The Odelay! Phenomenon

It’s when you love an album on first listening, and consequently play it to bits over the next couple of days or weeks. A few months or years later, you inexplicably feel little or no inclination to listen to it any more, even though you still think it’s a great album. (No prizes for guessing which album tops my list of albums relegated to the bottom of the playlist barrel due to this annoying phenomenon.)

And right now, I’m really worried that Hefner’s The Fidelity Wars might meet a similar fate, because it arrived last Thursday, and I think I’ve just been loving it too much since then.

Is this a strange thing to worry about, or does this happen to anyone else?

One of these days I’ll write about the wonderful converse Loveless phenomenon, although I stupidly left that album in Singapore and haven’t listened to it since last summer.

More random and reasonably shallow music ramblimgs:

I was going to write a little more about the Lift To Experience/Calexico/Stephen Malkmus gig I went to last week, but John Peel beat me to it. It’s a good thing he only put the Calexico and Malkmus sets up for full listening, because Lift To Experience weren’t great to listen to live, and would probably sound even worse over Real Audio.

Last week, while trying to restrain myself from either falling asleep or rushing up on stage and strangling the lead singer of Broadcast, I started wondering if it might have been a better idea to go see Sparklehorse, who were at the Borderline the same night, although this was technically an exercise in futility since their show sold out long before I knew about it. After reading this review, I have no regrets, although it would have been nice to have been able to go to both.

I haven’t heard the new Radiohead song enough times to have an opinion worth sharing yet, but NYLPM, as usual, does.

REM’s new song has firmly established itself in my head, although I haven’t actually decided how much I like it yet. The verses are reasonably nondescript, and I can’t remember what they sound like at all, but the chorus is scrumptious.