15 months has passed, and now that crummy redesign is the new face of the site. I don’t seem to be alone in my dislike for it: the support pages are full of complaints, and its Alexa stats look like the site fell off the edge of a cliff. During the upgrade, they even broke their Firefox plugin, so I can’t bookmark anything at the moment.

It’s become clear over the past few years that social bookmarking was never going to grow beyond a tiny niche, but with the amount of time they’ve wasted on a redesign that nobody seems to like, I wonder if delicious hasn’t essentially killed the idea altogether.

I pulled my occasional largely-unplanned-trip-to-the-record-store trick on Thursday. Oh, it was good. A mediocre, rushed trip to Aquarius is enormously more satisfying than two hours ferreting through endless top-40 dreck at Borders, and this trip was neither mediocre nor rushed.

• Biosphere, Autour de la lune. This album sounds like it will be a challenge, if only because of the constraints it places on the listener. Most of the tracks are very quiet, low- or high-frequency droning affairs–not bad, but not music you can listen to, or even hear, in the car or on the train. Biosphere’s Cirque is a masterpiece of haunted isolation, so I have high expectations for this. Initial impressions are of every bit as much atmospheric wonder as Cirque.
• Boom Bip, Seed to Sun. No solid opinion yet.
• Bola, Soup. This escaped my attention in 1998, when it was first released. I find it to be pretty agreeable, but dated to my ears, and a little too much in the conventional IDM mould. Bit of pre-algorithmic-alienation Autechre here, touch of Plaid there, some ambient washes and fades between sludgy tracks to finish it all off, and we’re all off down the pub for a pint.
• Fridge, Eph. Not enough listening time yet.
• To Rococo Rot, Hotel Morgen. The pick of my crop. Apparently, this trio is prolific, but I’d only come across The Amateur View, which has long been one of my favourite albums, before. Hotel Morgen is similar enough in style to TAV to be instantly familiar, but avoids the peril of boredom through repetition of old forms. It combines bouncy, almost poppy tracks with beautifully stark mood pieces.

The people–“tone-deaf insensitive clods” may not be too harsh–who reviewed this piece of tosh used honeyed phrases like “…relentless attention to detail eclipsed only by the stunning emotional power it conveys”. In fact, Dead Cities… is a derivative knockoff of My Bloody Valentine, sounding like it was recorded on a bank of 1985-era Yamaha DX7 synths, with an elderly Roland 808 wheezing out some weedy bass and thin percussion.

The melodies are vapid; the arrangements, crashingly unsubtle. With the sheer annoyance of massed square and sawtooth waves blaring mindlessly in the foreground, there’s nothing positive about this album that sticks in my memory.

The South Bay (where I work) has exactly and precisely nothing to match San Francisco’s Aquarius or Amoeba record stores, and since perusing San Francisco record stores requires time that I don’t often have to spare, I make do with the occasional visit to the nearest Borders.

Said Borders, by the way, is in a mall named the “Cherry Orchard,” which used to contain actual cherry trees until not too long in the past. I find the American enthusiasm for razing, grading and paving an area, then renaming it to reflect what it used to be (or what they wish it was) disturbing, as it lacks any sense of deliberate irony.

So to Borders I went. Borders has a notionally nifty in-store preview system whereby one can scan a CD at a listening station, then listen to about 30 seconds off each track on the CD. This system is only notionally nifty, since my my estimation Borders has only ripped about 5% of their CD collection. Most CDs, when scanned, cause the station to chirp and say “Selection not in database.” Some team of people must have worked hard on this almost entirely useless feature. Builders of Borders’s useless CD preview service, I salute your heroic failure!

Hence the title of this post; I was reduced to looking at CD covers and trying to figure out which ones might appeal. I hate doing this, because Sturgeon’s law is overly cautious when it comes to music; way more than 90% of everything on the shelves of the music section at Borders is crap, even to the most eclectially-inclined generous soul.

The album as a whole is disappointing to me. The drill-and-bass tracks are either stuck in a stale late-90s groove or so harsh as to have me diving for the “skip past this track” button. The jazz tracks are standard middlebrow fare–not unpleasant, but they don’t have any stick-in-your head quality either. Most of the album strikes me as either reprises of earlier fare or obvious derivations of work by newer artists, most obviously Prefuse 73.

The exception to the dross is the third track, Iambic 9 Poetry, which is simply beautiful. The melody is a simple guitar loop, and the complexity of the percussion is what drives the tune and keeps my ear engaged. This track is a classic; the rest of the album is fluff.