Acoustic/Slide

With my departure from eMusic, after drawing $10 from my bank account for months on end, came a small-scale exodus of music. Really good albums from Yo la Tengo and Built to Spill to be mentioned, but most notable is a bones-bare album from a bluesman named Patrick Sweany of whom I had received his second, more blues-rock instrumented release only a week earlier.

Both albums find you pulling a melody out of the air during a daily moment of impatience only to remind you: "Yeah, I taught you that". But only through proper listening syntax have I begun to appreciate the latter Every Hour is a Dollar Gone as much as his first. Lyrically, it is his earlier self-titled release I Wanna Tell You that reveals the underlying motif of his music, with accompaniment from a lone lap steel, 6 or 12 string on each track.

Dees Ruts

The minute civic footprint of Zebedee's record store was a side-pocket destination of a weekend bike ride around the West 39th St area that happened to bring me tidings of a couple-year-old Funk Rarities collection oddly named Cold Heat. Not to be confused with late night info-mercials for heatless saudering irons, the owner had recently ventured to purchase this compilation by well-known (I exempt) crate digger Egon. The spinner fuses together diesel burning beats and basslines, some of which are light on duration as opposed to lead, but the abundance of tracks is appreciated nonetheless.