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When Rod Blagojevich rode into Chicago like a cut-out western cowboy, he imparted the image of a regular guy with a pistol towards reform. Before the Obama senate seat controversy, Deputy Governor Bradley Tusk said, about the self-obsessed governor, "Life isn't a TV show." Rod, with his recent stint on Celebrity Apprentice, and his countless media-expositions defending his public face, has proved Tusk wrong: Life is imparted on the surface without depth of a television screen, somewhere between the pixels and the backlight, always held in place by power and back-room dealings.

Rod, when not gracing television screens worldwide, belongs in a book of cutouts alongside other cowboys of language. In a world where politicians say as little as possible to avoid misgivings, Rod has always had a mouth full of lead. His critics lambasted him, even before the scandal, for saying things on-the-record full of implications and hidden meanings. For instance, Rod had a dream about Obama which he shared with the media, like a narcissist who keeps Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams beside his bed, not to find out what certain dreams mean, but only to prove himself right. "So as Barack and I are fixing the taxi cab and the security detail is getting more and more nervous about security... the taxi-cab driver gets out of the cab and it was Alan Keyes." Rod once referred to his own, and I quote, "testicular virility" as the driving force between his closing down of a landfill run by a relative of his wife. Surely took some brass to do that, Rod. For a cowboy so caught up in language, for a caricature being such a product of language, like a balloon that only inflates at the 600th page of an autobiography, it is no coincidence that Rod's words, like those recordings of him trying to sell the Senate seat, were eventually his downfall. Rod was the man who said too much, like the recorded voice and main character of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, a smiling fast-food logo that greets you automatically at the drive-through when your car triggers the sensors. Rod is a theatrical machina of a man, a distant technology brought into the present time, given power and a stage.

Lineal, who recorded this album in early 2005, well before Rod became a punch-line, writes:

"In May of 2005 I quit my job working at a hotel and wrote a short album about and for the Illinois state governor, Rod Blagojevich. I completed the album within three days (with help from Naomi of Sentimental Journey) and mailed it to him with a letter. The letter explained that our relationship, of which he had been until then unaware, would be expressed in song. I was pretty amped to get the music to him as fast as possible, that he should know freshly such inspiration as he made in me.

I received no response.

Blagojevich has been a man of rich mythic textuality, of weird resonance, of vacant form. I have intuited deeply about him. I believe that I have been his spirit animal.

For The Love of Rod celebrates my relationship to the man we could once imagine him to be."

Limited to 100 copies on gray tapes. Full-color artwork with a monolithic cut-out cover, Rod's bust on the Chicago skyline, and $1000 in Monopoly money for future bribes. Full-color labels on a chrome CR02 cassette emphasizing the width of Rod's smile.

Uh Oh Maxi has swagger, hooks, and groove. Usually ten people in a band is too much, but there is a symphonic coalescing that happens with these five tracks, neo-Beefheart/Ubu vocals tempered by three female librarians adding Phil Spector girlgroup-like flourishes, feedback drenching the bottom-end of the rhythm section pulses. Heavy in beats and photolinguistic lingo, like dancing at the beach to concept art with your body being just another sign in a system of signs. The production is clean and this is, without a doubt, the most professional-sounding Really Coastal release to date. NPP also makes great videos (check them out on Youtube).

NPP has toured with Dan Deacon, has a forthcoming split record with him, and is currently on the road supporting Uh Oh Maxi. This 5-song maxi-single/EP is a companion to the Wicked Eats The Warrior LP out now on Wham City Records.

Double-sided full-color artwork by Dina Kelberman, full-color stick-on tape labels, rhodamine red chrome CR02 tapes. Limited to 125 copies.