CAN'T GET ENOUGH NERD ROCK: Photo caption special

On Thanksgiving day, the Los Angeles Times delivered its weekly regular nerd rock special. Closeted away in the weekend preview, reporters and editors delivered the prescribed dosage of tortured white, constipated nerd rockers for upper-middle-class liberal arts graduate school washouts.

Not the music of your USC or UCLA or Isla Vista/UCSB fraternity party, it's poverty-case pop music without a beat, thought of but not bought of very highly when Robert Christgau gives it a good grade or it shows up on an NPR morning show as air-freshener for pseudo-intellectuals and miscellaneous snobs.

Lyrics are always sensitive but untraditional as in "cooked up while trying for my MFA:" "Look at my teeth/Look at my teeth please/My teeth are cracked from the love of you."


Iron & Wine man: Muso for concerned mustache chewing and NPR listening.

It's "Rock of Rumination."

So says the Times of its weekly nerd rock choices, not actually meaning the digestion of grass into gas in the stomach of the cow, although the hoof fits.

"[Full] of ruminative, Southern-tinged folk and serious beard-stroking more worthy of nights sipping bourbon than feverishly updating your blog," it is claimed.

Our next nerd rocker has "a philosophy about music and it's about dudes." Actually, DD would have guessed the philosophy to have something to do with "slide rules" but no one who writes for the LA Times' entertainment section knows what they are anymore.

Anyway, they're liars, as usual. Check this pic -- below -- of Mike Doughty.

Mike Doughty: Has new rock album entitled "Bookbag Full of Love." A teaser, "Broken Hearts and Pencil Cases," is available for download on MySpace.

The best is saved for last.

Jose Gonzalez is "an Argentinian-via-Sweden crooner" who does something which "smacks of an NPR fantasy..."


Performs killer down-at-the-end-of-Lonely-Street coffee bar version of "Heartbreak Hotel" in Swedish.