I've been a bit cranky this week, I admit it. The worms keep trying to escape, there's a really foul bowl of advacado/bean/corn stuff stinking up my fridge and my hallway is full of someone else's hair. And don't get me started about my social life. But you know, despite my less-than-chipper mood, every time I hear Half Mexican Teenage Witch burst out with the line "I consider her one of my friends, except she is on fire", I can't help but smile. And then when the next song, "Mexico", starts out with someone playing bad harmonica over a cheeseball ballad on Mexican radio, I know that everything is going to be all right.

"Lo-Fi" doesn't really do justice to many of the recordings on A Desert Home Collection. When you can hear the tape recorder being switched on and off -- sometimes in the middle of a song -- you know you're dealing with the real thing. The recording levels are all mixed up, there's mud everywhere, and there are no frequencies above about 5KHz. But who cares! Listen to that guy sing! He's howling or something. And he means it. Listen to that crazy guitar solo! Listen to the mostly unintelligible but still strangely effective lyrics. "I'm just a metal detector, nothing more." This is good stuff.

These thirty three (!) songs were recorded from 1994-1996 by David Lamplugh of Austin, Texas. They range from random, messy sound collages to twangy, folk ballads to almost-pop songs that would sound almost Beatles-esque if they didn't feature incredibly out-of-tune background harmonies and sudden spazz-out breakdown sections. There's also sort of a doo-wop tune, with more out-of-tune harmonies that seem to have been created by changing the recording speed on a broken four-track tape recorder. Very nice.

The downside of all this? These are old songs! While it's interesting to hear what a very creative person was doing in his Austin apartment with a four-track and a guitar in the mid-1990s, it would be a lot more interesting to hear what he's doing today. A CD with thirty three extremely lo-fi demo tracks recorded six years ago makes for a fun listen once in a while, but it's not really enough to hold my interest in the long term. I hope that Mr. Lamplugh has something a bit more current to share with us, and I hope he does so soon.