64 minutes, 31 seconds

Lycia
Tripping Back into the Broken Days

Last day of February! Sheesh--I've been at this for two and a half months, and I'm only up to 64 minutes. There's a part of me that feels like Casey Kasem ("We're counting down the hits!") when I log in and blog each day. Um, except for the fact that Kasem had thousands of listeners, and I have zero readers. Oh, and he was an Arab, and I'm not.

Lycia: Sadly, now broken up, but at their height probably the most interesting band to grace Sam Rosenthal's Projekt label. When their debut, Ionia, came out, in 1991, I remember thinking it sounded like nothing else I'd ever heard before. Ambient goth rock backed by an insistent drum machine, the whole thing haunted by Mike Van Portfleet's hoarse, whispered vocals. They went on to even higher highs (A Day in the Stark Corner, The Burning Circle and Then Dust), but Ionia has a certain raw energy that was never reproduced on any of their later albums.

Tripping Back into the Broken Days is a more recent (2002), and wholly acoustic, effort. It's got that Lycia intensity of feeling, but its overall texture is mellow and more contemplative than the earlier work. If it's a little dull, that's only by comparison to those early albums.

OK, back to work for me. Which means it's time to stop using words like "contemplative" and "mellow" and start using "capitalize" and "revenue." Please kill me now.

Also today:

64:31 X Marks the Pedwalk, Four Fit
64:29 Von Thronstahl, E Pluribus Unum
64:27 Stellamara, The Seven Valleys
New arrival! 68:08 Keef Baker, Redeye
64:25 Dither, Urei