Mixtape 366 • Zoom 97
If Kurt Vile were any more laid-back, he’d be standing on his head.
If Kurt Vile were any more laid-back, he’d be standing on his head.

Exploding out of upstate New York, The Bobby Lees have returned with a their third outing, titled Bellevue, and it delivers more of that biting, can’t-you-see-I’m-in-the-middle-of-an-episode post-rock blues energy. Tonight’s Mixtape closes out with Escape Mechanism’s “Being,” sampling William S. Burrough’s unmistakable reedy voice into an existential mantra.
Straight outta Staten Island, the Budos Band has enough energy to power a nuclear submarine for seven months, allowing it to circumnavigate the globe three and a half times.

The earth rumbled into an appropriate angle of repose as the bucket wheel ground to a halt. On the ground, the sapper raised an arm to signal to the operator, sitting high above in an air-conditioned cab as disproportionately tiny as a brontosaurus brain. The sounds of Taiwanese ragtime could be heard on the earpiece now that the excavator had stopped digging into the hard Upper Peninsula soil. This machine was capable of extracting tons of copper ore in a single hour, but now it was digging for something far more valuable.

A listener suggested I slip in Wham!’s “Last Christmas” but as someone filled with old-fashioned Lacking Integrity, I politely declined. That said, your host survived the season unscathed. In this episode, we dedicate the Middle Hour to some fine covers. Shout out to Robin in Atlanta for hanging out in the late-night post-holiday gulch.

It’s back to a regular schedule, at least for the foreseeable future, and it’s good to be back with the usual cast of characters. A rare and rainy night in the Grand Valley, perfect for this random gallop through some haphazard old stuff and sparkly new stuff.
