I see that Spock's Beard is working on a new album. I hope it's good; I can't find any music really worth listening to. Here's a bunch of candidates that suck: Rammstein, Apples in Stereo, Deep Dish, Teenage Fanclub, Blues Saraceno, Atomic Opera, Big Star, Glassjaw, Greg Howe, Richie Kotzen, King Tubby, Queens of the Stone Age. I've been looking all over. Some of these don't really suck, but they're just not very good. It's amazing how much music is just not very good. Not written intelligently, or too self-conscious and posey, or thin on ideas, or just technically bad and off-key.

Spock's Beard is in kind of a tricky spot right now, since Neil Morse announced his departure earlier this year. They have a good singer in Nick D'Virgilio, but I think everyone's watching to see whether they start to drift into commercialism now that the main prog writer is gone. The parallels with post-Gabriel Genesis are inescapable. I think the smartest thing they could do is release an instrumental album. That would play to the strengths of the remaining members, and avoid spotlighting the loss of Morse's voice and lyrics. They could introduce singing in a later album, once the fans bought in. There's precedent for an all-instrumental prog album—Camel's The Snow Goose was among their most successful albums.