Our favorite review of the week, thanks to Something Awful.

Florence & The Machine:

I am also certain that she identifies strongly with movies about a quirky girl who meets a sweet indie dude with permanently messy hair who wears rumpled, button-up shirts. He is about to get married to some uptight bitch who wants to control everything and stomp all the creativity out of him, but fortunately the quirky girl comes along and reignites his passion for life and shows him that he has to call off the wedding at the last minute, even though it's going to disappoint his parents and make him question everything he thought he knew about himself.

Oh, and I'm almost positive she "doesn't even OWN a television" and takes every possible opportunity she can to tell you that she doesn't know who a given celebrity is: "Who is THAT?? Why do you get so wrapped in all that fake Hollywood bullshit? It's so PLASTIC and PHONY, man! Wait, hang on a second, my iPhone is ringing."

The BBC reports:

For better or worse. [Researchers found] that if the wife was five or more years older than her husband, they were more than three times as likely to divorce than if they were the same age.

If the age gap is reversed, and the man is older than the woman, the odds of marital bliss are higher.

Add in a better education for the woman - Beyonce has her high school diploma, unlike husband Jay-Z - and the chances of lasting happiness improve further.

Beyonce Knowles is 28, and her rapper husband Jay-Z is 39.

In late January I wrote this snarky little note to Portland in which I said:

I was completely disappointed by the lack of anything interesting in your used vinyl, and was totally turned off by how many re-pressings and re-issues fill the bins at your stores.

Many readers from Portland, and some from Seattle took offense to that, adding that I had made the huge mistake of not going to Crossroads music and Exiled Records.

um, didja try Crossroads at all?

and:

If you didn't go to Crossroads or Exiled you blew it.

and:

Have never shopped for music in Portland, but if I ever encountered you as a customer in any form I would hit you in the face. You sound like a whiny sophomore learning to shop like a bitch from your WASP mother in Nordstrom. Stop posting on lineout.

Well, I went back down to Portland last week and decided to check out the two stores that I had inadvertently missed.

Crossroads was okay. Just barely.

If you've never been to Crossroads, imagine an antique mall with each "room" having a different vendor and you'll get the vibe. The whole store is just a vendor mall for other smaller collectors. While there are some ace finds throughout, lots of the sections looked the same. I would look through soul selections and see many of the same second rate records in the bins. There were some notable vendors: One guy's niche was Soundtracks, and another had a great selection of World Music. But on the whole there wasn't a lot of wholly unique stuff there.

I did manage to pick up some stuff to fill in gaps in my Disco album collection, and a nice copy of hippy Hawaiian folk rockers Sunday Manoa's Cracked Seed. As well as a mint copy of (gulp) Madonna's "Everybody" (the dub side is soooo good).

The most hilarious thing in the store was one vendor's Electronic section, selections of which are pictured below.

I still bought two records there. A new bootleg 180 gram vinyl pressing of Sandy Bull's Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo (so, So, SO, SO good!), and a Slow To Speak re-issue of Arthur Russell's "Is It All Over My Face". (Slow To Speak do great pressings of rare classic dance music that never got a good 12" treatment). The Sandy Bull record put me back $20, and it's a nice pressing, but finding it used in pristine condition would have only been $25-$30.

See what I mean? Kinda feels like cheating.

I don't know if I'm just used to Seattle's stores. Maybe I know what to expect, so I save my real rarities hunting for other cities. Or maybe I'm just pleasantly surprised at what I find when I root around the bins in Seattle. A friend also clued me into the fact that Portland is a "very white city", so looking for rare disco gold there is probably the wrong idea to begin with.

Anyways, even though your record stores still suck, Portland, I still had fun toiling in your dusty bins.

PS. Incidentally, I wrote about Sandy Bull quite awhile ago here.

Low Low Low La La La Love Love Love. Musically, they're okay—shivery, gentle folk rock for those looking to get their pleasant on. But their repetition/alliteration thing has gotten out of control, and it's a huge pain to type. On top of that, it takes up way too much space on a marquee, should this British group ever reach that level. Plus, I don't think Low, the La's, or Love will take very kindly to having their monikers dragged into this.

Are people calling them L9 yet?