Free Dece Jams

You can stream the whole new Hold Steady album Boys and Girls in America over here. If the Killers have any good sense in them--and judging by their facial hair styles, they do not--they will pull Sam's Town from stores because if the Hold Steady's past records have been taking people to school on how to do the "Springsteen thing," Boys and Girls in America is like signing up for an intensive senior-level seminar in Boss Studies.
EDIT: Hold Steady's in the NYT.

Desert Island Top 5 Ironies: Number 4

If you have no respect for musicals, music, Nick Hornby, yourself, or any combination of the four (the last two generally being mutually exclusive), head on over to the website for the upcoming Broadway musical based on Hornby's novel High Fidelity and its simpering-heavy John Cusak film adaptation. I'm sure you'll have a ball. They've not only adapted a novel about desperately trying to hang onto your cool into the uncoolest entertainment form ever, but also adapted a story about an obsessive love of good music by telling it through the most unspectacular, cliche-ridden showtunes I've ever heard outside of parody. No, actually it's at or below the level of most showtune parodies I've heard. And I love it. I hope it makes every whiny baby-man who ever read High Fidelity's opening chapter as a way to passive-aggressively hate their girlfriend (or women in general), or got distracted by John-Cusak-as-Rob's record shelves and never caught onto how pathetic he is, cry a little bit. Or at least get mad that "their" book is getting played like this, that Hornby's sold out about as hardcore as you can get. Or better yet, both. I thought ironies on this level only ever happened in Greek myths or in Hell. I never thought I'd get to see it happen for real.

Raps about drugs

Fuck, man. Still Listen to Gangsta Music posted a new Streets remix today, this time with vocals by Pete Doherty, and it's a heavy fucker. The song is Mike Skinner's coke paranoia jam, "Pranging Out," which makes drafting Doherty for it either a macabre bit of stunt casting or else total brilliance. But I don't even know that anyone did cast him. Doherty's vocals sound sort of lo-fi/home-recorded, and the edits are sloppy. He may have just done it on his own and put it on the internet. Who knows.
The important part is how equally brilliant and fucked up the final piece is: Skinner's epic, stuttering beat and Doherty talk-rapping through it, speaking lyrics that are garbage or stunningly honest and good. He sounds like a messed-up friend on the phone at 3 AM, he sounds like he have been wasted while he recorded it. He sounds like he's already dead.

Flying death fish

Some of you may be overpowered by my blogging abilities and can only bear the relatively mild heat of the sporadic, half-assed blogging I do over here at Critical Darling: As Good As An Internet Web Page Can Be Without Showing Full Penetration. The braver sort among you can among you can point your web browser's prow towards the paradise that is Crickets, the Chicago Reader's official music crit bloggy. If blogs places to buy sushi, this one would be a Jewel at 1 AM and Crickets would be a place that serves $200 hand rolls and the chef periodically whips a still-breathing fugu fish at patron's faces.

No cheap jeans

Last night I played the You Say Party! We Say Die! track "The Gap" in my DJ set and it kind of killed. If you want to listen it you can click here: mp3
As far as I can tell the song is not actually about the Gap, but rather a gap, one which is more of a metaphor and which doesn't have posters of Pete Wentz wearing too much eye makeup all over the fucking place.