Shake Your Fist

Update

2010-04-02T08:56:00.001-05:00

I'm now blogging about music (as well as books, art & other interesting things) at Anything Could Happen. Please join me.

Fin

2009-05-18T12:50:00.002-05:00

It's time. I always said that when Shake Your Fist became more obligation than pleasure, I would quit. Even if I could make time to write posts, I don't have the hours to deal with all the peripherals (emails, hosting, site upkeep, PR people, blog networking, etc.). And four years is enough.

Thank you to my dear friends Jon and Joe for their early contributions and continuing support. Thanks to those fellow mp3 bloggers who, to my astonishment, took me and this little site seriously. I can't possibly express how much I appreciate the affirmation and friendship. Thank you to the artists who make the music that constantly inspired SYF. And, most of all, thanks to those of you who checked in regularly and read the stuff and nonsense I posted, downloaded the mp3s, commented and generally made the whole endeavor worthwhile.

Don't worry, I'm still around the web, writing album and track reviews for Pitchfork and blogging (just images) about art/craft/design/style at just three things.

Thanks again and best to you all!

The moon tonight

2009-04-28T22:00:00.002-05:00

Image: Your personal moon

River's Edge - Great Lake Swimmers

Put There by the Land (live) - Great Lake Swimmers

Great Lake Swimmers is a maddening band to invest anything-- time, money, energy-- in. For the several here-and-there brilliant, breathtaking songs ("Moving Pictures, Silent Films," "Where In the World Are You," "Your Rocky Spine") there are many times that number in bland mediocre tracks that attempt to get by on atmosphere alone. The problem is that the band works with such soft, soft materials, shaping sandcastles from dry sand eager to revert to beach. Their latest has a little more gusto and gumption, a few bends and sharp edges, sounding heavily influenced by Out of Time-era REM (ok, not exactly rockin'). Ironically, though, it's one of the doughy numbers, "River's Edge" that's caught my ear. It sounds like a hymn and, um, like a Great Lake Swimmers song. Go figure.

And to show the band sounds pretty much the same live as in studio (I know, you didn't ask), one of their really good songs: "Put There by the Land."

From Lost Channels (eMusic, Amazon) and Live EP, Myspace

Your Control (w/ Neko Case) - Crooked Fingers

Sleep All Summer (live w/ Emma Pollock) - Crooked Fingers

I guess I'm on record as not liking Crooked Fingers' last release so much. I respect Eric Bachmann's songwriting but, man, he can make really confounding lyric and production choices! His duo with Neko Case, "Your Control" is Forfeit/Fortune's best track (despite the cheap gilt shine) and after seeing him perform it last week opening for Case with minimal instrumentation, I've learned what an unlodgable earworm it can be. (Aw, I'm a sucker for a song with rounds.) Lumbering, laconic and sort of shy-seeming, Bachmann's a solid stage presence and performer, so if you never have, see him live in band or solo guise.

The couple years old live duet with Delgados' Emma Pollock is of negligible recording quality, but a very nice performance nevertheless.

From Forfeit/Fortune (eMusic, Amazon) and Sleep All Summer 7" (eMusic), Myspace

Winter's end

2009-03-31T19:00:00.002-05:00

Image: Christopher Davidson

Iceland - Bark Cat Bark

It's been a long, hard winter. But I don't need to tell you that; it's been a long, hard winter for you too. And even as gray rain slushes my windows to say spring has (sort of) arrived, I don't think winter is over just yet. You know what I mean. So does Bark Cat Bark (Josh Todd), a man of no decided abode who calls himself after an improbability and plays his piano on the dotted line between today and yesterday, here and not-here as dust motes wink in the weak late afternoon sun.

From A Lifi. Myspace

Candy Cigarette - Boy in Static

I love the part where static boy (Alexander Chen) sings "let's lull divorcées from their households" with a hint of Antony's tremulous tremelo and the promise of something illicit, but also totally right. What could be more natural than swinging open windows and doors on a warm spring day and running into the street barefoot to a toy instrument orchestra? If Chen sings about childhood games, starting over, novelty candy (frankly, I'm just not sure), he delivers it like metaphysical verse, like a breathy, deep-felt pillowy pop poem.

From Candy Cigarette (eMusic), Myspace

Soul of the machine

2009-03-20T21:30:00.002-05:00

Hiroshi Sugito

Strider - Paper

I've heard the first album this year that I can say absolutely unequivocally will make my year-end best list. "Strider" is one of the awesome tracks from it. Just to show you how awesome: Cept for the first two seconds (the song starts like something from Suicide--but don't worry!), this track is vocals-free--and I'm almost always partial to the human voice. I hesitate to call "Strider" instrumental because, like a lot of good electronica (for clarity, "Strider" is more punk than anything), it seems to eliminate the very concept of vocals as a medium through which to convey overwhelming emotion. Its hammering headlong, yet running-in-place, rush does a very close approximation of that alarming moment when you realize you've done or said something incredibly stupid and are totally fucked and there's nothing you're gonna be able to do about it and everything seems simultaneously to be going in fast and slow motion. I've heard the band is really really loud in person, which makes me really really anxious to see them.

From An Object (eMusic), Myspace

I Want to Be Your Girlfriend - Bachelorette

Can't stop listening to this. Supposedly the New Zealander (with the pouty French robot inflection) has an album coming out sometime this year, and if it's anything like this lush, pillowy electropop number, I'll be all over it. So maybe I'll wait until later to drown Bachelorette in purple prose. In the meantime, you know what to do.

Myspace

No, I'm not jealous of y'all in Austin right now. Or wasn't anyway until I saw this listing (gasp x 4):

The Local: Sam Amidon, Alela Diane, David Thomas Broughton, Shearwater - 18th Floor at Hilton Garden Inn

And although a small part of me wants the Stone Roses rumors to be true, I was actually relieved to see this. You go, John!

Girls rule

2009-03-08T22:40:00.005-05:00

Image: Susan Seubert

Correspondence Course - The Hermit Crabs

You don't hear a lot of musical a-ha-moment stories, conversion narratives or even conversations in which music is an end to itself--as opposed to a gateway to friendship or romance or opportunity for personal branding--from and among girls. That might be changing, what with Lavinia Greenlaw's pointedly titled memoir The Importance of Music to Girls and, perhaps, a song like "Correspondence Course." I wrote about Glasgow's Hermit Crabs and their delightful "Feel Good Factor" two years ago and apparently that song wasn't a fluke: The newish Correspondence Course EP is start-to-finish pop delish. "Sing me something that I don't already know" is the song's key phase, a summing-up of this kismetted meeting of music-geek minds, "have you heard" exchanges and ok, yes, flirtation. Music is personal and social, natch. But name-dropping This Mortal Coil and plotting an instrumental combo ("I'll play guitar, she'll play cello") seems to signal a certain commitment to the thing and not just the relationship wound around it. The music's fantastic, of course. Sweet violin, chugging guitar, Melanie Whittle's great girlish voice and a chorus way catchier than anything I've ever heard from Camera Obscura's camp.

Buy from Amazon, Myspace

Foreign dispatches

2009-03-02T18:45:00.002-06:00

Image: Squareamerica

Sinkership - Sin Fang Bous

Economically speaking, Iceland makes the U.S. look like it only needs to borrow some quarters for the soda machine (pay ya back tomorrow!). I hope the financial meltdown doesn't pop these Icelandic kids' balloon, because Clangour is a, yes, clangorous bounty of breathless folk jangle and electronic pitter-pattered joy. It's a pop record. There's tambourine. "Sinkerships'" beats, harmonies and a certain kindergarten playground milieu will have you, inevitably, think of Animal Collective. Try not to. Don't get me wrong, Merriweather Post Pavillion is really good--it would be ridiculous to say otherwise--but Sin Fang Bous isn't trying to challenge anyone with anything. If there's math on this test, it's simple arithmetic. Jeez, times are hard enough as it is. (btw, Simon Reynolds has a worth-reading Guardian piece on AC's critical cultural juncture and why we're suffering a plague of [unfortunate, tiresome] AC polemics.)

From Clangour (Amazon), Myspace

Rattlin' Bones - Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson

My first thought: Australian country? But that's just my own shameful ethnocentricity. And if you think about it, who better than the hardscrabbled Aussies to pick up and rub through their calloused hands those home-ditching/homesick, sinner/saint, lost/found, dreamer/wanderer narrative threads? Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson perform this particular redemption tale with tons of professionalism (no rustic authenticity bullshit here), not to mention the hand-in-glove ease and relaxed chemistry of a happily married couple. Understandably, it was a radio hit in Australia. Also understandably, it will never be one here.

From Rattlin' Bones (Amazon), Myspace

Don't make me a target

2009-02-15T15:45:00.000-06:00

Image: Gush O.

Like other music bloggers, I've started to think about the best songs of the decade. After doing a fast, rough sweep, I culled more than 200 songs--and that doesn't include anything from 2009!. Many that won't make my personal top 50 or 100 or whatever are still excellent, and, more important when you're writing about music, interesting. So I'm hoping to jot down thoughts on some of them over the course of the year (and several top-of-the-list tracks too, of course).

No promises that these public musings will be anything you haven't heard before, and you're absolutely welcome to leave your own brilliant insights in the comments when these songs mean something to you too.

So You'll Aim Toward the Sky - Grandaddy

This song has always seemed to me Grandaddy at their most vulnerable. I think there was often some misunderstanding about how the band engaged its subjects, with plenty of listeners taking the cheesier synth lines and Jason Lytle's high lonesome cries for an elaborate game of irony (and yeah, the matching beards and flannel shirts were effective red herrings). But playfulness and hyperbole don't necessarily equal ha-ha. I've always heard more wist and even despair in Lytle's voice than he's usually credited with. It's the same problem, in fact, that plagued the Beta Band--their cleverness read as insincerity. Of course the two bands share a historical moment: the late1990s into the early 2000s. Arguably a time when the irony era yielded to the post 9-11 period of anxiety, earnestness and massive uncertainty.

The Sophtware Slump came out in June 2000, on the very cusp of the technology sector's implosion and decade's first recession, and about a year before the terrorist attacks. It's impossible not to view it, retrospectively, as prescient. But, to be fair, Grandaddy had been pounding away at these issues for at least a couple years, arguing the fragility of a human existence in which the technology we're no longer able to live without is in many ways fundamentally hostile to us. I'm no Radiohead scholar, but Grandaddy always seemed to take a more even-handed, humorous approach to these kinds of concerns. The beauty of this song (besides it's soaring, ornate, obvious prettiness) is that it doesn't come down hard on either side of the pro-tech/luddite divide, instead surfing subliminal anxieties while celebrating the magic inherent in technology's possibilities.

Using space travel as the metaphor (and given the mixed history of humans shooting for the stars, a well-chosen one), Grandaddy plays things particularly twee and diffident, with slow, trebley arpeggios, cymbal hissiness and an extra dollop of yearning falsetto. All of which you could read as a little mocking, if not for the poignancy of the song's lyrics, from the opening "dream dream dream dream" to the chorus' "fly away, far away, far from pain" to the final "goodbye." Is it a human drifting into infinite space, a robot or both? Or is this a robot's escape fantasy--one that really is just a dream from the factory floor? One of Grandaddy's favorite strategies for coping with the technological conundrum was to anthropomorphize machines. Not the way they're usually imagined--as evil and scheming--but as lonely beings with a human capacity for hurt. Whatever path you choose to follow, it's an awfully sad song.

Buy The Sophtware Slump (eMusic, Amazon).

White nights

2009-02-05T12:10:00.002-06:00

Image: holgabot

Thousand Crazy Nights - Music Go Music
From Warm in the Shadows (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Byron Barrett

Keep a Secret - The Whitest Boy Alive
From Rules, Myspace

Image: sulaearts

Chain - School of Seven Bells
From Alpinisms (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: evesimone

Expectations - Cut Off Your Hands
From You & I (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Li Orpaz

Young Adult Friction - The Pains of Being Pure of Heart
From The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Martha Burzynski

Shampoo - Elvis Perkins in Dearland
From Elvis Perkins in Dearland (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Liad Cohen

Satisfied - Bruce Peninsula
From A Mountain is a Mouth (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Zip file

Plan for rain

2009-01-21T21:00:00.005-06:00

Image: Susan Schwake

Children of the Polka - Children of the Wave

This being Chicago and me being half German, I've obviously heard and, more importantly, witnessed--in all its pink petticoated glory--polka. Trust me, this isn't polka proper. Generated by a clutch of conceptual-minded Australians, it's more like hearing polka's lusty shuffle and twirl through a thick wall as it bleeds into the lackadaisical murmur around you, winds through the hiss and sputter of espresso machine, clings to a car slow-rolling by with its windows down, pouring its sweet syrup of country radio onto the sidewalk. "Polka" is the most "pop" song on Children of the Wave's album, but if you like experimental folk with stretches of ambient and field recordings (who doesn't, you ask!) you'll be quite pleased with it, I think.

From Carapace (eMusic), Myspace

I Lost My Colour Vision - Burning Hearts

So that last track wasn't for everyone. But I don't even want to know you if you don't immediately love--or can't come to love--this song. Seriously: Don't ever speak to me again. Sounding for all the world like Swedish popsters, Burning Hearts are, in fact, Finns. Finns who memorized the Magnetic Fields' giddy, gaudy and oh-so-melancholy The Wayward Bus and perform it back at twice the tempo.

From Alboa Sleeping (Amazon), Myspace

Retrofuturist fantasy

2009-01-13T19:35:00.004-06:00

Image: Dark Roasted Blend

You know that 2008 best-of list? I take it back--not gonna happen. 2008 was a rotten year for music overall and I'm not motivated to extend it any longer than necessary. But 2009--shaping up to be awesome!!! Aw, just kidding. You know better than to expect ADDed enthusiasm round here. Read on for the usual hedged rah rah and ambivalent approbation.

Tunnelvision - Here We Go Magic

Didn't really expect this coming from Luke Temple, whose previous work struck me as alright but kind of plodding guy-with-a-guitar prime-time TV drama fare. But this and "Fangela" are two of my favorite songs this year (all 13 days of it), so go figure. Temple sings a Lindsay Buckinghamesque falsetto to divine syncopated folked-up pop, and coats it with ambient drone. To make a visual art analogy, it's like an Edward Hopper/Agnes Martin mashup. Any representational/abstract tensions get canceled out by a shared appreciation for geometry and the American perspective of hard, flat, infinite space.

From Here We Go Magic (preorder), Myspace

Woodfriend - Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson

A con artist approached me recently while I was wrestling with one of those barely functioning parking garage ticket validation machines. He didn't start out as a con artist, of course--he started out as an 19-year-old or so kid who wanted directions to a Metra station. The tip-off (even before he produced the "police report" about his "stolen wallet")? He said his mom had told him to ask a nice lady for help. Lady, hee hee. Nice, har fucking har. First rule of the con: Know your mark. That's when I decided he was a) working a classic angle, and b) really, really bad at it. But I listened to his spiel with fake interest anyway and almost felt sorry for him when I asked if I actually seemed like someone who would hand over money to a stranger with a lame, completely illogical story. There's a sucker born every minute, etc. Now Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson recycles just as many chestnuts--of the guitar hero variety. But I'd slip him some cash to buy drugs, sure. He's that charming, in a slack-shifty sort of way. When he yells hey like a faded Gary Glitter and slurs something about everything being ok, to a ticking cowbell, you believe--because you want to. Good cons make you care.

from Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Pick-up shots

2008-12-19T22:01:00.010-06:00

Image: Michelle Caplan

Some songs that won't make my 2008 list, but are still pretty awesome.

Shitty Little Disco - Arms

Guitars stutter then slide, keys weep, bass pogos and someone rides cymbals into the night. Moods and manners are all so cleverly synthesized that you don't realize "Shitty Little Disco" is as miscegenated, and in almost the same way, as all that indie dance music that was popular this year. Yet you wouldn't call it disco; you wouldn't even call it shitty disco. And if it starts with a party gone horribly wrong in all kinds of predictable ways, it ends, surprisingly enough, with a plea for the healing power of the human touch: "Oh brother lay your hand on me/ Oh sister lay your hand on me." A physical balm that mends the mind--maybe it is disco after all.

From Kids Aflame (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Song for Man with Pica Syndrome - Let's Wrestle

It hasn't been a good year for music in general, but it's salad days with toasted walnuts and blue cheese dressing for noisy garage pop (Sic Alps, Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Times New Viking, Cause co-Motion, among many many others). I think this is one of the few rock niches where it's actually pretty easy to record a decent song if you aren't particularly talented. Weak melody? Bury it in noise. Too noisy? No such thing. Not that I'm saying Let's Wrestle isn't talented. Their band-naming skills suck, but their music is worth hearing. Here, revving guitar and bopping bass--like Pica syndrome itself--are compulsive, unstoppable. But the singer's emotional swings, between helpless flail and assertive rant, sorrow and bravado ("Have you ever wondered what rust tastes like?/Well I know! It's all right.") are totally sympathetic.

From In Loving Memory Of (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

The Most! The Best! The Greatest! - Blackblack

If you're one of the whiners complaining that Vivian Girls are spoiled, untalented, hipster amateurs, start sharpening your knives. Here come the girls of Blackblack (barely) singing lyrics you invented in the backseat of a station wagon when you were eight to a tune from that band you put together with kids on your block when you were 14. Punk has gotten so establishment (AARP ads, anyone?) that it needs to go back to square one and resurrect that original contrary spirit. In this case, square one is a chalked box on a hopscotch grid and contrary takes the form of bratty.

From Blackblack (eMusic), Myspace

Oops

2008-11-30T23:30:00.007-06:00

Image: Caitlin Atkinson

Yowzers -- didn't realize it had been more than a month!

As I've said before, I don't make excuses here -- blogs being totally optional and therefore not worthy of guilt, let alone hair-shirt-donning. But if anyone still reads this old thing, you might want to know what keeps me from punching "create new post" with any regularity. To a few of you this is old, old news, but I've been writing record reviews for Pitchfork most of 2008 (hey, it never came up). If you read music blogs, you read Pitchfork, and if you read Pitchfork, you've almost certainly bitched about some of my reviews on your blog (hi there!). That's not the time-sucker, though. Aside from showing up at The Day Job for 8 hours, 5 days a week (*sigh* it pays the bills), I make stuff for my Etsy shop (warning boys: tis girly). Unless you too have an artsy-crafty bent and flog your own wares, you have no idea how time-consuming it is.

[Trying not to hyperventilate now that I've outed my various online personas. Breathe, breathe.]

ANYWAY, I've thought a lot about it and don't want to quit Shake Your Fist right now. Maybe it's naive in these mp3-blogging End of Days, but I remain committed, in theory at least, to amateur music criticism/evangelism. At the very least, I'd like to make it to SYF's four-year anniversary. So let's continue to limp along, shall we?

Oh and yes, I'm planning to do some sort of year-end list. But it won't be as elaborate as last years' and probably won't appear until we're deep into December, encroaching on January (yup, right about when the word "list" raises the sour specter of vomit in your mouth).

Ok, music! And not just music, but Christmas music! (that'll distract 'em!)

Come on Santa - The Raveonettes

I could've chosen any one of the four tracks on The Raveonettes' lil Christmas gift to the fans, they're that interchangable. Some synth-swamp with greater conviction, others bust out flashier tambourine moves, all of them sound like Phil Spector's Christmas album on Quaaludes. Which doesn't seem festive, I know, but at least it's honest. We pay for any "joys of the season" with sleep and sanity, so an exhausted, almost catatonic, Christmas EP is so right-on you wonder why anyone bothers to record aggressively cheery or comic or sad or bitter Christmas projects when what they're probably trying to emote is, you know, tired. "Come On Santa" distinguishes itself by not being the lead track or the one about ghosts or the one about Cleveland. It has a fragile, winking music box intro (calculated and effective), a phoned-in drum part (not a figure of speech, the beats sound like they were literally mediated via telecommunications equipment) and detached boy-girl harmonies line-reading a romantic script with about as much conviction as John McCain arguing that Sarah Palin was presidentially prepared. A plangent guitar cuts through The Eurocool Raveonettes' sophisticated malaise, though, and lends the song surprising humanity, even pathos. You won't turn this one on when you need a little Christmas right this very minute, but on certain days and particular hours in December ... when you need to put the forced hilarity on ice.

From Wishing You a Rave Christmas (eMusic, Amazon)

Country & western

2008-10-24T12:30:00.004-05:00

Image: National Photo Company Collection

The Treehouse Song - Ane Brun

These are days of miracles. In less than two weeks -- bar catastrophe -- Barack Obama will become this country's next president. And Tuesday night, I, with a couple hundred other exhausted E6 followers, sang a capella, "we will live forever and you know it's true" as we circled Jeff Mangum on the inauspicious floor of the Bottom Lounge. And he played a song. So I shouldn't be surprised, not at all, to hear a young Scandinavian woman sing with Dolly Parton's self-deprecating coo and hiccup, and perform regret looser, more ambivalent and thus convincing than anything I've heard all year. Ane Brun offers "Wouldn't It Be Nice--10 Years On" as a small, sad smile that nevertheless lights you up inside.

From the lovely Changing of the Seasons (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Cowboy - The Rumble Strips

Remember that Depeche Mode video where they dressed up like cowboys and kicked around some dusty desert town (or dusty desert town set)? And how it was totally whack but also kind of sexy? Hmm hmm, that kind of cowboy. Except imagine kids raised on ska and frequent affirmation instead of dance pop and depression. They grew up and started a band.

From Girls and Weather (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

A Drink - Micah Blue Smaldone

If it were only for Sam Amidon's album, this would be a excellent year for plain-cloth roots performed with wonder and awe and rue. But here is Micah Blue Smaldone -- that former punk reborn as a troubadour in a musty Union Army-issued greatcoat -- with a new record. Songs about drinking -- drinking too much -- can be blunt and facile. But the expository "A Drink" offers no lessons or summaries in its verse upon verse. And when Smaldone sings "Tonight I will drink to coming home/ I've loved your babies as though they were my own," these impulses and actions aren't incompatible.

From The Red River (Amazon), Myspace

Midnight, sapphire, cerulean, teal

2008-10-12T14:45:00.005-05:00

Image: Franziska von Stenglin

Midnight Blues (live at Planet Claire) - Liz Green
Midnight Blues - Liz Green

Thanks to Blogotheque for reminding me (a month ago, things are on a 30-day delay round here) about Liz Green, a Northern English lass with the haunted timbre and cadence of a lost, nameless American Southern blues singer (who scrubbed floors and rubbed her fingers raw by day, lost herself on a tiny stage by night and died at 33 of TB, as those stories go). A British girl with a well-deep, well-dark voice that ripples and ripples and ripples. The first track is live-recorded in Paris; the second is a studio recording. Often -- mostly -- musicians efficiently reproduce their recordings on the road. Not the sonics, the emotional tenor, the meaning to the singer, the sung-about, the sung-to. But these are two utterly different songs. I'm sure you can guess which I prefer.

From Bad Medicine/French Singer (Amazon), Myspace

See My Love - Headless Heroes
See My Love (Song for Greg) - Gentle Soul

Alela Diane and a crew of Nevada City, CA (Newsom country) musicians have made the covers record I wish Vetiver had earlier this year: eccentric, eclectic, electric, ringing with reverb, good cheer and imagination. The original "See My Love" was performed by Gentle Soul -- an obscurish hippie folk duo -- soft, whispery, sideways. But Diane sings it strong and melodramatic against surging and cresting orchestral waves (I never realized she had such powerhouse pipes) like it's a certain girl-group declaration of destiny, romance, true love and affirmation of faith in the power of songs to communicate those things unambiguously.

From The Silence of Love (Amazon), Myspace

Natural's not in it

2008-09-21T10:45:00.001-05:00

Image: Alexis Rockman

Eternal Day - Henegar-Union Sacred Harp Convention

Kedron - Sam Amidon

From Awake, My Soul: Original Soundtrack (Amazon)

Image: Rachel Denny

The Fallen Aristocracy - Northern Portrait

From The Fallen Aristocracy (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Yeondoo Jung

Oh Sky! - Coal Beautiere

From Fight Your Broken Heart and Fly (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Aliki Braine

Avenue of Trees - Parenthetical Girls

From Entanglements (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Image: Will Cotton

Neverchanger - A Shoreline Dream (feat. Ulrich Schnauss)

From NeverChanger single (eMusic), Myspace

Image: Joel Ross

Settle On - The Shaky Hands

From Lunglight (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Zip file of Sept mix

Glorious fuzz

2008-09-03T18:30:00.002-05:00

Image: Mokona73

Private Amber - Rosemary Krust

Nico's smoky slur & drawl dances an uneasy lap with an opiated guitar strum. Instead of sun-baked, this field of poppies is traced with frost. Brittle petals crumble in a pinch. The cold wants to see you shake, she sings. And you do.

Myspace

Tell the World - Vivian Girls
I never got the whole Pipettes thing. They are (were? are they gone yet?) charmless singers and I confess their post-post feminist irony performance thing cleared the top of my head by a good couple feet. Vivian Girls not only charmingly reconstitute Spector-girl-group, they make a passionate plea for the relevance of C86 breeze and shoe-gaze dense. Oh, and for new wave and garage rock and poor--really, really poor--production values. "Tell the World" is thick as clotted cream with close harmonies, gingersnap beats and a glorious fuzz.

Buy Vivian Girls (Amazon), Myspace

The real

2008-08-21T19:50:00.003-05:00

Image: Shelby Nycole

Let's Talk About It - White Denim

White Denim's (first? new?) album is a package bus tour of 70s rock, breezing through psychedelia, glam, hard rock, prog, soul, post-punk -- even waving at disco. Ya know, if it's Tuesday it must be Bowie. At several points their enthusiasm seems kinda feigned and mocking, and at other stops they're palpably enthused. "Let's Talk About It" is White Denim's spiked, angular Buzzcocks/Wire/Minutemen nod. But instead of attempting some inevitably flawed forgery, they expose the influence/creation process for its fakery. The singer seems to forget when to come in and then sorta slips out, the guitars break down, the drums pursue their own alien muse, the lyrics dryly meta comment: "Let's talk about it/ let's react to it." Then there's the puppet-string pulling post-production slicey/dicey that's as common these days as bands with "white" in their name. Somehow that doesn't screw up the song.

From Workout Holiday (Amazon), Myspace

Disaster - Nerve City

Dogs - Nerve City

I guess it's my unhealthy attachment to the thoroughly delegitimized concept of artistic authenticity and related false consciousnesses, but I never seem to tire of this type of crusty, lower-than lo-fi, "hey, you'll never believe what I found buried in a box in the basement!" material. Allow me to amend: I never tire of it when the songs are actually good, i.e. melodic, hooky, concise, wrapped in mystery, wonder, secret and surprise. These are that, but "Living Wage" an undownloadable on the one-man (the multi-monikered, multi-residenced Brendan Sullivan) garage band's Myspace is even neater. Pretend The Animals secretly recorded an epilogue to "House of the Rising Sun" and tucked it away for a more forgiving age.

Myspace

Oh My God - Ida Maria

Just rocks.

From Fortress Around My Heart (Amazon), Myspace

Saturn rising

2008-08-03T11:05:00.006-05:00

Image: Jayme McGowan

Perception Stick - Talbot Tagora

Hyacinth Grrls - Abe Vigoda

"Perception Stick" is what screenplay pitchers refer to as high concept. Just sort of beats you into entertained submission with a, um, stick: point blank metaphor, rigor mortis beats (think Meg White), massive low end and narcotized coed vocals sticky with swamp (think a less-sophisticated Black Mountain). It's pretty great. Talbot Tagora's part of Los Angeles' Smell scene, which I'm loving against my better judgment. I ignored the initial buzz on neighbors Abe Vigoda, but looked the band up after their messy, convoluted (and loud so loud) strawberry jam with No Age at Pitchfest on a Sonic Youth cover. Yeah, they do sound a bit like No Age crossed with Animal Collective informed by Sonic Youth. And I suppose "Hyacinth Grrls" is a ref to The Wasteland, which I guess makes them a little literary too. God bless L.A. and may its music ever prosper!

Talbot Tagora: Buy some of their stuff, Myspace
Abe Vigoda: Skeleton (Amazon, eMusic) Myspace

Shape of My Heart - Noah and the Whale

So no, this isn't the car commercial song. But the first dozen times I saw that ad I thought good for the Magnetic Fields! The similarities were pretty superficial anyway. NatW, for example, isn't soaked in bleak irony; Noah (presumably) just has a funny-miserable voice. Also: British. Also: seems to have picked up the ever-popular eastern European brass thread. In fact, the band is of a piece with a dozen folk-pop outfits and has simply made the looser, less-calculated (better) LP Bishop Allen should have.

From Peaceful the World Lays Me Down (Amazon), MySpace

Red eye

2008-07-19T12:00:00.004-05:00

Image: aptrick

Lotus Flower - One Little Plane
Myspace

Image: Lauren Greenfield

Your Red Dress - Alaska in Winter
Myspace

Image: Michele Valdez

Who Loves the Sun - Velvet Underground
From Loaded (Amazon)

Image: Bea Fremderman

Last November - Lackthereof
Myspace

Image: Benjamin Donaldson

Blind Lead the Blind - John Matthias
Myspace

Image: Elspeth Diederix

The Swimming Song - Vetiver
Myspace

Zip file of July mix

Belladonna

2008-07-13T00:45:00.004-05:00

Image: Nesta

Half an Apple - Hospitality
Despite a "you" address, this song is an internal monologue, a desperate reach for fleeting thoughts and places buzzing by -- wading boots, pennies, traffic on the bridge, half an apple to eat while you wait. With flesh not brown and grainy like that of every other cracked-open pomme in this world, but as white and crisp as the second you sliced it on a scarred wooden board at half past eight this morning. In all the blur and flux, this half apple is a still point, a portal. And the song...it could be a Woolf novel. It could be from anytime in the last 60, oh 70 years.

You can download a few more Hospitality songs at their Myspace.

The Gift of Song in the Lion's Den - The Lord Dog Bird
Within every noisy psych-art-rock guitarist is trapped a 4-track bedroom taper. Meet Colin McCann, also of Wilderness. Here, his playing, the production, is appropriately humble, but his subject and melody strain at the leash, yearning for the volley of reverb, the fury of drums, a big booming mania of vocals. Within every 4-track bedroom taper is trapped a noisy psych-art-rock guitarist.

The self-titled album will be released in August (pre-order from Amazon). And if you don't already own it, pick up a copy of Wilderness' first record (Amazon, eMusic). It's phenomenal.

Throw that beat in the garbage can

2008-06-26T14:00:00.002-05:00

Image: Christina Romeo

The Snow Leopard - Shearwater
Shearwater's new record, Rook, sounds comfortable, like the band pulled the shades, settled into vast, fluffy floor pillows, drank black tea (or 12 year old scotch) and picked up their instruments only as they felt moved to do so. Palo Santo (which I still prefer), came from the highwire. It was desperate, anxious, angry, spooky, spooked. And fierce, so fierce. Jonathan Meiberg's wondrous voice can still generate some snarl when necessary, but I don't know that it -- or the songs on Rook--extend any actual claw. That said, "Snow Leopard" is a grand thing and Shearwater is still intense, even electric, in person. (And wow, Meiberg's boy next door in need of a hot bowl of chicken soup sure pulls the indie chicks, huh?)

Buy Rook (eMusic), Myspace

Fort - Pumice
I'm not going to lecture you again on neglected New Zealand bands of yore or argue that The Clean is probably the most awesome musical act ever to put sound to twisty tape. Pumice shares a homeland and really, really poor recording equipment and that's pretty much it. This is messy, abrasive shit (Pumice, indeed) that buries any insinuation of melody under miles of grime. Nine out of 10 of you are going to hate this. I guess that's a challenge.

Buy Quo (eMusic), Myspace

Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks - The Rapture
Working on something else, I was reminded of how this is pretty much the awesomest track ever for kicking off a mix. The pacing is brilliant and when the guitar and Luke Jenner's voice come in, it's like being pierced by a long, sharp needle at the same time your bones are shook broken. I mean, if multiple forms of torture felt extremely good.

Buy Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks (Amazon), Myspace

Catching up:
Speaking of mixes, Locust Street has a Ting Tings, Girl Talk, Cut Copy-free summer mix (instead, Vivaldi, Michael Jackson, Al Green, The Pogues and the Meatballs theme, among others). One of these days I'm gonna get mine up here. Hopefully before the end of summer.

The ever-pragmatic Catbirdseat/Catbird Records offers multiple options to pay or not pay (as your budget, ethics, medication dictates) for the new Forest Fire LP.

Dusted's mid-year list talks up albums I've never heard of. Yay Dusted!

Looking through lucite panels

2008-06-15T16:45:00.004-05:00

Image: aperrigue

Brightness - Organic Stereo

First off, Organic Stereo has the prettiest album cover this year, the linearity of its buildings buffeted by cotton-ball clouds, color-saturated by buckets of orange popsicle and Hello Kitty toaster cheer. Hiroyuki Morikawa builds folktronic layers with pastel tinted lucite panels, and when the clear, white light of morning lands its beam where violet meets yellow meets green, it's joy.

The Stories Linger in My Mind is only available in Japan right now, Myspace.

Trading Things In - The Voluntary Butler Scheme

Based on the band's EP, I'd say that in the future, The Voluntary Butler Scheme might want to follow their Jackson Five obsession rather than their Archies (tho it sounds more like The Archies via The Apples in Stereo). This song is the exception--relentlessly clapped, intensely shakered, silly lyrics sincerely sung ("If you were broccoli, I'd turn vegetarian for you"). But what bumps it from unremarkable 60s-worshipping pop song to summer playlist essential is an amateurish drum shuffle/cymbal crash that's so overused and so badly recorded that you've gotta love it. It's like someone keeps tripping over a cable and falling into the drum set. And it's the most wonderful musical move I've heard in months. I mean, these kids are having fun.

Trading Things In single (iTunes, July 21), Myspace.

June jangle

2008-06-06T00:10:00.003-05:00

Image: New York Times/Westminster Dog Show

Leave That Scene Behind - The Wave Pictures

It's not a matter of "getting past it." You either hate Dave Tattersall's voice, or you hate it less. It's whiny and nasal and so maddeningly atonal you want to reach through the speakers and grab Tattersall by the shoulders and shake him til his ears fall off (they're not doing him any good anyway). So why do I crush so hard on this nerd and this song and his rickety band and inconsequential--but oh so lovingly detailed--lyrics?

From Instant Coffee Baby (Amazon), Myspace

Whole Wide World - Wreckless Eric

I'm embarrassed to say how few of the tracks on the new John Peel favorites collection I already knew (very few). But even if I couldn't say how, I recognized this song from somewhere. I didn't think it was ever a radio hit in the US, but didn't want to google it (Google just makes everything too easy). Then it came to me: the underrated Will Farrell & Emma Thompson & Maggie Gyllenhaal vehicle, Stranger Than Fiction, which has one of the best soundtracks of recent memory. That could have something to do with the fact that Britt Daniel helped out (so lots of Spoon songs and smart picks like post-punk classics "That's Entertainment" and "Mind Your Own Business"). And it's not difficult to hear "Whole Wide World" as a Spoon antecedent--as something that could even inspire a musical career--with its elegant and discrete pieces, its chug of bass, dash of tambourine, guitar squiggle, drum thumps. Nothing extraneous, everything perfectly in its place.

From Perfect Unpop: Peel Show Hits and Long Lost Lo-Fi Favourites: 1976-1980 (eMusic)

glowglimmershimmersparkleshine

2008-05-24T21:00:00.006-05:00

Image: Karen Casey Smith

San Solomon - Balmorhea

From Rivers Arms (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Jake Dobkin

Outta Sight - Osborne

From Osborne (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Lisa Kereszi

Now Til '69 - The Shortwave Set

From Replica Sun Machine (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Travis Ruse

Wondrous Place - The Last Puppet Show

From The Age of the Understatement (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Estelle Hanania

Ruususuu - Lau Nau

From Nukkuu (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Image: Jan van Holleben

My Dunks - The Clik Clik

From My Dunks, Myspace

Image: Melanie Schiff

Working Bees - The Pinker Tones

From Wild Animals (eMusic), Myspace

Image: Corey Arnold

Close the Lid- Port O'Brien

From All We Could Do Was Sing (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Zip file of May mix

Introductions all around

2008-05-19T09:30:00.008-05:00

Image: Irene Cecile

Knock Knock - The Accidental

Ali Smith wrote a novel called The Accidental about a stranger who insinuates herself into the lives of a fraught family. It came out a couple years ago and you might have heard of it; you might even have read it. I tried, but only got halfway through. The Accidental, the band, may have also (read the book, not succumbed to short attention-spanitis) and this sorta-supergroup may have taken their name from it. And if you've ever played the piano (me! But abandoned before I got very good. See a pattern?), you know that accidentals are the black keys on the board (an accidental is also a musical notation related to pitch). So maybe (ok, probably), that's what the band's referring to. Either way, it's a great name--solid, confident, totemic-sounding, but at the same time a little uneasy, a tad vulnerable.

"Knock Knock" is the first track on The Accidental's delightful first album, and it's the perfect meet n' greet, an introduction to their offhand harmonies, homemade percussion, barefoot la-di-da. It's also an introduction to one another. They start kind of tentative, like strangers meeting on a country road, slowly entering into polite conversation, then engaging more intensely, dropping the small talk for talk about what's real.

From There Were Wolves (Amazon, to be released in June in the US), Myspace

Static

2008-05-09T10:32:00.003-05:00

Image: Martina Mullaney

Pompeii - Indian Jewelry

Indian Jewelry didn't used to be this nice or good. They used to be noisy, vaguely threatening, willfully iconoclastic, difficult and interesting but very ... did I say noisy? Ok, they still sound like they're singing from the bottom of a well (or in the case of "Pompeii," choking on volcanic ash?), still spouting static, knitting dense nets of mild-to-moderate cacophony. And they continue to love a good coma-inducing drone. But for all intents and purposes, this here is a folky pop song, with clear, emphatic chord progressions draped in jingle-jangle and mope. Don't ask me what the guy's singing.

One of the best surprises of the year so far, you really should buy "Free Gold!" when it hits the street May 20 (preorder from Amazon).

Time to choose a side

2008-05-07T17:15:00.003-05:00

Image: Erin Tyner

Oh, Heaven Isn't Real - David Karsten Daniels

Why should Jesus get all the good music? It's not like it's for the devil or anything -- the song's just one great big secular humanist sigh of exasperation, as if Daniels has had it up to here with heaven this and hell that and will no longer hold his tongue. From the backyard of the Bible Belt, bluegrass swing, handclaps, holler and all, this one goes out to the atheists and undecideds.

From Fear of Flying (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Jesus Had a Sweet Girlfriend - Justice of the Unicorns

I suppose even to suggest Jesus had a girlfriend is blasphemy. But Justice of the Unicorns (dudes, you're gonna have to live with that--possibly for years!) means no harm I'm sure. They're just trying to humanize the deity and all that. How could shy, marble-mouthed singing and angelic girl back-ups be evil?

From Angels with Uzis (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Elsewhere:
I've been kinda out of the loop so this is a bit old, but Moistworks' collective post on that great indefinable, indie, is well worth reading (as are the comments).

On edge

2008-05-02T13:00:00.002-05:00

Eleanor Jane Parsons

We Carry On - Portishead

Carry on as in muddle through, grimly persevere, make do, endure-- it's all so characteristically English, though not uniquely so. These days, we Americans are muddling through til the next election, many of us holding our breath and crossing our fingers that the Dems don't fuck it up again. We carry on, despite economic news more dire by the day and the contradictory message that it's our patriotic duty to spend what we don't have. We grimly persevere waiting for the other shoe to drop. We make do, we endure. Portishead's got that limbo just right, its opaque face and hair-trigger nerves, its moody swings from boredom to emergency. I'd say Third is my fave 2008 album so far, but I keep getting stuck replaying replaying replaying just a couple songs.

Buy Third (Amazon), Myspace.

She's Gone - Langhorne Slim

It's like the closest country gets to Cab Calloway, hiccuped, hyperactive, jumpin jived, and so speedy it's rural meth lab to the typical highway roadhouse. Then there are the lyrics and music that wave at one another from opposite sides of the room.

Buy Langhorne Slim (Amazon), Myspace.

Falling Down - The Lodger

Careful as you pick up this amber-crisp lace cookie of a song--you might break it. Lucksmiths-lite (which is pretty darn lite) and The Smiths without the sexual subtext, "Falling Down" is also fresh as line-dried linen and welcome as the red and yellow tulips I see from my kitchen window (finally!).

Preorder Life is Sweet (Amazon), and def go to the band's Myspace to hear the super neato Slips remix of "The Good Old Days."

Only skin

2008-04-18T08:45:00.005-05:00

Image: Nina Hartmann

Skin Lieutenant - My Teenage Stride

From Lesser Demons (eMusic), Myspace

Image: Liu Zheng

LCD - Mathematicians

Myspace

Image: Brian Finke

Lights & Music (Superdiscount remix) - Cut Copy

From Lights & Music EP (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Image: Mary Coble

Lions After Slumber - Scritti Politti

From Early (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Image: Suzy Poling

Navigate, Navigate (Loving Hand remix) - These New Puritans

Myspace

Image: Ringl & Pit

Los Ninos Del Parque - Liaisons Dangereuses

From Disco Not Disco 1974-1986 (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Image: Levi van Veluw

Converging in the Quiet - Crystal Stilts

From Crystal Stilts (eMusic), Myspace

Image: Hellen van Meene

Kast - Silje Nes

From Yellow (eMusic), Myspace

Zip file of April mix

Smallest in the crowd

2008-04-13T13:45:00.003-05:00

Image: Cathy Cullis

I Don't Feel Young - Wye Oak

A lot of indie pop bands, to their credit, recast the misery of being young and awkward and self-conscious as a magic of infinite possibility, constant discovery and profound connections. But what of that unaddressed misery--the lack of control, the sense that you speak too fast and laugh too loud and can't trust anyone enough to unburden the lead backpack of secrets from your shoulders? Wye Oak speaks of the purgatorial space between not feeling young but not being old enough to do anything about it. In words, but also in sound, engulfing singer Jenn Wasner's unhappiness in a snowstorm of buzzing cymbals and loud liquid guitar chords.

From If Children (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Great things:

Cathy Cullis' poetic textile and mixed media collages (see above).

Jezebel's mad, literary letterpress cards.

All hail second albums

2008-04-06T17:50:00.004-05:00

Image: wondercabinet

I Feel Better - Frightened Rabbit

I didn't really see it before, comparisons to fellow Scots, The Twilight Sad. But now that Frightened Rabbit has traded their small-scale art songs for broad mural-scope anthems with dramatic instrumental builds, the points of convergence are coming into focus. The band's lyrical pessimism and Scott Hutchison's mournful voice works both in scrappy and -- on the new album The Midnight Organ Fight -- ambitious modes. So whether you'll like the new album better or worse than Sings the Greys is probably going to be an aesthetic, not a critical, choice. I'm a little leery about a few Coldplay-falsetto moments, but there are plenty of awesome, ultra-catchy tracks here like "Modern Leper" (I posted a live version last year), "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms," "Floating in the Forth" and "I Feel Better." The last works in sort of a"You're So Vain" vein. Hutchison promises "This is the last song I ever sing about you," but the way he chants "I feel better and better" like he's shredding the sofa with his teeth, suggests otherwise.

Previous posts on Frightened Rabbit here, here, here, here and here. Buy The Midnight Organ Fight (Amazon), Myspace.

Spinning out of control

2008-03-25T16:20:00.002-05:00

Image: Peter Sutherland

Everyday I Saw You in Egypt - Boo and Boo Too

Boo and Boo Too is a thrift store of sound, for sure. I don't even need to get my hands dirty digging through historical bins because the Lawrence, KS band is kissing cousins to Chicago's still alive-and-wailing (usually good, sometimes quite excellent) The Narrator. But what The Narrator hasn't managed to pull off (i.e. The Big Time [in the indie sense, natch]), I betcha these guys will. Yeah, yeah: punk-pop squawk uneasily buttressed by f(r)actious guitar noise, chaos contained by a thin membrane of control and a tiny salute to no wave. But also that elusive, near-impossible to articulate quality -- charisma. You heard it right here: for the 64th time this week.

From Iron Paw EP (Amazon), Myspace

Pieces - Miwagemini

When it gallops, this song, it's not like a flesh & fur horse. But like a pole pierced carousel creature spinning on a spit. It doesn't so much slip its reins as lose its terra firma, and run in place as cartoon characters do, feet forever soft-pedaling the air.

From This is How I Found You (eMusic, Amazon), Myspace

Around:
A lot of us bitch about the collective fallacy known as Vampire Weekend fandom (howdy!), but Mr. Heart on a Stick does something productive (and great) with his hate.

Bloodthirsty rainbows

2008-03-17T14:45:00.004-05:00

Image: John Murphy

Bloodthirsty Angels & The Terrible Trumpets - John Ralston

"Bloodthirsty Angels & the Terrible Trumpets" borrows the language of Revelations to delineate a fraught relationship. And with its lonely echoed spaciousness, the song sounds like it was recorded in a wooden church -- some 17th century New England meetinghouse in the dead of winter or a rough structure in the hot, arid western desert. But like most pop songs (and whatever I've led you to believe in the previous two sentences, this is a very traditional pop song), it's primarily about the Church of Me and the way misery makes you the most self-centered person in the world.

From White Spiders (Vagrant Records, eMusic), Myspace

What Swallows a Rainbow - Hysterics

Hysterics come at psychedelia sideways, through obliquely day-glo pop hooks and temperate guitar solos: the 60s as remembered from the 80s and 90s -- as neatly harmonized power pop blaring from a car radio in the high school parking lot. My hackles naturally rise whenever "rainbow" appears in a song title, but at worst these guys are smoking a lot of pot, which may be why the chorus keeps asking, "Tell me whaaaat holds me back."

From Hysterics (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Keep the hits coming

2008-03-08T16:30:00.004-06:00

Image: Mandy Lamb

Aly, Walk with Me - The Raveonettes

If it even crossed my mind in the past, I think I thought The Raveonettes were Dutch. I guess I visualized them flogging their seedy Spectorish wares on the edge of some dank low-country canal a few meters from a red-light zone window display. Close enough: They're Danes living in New York. But you can locate the cathexis of their music in Los Angeles -- specifically, the LA of James Ellroy and Chinatown and its fictional, but viscerally oh-so-real fatal flaws, pitiless ambition, atavistic slaughter. Not that national identity matters much when every artist sings in English, is easily accessible via their social-networking site page and illegally downloadable off Romanian servers.

I can't help but think that The Rs' rootlessness is important, though, as if it lets them execute their art-damaged garage kink menacing and authentic. Sort of how the heroes of John Ford's westerns got away with violence (in the administration of justice) only because they were physically and emotionally disconnected from the familial and civic. Ok, this may not be the best analogy, because I don't get the sense The Raveonettes have any inclination toward moral markering. It's this anomie, in fact, that keeps a phrase like "walk with me" so open-ended. Are we just talking restlessness? Streetwalking? A haunting? Spiritual reassurance? Also, the way this song carves pop out of fizz and reverb is marvelous.

Buy Lust Lust Lust Lust Lust Lust Lu (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

£4 - These New Puritans

I keep hearing how indebted These New Puritans are to hip-hop. The primacy of beats to this band of the mo I'll buy. But lyrically... there's not a whole lot of storytelling, cultural representation or linguistic calisthenics going down on Beat Pyramid. "£4" pretty much consists of "four of your pounds" and its variation, "we've got four of your pounds." The only provocative, pause-and-ponder moment comes in the last few lines, "You get zero percent ... if you can fucking try to stay silent" (I think). Are TNP editorializing on the entertainment industry's decades-long exploitation of consumers and artists?

What's really fascinating, though, is how TNP uses symbols -- the number four, the pounds sterling currency -- not symbolically, but aesthetically, as sounds. "Four" and "pounds" are jackhammered into a blur of almost-abstraction so that they're sonic patterns as much as the cha cha chas. Defamiliarization could go a couple ways here. The obvious one is the deconstructive path -- the song highlighting inherent instability of meaning (another track, "Numerology," repeatedly asks "What's your favorite number/what does it mean?"). But I think these boys and girl have a slightly different agenda. Consider what Jasper Johns did with his number paintings and drawings: highlighted process with texture and erasure, prodded the nature of representation by divorcing symbols from context. But more important, rendered the ordinary new and mysterious, made art out of the prosaic. The cool thing is, unlike a Johns' canvas you can dance to this.

Buy Beat Pyramid (Amazon), Myspace

Starry starry night

2008-02-28T00:05:00.005-06:00

Image: Randy Bolton

Time City - Laura Barrett

If Peggy Lee had taken a right instead of a left from her wretched North Dakota girlhood to Manhattan instead of Hollywood and shared a two-room cold-water flat on a ragged street on the lower east side with another cigarette girl and tucked under her iron bed in an old blanket this African harp called a kalimba she won from a guitar player named Stan in a poker game. She had never played poker before that sharp barb-winded February night and never won anything she could remember except third place in a 4H singing contest, but she had been kissed -- lots of times -- so she wasn't startled or even especially surprised when Stan tried to fold her in his arms (whether for comfort or from cold she couldn't tell) on the fire escape at two in the morning after he'd lost the game and swallowed three-quarters of a bottle of rum. That next summer, the owner of a 10-table jazz club let her have the tiny stage every Tuesday and Thursday evening before the sun went down and the real band showed up. And she played her kalimba and sang a sad, arch, amateur soprano, stitching together songs as she went along from scraps of her mother's lullabies and half-remembered high school science texts, songs inspired by all the hopeful, heartless boys she had since met.

From Ursula (eMusic, iTunes), Myspace

Eat cake

2008-02-19T21:10:00.006-06:00

Image: Betty Turbo

Come on Feet - Pete and the Pirates

It rattles like teeth in a tin can, rings like a hard right to the head, packs more handclaps per square feet that your average gospel choir and breaks landspeed records in a Lamborghini. If you only eat a meal to get to dessert, this song is butter-sugar-flour lumped on your plate like mashed potatoes and fed fingerstyle. And fuck the Libertines, the Arctic Monkeys and the last great British hope. Dig this lineage: The Kinks, Buzzcocks, Blur, Pete and the Pirates (ok, maybe they'll need to shorten their name).

If "Come on Feet" sounds familiar, it's because one of PatP's number is also the bloody brill Tap Tap, on whose bonus version of Lanzafame appeared a slower-mo version. (And, it should be said, these PatP tracks aren't really new -- they've been floating around the web for a while.) I hate to overstate things, but Little Death (Amazon, eMusic) is the best pop record so far this year.

Myspace

Pluck all your silly strings

2008-02-13T08:40:00.005-06:00

Image: Keith Carter

Jump In (For Gilkey Elementary School) - High Places

They're small, with soft hands, sweet-scented hair and clay-porous minds, kaleidoscope eyes and hearts radiant as day lilies. Even so, they recognize condescension by several paces the way forest beasts see poison plants, as pretty and greeny as they are, as poison. And they know immediately their own kind -- speakers of the secret hiccuped, jigsawed jargon of childhood, as leaped, crouched, spun, yipped, yelped, shrieked and heyed as spoken, as sounded as much as sensed.

From O3/07 - 09/07 (eMusic), Myspace

Elsewhere:
Chris has a story about The Beatles (and some early demos) circa 1960, at Locust St.

Still life

2008-02-09T11:10:00.001-06:00

Image: Heiko Rintelen

Hands - Soft Fruit
Myspace

Image: Hyun-ah Cho

Georgia May - The Harpeth Trace
From On Disappearing (CD Baby), Myspace

Image: Gwyn Hanssen Pigott

Nightswimming, AR - The Finches
From Human Like a House (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Joachim Lapotre

Peach Heart - Serafina Steer
From Cheap Demo Bad Science (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Image: David Goldes

Power - Nick Jaina
From Wool (March 1, Hush Records) Myspace

Image: Jo Whaley

The Girl I've Always Known - Gorky's Zygotic Mynci
From Poodle Rockin (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Maurice Scheltens

Sunday Morning - Margo Guryan
From Take a Picture (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Zip file

Chalkmarks on windowsills

2008-02-04T21:45:00.001-06:00

Image: Megan Whitmarsh

Hey peeps, I know I know. Every stolen moment I sit down to write a post, the words get sandtrapped somewhere between my brain and fingers. I hope to un-gum the machine with a new image & song mix in a couple days. So stay tuned for that.

What exactly have I been doing since I haven't been blogging?
Because you asked (or didn't): mostly disposing of inventory and supplies of a small business I used to have. Trust me, it's completely uninteresting, extremely time-intensive and absolutely necessary.

What else have I been doing?
Taxes.

Ugh. Anything fun?
I'm embroidering a wrap (shawl, whatever) with an elaborate flower and vine pattern of my own, increasingly elaborate, design. And making fingerless gloves from recycled sweaters. Crafty crap like that.

Have I at least heard any good music lately? This is a music blog, remember.
Yes yes, I know. I'm liking the new Mountain Goats record a lot. After the overslept, unshowered slug-pace of his last album, John Darnielle sounds like he's regularly consuming B12 supplements and falling a lot in love. Heretic Pride dons moon boots and a pom-pommed knit hat and leaps laps around town in below-zero windchill with energy and heart and momentum. I wouldn't say it's flushed with the same ruddy fever as the earliest material, so autodidactically enthusiastic for historical and mythological esoterica (Cicero wrote it allll down!). But what is? Opener "Sax Rohmer #1" is patented Mountain Goats -- finger-bleeding guitar hammer-strum intense, brooding and portentous as red clouds, and allusive as ever. Apparently, the title references the author of the Dr. Fu Manchu books. Do with that what you will. Actually, do nothing with it. Darnielle swapped out his clever, bookish, logorrheic runs with experience a long time ago. Home sounds like a real specific place these days.

Sax Rohmer #1 - The Mountain Goats

Also, I don't know if I can endorse everything on Oh:Io, but the cardboard cutout laser guns and mildewed-basement three-chord progressions of this Bearsuit sci-fi twee-punk shoutdown (surely not named after this) are holding my serotonin levels high and steady:

Jupiter Force (Recruitment Video) - Bearsuit

Oh hey: I actually wrote a (not very insightful or engaging) post.

Anyway:
I don't think you need to have weighed split vs. back stitches while working a stem to appreciate Megan Whitmarsh's embroidered art (see top o' the post). Whitmarsh exploits (in a good way) the tension between her demure and historically feminized-therefore-marginalized medium and her supernatural and popcultastic subjects -- yetis and elves and yetis and elves playing in punk bands (X-Ray Spex! Billy Idol! Really!).

It looks like Spoilt Victorian Child has (definitely? maybe?) called it quits again. A shame, but a crazy, great list of songs, eh?

Bread and circuses

2008-01-28T15:30:00.001-06:00

Image: Youngna Park

Serendipity Doodah - William D. Drake

William Middle-Initial-D Drake's pop is grandiose and OTT, bursting with bread and PT Barnum-gaudy circuses -- lions and tigers, gold leaf and scarlet silk flags, mellotrons, harmoniums, trumpets and shakers -- owing as much to the West End as XTC. Drake's lexicon is also ornate and delightfully decorative. I always think "serendipity" is too soft a word to trace the jagged lines where chance and good things collide, but it sounds so pretty scrolling off the tongue. And doodah's a nonsense word that privileges sound over significance, whose meaning depends on context more than usual. (First-known utterance: 1915 in minstrel song "Camptown Races" as a synonym for excitement. Famously revived in 1947 Disney animated pic Song of the South to signal something closer to joy [albeit joy inscribed with and complicated by racism].) In "Doodah" the word is vague -- expressing, perhaps, the inexpressible feelings of finding oneself oddly and comfortably at home on the road. Is this possibly a metatext about the emotions of performing music itself?

Drake's got a fascinating musical history -- almost three decades of playing in pop, folk and country bands and recording his own classical compositions. Check out the bio on his Myspace.

From Briny Hooves (Amazon), Myspace

Awo Dudu: The Skin I'm In - Afrologic

Isn't it just a little inconsistent to bemoan contemporary rock's appropriation of African idioms (BTW, this is not why I shudder at the words Vampire Weekend), but wave through African acts that plunder American jazz, blues and hip-hop? Is it a skin-color thing -- an implicitly racist stance predicated on the idea that it's ok for blacks to steal from blacks (skating over the differences of national origin and culture), but not whites from blacks?

A lot of African pop hosts at least a few strands of American and European DNA, and critics invoke "fusion" as often and imprecisely as they do "freak folk" when talking about eccentric vocals and meandering acoustic guitar lines or, ugh, "balearic" when discussing last year's dance sounds. But Nigeria's Afrologic does fusion by Webster's definition. In fact, this one remixed jam is an anthology-volume's worth of popular Western song forms of the past 100 years -- funk grooves, disco beats, blues chords, jazz riffs -- braided with indigenous folk traditions. A call for black unity, it's utterly joyous without seeming simplistic, suggesting that political unification can leave space for difference.

From Milliki Music: Society Sounds from 60s Lagos (regrooved) (eMusic), Myspace

Elsewhere:
I agree with Everybody Cares on music blogger's block, esp. the part about some blogs churning out content without heart. Notice I'm not posting so much this dry January...

And oh oh oh: Hype Machine aggregated bloggers' 2007 albums and songs and just posted it (now that it's almost February and post-Pazz n' Jop and all. Just joshing, you guys -- good work!).

Cross-country

2008-01-20T17:10:00.001-06:00

Image: Dorothea Lange (cropped)

Kind of Man - Sam Owens

The name Sam Owens sounds like the sturdy, brown paper wrapper of another era. One of Steinbeck's rootless, hopeless Central Valley strivers, perhaps, or an itinerant Dust Bowl balladeer, matching social critique to melody and meter. Some names, it seems, are destiny. The actual, 2008 Sam Owens is a wandering troubadour -- claiming both Seattle and New York as home and logging his peripatetic cross-country journeys on his Myspace page. And his clear tenor is sinuous-strong and serpentine supple, an expressive instrument suited to the kind of persuasive rhetoric Pete Seeger trafficked in. But even if Owens has some old-time folkie tendencies, "Kind of Man" isn't a community-building exercise, or a song of hard-sell concepts or particular ideological agendas. It's just an uncomplicated illustration of the bitter rules of attraction -- I'm your kind of man, but you're not my kind of girl -- made blunt and a shade mean by Owens' (Bo Diddley, Everly Bros. influenced) hard rhythmic strum.

From Garden of Leaves, Part I. Owens' website.

The city stoops to take the weight

2008-01-14T20:00:00.001-06:00

Image: Seasprayblue

Silent Hotels - The Answering Machine

Turns out the new indie rock anthems are pretty much built on the old specs. "Silent Hotels," a superior example of the contemporary model, offers the indignant plaints and brittle rattle of Chapel Hill circa 1994 (not to mention Minneapolis, 1983). When Martin Colclough sings, It just hit me, in this city/ I talk to myself and drink til I'm sick, he's reaching the epiphany of decades of twentysomething urbanites.

But hey, nostalgia's cool. And the kids gotta learn it for themselves. Plus, The Answering Machine has some neat new tricks in its lo-fi, hi-volume arsenal. The guitars clang like bells on a shiny red toy firetruck -- cheerier than Archers of Loaf or The Replacements on their most optimistic mornings. And the vocal shout-and-response is like a game of tug of war. You know, rough, dirty ... fun.

From Silent Hotels single (eMusic). Myspace

Building character

2008-01-09T21:00:00.001-06:00

Image: Leah Hayes

Sorry We Took All Your Money - Scary Mansion

Best song title of the (9 days old) new year! Leah Hayes (see art above) dresses gothic sentiments in a new-wave dance beat and squeezes a novel into a two-syllable word. When she says sorry, she's really saying yeah, I screwed you over, took you to the cleaners and razed your house, because you deserved it! Still, now that nightmares stalk my sleep, I guess it wouldn't hurt to apologize and maybe boost my karma. Ok, that's not why. The truth is, I sort of miss you (even lying here next to my kind new husband). You and your bastard ways and your cold, cold hands.

From Every Joke Is Half the Truth (Jan. 22 release). Myspace

The Wizard of Os - Professor Pez

Professor Pez's welterweight pop is surprisingly content-heavy. But maybe I'm surprised only because I'm American and, therefore, accustomed to musicians delivering highly politicized songs like they mean it, with shouts and grunts and growls, furious electric guitar solos and hard-strummed acoustics. Indie pop in this country is the domain of crushes and chaste kisses and the prosh kittehs and puppehs you find on Cute Overload, not, needless to say, irony-laced jabs at rapacious politicians who want to expand land development and privatize water. Not being Norwegian and unfamiliar with the town of Os, I'm sure I'm missing the insider references that enrich this soil. Still, I appreciate the band's pun (I almost always appreciate puns), its various metaphors and the prancing trumpet. And I'm always a sucker for bah bah bahs. If these guys were singing in Norwegian, I'd think it was a song about waddling baby ducks or something.

From Hordaland. Myspace

Around:
A fascinating photo mystery and fun comment speculation at A Dress a Day.

Fair warning:
Posting will probably be lighter than usual for the next month or so. Things to take care of that I've put off long enough.

Favorite albums of 2007

2008-01-01T12:00:00.000-06:00

And I was worried I had nothing more to say about 2007...

(If you're going to download multiple mp3s, check out the zip file of all 20 at the bottom of the post.)

1. Kala, M.I.A.
This past summer, the population burp that came of age in the late 60s reinforced its version of that cultural moment and its historical significance by feting four decades of a certain Beatles record (WSJ link pointed).The more nuanced, pessimistic and, to my mind, better-truer, take on the Summer of Love marked its 40th anniversary in November to considerably less fanfare. I happened to be reading Andrew Hultkrans' 33 1/3 series entry on Love's Forever Changes when Kala first kicked my feet out from under me. And Hultkrans' discussion of Arthur Lee's gift of apocalyptic prophecy, his paranoiac vision and outsider purview, all of which exerts itself in ambiguous wordplay and destabilizing sound and yields plenty of public misconception, seemed so naturally transferable to a certain contemporary musician and world citizen.

It would be hard at this point to say anything original about Kala. The record's release sent journalists scrambling for their old postcolonialist readers and the latest issue of The Economist (which they dutifully put to use in the service of lengthy analyses). So I'm sure I'm not the first one to excuse Maya Arulpragasam's ideological inconsistencies (she's what? knocking on the door of my Hummer wearing Rocawear purchased with major label advances?) by locating her as part of some mystic continuum. Mystics, you see, don't have to make sense now -- only from a temporal distance. I don't mean Arulpragasam is some white-garbed, untouchable Delphic Oracle. Like a lot of musicians, she likes to party, posts regrettable idiocies on her Myspace page and gets defensive with Pitchfork interviewers. She's a former art student, for fuck's sake! And there's a little (excuseably human) smugness in her tone when she says, I put people on the map/ Who ain't never seen a map.

But I've grown a strange sympathy for M.I.A. this year. Whatever its flaws (we can all agree that Timbaland should stick to producing), Kala is an amazing album, a category-of-one kind of release that has more in common with Joanna Newsom's Vs. than M.I.A.'s own first effort, Arular. For its far-flung folk inclusiveness and warring political discourses, it's as singular (if not noiser, more abrasive and better to dance to) an aesthetic vision. Which shoves M.I.A. in the radical artist's classic rock and a hard place. She has some serious things to say and inventive ways to say them, but is compelled to speak slant with populist, possibly insincere, gestures -- say, mugging "street" for every goddamn camera that invades her space, sampling indie rock nostalgia, playacting cultural terrorist (does anyone else find it curious/telling that every profile calls her Sri Lankan, when in fact she's a British citizen?). It's a complicated kind of communication that Newsom, for example, never had to take up because her art and audience are culturally cohesive.

So here's where we return to Authur Lee -- biracial in a mainly white L.A. psychedelic-rock scene, good vibes buzzkill, mental breakdown candidate -- sitting on the hillside, watching all the people die. Lee, nakedly beautiful with "Andmoreagain," metaphored and doubletalking in "The Red Telephone" (the most famous example: And if you think I'm happy/ Paint me (white) (yellow). Lee, who prophesied the death of the counterculture dream in an apocalypse of economic interest, bad leadership and insanity. While I don't wish Lee's fate on Arulpragasam, I think the way she stands aloof and belongs nowhere specific, the way she fogs her oracle glass with clever rhymes and intractable beats, even her muddled logic, auger a bird flu epidemic in our time. If not worse.

Bamboo Banga

Buy Kala (Amazon). Myspace

2. Weirdo Rippers, No Age
The song is the single and the single definitely doesn't suck -- even when it sounds like (or maybe because) it's totally trying to. Unlike its literal-minded, confessional colleague Brendan Fowler (Barr), the No Age duo blanket their mostly spare and unparseable lyrics with sheets of static, drone and buzz. But who cares about the lyrics, right? Let's talk about the noise! Half of the scrappy, scraped together singles collected on Weirdo Rippers aurally quote the lowest of the lo-fi early Pavement (I keep hearing "Texas Never Whispers") and an entire Orange County hardcore scene undergirds the furious choruses of "Boy Void," "Everybody's Down" and "Neck Escaper." Dean Spunt and Randy Randall advance the Cali-context with a little surf-rock guitar on the mischievous "My Life's Alright Without You" -- the best song this year about the best revenge (happiness, or something like it).

Expect No Age's first proper full-length -- its debut under the Sub Pop umbrella -- to be one of relatively cultivated mass-consumable pop-punk. It may seem like this special ed teacher and wardrobe stylist conquered the indie-rock nation with stupid, blunt force, but their swift underground ascendancy (even with all of 2007's technological assists) required considerable media sophistication and image finesse. It takes smarts and skill to be this good while pretending to be bad.

Boy Void

Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

3. Andorra, Caribou
When I gave Caribou's last album, The Milk of Human Kindness, the number six spot on my 2005 album list, I said something I still kind of like: There's a warm-blooded, cold weather animal that wanders within the loose borders of this record. Dan Snaith's follow-up lets the beast sleep in the barn. It's a hell of a lot warmer, and even at 60 minutes, Andorra is conceptually tight. With one exception: Closer "Niobe" shares more with Snaith's sonic explorer past than with the domestication, focus and pop generosity of "Melody Day" or "Sandy." I'll hazard that "Niobe" is the talismanic relic that allows him to take the scary, giant step forward that this record represents. The very lovely "Irene" splits the difference with, on one hand, geeky stereo-panning and volume dynamics, and on the other, a poetic bone-ache of a melody and waterfalling harmonies. Caribou has assumed the mantle Olivia Tremor Control abruptly abandoned almost a decade ago, but wears it with way better fidelity. And if Snaith travels Irene's route to his next destination, that album will probably be another top-ten contender for me.

Irene

Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

4. Woke Myself Up, Julie Doiron
A deceptively plain document of life after rock n' roll, Woke Myself Up, like a string of pearls, gains radiance -- not to mention complexity -- with repeated wear. Not that these songs aren't easy to like. Julie Doiron's warm rasp is immediately enchanting and seems to hide a secret joy you'd like to pry from her shy grin. And former Eric's Trip bandmates lend satisfying structure and heft to her spare folk-pop ruminations. So it would be simple to enjoy Woke on the level of intriguing voice and sly-hooked songs. But step back and turn phrases over in your head and you realize how paradoxically true lines like opening stanzas I woke myself up/ To rest my weary head/ From all the work I'd done/ In those dreams I'd had. Dreams -- the waking kind -- are work and demand such mental energy, we don't realize how exhausted we are and what we missed in their pursuit until we've set them aside. The fleeting fragment "You Look So Alive" perfectly captures that mental pause when meeting an ex -- and regret -- on the street. And there's a wonderful revelation in the album's sole rocker, "Don't Wanna Be/Liked By You," that catches even Doiron by surprise -- So I suppose I'll just let the love in. It may seem like resigned capitulation, but it's actually the sound of opening a door to other, possibly better, things.

I Woke Myself Up

Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

5. Sing the Greys, Frightened Rabbit
These Scottish imps brightened my world considerably in 2007, even when they were performing relationship malaise ("Yawn"), obsessing over social malfunction ("Be Less Rude" and "Behave") and sketching the shades of despair with What's the blues when you've got the greys? (the best first 10 seconds of any song on any record on this list). I've raved and raved about these brothers' song smarts, their wondrous consistency in delivering the freshest, most rousing indie pop. The album's been released, like, three times now, and there's no excuse not to pick it up.

Be Less Rude

Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

6. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Miranda Lambert
You could argue that this isn't country album tokenism because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is decked out in more rock signifiers than Nashville ones. I'll pass on that discussion, though. What interests me is how Miranda Lambert hews to the tradition, primarily by giving primacy to place. If country music is about one thing (just pretend with me here) it's the uneasy concept of home. Not necessarily a real, physical house or city or region (though Lambert namechecks Jackson Hole, Missoula and Turner, Texas), but a composite of emotions, relationships and cultural practices that contribute to the construction of home -- the half-imaginary place country singers are always either stuck in or longing for. Crazy's affective poles are the witty, rueful "Famous in a Small Town," about the curious comfort of being just like everyone else and "Gunpowder and Lead," a justifiably angry number about ridding the homestead -- by violence, if necessary -- of an abusive husband. It's not all emotional roller-coaster. The album's best singalong, "Dry Town" breezy-sasses Loretta Lynn-style the humor and horror of getting waysided in a beerless burgh. But the track list ends ambivalent with "Easy From Now On," a paean to a place where "you can lay your heart down" and settle. An impossible place when you consider that this star's on the move.

Dry Town

Buy (Amazon). Myspace

7. Sound of Silver, LCD Soundsystem
"Losing My Edge" is the second best song of the decade (after "Hey Ya," obviously). But who would have thought a couple years ago that it was only an eight-minute preamble to a whole album documenting, not this time, the minutiae of what we lose -- that naive badge of honor known as a killer record collection -- but the big, universal feelings of losing it? The avalanche of personal essay writing "All My Friends" tipped among the aging indie rock guy contingent confirms it. Funny thing is, the most celebrated song of the year is the Sound of Silver track I like least. To me, its dude-centric laments don't quite click and lock, and honestly, that pounding piano chordage makes my temples throb. But with the musical and emotional complexity of "North American Scum," "Get Innocuous," "Us v. Them" and "Someone Great," James Murphy proves that the early singles weren't a fluke (I wasn't that blown-away with LCD Soundsystem's first non-singles record). And here I was ready to write it off after "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" soundtracked Summer or Seth or somebody on The OC vomiting into the pool -- immediately after "Technologic" blared from expensive speakers (groans and more groans). I had assigned LCD Soundsystem the ignominious rank of hipster convenience store for time-constrained music supervisors. Ok, it still is, but it's a really, really well-stocked one.

Get Innocuous (Soulwax remix)

Buy (Amazon). Myspace

8. Kissing Like It's Love, The Voyces
To drill to its heart, you have to stop hitting the repeat button on the insanely catchy Archies-meet-Fleetwood Mac beach-party title track and explore the rest of the record. Because it's the penultimate song, the shapeshifting, tawny-lustered "The Canyon Ladies" that betrays The Voyces' aesthetic and conceptual anxieties. Like the aforementioned Forever Changes, this LP tells tales from the dark side of the California dream that collapsed some 40 years ago. Even if The Voyces' album starts with an optimistic shrug, proceeds to a sumptuary of hopeless love ("Hair Up High"), gets darker with an anxious, staccattoed Bee Gees' impersonation ("You're In Charge of Driving the Narcotics Trolley"), it ends its musical and emotional pilgrimage gasping for air in a shabby lean-to. (The band lists The Eagles as their first influence, so this might be its "Hotel California.") Denouement "Where the Little Girls Still Throw Roses," is half-drugged and half-hoped, hallucinating rose girls, demon lovers and houses without hearts. If you crave less confusion, return to track one immediately.

The Canyon Ladies

Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

9. Challengers, The New Pornographers
Never mind that with "Myriad Harbour," Dan Bejar is the dish that ran away with the spoon. However much a full-cast effort, this production runs on Carl Newman's direction. (Here's my bias: If asked to name my fave NPs album, I'd say The Slow Wonder [and after that, Twin Cinema].) And if fans were a little disappointed in what seemed like the sound of middle-age spread, perhaps they haven't yet learned what Newman knows: Life rarely follows the predictable path of verse, verse, chorus, verse, spectacular, mind-blowing, orgasmic chorus. Challengers is at its slightest when it treads water (the forced frenzy of "All the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth") and best when it takes a few deep breaths and paces itself ("Adventures in Solitude," "Unguided," "Go Places"). "My Rights Versus Yours" is as effective a starter gun as any NPs' album opener, beginning slack and slowly swelling with hooks and harmonies, oohs and ahs. Newman's stunner, the heartbreaker, though, is the Neko-Newman duet "Challengers" and the seasoned rue of I know you live with someone/ I live with somebody too/ Leave it there / For safekeeping.

My Rights Versus Yours

Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

10. This Bliss, Pantha du Prince
They say that when people go blind, their ears pick up the slack. I never mentioned it here, but in the past six months I've had a lot of trouble with floaters in my right eye (otherwise known as my good eye -- the left's one a lot weaker). At times, my vision was so impaired and my frustration so extreme that I couldn't look at a computer screen, read books or even watch TV. So I'd lie in the dark and listen to music, which is the only thing that allowed me to evade those stalking protozoan ghost filaments. My hearing has always been extremely acute (my antenna intercepts conversations I really rather wish it wouldn't and the primary reason I suffer insomnia is that every nature of noise keeps/wakes me up). But my hearing got even better as I looked less and listened more. For a while I even flirted with synesthesia. This coincided with my introduction to Pantha du Prince -- when I could feel the woodpecking beats of "White Out" in my teeth and taste the metal and saline of "Florac" on my tongue.

Kompakt's big release this year, The Field's From Here We Go Sublime, is an undeniably good record, but This Bliss is the nail that snagged my sweater. Sublime is a daytime album, a chilly day of frozen ground and thin winter sun -- but day nonetheless. This Bliss is a night prowler that accompanied me in my vision-impaired evenings, painting great swathes of black on brick walls and studding the sky with blinking lights. From the glassine tingle of "Asha" to the four-elements float, trickle, shift and spark of "Seeds of Sleep," Bliss lives up to its ecstatic, sensory name. "Saturn Strobe," a midnight drive of portentous strings and slick beats that pick up cymbal buzz and jittery bells for the ride, is a miniature masterpiece.

Saturn Strobe

Buy (Amazon). Myspace

11. From the Air, M. Shanghai String Band
How's this for bluegrass authenticity? A dozen-member Brooklyn band named after the Chinese restaurant in whose basement it first performed, which, instead of interpreting standards, performs its own compositions about, oh, Henry Darger's fictional universe, one-way buses to the cemetery, tic tac toe chickens and a Manhattan boyfriend who refuses to cross the Brooklyn bridge. The familiar props are in place: fiddle, mandolin, harmonica, washboard. But the multi-culti collective is as conversant in jazz and klezmer as folk. Still, they're at their best when not pushing so hard for clever and quirk. I thought for sure "No Home In This World" was an old mountain mourning song, but no, the simple banjo-led melody and sublime harmonies are pure 21st century Brooklyn bluegrass.

No Home in This World

Buy album (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

12. Strawberry Jam, Animal Collective
I didn't swoon for Panda Bear's solo record the way so many other bloggers did this year. But no album made me so giddy-happy, even irrationally so, in 2007 as Strawberry Jam. The first half of the album is unassailable, manic and maniacal, skip-roping, hopscotching, slinky-on-the-stairs fun. It would be hard for any band to follow such furious, logorrheic highs as "Peacebone" and "For Reverend Green," an Al Green tribute that sounds like someone jammed a dinner knife between some synthesizer knobs. And side two doesn't; it settles into a less melodic, more contemplative (it's all relative here, folks) mode. In a duller year, this would have ranked a lot higher.

For Reverend Green

Buy (Amazon). Myspace

13. Untrue, Burial
I pretty much said my peace about Burial here (for now -- as all things on this blog, it's a work-in-progress).

Ghost Hardware

Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

14. We'll Never Go Back, Mavis Staples
Mavis Staples nails her theme halfway through the album: It's the 21st Century/ It Feels like its 1960! A more nuanced and sophisticated protest than Kanye West's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about black people," the line -- and the album -- are no less passionate, angry and appalled about the government's implicitly racist, classist (lack of) response to Hurricane Katrina. But Staples is a pro at protest rhetoric; you'd expect no less from the crown jewel of gospel's first family and long-time civil rights worker. What's astonishing about this record is how inventively it reworks the familiar. Opener "Down in Mississippi," sounds more like something off Moby's Play than any old Staples Singers' record. Staples' harrowing tale of the bad old days in the South gathers grit from Ry Cooder's rhythm-and-blued hard right hook to the gut and a choir that could be a sampled field recording. A surprising and whimsical banjo intro knocks the stuffing out of gospel standard "Turn Me Around," and as I said in my favorite songs list, "99 1/2" is one of the best dance songs of the year.

99 and 1/2

Buy (Amazon). Myspace

15. Dark Undercoat, Emily Jane White
San Franciscan Emily Jane White wrote the theme song for Cam Archer's self-conscious, -indulgent coming-of-age film, Wild Tigers I Have Known (FYI: Tarnation is a better, more visually exciting picture that covers the same ground). That's not White's fault. "Tigers" -- the song -- is a careful exercise of piano and voice, whose restraint only underlines the internal tumult of lines like Cuz it's a man's world/ Say all the right words and hold your heart from your chest. Oh hey, I should probably introduce the elephants in the room: White sings a lot like Chan Marshall, and in her bluesier moments ("Bessie Smith"), something like Jolie Holland. Get over it, because White's songwriting sparkles with the melody and passion these other two artists' recent work lacks. Then there's her focus. This is a debut album and taps various (presumably) personally meaningful folk, blues and rock touchstones, but there are no ill-conceived experiments, floundering or filler. Just ten moving, memorable songs.

Dagger

Buy (eMusic). Myspace

16. Wátina, Andy Palacio
Belizian Andy Palacio sings for the sake of ethnic and political survival, but unless you understand Garafuna, you revel in the music for its sheer joy.

Aguyuha Niduhenu (My People Have Moved On)

Buy (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

17. Ghosts, Siobhan Donaghy
Track-by-track techno-pop perfection from the former Sugababe.

Ghosts

Buy (Amazon). Myspace

18. Deuteronomy, The Intelligence
An utterly unpretentious punk record from a band that probably doesn't give a fuck if you like them, and are all the better for it.

Dating Cops

Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

19. West Coast, Studio
The Swedish LP that knotted together the major music trends of 2007 -- African polyrhythms, 80s nostalgia and techno gone pop -- and still managed to be really good.

West Side

Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

20. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon
I'm beginning to suspect that nothing will ever again approach Kill the Moonlight for me. But Ga5 is a Spoon album, always recommendation enough (and may it continue to be for many releases to come).

Don't You Evah

Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Understudies: Bach's Goldberg Variations, Simone Dinnerstein; Environ Maiden, The Capstan Shafts; Bearded Ladies, V/A; Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release, Simian Mobile Disco; Transparent Knives, Promise and the Monster; Pride, Phosphorescent; The Light Shines Almost All the Way, Ai Phoenix; Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Of Montreal.

I could go on. For the first year in many, I could name 50 excellent LPs. There were disappointments (Bishop Allen, The National, Fields), but all-in-all it was a brilliant year for albums.

Previously:
Favorite songs of 2007
Recommended EPs, reissues, non-2007 finds

Merry belated

2007-12-27T17:00:00.000-06:00

Image: Katie Baum

The last week has been a whirl and blur of airports, cash registers, gold paper & green ribbon, lemon, chocolate, cinnamon & walnuts, hot ovens & cold turkey, family gossip & a family friend's cancer death, wooden puzzles, toy trains & doll dresses, Bach, Dickens, snow (and snow and snow), treacherous ice, thick wool sweaters, knit hats, shivering outdoors, sweltering in, smiles & laughter & small irritations, paper peace cranes, lit candles, children singing "Joy to the World" awkward and out-of-tune in angel and shepherd costumes like something in a Christmas comedy. And finally, in the last 36 hours -- sleep, blissful sleep.

Stampanasa - Horses Brawl

From Horses Brawl (Amazon, eMusic)

Nowell, Nowell: The Boarees Head - The Orlando Consort

From Food, Wine and Song: Music and Feasting in Renaissance Europe (Amazon)

I remain determined to write a list of my favorite albums of 2007. Not because I think the mp3 blogosphere needs another list (good god, it doesn't!), but because there were so many wonderful albums worth talking about this past year. So I swear I'm posting something before the stroke of midnight Dec. 31!

In the meantime: Eric's 2007 album post is smart and thoughtful and intensely personal, and Charlie writes a lovely series of mini-fictions for his favorite singles.

2007 EPs, reissues and other good things

2007-12-18T09:45:00.000-06:00

A slight change in programming: I'm pushing back writing and posting my favorite albums list til the quiet period between Christmas and New Year's when I'll have time and energy to give these records their due. (And when I'm out of the office for almost two weeks, woo!). Basically, the list will go up exactly one hour after you've stopped caring about such things. So be it.

Instead: a mop-up post of good EPs and reissues and music I loved (sometimes obsessively) in 2007 that wasn't released in 2007. Plus other bits n' bobs. (And if you missed my 50 favorite songs of 2007, they're here.)

I will refer to:

Lola Who? - Plants and Animals

Thunder & Lightning - Christy & Emily

A Child Lost in Tesco - Eugene McGuinness

The End of the War - Winter Flowers

Gesi Baglari - Selda

Memphis Flu - Elder Curry and His Congregation

EPs:
I wrote up Plants & Animals' track "Jacques" in 2006, but when a year had passed and nothing seemed to be stirring, I figured I'd never hear from the Montreal band again. Then P&A dropped With/Avec this autumn, a dense and detailed meanderer with songs that thump, rattle, sing-along and build and build and build, like beavers and birds and fine carpenters with teak wood, nails and a hammer. The lead track, "Lola Who?" -- the most precise and perhaps best of the four -- croons vaguely Thom York-ish to a sweet molasses melody. It's awfully durn pretty. Buy from eMusic. Myspace

She's a little bit classical, and she's a little bit rock n' roll, and together, Christy & Emily sound sometimes like the former and often like the latter, but mostly like an avant-folk warmup, a dreamy preview of good things to come. Not that there isn't plenty to appreciate in Gueen's Head. I love how the opener, "Ocean" drifts and swirls before locking into a chorus-like meme at the three-minute mark. And in "Thunder & Lightning," the pair is as raw, convicted and girl-powerish as any early-90s International Pop Underground act. I talked about the mysterious nostalgia of "Island Song" earlier this year. Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Joanna Newsom, remember her? The girl with the harp? Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band is a totally rad live-recorded EP that probably slipped your mind because it was released all the way back in April. Even if you aren't a Newsom completist (and even if that title makes your teeth ache), these three banjo and accordioned tracks -- new song "Colleen," Milk Eyed Mender's "Clam Crab Cockle Cowrie," and Ys' "Cosmia" -- are worth making space on your hard drive for. "Cosmia" delighted me the least of Ys' original five-song cycle, but here it's lighter, lovelier and dancing in its bare feet. Buy from Amazon.

Eugene McGuinness crams so many influences and ideas and words into Early Learnings of that it sounds like he just wedged the cap off a pressurized bottle of lifelong music-listening-and-loving, and chugged it. In other words, it sounds like the first record it is. Even if McGuinness is still ID-hunting, the EP's enormous pop fun -- even the slow songs about girls. In August I called the kid "an ironist, a jester of clever asides, a greeter of misfortune with devil's horns and funny glasses." Buy from Amazon. Myspace

I don't know if David Thomas Broughton is ever going to make a proper studio album, and I don't care so long as live recordings like David Thomas Broughton vs. 7 Hertz continue so passionate and fragile and taut like wires buzzing with life and love and lust and death. Even his nod toward levity, "Jolly," is pregnant with dark matter. Buy from Amazon. Myspace

(Relatively recent) reissues:
Reverend Charlie Jackson's God's Got It: The Legendary Booker and Jackson Singles.
Holy moley! What a superb record of timeless, indeterminate-vintaged blues-gospel root and rudiment (from the early to mid-70s, but would you ever guess?). I effused about title track "God's Got It" in October. Buy (Amazon, eMusic).

Judee Sill's Live in London. As much as the songs, live albums are about the relationship of performer to audience, the thick air thinned by a joke or cool space warmed with a passionately played crowd favorite. What I love on this record is Sill's diffident, hard-lived voice as she explains her songs -- like they need explaining. In August I talked about her intro to "The Kiss": "A song I wrote seven days, eight days ago, Judee Sill confides to this 1972 BBC studio audience. Her voice has a shiver of stagefright jitter. Or maybe she's just so thrilled to offer this shy gift (like a first kiss) because she knows it's something special, but also fears it's not."
Buy (Amazon, eMusic).

Selda's Selda. The superlative Bearded Ladies compilation turned me on to Turkish folkie, Selda. And if you think "Turkish" and "folkie" tell you everything you need to know, think again. I recently posted "Gesi Baglari" (not on this album, but the comp) as part of a song & image essay and have kept the file up for your great downloading pleasure. Buy from Amazon.

Loved in 2007 / released sometime other than 2007:
The Wave Pictures. Like, all of it -- everything they've ever done. Several tracks are available for download on the band's website. Buy 2006's Sophie from Amazon. Myspace

Winter Flowers' 2006 self-titled album. It might have made last year's list; alas, I didn't hear this record until this April. I originally described the song "End of the War" as "delirious, off its head, dancing so abandoned it abandons keyboard and plays thick gold air," and listened to it as much as any 2007 song. The wistful and dewy, "Too Young to Marry," which sounds like a traditional ballad but is actually an original composition (though probably related to older ballads of that name) is also stunning. Buy from Amazon. Myspace

Boduf Songs' Lion Swallows the Sun. Ditto for this criminally underrated apocalyptic folk album. In February I said that Mr. Boduf Songs, Mat Sweet, "plays and sings thresholds, the certain heres before the indefinite theres, the doorframes against which we slump in suspension against action." Buy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Laura Barrett's "Robot Ponies." This song came to me sometime after I made my 2006 songs list and before the end of last calendar year. But I think it took time for me to appreciate how brilliant Barrett is to pluck peals from the strings of her ancient-sounding kalimba while singing chrome-and-vinyl retrofuturistic about Christmas 2053 -- where every little girl wishes for a nylon-furred, plastic-bag feeding robot pony. Stream the song on Laura Barrett's Myspace.

Elder Curry and His Congregation's "Memphis Flu." One of the first (and best) things I posted all year is a 1930 gospel track sang vengeful and lusty, whooped and hollered. Buy How Can I Keep From Singing, Vol 2: Early American Religious Music and Song (Amazon, eMusic).

Videos:
I wasn't even going to mention videos, but Saturday night over a lovely Malbec and the largest mussels I've ever seen (so big they should have been named in the Mitchell report), a friend remarked how he never gets tired of watching the Will Oldham and Zach Galifianakis video for Kanye West's "Can't Tell Me Nothin'." I'd totally forgotten about it, but yes -- the funniest, silliest, most ridiculous (in a wonderful way) clip of tractors, bearded guys and dancing 4-H'ers to grace YouTube this year.

Then of course there's La Blogothèque's Les Concert à Emporter (Take-Away shows). I probably don't need to tell you that the French site has carved its own niche of taste and innovation with these whimsical mini-concerts. But just in case you haven't journeyed there in a while, the latest greatness: Caribou grandmasters a parade of Paris schoolchildren in its first ever acoustic performance, then plays "Sundialling" as wandering (and sprinting) minstrels.

Speaking of videos:
Soon, the holidays ("list season" for you bloggers) will be over and it will be January. Said the Gramophone has a wonderful way for music lovers and creative types (all of us, right?) to fight cabin fever and productively muddle through this otherwise dreary time of the year: Enter StG's video contest! Make a short film of your favorite song (any song, from whenever, by whomever) for the chance to win an amazing prize package of CDs, records, t-shirts, Sennheiser earphones and more -- including a birthday phone call from Basia Bulat. You'll have fun even if you don't win, so enter already.

Art by Anne Siems.

50 favorite songs of 2007

2007-12-11T10:30:00.000-06:00

This year I got ambitious and thought I'd jot down some thoughts on every one of my 50 favorite songs (though about half of these blurbettes are quotes from earlier posts). Each song is so different and delightful in its own way that I couldn't rank them. You'll find the list in alpha order by song title.

I'd love to host an mp3 for every one, I really would, but given bandwidth constraints -- out of the question. So I tried to put up the songs that may be harder to find via Hype Machine or Elbo.ws, or to stream from the artists' Myspace pages. Clear your afternoon schedule and get comfortable: This is long.

Alice and Sarah - Orion Rigel Dommisse
"Their white necks smell of nutmeg and cloves, their bare knees blush pink, and yellow satin ribbons flutter like butterflies in their chestnut hair. But this sweet folie à deux would sooner slip razors from the bright folds of their dresses and eviscerate that frog than kiss him." [From Nov 12] Buy What I Want From You Is Sweet (Amazon). Myspace

All the Night Without Love - Elvis Perkins
"And you hear the way he drawls 'all' like ahhh or awww, like a chronic ache. And how he pries 'love' from his tongue, letter by letter, sticky and slow like a curse, like a taunt. And you learn his story (his real story), one that puts the lie to the thoughtless, irresponsible, everyday misspeaking of the word "tragic." And you think you know what this song is. But it's not." [From March 10] Buy Ash Wednesday (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Be Less Rude - Frightened Rabbit
Frightened Rabbit makes so quaint a plea for civility -- Scott Hutchinson's voice appropriately choked, hurt, deeply disappointed -- that you almost miss what's going on behind the pained show of wist and woe. If you could be less rude/You don't know what it might do for you. Sarcasm, or pragmatic appeal to self-interest? Buy Sing the Greys (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Bird Flu - M.I.A.
"Bird Flu" -- all teem, screech, squawk, squeal, grind -- is the imagined hot zone in sound. It's dangerously irregular heartbeats, the scratch and sluggish swell of pustules, fever ripping throat, fog crowding head, bones itching with ache. It's the sound of your own fears leveraged against you. With two words, M.I.A., however otherwise incoherent her personal politics, aggregates every global ill -- not just (or mostly) biological ones. As Susan Sontag said, illness is a metaphor; disease is morally coded. Sontag was speaking from the personal experience of cancer, but the metaphor extends, particularly to an infectious disease so culturally scaffolded, ideologically contested, inexorably entwined with issues of national identity, geographic borders, economic might, and the fragile equipoise of regional and global power. Electron microscopes don't lie: The viral microbes of avian influenza are real all right. But bird flu's also the third-world anxiety about first-world border protectionism. It's the eco-destabilizing effects of global warming and aggressive development. China's burgeoning economic power and protectionist trade policies. It's terrorism -- or the imagination of terrorism -- as uncontained and uncontainable, as inevitable as apocalypse. It's even a psychic hangover (for Americans, anyway) of the political catastrophe of Vietnam. M.I.A.'s genius is to deliver the fear sly and sexy and engaging, to crook her little finger and urge, come closer. Touch me, I'm sick. Buy Kala (Amazon, iTunes). Myspace

Book Lung - New Ruins
I'm flummoxed. This should be like catnip to fans of Wilco, Okkervil River, Band of Horses and other Americana-inspired indie rock. So why did this central Illinois band receive so little attention in the mp3 blog universe -- or anywhere else -- this past year? Here's what I originally said: "A riveting track of quicktimed martial drums, sketched with black skies, dirty sheets and men who shake with rage like power lines in the wind. Mostly, though, it's a song that seems to exist to convey a single line sung again and again: Your ghost still walks all around these hills. The key word, I think, being still. The implication, still here, trapped." [From May 9] Buy The Sound They Make (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

The Bower - Robin Allender
Pay no mind to the fact that (full disclosure) Robin is a friend, or that drafts and scribbles of the songs that ended up on his beautiful, bucolic folk record, The Bird and the Word, have been winging their way to me via email for the more than two years I've known him. "The Bower," if I recall correctly, was once a much shorter song. It was always graced with that melancholy melody and Robin's fleet fingerpicking (I don't think it's hyperbole or bias to hazard that he's one of the best young guitar stylists working in Britain today). But the coda that I've come to love so much -- especially that line like a long-suppressed truth, I'm just a wasteful man in a caravan -- is a relatively recent development. And a song that was like something pressed between the pages of a cracked leather-bound book, something hazy and nostalgic, is pinpricked with here-and-now real-life poignance. Buy The Bird and the Word (Dreamboat Records, iTunes). Myspace

Comfy in Nautica - Panda Bear
In interviews, Noah Lennox has nonsensed about how "Comfy in Nautica" is a track about "coolness" and fitting in or wearing the right clothes ... or something. And yeah, the song does surf a shrugged vibe and laid-back lines like, Try to remember always just to have a good time, delivered in dulcet Beach Boy homage. But dude, you're either way disingenuous or you don't know your own strength! Because that ominous rattle of train tracks, pounding sound of marching feet and grave whistle of dive-bombing planes, not to mention loaded phrases like Shut up boy and be a soldier/ coolness is having courage, are like, deep. Sophisticated, anyway. Gorgeous and scary and cool tossed in a blender and pulverized. Intentional or not, Lennox's synthesis of pop culture and political provocation, "Comfy's" free float between aesthetics and invective, reminds me of the work of -- more than any musician -- artist Robert Rauschenberg. (The artist, note, has been hugely influenced by Philip Glass, so this isn't as left-field as it sounds.) Rauschenberg depicted early 60's chaos, confusion and sensory onslaught with collaged magazine cuttings of culturally evocative images and other material flotsam of contemporary consumer life. Recontextualized images of John F. Kennedy in canvasses such as Retroactive, seem to serve a parallel purpose with Lennox's aural appropriation of Brian Wilson; both are overdetermined icons resonant of American dreams and myths soured, and both are juxtaposed with darker images. But neither Rauschenberg or Lennox imply any sort of moral imperative. I'm connecting the dots between these guys for another reason. Panda Bear's Person Pitch album is a thrilling sonic assault -- like nothing I've ever heard. But it's also excessive and exhausting and overloaded. I haven't found a way to listen to it more than 30 minutes at a time. Buy Person Pitch (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - Miranda Lambert
"Hoo boy, does Lambert perform an ugly public exorcism of some bad, and yes, violent, feelings. This expert balance of horseplay and insanity makes "Crazy" more than your typically tiresome values-affirming Nashville product. Besides, who's to say what happens off-screen? There's always closing time in the parking lot." [From May 22] Buy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Amazon, iTunes). Myspace

Daddaughter - Matzak
"A production that starts snowy baby-blanket white, with pristine blips and incandescent organ glow, then gently swells in perfectly paced stages, gradually gathering color and texture, including some brief buzzy-bleepy spazz-outs. It swells round and rich and ample. It swells human." [From April 19] Buy Life Beginnings (eMusic). Myspace

Dagger - Emily Jane White
It's the way White worries that guitar figure and how its repetition inks the lines of melody and sharpens the emotional pitch. So when she sings, Please walk back to me, it's a heart piercer. Buy Dark Undercoat (eMusic). Myspace

Dancing on Our Graves - The Cave Singers
"I love how the percussion seems to skitter in every direction, like a bag of BB pellets loosed in a school gymnasium, like a tapdancing marathon in a bowling alley. It's as if The Cave Singers handed everyone they saw a pair of sticks and various jingle-jangle makers and asked them to paint the sun in rhythm." [From Oct 3] Buy Invitation Songs (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Dating Cops - The Intelligence
"Lars Finberg is seized with an anxious, itchy aggrievement that knows no precise object, a vague and omnivorous can't get no satisfaction. So his voice careens around the room like a squash ball, hard and unpredictable. Going out, going out with, going out with you, he stammers over the dirty chug of guitars and drums, scrambling for the most withering insult in his arsenal." [From Oct 14] Buy Deuteronomy (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Don't You Evah - Spoon
Before Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga hit this year, one of my favorite Spoon songs was "Tear Me Down," the band's contribution to the Hedwig & the Angry Inch tribute album. A skeletal bone-shaker, the song's an explicit showcase for Spoon's minimal and studio-manipulated sound. But it's not a Spoon composition; it's a cover. Another fave was Britt Daniel's slinkier and sexier than it ever deserved to be remix of Interpol's aloof "Slow Hands." Again (obvs), not a Spoon song. "Don't You Evah" makes three. But if you hadn't been told, would you evah think, hearing that hip-bumping bass or the way Daniel drawls vowels, that this isn't a bespoke suit? I can't think of any band so capable of utterly remaking songs in its own brilliant image. Buy Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Dulce et Decorum - Alsace Lorraine
"What counts is the sound-sweep: its swooning soft glamour, its billowy beats and coy false ending, its adolescent ache." [From April 19] Buy Dark One (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Dumb Animals - Handsome Furs
If non-human animals could speak (I'm hypothesizing here and basing my theory, admittedly, on the relatively small sample of animals I know personally), I don't think they would mumble or mince words, speak through metaphors and veils and the wool of their turtleneck sweaters pulled over their mouths. I doubt very much they would passive-aggressivize basic wants and toe (paw) the ground while they prevaricated. They wouldn't need the sudden thunder of an organ chord to command attention or a maelstrom of noise to speak a fierce or unwelcome truth. Buy Plague Park (Amazon). Myspace

Everybody's Down - No Age
"Even when you know it's coming, even though the song's been building to it the whole time, the last 42 seconds are like the climactic scene of the best kind of Hollywood action pic, where the explosions and car chase and shoot em' up are diegetically predictable and necessary, but also totally unexpected because they so wonderfully exceed your expectations." [From June 25] Buy Weirdo Rippers (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Feeling Free - Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators
Nicole Willis is never going to put Beyoncé out of a job. And on her extremely fun album with the Soul Investigators, there are some very awkward stretches where, when it comes to hitting the notes she's not within miles of the ballpark. But that's sort of the point. This is disco for ordinary cube-dwellers (not club-dwellers), the working stiffs and stiffs-from-working who need a glass of sparkling wine to get their feet and asses moving. And, as such, it's not formalist about where it gets its ideas, but shuffles through just about any soul lover's record collection -- Motown, Stax, Donna Summer, James Brown, Parliament. It's all waiting for you on the dancefloor. Buy Keep Reachin' Up Amazon, eMusic) Myspace

Five and Dime - Port O'Brien
Isn't this song a couple years old, you ask? Maybeee. Happily for me, it turned up on Port O'Brien's 2007 LP-length reconstitution of a couple earlier EPs. Anyway: "Midway through, the song indeed takes a happy turn (a cue from rock n' roll, a big gulp of sunshine and blue sky). It rides a sea-foam glinting wave, opens to the wide ocean and nothing for those couple minutes makes the world seem so vast and right." [From March 4] Buy The Wind and the Swell (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Flatland - Red Leaf Black Bird
"A voice like Kelly Nyland's, a glum gluey-tongued twang, can convince you that something terrible has happened out there on those desperate plains (that cruel geometry where the earth meets the horizon at brute angles). Some Cold Blood, some Badlands." [From March 27] An album is expected in 2008. Myspace

Hallelujah the Hills - Hallelujah the Hills
"Why just burn the barn when you can also torch the farmhouse, set the fields afire, watch the whole world go up in flames? It's a ludicrous song of ridiculous joy, of secular religiosity, a sing sing a song, sing it loud act of music-faith testifying." [From June 18] Buy Hallelujah the Hills (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Haze - Essie Jain
"Something wonderful happens in "Haze," beginning just under a minute. [Essie Jain's] voice thickens and pleats and the keys pick up their feet, lose their moorings, and gather plucked strings. It's a flowering that's torpid at first, but soon reveals brass that blazon brighter, chorus on chorus." [From Jan 19] Buy We Made This Ourselves (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Hip to the Sweet Blue World Again - Capstan Shafts
"It has a feverish lilt, a buzzing, faintly throttled elation that can't be contained by the walls of the garage where [Dean] Wells plays a modest Guitar God to the rakes and broken toasters and spare tires." [Nov 15] Buy Environ Maiden (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Hustler - Simian Mobile Disco
A monstrous catchy themesong for everybody reading this. Yeah: you, me, everyone we know -- we're all hustlers, baby. Not like this or this, but like this: I walk out that record store/with the records in my clothes/what the fuck is you gonna do? Well? Buy Attack Decay Sustain Release (Amazon). Myspace

Igloo - Clear Tigers
It's cold outside and the wind screeches something fierce -- a vulture closing in on its prey. But inside our igloo everything is snug and the rest of the world is so much cotton batting. My bracelet jangles and your shoe taps to the Christmas carol we're belting ("Hark the Herald Angels Sing," if you must know), and we've got a blanket, a bag of cinnamon doughnuts and a bottle of rum to keep us warm. Let's go! Let's go look at the ocean again! you interrupt every so often. But you say it like you're running in place, like you're miming movement for comic effect. In the battle of stasis and kinesis, stasis wins. Buy Brutal (eMusic). Myspace

John Allyn Smith Sails - Okkervil River
"A tender/brash/funny take on [John] Berryman -- this song starts direct, in medias res, its lyrics of liquored melancholy bluster and sarcastic self-pity, its languid bass guitar and tight, insistent beats, its neat, feedbacked slide into rousing sail into the sunset." [From Oct 9] Buy The Stage Names (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

John Brown - Papercuts
"The lead guitar stabs sharp and sure, and if [Jason] Quever's intonations start foggy, four minutes in he's bleating sweet certainty to a crisp backbeat in support of this John Brown who sees things and hears voices (and who may or may not be the famed abolitionist and infamous half-deck card player). For a moment, the invisible and disenfranchised are bright hued and clarion voiced." [From Feb 8] Buy Can't Go Back (Amazon). Myspace

Johnny - Gowns
"I'm not certain there is such a thing as a good anti-war song. But the way Gowns performs "Johnny," in rasps and gasps, hisses and glitches, prying turgid harp lines with thick thumbs, seems true, sounds right. Hard despite its soft, florid beauty, it intimates the agony and weariness of war, insinuates the mechanical motions of machines and men and the arduousness of resisting that mechanism, affirms the futility of saying, they'll never take our sons again." [From March 19] Gowns' website. Myspace

Kissing Like It's Love - The Voyces
"A honey-smacked ditty about, ya know, faking it a little, surrendering to the moment because the moment's what you have, because the sun is grinning yellow and the sky is blue, because for now it's enough. Or in the words of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." [From March 25] Buy Kissing Like It's Love (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Lake Somerset - Deerhunter
Deerhunter posed one of the most formidable mental challenges of 2007: How to overlook the hype, shenanigans, meltdowns, disturbing blog posts and breakup rumors, and just enjoy the music. It helps that they're a very good live act (I saw them twice) and Bradford Cox a mesmerizing frontman. On stage he's self-involved and unpredictable -- a bit like a wounded bird privately nursing his broken wing and when you venture close to help, liable to start flapping and screeching. In "Lake Somerset," a murky mix of noise and rhythm give the best impression I've heard of what it's like to drown -- or lose your mind. Throbbing bass is eclipsed by voice, voice submerged by guitar, guitar engulfed by drums, drums soused by feedback, and so on, until every instrument is kicking and screaming for life. Miraculously, the din locks into a fantastic groove and you don't mind going down. Buy Cryptograms (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Let Me Get Your Coat - Future Clouds and Radar
At his best, Robert Harrison (as Future Clouds and Radar) isn't aping John Lennon and his pysch drop-out experiments (and there's plenty of that on his double self-titled album), but paying homage to the rip-em-up-&-start-again era -- specifically, the bitter-ironic croon of Elvis Costello and the romantically defeated power pop of Squeeze. Equal parts misery and pomp, it's a nice song to mope cheerfully to. Buy Future Clouds & Radar (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Like a Drug - Kylie Minogue
Yes, it's a sort of silly pop song of obvious hooks, phone-it-in beats and bargain basement lyrics. But it grabs you after one listen -- whether you want it to or not. And when I think about Kylie of the long-and-storied career (that you know Britney's never gonna have). And even more about Kylie, breast cancer survivor, singing lines like Boy, you've got me feeling crazy bout my body, I have to give her a pass. Even a ringing endorsement. Buy X (Amazon). Myspace

Lip Gloss - Lil Mama
Whatcha know bout me? Lil' Mama demands as she struggles, like every adolescent (cept, she's way more charismatic!), to negotiate the liminal zone between interiority and public identity. What's excellent about this song -- besides its massive pep rally stomp and sassed vocal hooks -- is that Lil Mama doesn't resort to tiresome sexual innuendo to define her burgeoning adult-ish persona. Lip gloss is just that: a cosmetic. You could definitely critique or culture jam the track, Adbusters-style, or worry yourself sick over the troublesome (I guess) capitalist fetishization of blah blah blah. But I think it's important to keep your eye on the ball here. This is a song about a young woman who feels strong and empowered and beautiful -- for a change. So who's gonna quibble about a little face paint? From Lip Gloss single (Amazon, iTunes). Myspace

Myriad Harbour - The New Pornographers
Maybe the chewiest brownie of the year, "Myriad Harbour" sounds like another class trip with the coolest kids in school. Noses pressed against bus windows, Dan scouts the sights with Carl and girl-watches with John (Kathryn's fallen asleep to her iPod, Todd's in the bathroom, Kurt's chatting with the driver, Blaine's playing solitaire and Neko's off touring her latest record). It's the blithe and breezy fun we expect from The New Pornographers and is completely enjoyable on the level of sensation and spectacle. Yet ease a trowel a little ways into the soil, and it's also Bejar's sophisticated discourse on structuring space, and, in particular, how mobile dwellers -- tourists, migrants, students, long-distance commuters and consultants (and certainly musicians) -- read the city. A relatively large segment of any urban populace, particularly New York's, these individuals know it through its restless comings and goings (I took a train, I took a plane/ Who cares you always end up in the city). And they map it with what Zygmunt Bauman calls a "stranger's aporia," or a dialectic of moral uncertainty and aesthetic attraction to the strangers and strangeness that share their space. "Harbour" hums with a sense of estrangement, intimacy, pleasure and anxiety all brushing up against one another. Bejar muses familiarly about New York musicians (and the girls who love them), but also wanders into a record store and buys a generic anthology of American music -- a passkey to the local culture that has thus far remained locked to him. Walking the city is also a way for him to talk about the greatest unknown, the intimate stranger (you), that dogs his every step. One more thing. A lot of people have speculated about Bejar's plural harbor. I read it as a composite of New York's many physical and cognitive portals. At the same time, it's a wistful reference to the city's original, grand point of entry and a knowable, singular narrative. Buy Challengers (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Nerds - The Dodos
"[Meric] Long's psych-folk-pop compositions are smart and tight and melodic and his hammer-handed, fleet-fingered acoustic attack always meets [Logan] Kroeger's thumps halfway, awkward toe to toe, chin to chin, heat to intensity. And his voice is great. Warm and wobbly and familiar like a brother's or a best friend's." [From Feb 1] Buy Beware of the Maniacs (from band). Myspace

99 and 1/2 - Mavis Staples
Well, she drawls, hands on hips astride Ry Cooder's springy mix. Well: Like what have you got to say about the fact that one of the most kick-ass dance tracks of 2007 is a civil rights standard from the 68-year old Staples Singer? "99 1/2" is about going the extra mile, and Staples advises that it's hard; it wouldn't be worth anything if it wasn't. On this last half mile, her voice gasps and creaks and chokes with exhaustion and feeling. But also laughter. Her chuckle implies that it's not only about faith, persistence and muscle, but also an indeflatable sense of humor. Buy We'll Never Turn Back (Amazon) Myspace

The Past is a Grotesque Animal - Of Montreal
Forgive us our pretensions, our social gaffes, our uncontrolled urge to insert our intimacy with Georges Bataille into conversation. We were young, insecure, trying to impress. We were discombobulated by music. We were in love at first sight. This initial deception, in retrospect, wasn't a strong foundation for a relationship. Credit us with the wisdom we've earned since, though. Admit that when we say, It's like we weren't made for this world/But I wouldn't want to meet someone who was; when we say, Project your fears onto me, I need to view them/ See there's nothing to them; when we say, It's so embarrassing to need someone like I do you, we speak poetry, we speak gospel, we speak honest and profound. Buy Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

A Paw in My Face - The Field
Walking over the pond frozen February solid, something red catches my eye -- a knitted hat trapped just beneath the ice's crust. I reach down to brush aside a dusting of snow and touch a tremor; a cold and gentle rumble quakes my fingers. I retrieve a pickaxe from the shed and start hacking. The hat -- adult sized -- comes up easy enough, but a child's mitten is buried beneath it. And below the mitten, a white-now-gray water-sodden sneaker. As I crack open the pond chip by chip, I accumulate a fine pile of outerwear, and the vibrations -- now a distinct beat -- get louder. Then, out of the corner of my eye, a flash of skin, a patch of hair. There are people down there! And they're dancing! And the music -- it suddenly sounds familiar. I peel off my parka, shuck my fleece-lined boots, unwind my wool scarf and start climbing down. Buy From Here We Go Sublime (Amazon). Myspace

Peacebone - Animal Collective
Five things that made "Peacebone" one of my most-played songs of 2007 (ranked in ascending order):
5. It hops and hums and howls as if stung by a thousand mechanical bees.
4. Avey Tare's register shifts from chest to falsetto are like Grand Canyon ledge-leaps.
3. And the way he sings surface like surfacccce, to rhyme with curious: I dunno, it kills me every time
2. The boneface vocal sample is like the return of the repressed -- in Groucho Marx glasses.
1. I have no idea what this song is trying to say (monsters, mazes, mildewed rice?). But I love the way it says it.
Buy Strawberry Jam (Amazon). Myspace

The Pilgriming Vine - Basia Bulat
Some voices reinforce roles in this imaginary shared space: You: audience. She: star. But bonny Canadian lass Basia Bulat isn't like that. Her voice is rosy and ringing and her music has that rare quality of the welcoming, the direct, the communal. She bends down and reaches into the crowd, offers her hand, invites you to join her onstage in her quiver and fevered trepidation as she contemplates that pilgriming vine. If Bulat were to pick up one of those flutes and pied piper it into the forest, you'd follow her without a backward glance. Buy Oh My Darling (Amazon). Myspace

Poor Things - The Boggs
"The plates spinning on sticks include a rhythm section performing something between a jig and a post-Madchester shuffle, growling riffs and puckish picked strings, wood block percussion, bells and "sci-fi" synthesizer sounds -- almost all of which play hot potato with the melody, almost all of which urge you to move." [From July 31] Buy Forts (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Reflection of the Sun - The Sheds
"With its plain-spoke and spirited testimonials (courtesy of The Seedy Seeds, Uncle Smokin' Joe, Matthew Shelton), and a bam-bam beat ushering it from storyboard frame to frame, [the song is] highly effective. It's also, in all seriousness, as random-whimsy as a dog parade, as stifled-giggle as a school play, as sweet as pink lemonade, as summer as the sun." [From July 5] Download from The Sheds' website. Myspace

Saddle Song - Mary Epworth and the Jubilee Band
"So exuberant in its ragged glory that you would be very hard-hearted indeed if you weren't moved to smile, to join its rutted rolling procession, its pilgrimage, its parade of smashing cymbals, shivering violins, clamorous voices and a horn section just roused from sleep, but game for the journey to Rome, to Damascus, Samarra, Mecca or simply the end of a cobbled London street." From [Jan 28] Myspace

Sandy - Caribou
"It's an embarrassment of riches, this song. A feast of components layered like berries and cake and whipped cream in a trifle bowl -- and every bite the best you've ever tasted." [From Aug 22] Buy Andorra (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Stockades - Frog Eyes
"Overzealous, gaudy (even tacky), majestic and somehow able to successfully perform basic hurts, plain heartbreak, with ornate sets and extravagant costumes." And OMG, the insanity and greatness of that piano! [From May 3] Buy Tears of the Valedictorian (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

A Sunday Smile - Beirut
A smile, as you know from your everyday gift and receipt of that coordinated flex of 43 (or so) muscles, can signify unfettered happiness. A smile also may manifest love, pleasure, kindness, good humor, contentment, relief, flirtation, pride, confidence, irony, submission, false sincerity, rue, mockery, anxiety, embarrassment, contempt, cruelty, fear -- to name just 20. And often (usually), a smile is more than one at once. Beirut, with its parchment-papered curl of melody, its boated bob and sway, signals the emotional complexity of this easy physical gesture. Explains, at least a little, how on Saturday a smile is bathing you in its hot glow and on Sunday, only a dotted line marks its traces. Buy The Flying Cup Club (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Swan Pond - Julie Doiron
A waltz counted on a child's stubby, jam-sticky fingers. One, two, three, one two three. A snug, sleepy afternoon sprawled on the kitchen floor with craft paper and a box of watercolors. A house where the biggest bother is a lost sneaker or spilled apple juice. Julie Doiron sings domesticity with a throat threadbare from picturebooks and lullabies. She sings with joyful exhaustion and bemused wonder. Buy Woke Myself Up (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Tony Danza Dancetravaganza - Shitt Hottt
This song isn't strictly garage band, but it's awfully attached to staccato Farfisa (and wafting more than a whiff of amateurism). Not exactly punk, but sarcastic and sportin' attitude. Not a novelty, but awfully funny, even demented (uh, it's a detailed and enthusiastic fantasy about hooking up with Tony Danza). Like the girl groups that came before it, Shitt Hottt is a sassy, insouciant blend of innocence: I'll wear my new socks, in case we take a walk/ You know they're argyle, I hope he likes that style! and experience: And then he kissed me for all to see/The way his ass is, and oooh those glasses. From Are You There God? It's Me Shitt Hottt (Buy from band's Myspace).

2080 - Yeasayer

Image: Laura Hughes

Buy All Hour Cymbals (Amazon, eMusic). Myspace

Umbrella - Rihanna (ft. Jay Z)
Future pop historians will probably go over it with tweezers and toothpicks, but I think it's pretty obvious that the key to "Umbrella's" fabulousness lies in a certain sultry stammer -- just one little extended vowel that says more than 1,000 words. Buy Good Girl Gone Bad (Amazon, iTunes). Myspace

You Earn Your Enemies - Un Deux Trois
"[Lead vocalist] Heather McEntire never sings cold or bitter; her tongue sustains notes like orange embers. And I nominate the backing ahs ahs in a best supporting role. They coax the lead with courage, courage, like some Ronette or Shangri-La or Go-Go who wandered off and into 2007." [From Feb 14] Buy Lovers EP (Holiday for Quince Records). Myspace

Update: See my recommended EPs and favorite non-2007 music heard this year here.

Art throughout this post by the amazing baroque revival painter Julie Heffernan.

Ho ho hum

2007-12-07T21:00:00.000-06:00

Image: Pascal Fallonneau

It's Christmas So We'll Stop - Frightened Rabbit (The Pretend It's December Choir)

I've been yapping about Frightened Rabbit all year and (surprise!) here I go again. Sort of. This is the very proper choir arrangement of the lily-livered lapins' new holiday single -- soon-to-be holiday classic. If you'd like to hear the rousing pop version, I suggest you digital download it from eMusic or order the old-school 7" vinyl from Fat Cat (iTunes offers a "clean" track, but I can't in good conscience endorse censorship). If you're utterly broke from splurging on gifts for your loved ones, you can also stream the song from these festive Glaswegians' Myspace.

I'll be spending the weekend making my 2007 favorites lists and proofing them twice. Will they feature some Frightened Rabbit? Tune in to find out! Favorite songs go up early next week and albums the following week.

Ice promise

2007-12-05T20:45:00.000-06:00

Image: Camille Solyagua

Sheets - Promise and the Monster

This afternoon, feverish and bundled in blankets on the sofa, I watched the migration of a murder of crows. Or, I should say, I watched a very short leg of their journey (and though murder is the correct term and these birds were ginormous, they didn't appear life-threatening). The weary ones settled in a naked tree, their spindle legs tightroping brittle branches, gelid eyes scanning the fresh-laundered sheet of snow. Others, eager to get on with it, flew anxious laps of the block, beating black wings against sifting snow. Ten minutes later they pushed south again.

Promise and the Monster's album Transparent Knives is a delightful late-year surprise from glassine-voiced chanteuse Billie Lindahl. She plays guitar with the patience and rigor, tremble and spellbindery (not to mention consistency -- there isn't a dud track on the record) of her countryman and soon-to-be tourmate, José González. See PatM's Myspace page for various Swedish dates beginning next Tuesday. And buy the album from Imperial Recordings or (much cheaper) on iTunes. It's very, very good.

A sudden strange

2007-12-03T08:00:00.000-06:00

Image: Helen Levitt

I See Who You Are - Björk
From Volta (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Irving Penn

Trust - Gravenhurst
From The Western Lands (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Pamela Klaffke

The Catch - Emmy the Great
From The Mules Present Pick Your Own (eMusic), Myspace

Image: Noa Baak

Dark Eyes - Iron & Wine & Calexico
From I'm Not There soundtrack (Amazon)

Image: Roger Ballen (cropped)

Hyenas - Tulsa
From Hunting with Cats (eMusic), Myspace

Image: Nicholas Prior

Danger - White Williams
From Smoke (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace

Image: unknown WWI

Dark Holler Blues - Clarence Ashley
From Old-Time Mountain Ballads (Amazon, eMusic)

Image: nullalux

Gesi Baglari - Selda
From Bearded Ladies, Vol. I (Amazon), About

Zip file of 8 tracks

Previous song & image essays: Nov, Oct, Sept (mp3 links no longer active)

How everything turns away

2007-11-29T21:00:00.000-06:00

Image: John Vachon

Wild Bill Jones - Sam Amidon

About suffering they are never wrong, these old mountain songs. Life -- and death -- is what happens while you're mundanely living it. While you're sleeping, tangled careless in bedclothes; or strolling the aisles of a supermarket with your little brown handbasket, scanning the shelves for anchovies and oatmeal; or dancing at a wedding reception, flatfooted and arms flailing, shouting vain requests to a scornful DJ. That's when violence visits some man, unknown to you, with a flash of gunmetal, a flare of light, a scream, a moan. In just a second ... two, three, four. That's when another man discovers he holds a hot revolver in his very own hand -- and has shot a poor boy body and soul.

Other performers of "Wild Bill Jones" have tried to explain the narrator's cruel action, why a seemingly modest, law-abiding citizen shoots on small provocation and becomes an outlaw. In some versions, he is drunk, in others, Wild Bill Jones pulls a knife first. Sam Amidon, in his careful, considered way offers little context and no excuse. His flat-voweled, everyman twang, his da da da da, isn't unkind. But Amidon, like his 19th century predecessors, assumes you know what life is -- brutal, unfair, inexplicable. He assumes you know that while a small human drama plays out, birds carry on building their nests in treetops, a nearby creek's fierce onrush never pauses, a child in a house a half mile away sits down at the kitchen table, lays out her homework and turns on the radio, as she does every school night after dinner. And tonight no different. He assumes you know that a sudden act of violence is just a tiny knot in a sprawling tapestry, an unimportant failure, a murmur drowned out by the bleating, booming, humming, singing, ticking glory of oblivious life bustling all around, beautiful and terrifying, wild and sublime.

With his wonderous plain voice and a small orchestra, Sam Amidon tells nine more stories on All Is Well, which is due for release in February (preorder), Myspace.

Don't want your stories anymore

2007-11-26T00:00:00.000-06:00

Image: Kathy Osborn

Stormy Weather - Bedroom Walls

"Stormy Weather" was never one of my favorite Pixies songs, and it seems weird that anyone would feel so inspired by the original to want to cover it. Black Francis sang some of his least interesting (and most laconic) lyrics morose and humorless, emphasizing the grim inevitability of discord, the it is time-ness of It is time for stormy weather. The guitars, meanwhile, chugged phlegmatically, like they were stuck jogging on a treadmill. The product of a bitter and contentious period for the band, it isn't much of a stretch to imagine the Bossanova track as a very thinly veiled metaphor for tempestuous internal goings-on.

Los Angeles-based Bedroom Walls, which I expect holds a happier lot of musicians, makes a surprising success of second-rate material. Even from the start -- a flat, queasy warble-wobble of guitar -- it's special. The female vocalist (I've actually only heard Adam Goldberg sing for BW, so I'm not sure who she is) dwells at the deep end of her natural range and enunciates breathy and purse-lipped like a Kim Deal fanclub member in good standing. You get the feeling she's been waiting years to pay tribute and is barely repressing her glee through the performance. The whole band, in fact, sound like a giddy pack of fankids when they burst into the jubilant glockenspiel-gilded chorus. If stormy weather's in the forecast, it's the cheery sort of young-winter white crystalline snowfall with lacey six-sided flakes. This could almost be a Christmas song.

From: Dig for Fire: A Tribute to The Pixies (Amazon, iTunes)
Bedroom Walls' Myspace

Around:
Hey freeloader! Assuage your bittorrenting, mp3-grabbing burdened conscience. New blog, Dear Rockers guilts you into paying back the musicians you've been ripping off, five bucks and one apology letter at a time (with a helpful find-an-address search function).

Kathy Osborn's photos (above) of domestic malice and malaise, as dramatized by plastic dolls, are amazing -- and for sale (if you got the dough).

And if you didn't already see it, I posted an exhaustive -- or perhaps, I mean exhausting -- holiday gift guide. It includes neato stuff for music lovers and lots of artisan-made items. Claim my taste as your own!

In the spirit (gift guide)

2007-11-23T13:30:00.000-06:00

Image: Tokihiro Sako

Special Rider Blues - Shearwater

This isn't the blues in any conventional sense. Jonathan Meiburg sings as high and desperate as Skip James did. But Shearwater doesn't play the song as rangy and fierce. The band unwinds it slowly, letting the fuzzed wool yarn tangle in their fingers, and only gradually, with languorous laps of guitar, flicks of percussion, do they knit it into something resembling shape. But there it is finally -- a blanket, nubby and warm for you to rub against your cheek. A cover in two senses.

From the rereleased, expanded and gorgeously packaged Palo Santo. Holiday gift alert!

Speaking of gifts... I can't stand shopping crowds, so my holiday goal this year is to buy all of my gifts online. And because I've found so much good stuff in my travels, I figured I'd share some of it. The list got a little long (a lot long) (ok, this is totally insane). Most items are in US $$s. And while there are some expensive goodies, most are less than $25. If you actually take me up on a suggestion and your recipient loves you for it, let me know. This may be the beginning of my new career as a personal shopper.

Music-geekery
Box sets: Stax 50th Anniversary, The Brit Box, Goodbye Babylon early gospel, The Fall's Complete Peel Sessions, People Take Warning: Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs

Gig posters: Aesthetic Apparatus, Programmable Press, Redbird Posters, Dan Stiles

Neko Case Live from Austin and Danielson: A Family Movie DVDs

Raymond Pettibon notecards

Books: The Rest is Noise, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, 33 1/3 series, Jay Ryan's 100 Posters, 134 Squirrels

Emotibud earbud set

iPod cases: iPod Crafts, Mod Dots, Hotel Fever and iPod pillow

Daydream Factory t-shirts

Art appreciation
Anemone limited edition artbooklet

View-master reel, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities

Matte Stephens prints and paintings

Jeff Wall exhibition catalogue

Tiny Showcase Winter prints (Jen Corace, Ryan Jacob Smith, Catia Chien, Evan B. Harris)

Artist's survival kit

Sartorial gestures
Poketo garden t-shirt (women's and men's)

Typewriter t-shirt (men's)

Squirrel hair clip set

Through-the-woods knitted cap

Teal crochet hat

Bags: Antler girl tote, Blue forest market tote, Five penguins tote, Lotta Jandotter tote, Blue swans side zipper, Autumn trees tote, Tree lace tote, Suzi plaid bag

Felted wool coin purse

Krista Raak choker

Paper play
Best American Comics 2007, edited by Chris Ware

Quick Vegetarian Pleasures cookbook

Elephant and Nemo composition book, Sukie Winnebago travel journal, Nantaka Joy "I love" notebook

2008 calendars: Red Prairie Press (Rachel Bone), Hidden Habitats, Mark Rothko, Paper Source letterpress, Smosch mini, Japanese woodblock prints, Valery Goulet, Monster Movies, Seaspray Blue, Charley Harper engagement, Daily planners in fuchsia, lime, orange...

Vintage matchbox labels

Mushroom Hill paper play set

Milkshake bookplates (customized at no extra charge!)

Holiday cards: The Beautiful Project, R. Nichols, Two Guitars, Ink Drop Design birds, Kashimagawa (see above image), V&A 1950s bauble, Koko New York peace

Miscellany
Todd & Holland tea sampler and Bee House 2-cup teapot

CB2 large comma plates in orange, avocado, brown

ZipZip USB memory brick (looks like a Lego!)

Moo-Shu Mitt knitting kit

When I speak of flowers

2007-11-19T19:50:00.000-06:00

Image: Elspeth Diederix

Annie's Song - Sunshine Club

I don't apologize for liking John Denver's "Annie's Song." It's sappy and sentimental, but it's a love song, and one of the most naked and risky to ever grace the pop charts. Written upon reconciliation with an estranged wife, it's so vulnerable it's almost embarrassing (almost). It strikes me as a more populist expression of William Carlos Williams' sentiments in the exquisitely moving, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," which was also written to a wife at an emotionally fraught juncture. Both gallantly (yet indirectly, and arguably inadequately, through their respective artistic mediums) affirm Williams' agonized assertion, It is ridiculous/what airs we put on/to seem profound/while our hearts/gasp dying/for want of love." "Annie's" rejects airs and profundity for love with every ounce of its hot, quivering heart.

This cover isn't a radical revision. Sunshine Club, a band that existed in 2000 when Denver tribute album Take Me Home (Amazon, eMusic) was released but seems to exist no longer, is content to walk in the songwriter's soft, dusty footprints. Except, where the original is yearning and flushed by the pink glow of optimism, the cover offers a gray whiff of melancholy. It's stark and spare and spacious, seeming to expire less than two minutes in, then only refiring for an instrumental coda. The song is tender, yes, but its wide open spaces leave room for some complications, some uncertainty.

I think I'm going to post a couple more covers this week. Speaking of covers, Berkeley Place is collecting votes for the best covers of the century so far.

Sweet blue world

2007-11-15T09:30:00.000-06:00

Image: Colleen Plumb

The Origin of Rain - Capstan Shafts

Hip to the Sweet Blue World Again - Capstan Shafts

Project of the suspiciously prolific, faux-Brit accented, pretentious song-title bestowing Dean Wells, Capstan Shafts sometimes out-Pollards even Robert Pollard. The 29 tracks on Environ Maiden (CS's seventh full-length following a flurry of self-released LPs) average to less than a minute a pop. And Wells, I'm convinced, built his own recording equipment with tinker toys, scrap metal and bendy straws. In the age of Pro Tools, that there's what's called a conscious choice, a pledge to what can be, in the right hands, the awesome beauty of lo-fi. And by the right hands I mean, of course, someone with a knack for hooks. Oh lordy, the hooks! "The Origin of Rain" is an aching-breaking snip of song whose chord progressions are as lovely and familiar as high school crushes and clam chowder and the smell of snow. The relatively long (49 seconds) "Hip to the Sweet Blue World Again," has a feverish lilt, a buzzing, faintly throttled elation that can't be contained by the walls of the garage where Wells plays a modest Guitar God to the rakes and broken toasters and spare tires. When his voice doubles up on goodbye, I puddle at his feet.

From Environ Maiden (download album from Amazon for only $7.99). Myspace

Little girls

2007-11-12T11:00:00.000-06:00

Image: Ana Bagayan

Alice and Sarah - Orion Rigel Dommisse

There's something of Vashti and Joanna and perhaps, Larkin in Orion Rigel Dommisse, this coy-voiced singer named after a winter constellation and one of its brightest stars. And besides sharp, twinkling celestial lights, you can catch snatches of carnival and klezmer, white-tie waltz and Appalachian strum and drang in Dommisse's shadowy sing-song and electric cello orchestra. Her fictions, Alice and Sarah, are made of darker stuff still -- more Angela Carter than Pink Fairy Book. Their white necks smell of nutmeg and cloves, their bare knees blush pink, and yellow satin ribbons flutter like butterflies in their chestnut hair. But this sweet folie à deux would sooner slip razors from the bright folds of their dresses and eviscerate that frog than kiss him.

From What I Want From You is Sweet (Amazon), Myspace

Haunted

2007-11-08T23:15:00.000-06:00

Image: ghostpatrol

Untrue - Burial

Honey in the Rock - Blind Mamie Forehand

Weight of My Love - David Thomas Broughton

Burial's new album, Untrue (Amazon, eMusic), is a production of relatively few words. The legible ones are channeled via looped vocals of lost club divas, temporally dislocated soul singers and disembodied MCs who shuffle and reshuffle flashcards -- "I envied you," "you lie," "the way I feel inside" -- with a kind of intense randomness. These quotidian phrases scan of text torn from a hundred relationship articles in a dozen different magazines and tossed to the wind (or, of arbitrarily aggregated phrases from a thousand Myspace blogs). Considered with the music's bedemoned beats and underworldly pastiche of synths and reverb, they could be the psychogeographical signposts that signify Bitter Breakup Album. And wouldn't it be boring if Untrue were only that?

Several proponents of sonic hauntology -- a critical model that grafts a key trope of Derrida's critique of Marxism in Spectres of Marx onto considerations of music production modes and receptor response (I know, I know! I'll try to make this as painless as possible) -- have adopted dubstep and Burial as particular pets. (Dub reggae also gets favored status for reasons that will be obvious.) In addition to thoughtful fare, intra-blog potlucks have dished up some woefully undercooked speculations about what might constitute sonic hauntology, including silly lists of songs and artists with the word "ghost" in their name. Ghosts don't, as it seems pretty clear upon consideration, figure prominently in hauntology. Instead, the neologism speaks to something that is neither present nor absent, that collapses the ontological binary (Derrida, in fact, derived his portmanteau in part from "ontology"). Hauntology can explain an erased history that nevertheless leaves recurring spectral traces in the now, or account for how a potholed historical narrative produces, by its absence, meaning in the out-of-time -- or end-of-time -- present.

If you wanted to assert that hauntology sounds like a gussied-up version of the uncanny, or first cousin to various postmodern discourses, I wouldn't argue with you. It does seem to try to grapple with similar fraught and alienating aspects of contemporary life, particularly the decentralized, nonhierarchical ways in which technology disseminates information and we receive it. So yes, hauntology's probably a theoretical fad, or as k-punk puts it more polite, "the closest thing we have to a movement, a zeitgeist." Which doesn't mean it can't be productive of ... something, even something significant. In the latest issue of online journal Perforations, Ian Mathers theorizes the hauntological aspects of Joy Division in provocative ways (though his argument -- which seems predicated on your acknowledgment that Ian Curtis' vocals sounded ghostly before Curtis actually gave up the ghost -- teeters a bit). M Fisher (aka k-punk) performs a more persuasive reading of The Shining (both novel and film), and Sam Miller executes a marvelous Marxist theory-into-practice alchemy about gentrification that I wish was the rule with these types of intellectual exercises, not the exception.

But hell, nobody invests in so fragile a framework as hauntology without a concurrent and significant commitment to its poetic possibilities. This, I'll admit, is why I've been intrigued enough to troll these academese-spiked discussions for a couple months. I first encountered that Perforations issue the same afternoon I found the Valgeir Sigurðsson track I posted on Monday, and on cursory listening/reading, it seemed like serendipity. Hauntology, I thought, corralled "Winter Sleep's" eerie sonics -- specifically, those discordant sputters of noise that irrupt and threaten to rupture the melodic, soft-pattered whole (sort of like the teasing, yet benign threshold violations of poltergeists). But while the tract sounds unsettling and dyschronic, and Sigurðsson's production (he's probably best known for engineering Will Oldham and Björk albums) disinters some hard-to-place sounds, I'm now not convinced that hauntology brings anything interesting to this particular table.

Arguably, all multi-tracked productions -- or even anything mediated by recording technology -- are haunted by the contradiction of presence that isn't; they're performances that never physically happened as you hear them. But recordings that somehow foreground or acknowledge their placeless and timeless status, more willingly lend themselves to hauntological arguments. The hiss and click and pop of a pre-war blues record, for example, isn't contingent, but constitutive of it's meaning. K-punk argues when talking about Robert Johnson, the "'mythologized deep south' arises from the 'layers of fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise.'" So the blanket of fuzz on Blind Mamie Forehand's wonderful gospel-blues side "Honey in the Rock," (found on American Primitive - Volume 2: Pre-War Revenants 1897-1939, Amazon, eMusic) is as critical to the mix as her voice or the guitar. It's intrinsic to our own fabrication of "sincere" and "authentic." (Also, I have to mention that bell's ding ding. It always seems to me like the spectral nagging of repressed memories too terrible to articulate.)

Sonic hauntology can also be a useful way to wrap your head around Burial. Jeez, you could start with the (metal band-ready) name and proceed straight to punny persiflage about sonic resurrection. Or probably better, highlight the artist's shadowy identity (he claims that only a handful of non-family members in his everyday life know of his alter ego). Anonymity, in fact, supplies what could be necessary for a successful hauntological text: stranded and sourceless sound, sound produced by no one. And Burial supports this sense of absent presence by exposing the seams of his production process -- vocodered vocals that could be emanating from (if anywhere physical) a sewer tunnel, and hissy, crackling, patchworked soundscapes. "Untrue," makes me think of a beautiful face that has been disfigured and competently reconstructed by plastic surgery, but whose thin white scars and awkward spatial logic are visible in certain ephemeral light. The album, then, is uneasily beautiful, an elusive work of splendor and risk. And if not as explicitly political as Burial's first record (Amazon, eMusic), political all the same. Take a gander at the track names: "UK," "Homeless," "Dog Shelter," "In McDonald's," uh, "Untrue." Fangirl plots and connects some dots between Burial's aesthetic and an invisible London economy at phantasmal odds with capital's official "commodity urbanism." So yes, and without really getting too deep into it, this record can certainly be read as critique of New Britain.

But I'm not sure even Burial illustrates the possibilities of this theoretical schema quite as well as the case of David Thomas Broughton. Last year, I said this about Broughton's first effort (Amazon, eMusic): "Excessive and often unbordered, the record has inexplicable moments ... and says uncanny things that don't fit in any small boxes I have lying around." What I didn't unpack very well was why and how. The Complete Guide to Insufficiency is a single-take recording in which Broughton uses a sampler to loop back what he's just performed and layer the loops in waves of sonorous din. It's a dizzying, disturbing, emotionally gutting gimmick that conflates past and present and challenges spatial orientation. (And a good account of Broughton's live performance process can be found at The Daily Growl.) Improvisational chamber quartet 7 Hertz supports Broughton's voice and guitar on his latest release (Amazon), so he makes less extensive use of his trusty sampler. But in "Weight of My Love," the vocal sample, it's not the weight I carry with me, ghosts his immediate voice, the sputtering bass, moaning clarinet, keening violins. The delayed and doubled effect is eerie and gorgeous and, above all, metaphysically slippery. It asks us to consider what we're hearing and interrogate our own assumptions about how we construct meaning from the experience.

Elsewhere:
Well hey, whadya know? Carrie Brownstein's NPR blog is a lot of fun.

Twisted round the barren oak

2007-11-05T14:10:00.000-06:00

Image: Tony Lloyd

Winter Sleep - Valgeir Sigurðsson

From Ekvilibrium (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Anna Gaskell

Dumb Animals - Handsome Furs

From Plague Park (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Vanessa Albury

Golden - High Places

Myspace

Image: Gabe Bledsoe

Carnival - Tissø Lake

From A Coronet, Myspace

Image: Rachel Hulin

Over the Ice - The Field

From From Here We Go Sublime (Amazon), Myspace

Image: Erica Shires

Yours, and With Ever Grateful Wonder - Christine Fellows

From Nevertheless (preorder), Myspace

Image: Whitney Hubbs

Peter Pan - Ai Phoenix

From The Light Shines Almost All the Way, Myspace

Something nasty in the woodshed

2007-10-31T14:30:00.000-05:00

Image: Colin Blakely (cropped)

Purty Polly - John Hammond

As much as I like the many weird and wonderful ways murder ballads dramatize root anxieties (life is short, strangers are dangerous, love can kill you), the seemingly inexhaustible methods with which they execute rather elemental melodies, I prefer old recordings. With the exception of Gillian Welch's "Caleb Meyer" and some of The Handsome Family's morbid outings, I never quite warm to contemporary takes on the tradition. The older, the crustier the patina of pop-and-hiss, the more voices and instruments rattle like dry bones in a box, the better. So maybe I have some misguided notions about authenticity. But I like my murder ballads to sound like this 1927 variant on the durable "Polly" standard: ancient. John Hammond's wheezed twang isn't beautiful. But it's perfect-- strained and anxious and a little out of breath from trying to keep up with the banjo. A banjo that flows so fast and fluid it sings in sympathy to the poor girl's exsanguinating heart.

From American Primitive - Volume 2: Pre-War Revenants 1897-1939 (Amazon, eMusic)

Halloween treats:

Get your Vincent Price here: Heart on a Stick has a scary holiday mix.

Love bacon? Love bacon so much you want everything to taste like bacon?