I don't know what to make of this weekend's fatal shooting at Chop Suey either (except to say that it's always tragic when violence and death spill into the music scene). The night the shooting happened, I was down at the Comet for a show mourning and remembering John Spalding, who recently passed away from cancer at age 33. I was going to review the show (along with the Pharmacy's farewell to Seattle the previous night) in my column this week, but now I don't have much to say, and anyway that space is going toward more urgent matters. I was going to talk about the reunited Suffering and the Hideous Thieves' touching though Jesus-y hymns and Jeff Suffering's vague resemblance to Craig Finn (although with religion/god invoked as personal testimony rather than as narrative device). I was going to talk about missing a lot of that Pharmacy show because I was loving DJ WD4D's abstract hip hop set at Grey that night (FlyLo, Modeselektor, Oizo, Ratatat, etc). I was maybe going to talk slightly bigger picture about how so much of my favorite music deals with the existential dread of death, with worries and doubt about what if anything comes after. But all that shit seems really small now, and I just can't make much sense of any of this.

Here's wishing the best for all those affected by any of these deaths. RIP.