Let me just mention what two of my favorite things are these days: Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens . . . no wait . . . that’s Julie Andrews. I get confused easily. The version I have in my head when I think of that song, however, is (I think) from an Anne Murray 8-track that my mom listened to all the time when I was a kid. What I meant to say is that Godspeed You Black Emperor!, a nine-piece Canadian anthemic experimental rock band currently playing at top volume in my headphones, have recently been elevated to this week’s favorite band. Epitonic has this to say about them:

Listening to Montreal nine-piece Godspeed You Black Emperor! is a bit like opening up the face of a clock and trying to make sense of its works. They’re fascinating in their shiny metallic complexity, beautiful in their technical sophistication, yet ultimately unknowable for a mere layman, representing a prototype for a strange world with a different physics more than a functional machine. In other words, true understanding takes work and effort, but true understanding with respect to Godspeed, unlike a clock, is always a matter of subjective interpretation.

What Godspeed You Black Emperor! actually presents its listeners are dense, epic instrumental compositions, which tend to start small and stark and build inexorably towards intense climaxes, swaying and bending as they go under the weight of so much accumulated instrumentation. Strings, in varying shapes, sizes, and degrees of distress, are their pieces’ most dominant element. These include guitars which rarely sound like guitars—some bathed in layers of feedback and fuzz, some prepared and painful sounding, almost all broodingly dolorous—as well as achingly pretty cello, viola, and violin parts which often sound almost as if they’d been plucked from some forgotten backwoods folk tune. Complementing all this stringed noise are brassy waterfalls of French horn, repetitive organ and synth parts, heavily processed machine noise, found sounds, and a lot more. As the pieces build from delicate sound poetry to frenzied eruptions, martial percussion rhythms—often featuring glockenspiel, chimes, and nontraditional percussive instruments in addition to the drum kit—emerge, underpinning the rest of the instrumental mix. It all adds up to varying degrees of incredibly nuanced, repetitious hum, the sound of an alien life force, its heartbeat and breathing, expressed through music.

You can find two songs from their 2000 release, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, at epitonic.com.

The second one of my favorite things is my new 20GB iPod, which I bought in order not to go crazy on the three-day drive out here. It worked well for that, since I also bought Griffin Technologies’ iTrip, which broadcasts on the FM frequency of your choice and allows you to pick up your iPod on the U-Haul truck radio. I thought it a pretty clever solution. My new iPod, Alyosha, now accompanies me while I wait in the mornings, for up to 20 minutes sometimes, for the bus to arrive. And as I walk down the street, my feet in lockstep rhythm to whichever soaring and/or richly textured music I’ve chosen to escort me into wakefulness that day, my otherwise nondescript getting-to-work routine syncs up to the beat, like in that Jetta ad from the mid-’90s. (You remember it, don’t you? This one.) The world is a beautiful place when you’ve got your iPod in your pocket, especially when you have the little remote control clipped onto your pocket so you can adeptly change songs or turn down the volume when somebody’s looking you in the eye and his lips are moving and you realize that he’s probably trying to ask you a question.

It sometimes makes me feel better, when I’m sitting on the bus in my dorky business casual get-up with my shirt tucked in, that I’m secretly listening to loud fast punk rock music that has its middle finger raised haughtily at the Man I’m working for. The funny thing is how many other people I see on the bus in the morning, their shirts tucked in, their tan chinos ironed smooth, with those tell-tale white ear buds, spinning the little virtual song chooser dial with reckless abandon.

It’s good to know I am not alone.