Mixtapes for Hookers

That other album I couldn’t think of the other day is the debut record by Von Hayes.  It’s called Evident Eyelid and it’s the best thing a Guided By Voices fan could ever want in this millennium.  Twenty songs, the longest of which is 2:26, with poppy guitars and song titles like Karen Dreams In Hardcore and This Is My Gun City and Auspicious Falcon. They sound like they were recorded in one take in somebody’s parents’ rec room, and for all I know they probably were.

Somehow, though, it doesn’t come across as totally derivative; it’s actually a lot of fun, and I’ve been listening to it more or less nonstop in my car, on the rare occasions in the last two weeks that I’ve actually had a car.  (I ran out of gas at one point, and shortly after I got gas my boyfriend borrowed it for a few days.  But that actually has no impact on how much fun it is driving around listening to this album.  Especially Ellen Degenerates and Mr Guts, which I may post here when I resolve my dumb posting inabilities.)  The band get their name from a baseball player I’ve never heard of, and they sound a little baseball-y; not in the sense that they dress poorly and listen to Dirty Water; more in the sense that I bet they drink a lot of bad beer, if that makes any sense.

Anyway.  Highly recommended, even though I couldn’t remember it the other day.

And speaking of my bad memory… Recently I posted a picture and said I didn’t know who the people in it were; it turns out it’s the couple that created the MonkeyRocker (the whimsical device in the picture), and that I sat across from them at dinner once.  Actually, after dinner we rode in a hummer limo to a strip club together; it was my first strip club experience, as well as my only (I’m guessing) Hummer limo experience; boy are those things stupid.  But the MonkeyRocker people were super-nice.