"Don't feel sorry for the protagonist, he's just down on his luck." - Uzi & Ari.

Admin: We've updated the links and blog roll and whizzutnot, so look right. Take special note of the Tuning blog. The Google indicates that he's been linking to us for a while, and we had no idea. So thanks Mr. Tuning. Also, we tried to change the overall width of Clicky Clicky, but were stymied by the grey line that encircles the box surrounding this text you are reading. And laziness. Perhaps we will persevere another time.

Reader #6 kindly extended permission to post some of the Wendyfix he sent along recently, so here is the song "Forward + Upward (Ridge)." This is the song that really sticks to your ribs longest when you first hear the set of later King Size demos the trio did. Which is notable if only because when we originally got the stuff on cassette we think it was sequenced last, meaning every other song had its way with you before this one. But anyway, there is something in the main riff and dense chords in the chorus of this song that, as H-Dawg from Accounts Receivable once noted about the title track to ...AYWKUBTTOD's Source Tags & Codes, just sounds like an old friend the first time you hear it. We once saw a large-scale painting of a sort of post-industrial, Bosch-ian landscape with a lot of reds in it in Reader #6's studio, and we've always equated that with this song due to the lyrics. There is likely no actual association, but what the hell, that is what we think of, besides some mythical Evanston where the song was probably written.

So we did the right thing and "supported the scene" by purchasing the Uzi & Ari record at the behest of Music.For-Robots. It is a really solid record of big-guitar indie rock. We'd like to believe that it is the beginning of a new trend toward the sounds of the early '90s, but we can't really back that up. What we do know is that M.F-R's likening Uzi & Ari to Haywood may not be the most apt comparison. U&A have more sprawling and dense compositions and somewhat more twee vocal delivery that suggests more a mix of Saturnine 60 (We don't care that you dropped the 60 from your name, that is how we will always remember you) and Spent (drinking and rebellion, indeed, good sirs) and Seam. So there. On the whole, however, the eight-song set is rock solid. There is one sort of trite lyrical couplet that jumps out at me every time we hear it, but we learned a long ago as a songwriter that you have to be true to the song, even if it leaves you a little more wide open in the end than you'd like to be.

COming Up: Thinking about The Halo Bit; the mysterious Low Numbers.

That is all.