Bored and bedridden

What happens when you can’t leave the house? In my case, a rather painful medical condition, which entails drinking lots of water and the use of, ahem, a strainer, has kept me out of commission for the past week. Best to hang around at home and listen to music or make up a game to listen to local music.

So, I went to my page on MySpace.com, that wonderful networking tool that’s now part of the same benevolent media corporation that owns the Bush-administration propaganda outlet Fox News, and randomly clicked on a friend, Skinner. (I’d hype his band here, Iguanadon, but it doesn’t have its own page, which is kinda curious.)

Clicking on one of Skinner’s friends, local duo Pets, I found a page with no music, but with a link to another MySpace page for the band, which listed an upcoming CD-release gig on July 14 at Old Ironsides. That page’s embedded MP3 player launched the song “Backseat,” a sexy Jesus and Mary Chain-style rocker.

One of Pets’ friends is Deathray. After clicking on a page that featured four songs, including a demo of an upbeat, dance-friendly tune, “The Only One,” I clicked on one of Deathray’s friends, Goodmornings, which launched a sweet modern pedal-steel-laced Americana tune, “All My Good Intentions.” From there, I clicked on Nevada City band Golden Shoulders, but the music player wouldn’t launch any of the four songs there, so I clicked on one of their friends, Lee Bob, which launched the song “Columbia.”

I should point out that the downside of this kind of daisy-chain MySpace listening is that sometimes you can get stuck in a loop inside one genre, because all the acts you’re clicking on have friends that sound similar. The upside is that if you want to explore a set of local music with similar aesthetic touchstones, this makes it pretty easy.

From Lee Bob, I clicked on Prairie Dog, which launched a Tom Waits-style saloon number called “Black Haired Man,” and then I opted to get out of the Americana loop by choosing Rock the Light over Ruebi (who’s great, but it was time for something different). The player on the band’s page launched “Summer We All Got Laid,” which is a great name for a Bic-lighter Bowie-esque rave-up. And from Rock the Light, I navigated to the MegaCools, which launched “You Don’t Send Me No Flowers,” a repetitive but effective punk tune with a riff mutated from the old Spencer Davis Group tune “I’m a Man.”

Next was the apparently now-disbanded Fetus Deathsquad, which launched a techno tune called “Iron Man” that wasn’t a Black Sabbath cover. Fetus Deathsquad has 3,985 friends, and I couldn’t find a local act on the first page of its friends list (although no-talent MySpace celebrity Tila Tequila was there), so I clicked on local venue Red Square and found Coloma-based psychedelic duo Chorused the Animals, which launched the trippy “O Feed Us, O Fend Us,” a tune that would have been right at home on Virgin Records in 1972 when that label was an import-only haven for lysergic oddballs.

And that seemed like a good place to stop this lazy man’s excuse for churning out a sickbed column.