Ennui.

I’m not DJing on Tuesdays for the next two weeks, and I'm welcoming the break. I love DJing each week ... I just LOVE it. I honestly don’t know what I'd do if I didn't have that outlet. That said, I've been spinning somewhere in Wicker Park, with a break only here and there once in a great while, for over seven years now, and that's a little draining.

I think it shows, too. My sets have gone from being iron-clad crowd pleasers, to head-scratching self-indulgments, and have recently settled somewhere in-between in a land where The Killers, Phil Collins, Uncle Tupelo, My Chemical Romance and Beyoncé are each just as culturally significant as the other.

One thing a DJ is paid to do is entertain and, hopefully, enlighten in-between the sure-fire hits. I think I do a more than passable job on this front, otherwise I wouldn’t get gigs. Duh. But as I've switched from records and tape manipulation, to CDs, and now, finally, to mp3s / m4as, I've noticed the process of song selection has changed. You see, when you have a crate of records / rack of tapes / book of CDs there is a primal, physical connection to the music as you flip through physical-space-occupying slabs of vinyl / loops of magnetic tape / aluminum (or 24K gold if it's one of those audiophile traps deployed in the '80s). If you, like I did, group albums / CDs by genre this actually helps create connections from one song to another. When you scroll through an iPod, though, this facet is sorely lacking and selection depends more on brain power, and by the end of the night, after a few too many drinky-drinks, brain power is often less than optimal.

Basically, as the physical act of lugging around source music has shrunk to the size of a pack of playing cards, the mental portion of the task has grown more demanding. I think it's too late to really turn back, and I just need to continue to adapt, but at the same time it’s nice to take a break every once in a while to regroup, recoup and refine the ol' inner playlist.

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Ennui deux.

We saw The Killers Tuesday night. Halfway through the show, Photogal’s sister leaned over and asked me, "Don't they ever move?" I pointed out that the "My Name Is Earl" look-alike behind the drum kit was pretty animated, and that singer Brandon Flowers was actually far more mobile than he was in the past, but, for the most part, no, they didn't really move much.

The show was what you would expect, with a healthy dose of new material with a few proven crowd-pleasers sprinkled throughout. It was pretty obvious the sold-out crowd had barely paid attention to the new disc since conversation blossomed during those portions of the evening. Folks went bat-shit for the oldies though, and at forty buck a ticket pre-TicketBastard, that's what they were paying for. Also, suburbanites attending city shows should really look beyond "The OC" for suggestions of hip urban-wear. Double also, teeny blondes in pointy shows do not stir my pants, but they do upset my stomach. Triple also, I haven't seen so many dudes at a rockshow in, like, forever. It reminded me why I avoid these big label, promo events. Unless it's Green Day ... that small club tour fucking killed.

Anyway, The Killers. Like I said, the show was exactly what you would expect, no more, no less. I still maintain that Sam's Town has been unfairly maligned in the press, but a portion of the blame must be attributed to Flowers for mentioning the group had been listening to a lot of Springsteen. While the album sounds NOTHING LIKE Springsteen, lazy journos the world over have latched onto that lens and it’s the only way they’re viewing said disc's content.

I've decided to pot the opening track from Sam's Town because I think it handily highlights all that is right, and all that goes wrong, within the album. If you like portions of, or all, of the song, by all means buy the album. However if everything within the tunes hits you as wrong-minded and off the mark, Sam's Town is not for you.

I leave it up to you to decide.

The Killers "Sam's Town"
P.S. The pictures of pretty girls on the post have nothing to do with the content, I'm just trying to clean out my hard-drive. Sorry, I don't seem to have any photos of pretty boys or those would have gone up as well...