I burned out. I was out of metaphors for describing "tight" drumming. "Tighter than peanut butter jar lids in Chyna's cupboard" signaled the curb drain at the bottom of a downhill cul-de-sac. Few words found my screen, and fewer bands and albums warranted the backpain that comes with the laptop + futon formula. I de-linted my satin Pitchfork jacket, handcrafted in 1998 by the same main who stitched up Jethro Tull's codpiece and Peter Gabriel's flower mask, and hung it up in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It's only on hold in the coatroom, but it's in there.

Declining offers to become the ghost pen behind V.C. Andrews novels and "Hagar the Horrible," I bought a trailer in Social Circle, GA and set forth to write about my other, heretofore neglected passions: motorcycles and smoking grass. Crotch Rocket and Purple Hairs gushed over the hackneyed po-mo approach I can pump out unconscious. It'd been done to death with record reviews, but "Kustom Kickstands" and"Righteous Bud and Crystals of the Month" columns remained virgin soil for loquacious point-avoiding.

Naturally, one of the perks of writing for Crotch Rocket is the comped nipple-red 2001 Honda CBR929RR each writer receives, complete with a designer in-helmet sound system. But I could never bring myself to listen to music through that rich, five-speaker, binaural, 100 watt system. Mostly, I popped in Anthony Robbins' books-on-tape, trying to find direction and "the beast within." The rural roads between Social Circle and Ball Ground, GA knew those bald tires well, as I'd race under crisp winter sun, composing reviews of the latest camshafts or axles or hydroponics, higher than Christ on sticky B.C. chronic.

"Hey, you might be interested in this. It was in my box," said Sandy, who ran the monthly Muffler and Relationships Advice column. She handed me a compact disc.

"Sorry. I have no use for that. That's all in my past," I said in my most mysterious voice.

"It was sent to us by mistake. Some band called V-Twin," Sandy explained.

"Ah, like the engine. 230 horses," I rattled off, bored.

"Listen, maybe this is what you need. To get back in the saddle," Sandy whispered.

"Hey, the only saddle I need is that black leather dick-cushion out there, strapped to 245 pure horses of Japanese engineering," I spat pointing to my ride.

Still, I took the CD.

***

Five miles outside the town center of Dacula, I stopped to feed wild horses. My CBR-- "Cold Black Reign" as I called it-- waited on a 20" platinum kickstand. I offered one of the animals promotional Limp Bizkit "Nookie Cookies" and some Warp 100 hard candies I'd dug up in my old music journalist knapsack. The dumb brown horse rummaged forcefully through my bag, and began chewing on my Anthony Robbins cassettes. Yanking back hard on his mane and pointing into the beast's eye, I demanded release of my tapes. But the horse had already made cud of my inspiration.

Rain spoiled the ride back to Social Circle. The incessant tapping of droplets on my helmet tortured the silence. Faced with nothing better, I popped V-Twin into the handlebar-mounted 12-disc changer. I was skeptical, but desperate. A comp of British EPs was unlikely to ignite lost fires. But then again, I could faintly remember loving similar discs by Clinic and the Beta Band before my downfall.

Clean analog drum-breaks hustled into the helmet, rich with the sort of MC5-on-dub guitar pumping Primal Scream explored, to my rekindled delight. The song, "Delinquency," was dumb yet heartfelt. Inspiredly so. Like other recent British indie bands, V-Twin meddled in their garage with both highlights of rock's insurgent history and the possibilities of its future. Id-tickling nonsense hooks and fist-pumping drenched each moment. The vocalist best expressed his emotions in tweets and whistles, and it worked. The cadence met the pavement-ripping RPMs of my Honda. The song popped up twice more, without complaint, thanks to nifty reworkings. Royal Trux, appearing here in their Adam & Eve personas, floated the song through hazy, narcotic filters not entirely dissimilar from their Accelerator highs.

Elsewhere, Free the Twin took drastic turns (like GA Route 81) through slower, softer country. "Derailed," a folk number, betrayed the band's Scottish home. Decent enough, but more along the banal lines of slow, sentimental pap which fed my disinterest in music. Badly drawn songs in predictable syrup.

I pulled over to smoke a fat one, and "In the Land of the Pharoahs" fit the bill just fine. Jumble-sale beats and cavernous keys stretched the lo-fi rhythm into a safe trip. The boys over at Purple Hairs would certainly jump all over this and "An Amonite for Bill," a Syd Barrett-meets-Lee Perry joint. Pun intended! Over a handful of songs, V-Twin dabbled in a handful of styles, hitting the target each time. If the mind of one man and his assemblage of All-Star friends (reported to include members of Belle and Sebastian) could manage such wonderful unpredictability, perhaps music wasn't so bad after all. Or maybe that was the Maui Wowee seeping into my brain.

"We hate to see you go, Brent. Your piece on screens that mimicked VCR instructions was classic," said Bibby Loviccio, my editor at Purple Hairs.

"Bibby, I'm feeling it again. Music can be fun," I said.

"It was always fun. You were just jaded, man," he said. "And smoking the wrong shit."

"Totally!"

"I was thinking you could, like, compare V-Twin to the shiny, intestinal chrome of a motorcycle engine. That'd be far out," Bibby offered.

"I don't know. That seems too obvious. This music isn't chromy or intestinaly. It's just off-the-cuff fun. I like not knowing where V-Twin are going to take their music. This collection opens their careers at a crossroads."

"Man, just like riding."

I handed over my resignation and headed back to Chicago. I wasn't sure whether my bliss was temporary or sustainable, but a lot of it had to do with finding V-Twin. Domino Records can be expecting "big ups" in the next Crotch Rocket for the simian glee of "Delinquency," and in Purple Hair for the glow-stick swirls of the instrumentals. Domino's British bands have caught up with their all-star imports at last. Excited for the future, I rode into the sun. The sunrise, of course.

-Brent DiCrescenzo