The Minor Improvements and The Bug Fixes are apparently both better bands now, but we don’t know quite how. Both have been enhanced with a new rhythm guitarist, the alleged Oswald Xavier the Tenth. But he barely plays, he’s the antithesis of a natural showman, and even the comedy potential of his name seems as yet unrealized.

Where Mr. Xavier really matters is behind the scenes. He’s arguably the best street-flier designer in town right now, and more importantly he’s a street-flier designer who actually makes the effort to get his work seen. We’ve run into Ozzie X (real name as yet unknown) dozens of times in the last few weeks, on the street, hanging his art. His role onstage is strangely muted—both times he played Thursday, with both those bands, his guitar was buried in the mix and he seemed to actively evade opportunities to use the mic.

Why is he even onstage? “He’s a musician first,” the MI’s Flip Casuary counsels. “We respect that. He’s finding himself. You know, he’s never been in a band. He grew up in the sticks, dreaming of being in a band. Now he’s in two.”
“He’s actually pretty amazing,” adds the BF’s Joe Smith. “He writes bridges. Like three of our songs, they had no, you know, bridge, and he came up with those, well, bridges. He hears our music and makes it better.”

Casuary noted that Ozzie X was doing more that it seemed, including working the pedals and feedback for other members of the band.

So what we have here, music fans, is part anomaly, part godsend: The quiet, selfless scenester. We could use more of a show from him, sure, but he’s a character to watch.

The Pixelmaters and The Prizmos at the Bullfinch… The Calcbots (retro New Wave electronica covers) and World Clock turn back time at Hamilton’s, for a college-on-the-hill reunion-party thing that happens to be open to the general public… Neo-prog-fusionists Collage It are at D’ollaire’s. It’s the full show, with lights and projections, not the “Evening With…” rip-off they brought last time. XScope opens…

…and less than half of them are about telephones!

1. “The Party Line,” Belle & Sebastian. Brand new. First single from the Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance album, due in January.

“Teen Line,”The Shivvers. Overlooked power pop classic from late-1970s Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in recent years known only to those who’d heard it on the Hyped2Death compilation named after it. The song, and a lost album’s worth of other Shivvers tunes, were recently remixed and rereleased on vinyl by Sing Sing Records. Some local Milwaukee press coverage of the band’s comeback is here.

2. “88 lines for 44 Women,” The Nails. For those of us who didn’t think of punk as just a snarl-and-violence thing, this was a fast and loose memoir that took full advantage of the new form:

Sarah was a modern dancer
lean pristine transparency
Janet wrote bad poetry
in a crazy kind of urgency
Tanya Turkish liked to fuck
while wearing leather biker boots
Brenda’s strange obsession
was for certain vegetables and fruit

3. “Telephone Line,” Electric Light Orchestra. “OK, so no one’s answering…”

4. “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke. The infectious beat is Marvin Gaye’s and the lyrics have been dubbed “rapey” by Huffington Post, jezebel.com, The Daily Beast, The Wall Street Journal and others. But this execrable hit did inspire Weird Al Yankovic’s good-grammar anthem “Word Crimes.”

5. “Laughter Lines,” Bastille. This boy band only formed four years ago, but they make elaborate videos like they’re Duran Duran in the ‘80s.

“I’ll see you in the future when we’re older

and we are full of stories to be told. 

Cross my heart and hope to die,

I’ll see you with your laughter lines.” 

6. “White Lines,” Grandmaster Flash.

7. “Between the Lines,” Janis Ian.

8. “Days of Lines and Noses,” proposed Joe Walsh album title.

10. “An Apology For Five Songs About Power Lines,” The World Without Parking Lots.

We are packing and moving on and figuring out who our friends still are.

World of Archie Comics Digest #43 (Nov. 2014). With all the hubbub about the gory Afterlife With Archie and the forthcoming, apparently equally “mature” Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, few are noticing that the standard-issue Archie Digests haven’t been pushing any boundaries of sex, violence or bad taste at all. The new story in this issue—a few years ago, the Archie digest format went from all-reprints to having a brand-new story or two as well—is as tame and old-school as comics get. Talking animals!

Ornaments adorned the Bullfinch stage when Hillbilly’s Angels and 16 Cylinders Inside a Jalopy held their holiday spectacle there Thursday night. Naturally, these glass trinkets, culled from church tag sales the previous weekend, became a horrible hazard to both bands and audiences. Guitarist G.G. cut her toe mistaking one of the figurines for a foot pedal. Others got willfully kicked off the platform by bassist Bink. In the crowd, they got thrown about, resulting in the strongest disciplinary measure known in any small club—the houselights went on. The star of Bethlehem could not have shone more brightly.

There’s now a sign above the bar demanding that no Christmas ornaments or creche pieces are allowed onstage. No room at the inn.

Tonight: Gigi’s solo project, Girl in Glass, is at the new Pilgrimage Coffee House near Church Street. … Death Alley brings the darkness, and the merch tables, to D’ollaire’s. … The Spinning Song folk ensemble plays a family reunion/class reunion thing at Hamilton’s…