The ‘Mericans will be the featured guest tonight on Boudin Barndance on WRIU 90.3 fm. They’ll be playing songs and taking calls, basically taking over the broadcast, at 8pm and if you don’t have one of those old-fashioned radio thingys you can listen online too!

Indie pluckers The Low Anthem will be gracing the airwaves this evening on WBSR’s weekly Live Block show. These guys are nominated in that Phoenix Music Poll for best local act and album of the year, so if you like what you hear send them some love. Live Block, 88.1 WBSR, 8pm

Tiger Saw’s music is woozy and beautiful; gentle electric plucking, mandolin, accordion, and soft lonesome voices that threaten to rock you to sleep. But they can also get soulful, as on “Words Not Used In Books” which although it unfortunately contains some rapping, its electric piano groove more than makes up for it. They’re on WBSR’s Liveblock tonight at 8pm, 88.1 fm.

I don’t know about you, but if there’s one thing I like to do for fun on a Saturday night, it’s drive around in my car listening to the radio while an old man in a lonely control booth far, far away pretends that his studio is actually the site of a raging party. I especially like it if that DJ mostly plays songs that are in the current top 40–even slow ones like that crappy new Lifehouse song–mixed in with every clubby top 40 hit ever, from Cascada to Calabria to that one instrumental song that was really big like six years ago that I don’t have the energy to locate the name of right now.

Luckily, to fulfill those wishes, there’s Open House Party With John Garabedian, a nationally syndicated show helmed by a seventy-year old man from Worcester who has been literally broadcasting from his basement every week since 1987 . Garabedian, who is approximately four times larger than Rihanna in every direction, plays more or less the same songs every week, while teeny-boppers who aren’t really into the internet call in and request Flo Rida over and over. Of course, why the hell anybody would call to request Flo Rida when he’s all the damn radio has played for the last three months anyway is unimportant. The point is that the kids care, and young hearts and bootays in baggy sweatpants from coast to coast start thumping in unison when faced with a song that–let’s be honest, people–totally sounds like Nelly did seven years ago.

At the end of his Saturday night broadcast–which in Providence sort of seamlessly goes back into 92 PRO-FM’s regular playlist without any kind of formal goodbye or anything–Garabedian counts down the top 3 requests of the week. And this week, for the first time in half a year, the top 3 did not contain “Crank Dat”, the dopey yet enormously popular hit by the dopily named Soulja Boy Tell Em. Seriously. Six months. Since September. The beginning of the school year. Every single week. Day in and day out, boys and girls across the country have been so enraptured with that song that they aren’t just downloading the song, and the ringtone, and watching the Youtube video and doing their stupid little dance or whatever. They’re doing more than that. They are calling a seventy-year old man from Worcester to express their love for the song.  That’s nuts.

I’ll ignore the fact that the decline probably just has to do with the fact that Soulja Boy’s “ Yahhh!” is hastily oozing into the top 10 and just say that, oddly, I never thought I’d be so excited by a situation where the three most requested songs in the country are by Flo Rida, Chris Brown, and, um, whatever that lame country ballad thing was at #2.

WBSR’s tiny Liveblock room hosts heavier-than-heavy sludge-metal duo The Body this evening at 8pm. If you live on the East Side just open your window around then you’ll probably be able the hear it. 88.1 WBSR Liveblock @ 8pm.

music by Andrew WK/lyrics by John McLaughlin

And if you think I’m gonna illustrate this post with a picture of John McLaughlin you’re not even paying attention. Face it, by all objective criteria, and when he’s not making faces, Andrew WK is dreamy. He is also completely daft and usually making faces. Musical update, he has now gone from producing noise bands to ‘collaborating’ with John McLaughlin — yes, that John McLaughlin.

Just for the heck of it, PRI’s Fair Game with Faith Salie commissioned the 47-second theme, The McLaughlin Groove, a tune written by Andrew around a recent exchange between Mr. McLaughlin and Pat Buchanan. (Andrew gets more airtime on NPR than he ever did on all other radio networks combined — why is that?) And you know what… this song rocks.

The Nashville-via-Brooklyn-via-Boston band Clem Snide got their name from a character in Naked Lunch, so it shouldn’t be that surprising that nerdy frontman Eef Barzelay sounds like a really stoned beatnik. That is, unless you’ve actually heard any of the nasal sad-sack ballads he’s written over the course of seven albums (five with the band, one solo, and one coming out on April 15th that I’ve seen credited to both.)  Amd that’s not even getting into the man’s interpretations of songs like Richie Valens’ “Donna,” Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” or Christmas standby “Joy To The World,” which he used to end 2006’s Bitter Honey album.

So it’s crazy listening to his recent appearance on Phoning It In, the radio show where musicians play songs over the phone. Turns out when he’s having a conversation he really sounds like a stoned beatnik after all, or possibly the kind of guy who’d call you at four in the morning with some scary new theory about the apocalypse. Which, considering that his songs have titles like “Messiah Complex Blues” and “Jews For Jesus Blues” and “Evil Vs Good”, might not actually be out of the question.

Detractors might accuse him of whining, but at his best Barzelay walks a thin line between cultural awareness and self-awareness that prevents the bespesctacled crooner from sounding too wimpy. Despite the fact that almost all his songs are mopey country ballads–including the one about David Icke and the one about Corey Feldman and the one about doing whip-its with a first love–Barzelay has an interesting degree of ironic detachment that always keeps things interesting.

Listen! phoning it in

Tonight at the Hourglass Cafe in Brown’s Faunce Hall, Deer Tick and Tom Thumb play live and over the air on BSR’s Liveblock (88.1 FM) The show is at Liveblock’s usual airtime of 8pm, and it’s free.

I’d meant to post this a few days ago.  It’s an NPR piece that made waves this summer, by former BSR-er Addie Goss.  (Filed from under a table, while stricken with malaria, as I understand it.)  It just made NPR’s list of that network’s top 15 pieces of the year.

All Things Considered, July 1, 2007 · Laura Bush has just completed a tour of Africa, stopping at a school in Bamako, Mali. The U.S. Embassy there helped to spruce up the school before her arrival, making it more amenable to a photo-op.