Clean (sounding and) Living!

Missing Monuments
Painted White
Douchemaster Records

(Editor's note: The sad fact of the matter is that I have a very demanding job which leaves me very little, if any, time to write blogs. I restarted The Midpoint with the hopes that simply having dominion over a small slice of the web would guilt me into regular posting. Several months later I see that isn't the case, sadly. I will do what I can, starting with my favorite thing to write about, new(ish) music! I don't care that it's almost March of 2012, I'm going to write about my favorite albums of 2011 in alphabetical order by band name.)

Recently, NYMary of the fantastic Powerpop blog did a three hour radio show where she did as good a job as could possibly be done explaining what powerpop is and what we love about it. For a pretty loosely defined genre which has been going for decades, answering those two questions in three hours is just about an impossibility. Putting bands like Shoes, Foundtains of Wayne, and The Black and Whites into the same bag requires the bag to be fairly large.

I'm happy to add King Louie's latest outfit, the Missing Monuments, into that gumbo. Louie brings his own flavor to the genre to be sure, but is firmly a part of it. His heart is exposed for everyone to see, the drums and bass and mixed down pretty low - the guitar and vocal melodies are the stars here. Some of Louie's finest work in both of those areas to date are on this album.

What I love the most, however, is Louie's ability to transcend the filth of this world and take us with him to his world. The trash is still there, but the radio is playing the songs we love, and the pretty girl at the bar wants to talk to us. The opening track, "The Girl of the Nite" MUST be spelled that way. Same with "Dance all Nite." They're evocative of the glowing neon signs in this trashy world made heaven by those pretty girls and great radio stations. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the excellent closing number - "Dance all Nite." It's for anyone who's never wanted the song to end, or the sun to come up, or to get on that plane back home.

Then you look up baby you can just where we are in the stars/Down in the filth and the full moonlight/Baby, let's dance all nite.

The filth and the full moonlight. A shitty world made beautiful by music like this. Keep 'em coming, Louie!

"Girl of the Nite"