Here’s a heads-up for Silkworm/Bottomless Pit fans: Bottomless Pit has three new songs streaming from their MySpace page. All three are Tim Midgett vocals, which is a bit surprising given the even split of the four tracks from the band’s CD-R (and the usual Midgett/Andy Cohen equilibrium on Silkworm records), but hardly a detriment given the songs’ uniform excellence. “Leave the Light On” is my immediate favorite, a dynamic, emotional rave highlighted by a closing flurry of guitar, but “Repossesion” and “Winterwind” both bring back some of Midgett’s usual vigor. Think his peppier numbers from Libertine with more of an ’80s New Order approach. The forthcoming album, Hammer of the Gods, will feature eight songs and will soon be available for preorder on double LP (with two songs per side at 45 rpm), so keep an eye out for it. Given that I’ve heard seven of the eight tracks, there isn’t much mystery left to unveil, but these new songs solidify the album’s place in my year-end thinking.

In unrelated news, I hope to finally implement some long-awaited changes to this site in the next few weeks. This will involve a server change, so if the site is down for a day or two, there’s your explanation. After the server change, I should have “clean” urls for all articles, meaning that awkward page names like index.php?id=68 will be a thing of the past. Additionally, I hope to make the archives considerably easier to navigate by differentiating some of my lazy category headings (like the nearly 30 posts I have under “music”), adding a specific archive pages, and maybe, just maybe, giving my photography actual pages. Other hopes/dreams that will more likely not come to fruition: a new (or at least modified) site design, more ongoing memes like iPod Chicanery, an update of my best of the 2000s, and a personal top 100 of the 1990s.