinking about trying to sound like "the record." They were too busy sounding like the Plastic Letters, October 1, 2005.

L.A.'s such a fucked up place for music. This week L.A.'s air stunk from the fires in the 'burbs but everyday L.A.'s soul stinks from the wealth and the dreams and the desperate desires of the boys and girls who want to do anything to get to them. Part of that is because it's the home if The Industry and The Industry is so completely and utterly bankrupt that if a musician pays attention for more than a minute or two he might as well go back to school and become a dentist. Plastic Letters don't pay no attention to no stinkin Industry. They don't sound like any of the execrable radio stations and they don't sound like any of the regurgitated garbage The Industry is, always mistakenly, looking for. They're too busy sounding like the Plastic Letters. Damn are they great! I hope I can see 'em again soon.