Booty

Ah, booty... my favourite name for pirate treasure. I may have zero money still but I've got a credit card and a free overdraft facility where you only pay interest on what you overspend. (You can fuck off and leave me alone now, Scum Of America. I cut up your card yesterday.) So I've been plundering the local merchants to enrich my meagre, portable stash of fun stuff.

Frank Black released a new album without telling me, and now I see why. I liked his previous solo stuff and loved what he did with his last band, The Catholics, despite an obvious move towards more tradional rock. Honeycomb seems to complete his slide towards middle age and unfortunately he just doesn't have the voice to carry off songs like At The Dark End Of The Street. Frankly, if I wanted to hear that I would have bought The Commitments. Can we have a new Pixies album soon, please? Everyone wants one and we're all gonna buy the upcoming live DVD of the tour I saw last year to prove it.

I picked up The Futureheads on the strength of comparisons to Franz Ferdinand (the record by the band of the same name, not the Austrian archduke whose assassination triggered World War I) but it's not very original or musical. So both albums are going back tomorrow. Next I'll investigate The Zutons, Kaiser Chiefs, and Saint Etienne's latest squeezing. If you know they're no good already, please leave a warning comment.

The saving grace of my inaugural shopping trip was a live DVD of David Bowie on his Reality Tour, featuring 30 career-spanning tracks. It's so good, I want to set up my dad's surround sound system before he gets back from vacation. Bowie even covers the Pixies' Cactus, so at least I got to hear one good Frank Black song that day.