Who’s NOT A Member Of The Broken Dreams Club?

Girls is a San Francisco band who put out an elpee in 2009 called Album. I had a copy, but didn’t even listen to it. I figured that a band that called themselves “Girls” and named their record “Album” must be pretty damn boring. That, and there were a lot of other new elpeez to listen to because it came out in September, when the INDUSTRY barfs out tons and tons (and tons) of PRODUCT.

This week, however, there are not tons of new titles coming out. ‘Tis the season of The Blockbuster Release (Kanye! Rihanna!) and the repackaging of music that’s been rubbed right into the dirt. Plus, the INDUSTRY is already packed up and ready to embark on their annual one-and-a-half month holiday vacation extravaganza, where nothing gets done until after The Grammys.

None of that is interesting to me, so I went with the Girls eepee, Broken Dreams Club, which worked out great, because eepeez are shorter than elpeez, and the Stripwax deadline was hanging over me like a guillotine. Again. Every year, after hitting about 49 consecutive weeks worth of deadlines, I’m usually feeling about as rubbed into the dirt as a Greatest Hits package, and looking forward to the last two weeks of Top Ten lists, a quick holiday break, and then… starting up another year.

I got kind of hung up on the idea of an actual Broken Dreams Club … every person who’s ever lived has one or two broken dreams (at least), so that would have to be a pretty big club — big enough to have its own zip code, maybe even big enough to be a nation state with an economy and everything. The eepee, it’s alright. It’s pleasant and inoffensive pop. Sometimes it’s like Conor Oberst playing with The Aluminum Group, sometimes it’s like The Aluminum Group and Conor Oberst playing with Fujiya & Miyagi with a steel guitar thrown in.

Not bad. I might even want to hear the full elpee when it comes out.