So it’s a Saturday night, during fireworks in the West End, and I’m in a deep chair with big ol’ armrests, and I reach over for my glass of scotch (thanks, Claudia!), and I end up sitting there for about three minutes, turning the glass round and round, watching the liquid seep down the sides of the slightly squared glass, like something out of Blade Runner.<\/p>\n
Until I notice<\/em> it’s like something out Blade Runner, and remember that I started turning the glass because I’m pretty sure I saw one of those little flies go in there, and didn’t feel like ingesting another no-see’em today (I swallowed one during the bike ride home about a week ago, and so I’m good for a bit, mmkay?)<\/p>\n Where was I?\u00a0 Oh yeah, bending my head a little tonight, that’s right, I forgot.<\/p>\n I need to relax about my kids.\u00a0 They’re kids, and they’re being kid-like.\u00a0 Doesn’t matter how refined and and high-strung the West End is, my kids are being KIDS.\u00a0 They’re six (going on fourteen) and two (going on three), and I just need to chill out and let them be kids.\u00a0 Yes, they make noise, and get stuff on their faces, and drop things, and knock stuff over, and are just generally little human beings trying to figure out how to have fun and do things they wanna do.\u00a0 Who am<\/em> I to mess with that when they’re not hurting anyone?<\/p>\n So yeah, more going to the park, and less “shushing” on my part.\u00a0 Really nothing to be gained, there, if the truth be told.<\/p>\n So what brought this up?\u00a0 A new (to me) album by some guy named Tom Baxter<\/a>, by way of Radio Paradise<\/a>.\u00a0 Tom Baxter sounds (almost too much) like the lead singer of Elbow, with a healthy dose of Damien Rice<\/a> in there, too.\u00a0 I hit AllMusic.com<\/a>, and looked up Mr. Baxter (and queued up some Damien Rice and was reminded how much I heart Lisa Hannigan’s deliciously overwrought vocals – she manages to come dangerously close to the shark-jumping ranges of Tori Amos, but missing it somehow), AND THEN read the blurb about him (Tom Baxter, remember him?) and his latest album, Skybound<\/a><\/p>\n There was a popular term slung around in British music-critic circles a few years back, “dad rock.” That is, anything that middle-aged men could point to in an attempt to prove that they were still as hip and with it as they had been when they were teens, and which they mostly liked because it was so baldly derivative of what they liked when they were teens. Wilco<\/a>, for example, is probably the ultimate dad-rock act, with Coldplay<\/a> not far behind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n and I thought “This?\u00a0 This is dad-rock?” but after reading a little further along, there’s a slightly snooty reference to Tom Baxter’s stuff being “mom-rock” in counterbalance to bands like Coldplay.\u00a0 Seriously, the review reads sorta like one of those “It works, don’t act like you invented it” kinda comments.\u00a0 There’s just a hint of “How come this guy’s album is selling, and I’m stuck writing reviews on AllMusic.com?”<\/p>\n Yeah, so I’m sitting around listening to a largely acoustic album, and not<\/em> listening to the idiots who went to the fireworks six hours early, and are now bombed, and staggering home with their sunburns and aggression, and thinking I… uh… like<\/em> this album.\u00a0 Not quite in the same jaw-dropping way I responded to Damien Rice’s stuff, or the way I was floored by the wall of clangy angst I felt with Elbow’s first album, but hey, nice stuff.\u00a0 This album makes me wanna sit here and write, instead of getting out on the porch, and yelling “Yeah, yeah, flashy light go boom, now GO HOME!” at the drunks and tourists who are flabbergasted that anyone actually LIVES down here, where there might be, y’know, THE GAYS.<\/em><\/p>\n (Didja know you can italicize a period?\u00a0 Well you can.)<\/p>\n So go pick up a copy, and grab a few for your moms and dads out there, and let them decide whether it’s sexist or misogynist or somehow stereotypical to enjoy it.<\/p>\n