John the Evangelist said there'd be days like this

From momentarily glancing at ordered phonetic symbols, as I do when in a certain mood, I've somehow cobbled together the brain-notion that this spring was going to be pretty good for music.

For a while I couldn't remember just what invested me with this belief. Since moving home my short-term memory has become little more than a fog bank of opaque impressions--droplets of consciousness so diffuse and elemental as to be suspended in orbit and held in tension, each availing the others of a unique and repulsive polarity.

You'll remember that I've made a vital discovery: sitting on one's ass in the country is conducive to nothing other than ass-sitting, with almost no mental legroom for feats of hypertasking. I've realized the buttocks to be connected in so neurologically intimate a way as to render any other simultaneous functions impossible, like sitting while also listening to something; to say nothing of computing while sitting.

You'll imagine my surprise, then, when I emerged from some semi-conscious state this evening to find myself standing over an unfamiliar weblog, uncertain of how I arrived there. This is how movie franchises start. From my initial examination I'll say that this blog has a more than spectacular title and less than intriguing contents. Less than intriguing save an inauspicious release calendar on the main page.

Gazing at it, I suddenly found neurological pathways reaching out to memory nodes, latching on and solidifying in an electro-crystalline structure my belief in the quality of this virgin year's music offerings.

And though there's a lot of good stuff coming out between now and March, one day was particularly alarming. Alarming for its sheer musical fecundity. Right now, mark on your calendars with red pen the date of March 22nd.

By then you'll need to have stored up stockpiles of food and/or gotten yourself in right standing with the Cult of Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, because at least one person will be ascending bodily.

Me. Rapture. Take a number.

For on that day both the Decemberists and the Mars Volta release albums. And, on that day, while the lilting, idiosyncratic voice of Colin Meloy is spinning hypnotic yarns of "mourning sea-widow[s]" over heart-wrenching accordion and cello, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez might just be melting your face off with a gnarled yet rhythmic guitar solo over driving Latin beats, only to break it down for a twenty minute treatise in zeros and ones--bleeps. Two more disparate bands you could not find.

You'd also be hard pressed to find two bands better at what they do, which is rock the masses' asses.

The mere titles of each album have me writhing in a pre-coital stupor: Picaresque and Francis the Mute, respectively. Both are reported to be concept albums on the heel of concept albums, the Decemberists' 18 minute modernization of the Celtic epic The Tain, and the Volta's De-loused in the Comatorium, which is supposedly about some dude's life, but the lyrics don't make any goddamned sense. Both were great and showed tremendous maturation from previous projects.

One other day of note: . . . And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead's third album drops January 25th. One Trail of Dead album is generally worth two or three albums by anyone else, so you might want to set your estate in order early, just to be safe. There might be some prematurely shuffled mortal coils.

To get your mind in right standing with the pop gods, some tracts:

The Decemberists
Decemberists: Songs from Picaresque and streaming audio

The Mars Volta
Francis the Mute promo crap

...AYWKUBTTOD

Brooklynvegan led the way to that streaming audio page, and ties for first place with fifty thousand other blogs for Most Factually Accurate Blog Title: Descriptive Compound Word Category.