I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record

I spent all weekend cleaning my apartment (well not all weekend, I did find time to get see the Harry Potter movie and attended a couple social gatherings, let's say most of the weekend). There were floors to scrub, pots to clean and always, always vacuuming to do. Anyway, now that it's mostly done, I'm filled with an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. If I weren't so messy, I would clean all the time.

Speaking of messy, today's album is from the poster boys of slacker rock - sexually frustrated and angst-ridden slacker rock. Yes, that's right, it's Add It Up (1981-1993) by the Violent Femmes.

Pretty much everyone I know was madly in love with the Violent Femmes in high school. Seeing how it is most people's pinnacle of angst and sexual frustration that's not surprising. They practically wrote the soundtrack for those years.

So Add It Up is a nice trip down memory lane. It starts off nicely with "Blister in the Sun" "Gone Daddy Gone" and "Country Death Song" but it does ramble a bit in the middle with some songs I could really do without (like "Degradation"). Overall, the whole thing is a great collection of everything you could want by the Femmes.

But then they pull a little bit of a bait and switch on you at the end.

What two songs does every casual Violent Femmes fan want? "Kiss Off" and "Add It Up", of course. But if you buy this album you get live versions of those songs. While this might be a nice treat for hardcore fans, it's sort of a bummer for those of us who were hoping to get everything they wanted on one album.

So what you really need to do is but this album and their self-titled debut album. That'll pretty much cover every song you can think of from your high school years.

Favorite Song of the Week: "I Melt With You" by Nouvelle Vague - If you listened closely to Grey's Anatomy last week, you may have heard this nice little cover version of the Modern English hit. Nouvelle Vague is a French electronica group with a new album that features loungy bossa nova versions of 80's songs. Yes, it's as awesome as it sounds.