Glenn McDonald was the author of The War Against Silence, a weekly online column about the records that were moving him. He published it for twelve years, finishing his 500th column and calling it quits (tentatively) this past August. He can currently be found writing in furialog, but be warned, Glenn says it “may or may not be of any substantive interest to readers, but if it consumes little of my time it will demand even less of yours.” Stylus brought him out of music writing retirement to curate the Stypod for a day. Enjoy.

The Sounds– Fire, [Living In America]

I grew up on New Wave, and every new band touted as its reincarnation sends a shiver of plaintive hope through me, which is almost always followed by a shudder of wearying disappointment when I actually hear them. I don’t want smug pastichists congratulating themselves for stealing the right remastered box sets, I want new bands that can still sound enthralled by new sounds, even if some of us who are older know that their new sounds aren’t entirely new. I want bands that sound like they discarded their punk reductionism because they remembered that rebellion was supposed to be fun. I want to feel excited, not just nostalgic. I want more bands like Sweden’s The Sounds, who cheerfully mash Missing Persons, Berlin and Blondie together with second-hand shards of X Ray Spex and environmental traces of Roxette, and aren’t so post-modernly glum that they leave out the critical ebullient melodies or shimmery major-scale synthesizer hooks that made New Wave the play to punk’s fight. Living in America, their happily edgy debut, has three or four world-class sugar-high singles, but I love it most when they slow down just a few beats and reveal senses not just of brashness and speed but also of drama and poise and resonance.

[visit The Sounds’ website here, buy Living In America here]

Fake?– Pristine, [The Art of Losing Touch]

I grew up on metal even before I grew up on New Wave, and these days now ought to be a golden age, in which every week brings ten new minor variations on metal’s defining pounding roar. But I’m not as grim and shouty as I was back before I understood what I’m really alienated from. I’m too happy in general, too specific in my discontents and generic surliness has come to sound no more responsive to me than bubblegum inanity, and maybe no different in substance. I want my stentorian vehemence sparked with thrill, my power laced with discovery and joy instead of merely satisfaction and menace. Japanese duo Fake?’s exuberant animation of metallic surge with sampler-chopped guitars, swirling synth textures and scritchy old-old-school turntablist exclamations embodies my euphoria as selflessly as anything, maybe best on this bounding, crashing, headlong song from their third album, The Art of Losing Touch.

[visit Fake?’s website here, buy The Art of Losing Touch here]

Canvas Solaris– Cosmopolysyndeton, [Sublimation]

In the pre-iTunes era, I wouldn’t have given Canvas Solaris a second’s chance. My adult tastes in serious metal have become heavily dependent on individual vocal styles, and even in my most obsessive youth I had limited tolerance for endless mathematical complexity for its own sake, and still less tolerance for dubious application of abstract theory in the absence of any literal text. Instrumental progressive metal is the terminal confluent quagmire of these impulses and antipathies, so in the old world there would be no chance that I’d countenance, much less tolerate, the witheringly involuted South Carolinian instrumental progressive metal trio Canvas Solaris. But here in the new world, where you can just click and hear and decide and buy, advance countenancing is a superfluous distraction. Sublimation, their second album, came up on the iTMS new-release list, and I skipped through the tracks in serenely contextless ignorance. An hour later, I went back and skipped through them again. Click. Apparently I have developed an unanticipated weakness for wordless math, after all. Don’t ask me to tell the individual songs apart even now, this one is merely the first and shortest. But per-track pricing is the curious budget progressive-metal fan’s godsend, and $6.93 for the whole album is good math in both directions.

[visit Canvas Solaris’ website and buy their CD’s here]