"I sit on the ridge at dusk..."

My most recent batch of music store purchases has left me in a sort of post-rock haze, wondering what's become of my musical preferences [1].

Besides the Mountain Goats Get Lonely [2], my latest haul included: Talk Talk's Laughing Stock, which I mistakenly decided to shove on in the car on the way home from the record store, only to ask myself what the fuck I was thinking about five minutes later [3]; the Dirty Projectors' The Getty Address, which I masochistically listened to on my next car ride, and which actually fit a little bit better if only because it's sort of a road-trip/discovery type of album [4]; and Matthew Friedberger's Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School double album, which is the poppiest of all three of these, but still pretty fucking inscrutable.

Anyway, all of this is to say that if you hear me humming a Franz Ferdinand track, this is probably (the only reason) why.

[1] Which is not to say that I don't like this stuff, or that underneath it doesn't have pop sensibilities, &c., but really only to say that this is not particularly catchy music.

As a demonstration of which, take this example: all of the above left me so yearning for a catchy melody that, on a recent flight, I even enjoyed the Killers track at the end of The Matador.

[2] Which isn't necessarily catchy, but it's also not that hard to parse, musically--it just happens to be really fucking depressing.

[3] ... for putting it on in the car, not for buying it in the first place. I'd seen it mentioned a couple of times on ILM as a sort of equivalent in the career-trajectory sense to Scott Walker's Tilt, which interested me immensely. And then I also saw Michael mention it, so I added it to my list.

But it's not really car music.

[4] This album perplexes me. If you catch a five- or ten-second snippet of it, it sort of sounds unlistenable (as well as unclassifiable), but listened to in whole it's seriously one of the most comforting, warm, relaxing albums I've heard in a long time. In that way it reminds me of the KLF's Chill Out (about which I could, and will, write a full post someday), also a travel album, & also an impossibly relaxing album.