Okay, maybe this isn't the wisest thing to admit in public, but I have to in order for my point to make sense...

In the last ten years or so of my life (mid-twenties to mid-thirties), I have pretty much almost completely lost touch with the latest in the world of indie-rock, despite once devoting years of my life to a college radio station back at the University of Missouri (Columbia) in the '80s and early '90s, with me being lucky anymore to learn of even one or two good new bands each year. It's a situation I've wanted to change since opening CCLaP last summer, but has sat on the backburner while first trying to get caught up in the worlds of books and movies instead; I am slowly, though, starting to get my feet wet again in the universe of new music, with among other things a trip to such hipster sites as Discobelle now a part of my daily routine.

Among other interesting stuff I've stumbled across online, I found an entry at someone's website (URL now forgotten) that took Pitchfork's 2007 list of 20 best albums and linked to all their illegal download versions at Rapidshare; of course, if you're not a customer of Rapidshare yourself, you're only allowed to download one file a day there, which means between that and getting them all decompressed and added to iTunes, I'm just now getting around to starting to seriously check all of them out for the first time, basically one new album a day while at a cafe doing my usual daily reading. One of the picks was Radiohead's In Rainbows, which I already owned, making it a total of 19 new CDs unknown to me; as of today I've now made my way through 11 of them, with some of them being great and some of them being an entire hour of stuff I don't care for at all.

The only album so far of the eleven, though, that has really struck a serious and profound chord with me, has been the debut CD Mirrored by so-called "math-rock" dream team Battles, "so-called" I say because I myself have never actually heard of any of the other bands these guys have come from. And the reason I keep coming back to them again and again, I think, is because I just can't figure out what precisely the hell I'm listening to; I mean, just see for yourself there, in their single and video "Atlas" that I've embedded above, for all of you on devices/computers/phones with Flash Player. Just listen to that and then tell me -- what exactly are we listening to? Is it the richness of acoustic instruments and human choruses, sampled into ultra-high-quality software and spit out with the preciseness of dance music? Is it actual acoustic instruments we're hearing, played with the preciseness of dance music? Is it a digital replication of acoustic instruments we're listening to, created with ultra-sophisticated equipment, which exists as digital media from the start and so can be manipulated in any way they want?

In any case, it's clear that this is the next stage of electronica in the world of indie college music, a stage I didn't even realize the genre had gotten to since I've been out of the music scene for so long, a genre I mostly still associate with the computer-generated bleeps and bloops of my '80s youth; turns out that this unique style of music has gone through so many iterations now, and has become so popular among so many different kinds of people, that an entire diverse scene of subgenres has cropped up like wildflowers on a dewy spring morning, including a mind-bending prog-rock cutting-edge that makes you shake your head when you hear it and go, "Da f--k is this?"

It's part of why I wanted to get reacquainted with contemporary music again, to find bands like this and to remind me, "Ah yes, here's what all the kids with the funny clothes have been doing while you've been away, Jason," so as to be as well-rounded an artistic critic as I can and to make the CCLaP blog as relevant and fun as it can be. But it also makes me realize quite plainly why so many people starting around my age (hovering near 40) start rapidly losing touch with what's going in the true underground music scene, and come to think that the entire generation after them consists of nothing but American Idol worshipping fools; because unless you're willing to continue putting in the 20 hours and hundred dollars a week you did when an undergraduate, it's hard to follow along with the always loud, pretentious, late-nite, snarky, drug-laced, garbage-filled world of college rock, and thus the more you come to believe that the entire music scene you're no longer a part of has devolved into endless conversations about Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake.

That's where sites like PItchfork and Discobelle are really at their most useful when it comes to 'old fogies' like myself, despite (I know, I know) all the kids who are really in the know already spitefully snorting and spitting upon even hearing the words "Pitchfork" or "Discobelle" anymore. ("Ugh, Pitchfork, that's so 2005, old man!") Yes, I know, you're all hanging out somewhere online now that I know nothing about! And that's just how it should be, damnit! I'm just shooting these days for not being hopelessly lost, certainly not to out-hipster anyone out there more than five years younger than myself. I think the entire effort would be a lost cause on my part if I even tried, to tell you the truth, something I wish more aging wannabe hipsters would acknowledge in their own lives.