OK if I say something now?

Far be it from me to steal Eti's thunder, especially given the entertainment value of her recent soft-yet-firm adventure, but I figured it had been a while since I contributed anything of note to the blog. Not that that's going to change with what I write here, so.... yeah, whatever.

Anyway, by now you're all familiar with the way Eti tends to get hooked on questionable music. You know the same thing happens to you, but you're just too shy to admit it. That's right: we can all hear you listening to "Now That's What I Call Music! Vol. 2,576" on the CD player in your Jetta, so don't bother keeping the windows rolled up because you're really not fooling anyone. (And by the way, hiding the Xtina disc in an Arcade Fire case? So fucking lame of you. Seriously, for shame.)

So I'd like to talk a little about my current auditory obsession, and while I'm not going to testify under oath to listening exclusively to quality stuff, it just so happens that the object of my focus would be unlikely to be mentioned in the same breath as American Idol, Casey Kasem's Top 40, or the booming overhead speakers at Abercrombie & Fitch. I'm talking, of course, about girlie indie pop duo Tegan & Sara. Chances are you've heard "Walking With a Ghost" on the radio at some point (but click that link if you haven't or want to hear it again), and maybe you thought something like "Okay, that's catchy, but isn't it just like the same 5 lines repeated over and over?" Eti sent me this very song earlier this year -- because she really does listen to good stuff most of the time -- and it got stuck in my head without my actually liking it at first. This is the way I usually am with music: hear it, hate it, learn to put up with it, sort of want to hear it again, have to hear it again, play it nonstop until I forget that my iPod is capable of playing anything else.

I was probably about at the "put up with it" stage with T&S when Eti loaded up my iPod with all three of their albums. Eventually I actually got around to playing them, starting with the most recent one, So Jealous. And it's pretty hard not to love that one. Starting with "You Wouldn't Like Me," ironically one of the more likable songs I've ever heard, it just hurls catchy stuff at you left and right until you don't know what's what. You know Michelle Branch? Avril? That ilk? If they didn't suck, they'd be Tegan & Sara. It's about that simple. They're sort of the Kissing Jessica Stein of female pop music, not just in the pair-of-cute-lesbians sense, but also in the sense of being a lot better than the fancier, bigger-money stuff without seeming to try all that hard. Yeah, it's still pop. so there's a lot of hookiness and repetition, but it always works. And the previous two albums, If It Was You and This Business of Art, also rock pretty hard even if they're not as immediately lovable.

So yeah, my iPod has been playing nothing but Tegan & Sara for weeks without complaining even once. That may be because the iPod is a non-sentient inanimate object lacking the capacity to identify such inherently humanistic traits as boredom or tiredness, but I'd like to think it's really because the music is just that fucking good.