Green Pea-ness

Odds & Ends

2009-04-03T15:37:00.001-07:00

See above

Petar Dundov, "Oasis" (Gavin Russom remix)
Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom, "#5"

The picture, to answer your first question, was basically my reaction to Gavin Russom's abrupt uncloistering last winter; dude had basically spent the last three years keeping a lower online profile than me. I presume few if any of you give a shit; Days of Mars has been out for almost half a decade and despite my undiminished, unyielding advocacy for its era-defining excellence I've been able to get one of my friends to check it out. One. (aside: this person does approve of it mightily.) Still, this is my site, my eight dollhairs a month, get yr laws off my body etc.

ANYWAY. Russom resurfaced last winter by posting four songs to his MySpace: a track from his acid-house side project Black Meteoric Star, two other I can't remember (and since Flash refuses to play nice with my computer I'm unable to check), and his remix of Petar Dundov's "Oasis". The latter was far and away my favorite of the batch; luckily it's also the only one yet to surface as a non-rip, so now you can all join me in basking in its gleeful, don't-give-a-fuck incrementalism (not that any of you will, but hey it's not my job to update your firmware to include good taste). I also thought I'd go ahead and post Delia & Gavin's "#5", erm...thing from the 2005 DFA Holiday Mix; it's one of my very favorite things they've done, but it's also pretty much the biggest outlier in Russom's entire catalogue to date and that ain't no small potaters. Anyway, have them both and either join me in breathlessly anticipating the long-promised BMS debut release (where have I heard that before?) or take yr shots about me disappearing up my own musical ass and go back to yr Dave Matthews Band record.

(Click here to buy "Sparkling Stars" from Juno.co.uk; it's a limited-edition disc with some grin-triggeringly cool packaging, so I would suggest that you jump. Click here to buy a used copy of the DFA's Holiday Mix from Amazon.co.uk - wait, it's like two-fifty these days? MY NEST EGG NOOOOOOOOOOOOO)

Downtown Party Network, "Days Like These" (vocal mix) - This happened to be playing on the embedded player on Eskimo's site when I stopped by in search of info on Lindstrom & Prins Thomas' forthcoming album (set to release, incidentally, on May 18th on CD and motherfuckin' QUAD LP; also "Tirsdagjam", the song currently streaming on L&PT's MySpace, will be released as a teaser single on April 13th), and it ended up being more or less the best thing I've heard all week. Mostly, it's just the way it builds; even blasting out of my shitty laptop speakers, the progression's just so inviting and assured that I kept getting more excited by the second. Strong reccomendation for fans of stuff like House of House's "Rushing to Paradise" and Aeroplane's Low Motion Disco remix, although of course this is like three month old now so it's not like I'm bringing the news to anyone here. (Click here to buy the "Days Like These" single from a GEMM merchant; click here to visit DPN's MySpace)

Doves, "City of Rust" (Prins Thomas remix) - Seriously, fuck Doves; that shit is weak, and I say that as someone who once bought a Keane album. The original is, admittedly, probably my favorite song of theirs to date, but Prins Thomas just gets motherfucking stupid all over it, smoothing out the original's awkward urgency into a loping eight-minute tour-de-force; let's just say you won't have trouble recognizing the point at which he decides to bring the original mix back in (more or less). In a perfect world, this would be the all over the radio, possibly even bumping up against Superpitcher's take on that Gotye song from a while back. (The Prins Thomas mix is still currently promo-only, but you can buy one from GEMM if you want.)

Frankie Valli, "The Night" (Pilooski re-edit) - I'm sure Pilooski must be hell of over the whole Frankie Valli thing by now, but dammit how the hell else am I supposed to react when literally every single one of his edits for the dude own so fucking hard? I mean, "The Night" isn't all that different from his thrilling dissections of "Beggin'" and "Who Loves You" in either approach or effect - basically it's Yet Another Vocal-Driven Pilooski Rave-Up - leaving me at something of a loss; it's a little hard to avoid repeating yourself when you're describe songs with fundamentally identical virtues. What can I say? I'm just a sucker for the gimmick - and "The Night" is as flawless an example as I've ever found. At least this is the last time I have to do it (by which of course I actually mean FUCK, THIS IS THE LAST TIME I GET TO DO IT /wrists). (Click here to buy Beggin': The Ultimate Collection from a GEMM merchant)

Real-Time Record Review: Lindstrom & Prins Thomas II

2009-03-31T17:43:00.000-07:00

Subquestion: HOW MUCH DOES THE COVER ART OWN?!??!??!?

Lindstrom, "Grand Ideas" (Radio Edit by Prins Thomas) - Once or twice upon a time many moons ago, I hit upon the (completely original) idea to write a running diary for albums as I listened to them for the first time. It worked out pretty well for a while; I really thought the buzz was about to hit critical mass when the Foo Fighters booked me to open for their show at the Gibson Ampitheater, but like so many E! True Hollywood Stories the rock and/or roll lifestyle only ended up driving me to the needle. Consider this, then, to be my coffee-house open-mic-night comeback; I'm just gonna sit here with my acoustic guitar and caterwaul a bunch of couplets rhyming "smack" with "jack" and engaging in heart-stoppingly uncomfortable banter between songs and WAIT COME BACK I PROMISE TO START MAKING SENSE.

Anyway; this album came down a series of tubes a couple of days ago, and since for some inexcusable reason I haven't found the time to to listen to it yet (I choose to blame Waves at Night for coming through with all the goods at once. like, alllllll the goods), here we are. (The "Grand Ideas" remix, of course, has nothing to do with II; maybe this week's theme can be "Awesome-Yet-Tangential-At-Best Hype Machine Bait" [but this edit really is both awesome and a minor pain in the ass to track down, so git].)

1. Cisco

00:00: Since this is obviously going to to take a minute to ramp up, I'd like to start off by apologizing to my vast Scandinavian audience for my mangling of your fine language with these song titles;

00:45ish: WELL, I was wrong; all of a sudden this turned into some lost Fleetwood Mac dub track. It's not a surprising look for them or anything, of course; I'm just impressed by how much quicker they can flip that switch than, like, anyone. Let's all start a rumor that L&PT are producing Lindsay Buckingham's next album and hope it comes true.

03:01: Yeah, not that there should have been any doubt in your minds but I'm sold as shit on this already. I had just turned up my speakers to catch some of the background noodling when in come the big quicksilvery synths. Apparently they made this record to satisfy people whose brains function exactly like mine. I had no idea broke-ass recovering professional scumbags were such an alluring demographic.

05:15: Big weird psychedelic fading-in-and-out going on all over the place. Motherfucking love this so far.

07:00: Wow, that last big gated swell was a tease?!??! They could have gotten like another three minutes out of this motherfucker easily. Not that it sucks in any way as-is or anything, just damn, MOAR PLZ.

2. Rothaus

02:21: Case in point: it took me so long to try and cope w/ the fact that the opener had wrapped up that here we are two and a half minutes into the next song w/o anything needing to be said. To be fair, it's pretty noodly stuff so far; also let's pause to recognize the fact that I'm admitting to the whole internet that it took me three minutes to come up with a MOAR PLZ joke. But where's my parade?

02:44: OH WAIT HERE IT GOES. Okay, this just hit Must Check Out status for anyone who liked the DFA remix of "Rise".

04:20: WOO SMOKE HERB EVERYDAY YEAH WHAT. No, but seriously, this is where the drum fills start to get really tremendous, no mean feat for this song so far. Somewhere in the world, some enterprising young chap or she-chap is blending out of this and into "Get Innocuous" right now. And lo, it was good.

05:58: And there it goes building again. Let's just say that this is clearly one of those records that sounds like it came from a place where the fact that it's colder than a witch's tit for nine months out of the year gives people extra incentive to stay in and get their album just right.

07:29: Love that warm synth pad that just showed up. I believe the term I'm looking for is "Stevie-esque".

08:45: And after all that it just kinda peters out. Then again, after nine solid minutes, where the hell else was there for it to go?

3. For Ett Slikk Og Ingenting

00:30: THEEEEEEEEEE LOOOOOOOOOOVE BOOOOOOOAAAATTTTTTTT...

00:51: The psychedelic overtones of this record are painfully awesome. I absolutely cannot wait to listen to it on headphones.

03:23: There's some odd clicking around here which kind of throws the song off a little; I can't tell whether that's an actual fuckup on their part (unlikely) or due to the arduous en-steal-ulating process this album went through (promo copies apparently went out with the songs divided into 99 fragmentary tracks [so that folks could listen to the CD but have a hard time ripping it, you see]). Guess I'll have to wait until I get the vinyl to find out for sure.

05:47: Okay, congas getting all up in this piece are saving this track's ass from being kinda wanky. Definitely the most jam-oriented of the songs so far, and yet I still want to hear someone throw some Lou Rawls acapellas (god, please let these exist) on top.

08:45: Credit where it's due: the rebellious 80s arcade-game outro is kinda rad in its own right.

4. Rett Pa

00:35: OKAY THIS RULES ALREADY. Lindstrom and Prins Thomas may be better than anyone in the universe at coming up with kick drum sounds; they're just all-consuming and metronomic enough to get even the whitest of honkies up and going. You're just like, "How in the world did they - oh, right. Norway."

02:00: By the way, have I ever mentioned that I missed out on my only chance to see Prins Thomas in LA? Yeah, guess what I'm stewing over right now. (I also missed out on Lindstrom up in San Francisco a few weeks ago; that's of course a pretty formidable commute but LINDSTROM.)

03:39: Yeah, this is building into something motherfucking tremendous. Big-ass drum fills, an utterly beguiling tambourine, and crazy whooshing-ass sound effects all over the place.

05:14: No disrespect to Norway earlier, by the way; I can only dream of living in a place where stuff like this gets played in huge twelve-hour (no joke) blocks. JOAX BRUV.

5. Skal Vi Prove Naa

00:06: And here come the new-age synths. WHOOOO CANNNN SAYYYYYY...

01:00: Uh damn, this just sort of picks right up.

02:24: I'm not going to lie: I'm finding it kind of daunting dealing w/ the lyriclessness of the

05:45: Sorry, I had to set up a job interview for tomorrow. Anyone laying odds of me meeting 2 midgets at 2 interviews within a 1-week span?

06:57: Oh, and this track is kind of pretty good in an utterly-unremarkable-in-the-context-of-this-album kind of way; the most involving aspect of it is just trying to place which massive R&B melody line the book to this song bites (edit: apparently I'm not the only one w/ this problem). "Rothaus" FTW ATM. Y R U MVNG?

08:57: On the other hand, at least this song seems to be wrapping up in a familiar manner; it's pretty great hearing every stem of the song wrapping down one-by-one.

6. Gudene Vet and Snutt

02:35: God, this would be a summertime bar-be-cue anthem if dudes who grilled meat outside could only be convinced to listen to super-hipster disco noodling. I should make a tape of this with a label "Zep Instrumental Takes" and leave it lying around before my neighbors' next cookout.

05:39: Wow, it's going to be pretty interesting to see where this goes; in contrast to "Cisco" this feels pretty thoroughly worked-out by this point.

06:39: Whoa, was that a voice? After like 45 minutes of wordless silence, just the sound of a human voice is almost startling.

07:17: And so it goes all... kind of... acid-y Motown? I'm Ron Burgandy?

07:35: Nope, false alarm; the "Why Can't We Live Together" drums just came in. I suppose that's the "Snutt" part.

7. Note I Love You + 100

00:11: And in contrast to the opener's Fleetwood Mackitude, this one's all Carly Simon'ed up like you wouldn't believe. I ordinarily despise Carly Simon apart from "You're So Vain" but they're actually getting some mileage out of it here.

01:22: Seriously, is there some huge catalogue of vocal or acapella tracks from the seventies floating around somewhere? There's work to be done for enterprising young bootleggers here.

02:55: Uh okay, that part just happened.

03:51: Really liking that heavily-opiated guitar.

06:19: Wow, this song's really going to go all over the place. I mean it's eleven minutes long and everything (and it certainly hasn't gone anywhere bad yet), but it just kinda switches gears on you.

07:33: Oh shit, is this going to be the track on this album that just blows itself up in a blaze of glory? That'd sure be one hell of a trick; this song's been exploring the studio space for so long that I can barely remember how it started. I'm not even sure it's going to come together in some huge ecstatic tida wave or anything; this record's pleasures are very detail-oriented so far. But hey, we've got like four minutes left to find out.

09:25: And there's your answer: YEP.

10:10: Oh man, this is some hardcore chin-stroking wanky nonsense right here. It's also really really really good chin-strokoh I'm done with this joke. Basically this song is good.

11:15: Okay, unless this next track's a biblical Revelation I'm pretty sure we're good here. Holy hell, I cannot WAIT to hear it on headphones.

8. Flue Paa Veggen

01:05: Thirteen minutes? God, why didn't I make myself a sandwich before doing this?

01:54: I went through an abortive Miami soul/disco phase a couple of months back - let's just say that aside from George McCrae and a handful of singles it's more or less been evaluated correctly by history - so it's impossible for me not to hear "Why Can't We Live Together" with every occurrence of this album's synth-drum sound. Still, in the case of this song it's going hella crazy places so far.

03:35: How many producers are there in the world (well, the world of mainstream hipster dance music, anyway) whose longer songs always end up being their best ones? I mean, Lindstrom, Prins Thomas, Todd Terje, the DFA kids, Joakim, Pilooski... anyone? (Villalobos doesn't count; every time I hear "Enfants" I kind of keep waiting for him to pull the needle out of the groove and scream GOTCHA SUCKERS like Eddie Murphy at the end of Bowfinger. Uh, spoiler alert.)

06:03: Crazy panning organ like whoa. I can haz acid tabz?

07:16 Okay, this is definitely THE wanky jam of the album - again, it's saved by the dynamic duo's supernatural faculties with musical texture, but let's call a spade a spade here. It's sort of like if someone took the ideas behind George Harrison's post-Maharishi Beatles songs and turned them into a gentle, meandering thirteen-minute nu-disco epic.

09:50: OKAY THE CHOIR JUST COMPLETELY WON ME OVER. Time to start mixing this with the Flying Picketts' RIGHT NOW.

11:20: Wow, you could actually probably just overlay the entire song here. Oh man this is gonna sound like such ass when I spend like four minutes doing it haphazardly in MixMeister.

12:05: And thankfully it looks like they're letting the choir provide the period at the end of the sentence; we've reached the minute where it's all fading out. Great great great way to wrap it all up.

CONCLUSION
This is what we in the record-listening-to-and-then-verbally-evaluating-on-the-internet biz like to call a damn good little album. Both Where You Go I Go Too and Exodus make it look like a bag of hacky quick-cash-in crap, of course, but let's be reasonable; this is clearly an album which deseres to be picked apart like a loose thread, and I'm probably not doing it justice snarking all over it. I don't want to make it sound like my album of the year or anything (so far, that would either be Junior or Merriweather Post Pavillion - why yes, I am the most predictable man on the planet!); it simply strikes me as a thoroughly decent musical accompaniment to any hour you might be looking to soundtrack. Ask me again in six months once I've listened to it again over headphones a billion times; for an album I like a fair bit already, there's nowhere for it to go but up.

(II is due out on Eskimo Recordings on May 26th; if somebody wants to hook a brother up w/ a preorder link I'll throw it in here. In the meantime, click here to buy Where You Go I Go Too from Amazon.com if you don't have it already. Also, there's an allegedly dynamite extra track from the II sessions on Eskimo's MySpace right now; I haven't heard it because Flash 9 is being a butthead and refuses to load the player no matter how many times I reinstall it, but you should probably check it out if you're so inclined.)

And Now For Something Completely Different

2009-03-30T16:07:00.001-07:00

not that this picture has anything to do with the following post either, but COME ON

Michael Jackson, "Don't Stop" (T&T remix) - I'm not even going to pretend like this song has anything to do with the story I'm about to tell; it's a great, subtle, great, respectful, greatgreatgreat update of an obviously classic song which you should be listening to RIGHT NOW (not that anyone with one iota of sense would have expected anything less from Tim Goldsworthy & Tim Sweeney), but I can't even claim to have been listening to it on the way to and from... the story into which I'm about to get. My apologies to the gullible Hype Machinists lured into my web of lies; consider this your penance for not reading the eminently essential Disco Delicious like you should.

ANYWAY. Like many of you, I too am currently frantically scrambling to find employment during this funky buttloving economy. A while back, I thought I'd actually managed to somehow find the last job in Los Angeles working (from home, even!) for these fine folks doing data entry, which would be just about perfect; all I want in this world is a job I can do mindlessly while listening to records without being bothered (preferably from home, too). Unfortunately, they apparently ran ass-out of money the minute I walked out the door, because it's been like three weeks and they're still not putting me on the schedule; I've spent the last few weeks chasing down damn near every data-entry position Craigslist had to offer.

So at some point last week I happen to come across this golden opportunity. And yes, the job market's bad enough in Los Angeles right now that I even gave such a transparently shady an ad the time of day in the first place; after all, even I have enough sense to take qualifications like "must bring your own computer" and "some adult content required" as a big ol' THIS PROBABLY ISN'T ON THE UP-AND-UP signal. But hey, nobody ever got anywhere in life without taking chances, right? I mean, sure that logic's usually best left reserved for buying lotto tickets and asking girls out, but I figured I had an ace up my sleeve: a good feeling about this.

Well, that good feeling led me directly to a suite in a non-descript office building on Wilshire housing the world headquarters of Priapus Investment Fund. (Priapus, of course, was an ancient Roman god of boners; hopefully they at least discussed going with "Priapus Holding Company" instead.) When I ring the bell, the door is opened by the single porn-star-looking-est woman I've ever seen in my decade in Los Angeles; her rack probably made it through the door a good four seconds before the rest of her. She ushers me into a conference room in the back of the office with the other two candidates for the position currently present, a non-descript dude and a yappy young actress, the type who apparently can't let four consecutive seconds pass without saying something self-congratulatory or else this bus will blow up; apparently she's used to "making dollars, not cents (GET IT)" with her acting gig and is currently considering going back to school to learn "directing" because she feels marginalized on set.

After we'd managed to log onto the office's wireless network, Chesty LaRoux shows back up with a few more folks going after the job; we're up to like six or seven in the room by now. At this point, Chesty sets about actually explaining the job: apparently we're competing against each other to see who gets to go to this website (NSFW UNLESS YOUR BOSS LIKES PROSTITUTES), surf to an assigned city, and start copying the vital stats for as many of the... ladies of the evening in that particular city into an Excel sheet as you could manage in an hour. Oh, and apparently there'd only be one position available, not "multiple" as the ad mentioned. Oh, and apparently the pay maxes out at twelve bucks an hour, not "twenty" as per the ad.

And as if all that weren't enough, guess which city I got assigned? That's right - BALTIMORE, the city whose drug problem happens to be so all-consumingly nihilistic that they made a show about it. Believe me, any jokes you might have been dreaming up about me getting paid to lookit them thar nekkid lay-deez will utterly collapse once you start checking out the beauty queens I was dealing with, especially when you take into account that I was attempting to set the world landspeed record for most ho-data aggregated in an hour. Hell, the pictures arguably weren't even the most depressing part - that dubious honor either goes to the chick who's "temporarily dropping her prices due to the economy" (even pussy futures are falling these days!) or the three girls sharing one hotmail address (dig the links out of the Baltimore ho-dex yourself if you want proof; otherwise, take my word) which I presume belongs to their pimp. It all added up to a pretty sobering scene; one middle-aged lady actually had to excuse herself from consideration after about 30 minutes. It was, all in all, most certainly neither my beautiful house nor my beautiful wife.

And then the midget walks in.

That's right: as of March 27th, 2009, I can no longer say I've never competed against a midget for a job. In walks this stubby little Asian dude looking for all the world like Tattoo from Fantasy Island (n.b. that my comparative library of Asian midgets is not huge; this is merely an approximation of his Asian midgitude), and the room goes absolutely silent - no mean feat when we're competing against each other to see who could input the most data. Ms. LaRoux, to her credit, explains the job to him in exactly the same measured, professional tones as she'd done with the rest of us - well, up until the point when the lil' guy not only whips out a mini-laptop, but plugs a mini USB mouse right on in. The lily having clearly been gilded, Chesty beat a hasty retreat from the increasingly Lynchian scene; as he was leaving she couldn't help cooing over how cute all his "little computer things" were, which would be probably be a real ego-boost if you happened to be into girls who give off a big-ass hepatitis vibe.

Anyway, that was pretty much it. I doubt I'll ever hear from these people again, considering that the whole interview process struck me as a really cheap way to get most of their data entry entered for free (there ended up being like 10-12 people at my interview; multiply that by the total number of interviews they mentioned hosting in the Craigslist ad and you're looking at a lot of data being accumulated during the interview process. A ho lot. I... I'm sorry), but whatever; it might well be the craziest interview I've ever been on, and a few years ago I went on a job interview that ended with me being deemed unfit for Scientology. LA, you know? (Click here to buy "Don't Stop" from Phonica; they turn in a great mix of "Superstition" on the flip, too.)

LET US HAVE ANOTHER MIX

2009-03-25T11:38:00.000-07:00

oonce oonce oonce oonce

What the hell. I finished this up a couple of days ago and it's good enough to meet myyyyyy high quality-control standards and so, to reiterate, what the hell.

http://www.divshare.com/download/6888740-c6d

(n.b. that you can stream this through DivShare if you don't want to download a 150mb file)

1. Laughing Light of Plenty, "The Rose"

I was a little taken aback to hear a bunch of people delicately asking me if I'd reverbed this track up in the mix when I posted it to the ILX mix competition thread; to my ears, "The Rose" is one of the least-obstreporous nu-disco songs I've ever encountered from start to finish, like an exsquisitely-balanced alchemy of the Steve Miller Band's "Rock 'n Me" and the Talking Heads' "I Zimbra" (well, sorta, anyway). Some day I'll invent that time machine I'm always talking about and take a copy of this record back to 1978. Then you'll all see. (Actual copies of "The Rose" are pretty hard to come by these days; your best bet is either GEMM or the Discogs marketplace.)

2. Chaz Jankel, "Glad to Know You" (Todd Terje re-edit)

Still never heard the original of this (for whatever reasons, Ian Dury & the Blockheads never really took root w/ me), but Todd Terje's gauzy, dreamlike re-interpretation kinda makes me wary of digging any deeper and ruining my currently-immaculate preconceptions about this song. I mean, it's going to be next to impossible for me to not flip out over anything with a piano like that, isn't it? (Your best shot at this song is, again, probably the Discogs marketplace - prices aren't too painful, though.)

3. Sebastian Tellier, "Kilometer" (Aeroplane Italo '84 remix)

Despite the kerfluffle it caused when it leaked (and then subsequently got taken down) a few months back, I'm pretty this is actually my least-favorite Aeroplane remix, mostly because Tellier's original really isn't anything worth speaking about in the first place; I've come to realize that I can pretty comfortably ignore his music completely aside from "La Ritournelle" and Danger's remix of "Divine" and his allegedly-discomforting live shows. Of course, since "the worst Aeroplane remix" is still roughly eleventy billion times better than most everything else out there, it took me about .0000002 seconds to decide on including it, especially when I realized how well it led out of "Glad To Know You", but especially when I realized how well it transitioned into... (The "Kilometer" single is forthcoming on Lucky Number; in the meantime, you can buy digital copies from Nuloop.)

4. Mr. Flagio, "Take A Chance" (extended 12" mix)

I'm pretty sure that either this or Pineapples' "Come On Closer" is my favorite old-school Italo song outright; there's just something about the interplay between chintzy Italo arrangements and bombastically vapid lyrics, I guess. Of course, "Take A Chance" has the added advantage of those disarmingly icy autotuned verses, which are probably my favorite part of the song (especially when the shrieking chorus comes in on the bridge to play counterpoint); I also love how the guitar line just pops up every so often almost as a sop to crusty rock fuxxx who got dragged to the club by their girlfriends. Of course, to focus on that would be to miss the entire point of the song's existence, but hey, that's what crusty rock fuxxx are for, right? ("Take A Chance" came out in 1983 and italo-hoarders have snapped up most of the outlying copies by now so obviously this isn't the easiest record to get ahold of these days; try eBay or GEMM for the least-ridiculous prices.)

5. Grace Jones, "Williams Blood" (Aeroplane Rejected mix)

Have I mentioned that I kinda like Aeroplane yet? With the possible exception of Black Leotard Front's vaporware full-length (le sigh), there's not a record on earth which I'm anticipating more than their debut LP (which is being co-produced by motherfuckin' SOULWAX! EXCLAMATION POINTS, PPLS), mostly because their catalogue of remixes points towards Steven Fasano and Vito de Luca having the most alarmingly complete control over their breakdowns of anyone working in music today. I mean, just get a load of the way they get "Williams Blood" to first pick itself apart and then reconstitute itself as some Jacques-Lu-Cont-in-2004-or-2005 disco monolith - sheeeeit, even the breakdown has a breakdown. Just masterful stuff all around. (Blah blah blah GEMM and Discogs marketplace. Seriously, this came out pretty recently, so if there's a legitimate link to buy this out there somewhere, plz do let yr boy know.)

AND NOW LET'S SHIFT GEARS A LITTLE

6. Who Made Who, "The Plot" (Discodeine remix)

I've posted about Who Made Who in the past, but I don't think I've ever loved them as much as I do on this remix. Discodeine get completely out-of-pocket here, ripping the original track to shreds and then expertly using the violin as thread to stitch it back together into a gloriously messy-sounding sinuous disco burner. It sounds lush and broken at the same time, and that's one hell of a balance to strike. (Click here to buy "The Plot Pt. 2" from a Gomma-sponsored link)

7. Holy Ghost!, "Hold On" (Blackjoy Mazego Groove)

I heard the original version of "Hold On" for the first time in one of Tim Sweeney's Beats in Space podcasts a couple of years ago; I then heard it for the last time once I got my hands on the 12" and discovered that Blackjoy's ecstatically goofy handbellstravaganza on the flip rendered the (quite good) original more or less moot. I mean, the violin stabs and that super-warm Stevie-Wonder-sounding bassline certainly have their charms, but as far as my ears are concerned this track is alllllllllll about the syncopation of the percussion; one's almost half-tempted to mix straight into a David Shire song just to keep it going. (Click here to buy the "Hold On" single direct from the DFA)

8. Empire of the Sun, "Walking on a Dream" (Treasure Fingers remix)

I normally find both Empire of the Sun and Treasure Fingers tiring to the extreme, but this remix right chear pretty much leaves me without anything else to speak about on that subject. I mean, my main complaint about the original of "Walking on a Dream" is that it just sorta seems to meander along until it's done, so here come Treasure Fingers to add in a whole bunch of swooping breakdowns and neat little touches (the bit with the second bridge to the chorus may be my favorite section of this entire mix, no lie); meanwhile, EotS' indomitable pop chops help stave off the usual YES YES YES YOU HAVE MADE A TRACK OF THE HOUSE-MUSIC VARIETY response Treasure Fingers' remixes typically inspire in yr boy. Of course, it's a completely unofficial remix and you'll probably never be able to pay money for it, but oh well. (Click here to buy Empire of the Sun's debut album Walking on a Dream from Amazon)

9. The Supermen Lovers, "Starlight" (Luca Agnelli sax remix)

I yield to nobody when it comes to the subject of gloriously faggy, turn-of-the-millennium vocal-house crossover attempts - seriously, don't even get me started on the virtues of Modjo's "Lady" unless you've got a couple of hours to spare. As such, I'm immensely satisfied with Luca Agnelli's approach to updating it, by which I mean his decision to basically let the track play unmolested and rock the fuck out on his saxomaphone over the top. I've listened to it about a thousand times by now and I'm still not sure how to put into words what it adds to the track; all I can really do is reiterate that I've listened to it about a thousand times by now, and as soon as I finish typing this sentence I'm about to make it a thousand and one. (Click here to buy MP3s of "Starlight" from Amazon MP3)

10. Golden Silvers, "True No. 9 Blues (True Romance)"

During my blog sabbatical (sabblogical?), I stumbled across a copy of the Golden Silvers' "Arrows of Eros" and enjoyed it thoroughly; several months later I stumbled across their second single and figured well that's the end of that. Well, as it turns out, I'm a ridiculous jackass; their full-length album's leaked and holy shit is it ever a winner, like a more-jangly late-period Blur record or words to that effect. "True No. 9 Blues" is currently getting pushed as the LP's lead single, probably because it is AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME; I genuinely loved "Arrows of Eros" (and really ought to get around to uploading the vastly-superior original 7" version one of these days), but this song's light-years more accessible in every way that counts. I also ought to cop to loving the everliving bejesus out of the synth tones on this record, both the gargantuan Remain in Light-era one punctuating the chorus and the tropically warm bassline underpinning the track. Top-shelf stuff, and I'll have a lot more to say about these dudes as soon as I find out which songs from the full-length I'll be able to share. (Click here to preorder "True Romance" from Amazon.co.uk)

11. The Juan Maclean, "Happy House"

Speaking of invitingly warm tones, here's "Happy House", because I presume you're like me and haven't even come close to growing tired of this song yet. And yes, I'm making you sit through the acid-y part at the end too, both because it's awesome and because it leads so well into... (Click here to buy "Happy House" direct from the DFA)

12. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, "Who Loves You" (Pilooski re-edit)

I've spoken before about how much I love Frankie Valli, but I love him roughly a sesquillion times more whenever Pilooski rips into one of his songs. I mean, I love his take on "Beggin'" as much as anyone else with ears or a soul, but from an objective standpoint surely this is just as good; somehow he manages to both respect the song's original simmering, skittering tension eventually just go "fuck it" and cut loose with something to which the kids might hurl themselves about thither and yon. And plus, the original in this case is GREAT, a claim I'm not necessarily willing to make about "Beggin'". (The best place to find this track is on this compilation, but it's a little difficult to find - try eBay or GEMM)

Sitting Around Collecting Dust

2009-03-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

I am fucking clever

Spymob, "2040"

Spymob, "It Gets Me Going"

While we can all agree that time hasn't been too polite to midwestern Generation X power-pop acts (poor, poor Fastball), I'd like to single Spymob out for particular distinction, both because of their off-the-charts coulda-shoulda-woulda factor and because their collective their efforts resulted in at least one very good album (more on this in a minute). They could have easily broken big in the late 90s, back when labels were eagerly hoovering up all the local talent Minnesota had to offer; the only effective difference between Spymob and Semisonic (a band for whom I still unashamedly ride) is that the latter allowed overly-informed dorks to go YUO KNOW THEY USED TO BE TRIP SHAKEASPEAR RIGHT. They really should have broken big after Pharrell Williams somehow heard these guys and hired them to play the "live" instrumentation on the US release of In Search Of... after coming to feel dissatisfied with the UK version's canned, Neptunes-sounding version (and seriously, I'd love to hear the backstory here if only because of the timing - I mean, Pharrell was working on In Search Of... in, what, 2001? 2002? So all that time he's sitting around working on "Grindin" and "Bouncin' Back" and like a thousand other era-definers, he's spending his free time bulldozing through butt-rock demo tapes from the heartland? Did he shed a single tear during The Blueshammer Scene? Was he keeping himself in check while plowing anonymous contemporary groupies by trying to remember the name of every band who'd sent him a shitty cover of "Game of Pricks"? I... I'm sorry.) And they really should have broken big in 2003 back when Pharrell was scrambling to attempt to make a home for Spymob's full-length debut on Star Trak (and the band turned in a lackluster track for the label's compilation Clones, better known today as "Frontin'" And Like A Shit-Ton Of B-Sides). Unfortunately, they never did - label woes kept Sitting Around keeping Score in limbo for almost a year before eventually surfacing on Ruthless Records (...); meanwhile all of their burgeoning momentum was inexplicably sapped by the then-ascendent High Speed Scene, and I think we all remember how well that turned out.

The loss, of course, was entirely ours. If you can ever remember enjoying Spoon's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga for its studied polish or Fountains of Wayne's debut album for its ecstatic conventionality or - hell - even Maroon fuckin' Five for their 70mm pop chops, you need to do yourself a favor and seek out a copy of Sitting Around Keeping Score as soon as you hit the period that I'm putting right here. "2040" and "It Gets Me Going" are the album's two most immediately engaging songs (and, accordingly, tracks one and two respectively - "It Gets Me Going" was also slated to be the album's big single, for reasons which should become glaringly obvious when you listen to it), but there's rewarding stuff to be found no matter how deep you look - every song is a model of efficient arrangement and deleriously refined pop musicianship (q.v. those backing vocals on "2040"). I mean, even the ballads don't drag. I know, I know - I'm as surprised to hear myself saying it as anyone, but it's true.

Anyway, I had a whole bit about how Sitting Around Keeping Score had become, if not a rare CD, at least a royal pain in the sack to track down; unfortunately for me, I decided to actually do my research this time and discovered that it's actually available on iTunes and I probably didn't have to spend all that time and energy sorting through shiesty eBay resellers and GEMM listings and it would have probably been cheaper once you factor in the shipping costs BUT WHATEVER; Sitting Around Keeping Score is an outrageously gratifying album and I'm as thrilled as an abstract simile for exuberance to have it on my shelves. (also you can probably get it directly from them via their MySpace; I'm not sure since my Flash has decided to act like a shitlord w/ Myspace for the last few months no matter how many times I reinstall it, but it's a fair guess. also hard copies aren't too much used from Amazon resellers.) Just throwing that out there. You'll probably be curious.

Aeroplane, "Whispers"

2008-06-05T15:40:00.000-07:00

Aeroplane, "Whispers" (feat. Kathy Diamond) - As a man who owns up to his own prejudices, I will freely admit that my contempt for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' song of the same name kept me from ever investigating Aeroplane before now. (Sadly, this is by no means the stupidest snap judgement to affect even my recent life; it has taken me until the middle of May 2008 to get past my internal talking point that There's A Riot Goin' On sounds "too washed out and hazy", no joke.) To be fair, given the vast preponderance of tedious nu-Balearica to spring up in the wake of Studio and Prins Thomas busting a nut all over last year, I was also looking for a reason to be prejudiced against Aeroplane in the first place; good as the best representatives of that genre may be, the bad stuff doesn't just gaze at its navel, it damn near falls in, and I am of course far far far too busy to ever be bothered with sorting out what's what. Besides, this way gives me yet another opportunity to hate on the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it is always good and proper to do the Lord's work.

Thankfully, however, Aeroplane have taken it upon themselves to come up with a song so intransigently awesome that not even my ridiculous ass can resist its charms; having discovered "Whispers" during a shuffle-assisted stroll through everything I've culled from other blogs recently, I see absolutely nothing wrong with putting it on the same level as "Happy House" or "No Matter What" or "Young Love" or "Drive My Car", which is a long way of saying that this song is one of the very best things I've heard this whole year. It hits literally exactly the same retro-disco vein Escort's been shirking ever since "A Bright New Life", riddled with sly little drum fills, glistening little synth flourishes, and one BIG MOTHERFUCKING ASS star turn for Kathy Diamond who does a better job of making me like her on this one track than anything from Miss Diamond To You ever managed. She plays so coy and sultry against the relentless gliterball assault of the track itself that I can't imagine anyone but the stuffiest of disco purists ever wanting a dub; the breathy archness of her voice just lends too much to Aeroplane's hired-gun session-musician precision (note: this is in no way a condemnation). In any event, Aeroplane certainly has my full attention now. The Red Hot Chili Peppers can, of course, continue to suck it. (Click here to buy the "Whispers" single from Juno)

But I Was There: The Long Blondes @ the Echo, 6/5/08

2008-06-05T13:31:00.001-07:00

The Long Blondes, "The Couples" - By all rights, this should have been the most soul-crushingly depressing show in history. Despite my years of unyieldingly vehement advocacy, the Long Blondes have yet to secure the kind of Stateside profile necessary to warrant a headlining gig at the Troubadour; Indie 103 couldn't even be bothered to show up and park their damn van outside, meaning the Long Blondes have less pull in Los Angeles than the motherfucking Ting Tings. Consequently, the Troubadour was dismally empty - I mean, %60-capacity empty, nobody-in-the-VIP-section empty, easily-find-a-new-spot-if-you-hate-your-neighbors empty. There might have even been more people present for show-opening douchebag-ensemble Castledoor, which is a real shame on account of fuck those guys.

The only thing keeping the show from being an outright disaster, as it turned out, was Kate Jackson's absolute and unchecked delight at playing the Troubadour, and it turned out to be way more than enough, too. It could have been an act, of course; Jackson's blindsiding sexiness (whoever had "158 words in" in the pool, go pick up your check) had the crowd making asses of themselves trying to get her attention from more or less the instant she took the stage, and for once in my bitter, hateful little life even I can't bring myself to make fun of them. (well, except for the guy who yelled out "SHEFFIELD!" - seriously, why do people do this? should Kate Jackson come to your place of employment and start blurting out "THOUSAND OAKS!"? actually, that would be pretty awesome. SHEFFIELD!) Never in my life have I seen a performer do such an effective job of making every girlfriend in the room get hell of uncomfortable simultaneously; I saw like five girls grabbing their guys for dear life within the first three songs, the unspoken message being I am going to cut your nuts off if you call me Kate tonight.

But to be honest, I'm inclined to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt, if only because of how often she kept breaking her own character as the most circuit-fryingly hot indie girl in the universe to completely and totally geek out over her surroundings. In addition to a half-dozen references to the venue during the show, when the band were dragged back out onstage for an encore (presumably the delay was due to Dorian Cox giving the sound guy several dozen strategically-placed cuts - the sound was all over the place during the show, particularly during "Century" where the climactic synth freakout was barely even audible), she shyly told the audience about how she'd been dreaming of playing the Troubadour since she was thirteen, which was awesome. It would certainly explain the stupefying effort she put into singing the everliving hell out of her band's songs, too. You can always tell when someone's really enjoying singing what they're singing - no flubbed notes, no overextensions, inability to keep still while doing it, etc. Well, Jackson was all that and more for an hour straight last night; her only miscue was accidentally going back into the chorus of "Guilt Has Nothing To Do With It" once too many times (a mistake for which she immediately apologized to every member in the band one-by-one - AWWWWWW), and you'll have to forgive me if I have a hard time seeing her fervor to keep singing as anything other than supportive of her enthusiasm.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that her performance of the songs off the new album were remarkable enough to insist upon another shot for the Long Blondes' second album, a record to which I've been despairingly indifferent until hearing Jackson sing some of its songs last night. I have no idea how my favorite band + the coolest producer on the planet + a track record of adjective-defyingly awesome b-sides =/= awesomeness, but that's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes; hell, I'm not crazy about Wilson Pickett In Philadelphia either. Besides, after last night's show I've got no problem placing the blame squarely on Erol Alkan's shoulders; the band absolutely demolished any complaints about the songs not sounding lively or rocking enough for my liking without the benefit of any complex double- or triple-tracking arrangements or manicured synth polish. Instead, what you got was Kate Jackson absolutely belting out everything, and even having seen them last year I still wasn't ready for just how completely Jackson throws herself into the new stuff. My favorite was, as you may have guessed, "The Couples", which sounds awesome live - it's just as wiry and slinky and upbeat as their old stuff, with plenty of opportunities for Jackson to sultrify things as she sees fit - but could have just as easily gone to their set-opening "Here Comes The Serious Bit" or big? single? "Guilt", all of which she just absolutely inhabited like she was afraid of the Sandman Hook.

I realize, of course, that I've fallen into the same trap as every other heterosexual music-show-review-writing-dude on the planet and blathered on about Jackson at the expense of everyone else in the band; I'd even avow that that's an even greater shame than usual given the show that they each put on - Cox snapping at the sound techs one moment and sullenly shaking a banana-shaped maraca on "Too Clever By Half" the next, Emma Chaplin trying to keep him from running up into the booth and choking a bitch, the comedic stylings of Screech Louder (ugh), Reenie Hollis playing the bass with Entwhistlian stoicism... these are all good things, the kind of things that make a good show great, and certainly not the kind of things which any critic worth his salt would bury under an avalanche of starstruck gushing for their more-famous bandmate. I have no defense apart from Jackson's singular ebullience. She was the one who couldn't shut up about the Troubadour, home of the $8.50 seven-and-sevens. She was the one who insisted on engaging the crowd at every turn, even going so far as to invite the audience to stick around for a drink. She was the one telling stories about wanting to sing at the Troubadour since the days when she wanted to fuck Duff McKagan. I mean, there's absolutely such a thing as fawning adulation in this world, but sometimes, fair's just fair. (Click here to buy "Couples" from Amazon.com)

(And an extra-special thanks to whoever's decision it was to play Evie Sands' "A Woman's Work Is Never Done" between the two bands' sets - you blew my fucking MIIIIIIIIIIIND.)

ELSEWHERE
- So in an effort to keep me posting more regularly, I've decided to abandon the old several-mp3s-in-one-post trope; this way (in theory) I don't have to sit around waiting for enough content to justify a post and can just throw shit up as it appears to me. Will this strategy prove successful? WHO KNOWS~

LET'S GET SOME INDIE-ROCK UP IN THIS BITCH

2008-05-15T16:56:00.000-07:00

A great band to get drunk to

Air Traffic, "Charlotte" - So I suppose I should disclose this right up front: I accidentally got kinda drunk at the show. You know how sometimes you roll up to the club reasonably late and without any cash, and so you head to the bar and order something, and the bartender makes it right there in front of you and hands it to you and says "six bucks" and so you hand him your credit card and he says "Uh, we have a twenty-dollar minimum for cards here"? And so you think to yourself well fuck it, I can handle four drinks and start plugging away at your chosen task with an eye towards closing out your tab right before Air Traffic go on, and so you start making your way towards the bar when you see a bunch of ostensibly roadie-esque persons taking the stage, figuring that you've missed the opening act and that these people are setting up for the main event? Except then, right as the same goddamned bartender brings you your credit card slip, they introduce themselves as some other traitorous band entirely, and so you look up at the setlist posted over by where they keep the fancy beers and get that sinking feeling when you realize that it's going to be like an hour and fifteen minutes until the headliners go on? And so you think to yourself No! I'm going to be responsible this time and just nurse this last drink until the ice melts, except then the band in question turns out to be one of the most elegantly prototypical example of navel-gazing Silverlakery, the likes of which inspire the kind of howling banshees of ennui in yr boy which can only be effectively drowned by a monsoon of Seagram's 7, and so you're standing there, and you're standing there, and you're standing there, and you're standing there, and you're standing there, and you finished that last drink, and you look at your cell phone, and oh fucking hell there's still like an hour left how have they only played two songs OH FUCK IT.? Yeah, I got that drunk last Saturday night. Hoo boy. I don't even want to think about how much I must have tipped the cab driver; that's going to be a fun little present when my bank statement rolls in.

BUT! All was sort of not lost, because (and I swear this is true) it actually somehow occurred to me to take "notes"! I use quote-marks, of course, because to call the preposterous scribblings I somehow managed to drunkenly eke into a notebook "informative" would be a remarkable feat of liberal interpretation; apparently my shorthand trails off even more precipitously than my speech when I'm annihilated. Funnily enough, however, damn near all of those nigh-unto-illegible scrawlings confirmed my most fervent hopes about the show...sorta; apparently their drums were "relentles" and "banging the shit out of", two eminently reliable indicators that no matter how air-tight and Keane-y a band may threaten to sound on record, their live show proves conclusively that they fucking rock. Better yet, it appears that "lead singer sings REAL good!!!!!!", a fact I can actually remember well enough to corroborate; hearing someone absolutely belt out songs like "Never Even Told Me Her Name" exactly as well as you'd hoped tends to be the kind of thing that sticks in your memory. Besides, thinking back on it now, Chris Wall was more or less born with a voice made for Spaceland; the soundsystem is just deafeningly loud in there, the kind of setup that captures every little ounce of effort you throw into your performance - and make no doubt about it, Wall threw down on stage.

And in that same spirit, I remember "Charlotte", a word pregnant with so much importance that it demanded no less than four attempts to underline it. Can you blame me? The simple fact that "Charlotte" isn't married to a prohibitively-difficult-to-transport musical instrument almost guarantees that it's going to be a more potent weapon in their set, but YIKES was I ever not prepared for it; these kids know how to milk that song for all it's worth, and given the fact that "Charlotte" may be the hookiest confection since Blink 182 got tricked into thinking they meant something, the kids in attendance knew just how to eat it up. Needless to say I've had a hard time keeping "Charlotte" off my iPod lately. "Chasing the dragon", as the kids call it.

I should point out that, as a guest of the band enjoined into reviewing the show, it was probably pretty irresponsible of me to get as truly and completely obliterated as I did; hopefully everyone involved realizes that nobody in their right mind goes to a site called "Green Pea-Ness dot org" expecting anything even approaching responsible journalism (and if that doesn't work, seriously). And it wasn't a total loss; I did come away from the whole sordid affair with conclusive proof that there are at least two ways to enjoy Air Traffic's music: on record (feel free to scale the doses to your tolerance for piano-driven power-pop) and completely and utterly trashed at their concerts. And I unequivocally do not mean that as a pull-quote. (Click here to pre-order Fractured Life from Amazon)

Eagle*Seagull, "Photograph" - While I may have been completely and utterly incapacitated with drink by the time Air Traffic went on, I was most emphatically still among us for openers Eagle*Seagull - and thank God for that, because they ended up impressing the everliving hell out of me. Granted, it was touch and go for a minute there - as long as Conor Oberst continues to draw breath, I pledge to hold every band from Nebraska in the utmost of suspicion - but once they started playing it was over; their set was forty-five minutes of tense, nervy post-Clap Your Hands Say Yeah indie-pop of the finest caliber. Unfortunately, I doubt that it's going to come across too well in this studio recording of "Photograph" from their debut album (at the show, they were selling a new EP [cleverly titled We Hate EPs {BAW HAW HAW HAW GEDDIT}] but since I was cashless at the time and they're only selling it on DRM'd-assed iTunes, I have no way of comparing the two), but hopefully you can at least hear the elements that made their set such a rousing success. At the very least, take notice of that violin - live, the band wisely pushes it right to the front of the mix, putting it to work like New Wave bands used synthesizers. It is AWESOME; it makes the songs practically fling themselves out of the speakers and into your ears, and it really is a shame that the studio doesn't do them any favors - or at least hasn't done them any so far. Check back with in a few years and I doubt I'll be saying the same thing. (Click here to buy I Hate EPs from iTunes - personally, I'm waiting for it to show up on Amazon MP3, but if you can stomach DRM, they're worth checking out nowish.)

White Lies, "Death" (demo) - For a band who only released two singles in their all-too-short lifetime, Fear of Flying certainly managed to inspire a hell of a lot of loyalty in me; when I heard they split up it was all I could do to keep myself from getting a tribute mural spraypainted on the hood of my car (which should indicate just how long ago they apparently split up). Then along comes Derek with a demo of White Lies, the band that rose from Fear of Flying's ashes, and oh my god. This song is absolutely magical; it's like someone toned down every single characteristic of Bloc Party's "I Still Remember" (a song I am only begrudgingly willing to admit to liking, and even then only with the help of the amazing remixes it wrenched out of people) and the result is a modern indie-pop song comprised of seemingly every two-word virtue ever stuffed into an email blast - sweepingly cinematic, compulsively danceable, elegantly structured, all that stuff rolled into one wickedly tense little package. I keep having to remind myself that it's only a demo since all the ideas are so flawlessly realized; I'm honestly a little scared that they're going to fuck it up in the process of perfecting it in the studio. Needless to say, I'll keep you posted on that. (Click here to visit White Lies' MySpace, where you can sign up with the band's mailing list and receive another MP3)

Fyfe Dangerfield, "Well, Love Does Furnish A Life" - You probably don't need to be told that Fyfe Dangerfield's solo works tend to be rather hit-or-miss - I mean, I love the Guillemots more than I'll probably love any of my own children (a fact of which I plan to make my children painfully aware) but even I haven't been able to go all-in on them since the release of Through The Windowpane. Fortunately, Dangerfield's latest project includes this shimmering little slice of heaven, a cover of Larrikin Love's "Well, Love Does Furnish A Life". In the hands of the original band, the song is shall we say somewhat less than a moral imperative, but Dangerfield turns it into one of those records that's so slight and airy that you struggle to distinguish between intentional atmosphere and surface noise. And, like all of Dangerfield's best songs, it is spectacularly pretty, especially on a compositional level (I'm thinking of the melody to all those little flute flutters in particular). God only knows why Dangerfield's been celestially tapped to act as a conduit for overpoweringly beautiful music so frequently, but you sure can't argue with the results - I mean, this song's so pretty that I can't even make fun of how Grey's Anatomy-y it is, and that's not a strawman I pass by idly. (Click here to buy the A Day In The Life EP from Amazon)

ELSEWHERE
- Site feed's finally fixed

Quick Update - Air Traffic this weekend

2008-05-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

1. No, I'm not dead; tax season was a b-word and then work subsequently started a big honking super-mega on-the-rag b-word for the next few weeks. And then of course Phil Collins retired; oh man I was a wreck. Rest assured that I've got two sets and a hilariously loaded backlog of stuff to bring you on...next weekish? That work for you? Well okay then.

2. Coachella in sixteen words: Prince ruled. Mark Ronson ruled. Sam Sparro ruled. Hot Chip ruled. Erol Alkan sucked. No, really.

3. So apparently GP favezzzzz Air Traffic are going to be releasing Fractured Life here in the US of States after all, and as such have made plans to tour this fair land far and wide (and possibly even in other directions too). As I'm'a be at their show at Spaceland this Saturday (barring my ride suffering some sort of tamale-related disaster beforehand), I figured I'd pass along the (poorly formatted - my bad) schedule for their upcoming tour:

5/8 -- San Francisco -- Bimbo's 365*
5/9 -- Los Angeles -- The Avalon*
5/10 -- Los Angeles -- Spaceland
5/11 -- San Diego -- Soma
5/12 -- Phoenix -- Brickhouse (it's mighty mighty)
5/14 -- Dallas -- House of Blues
5/15 -- Tulsa -- Bob at Cain's
5/17 -- Kansas City -- Record Bar
5/18 -- Chicago -- The Bottom Lounge
5/19 -- Columbus -- The Basement
5/20 -- Detroit -- Shelter
5/22 -- Cambridge -- TT The Bear's
5/23 -- Philadelphia -- Johnny Brenda's
5/24 -- New York -- Knitting Factory

* = with Elbow

I have complete and total confidence in this show, by the way - my main complaint about Fractured Life was that the songs tended to sound kinda MOR-ish on the record, but playing stuff live has always been the best antidote to a tepid recording. Here's a MP3 I was passed of the kids playing "No More Running Away" live - needless to say it leaves me stoked carat infinity at the prospect of "Never Even Told Me Her Name" played live.

C U NEXT TUESDAY

JUSTICE VAMPIRE WEEKEND LEONA LEWIS LIL WAYNE SOULWAX MSTRKRFT KENNY LOGGINS

2008-03-24T18:15:00.000-07:00

WELCOME TO THE LOGGINSPHERE, FOOLISH HYPE MACHINERS

Dinosaur, "Kiss Me Again"
Dinosaur, "Kiss Me Again" (version)

WARNING: IN BIG-PERSON 320K

But seriously, folks: out of every word that I've ever written in the three-ish years I've been doing this stupid thing, the only ones I still consistently get specific mail about are the ones I used right cheer the first time I wrote up "Kiss Me Again". Naturally, most of the mail comes down to "d00d u should totaly send me that shit y0" in varying degrees of eloquence, but I kinda find it hard to fault them; this song is a stone-cold, unyielding, zero-shades-of-gray classic, and frankly it's more than a little ridiculous that some folks' enjoyment of it is entirely predicated on my mercurial ass taking action. Therefore, this time I'll be leaving it up until I get a takedown notice, at which point you can all look forward to my impending perpetration of a blisteringly self-congratulatory verbal wankfest at having ACCOMPLISHED~ something through my WORDS, MAN, WORDS~ and so on. Oh man, that's gonna be great. You're gonna be forwarding it to all your friends under the subject line "Check out this hipster douchebag". I'm gonna be the next this guy. Can't wait for that.

BUT I DIGRESS. As I scramble to regain the point, please enjoy this vastly superior rip of "Kiss Me Again", lovingly encoded with EAC and LAME (and actually cleaned up before exporting) instead of negligently entrusting this masterpiece to whatever stupid spyware-ridden junk I had on my old computer. I hate to belabor the point but it makes the rips I posted before sound like they were recorded through a kangaroo's pouch by comparison. I honestly feel like apologizing; here is a picture of a baby seal. Look at that while you listen to this single, both sides, all thirty-ish minutes of it, even if you got it last time; for reasons which are completely lost to me, the stylus gods decided to smile on me when I put the needle on the track this night, and this shit came out right this time. There's so much going on here that it's almost embarrassing to listen to it the whole way: you already feel like a burglar way before the running time hits double digits.

In particular, make sure you get the b-side; this time it's such a revelation that I'm going to subject you to an entire rambly, stoned paragraph of utterly pointless explication which you'll care about even less after you've read than you do right now (BELIEVE): the story of my mom seeing The Wizard of Oz. My mom, you see, (1) is from Louisiana and (2) was born after 1939, and was thus unable to see The Wizard of Oz on the bigscreen, and had thus only ever seen it on television (this being back when TV sets were black-and-white and had screens dwarfed by the iPhone's), and had thus always thought the whole thing was completely in black-and-white, which meant that, when my dad unknowingly took her to see it on one of their dates, she practically went apoplectic when Dorothy walked out into Oz in color. To hear my dad tell it, she was on the verge of causing a scene simply from sheer shock; she just had no idea what was coming.

YES YES GREAT STORY JAMES, right? Well I shit you not, that's exactly the experience you're in for with the flipside of this track. All of a sudden, what was once an incidental curiosity - I mean, I've called the original version of this the best song I've ever heard on prior occasion - is unequivocally the definitive version; I'm honestly at a loss for words to describe what you're in for if you're into sonic details and all that shit. The rough sound of the track alone takes on entire new dimensions; you can practically hear pieces of the track being taped together, especially during the stupefyingly "new" verse when the vocal tracks start doubling up. Hell, during the breakdowns, you can literally hear traces of vocal performances which bled onto the tracks chosen for the final piece; it's downright... I mean, "breathtaking" doesn't even begin to cover this song, people. You are in for a treat.

Anyway; as stated up top, to the best of my knowledge, the closest this song comes to "available" these days is at the conclusion of the Optimo Psyche Out mix from a few years back, so I suppose go buy that (n.b.: this is not the only reason to buy this mix). In the meantime, please to enjoy these rips and to suggest to your likeminded friends that they follow suit. This song is way too good to survive as literature. (Click here to buy Psyche Out from Amazon.com, or click here to browse used copies of "Kiss Me Again" on GEMM)

The Zombies, "I'll Call You Mine" - Look, you people know me by now; if I were to like a song by the Zombies - the "Tell Her No"/"She's Not There"/"Time of the Season"-ass Zombies - then obviously it would be off their "unreleased" album which nobody except the least lifeful of the lifeless (ha-cha-cha) have ever even heard of in the first place, I KNOW RIGHT? YEAH, TOTALLY BRO, except for the fact that as it turns out "I'll Call You Mine" really does crush everything else that's ever been presented to me as a Zombies song of consequence; it practically jumps out of the speakers and unfurls a bedroll in your head. It's also conspicuously undated in the way only truly great power-pop can ever be; it sounds distinctively not from the present, but never ties itself to any specific era (aside from those momentary flirtations with classicism, but since they never derail the song I figure hey). I mean, to my ears, it's a short hop from this to the Names' "Why Can't It Be" or one of like ten Big Star songs; this is really good company to keep.

Anyway my point - YES, MY POINT - is that I am not an obscurantist twat, or at the very least not one who engages in twattery which doesn't bear results. This song being one of them. (The Zombies' unreleased album can be found on their box set, which unlike most box sets really is the way to go - you'll probably end up passing over the rarities disc, but all three of the other sets are all completely compelling in their own right, PARTICULARLY the covers disc at the end; click here to buy it from Amazon)

The Mystery Jets, "Young Love" (feat. Laura Marling) - And now for a sentence which I never would have forseen myself writing: OH MY GOD THE NEW MYSTERY JETS ALBUM JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE. I mean, it's neck-and-neck between that and Portishead on top of my albums chart; I like it even more than the new Long Blondes album, and this is saying that. I honestly don't even know how to begin assigning credit for it - do you start by crediting Erol Alkan with somehow getting the Mystery Jets to settle down and stop cramming four songs into one? or do you start off with the band for writing an entire album's worth of reliably rewarding songs? I do stress that phrase "reliably rewarding"; 21 isn't a compelling album, or at least not the way Through The Windowpane or Funeral were. But "consistently rewarding" fits it like a glove: every time I go back to it, I'm discovering new inroads, new wrinkles - new reasons to listen.

Except, of course, for "Young Love", a song which needs absolutely no depth whatsoever to present itself as eminently deserving of your attention. And really, on this one, points have to go to the band; Alkan does a great job of keeping the rhythm section reined in (and that little shimmering flutter during the chorus is grin-crackingly awesome), but this is all about the song itself being catchy enough to signal the end of the world. Interestingly enough - and I am about to reveal myself to be hell of lame here, people - it's also eerily similar to some stupid song they came up with for that terrible Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore movie, a song written for the purpose of serving as an example of what audience-appealing pop music sounds like; the fact that the borrowed melody is used to such riotous success here feels almost strikingly appropriate. (Oh, I'm sorry - you're still wondering what could have led me to watch that stupid-ass Drew Barrymore movie? ME TOO.) (Click here to buy 21, the GREEN PEANESS DOT ORG ALBUM OF THE YEAR SO FAR, from Amazon.co.uk)

Isosceles, "Watertight" - Finally, I was passed this single early and encouraged to post it by the label on account of my rabid fandom of Isosceles' first single, and as it is quite the little nugget of Scottish indie-pop I am only too happy to oblige. I can't summon the same vehemence that I did for "Get Your Hands Off" if only because the song is so much more dialed-down; the band seems to have traded monolithic bleeping for streamlined Franz Ferdianism, and it's hard not to mourn the loss at least a little. Not too much, however; "Watertight" is deceptively good, at least as good as anything the aforementioned FFs have put out since "Darts of Pleasure", and yes I will go there thank you very much. It's one of those songs which always gives me the urge to fast-forward when it shows up on shuffle (SORRY ISOSCELES, TAKE ME BACK), but then out of sheer slothfulness I can't decide whether to fast-forward or not by the time the chorus hits, and by that time I'm more than on board enough to let it play to the end, bruising my back from patting it so relentlessly the whole time (see? practice makes perfect!). God, I don't even know if that's a compliment or not; fortunately I'm certain that the sheer volume of playtime this song gets unequivocally is. (Click here to visit Isosceles' MySpace and here for Art Goes Pop's MySpace. Also, AGP's supposedly putting out a new Findo Gask single in the near future, so keep an eye out for that, obviously.)

ELSEWHERE
- So I finally took the plunge and started up a MySpace; come and bask in the warming glow of what will surely go down as the least-attended-to corner of the whole socially networked internet. Ditto for Last.fm, too.

The Lord Works Through My Postman

2008-02-10T14:55:00.000-08:00

Can't I do one simple GIS for "postman" without being bombarded with mail-on-mail action?

All things considered, I had a pretty good week last week. My boss gave me a raise out of the blue; it won't be enough to keep me working at that soul-killing death factory one second longer than I have to, but hey, free money. datA and the bafflingly-named MY!GAY!HUSBAND rocked shit at IHEARTCOMIX Saturday night, despite datA being hampered by some truly disheartening tech diffs (bass cutting out right when he's dropping into his remix of "Minuit Jacuzzi"? BOOOOOOOO). Above all else, however, the mailman handed me a package full of singles from Rough Trade that I'd been waiting on for months. This particular order was notable for being unusually chock-full of twelve-inches; I usually stay away from them since I have to save SOME money SOMEtime I guess, but over the last few months a few just proved too tempting to pass up. And thank god for that, because lord almighty did I turn up some gold. Let's recap.

Findo Gask, "Va-Va-Va" - There are few things on this world or off it which I treasure quite so much as a pop song which makes me say - out loud, in my empty apartment - "what in the FUCK?!", and it's been an awfully long time since a song's made me say it quite so loud as this one. I mean, it took me three test runs before I felt confident that I was playing it at the right speed, and even then it wasn't until the second track before I completely stopped worrying. Can you blame me? Songs don't usually come galloping out like this, throwing apparently tangential hooks around like that cat lady on the Simpsons; it could have been a 78 for all I knew.

And then KABLOW comes the chorus, and when I say KABLOW I say it after having spent five minutes carefully choosing the bluntest, most juvenile way to represent the rapturous stupidity this chorus is going to evoke in you. This is a heart-stopper, folks - when the backing melodies erupt and all those inexplicable little through-lines come together, the effect is flat-out transportative; you only wish all songs had a part like that. It's like Johnny Boy's "You Are The Generation" only turned on its head - same sense of the climactic moment, same supernatural ability to deliver, only instead of trafficking in the inarguably unobjectionable signifiers of Phil Spector, Findo Gask choose to go upside your head with searing little No Wave flourishes and jerky rhythms before plugging directly into your vein. The best part, I might add, is that in the process of getting through the meat in order to get to the pudding, you start to develop a real jones for the meat itself; there's some real intricate work being done here which takes some time to reveal itself, even after y0u've come to terms with the fact that a song with parts like that can actually come together like that and be that good. I mean, I guess; I've had this record for about three days and I'm still having trouble coping with the fact that it actually exists. (Click here to buy the "Va-Va-Va" 12" from Rough Trade. It should be noted that the other two songs really aren't anything like "Va-Va-Va" - they're good, but the A2 is some weird little lo-fi experimental thing while the B-side is an extremely pretty little song which stretches to like seven minutes thanks to a four-minute M83-ish outro. They're both good songs which recommend the band quite highly, but do be prepared to feel like you've bought "Trains To Brazil" all over again. Also, note that there's a really kickass "disco mix" available on the label's website - and that the label in question is an Optimo side project. God DAMN this turned out to be a long parenthetical.)

Filthy Dukes, "This Rhythm" - I'm honestly not sure quite where to shelve the Filthy Dukes in my mind; their body of work is both relatively small and all over the map in terms of methodology. Don't get me wrong - it's all pretty solid (particularly their mixes for Trabant and the Maccabees), but it's like trying to find a general classification for Soulwax' remixes before BOSH BOSH BOSH took over (note: in no way is this a dis on BOSH BOSH BOSH).

Sadly, "This Rhythm" does little to make things any clearer; it is simply so good as to force the issue, because if they're going to be turning out songs this amazing we need to know which pile to put them on top of (SORRY). "This Rhythm" is totally unlike anything they've ever done before - it wrecks your shit gracefully, elegantly, like a beefed-up Pet Shop Boys song, as effective an 80s 12-inch extended-dance-mix pastiche as we've seen since the rise of Richard X. I'd even go so far as to say that I like the vocoder on here alone more than I like any evocation of any stupid 80s touchstone on Sebastian Tellier's Sexuality - to my ears, it sounds like it completely and justifiably works even in a non "LOL, VOCODER" sense. (Also, let's give it up for the little run Samuel Dust's currently enjoying - in addition to providing vocals here, he's also better known as LA Priest and lead vocalist for Late Of The Pier. God, to think - I actually picked the Video Nasties to be the big band out of that scene. Why does anyone listen to me ever?) (Click here to buy the "This Rhythm" single from Rough Trade)

Martin Solveig, "C'est La Vie" (The Bloody Beetroots remix) - Technically this is a Beatport exclusive download-only EP rather than an actual 12", so you'll just have to allow me a little thematic leeway to discuss my new favorite thing from the Bloody Beetroots ever GOD PEOPLE WHY DON'T YOU GET OFF MY ASSSSSS. The Beetroots have been on my radar since that remix of "Miscommunication" last year, but I've never heard them release a song like this before; there's just something about the way that bassline seethes back and forth that almost seems to overcrowd the track - almost. And god, does it make the track move; it practically seesaws back and forth uncontrollably until, almost out of nowhere, these perfect little melodic footholds appear out of nowhere to allow you to regain your footing. The cool thing is how it all seems to work in negative space; it sounds like the Beetroots are pulling the sounds out of a vacuum, and that the track we get is just a recording of their struggles against the void. Compelling shit, just utterly and all-consumingly compelling; I cannot WAIT until they make it to LA next month. (Click here to buy the "C'est La Vie" EP - which has plenty of other kickass remixes, including a MURDERER from Goose - from Beatport)

The Real Ones, "Outlaw" (Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Re-Animation) - The Real Ones' original version of "Outlaw" is yet another one of my favorite songs of the year, and I was inordinately disappointed to discover that I'd have to keep hitting up their MySpace to hear it since it didn't make it onto the 12" - that is, of course, until the Beyond the Wizard's Sleeve version rendered it all but inconsequential. My favorite BtWS remixes are the ones where they simply pick up where the original artists left off - the prime example up to now being their epic take on Midlake's "Roscoe" where they fabricate three more minutes in which to soak up that song's overwhelming prettiness out of whole cloth - so, as you can imagine, I was TOTALLY STOKED BRAH to hear them doing exactly that to "Outlaw": giving all the Indian instrumentation free reign to run around justifying itself, adding layers of synth distortion just to momentarily throw the listener (although I say this as someone who counts "Platitudes" among his favorite Long Blondes songs), and above all else, teasing that piano with the same devastating efficacy as every girl I've ever dated. I mean wow do they bring that shit in well; now when I listen to the original I catch myself wishing they'd do it with Messrs. Alkan and Norris's seemingly reflexive grace. As far as I'm concerned, this is the official version of the song. (Click here to buy the "Outlaw" 12" - which also contains one of the most relentlessly hypnotic Prins Thomas mixes I've ever heard - from Rough Trade)

ELSEWHERE
- THIS

Five Old-Ass Songs

2008-01-21T18:40:00.001-08:00

actual GIS result for "still not dead"

(Editor's Note: Look, I'm knee-deep in a motherfucking banger of a post, but it's nowhere near completion; consequently I figured I might want to look into just posting handfuls of relatively random songs which have had me by the ears lo these many months. Of course, the epic New Apartment Project has pretty much precluded me from finding anything new or undiscovered; consequently, you can expect to see a squillion songs you've seen on countless other blogs roundabout these parts until I get back on my grizzy. Basically, look, it's either this or more multi-month hiatuses [hiati?] for the time being; suck it up.)

Das Pop, "Fool For Love" (original mix) - The internets have been pushing all the remixes harder than the original - and not too surprisingly either, considering the insanely gifted lineup of remixers assembled for the single - but it's like my parents always told me: the internet should only be considered a trusted authority with regard to matters of grotesque pornography. As it turns out, the original absolutely annihilates any of the remixes, all of whom push the track to some downright compelling places by ditching the original's straightforward guitar-pop framework altogether. Unfortunately, in doing so, you fuck up a song which could easily be mistaken for one of those classic continental indie-pop jams; to my ears, "Fool For Love" stands shoulder to shoulder with "Young Folks" or "Too Young" or "Much Against Everyone's Advice" - that last one being a particularly significant match due to Soulwax manning the boards for "Fool For Love"'s original mix. I'm convinced that the only reason that fact isn't more widely known is because the Dewaeles modestly played down their contributions to give the remixers more of a chance to shine; SebastiAn and Yuksek et al. may have some cache at the moment, but their names would still be laughably overshadowed by Soulwax' on any label which happens to see them bumping elbows. As this track ably demonstrates, that's not an accident. (Click here to buy the "Fool For Love" single from Rough Trade)

Chromeo, "Bonafied Lovin'" (Yuksek remix) - Speaking of Yuksek, I honestly can't imagine anyone undergoing a more dramatic reevaluation in my eyes last year than he pulled off in going from One Of Those Dudes Whose Name I See Every So Often As I Make A Brave Attempt At Deciphering French MP3 Blogs (Note: I Don't Speak French) to a guy whose name whose name I could probably type into the Hype Machine simply thanks to my fingers' muscle memory. I am flat-out obsessed with Yuksek these days; it's like he's managed to figure out how to marry the ruthlessly cut-up approach of latter-day French house to the bafflingly all-encompassing pleasures of big-ass, stupid-ass, epic-ass handbag house music, and I'm just not left with a lot of options when confronted with a musical opportunity like that.

Still, I feel compelled to admit that, if forced, I wouldn't really have a problem throwing out every other track Yuksek's ever touched if it meant I could keep this one. I'm not kidding when I say that the first, like, two minutes of this song may well have been my favorite stretch of pop-music from all last year; the way he balances the vocals against all those giddily cheesy syncopated synths is just preposterous good fun, the kind of neofuturistic pop music we used to get out of Richard X back before he fell off the map and out of the solar system. (Yes, that's right, I'm calling someone out on their perceived lack of productivity. Don't get me wrong - I abhor hypocrisy, but it's a card I reserve the right to play when there's been new, beloved, as-yet-unheard by me Annie about since Moses played kick-the-can on the table.) It's also worth noting just how much better Yuksek's accompanying track is than Chromeo's original; I doubt if I made it two minutes into the original when I finally decided to give it a shot.

Of course, I rarely get much farther than that into Yuksek's remix, either; the track's peak comes in the form of a stupefyingly forceful banger, but ARGH if that first bit doesn't make it feel like dating a girl who only ever lets you see one boob. If he'd taken the time to do whatever he did to the first bit to the whole song, it might well have been my favorite thing I heard last year full-stop; as such, it was "just" enough to win my rapturous attention for the forseeable future. Sigh. Oh well. Maybe next time. (Click here to buy the "Bonafied Lovin'" remix from Rough Trade)

Ali Love, "Late Night Session" (Phones Filter Fromage Dub) - Speaking of dudes who fell off the edge of the earth, Paul Epworth certainly isn't one of them - he was arguably as consistent in 2007 as he's ever been, if not as mindblowingly productive as he's been in the past. Unfortunately for Mr. Epworth, he spent most of last year doing stuff other than what I like him doing best, namely finding ways to make indie rock sound way more provocative than it would otherwise; instead he spent a lot of time playing around with dance-music idioms, which would have probably gone over a lot better with my ears if the idiom of au courant French house hadn't been having a banner year in real time. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't justifiably more interesting than checking up on any of five thousand other things going on, and in dance music, that's just death. Frankly, I was getting a little worried.

And then out of nowhere comes this song, wherein he takes aim at the classic Alan Braxe/Fred Falke symbology and puts a hot one where it thinks. Formally, it's simply textbook French Touch; the only possible reason I can imagine some hoary old Homework-waving house-music Luddite rejecting it is simple prejudice towards anything contemporary. This is not a song that's about cutting a sample up; it's about teasing a sample, coaxing it, kneading it, lovingly warming it, and then beating your brains in with it once it reveals its raw bludgeoning force. Needless to say, I'm a pretty big fan; now please, for the love of God, let him go do something with Fury of the Headteachers. (Click here to buy the "Late Night Session" single from Rough Trade)

Hercules & Love Affair, "Blind" (Frankie Knuckles remix) - Speaking of...man, I'm out of practice at this shit. At any rate, speaking of this dumbfoundingly great remix: hey, this is some pretty great shit right here. It's not for everyone, of course, but then again I'm starting to get the impression that this whole Hercules & Love Affair project may well be the same kind of kickass "not for everyone"-y record at which the DFA excels at releasing - I mean, I'm starting to think their album's going to be a consolation prize since we apparently won't be getting that Black Leotard Front record anytime soon NOT THAT I PLAN ON SHUTTING UP ABOUT IT IN THIS LIFETIME OR ANY THAT MAY FOLLOW NO SIR. Of course, I'd have a better idea of that if I could actually pull off listening to the original track when Frankie Knuckles' mix is such a world-eraser; it doesn't sound particularly intricate, but there's just something inescapably pleasurable about how big and holistic and graceful the overall effect is in action. To say that this song bodes well for H&LA's forthcoming album is an understatement of Austenian restraint; I'm starting to nurture hopes that it'll be as much of a pastiche of 2004-era DFA - an era I adore without restraint. I never thought I'd hear myself say it, but I couldn't be more excited to put money in Antony's pockets. (Click here to visit Hercules and Love Affair's MySpace)

Those Dancing Days, "Those Dancing Days"
Looker, "Master's Gone Away"

And lest ye think I only listen to stupid dance music and stupid ambient music and stupid Steely Dan, allow me to say hey! fucker, you are... sadly pretty close to right these days. Let's be clear: a lot of it has to do with distribution (which goes hand in glove with dance music these days) and level of involvement (what, you think Gavin Bryars' The Sinking Of The Titanic picked itself out?) and the fact that Steely Dan is fucking awesome. But that doesn't mean stuff doesn't slip through the cracks, and lord knows I'll always keep a fissure in my heart wedged open for that odd immaculate gem which comes along every so often. Well, since I've been gone, there have been two.

The first one I regrettably have to present to you in hysterically po-faced fashion; I'm so far behind the curve on Those Dancing Days that I literally got beat by SPIN. SPIN. Nate Patrin is my boy and all, but SPIN. SPIN openly endorses the existence of My Chemical Romance and actively encourages the existence of The Cobrasnake. SPIN named "Your Hard Drive" as its album of the year back in 2000. SPIN still likes U2. And yet somehow, SPIN inexplicably manages to pluck Those Dancing Days out of the pure Swedish air (well, okay, eleven years after the blogs had already justifiably freaked out over them) while I sit around with my thumb up my ass howling at Time Warner; let us simply say that there are times when this world can suck it and move along to the fact that I'm idiotically glad I heard them in any event, because band, song, fuck it, after hearing this track I was preordering five copies of anything with the words "Those Dancing Days" printed anywhere on it (y'know, in case four get lost in the mail). This was one of those songs where I was, like, pumping my fist in the air with sheer exhilaration at the sound of hearing every chord change I hoped I'd hear come true, and for someone like myself who derives an almost spiritual peace from the familiarity of the verse-chorus-verse three-minute pop song, that's just not something you pass up. I am stupidly in love with this song, even two months after the fact, and have the wildest expectations for the album they're supposed to put out later this year. Maybe I should stay tuned to SPIN for the latest on that. Ugh. God. (Click here to buy the "These Dancing Days" EP from Amazon.co.uk)

Looker, on the other hand appears to be all mine for the moment; I cannot, however, expect that to stay the same if they've got other songs in 'em as good as "Master's Gone Away", the friggin' b-side to their debut single. Needless to say, it is a cataclysmically enjoyable little song, diminished only slightly by its cheeky 60s-quoting, and only then since the song's beyond strong enough to necessitate any fancying up (up-fancying?). Plus it may well be the first song technology ever picked out for me; it showed up on my random playlists so regularly I thought my mp3 player was taking money from someone. I actually had to pick the a-side out manually to play it, only to discover that nope, my Zune had the right idea all along. Thanks, technology! (Click here to buy the "After My Divorce/Master's Gone Away" 7" from Serious Business records)

2007: It Was A Year

2007-12-20T16:31:00.000-08:00

Please do not use this

I'll be honest: even taking the Biblical annoyances which have plagued my music-consumption habits over the last few months - the move, two computers dying, Time Warner being Time Warner, certain harumph cough hack being shut down by the cough blagh hork snxxx, etc - the fact remains that my musical 2007 was spent decidedly elsewhere. 2007 was, for instance, the year I entered into My Steely Dan Phase, a project which certainly took priority over determining whether White Williams was worth being adorned with an 8.4 or damned to irrelevance with a 6.2 or whatever. The elegance and tidiness of Evie Sands and the Shivvers' bewilderingly compact discographies kept winning out time and time again over the history allegedly being rewritten with lightning by this year's alleged bumper crop of Britpop heroes. And Boz Scaggs...well, fuck you, Silk Degrees is just awesome.

Of course, the only reason I feel empowered to talk like that in the first place is because I did my absolute damnedest to keep up with every vector of musical subsistence 2007 had to offer. I practically hemorrhaged money on music in 2007. I approached Rough Trade's webshop the way an oil-rich sheik walks onto a Monte Carlo casino floor. I bothered the poor folks at Midheaven nonstop, to the point where I was one of the first people on the planet with a vinyl copy of 45:33 (more on this later). Time and time again, I ended up buying the randomest albums from the randomest bands on the randomest whims whipped up by the most predictably deceitful press releases. Fuck, if I'd saved up the money I spent on records this year, I'd probably have enough to put a price on Conor Oberest's head.

And that, as much as anything, is what makes 2007 feel like as much of a waste as it felt like: in a literal sense, it just didn't feel worth the price of admission. The "best" records of 2007 - even most of the ones I'd consider to be my favorites - felt like the musical equivalent of the kind of movies which get Oscars for Best Picture, and for someone who's spent every second since graduating from f*** s***** doing his best to repudiate any respectability he ever afforded the medium, that's pretty much the kiss of death right there. In a lot of ways, it felt like their primary value lay in proving that albums were, in fact, released this year.

In that spirit, then, I had the bright idea to do quick (or at least James-quick, anyway) writeups for every record of 2007 which I ended up keeping as a way of documenting just what, if anything, the albums of 2007 added to my own personal musical continuum. To do this, I tried to cast as wide a net as possible; this is literally everything on my CD shelf with a "2007" printed on it somewhere (and which I paid for - no promos). The implication by an album's inclusion is simply that it's proven at least to be good enough to keep, and in no way do I use the word "simply" to diminish that implication's practical value. After all, in days like these when the act of buying music is imbued with a nigh-unto political significance, simplicity of that kind can be downright virtuous, almost to the point where this can be considered a pretty comprehensive list of albums I would consider to have "won" 2007.

Well, either that or I found another excuse to talk about the Knife again.

(listed in alphabetical order)

Air Traffic, Fractured Life ("Never Even Told Me Her Name") - Yes, despite how much I really don't give a shit about this album apart from the obvious two songs, I ended up buying it; such is the intransigence of the inexplicable allure piano-driven power-pop holds over me. And besides, weren't we all saying that they'd never live up to those first two singles anyway? (Click here to buy Fractured Life from Amazon.co.uk)

The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible ("Black Mirror") - I'm as shocked as you are that this record's lived with me for nine months; I seriously doubt whether I've played it twice since the ride home from Best Buy, and I can't say I've got any plans to remedy that in the forseeable future. The packaging's still rad as hell, though - I do have to give them that. It is quite possibly the first album in history to both look and sound like a coffee table book, in both the best and worst ways possible. (Click here to buy Neon Bible from Amazon.com)

Bang Gang DJs, Light Sound Dance (Tepr, "Minuit Jacuzzi" (datA remix))- There's an argument to be made for the ethical necessity of this album - after all, given the amount of damages like %95 of the constituents of its tracklisting could claim from Hype Machinists, the price of one CD seems like a pretty fair bargain. One could also argue that it's a worthwhile artifact to own regardless of ethical precepts; as a document of the "blog house sound" Light Sound Dance is arguably comprehensive to the point of probably being a primary source on the subject in the future. Or, of course, one could simply point out that it's an awesome exploding shit-ton of fun to listen to. I would go with that last one myself. (Click here to buy Light Sound Dance from a GEMM merchant)

William Basinski, El Camino Real - Remember how, when you were a kid, in the process of fucking around doing kid stuff you'd stumble onto some previously-unknown aptitude for some meaningless activity like holding your breath or standing on one foot? Remember how excited you'd get about your prospects for destiny as you ran into the house in a frantic rush for the Guinness Book? And remember how that feeling of crushing finality would creep up as you struggled to do the computations which would reveal just how comically out of reach the actual record-holders' feats were?

I've come to accept that supremely pretentious, inexcusably snobby, resolutely unsharable ambient drones have some sort of unspoken power over me which dwarfs anything else, even the one previously ascribed to piano-pop. Every year since falling ass-backwards into Music for Airports and failing to get up, it feels like there's always one album of this stuff which proves to be so outrageously unintrusive as to prove intractably functionable, and ends up dwarfing everything else I accumulate during the year in terms of sheer volume just because it always could go on and god the day's been so long and do I really want to get up the energy to listen to that new Maximo Park album ergh no. El Camino Real is not that album this year; that album is Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, which (along with Aja and Gaucho, pretty much comprise the entire list of stuff I discovered this year I'd put in my all-time no-arguments-whatsoever canon), and El Camino Real only ended up in my collection as I was in the process of Hoovering up all of Basinski's works that I could find and heard about a chance to get an autographed copy, so I'm not %100 sure what to say about it. But really, I'm not sure too much has to be said; given its complete consistency with the rest of Basinski's catalogue, it's a worthy enough symbol of one of my most all-consuming addictions from last year. And, as all you normal people will no doubt appreciate, it's the album like this on this list. But don't forget - if we were talking about what I'm actually listening to here, for sheer volume, everything else on this list got lapped by Basinski the way you got lapped at holding your breath back in the day. Welcome to my 2007, y'all. (Click here to buy El Camino Real from Basinski's label)

Burial, Untrue ("Archangel") - To say that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Untrue would be a mild understatement; given how cold Burial's first album left me I would have been less shocked to catch myself raping a (figurative) horse than enjoying his sophomore album as much as I did. But oh well; I'm always happy to be wrong when it's over an album this good. Untrue manages to avoid the primary pitfall I associate with "evocative" albums, namely that it remembers to do things besides lay around evoking shit willy-nilly; songs like "Raver" and "Homeless" and "Archangel" ebb and crest with huge swells of bombed-out beauty. Hopefully this represents a moment of evolution for dubstep, by which I mean an evolution into something to which I enjoy listening. (Click here to buy Untrue from Amazon.com)

Caribou, Andorra ("Niobe") - Out of everything that I like about Andorra - and I like Andorra a lot - my favorite thing has to be the way the transition from jangly, Nuggets-y pop into, well, "Niobe", a song which not only as one of the most graceful pop songs I heard last year, but along with the Junior Boys' "FM" and the Knife's live rendition of "Heartbeats" forms a tidy little through-line of devastatingly powerful glacial-sounding electro-pop. Little continuities like that make me love songs like "Niobe", because they give me hope that there might be other songs like it that I just haven't heard yet. And, of course, sometimes they come attached to really good albums, too. (Click here to buy Andorra from Amazon.com)

Chromatics, Night Drive ("Mask") - I will admit that Night Drive really actually is pretty good in a way I wasn't expecting it to be, yes. And I am also not only happy enough with it to keep it for the moment but to also make seeking out a hard copy of After Dark a priority, yes. Having said that, I cannot for the life of me imagine listening to this album in any sort of organic manner; it is musically self-conscious in a way which demands that I set time aside for it rather than just throw it in for the fuck of it. Make of that what you will. (Click here to buy Night Drive from the band)

Culture, Two Sevens Clash (reissue) ("I'm Not Ashamed") - Anyone who reads this site and gives half a shit about reggae doesn't need to be told a damn thing about this, one of the most universally acclaimed albums the genre has ever produced. Anyone else couldn't possibly care less about any arguments to be raised in Two Sevens Clash's favor; I have no idea why reggae inspires such hatred in men's hearts, but I've given up trying to convince people too stupid to know what's good for them (especially when doing so lets me gloss over the fact that I somehow managed to avoid hearing this album until this year despite its status as kinda one of the most famously good albums in history. I will, however, say that this is, at best, the second-best unimpeachable column of the genre I picked up this year, with first place going to the even-more-inexplicably-absent-from-my-musical-consciousness Police & Thieves. Oh, hey, an end parenthesis). (Click here to buy the Two Sevens Clash remaster from Amazon)

Daft Punk, Alive 2007 ("Encore") - Because, shockingly, all of their t-shirts were stupid. (Click here to buy Alive 2007 from Amazon.com)

v/a, Body Language Vol. 4 Mixed By Dixon (Herbert, "Moving Like A Train" (Smith N Hack remix)) - Again, I can easily see how this could be construed as a cheat in service of something otherwise ineligible, namely the Smith N Hack remix of "Moving Like A Train" which came out in 2006 (although I wasn't aware of it until hearing about Erol Alkan bigging it up in like January so wtfEVRRRRRRRRR). The problem with this argument is that, again, the album is really fucking good - hell, between this CD and the Resident Advisor podcast alone Dixon can be said to have had an out-of-this-world year, to the point where if Tim Goldsworthy's show hadn't taken off as precipitously as it did around August (to levels I hadn't even considered possible) he'd pretty much have had everyone else trying to use the medium of house music outright lapped. It's an impressively fluid document, too - he even manages to have some fun with Thom Yorke's "The Eraser". Who'd'a thunk it? (Click here to buy Body Language Vol. 4 Mixed By Dixon from Amazon.com)

The Field, From Here We Go Sublime ("Over The Ice") - I am not going to lie: This album, which I have spent large chunks of this year defending as the best piece of music I heard which actually came 2007, is currently in mortal danger of winding up in a basket on a doorstep with a note reading "IM SORY" taped to its forehead. Part of this stems from seeing him live back during the summer, a fun outing at the time but one which, in retrospect, confirmed my darkest suspicions about the Field's music so completely as to scare me off the record itself almost entirely. I mean, he literally played nothing which he didn't produce; he might as well have just thrown up a white flag (lol Switzerland) and done a spoken word piece about how there's nowhere to go from his music. What's keeping me back, of course, is the fact that From Here We Go Sublime is still an impressively intricate work; I'm flat-out not done with it yet. But in no way am I made happy by the fact that (a) I know that there's an end point and (b) there's not really anywhere to go from there. (Click here to buy From Here We Go Sublime from Amazon.com)

House of Love, s/t (1988) (reissue) ("Christine") - Like many British guitar-pop albums from the mid/late 80s or later, the main problem with The House Of Love is everything that came after it - it is, in other words, distressingly easy to draw a line directly from this record to weak-sauce Snow Patrollery. Thankfully, The House Of Love itself is pretty unimpeachable (as compared to its sequel and its big single "Dale Gribble: The Song"), to the point where I may have had a harder time picking which song I'd be posting from it than anything else on this list. I mean, it's gotta be neck-and-neck with Forever Breathes The Lonely Word on the list for most economical C86 albums. Oh yeah. That's right. I am absolutely sticking to this controversial opinion and DON'T YOU TRY TO CHANGE MY MIND. (Click here to buy the reissue of House of Love from Rough Trade)

Justice, Option-T ("Genesis") - Has anyone actually dared to suggest that Justice might actually turn out to be a better group than Daft Punk? Granted, until they have both a live show as good as The Pyramid and a record as good as Discovery to their credit, you certainly won't catch me coming down on that side definitively...but give me a choice between Justice's debut and Homework and I'm going with Gaspard and Xavier every time. I don't even think it's a matter of technology rendering Homework obsolete or anything - I flat-out do not think Discovery can hold Justice's jock. If I want a banger which keeps dumping ever-larger piles of instruments on me, I'm going with "Stress" over "Da Funk". If I want to be hit in the chest with exsquisitely-manicured beats, I'm going with "Genesis" over "Rollin' and Scratchin". If I want to let stupid, empty phrases temporarily conquer the inside of my head, I'll admit that "Around the World" is pretty much king in the castle, but these days "DVNO" gets the job done even more quickly. You'll notice that I haven't even mentioned any of the album's big singles yet - I honestly don't think there's a song on Homework which comes close to either of the "Phantoms" or "Waters of Nazareth". (To be fair, you'll also notice that I haven't mentioned "The Party", a song I decidedly wish would disappear forever.) And don't even get me started on"D.A.N.C.E.", my choice for song of the year by every standard I value despite the fact that remixers have practically Gnarls Barklified it by this point. And this is their first album.

Look, I'm even willing to be That Guy over the issue: thanks to a lucky purchase of the Saint OST, I've been listening to Homework for a decade now. I've been a big enough fan of it in the past to be literally the only student at my high school with even the slightest inclination to recognize its existence, let alone own it and talk publicly about how it's awesome. I made most of my friends in college sending videos off of Homework back and forth over the T1 lines. This is not a fight where I'm without an iron in the fire. Meanwhile, Justice's new album is so widely and contemporaneously beloved that my enthusiasm for it probably doesn't even put me in the top fifteen percent of fans; I'm not even devoted enough to it to figure out how to type the fucking symbol on a PC.

But it's just better. I'm sorry but, well, yeah. (Click here to buy Cross from Amazon.com)

The Knife, Silent Shout (deluxe edition) ("Heartbeats" (live version)) - Toldja! (Click here to buy the Silent Shout deluxe edition from Amazon.com)

LCD Soundsystem, 45:33 ("Track 2")
LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver ("All My Friends")

Without hesitation, I would say that Sound of Silver is a better album in every measurable way; it is simply that, with the same freedom from hesitation, say that 45:33 is equally better as an musical artifact, and I honestly don't know which option I find to be more substantive. I can certainly say that I feel a more complete sense of ownership over 45:33, although it is kind of a shitty criterion to hold up when one record is, even as we speak, getting near-universal acclaim as one of the best albums of the year (it probably even showed up on Modern Oboe Enthusiast's list) and the other hogtied by its format, which limited its appeal to that minute slice of the popular audience with a hunger for forty-five minute disco suites to which they could take notes. It's doubly unfair when said forty-five etc kicks off with, but for "Losing My Edge", my hands-down absolute unequivocal runaway Steve-Hutchinson-clearing-a-fucking-path favorite LCD Soundsystem song ever, thereby condemning it to an obscurity so complete that it doesn't even have a title. Judging by the lack of coverage it's gotten on the Hype Machine, I can only assume that I'll be getting the same takedown notice as everyone else; I certainly can't argue with the premise that this here is a song worth protecting (and strenuously urge everyone to buy the shit out of the album which surrounds it). It is simply too amazing a track, one which knocked me far too thoroughly on my ass and one which has received a desperately disproportionate degree of praise relative to its quality, for me not to post.

This is not, of course, to imply that Sound of Silver is suddenly chopped liver 'round the stately halls of Cobo Manor, of course; not even a week ago I was taping another unfathomably rambly interview for Blog Fresh calling it my favorite album of the year, and you'll see the same reflected on my Idolator ballot at the end of the week. Sound of Silver is a fantastic album, both on its own terms and as a chapter in the band's ongoing evolution, and I categorically do not mean to inadvertantly demean it just because apparently a bunch of fratboys somewhere had a totally rad time dude DEVIL HORNS WHOO to "All My Friends". It's just that Sound of Silver feels to me like an album saved from its down patches (basically every song on there less than six minutes long) by its overall continuity, whereas by contrast "Track 2" stands out so far from the continuity of 45:33 - a record built from the ground up with continuity in mind - that I keep catching myself cutting the album slack out of sheer good fuckin' will. Whether this counts as fair use or not - well, uh, that's not up to me. If I were you, I'd get it quick. (AND THEN BUY THE FUCKING ALBUM ARGH HOW COULD YOU NOT HAVE 45:33 ALREADY WHAT ARE YOU TOO BUSY LURING CHILDREN BACK TO YOUR GINGERBREAD HOUSE TO THROW A COUPLE BUCKS INSOUND'S WAY SERIOUSLY GOD PEOPLE.)

Midnight Juggernauts, Dystopia ("Into The Galaxy") - I do like this album a fair bit, but facts are facts, and the best thing Dystopia really did for me in the end was free me up to sell my copy of Bright Like Neon Lights. (Click here to buy Dystopia from Amazon.co.uk)

Kate Nash, Made of Bricks ("We Get On" - yes, again)
St. Vincent, Marry Me ("All My Stars Aligned")

I'm not going to front like this is still the end-all be-all album it was for me when I discovered it, although it's so far above and beyond what anyone else in this whole London folkie thing has accomplished so far as to make me wince at the fact that I already wasted my Guinness Book thing. I will, however, attest to its quality by pointing out that I am a damn sight more likely to sell back St. Vincent's Marry Me (to the point of disrupting all this alphabetism to underscore it), a fine little album with a fine little stretch of tracks towards the middle which peaks with "All My Stars Aligned", a fine little song indeed. Quote me: Made of Bricks is neither fine nor little. It is a big-ass, awesome album with some big-ass, non-awesome parts over whose existence I am inexplicably unbutthurt. As it turns out, however, it just wasn't that good.

(Click here to buy Made of Bricks from Amazon.co.uk)
(Click here to buy Marry Me from Amazon.com)

Nico, The Frozen Borderline: 1968-1970 ("Nibelungen")- Up until I actually sat down and listened to it, I had always assumed that whatever experience I would have with The Marble Index would be pretty close to the one I had with The Exorcist back in high school (i.e. would largely consist of me focusing my attention on attempting to search out what other people had said about it instead of attempting to get into it myself, which in turn would be followed by much inelegantly-couched rhetoric about the pliancy of the masses on the internet). I had not, however, counted on The Marble Index being (1) quite possibly the most explicit album ever recorded when it comes to giving cues about how it is to be absorbed and discussed (seriously, there are Interpol songs less explicit about how their workings are to be interpreted. Interpol, people) and (2) way more engaging than I would have ever imagined. Forty minutes' worth of the intonations of some Teutonic tranny-sounding art-school girl set to music even more foreboding and dirgelike than "European Son" = automatic and irreversible DNW...except, apparently, for The Marble Index, which against all odds manages to be just as much fun to listen to as it is to describe the blight it inflicts on your outlook. It is to this remaster's great credit that it manages to improve on both of these aspects, much less to the outrageous degrees it actually manages to do so; songs like "Evening Light" practically acquire that eminently chaseable dragon record dorks refer to as "presence". Of course, it's still The Marble Index; regardless of how it matched up with my expectations I still bow before the simple truth that The Marble Index is er um uh not for everyone, arguably to a point which ought to make me think twice about gleefully bashing Ys. But it's certainly for me; this is a top-ten record of all time with a revelatory remaster, and I call that a win. And fuck Ys. (Click here to buy The Frozen Borderline from Amazon.com. It comes with a free coaster, which you can spot by the word Desertshore stamped on the cover. OHHHHHHH)

Paper Cranes, Halcyon Days ("Milkrun" (album version)) - This, however, was. I know I said "no promos", and in a way this is really cheating since I'm not even sure if you can buy this album yet, but my copy says 2007 and this is my 2007 so GO FUCK A PUMPKIN. I am, after all this time, still unashamedly a fan of at least two-thirds of this album, an outright homerun for an album which calls upon me to be rendered un-mercurial and un-surly; if that doesn't count for something to you people, go back and read the archives. There will be much more to follow in the coming months, believe you me. (Click here to visit the Paper Cranes' MySpace to stream more songs)

Papercuts, Can't Go Back ("Dear Employee") - oh man oh man oh man touring with Beach House touring with Beach House touring with Beach House can't wait can't wait can't wait. Seriously - I bought Can't Go Back in the first place as part of my ongoing pursuit of whatever the hell Beach House injected into my veins (mission kinda accomplished - Can't Go Back lacked Beach House's supernatural prettiness, although it went blow for blow in terms of getting maximum mileage out of that woozy sound), so this dovetails far too nicely to avoid, especially with Beach House's new record having turned out to be as awesome as it really, really is. To reiterate: can't wait can't wait can't wait. (Oh, and Can't Go Back was actually a pretty awesome little album in its own right - with the exception of that disgraceful "257th sumbasumbasumaaaaah" thing whose title I'm not even going to bother transcribing, I just couldn't shake how many different ways songs had of jumping out at you. And of course "Dear Employee" is, let us say, quite a song.) (Click here to buy Can't Go Back directly from the distributor)

v/a, D*I*R*T*Y Edits Vol. 1 Mixed By Pilooski (The Human Beinz, "Nobody But Me" (Pilooski edit)) - Someday, of course, this will be a pimpin'-ass new car, but for now, I am enjoying playing this apparently preposterously difficult-to-get CD an awful lot thank you kindly. This is in large part because of the fact that it's incredibly all over the map - arguably moreso than either Cosmo Galactic Prism or Light Sound Dance despite the fact that it only features half as many tracks as one of either of those album's discs. D*I*R*T*Y Edits is simply peerless when it comes to hurling you all over the place; one minute you're idly bopping along with Pilooski's edit of the Alan Parsons Project's "I Robot" (no, seriously), then all of a sudden you're getting hurled around by Pilooski's stupefying edit of the Pointer Sisters' "Bring Him Back" (no, seriously), and then all of a sudden you're being serenaded with a schmaltzy piano version of "Black Hole Sun". It is a thrilling little stretch of musical valence by any measure, and yet I still end up going with his take on the Human Beinz' "Nobody But Me"; take this as a hint about just how out-of-pocket this album is, let alone the fact that Pilooski's incalculably perfect re-edit of Frankie Valli's "Beggin'" isn't even on there. (Click here to preorder D*I*R*T*Y Edits from Rough Trade - lol, "limited no re-pressing" [unless of course it actually starts selling RITE GUYS?!? {no diss, of course - hey, sell 'em if there's interest]})

Pylon, Gyrate Plus - It's certainly not that I don't like Gyrate Plus, a pretty solid record to listen to under any rubric (assuming you don't mind music built, at least on a certain level, to grate). But for some reason, I just don't seem to have it in me to be an advocate for it - not that I don't think people shouldn't check it out, but rather that I just got nuthin' to add to the discussion. This is a record I bought to scratch the itch I caught from the Long Blondes* and (to a much lesser extent) Love is All; it does the trick and has the lightning bolt on it for good measuer. If you're in that demographic, then by all means buy with impunity; otherwise, well, yeah. (Click here to buy Gyrate Plus from the DFA's Insound store)

*that's a figurative itch, of course - you must have me confused with another Stylus ex-pat.

v/a, Fabriclive 33 Mixed By Spank Rock - Wait, I have this? (Click here to buy Fabriclive 33 direct from the label)

Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga ("The Underdog") -

the combination between Wire and Billy Joel probably
-- Zeno, Thursday, 17 May 2007 15:25 (7 months ago) Link

Never in my life have I jealously said "FUCK" so loudly. (Click here to buy Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga from Amazon.com)

v/a, Prins Thomas Presents Cosmo Galactic Prism - I'm not even going to try to pick something out of this; to do so would be to disrespect one of the greatest mix CDs I think I may have ever heard compiled. Literally the only criticism I can raise against it is that it requires an awful lot of commitment - I mean, sure you can jump around all over it and keep coming back to your favorite songs, but no song on here is as impressive as the overall flow from one track to another. It's just a virtuoso display of programming, and one hell of a compelling listen (time permitting) to boot. (Click here to buy Cosmo Galactic Prism from Amazon.com)

Voxtrot, s/t ("Kid Gloves") - FUCK YOU, I STILL SAY THIS ALBUM'S GOOD. (Click here to buy Voxtrot from Amazon.com)

White Rabbits, Fort Nightly ("Kid On My Shoulders") - God, this thing's so long that I'm starting to repeat myself, but HEY! did you know that piano-driven pop music works better on me than a roofie on a drunken sorostitute? Of course, in the case of Fort Nightly, said musical roofie is just as superfluous as said real roofie would be in said previously established circumstance; even if "Kid On My Shoulders" hadn't booted things off with the most insistently intractable piano melody of the year, I'd still probably have fallen victim to the sickeningly awesome melody or the spectacularly furious chorus - and by now, it's like my third favorite song on the record. I'm not %100 co-signing on all the songs on it, of course, but consistency is for suckers in the face of a power-pop record this flawless, let alone one with All That Piano. (Click here to buy Fort Nightly from Amazon.com)

Yeasayer, All Hour Cymbals ("2080") - 'Member that Blog Fresh interview I alluded to way (way way way) back there? Well, during the process of giving it, I caught myself belittling the bejesus out of freak-folk, taking great pains to kick as much dirt in the face of Strawberry Jam and Person Pitch as I could muster up the strength to kick. This will, of course, come as something of a surprise to my friends who dragged me to Coachella two years ago and then found themselves dragged thusly to watch Animal Collective Animal Collective it up for forty-five minutes (and then kept using it as a weapon against any praise aimed Sigur Ros' way, although in my defense, Sigur Ros really should all be shot); all I can do is assure them that Sung Tongs really was a good enough album to vouch for that level of enthusiasm and guarantee them that a year of its eccentricities being held up as virtues capable of being reproduced at the (relative) drop of a hat.

Besides, this was also the year that Yeasayer managed to take all those signifiers and turn them into a pop record. I'm not necessarily sure it's a good pop record, of course - thusfar, I haven't even been moved to play it enough to start noticing stuff past the big single - but it's definitely an accessible one, possibly one which might never be matched if you stay within the confines of the genre. I mean, I'm giving All Hour Cymbals to my little sister for Christmas; by measure of comparison, five years ago I got her Ryan Adams' Gold (and she loved it, too). We'll see if Yeasayer's able to maintain it after having everyone give them their advice about which aspects of their sound they need to play up and which ones they need to squelch, but for now, they're at least potentially capable of making something to appeal to that demographic. Yes, you heard it here first, folks - Yeasayer to take over TRL! Come back next year when Chris Keating has a five-figure coke habit and Anand Wilder has an inexplicable hat! (Click here to buy All Hour Cymbals direct from the band)

n.b: Soulwax' Most of the Remixes..., The Wombats A Guide o Love, Loss, And Desperation, and James Murphy & Pat Mahoney's Fabric mix would all have been on here if the postal service had their shit together. Alas, they don't, and so they ain't, and so here we are, at the end of a stultifyingly long piece.

Now please excuse me if I go rest up until 2008. Frankly, I deserve a break.

two, three, four

KIDDING, of course.

Still Not Dead, Hush Up With Yr Bitchin'

2007-12-14T06:57:00.000-08:00

Seriously, you can ask Jen: the day I was all ready to get back into this here blogging fooferaw, my less-than-three-month-old laptop crapped out on me, requiring that it be sent back to Bumfuck, Egypt for servicing. Well, it's back now, and I plan on following suit on Monday with one of the most retardedly exaggerated content explosions in this site's history. So yeah, watch out for that.

EDIT: By "Monday", I of course mean "Wednesday". I guarantee you that the wait will be worth it; you'll be able to waste like two-thirds of the day on this thing when I get done with it.

EDIT 2:

Seriously, though, it'll be up tomorrow come hell or high water - it's actually completely written, but since there's going to be like 20 tracks in total with the next post, ripping and uploading is a beeyotch.

Not Dead

2007-10-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all - just a quick note, but as I'm still in the process from moving out of my old, shitty apartment into my new, non-shitty apartment I still don't have internet access and therefore cannot furnish uproarious self-loathing at the moment. (Also, this happened and I'm still laughing.) Believe you me, I've got stuff rarin' and ready to go for when I do get back; keep an eye on this space.

Oh, Right, I Have A Blog

2007-10-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time; I should'n'a left you/Without a dope beat to step to

It's kinda funny - well, okay, it's not really funny at all, but editing is for pantywaists: At the beginning of the year, I had between three and five writing commitments, depending on who wanted what from me when; now I have one, you're reading it, and as you may have noticed I kinda sorta suck balls at updating it at this point. I have no excuse; this is simply all I have, and I beg of you not to use your chloroform. All I can offer in recompense is a post full of absolute, insouciantly insistent motherfucking BANGERS. To wit:

Breakbot, "Happy Rabbit"
Isosceles, "Get Your Hands Off"

I'm certain that I'm not the only American left who still buys stuff from Rough Trade, which therefore means that I'm also not the only American to run into the legendary shop's seemingly-Sphinx-like attitude towards responding to emails. It's hard to hold it against them - years and years of record-store patronage have taught me nothing if not to expect anything other than palpable indifference on the part of the store clerks - but it's still a somewhat galling experience to wait around for like fifty bucks' worth of records coming your way without even the most basic information about the sale (like, say, which records are actually coming - although I'd probably be a lot less sensitive to this had I not been spoiled by Piccadilly's order-reporting system) in your possession. Recently, however, Rough Trade came through in a monumentally huge way with one of those customer-service experiences which damn near gets you excited to spend money with a business again, and today, we shall all gather around and bear witness. This will probably be a boring read for most of you, but as a noted poet and scholar once pointed out, "I don't give a fuck about these white people."

A few months ago, I had a birthday (it happens), and my friends decided to get me an assload of gift vouchers from Rough Trade, an outstanding idea for a present marred only by the fact that Rough Trade's gift vouchers can't actually be redeemed online. After placing a rather substantial order, I went through literally months of agonizing over how to get these things spent, at one point even contacting D. Wreck during his London excursion to see if I might be able to mail him the vouchers and have him redeem them onsite, until I eventually just kinda sighed, gave up, and made a note to myself to visit London again someday so that I could actually get these consarned vouchers out of my apartment. And then a few weeks ago, without any prompting on my part, I got an email from a RT honcho informing me that not only had they been putting my order together for like three months waiting for a few straggling items to show up, but that they'd actually gone ahead and combined it with another order I'd placed to save on shipping, and that I could expect a ludicrously overstuffed pack of records in the mail in the coming weeks. To say that this worked out well would be a heroic understatement; miraculously, even though I'd figured my earlier order had gotten lost in the mail and had reordered some items from other shops, there was only one instance of overlap in the whole order (the rather lamentable single by the Sigma - o Young & Lost Club, why hast thou forsaken me?).

More to the point, it worked out in fantastic fashion thanks to the huge-box-o-stuff format, unequivocally my favorite way to receive stuff in the mail. Call me a crazy-ass pleasure-delayer ("YOU'RE A" oh fuck it), but if you're someone who's affected by the context in which you hear a record, I just can't believe that a better option exists - after all, given the relative age of some of the singles in my order, they might as well have flown in from Neptune. Breakbot's "Happy Rabbit"/"Summer Party" disc, for instance, probably would have sounded downright egregious had I received it during the summer - pleasant, mind you, but pretty strikingly derivative of songs like "Phantom Pt. 1" or "DVNO". By getting them now, however, all that context has been stripped from the songs like bark off a tree; now the aspects of the Ed Banger set onto which everyone seems to have glommed is the abrasive noisiness of the affair rather than the mellifluous poppiness (which, having spoken directly to Certain Folks Who Would Know this morning, is as critical an aspect to Justice' craft as whichever other aspect seems to be most violently fashionable at the moment), leaving "Happy Rabbit" as a nigh-unto-relic of this summer's theme of abrasive prettiness. And really, "Happy Rabbit" is kinda hysterically pretty in a summer-jam way - if anything, I wish it had more of the dur-dur-durrrrrr theatrics that have dominated Banger-a-like tracks for the last few months just to give it a little extra dynamism, but I can have a hard time taking a song to task for simply and steadfastly following its melody through to its logical conclusion.

The Breakbot track, however, only made an ancillary point about how anticipation and context (and, I guess, more concrete phenomena like "shipping") really work - a fine point, to be sure, but one which pales in comparison to the main point made by the Giant Box-O-Stuff format, namely an elegant illustration of the extent to which Rough Trade has their stock situation in check. It's not just a matter of them having two copies of everything - although boy do they have everything; thanks to them I'm one of an ass-few people with a hard copy of that Hercules & Love Affair single (complete w/ misprinted "33 RPM" label; clearly my future will include a Scrooge McDuckian swimming pool full of gold coins once I flip it on eBay) - so much as them having a level of insight as to their stock which vastly outstrips that of most folks who aren't trying to get you to pay them for stuff. I mean, every major indie record store in England made a point to stock the Isosceles single, but the only one to throw it nearly front-and-center in their store and go UH was Rough Trade, and thank God for that because it's an absolute burner. The first verse & chorus are more or less musically unimpressive, true, but then all of a sudden the most gloriously ungracefully bloopy synth in the history of grace or bloopiness pokes its head out like WAZ SUP FOAX; it is at this moment that your narrator realized that he'd be making an entry on this blog as soon as the world would permit. I mean, what an effect - it's honestly not even much of a surprise that the song runs maybe a minute or so long, since I for one will admit that if I'd stumbled over such a Hammer of the Gods-ly little indie-pop flourish, I'd probably find restraint a little unattractive too. And, again, out of all the major retailers that I checked, Rough Trade was the only one to hear this and make a big deal out of it - or at least a big enough deal to convince me to whip my credit card out, a meaner feat than you might think. And now, as a result of their diligence and enthusiasm, I get to introduce someone to their favorite song of the year - I have no idea who that person's going to be, but in light of the virtues "Get Your Hands Off" encapsulates, if you read this site with any regularity, it may well be you. And yes, I'm pointing at you through my monitor right now.

Anyway; my ultimate point is simply that Rough Trade deserves to be credited for their radness, so, uh, do that. Other record stores may handle other aspects of the music-buying procedure more smoothly than they do, but in this increasingly commoditized musical landscape it's important to remember that you're not just paying for the label when you pick a record store; you're also paying for their accumulated knowledge and capacity to carry out customer service without being obtrusive or pushy, and as I learned courtesy of one big-ass box, these happen to be categories at which Rough Trade has few peers. Maybe I should be thanking God that they haven't adopted Piccadilly's order-processing system yet; they're making me broke enough as it is, although lord knows I'm grinning like a Cheshire cat all the way to the poorhouse. Or maybe that's just from all the monolithic blooping going on in the background while I walk.

(Click here to buy Breakbot's "Happy Rabbit"/"Summer Party" 7" from Rough Trade)
(Click here to buy Isosceles' "Get Your Hands Off" 7" from Rough Trade)

The DeVonnes, "I'm Gonna Pick Up My Toys" - My iPod crashed (AGAIN) during my extensive and illustrious absence, so I have no way to tell just how close this guess is to the truth, but I would guess that I've probably listened to "I'm Gonna Pick Up My Toys" somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven hundred thousand million billion squillion times over the last three or four weeks, and if anything, that's a low estimate. I'm certain that a lot of this has to be chalked up to the incomparably full-bodied piano driving the song. I'm equally certain that just as much has to do with the production at work on the track, although you may need to break out your sickest-ass headphones to pick up on everything since all the subtleties seem almost accidental; the mix itself keeps most of the instruments pretty balanced throughout the song's duration, and so it's up to the individual musicians to just start giving their parts that extra oomph to make them jump out (and boy howdy do they ever - if you listen carefully enough, you can almost hear the aforementioned piano player pounding away on the ivories during the chorus in a way he/she never really bothers to do during the verses). But really, though, those are just my own personal prejudices coming into contact with a song which happens to address them directly; given how well "I'm Gonna Pick Up My Toys" stacks up to, say, any world-conquering pop touchstone by ABBA or the Bay City Rollers (two artists whose greatest-hits albums will nevah evah evah leave my collection no matter how much shit I catch), right down to the way loss and heartbreak plays out in near-euphoric fashion. Of course, unlike those two groups, this is (unless the internet is lying to me) the only song the DeVonnes ever recorded, and given its pedigree* I'm a little flabbergasted as to how it managed to cross my eardrums in the first place. Oh well - at the end of the day, I'm just glad it did, and that's all that matters. (Click here to buy The In Crowd, a top-shelf Northern Soul compilation featuring "I'm Gonna Pick Up My Toys" and a boatload of other worthy tracks, from Amazon.com)

*Northern Soul, for those of you who have lives, was one of the most cloistered and purist-minded dance-music idioms in the history of pop music; as a genre, it existed solely to glorify obscure soul records with the kind of popping, clapping beat found on songs like Dobie Gray's "The In Crowd". Unfortunately, there came a point where the DJs had literally mined the past bare, necessitating inventive groups to make new "classic" records just to keep the scene alive. As you might expect, an enormous number of these records are cloyingly self-conscious about the tropes they revive, possibly because they draw from referents whose novelty has long since been worn away but more likely because most of them just kinda suck.

Grandadbob, "Hide Me" (Al Usher remix) - And finally, Al Usher, or as I've spent the last three weeks learning how to call him, "Al 'Motherfuckingly Assfartingly Christpunchingly Doghumpingly' Awesome Usher". Having heard pretty much everything he's remixed or released on his own in stunningly short order after stumbling over his stupidly great remix of Amy Winehouse's "Tears Dry On Their Own", it's just kind of striking to hear how far he's come since co-producing electro-house remixes with Ewan Pearson - I mean, on the scale of understudies leaving their masters' tutelage to explore the aesthetics of disco, I'd honestly be willing to rank Usher above Fred Falke at this point. Granted, Usher's a lot more pop-minded than most of the folks to whom he'd be compared by that rubric; his remixes tend to be anchored to their vocals, and frequently play just as effectively as pure pop treats as dancefloor murderers, and we all know how far such measures go in winning over Yr Boy. But even taking that into consideration, Usher's arguably better at pop songcraft than Falke (or any other suitable comparison) is at disco; his take on Grandadboy's "Hide Me", for instance, sounds leaps and bounds more organic than Falke's take on Hot Chip's "Colours" (an excruciatingly fun track which, it must be said, undeniably gives the impression of having had the vocals shoehorned on top of the preexisting mix). It's also, I assume, a killer song to dance to; all those little interlocking tropical synth lines give the song a paralyzingly infectious lilt, while its airy, nonconfrontational melody makes it incredibly inviting (and a natural end-of-night track too - I'd love to hear Prins Thomas put it to the test). It's really pretty much one of my favorite things on which Usher's ever worked; I'm not sure if I'd put it above the Amy Winehouse remix (and if you haven't heard that yet, uh, seriously people), but it's certainly not too far behind, and it's just as certainly miles and miles ahead of lots of praiseworthy stuff. (Click here to buy the "Hide Me" CDS from a GEMM verified seller)

ELSEWHERE
- A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Blog Fresh Radio to contribute a segment or two to their ongoing blog-music-oriented radio show, and given the murder's row of contributors, I happily accepted. I've already done two episodes, so if you've ever wondered what I sound like when I'm devoting %95 of my concentration to not saying "fuck" and %5 to talking about the Paper Cranes' fantastic new album (hopefully I'll have more on this in my next post here, which at the current rate should be coming sometime around the time that Chinese Democracy hits stores) or Pacific!'s magnificent laid-backitude, now (and now) would be your chance. (You'll definitely want to listen at least long enough to hear the host pronounce "Green Pea-Ness", however - it's still not the best instance of hearing someone confront my clever arrogance [that title belongs to the poor Belgian DJ who interviewed me about Soulwax' show last year without realizing how my site's name was pronounced until we were live on the air, prompting a hilariously hurried address to his listeners in panic-stricken Dutch], but it's always a treat to hear, and easily the best justification for saddling my site with this stupid name in the first place.) Anyway, I apologize in advance for my godawful voice; much like my face, it was made for the internet and nothing else.

- Also, long-time readers may remember Middle Distance Runner, still one of the very best bands to introduce themselves to me via my inbox; apparently, they've been signed and are embarking on their first real tour, and since my ears are still calling their debut album "awfully fun", you should maybe oughtta think about checking them out if you're in any of the following cities on the following dates:

Oct. 3 - Harrisburg, PA - The Abbey - (http://myspace.com/indieabbey)
Oct. 5 - Norfolk, VA - The Boot - (http://www.insidetheboot.com/main/)
Oct. 6 - Baltimore, MD - Lo-fi Social Club - (http://www.lofisocialclub.com/)
Oct. 7 - Pittsburgh, PA - Garfield Artworks - (http://www.garfieldartworks.com/)
Oct. 9 - Hoboken, NJ - Maxwell's - (http://www.maxwellsnj.com/)
Oct. 10 - New Haven, CT - Cafe Nine - (http://www.cafenine.com/)
Oct. 11 - Cambridge, MA - Band in Boston Podcast Session - (http://www.bandinbostonpodcast.com/)
Oct. 11 - Cambridge, MA - T.T. The Bears - (http://www.ttthebears.com/)
Oct. 12 - Troy, NY - Revolution Hall w/ The Cliks - (http://revolutionhall.com/)
Oct. 13 (Steve's Birthday!) - Hartford, CT - Shag Frenzy @ Sweet Jane's - (http://www.sweetjaneshartford.com/)
Oct. 14 - Villanova University, Villanova, PA - WXVU in-studio 89.1 FM - (http://wxvufm.com/)
Oct. 14 - Philadelphia, PA - The Khyber - (http://www.thekhyber.com/)
Oct. 17 - New York, NY - CMJ - Indaba Artist Discovery Stage - (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=268+Bowery,+New+York,+NY+10012,+USA&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=addr&om=1 )
Oct. 17 - New York, NY - CMJ Showcase @ Fontana's (http://www.fontanasnyc.com/)
Oct. 18 - New York, NY - CMJ - The Musebox Presents @ The Delancey (http://www.thedelancey.com/)
Oct. 20 - George Washington University, Washington, D.C. - WRGW In-studio (http://www.gwradio.com/)
Oct. 20 - Washington, DC - The Black Cat (OUR DC-ONLY EP RELEASE SHOW!!) - (http://www.blackcatdc.com/)

Normal Service Resumes As Temperatures Drop Below "Hotter Than A Shitting Bitch"

2007-09-11T15:00:00.001-07:00

Hi Mom

Those of you who've been wondering where I've been for the last two weeks clearly don't live in Los Angeles; up until disarmingly recently it's been like Los Angeles had spent its high-school tenure shoving the sun in a locker, and now the sun was back to make us fill up the gas tank on its Maserati. Luckily for YOU, Exalted Reader, I elected to pass the time by holing up in my hysterically tiny, miserably underventilated apartment and listening to one ass-load of records. Let's explore those, shall we? No? Well, fuck you then.

Spoon, "Don't Make Me A Target" - There's a certain amount of lamentable glibness in comparing a band called Spoon to another band called the Knife, but I for one find the comparison irresistable and so here we are. I mean, okay, yes, so they operate in nearly antithetical musical idioms; they also both employ a dazzling array of studio wizardry in the production of their songs which doesn't necessarily jump right out and assault folx like me who aren't necessarily attuned to their M.O. as a band, so I say it just depends on where you'd like to place your focus. And I can say for a damn certainty that after spending two weeks nearly neck-deep in Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, that's precisely where my focus is staying these days; between all the weird little touches inevitably mentioned in every review of the record to surface yet (HAY GUYS DID YOU HEAR WHEN HE ASKED THE DURMMR TO RECORD HIS STUDIO PATTER GUYS) and the subtle, elegant manner in which so many of its songs come to a head ("Black Like Me", stand up), Ga^5 very possibly makes a better case for its own aesthetic than any album that's crossed my headphones since, well, Silent Shout.

More to the point, however, Ga^5, like Silent Shout, manages to unquestionably better its predecessors in at least one respect: including more than one instantly-appealing song. Sure Kill the Moonlight had "The Way We Get By" and Gimme Fiction had "I Turn My Camera On" - just like how Deep Cuts had "Heartbeats" - but the only effect either of those songs had on my actual experience with the album on which they could be found was to effectively render the rest of both into a really, really long EP. I'm certainly revising that opinion now that I'm relistening to their entire catalogue in the wake of Reign In Ga wising me up to a few of the finer points of Spoon's sound, but even the most ardent Britt Daniel defender should be able to admit that even the most artfully-conceived of his gestural production style can't hold a candle to the pure endorphin rush his undiluted pop compositions can set off.

For Can't Stop The Ga, however, Daniel wisely decided to wait until he had two sure-fire barnburners on his hands (not that you need to be told, of course, but I'm referring to "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" and "The Underdog") and people, let me get this off my chest: this album is a squillion times better for the tension created by those two songs. I can't begin to tell you how many playthroughs of I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ga have started with me thinking "Man, I could sure go for a nice dose of 'Cherry Bomb'/'Underdog' right about now", then "Aw fuck, might as well play both" as the first one gets two-thirds or so of the way into its playthrough, then "Shit, I'm already here and this album's only like thirty-five minutes long; I might as well give the whole thing a spin", and well here we are. Or, thanks to the two key songs not being totally dissimilar from each other - someone over on ILX described The Lexicon Of Ga as "Wire meets Billy Joel", which is more or less the most enviably elegant way of describing either of those songs as I've yet to come across - I'll come at the songs from a more combative perspective, attempting to ascertain which does a better job at the musical task they both seem to be attempting to accomplish. Either way, the result is the same: I end up listening to the album more and, unsurprisingly, discovering more stuff on it that I love just as unconditionally, if not as immediately. "Don't Make Me A Target", for instance, might well be my favorite Spoon song ever just for how batshit awesome that piano sounds (well, that and the sneering little chord change at the chorus and Daniel's acerbic yowl of the titular line and so on and so forth), but if it hadn't been for "Cherry Bomb" and "Underdog" sinking their hooks into my brain's fleshy tissue I probably would have just gone PFFT ANOTHER SPOON ALBUM YEAH WELL TIME TO WAIT FOR THE ONE GOOD SONG TO EMERGE. Now I listen to it more or less constantly - I even slotted it into a mix CD, something I can't say about either of its more accomplished siblings. Or at least not yet, anyway. If "Marble House" and "We Share Our Mother's Health" taught me anything, it's that there's the central duality of Lift Yr Skinny Fists To Ga ought to have an awful lot of gas left in the tank. (Click here to order Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga from Amazon.com)

Shout Out Louds, "Impossible" (Possible Remake by Studio) - Because I keep up with internet music trends in the most back-asswards unreliable fashion imaginable, I have no idea whether Studio have managed to attain the kind of critical currency I've seen people attach to their work or whether I just happen to post on the same messageboard as the eight people on earth in whose heads they seem to be setting off fireworks with astonishing regularity; my guess is the latter, but that the former's looming larger than folks might think. To be sure, there's something intoxicating about their breezy Balearicisms (not to mention the zeal with which they take aim at their aesthetic target - fittingly enough, Studio's sound is nothing if not admirably studied); unfortunately, up until this remix I just haven't been able to give their music enough of a shot to settle on a side of the fence on which to sit. Sadly, it really does come down to the lack of vocals; call me callous (NOT THAT) and uncultured (ANYTHING BUT THAT), but when it comes to music which self-consciously bills itself as the apotheosis of smoothness, there comes a point where my brain just cuts off the credit limit until the human element reveals itself, and in the case of Studio, that point tends to come around two minutes or so into their eight-minute orgies of nubile musical pleasantry. This remix, however, has vocals like a MOTHERFUCKING FUCKER OF MOTHERS - great vocals, rich in histrionics and effort and complete with all the rough edges a pop vocal track can handle before one starts assuming it had been performed by Ari Up - and boy howdy does it ever play counterpoint to the track's immutable temperance; as it turns out I'm hell of more easily sold on Studio's trickery when it's being put to a purpose - like, for instance, reshaping a track into a dead ringer for a lost Pet Shop Boys b-side - than when it's supposed to be justifying its own existence. Hopefully it's enough to get me over the hump with regard to checking out the rest of Studio's ouevre; I'd hate to think that I missed out on the Homework of the nu-balearic scene just because I couldn't sing along to it. Still, worst-case-scenario, this is still one hell of a consolation prize. (The Studio remake of "Impossible" has yet to surface for sale, but in the meantime, click here to buy the Shout Out Louds' latest album Our Ill Wills, or here to buy Studio's West Coast from Amazon.com)

Edit: Hi; so it's like four hours later, and I just got back from a walk wherein I listened to (among other things) the whole Studio album - which, naturally, is downright filled with vocal tracks (at least three out of the six!) That being said, there's a difference between tracks with vocals and vocal-driven tracks; their Shout Out Louds remix falls more under the latter category while their album tracks fall squarely under the former - the effect of the vocals is almost tantamount to what you'd expect from vocals on a dub reggae track. Still, point taken, and remember, kids - always do your research before sitting down to carve your musical opinions into the immutable monolith known as the internet. Yeesh.

Voodoo Chili, "Look What You've Done To Me" (Erol Alkan's Mustapha 3000 remix) - Talk about folks whose aesthetics you think you've got pinned down; it seems like every time I get all settled into thinking about Erol Alkan as a producer who enjoys exploring the hidden sinuous grace of tracks like "Boy From School" or "Golden Skans", along comes something like this track to utterly upend all of my presumptions. I mean, there's practically no grace to this of any kind; that pogo-y beat just sort of shows up, and then all of a sudden that sample starts reassembling like Robert Patrick in T2, and then all of a sudden it's a complete lyric, and then all of a sudden there's that world-erasing synth-bass flourish, and then all of it comes back at once. Part of me wonders if it might have been created at least partly out of a desire for a tool to mix into or out of Smith N Hack's unfuckwithable remix of Herbert's "Moving Like A Train", an Erol staple since like last year; certainly both tracks share a similar disregard for the audience's endurance level, although Erol's mix here features a wickedly slippery bassline rather prominently in the mix. In any event, it's a sincere and seemingly inexhaustible treat; as far as I can tell, the only downside to loving this song is that it makes the wait for my copy of Erol's mix of the LA Priests song to show up in my mailbox that much more arduous YOU HEAR ME ROUGH TRADE GODDAMMIT (Click here to buy the "Look What You Done To Me" single from Beatstreet)

ELSEWHERE
- MAN ALIVE BUT THE DFA GOT THEMSELVES ONE HELL OF A REST OF THE YEAR LINED UP. I have no idea how this escaped my attention until painfully recently (possibly due to negligence of Yer Mam - my brother from a British mother already did a far better job than I'm about to do of setting the table for the bounty Messrs. Murphy, Goldsworthy & Galkin have laid out for us), but apparently Dem Boyz have been trying to come up with the spiritual successor to Marshall Jefferson's "Move Your Body" since kicking off LCD Soundsystem's 45:33 with one of the single prettiest pieces of music in the DFA's catalogue, and now it's really starting to bear fruit. In addition to the Hercules & Love Affair 12" which apparently came out last week at Rough Trade and Rough Trade alone (and which I am forcing myself to avoid until I can listen to a version I personally ripped myself - seriously, GET A MOVE ON, MAIL CARRIERS) the next few months ought to see the monumental "Still Going Theme", hopefully an actual release of the Juan Maclean's "Happy House" (hands-down the best song to which he's ever been attached, take that shit to the bank), and even a CD version of 45:33 so's to make it easier for dorks with ideas such as myself to rip the first track and have fun with it - and this isn't even getting into Soulwax' recent remix work for DFA groups like LCD and Hot Chip (seriously, I am incomparably envious of anyone who's gotten to hear their remix of "Ready For The Floor", aka The Song Whose Title Refused To Stay The Same For Even Like Two Seconds Come On Guys I'm Strugglin' Here) or their remarkably consistent Death From Abroad side project (just go buy the Altz tracks off iTunes now and thank me later). And of course we are all familiar with my attitudes towards certain full-length releases on the horizon by Black Leotard Front and Hot Chip (short version: I am staunchly pro-both). Basically, they've conspired to reward everyone for not killing themselves out of sheer boredom during the fallow months; the least you can do is take a chance on a couple of unfamiliar purchases (or, if you're crazy like me, a lot of unfamiliar purchases).

- Finally, a tear-stained farewell to the sadly-defunct The Rich Girls Are Weeping (DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE!??!???!??!) and an elated welcome-home back-slap to the recently-returned Good Weather For Airstrikes, who apparently had the same come-to-Jesus meeting with Singles Going Ga that I did. SYNCHRONICITY~

So Some Music Happened

2007-08-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

more like MADE OF AWESOME

Kate Nash, "We Get On" - It figures; I go and write up a big, relatively-personally-authoritative explication of my favorite stuff from the world o' music this year, and then I go and trip ass backwards over a record which may or may not obliterate the whole thing before it's even off the front page. That's not to say that Kate Nash's Made of Bricks is a sure-fire lock-the-doors end-of-year up-fucker, of course; it is, however, the first album to which the enthusiasm of my response can be characterized as anything other than "clinical" since Sound of Silver suddenly appeared in my iTunes like a bolt out of the blue, and that counts for something. Mind, it does count for less than my overly-excitable prose stylings might lead you to believe; the reason this post is coming like a week late is largely due to half of my brain screaming at the other half to shut up and that we weren't going to be posting about anything until we had relaxed into a calmer, more meditative state and that if we didn't settle down now Dad would turn the car around and then there would be no Six Flags for anyone and it would be ALL MY FAULT. But it certainly counts for enough to have me attacking my lists with a machete; this album is awfully fucking good, and if it's OK by you I do believe I'd like to start talking about it now.

Shockingly (or at least to long-time readers), the ardor I maintain for this album is only marginally motivated by Paul Epworth's production job. That's not to say that Epworth spends Made of Bricks' running time mentally spending his paycheck; Made of Bricks simply isn't his show, arguably in a way which might prove somewhat galling to Epworth loyalists accustomed to the idea of the famed boardsman setting the tone for the record. Here, however, his role seems to be almost one hundred percent functional in nature - it's his job to get the most out of Nash's sonic textures, to smooth out the rough edges around her songs, to basically strip as much of the imposing indie-ness of the Chirpy British Female Singer/Songwriter idiom in which Made of Bricks exists as he possibly can. And it should likewise be pointed out that he does an admirable job in this capacity - Made of Bricks is nothing if not uniformly palatable, way moreso than Pieces of the People We Love (the closest album-length example in which Epworth effectively subsumed his agenda-setting tendencies to keep from distracting from the band's, y'know, music).

Of course, this simply makes Epworth the Peter Asher to Nash's Linda Ronstadt; clearly, this album is made or broken on the audience's ability to process Nash's virtues as a singer/songwriter, and luckily she spends more or less the whole of Made of Bricks making it as simple as possible to do so. I know I lean on this crutch like crazy, but it really is Nash's gift for arrangements in particular which shines through in the grandest fashion; "Foundations", the big #2 smash hit from Made of Bricks about a couple fighting, is relatively straightforward instrumentally and compositionally (not to mention subject-matter-wise), but the sheer effectiveness of Nash's subtle choices to do things like double up on her piano part when things get heated during the second verse or only allowing any flourishes to creep into her playing when her narrator gains some distance from the heat of the moment is more or less a matter of fact - I mean, in terms of a song working, "Foundations" practically cries out to have its distinction fingered.

One could also praise Made of Bricks in an equally fulsome manner simply by restricting one's attention to the lyrics - and for essentially the same reasons, no less. Again, it's not that they're depicting anything revolutionary per se; Made of Bricks is, after all, an album about boyfriends and modern life and basically all the stuff which isn't any more interesting on its own merits when it's showing up on a Lily Allen album. But it's the micro-adornments which give the songs on Made of Bricks their emotive textures - the little details Nash recalls, or the irrepressible character of her wry sense of humor (one ballad rather pointedly punctures its inherent poignancy through self-conscious repetition of the phrase, and I quote, "What ya bein' a dickhead for?"), or even the subtlety of her diction. I'd imagine that word choice was more of a consideration for Nash than the effortless pop constructs which pepper her album might indicate; keep in mind that she's competing against a whole host of Pipettes and Lily Allens and other girls who drop their haitches and say "yeeeeah" in a condescending tone of voice and such. Lord knows it's a suspicion Nash goes out of her way to cultivate; on first listen, Made of Bricks might sound as brassy and cheeky as Alright Still, but closer inspection of the lyrics reveal Nash's nigh-masochistic drive to catalogue - of her own caustic (not underscore NOT charming) behavior, of its motivations, and of its consequences.

But if any element of Made of Bricks can be said to define it, it's probably as simple as the overall performance, as best summed up by "We Get On", a song which combines Nash's musical quaintness with her innate knack for lyrical propriety and then absolutely renders each of them all but inconsequential in the face of the way she delivers them. There are moments of more artful subtlety on Made of Bricks than the one in "We Get On" where the piano crumbles as the narrator sees her object of dreamy abandon making out with some random tramp, just like how there are probably just as many examples of lyrical dexterity as revealing as the one coming when Nash's friends console her with reasons why she shouldn't be so broken up about the sad turn of events. But placing two events with such potential for sturm und drang in such close proximity to each other carries with it a commitment to a pretty dizzying performance, and that's exactly where Nash grabs a hammer and outright nails it; in the space of like thirty seconds, the emotional climate in which Nash's narrator exists goes from one of violent loss to one of spitting hostility to, at last, an honest one of shell-shocked misery. The best part is that you can get every speck of that simply by listening to Nash's delivery - it would of course be more respectful of the artist to sit there and pore through her rather amazing choices in revelatory details (seriously, that narrator's nameless friends are exsquisitely sketched in both their pettiness and their ineffectiveness), but the sheer valence of her tone of voice really ought to be enough to clue you into the fact that the girl at the center of this story just got hurt - bad. And the really crazy thing is that that little passage represents - at most - like, a fifth of all of the raw emotional data Nash offers up for her listeners to parse; I could have just as easily written this whole paragraph about the offhanded way in which she describes how and why she doesn't sit around imagining little romantic scenarios , or that bit where she finds herself momentarily racked with self-loathing after a plan to bump into her adored goes horribly (and literally) wrong. Or or or or or. Made of Bricks certainly spoils you with choices.

But is that enough to earn it the status of best album of the year? The copout answer is, of course, that I don't know; we've still got four months in which Delia & Gavin might show up out of nowhere with a copy of the mythical Black Leotard Front album in hand, and I am known for nothing if not my proclivity against gesturing emptily. I do admit that everything I love about Made of Bricks is wildly personal in nature, and that the instant Nash's music relinquishes its death-grip on my auditory perceptive organs my ardor may decrease substantially, and that the other instant when I come to terms with the vapidity of all the talking points about this album which I haven't brought up yet (what, didja think I wouldn't be interested in hearing how Paul Epworth goes about defining his second pop idiom inside of four years?) said ardor is likely to vanish completely. I accept all of these things and more. All that matters right now is that (a) Made of Bricks is awesome and (b) I can't stop listening to it, and, as mentioned way up top, that really does count for more than you might think. (Click here to buy Made of Bricks from Amazon.co.uk)

The Shocking Pinks, "I Want U Back" - One of these days, I do in fact aim to write a record review which doesn't hinge on like five or six major factual fallacies; if I'm lucky, it might even appear in print, so I can point to one example of my non-dumbassitude which even faulty server upkeep can't take away from me. I can tell you that the review I wrote of the Shocking Pinks' self-titled compilation of early works forthcoming on DFA sure hinged on a big one, namely that the Pinks actually re-recorded the tracks with their new disco overloards when, in actuality, the DFA's role in crafting the Pinks' sound extended no further than simple mastering duties (although their end product is like twice as loud as the originals, so clearly they did SOMEthing). Luckily, the DFA's participation was in no way the thrust of my argument for why people should check Shocking Pinks out; the closest I came was in asserting that people with an interest in the evolving DFA aesthetic really do owe it to themselves to check this record out, because it's quite a stylistic depature for the label seemingly as a whole, and that's a fact that remains true no matter how much of a hand Those Crazy Kids had in the actual sonic architecture on display throughout the album. I mean, parts of Shocking Pinks sounds downright radio-ready, and not simply due to contrast; its best songs are holistic pleasures, effortless in form and function - not more-or-less effective distillations of the grandeur easily attainable in other songs on the record (yes, I am That Guy for whom "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" did very little in the long-run). But don't be fooled: Shocking Pinks is every bit as exploratory a work as the DFA have ever put out - it's just that the musical aspect it explores most effectively (the three-minute balls-out guitar-driven radio single) runs so counterintuitive to the DFA's seemingly-immutable gravitation towards expanse rather than economy that it kinda leaves you scratching your head at first. Granted, it's somewhat less clear on "I Want U Back" than on other singles on Shocking Pinks (especially "Emily", a veritable orgy of New Order-y pleasures - apparently, it's set to be the Pinks' next single, and with GOOD MEASURE), but "I Want U Back" is the one cleared by the label for distribution, so it's what you get. Besides, all the efforts devoted to structuring still shine through despite all the layers of noise; this is, after all, quite possibly the first song in DFA history to feature the "Be My Baby" beat (or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof). And anyway, I'd say there's a greater chance of the best stuff on Shocking Pinks making its way to your ears without my guidance than on any other DFA-released record to date. I mean, with some of these songs, it's really just a matter of time. (Click here to pre-order Shocking Pinks from Amazon)

Pacific!, "Break Your Social System" - And just to bring things full circle, my introduction to the Moshi Moshi Singles Club came courtesy of (Chekhov's gun alert! Chekhov's gun alert!) Kate Nash's "Caroline's A Victim", a song so thoroughly devoid of gratification on the part of the listener as to have even remained more or less untouched during the ongoing Kate Nash renaissance; needless to say, my inclination to inspect Pacific! further had little if anything to do with allegiance to the label. Luckily for me, my lack of commercial radicalism ended up paying off once again; "Break Your Social System" is an outstanding summer single, burnished to the same taut pop shine most commonly encountered in the works of Phoenix (albeit with more of a mannered, gestural rigidity to it - one cannot under any circumstances shortchange the influence of Krautrock on Pacific!'s style). And as it turns out, the rest of their catalogue is more or less just as good - I chose "Break Your Social System" due to the incandescent ease of the chorus and the way the different vocal parts just sorta idly lap up against each other, but really, these guys haven't put out a bad track yet, and those are strong words considering that a full two-fifths of their released recorded material consists of instrumentals. I can see an album's worth of songs as good as "Social System" holding me utterly in its thrall for a good long while - although I guess the trick is to come up with an album's worth of songs which are all that good. I sure hope Pacific! manages to pull it off; after this single, their future efforts can certainly count on my attention. (Click here to buy the "Break Your Social System" 7" from Rough Trade, or visit the band's MySpace for iTunes links)

The Greatest Work Of Criticism I Ever Played

2007-08-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

I apologize to all girls & non-nerds

Chicago, "You're The Inspiration" - My taste in music may (MAY?!?) be impeccable, but even I can't argue with the folks who would characterize my taste in musical reading materials as, in the words of my NorCal brethren, "hella suspect". I am, after all, a man who readily admits to being mightily influenced by Nick Hornby's Songbook, who can practically rattle off between forty and sixty percent of the singles described in This Is Uncool from memory, who called Borders so many times before Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself To Live came out asking if they'd gotten it in yet that the store eventually sold me a copy two days early just to shut me up; clearly I am not the sort of person who should ever be listened to by anyone about anything. Anyway, a few weeks ago my overpowering enthusiasm for Tom Breihan - whose inchoate enthusiasm for the Field's From Here We Go Sublime and apparently controversial preferences & perceptions of rap aesthetics seem to have thrust him into the same snarky crosshairs as most of the other music writers I tend to read with uncompromising voracity - led me to pick up Marooned, a modern-day attempt (to which Breihan contributed) to summit Stranded, Greil Marcus' legendary late-70s compilation of high-profile rock writers' "desert island albums" (hence the name). Of course, since I hadn't read Stranded either, I figured I'd go ahead and pick that one up too, and as such I've spent the last few days' worth of bus-rides plowing through a bunch of late-seventies critics longform opinions on Van Morrison, which is a position into which I can honestly say I never expected to see myself enterint willingly.

Still, it's kind of striking reading about how people used to write about music; Stranded, after all, was written decades before file-sharing was even a tenable premise, and nothing speaks to that fact more than extent to which the contributors are willing to go to explain how this stuff works. Think about it: if you had to make a case for why someone could and should take sustenance from the Velvet Underground knowing full well that you couldn't in any way count on their ability to hear the actual songs (or, for that matter, the referents you might invoke) for themselves, would you put more faith in an approach which describes what songs like "Heroin" sound like, or in one which describes the logic of its kinetics? Listening to music is, after all, a linear experience at heart, and if you really want to connect with an audience in a near-pure tabula rasa state, it only makes sense to cast light on just how that experience works since that's really all they'll have access to.

Which brings me - sorta - to Elite Beat Agents, a game put out last year for the Nintendo DS which might well be the single most devastatingly accomplished work of pop-art criticism since Orson Welles' F For Fake, albeit probably completely inadvertantly. EBA is, fundamentally, a rhythm game (apologies to those of you who don't need the following explanation - believe me, I'm well aware that everyone and they mama has like four DSes at this point and that going over a critical darling like EBA in such exacting, pedantic detail is like someone sticking their head in the door of your apartment and screaming about Pet Sounds, but well uh anyway), which means it has the same expressed goals as all those other stupid rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero, namely to do stuff in time with the beat displayed by the game. Its big innovation - and we're talking Copernican levels of insight here on the part of designers iNiS - is that instead of pressing buttons or dancing or whatever, you're using the DS' built-in touchscreen to tap a pattern of dots sequenced around the screen in numerical order. Obviously, there's more to it than that - you also drag balls along laid-out pathways, attempt to time your tapping to match circles collapsing inward on the dots, confront a storyline going on (sorta) on the top screen, and inevitably deal with a big spinning wheel which can most sincerely fuck the motherfuck off - but really, they're all just extensions of the fundamental, tapping-oriented formula.

Astute readers will, of course, immediately pick up on the aspect of EBA which makes it great criticism: the following. I mean, here's a game which gives you an unprecedentedly direct way to learn how to follow a song, to the point where it even lays out precise, intuitive instructions on how to follow it, which rewards you for following your cues correctly and punishes you for failing to follow them; at times, it's hard not to think about EBA as one of the first instances of criticism employing a medium whose power to engage the audience supersedes that audience's interest in engaging with the subject of criticism. And don't get me wrong - huge wads of the songs selected for the EBA soundtrack are just straight-up ass. Funny thing is, after enough ventures through a song in the hopes of landing that elusive S-rank, you seriously won't care anymore; you've studied the song closely enough to appreciate its less-ostentatious pleasures, or at least the way its wholly-ostentatious surface comes together. I mean, Avril Lavigne's "Sk8r Boi" is a song I could quite happily go the rest of my life without ever hearing again, but I'll be damned if I can't point to a baker's dozen individual elements of that song which aren't inordinately satisfying, even if they're just little minor things like chord changes or cannily-calculated instances of doubling or whatever, and I owe it all to my need to get a pregnant woman to an in-game hospital without being stripped of my taxi-driver's license. To call it an extraordinarily successful system would be an understatement of epic proportions; I'm pretty sure that if Lester Bangs could have had you tapping on a screen in time to The Marble Index, he'd have seized the chance, and it would have worked.

But, again, this just puts it on a par with games like the aforementioned DDR and Guitar Hero when, to be perfectly blunt, EBA actually takes both those games and all other pretenders to the throne out behind the shed and puts them down for the long sleep. The secret, I think, lies in the tapping mechanism, or rather the universality of the tapping mechanism - there's literally no learning whatsoever involved in this game (although there's about four minutes' worth of learning how to go about reading the visual language of the game's world). I mean, who hasn't caught themselves idly tapping along with a song stuck in their head? That's literally the complete level of abstraction EBA demands of its audience to make total, unfettered participation wholly open to them, and it's genius. Again, think back to Guitar Hero (a game fundamentally "about" acting like a rock star on stage which asks you to conveniently overlook the fact that you're pressing buttons on the neck of a tiny plastic guitar) or DDR (a game fundamentally "about" dancing despite the fact that most anyone who tries to dance like that in real life ought to be and usually is pointed- and laughed-at back to the stone age); by contrast, EBA simply seeks to elicit your innate tapping proclivities simply by offering up some truly ludicrous venues for songs which don't offend you enough to skip over them. And best of all, the overall quality of the experience is wholeheartedly up to you, the end-user; if you want to play for points, you can just concentrate on hitting your mark (as the game progresses, this becomes an adventure in itself) or, alternately, if you want to ROCK OUT!!!!!1!!11!, you can throw on some headphones and try and poke a hole through your DS' screen as you murder some lighthearted musical fluff with a smile on your face. (I'd be pretty hard-pressed to think of an action in which I regularly partake being secretly videotaped and put on YouTube than the way I absolutely attack EBA's version of "YMCA" in my MDR-V700s, and for god's sakes, I do yoga now.)

But the ultimate proof of concept - and arguably the best sheer proof of concept offered up by a videogame designer since Super Mario Bros all but singlehandedly validated the idea of the side-scrolling platformer - has to be the level in which you play through a version (all of the songs on EBA are covers, although it should be noted that they're really really really good covers) of Chicago's "You're The Inspiration". (I'm going to be giving away spoilers here, so those of you who don't want your video games in which you help a team of government-sponsored secret agents through dance routines to help instill confidence in the citizenry spoiled should avert thy eyes.) The immediate difference between "You're The Inspiration" and most rhythm-game fodder is, of course, the seeming simplicity of its rhythm section, which probably couldn't be characterized as "propulsive" under any definition of the word. EBA's great insight, then, is to simply match it up with a story which relies in no way on propulsion to lay itself out; the "You're The Inspiration" level recounts the story of a little girl whose father dies before bringing home her Christmas present and how, thanks to the steadfastness of her belief, she's able to gain some closure. (Note that the game does add a few layers of instrumentation to the original song which make it sound more dynamic, most notably a twinkling synth and some drum fills, both of which are implemented so well that now I can barely hear the original without my mind filling their presence in.) It's worth noting that, unlike the rest of the stories which EBA matches up with songs, the "You're The Inspiration" level scrupulously avoids any semblance of cutesy, "Oh those wacky Japanese"-y moments; the game designers clearly approached their scenario with the same level of unironic melodramatic seriousness that Chicago did when they originally wrote the song. And the effect is nothing less than transformative; it's possible that the "You're The Inspiration" level is simply a shining example of an arranged marriage working out for both parties, but at the same time it's awfully hard to ignore the poignancy lent to a scripted scenario which would otherwise leave me nonplussed at best by the schmaltzy - yet note-perfect - violin arrangements or those triumphant, purgative "WHAO-OH-OH-OHHH"s in the background of the chorus. You're learning, in other words, how to appreciate the song on its own terms, and it's all due to an incredibly brave attempt to do something completely contrary to the spirit of the entire rest of the game, one which works in the same way "Shine A Light" works in comparison to the rest of Exile on Main Street. And if anything, that may be understatement; the "You're The Inspiration" level remains the only level of a game that I have ever lost due to pumping my fist and cheering out loud in response to the content. I mean, hell, it's the only level in the game where the I Hate You Spinning Circle is nowhere to be found; how in the world is it not the greatest level in video game history?

Anyway. The other cool thing about this critical format is that it seems to be staggeringly adaptable, as evidenced by the Ouendan line of games which originally laid out the gameplay basics. Like EBA, Ouendan's songs have an eye towards easy accessibility, only with Japanese artists instead of American ones since the Ouendan games originated in Japan; after months of hemming and hawing I finally picked up one of these games (the sequel) last night and was summarily floored by how much I was enjoying the experience of riding along to super-fluffy J-Pop, an aesthetic I typically shy away from in all its forms. All I can do in this situation is give due praise to the medium, which seems to have stripped away all the musical signifiers having to do with preference or cultural cache; these games seem to more or less change the question from "Do you like this song?" to "Do you like following this song?", and that is an intoxicatingly auspicious feat to accomplish. It'll never happen, of course (and there's a thousand reasons why it never should happen), but can you imagine what you'd get if the Ed Banger crew were able to somehow license this technology and select it as the format for the inevitable release of Ed Rec Vol. 3? What about gentler stuff like Vashti Bunyan - do you think your friends would laugh quite as vociferously at you if you were able to physically demonstrate to them exactly where the fun in records like that can lie? And don't even get me started on the pipe-dreams that we'd see in a matter of hours if the technology to simply use user-created and -selected songs, patterns and artwork were somehow made available to the public; I may love mixtapes more than my mom, but that would be game-over for that whole personal artistic endeavor if that ever came to pass. Of course, since this world isn't located in the stem of some galactic crackpipe, none of this will happen; instead we'll just have to be content with yearly rehashes of the formula featuring more awful new songs which we'll learn to love. I for one cannot wait. (Click here to buy The Very Best Of Chicago, or click here to buy Elite Beat Agents, from Amazon.com)

Calvin Harris, "Merry Making At My Place" - Even the most cursory peek at the Hype Machine will show you that I'm way, way behind the curve on this one, which (hopefully) should give you some indication as to just how jaw-clenchingly infectious "Merry Making" really is; if the rest of Calvin Harris' debut album I Created Disco is anywhere in the same qualitative ballpark as this, then it looks like I'm about to be thirteen dollars poorer. Can you blame me? I mean, one of the most pronounced developments in my listening habits this year has been an increased appreciation for the precise kind of blase disco Harris so elegantly reduces to pure pop-song; am I supposed to not get all starry-eyed over those soulless claps or that single-minded bassline or those carefully-placed jerky "OH"s? And it really ought to be pointed out (yet again) that Harris' delivery is outright idiotically perfect for the song; there's a twinge of urgency in the way the words come barrelling out of his mouth even as he's unable to move past the scant few individual signifiers which make up the song (q.v. the word "house"). I kind of like to think of this as being what you'd get from a Streets record if Mike Skinner aspired to the status of a Prins Thomas record rather than, I dunno, a Roll Deep record or whatever, although it's certainly just as possible that I like to think of it like that due to my own selfish reasons. I guess the world will never know for certain; all I know for sure is that I can't stop listening to this song. (Click here to pre-order I Created Disco from Amazon.com)

The Young Republic, "Your Heart Belongs In Tennessee" - Last year, I was one of the thousands of Americans duped into buying into Bishop Allen's year-long monthly-EP project, quite possibly the lushest and most accomplished demonstration of the necessity for quality control in the history of modern indie-pop. Bishop Allen isn't a bad band and their EPs weren't bad records, but they did have the detrimental effect of all but dynamiting my faith in American bands grasp of the notion of "quality control", which would have gone a long way towards rendering those short doses of tweeness into something which could maintain any semblance of a compelling presence after the initial flush of AWWWWW HOW CUET circulated back down into the body. I kinda think that my reaction to those EPs initially colored my reaction to the Young Republic's debut single "Blue Skies", which really is quite lovely despite (due to?) sounding like exactly the record you'd expect from eight Northeastern multi-instrumentalists, right down to the wispy-voiced singer. Fortunately, though I may have been merely too disengaged to post "Blue Skies" here, I wasn't too disengaged to let their most recent single, "Girl From The Northern States" pass me by (which, I will readily admit, is partially due to the packaging - from the cardstock to the insert to the foil printing, these kids really know how to put together something which feels physically substantial in a rewarding way when you hold it in your hands), which turned out to be a pretty alarmingly fun little record which also bodes fantastically well for their forthcoming full-length. The titular A-side is, of course, the main attraction, but I've ended up playing "Your Heart Belongs In Tennessee" more often; I just love the way the band occasionally seems to be lunging forward (musically, at least), and then of course there is the standard-issue Huge Epic Hey Let's Wrap This Motherfucker Up In Style part towards the end which is, predictable though it may be, devastatingly well-done. Whether these guys & girls can ultimately sell as many albums as, say, Voxtrot or even Papercuts is an issue in the hands of their marketing company, but they've certainly got both the chops and the vision to come up with songs which would speak to either of those camps in an indelible voice. But really, though, the music alone should be enough; I needed no other prodding to sign on completely. They could still stand to rock out more if they want to really take advantage of their gift for arrangements (well, that or work with some of the scions of American tweeness - one shudders to think of what their album would sound like if it were produced by Jon Brion), but all that's just idle speculation; one needs no such ability to predict one's future dissatisfactions to appreciate the gorgeous little tunes they're cranking out at the moment. (Click here to buy the 7" of "Girl From The Northern States" from Rough Trade, or here to buy it on iTunes)

ELSEWHERE
- MAN OH MAN did I ever jump the gun on Pete & the Pirates; as it turns out their best song ever is their newest one, "Knots", and not (GET IT??!??!) just because it happens to be produced by Mr. Of The Moment Gareth Parton. I'm not going to post it simply because I'm trying harder to be respectful of musicians' attempts to actually craft careers for themselves which would enable them to quit their day jobs, but seriously, if you're into that So Hot Right Now angular post-Strokes Britpop sound, YOU ARE AN ABSURDLY RETARDED PERSON if you don't go to their Myspace and play the everliving bejesus out of it right now. (Although "Come On Feet" is still a good song, dammit.)

HELL FUCKIN' YEAH

2007-08-11T11:36:00.001-07:00

Oh Blackdisco, we are all mere servants to your generously-portioned-out awesomeness.

But I Was There: The Wombats/The Squares @ Cinespace, 8/7/07

2007-08-09T14:44:00.000-07:00

Guaranteed to leave your memory less than "Crystal" clear (GET IT?!??!)

The Squares, "Bottle Me Up" (album version) - Long-time readers - a category which, in relation to this site, refers to anyone who's been reading longer than since, like, February - may remember a long, rambly (moreso than usual, even) post I wrote about my friend Shaun's band the Squares - or, rather, about basically everything EXCEPT the Squares. It's not that they were a bad band, but when it came to their music, them crazy kids were so clearly (a) working in a musical idiom (poppy emo) that tends to leave yr boy kinda flat and (b) in desperate, pleading need of tightening up their sound that I was left with no choice but to do the critical fan dance. That, however, was several squillion months ago; in the interim, they cut their drummer loose, replaced him with some new dude they found on Craigslist, somehow got themselves booked as the opening act for the Wombats' gig at Cinespace on Tuesday night, and then proceeded to blow my fucking mind with just how good they've gotten since their last appearance in this space. I mean, I still wouldn't put them in the same echelon as Escort or Explorer's Club or the Procession when we're setting up the list of up-and-coming American indie-rock royalty, but man oh man did they ever get good. I mean, hell, I've only been waiting for nine months to see the Wombats, but thanks to the Squares (and the gallons of promotional vodka I poured down my throat) I barely have anything to say about them.

Well, okay, that's not true. The Wombats were, of course, fun as fuck, although anything less from a band who put out an album as riotously enjoyable as Girls, Boys, & Marsupials (an album which I'm still loving almost as much all these months after getting it - outside of the Long Blondes' Someone To Drive You Home, I'm hard-pressed to think of a nu-Britpop album with a comparable shelf-life) would be unacceptable. I missed a few songs looking for a bathroom in which to relieve myself of some of the aforementioned free vodka so I may have missed them playing "Lost in the Post", but other than that they kept their set lean, mean, and with a definite ebb and flow to it - hell, they kicked things off with "Girls, Boys, & Marsupials" (aka the acapella album-closer) seemingly as a piss-take, although it did do a fine job of building anticipation for the rocking-er moments yet to come. And boy did they ever come; when the 'bats launched into "Moving To New York", you could practically hear the audience's collective interest come to a knife-sharp point, no mean feat considering that we're talking about a TUESDAY AT CINESPACE here - it takes one hell of a band to get a room full of label reps to stop trading war stories from lining up to buy an iPhone, but damned if the Wombats didn't pull it off.

Unfortunately, it has to be said that in doing so, they didn't really offer up anything which couldn't be gleaned just as easily from the album. That's not a dis, of course - believe me, there's plenty of bands who I can only wish were good enough to be as good as their recorded stuff, especially when the stuff in question is as indisputably top-shelf as Girls, Boys & Marsupials - but it did put them at something of a competitive disadvantage when trying to seize the crown from the Squares, who turned in an eye-opening set for anyone who'd ever come in contact with their music previously. I really actually feel kinda bad foaming at the mouth about the salutary effects of the Squares replacing their drummer given how much of said drummer's beer I've drunk over the years at Shaun's house parties, but facts are fuckin' facts: the simple act of shoring up one pillar of their rhythm section seems to have galvanized both of the other Squares into getting their shit into lockstep formation, and the end result is just a quantum leap in the right direction. For one thing, given their predilection for glossy, prefab indie-pop, the ability to keep rigidly to a beat is of paramount importance; this is, after all, a band that worships at the feet of the Cars, and I think we can all agree that "Shake It Up" would be exponentially less satisfying if David Robinson had gone slippin' and slidin' all over the place. More crucially, though, having a reliable rhythm section frees Shaun's vocals from being forced to give their songs their shape. Shaun's not a bad singer, but he does have one of those idiosyncratic thin indie yelping timbres to his voice which works about eleven thousand times better complementing the rest of the track as opposed to leading it by the nose into Proper Songville. And now that Shaun isn't compelled to try to fill in inconsistently-laid-out patterns thanks to their new drummer and his ability to actually create rigid rhythms (as opposed to alluding to their existence - again, sry Nate), he can focus on performing the songs more effectively, and boy is he ever able to do so.

Look, I'm not trying to argue that the Squares are glory-bound for stardom now; they've still got a ways to go, especially when it comes to pruning the their songs' lyrical content for the benefit of how well it scans (this is going to sound seriously ironic coming from my sesquipedalian ass, but I'm a firm believer in the idea that all bands with any designs on going big should try to write songs based around hooks of no more than either two words or four syllables). But listen to "Bottle Me Up" and tell me you can't hear the pop chops already present, even in this old mix with their old drummer (not the best way to present evidence for the band's advancement, I admit, but they haven't rerecorded this song with their new drummer and it really is the best showcase for their faculties as a pop band), and imagine how much more effectively they'd be able to be deployed with a more capable rhythm section. I mean, I'm not saying they're going to be the next U2 or Radiohead or OMC or what have you - I'm just trying to say that, with a little work, they could turn out to be an indie-pop outfit capable of scratching the same itches as Los Campesinos! or the Moths, and that's not a bad place for a young band to be. (Click here to buy the Squares' Call Me When Your Boyfriend's Dead direct from the band, or click here to buy digital copies of Wombats song from their digital store. Also, anyone who wants to buy me the Official Wombats Cuddly Wombat may feel free to do so.)

The Long Weekend, "Record" - Speaking of bands about whom I hate to talk shit, here's the Long Weekend, a band which seems downright poised to be this year's edition of the template filled out so ably last year by the Rifles. Looking back at their debut single "Medway Is The Difference (Between My Town And Yours)", I'm frankly a little embarassed that it took me so long to reach that conclusion; it took me about four seconds' worth of "Record" to lead me to the conclusion that these guys' one trick involves robbing Mod titans blind without feeling the need to cite their sources. This certainly isn't to say that I give a fuck, of course; for one, the Kinks have always left me kinda cold (that's right, I said it - motherfuck a Village Green Presevation Society), and for another, the Long Weekend are really really really effective thieves, or at least certainly good enough at thievin' to lift me up and over any lingering angst over credibility from my days as a middle-school dumbass. I mean, "Record" isn't anything even remotely novel; even restricted simply to the context of the band's output, its most original feature is probably that tambourine which shows up for the chorus to lend it a little Stax-y flavor, and what with Mark Ronson's existence this year it's a little hard to laud that as a stroke of heroic boldness. The thing is,the song they've come up with is so invigorating and effective that I just don't have it in me to give a fuck; the overall arrangement of "Record" is so expertly managed that I don't even have it in me to knock the band for tacking superfluous real estate onto such an obvious candidate for a three-minute gem of a pop single. I have no idea how well this approach will (or even can) play out over the course of an album, but I do know that I'll be checking in with the Long Weekend every chance I get to get a better idea. Oh, and I also know that that Rifles album deserved way better treatment than it got from the open market. If nothing else, it's at least better than the friggin' Maccabees album. (Click here to buy the "Record" 7" from Norman Records)

The Rushes, "Ripping It Down" - Look, as someone who's an avowed-enough sucker for a big, space-filling piano to find himself constitutionally incapable of switching stations whenever Train's "Drops of Jupiter" comes on (hands-down the most shameful admission in the history of this blog, and that covers some ground), my admiration for the Rushes' "Ripping It Down" was more or less a given - make it through the first thirty seconds and you'll hear what I'm talking about. What I'd like to draw your attention towards, however, is everything else about this song - or, better yet, everything else which inevitably won't be a factor in whether or not they start pulling in that Coldplay cream. I mean, sure, I guess you can focus on the almost-abrasive friendliness of the track's structuring or its mom-beckoning falsetto opening - yeah, okay, it's kinda breathtakingly cloying and tacky, and given my explosive allergy to wussy bullshit like the Turin Brakes or Richard Hawley I can't really fault anyone for turning elsewhere. But good lord, do I ever pity those of you who check out early on this one; you'll be missing out on some truly glorious multi-part harmonies and a tempo-shift which you can practically see the drummer poised at the ready to launch into and a piano being played by someone who really knows who to wring it dry of drama. I mean, these are downright inexhaustible virtues, folks; I've overlooked worse crimes against music for far lesser rewards (as previously mentioned - seriously, sheesh), and as long as the Rushes keep offering them up with such smirk-free ease, I'll be making a point to keep right on keepin' on. "Ripping It Down" is just a spectacular song, easily the best one I'm posting in this batch, and its b-side ("Will You Won't You") is shockingly close to being almost as good, so hopefully I'll be able to do so for years to come. (Click here to buy the "Ripping It Down" 7" from Piccadilly. Also, simply because the potential for lolz grossly outweighs the guilt which comes from being a jerk, I do have to point out this post on their MySpace blog which may well typify Spectacular Review-Oriented Indie Butthurtedness for the next decade and beyond - seriously, gang, anytime you start off a post by declaring that you'd never give a second thought to reviews, you've more or less pushed the horse out of the barn and blown the door into smithereens already. Doesn't reduce their gifts as songsmiths one iota, though.)

Sparrow House, "The Reflection" (Daytrotter session) - Part of me kinda thinks that the next Voxtrot album should be a split affair, with half the tracks going to Ramesh & the Gang and the other half being given over wholly to keyboardist Jared Van Fleet's Sparrow House project; I kinda get the feeling that the contrast between Voxtrot's insistent dynamism and Sparrow House's trademark lo-fi whispery gentility would go a long way towards rectifying the complaints of the nation of folks who are wholeheartedly entitled to their desperately wrong opinions about Voxtrot (i.e. everyone except me and Cindy Hotpoint). Of course, I also kinda think that Van Fleet has it in him to come up with even more compelling songs on his own than with his bandmates; if I had any doubt left after the gorgeously unassuming "When I Am Gone" (available for downloading on Sparrow House's site), it all certainly got resolved by the time he came knocking to do a Daytrotter session and dropped this woozy, gauzy, breezy, other-adjectives-which-end-in-zy little gem on us all. I mean, this is gorgeous stuff in the same vein of those Lou Reed songs where he capitulates to prettiness, and that simply isn't ground which gets covered by bands these days; one can only shudder to think of how effectively Van Fleet might be able to use actual production facilities to create sonic space rather than simply relying on the acoustics of the room in which he happened to stumble upon a piano. (Click here to buy the first Sparrow House EP direct from Van Fleet. Oh, and don't be a retarded person - just buy Voxtrot and learn to like it.)

But I Was There: Daft Punk @ the LA Sports Arena, 7/21/07

2007-07-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

FORESHADOWING

Daft Punk, "Face to Face" - The older I get, the more the world makes it apparent that I perceive the unfolding of history - or at least musical history - in an incalculably skewed sense. It's probably an overwhelmingly obvious point to make, but since I (and, if you're reading this blog, probably you too) tend to gravitate towards more marginal artists and musical idioms, the march of time has a way of revealing what I understand at the time to be epic, world-changing events to "just" be really fun shows; I may have had a better time seeing LCD Soundsystem at the Echo back in 2004 more than any other concert I've ever attended, but even within the then-volatile context of "dancepunk" or "the DFA" or even "indie music" in general, it changed absolutely nothing for anyone who wasn't in attendance that night, although anyone who was there and came away with anything other than a life-affirming spectacle in no way deserves to call themselves a fan of anything for the rest of their lives. I did, however, see Daft Punk at Coachella last year, and if their performance at the Sports Arena last Saturday taught me one thing, it's that I was absolutely there for at least one musical Ground Zero, even if the consequences of said event haven't necessarily fully unveiled themselves to me just yet.

For one, it's clear to me that no performance Daft Punk will ever put on could even approach their Coachella set even if just to kiss the ring. Admittedly, the Los Angeles factor may have hardwired me for disappointment to a certain extent; my adopted hometown is, after all, the place where the country turns when it needs instructions on how to best appropriate someone else's experience, so it's not like I was surprised to see a bunch of frat-bros-turned-indie-dance-snobs attempting to out-enjoy the rapturous reviews of what went down that night in the desert rather than simply appreciate the show being put on in front of them. Inexplicably, some of them seemed to fail to glean even the most incidental shred of pleasure from the evening's festivities, resulting in the disruption of what would have been a sea of people leaping into the air consumed by a singular desire to howl along with "One More Time" with intermittant dudes in black shirts and backwards-turned baseball caps unwilling to respond beyond nodding their heads in a show of Serious Appreciation; justice will only be served on the day that each and every one of these people get raped by a horse in front of their parents. There's also the not-insubstantial factor that the Sports Arena's soundsystem could be adequately described as "pathetic"; whereas the mids were crystal clear at Coachella, last weekend they sounded more or less as if the speakers had been tipped over onto the carcass of a grizzly bear. Yet while neither of these situations were ideal (to say the butt-fuckin' least), they're really just symptoms of the show rather than descriptors; I have a bunch of friends going to their show in Seattle, and I'm pretty sure they'll come back with a similar set of complaints.

No, what was missing from last Saturday's show was - if you'll pardon the pun - the element of discovery. People who only heard about Daft Punk throwing the bombest live shows in the history of bombitute through the internet's collective push to gush over their Coachella set rarely even hear about the fact that, until those tones from Close Encounters ambled out of the speakers, nobody in the audience had a fucking clue as to what to expect. After all, not only had Daft Punk not played live in something like six years, but they were fresh off releasing Human After All, an album I still consider earth-shakingly disappointing; it might have been overpoweringly improbable that they'd drop a set that would diminish Discovery or Homework in retrospect, but as anyone who saw New Order the year before could probably tell you, that certainly didn't eliminate the possibility that their set - their big, triumphant, return-to-form performance - might be really, really boring. Part of me still thinks that all the attendees' post-coital glow centered in large part around the fact that they just didn't suck - I mean, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but all fleeting moments of introspection that I took away from that set as it was in the process of being assembled in front of me all expressed sentiments like "Holy shit, am I actually enjoying Human After All?!"

It's also important to consider that in many ways, that Coachella set laid out a blueprint for how dance music might be able to present itself as a mass-market arena commodity. Their set, after all, wasn't a rave, which is a nice way of saying that it was in no way a simple pretext for people to take drugs and try to fuck each other; Daft Punk explicitly came to put on a show which would in no way compromise one's capacity to lose one's shit to the fullest extent physically available. Nobody - and I mean nobody - in that tent was turned to face their partner or some oblique light source or, really, anything except that pyramid. In retrospect, it's a pretty genius move if only because of the intractability at the heart of Daft Punk's music; songs like "Harder Better Faster Stronger" are events, not part of the diegetic soundtrack of your life. I kinda think that it's this aspect of their set which kept it at the forefront of my mind during the Great Justice Echoplex Annihilation of Dickety-Seven - just because the Ed Banger dudez' show might have been exponentially lower-tech (e.g. swapping out jaw-droppingly forbidding pyramid technology for the sight of Steve Aoki coming utterly unglued in front of God and Jesus and the Cobrasnake and everyone) didn't make it any easier to ignore, which kinda seemed like the point. "These guys", Daft Punk's set seemed to teach the crowd of rapturously eager students, "aren't here to soundtrack your night - these guys are your night until it just gets unbearable under those helmets."

Like I said, at the Sports Arena, this was pretty much common knowledge, and I feel pretty confident in saying that I'm not just interpreting the evening's festivities along my own perceptions when I say that. My first inkling came courtesy of the aforementioned assembled frat-bros; my second came when SebastiAn and Kavinsky took the stage for twenty minutes in between Ratatat's crushingly boring set and Daft Punk's, well, Daft Punkery and with the exception of the stragglers determined to have a Very Conspicuous Night of Fun and Dancing Which Involves Invading Neighbors' Space at all costs, the crowd all but stood at attention waiting for the preordained moment at which Daft Punk would take the stage and render it OK to become unhinged. Almost to an individual, these folks all conjured up the image of nothing so much as someone who's heard their friends (or, worse, their internet friends) spend the last fifteen months gushing about that time when they layered "Crescendolls" on top of "Around the World" and dude you just wouldn't believe it dude, which is fine if we're being fair (after all, the only way to have avoided it would have necessitated the whole world being able to fit under that tent last year) but, in practice, kinda left me feeling like I was about to be accused of plagarism for a paper I'd sweat bullets getting right. History has taught me that in situations like that, fairness can go fuck itself; the truth is that the Coachella set's spirit of HOLY SHITness is - was - gone forever, and any attempt to revisit it in the future would involve slamming into an impenetrable wall of scenefuckers. C'est la vie, as our robot overlords might say.

But that's the negative interpretation of the night's events, which, as anyone who saw me that night can tell you, in no way reflected the sheer transplendence of the amazing time I had. I danced so recklessly that by the time we filed out I practically looked like I'd just been birthed; I honestly can't think of another instance in my life where I actually managed to sweat all the way through a pair of blue jeans, for god's sake. Can you blame me? Last Saturday might not have been Coachella, but that doesn't make it any less enthrallingly awesome to find yourself in a crowd of tens of thousands of folks singing along to "Face To Face" - I mean, Johnny-come-latelys or not, that's still an impressive song for a whole crowd of otherwise presumably dance-apathetic Americans to know every word by heart. And don't get me started on the encore (an item lacking from their Coachella performance in the sorest of ways); I'm trying not to spoil it for the two people I know who read this blog and have plans to see 'em in Seattle, but let's just say that it was more than a little awesome to hear them annihilating Thomas Bangalter's remixes to cap off the hour they'd just spent doing the same to their collective work. Seriously, don't even get me started.

And anyway, the most revealing aspect of the night was such an uncompromisingly positive one that it's hard for EVEN ME to dwell on the negativity, by which I mean the degree to which the show was sold out. By "sold out", I hasten to add that this wasn't one of those "sold out" shows where half the arena's simply blacked out - I mean every seat had an ass in it and every square inch of floor space had someone laying claim to it. I saw kids who must have been in elementary school when Discovery came out rocking Daft Punk shirts and losing their shit under parental supervision up in the seats. I saw tens of thousands of people become anthropomorphic shrieks when the light show started to extend from the pyramid to the walls of the Arena. I saw idiots who bolted for the door before the encore on the receiving end of the kind of glares normally reserved for people who cut in line at the DMV. In short, I saw one hell of a show which, despite not being as awesome as one of the very best things at which I've ever pointed my eyes in the twenty-six years I've spent on this planet so far, kicked a ton of ass and took a ton of names despite coming to the one place on earth best equipped to turn its nose up at the proceedings, and came away without a single reason to consider their tour anything other than the live show with the best chance of being viable until the principle figures shuffle on off this mortal coil. I do believe I can live with that. (Click here to buy Discovery from Amazon.com if for some inexplicable reason you've managed to live your empty little life without it to this point)

The Rakes, "We Danced Together" (SebastiAn remix) - I freely admit that I was actually more excited to see SebastiAn (and to a lesser extent Kavinsky)'s set than Daft Punk's; for one, I'd seen the latter's show before (did I mention that yet?), and for another, I hear SebastiAn absolutely breaks his foot off in his audience's ass. Sadly, as previously detailed, this simply wasn't the case last weekend due to the LA equivalent of a swarm of bridge-&-tunnel folk, although these people came predictably (and, to be fair, quite justifiably) alive at the sound of his remix of Rage Against The Machine's "Bulls On Parade". Still, his set did an admirable job of showcasing the brute force of his approach - even playing his song selections relatively safe for the benefit of those present who'd never heard of dancing before Pitchfork admitted to hopping on the good foot for "We Are Your Friends", he still managed to pick a lineup of songs with a throughline of uncompromising physicality; all of his technical shortcomings as a DJ (and I'm specifically referring to the relative gracelessness of some of his transitions) were handily overcome by his gift to pick songs which hit you in the sternum with full force. He actually never played his mix of "We Danced Together", presumably because it's a slow loping beast and the order of the evening was an unalloyed footrace into an electro-disco singularity, but much to my neighbors' dismay I've been listening to it a whole lot ever since anyway. The contrast between Force and Not Force laid so elegantly bare by that One Big Sweeping Swelling Dropout about a minute into the song simply serves as far too tempting an allegory for the contrast between when SebastiAn was behind the decks and when he, for lack of a more precise term, wasn't; if the twenty minutes he spent onstage with some dude pretending to be an undead hotrodder are any indication, I need to see him live in a more intimate, less douchebag-filled environment in the worstest of ways. Of course, I'm sure he'll just end up playing, like, Cinespace one Tuesday night, although even that way at least I'll still get half of what I want. (Click here to buy the "We Danced Together" CDS from Amazon)

Celestial Choir, "Stand on the Word" (Larry Levan remix) - And fuck it, as long as I'm throwing up stuff that everyone reading this has already heard eleventy billion times, I figure I might as well throw up THE GREATEST SONG IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE, which Larry Levan's transcendent retooling of a gospel howler into an absolute weapon of ass destruction engineered to kick celebrations of secular debauchery into absolute overdrive. Oddly enough, this song seems to have gone at least formally uncanonized during the last few years' elevation of Levan from marginalized crusader into a full-stop canon-eradicating icon; I know it still gets dapped out by JD Twitch and Justice (seriously, if you can't hear the seeds of "D.A.N.C.E." in here, you wholeheartedly deserve the mediocrity to which you most assuredly attain), but "Stand on the Word" shows up on neither any of the last half-decade's Levan compilations nor even friggin' iTunes, and nobody on this world or any other has yet to give me a good reason as to why that might be. As such, it kinda feels like if this song is to survive - which it may well be doing; I may have never heard it at a club, but I freely admit that that and twenty bucks will get you a blowjob from a daytime hooker - it's got to do so on the strength of word of mouth, and I kinda like that; "Stand on the Word" is very much one of those songs which feels practically designed to be venerated as a sacred object, and the best way to go about that involves preaching to the choir, if you will. And I swear to anyone or anything to which you would ask me to swear that I'm not just posting this as an excuse to whip out my Cock of Wit - but you'll just have to give it a listen to make sure, won't you? (Juno somehow seems to have a few copies of this left in stock; I strongly urge you to click here and buy one.) (EDIT: Well, as usual I'm apparently an idiot; check the comments for details. I swear to you that Perpetua credited this to Levan when I copped it from Fluxblog eleven billion years ago, though. In any event, this in no way keeps me from calling it THE GREATEST SONG IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE.)

But But I I Was Was There There: Vampire Weekend @ the Troubadour, 7/16/07; The Field @ the MOR Bar, 7/19/07

2007-07-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

Ohmigod, shoes

Vampire Weekend, "Walcott" - I'd long since come to terms with the fact that Vampire Weekend were a pretty safe pick for the role of Indie-Rock Kids Who Come Clear Out Of Nowhere To Get Featured On Like Episodes Of The Office And Stuff for 2006, but until I made my way up to the Troubadour on Monday and saw a line nearly stretching from the ticket window to the (terrible and overpriced) Indian restaurant on the corner, I had no idea just how safe a bet it was. Unfortunately, as with any shit-hot indie band on the rise, the overwhelming preponderence of their fanbase at the moment consists of douchebags of the highest order, the kind of people who only take the shrinkwrapping off the box sets they buy to get their friends to stop pointing and laughing at them; I can safely guarantee you that if St. Kelefa hadn't written Vampire Weekend up, half the audience would have been disrupting their roommates' living-room conversations by plopping themselves down in the corner and breaking out the old guitar. And really, someone's gotta point it out: Vampire Weekend really couldn't be a more ideally-suited band for this particular breed of 'bag, not only musically (in a very real way, their sound might as well be lab-grown to appeal to everyone who grew up listening to Graceland but still wants to wave their indie-rock dick around), but sartorially; Jen spent the entire night flipping out over the entire non-rhythm section's decision to wear overpoweringly preppy uniforms right down to the matching topsiders (apparently a VERY SERIOUS OFFENSE or something), while I couldn't help but notice that I'd managed to get excited about a band whose drummer wears Phish t-shirts in public seemingly without even the most cursory trace of irony.

Luckily, none of this discounts them from being really, really good. When D. Wreck passed along a copy of their LP a few months ago, I will freely admit to being less-than-overwhelmed (or, at most, "whelmed"); what I heard was a bunch of songs which sounded like they needed about a quarter of their running time excised and a substantial amount of work put into tightening up their sound, and I just didn't see the point in anointing them Kings of NY Indie Up'N'Comers while the Harlem Shakes are still stomping around. Well, Monday night did a damn good job not just of illuminating just how much tighter their sound's gotten even over the last few months, but of how exceptional a gift these kids have when it comes to actually playing their songs, a rarer gift than you might think these days. I mean, at least in a live context they're so good at turning their songs into discrete total packages that their attempts at hooks almost grate, and as someone who lurves a good hook that's not something I say very often. And it's hardly a matter of being impressed by the technique at the heart of their deceptively convoluted song structures; "Walcott" is almost free from the polyrhythms and World Musicisms that go so far to define their sound, but oh my god did they ever pull it off live; this demo version really doesn't do justice to the sound those keys make when they're crashing so insistently right in front of you. I strongly suggest that you check out their show live if you get a chance - and make sure to get there early, too. (Click here to visit the band's homepage and buy the "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" single directly from them)

Annie, "Heartbeat" (The Field remix) - I have to admit to being more than a little disappointed by the Field's set at the MOR Bar in Santa Monica last night; I don't exactly know what I might have been expecting from a set of his, but "forty five minutes of nothing but his music" was pretty much the furthest thing from it. That's not to say that I had a bad time, of course - I defy the techno-loving World of Sense to have a bad time in any environment where "Sun & Ice" is playing, especially when the entire audience totally falls for the "record skip" towards the middle - but I tend to think of DJ sets as a chance for me to get some forced exposure to stuff I wouldn't have listened to otherwise, not recaps of stuff on which I've already come to a conclusion. Still, if nothing else last night ably demonstrated that the Field's aesthetic technique of suddenly yanking his songs out of abstraction has some serious dancefloor legs; whenever he'd introduce elements of concrete familiarity - the infamous Kate Bush sample, that cheesy guitar at the end of "A Paw In My Face", and most of all Annie's chorus as heard in the song accompanying this post - the crowd came alive, or at least as alive as a crowd of Westside Beautiful People can feasibly get. (Click here to buy From Here We Go Sublime from Insound)

Pete & the Pirates, "Come On Feet" - I have to admit that the most lasting impression surrounding Pete & the Pirates' Wait Stop Begin EP is probably going to end up being the note reading "AWESOME!!!!" which the mailing clerk at Insound decided to scribble onto the margin of my order slip; there are few dragons I chase with more determination than experiences with record-store customer service which actually manage to ratify my taste, and it's enormously reassuring to see that it won't necessarily be going the way of the dinosaur as the music-selling business moves out of the brick-and-mortars and into cyberspace (helloooooooo 2000!). Fortunately, whoever the mysterious "JW" might have been, he/she was devastatingly right, since if Pete & the Pirates are to be summed up in a word, "Awesome" suits just about as well as any; their EP isn't wholly consistent since they're such a young band, but their peak moments - the most immediately accessible of which is easily "Come On Feet" - are so flat-out invigorating that it's easy to forgive. I mean, we could sit here all day throwing out comparisons - Maximo Park, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the Wombats, etc etc etc - but any comparison would really just pale in comparison to these guys' readily-available gifts for pacing and inflection; just because they bump sonic elbows with a bunch of bands, after all, doesn't mean that they can't be awesome. Or, as the case may be, AWESOME!!!! (Click here to buy the Wait Stop Begin EP from Insound)

The Paper Cranes, "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" - Realize, gentle reader, that by describing the Paper Cranes as a hybrid of the Arcade Fire and the Cure, I'm characterizing them as a cross between my favorite band to make fun of and quite possibly my least favorite band in history (respectively). Of course, those descriptors flower into obviousness elsewhere on their debut EP Veins; lead single "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" seems almost completely free of both the vocal histrionics and the meticulous time signatures in comparison to the rest of the songs, instead choosing to ride a piano refrain which takes it dangerously, deliciously close to Dexy's Midnight Runners or even kinda Spoon-ish territory. Luckily for the band, one trait "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" does share with the rest of their output is an almost psychotic gift for getting stuck in one's head; they really could stand to tighten their rhythm section up (wow, twice in one blog entry! do I get a prize?) if only because the idioms in which they tend to operate increase in effectiveness in direct proportion to their rhythmic single-mindedness, but seriously, "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" is the standout track due to its structuring - in terms of songwriting, other songs on the Veins EP (particularly "Milkrun" and "Out On The Horse Tracks") match it, assuming they don't surpass it outright. You'd be smart to check it out before their album drops next month and people find themselves incapable of shutting up about them. (Click here to buy the Veins EP from Insound)

CATASTROPHIC CONTENT OVERLOAD: Mid-Year-Ish Awards Ish

2007-07-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

TADAO, BITCHES

Naturally you can go ahead and count on the rules being played with in both a fast and loose manner - I don't even want to think about how skimpy these lists would be if I actually restricted myself to 2007-only content. Instead, I'm going with the stuff that's made the biggest impression on me this year; please do not use your chloroform. And anyway, you're getting an assload of downloadable stuff out of this, so suck it up y0.

TOP FIVE ALBUMS
5. Voxtrot, s/t: As accurately forseen by yr boy, Voxtrot's solo LP seems to have receded from the consciousness of the hipsterverse already due to concerns about its "unevenness" and "lack of consistency" and all manner of other bullshit aphorisms people whip out whenever an album refuses to engage them on THEIR anointed terms. It's an understandable impulse, of course - Voxtrot is nothing if not a band which, on the surface, might as well exist to give you a holistic argument in favor of the continued viability of power-pop which seems almost custom-built for modern musical discourse, and I'm not going to act like I wouldn't have preferred their debut album if it had been twelve immaculate singles of the calibur of "Raised By Wolves" - but it's a totally, totally wrongheaded one as specifically pertains to the album they actually put out. I mean, even the most cursory look at Voxtrot's back catalogue makes it pretty clear that the open-armed sound of their music is more or less a smokescreen for the relentlessly incisive idiosyncrasy at work below the surface; isn't that a more productive aspect for a band to develop than whatever aesthetic flourishes the zeitgeist dictates sound attractive? It's certainly a conclusion borne out through Voxtrot's album; these days I tend to use it most frequently as a palate cleanser after a rigorous session of Steely Dan therapy (more on this later); you'd be shocked to discover just how much better Voxtrot sounds when you're already in the mindset of listening where you listen to music which in no way needs your permission to exist. (Voxtrot, "Introduction", from Voxtrot) (Click here to buy from Amazon)
4. Justice, †: As much as I hate to admit it, there's part of me that wonders how much higher this album would be if only Xavier had kept his mouth shut about his hardcore Christian beliefs; ever since the buzz started to build I've been nearly incapable of listening to † without trying to parse it like the Bible Code. It's a ridiculously unfair prejudice, of course, although in the specific case of † I think a lot of the knee-jerk aversion is tied more to fans having to eat a lot of crow w/r/t the interpretation of a lot of its signifiers - literally two days before the Pitchfork interview went up, I was reassuring a friend that all the cross iconography and titles like "Waters of Nazareth" were just cases of two dudes finding some outrageously exploitable symbolic material. After all, it's not like Xavier's been running around advocating blowing abortion clinics up or condemning gays to hell; the only real talking point he's put forward is that he's dead serious about his admiration for the bible, a statement which leaves plenty of semantic elbow room for the folks who can't or won't wrap their heads around the idea of, and I think I see a theme for the year emerging, music which reflects viewpoints other than their own. As for me, as long as Justice aren't endorsing the less-than-positive aspects of Christianity; I mean, fuck, it's not like I stopped listening to Arvo Part or George Harrison just because they got all God-y. And besides, on the big list of Christian Music I Have Been Hornswoggled Into Appreciating, † is about ten thousand lightyears better than anything Five Iron Frenzy ever released. As far as I'm concerned, it's biggest sin is the fact that I have to ctrl-c its title every time I want to bring it up. (Justice, "Phantoms Part II", from †) (click here to buy from Amazon)
3. Lil Wayne, Da Drought 3: As a more-or-less hip-hop dilettante - in other words, I can basically be counted on to have a pretty workable understanding of all the hip-hop which breaks through to the crowd which wouldn't otherwise be covering it, but when it comes to deep knowledge earned through years of careful, unguided study, I come off sounding like my little sister ("HEY JAMES THERE'S THIS BAND CALLED THE RADIO HEADS", etc) - I have to admit to a particular affinity for the rise in recent years of mixtapes which basically make the appeal of the mixtape format effortlessly obvious enough to be groked by even someone as dense as me. Tapes like We Got It 4 Cheap and Benzi's stuff and even arguably Dirty South Dance certainly don't have the market cornered when it comes to things like beat appropriation or turning commercially untenable content into art with the genuine capacity for popularity, but for whatever reason they simply seem to do a better job of foregrounding it for ears which otherwise wouldn't be trained to pick up on pleasures like those (i.e. ears like mine). Suffice it to say, Weezy's Da Drought 3 follows in this tradition admirably - some might even say to the point of damaging the overall product since, as much as I sincerely enjoy listening to it, I rarely make it all the way through both discs, but then again it's not like I reread The Brothers Karamazov all that often. (Lil Wayne, "We Takin' Over (remix)", from Da Drought 3) (note that there are two versions of Drought 3 going around; you want the earlier one with minimal input from DJ Khaled, which, if it wasn't freely available, was spread widely enough around filesharing spots to pass as such. Search out that one.)
2. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver: My guess is that, of all the albums released so far this year, LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver is the best bet for canonization; put simply, it codifies the appeal of dancepunk as adroitly and magnificently as Funeral summed up the Merge indie-as-fuck approach to songcraft a few years ago - in other words, it's the album to which the whole aesthetic category's been building since being established in the first place. Hopefully, people won't forget that that's emphatically not what makes Sound of Silver a great album; it may embody more of the genre's tropes in more effective ways than anyone else has even dreamed up yet, but there's still the little matter of pretty much every track on it with a running time of less than six minutes. No, what makes Sound of Silver great is everything else about it - I mean, is the greatness of "Us Vs. Them" or "Get Innocuous" in any way tied to the loose ends they effectively wraps up? Hell no - it's tied to their conception and execution, not some eminantly mutable conception of their context in the popular consciousness; a song as outstanding as "All My Friends" could probably have me screaming about its nature as an overpowering achievement if it were buried in the middle of the second half of a fucking Shins record. (LCD Soundsystem, "Us Vs. Them", from Sound of Silver) (click here to buy from Amazon)
1. The Field, From Here We Go Sublime: This time last year, the big issue was whether the Knife's Silent Shout might be minimal's answer to Discovery. The answer, of course, was a resounding "no"; unlike Discovery, Silent Shout in no way makes the genre of minimal any more accessible, a point made devastatingly evident by my sustained lack of engagement with the whole genre of minimal outside of a few singles until The Field's From Here We Go Sublime dropped from the heavens earlier this year. I hasten to add that I'm not suddenly awash in a sea of Villalobos and Eulberg tracks or anything - even I don't have enough time to suss out the virtues of one sample of a Chilean marching band being looped for half an hour - but thanks to the Field's stunningly accomplished efforts, I can at least say that I've got an idea of what to look for if I were so inclined to dig deeper; if nothing else, From Here We Go Sublime does an outstanding job of laying the hows and whys of the genre's effectiveness bare thanks to the elegantly-assembled textural studies and Willner's supernatural gift for disrupting them in the most viscerally immediate fashion imaginable. And then, of course, there's the way the title track gives way to the Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes For You" as the album melts to a close; the potentiality for moments with that kind of earth-shaking brute force makes a better case for minimal's existence in the first place than anything anyone could possibly write about it, myself happily included. (The Field, "From Here We Go Sublime", from From Here We Go Sublime) (click here to buy from Amazon)

(Honorable mention: White Rabbits, Fort Nightly; Chung King, Stay Up Forever; Papercuts, Can't Go Back)

TOP FIVE SINGLES
5. Bloc Party, "I Still Remember" (Lull's Music Box & Tears mix): Given (1) my unyielding love for dreamy, elegant pop music and (2) Bloc Party's undeniable knack for penning melodies which suit that first point like a glove, I see this track as more of an eventuality than anything else - I mean, really, Lull just kinda beat everyone else to the punch more than anything else. But uh WOW did he ever beat everyone to every punch with regards to this particular matter; they do a better job of harnessing the song's orchestral sweep here than Jacknife Lee managed anywhere else on the album, and it's not like Jacknife Lee's some yutz off the street when it comes to coaching a track to its schmaltziest form. Easily the prettiest thing and inarguably one of the, like, three or five best artifacts as judged by any criteria to come from the whole Bloc Party project to date; this is pretty enough to rub elbows with the Flying Pickets' cover of "Only You". (Click here to buy the "I Still Remember" CDS from HMV)
4. Lil Wayne, "We Takin' Over" (remix) - I can't lie and say there aren't aspects of the original version of this that I miss - Akon's hysterics, a few more minutes with That Motherfucking Beat, a chance to hear non-"Rubber Band Man"/"What You Know" T.I. without immediately mulling over my options for other things to which I could be listening - but come on; Weezy's solo version is simply too sleek/liquid-sounding/quotable to give the nod to anything else. I mean, it's plenty awesome for plenty of reasons which have nothing whatsoever to do with what it sounds like - if nothing else, he picked a hell of a track in which to address the whole Birdman-kissing brouhaha; let's not even get into the - but it's been my experience that the half-life for that stuff's ability to prove compelling can't hold a candle to stuff like "Great Scott/Storch, can I borrow your yacht?", a phrase I'm still trying (and failing) to work into everyday conversation.
3. Herbert, "Moving Like A Train" (Smith N Hack remix): YEAH YEAH YEAH, 2006 I KNOW SHUT UP. For all my talk about good teaching tools for the charms of minimal up there in the Field blurb, I have to admit that Smith N Hack's work on the remix might actually be a more adroit - if less expansive in its authority - statement than anything on it; unlike From Here We Go To Sublime, which occasionally borders on sensory overload, this is minimal music which doesn't need any explication as to just how it came to be described as "minimal". Since its variations are so subtle and relatively nondynamic, it keeps moving forward apparently propelled solely by the insistence of that infuriatingly involving beat, which is AWESOME; as someone who spent a good two years proudly listening to the gloopiest, most manipulative trance music the world had to offer (holla @ Gabriel & Dresden!), my reserve of good things to say about the mileage Smith N Hack get out of their artfully conceived austerity on this track is damn near limitless. Bonus points for single-handedly obliviating the need for "Fizheuer Zieheuer", too. (Click here to buy it from Boomkat, assuming they ever get any more stock in)
2. Hot Chip, "My Piano": In which Hot Chip take seven minutes to call dibs on the top spot on the Big List Of Incredibly Stupid Bands. I mean, you're just going to give a track as good as "My Piano" away to some mix-CD series? You're not going to hang onto it for your album? Even though it's like one of the three or four best songs you've ever done? You're not going to play it live even though the part played on the piano in question practically sounds like it was engineered in a lab to wreck a house full of people ready to dance? Really? I mean, I guess I shouldn't be too worried given how well their new songs seem to be coming together, but wow. Just wow. (Click here to buy the "My Piano" 12" from Juno)
1. Explorer's Club, "Forever": Still the best 60s pastiche I've heard since either Johnny Boy's "You Are The Generation Who Appreciates Long Song Titles" or the Solution's "I Have To Quit You", and those are not songs I base comparisons on lightly. Fun fact: I missed the Explorer's Club's first LA show due to the fact that Beck decided to use it as a platform for yet another one of his infernal goddamned "secret shows", which by this point get publicized so widely that they might as well be called by their real name, "Scientology Recruitment Events". The moral, as always: fuck Beck up one side and down the other, unless of course he happens to be playing "Debra" or "Sexxlaws" or "Lost Cause", three undeniably good songs which are each desperately inferior to "Forever" in their own unique way. (Physical copies of the "Forever" single are long gone, but you can still buy their outstanding debut EP through iTunes. Also MAKE SURE you listen to "Last Kiss" on their MySpace page - if there were even a whiff of an album out of these guys, they'd be making another appearance in this post.)

(Honorable mention: Justice, "D.A.N.C.E."; Lil Wayne, "La La La"; 50 Cent, "She Want It" (feat. Justin Timberlake & Timbaland)

TOP FIVE DISCOVERIES
5. The Wedding Present: I've been searching for years for a mid-80s jangle-pop band that I could really call my own - I gave everyone from Orange Juice to the Jesus & Mary Chain to the Fire Engines a shot, only to walk away with the opinion that I'd wasted my time on something too unrefined or too tuneless or too shitty (respectively). As you can imagine, then, the Wedding Present might as well have dropped from on high right into my lap; with the exception of a few traces of that heroically unfortunate 80s compressed-drum sound, this stuff could not only pass for modern, but surpass most modern stuff even by contemporary songwriting mores. Not that any of this is news to anyone who ever checked out the Wedding Present before me, by which I of course refer to anyone with two shreds of sense in their heads to rub together. (The Wedding Present, "Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft", from George Best Plus)
4. The Shivvers: So my copy of Lost Hits from Milwaukee's First Family of Power Pop finally showed up and HEY! Turns out the Shivvers were kinda sorta the best band ever, or at least certainly good enough to to earn the lofty status of #4 on the list of Great Things I Has Discovered This Half-Year; these are simply accolades your band can expect to receive from shut-in dorks like me when you can come up with a whole disc's worth of songs in the neighborhood of being as awesome as "No Reaction" (although that little gem still unsurprisingly stands head and shoulders above the rest of the songs - seriously, if y'don't know, now y'know). It's also worth noting that Lost Hits includes a buttload of live recordings which make it devastatingly obvious that this band could out-and-out play; I would have most certainly included one of them for download had "No Substitute" not been such a glorious monument to awesomeness. Seriously though, America Of Twenty-Five Or Thirty Years Ago - y'all dropped the ball in a big-ass way. (The Shivvers, "No Substitute", from Lost Hits from Milwaukee's First Family of Power Pop)
3. William Basinski: As someone who (a) writes a lot of reviews intended to judge how worthwhile a purchase an album might be when I'm either getting it for free or downloading it and (b) isn't afraid to make Mike Powell hate me by getting all meta with my reviews, I constantly find myself wrapped up in the debate over the viability of buying music. After all, the argument goes, how can I possibly say I'm engaging with this stuff when I don't even have to open my wallet - let alone leave my house - to get it? As a result, I've found myself taking a lot more chances where I buy albums out of blind faith in the restorative powers of the commercial cycle; more often than not, I wind up looking like a dunce with a copy of Japan's Tin Drum on my shelf, but every so often I do strike it rich. Q.E.D., I guess, William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, without exception the single best, most accomplished piece of music I've bought since picking up Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians on a whim last year, not to mention one which, practically by the conditions of access it creates for itself, might as well be inexhaustible. The big hook for the Disintegration Loops, if you hadn't heard, is that they're a recording of some old decaying tape loops Basinski had been processing the morning of September 11th, 2001, a fact which leads a lot of listeners to check them out in the hopes of the experience being even a little transferable. It's not, of course, and if Stylus ever fucking posts the huge-ass essay I wrote for them it'll make a better case than I'd be able to do in this space while waiting for Bossa Nova to drop off my dinner, but this turns out to be irrelevant anyway since the Loops are just such a pretty way to fill sonic space. More importantly, they're also an excellent introduction to Basinski's m.o., and although I still haven't found anything in his catalogue which compares to the first disc (of four - this shit is not for weak-hearted dilettantes!) of the Loops, it's been a genuine pleasure investigating his work. (Since Basinski's best pieces tend to run between twenty and sixty minutes in length, I'm not posting any of them; I'm buttfucking my bandwidth enough with this post already, and anyway his stuff deserves to be heard via actual physical copies to preserve every minute variation. I highly reccomend poking around his site and picking up whatever catches your ear, or, at the very leastest point of leastliness, picking up the first disc of The Disintegration Loops; if you've ever had even a split second of appreciation for Brian Eno's Music For Airports, you owe it to yourself to move on this.)
2. Steely Dan: For years, Steely Dan was a favorite target of mine, partially due to the Michael McDonald Factor and partially due to the fact that "Hey Nineteen" can most sincerely eat my ass. Well, for whatever reason, I decided to give Aja another shot a few months ago and more or less haven't been able to shake it since. Not that I'd want to, of course - it took about three listens before I realized that the laws of thermodynamics really couldn't get me to Amoeba quickly enough to hand someone money for it, which is of course the ultimate test of any album's quality. It's just such paralyzingly rewarding music; I can't remember the last artist I discovered who made me feel downright virtuous for enduring their songs long enough to "solve" them. And better yet, with the Dan, that solution never feels like the end point in a journey; even once I realized that songs like "I Got The News" were all about delaying gratification instead of simply overpowering you with unmistakable awesomeness right from the jump, I still keep coming back just to savor the moment of realizing it all over again. Now that is a good band, not that it means that "Hey Nineteen" can eat my ass any less. (Steely Dan, "I Got The News", from Aja)
1. Evie Sands: Steely Dan is, of course, "better" than Evie Sands in almost every appreciable, quantifiable way, but I'll be damned if I can possibly let anyone else perch atop a list of recent musical discoveries that I've made. Aja, after all, might as well have been lying in wait for me (or really anyone who takes an interest in the usage of the studio as an instrument) to stumble over it, but Any Way That You Want Me and Estate of Mind would have never had a hope in hell had I not made a covenant with myself to spend the everliving fuck out of the paycheck I earn through my seedy, disreputable, demeaning job on all manner of shit intended to provide the most instantaneous variety of gratification. I mean, this is a woman who proudly advertises - advertises! - herself as a folkie and draws comparisons to Barbara Streisand and James Taylor; under ordinary circumstances I'd rather cook one of my own turds and eat it than listen to anything described thusly. To that extent, Evie was nothing less than an outright discovery for the ages, because in spite of all her contextual baggage I cannot for the life of me stop listening to her album (Any Way That You Want Me in particular stands out as being a more enjoyable record to listen to than anything released this year) or attempting to get others to do the same. Basically, the thing I discovered was that I was dead wrong; I just never expected being wrong to sound so right. (Evie Sands, "A Woman's Work Is Never Done", from Estate of Mind. I strongly urge you to check out Any Way That You Want Me as well, although I think it stands up better as a whole than by any individual track - well, except for the incomparable "But You Know I Love You", of course.)

(Honorable mentions: Sneakers, Shoes, Portishead, Terry Riley, Lil Wayne)

TOP FIVE MOST ANTICIPATED (sadly no mp3s for these - hey, if I had the music readily at hand, I wouldn't be anticipating it, would I?)
5. The end of Jacques Lu Cont's tiresome stint as Madonna's tour DJ: Fuck Madonna. Madonna is shitty and boring, and in my less charitable moments (which are both many in number and frightening in their acerbic nature) I frequently invoke fandom of her music as a conversation-endingly revealing character flaw, and I would have said all of these things before she decided to snatch up one of the single most reliable dance-music auteurs working today for her own selfish benefits. I mean, I can't front like Disco Stuart hasn't been turning out shit-hot fire for her or anything; "Hung Up" is good enough that even I like it, although predictably enough I prefer his extended dub which features as little Madonna as possible. Still, though, even as I type this sentence he could be hanging silk purses from the ears of indie sows, or maybe refining his DJing technique to improve on his quite-fun-but-would-have-been-better-in-a-fairer-world Fabric mix CD, or (O PLEASE JESUS) actually producing an album for a band who could genuinely use the stylistic kick in the ass to come up with better music (read: he should be producing the Killers' next album, and presumably all of their subsequent ones as well). Or, fuck, he should just be sitting on his ass at home playing with a cup-and-ball; basically he should just be doing anything other than working with shitty stupid intellectually-untenable fake-British less-musically-interesting-than-Paris-fucking-Hilton Madonna, if only so that I can start ignoring her full-stop. LIKE SHE DESERVES.
4. Annie, untitled LP: Well, okay, let me refine that a little bit: Annie, the Richard X songs from her untitled, unreleased LP. I mean, I like Annie, but I'm not exactly one of her cult members or anything; she's an interesting enough instrument of blankness, but eh, I'm nowhere near done with Rachel Stevens' last album as far as shoring that particular need up, so w/e. By contrast, I am motherfucking Tom Cruise and John Travolta and That Exceedingly Hot Chick From King Of Queens all rolled into one in relation to Richard MF'n X; even after an alarming period of relative dormancy, he could still show up on my doorstep with an e-meter and I'd probably just hand him my bank card reflexively. And when he works with Annie, I mean whoa, seriously, look out; even if - if - "Me Plus One" weren't as infectious as the Hanta virus, the sheer force of the residual goodwill from "Chewing Gum", arguably the archetypal modern throwbacky synthpop track, would still have me on board with the whole idea of these two gettin' the band back together. And I would have said that before I'd heard they were teaming up for a cover of "Two Of Hearts", too. Seriously, the world is poorer for the lack of this record's existance - I can't even imagine how much of a bath 679 Records must have taken on Anniemal to keep her new one locked away like this.
3. Escort, untitled LP: So the nine-piece disco ensemble known for working with the Metro Area crew and boasting arguably the best sustained run of singles in the game today is putting together an album, huh? YES PLZ.
2. Hot Chip, untitled LP: As previously discussed, this absolutely, positively cannot fail. Well, unless they decide to give "Ready For A Fall" away like they did with "My Piano" (SERIOUSLY WTF).
1. Black Leotard Front, untitled LP: When I interviewed James Murphy - have I mentioned that I interviewed James Murphy? Because I interviewed James Murphy - a while back, I was literally five seconds away from wrapping up my interview (with James Murphy) with a series of hard-hitting questions as to just what the fuck Delia & Gavin might possibly be getting up to which could prove in any way to be an ass-hair's width as satisfying as a prospective Black Leotard Front album, especially since word on the skreet is that they'd already laid down one track (called something like "(Hey Coach) I Read Your Diary", for the benefit of you lazy slskrs) which was just as expansive and just as unremittingly funky as "Black Leotard Front", a peak previously thought to be insurmountable. Unfortunately, the label poo-bah chose that moment to jump in and end the interview before I even got a chance to ask, leaving me with no choice but to disappoint my readership as to the status of what promised to be the single greatest release in the history of the DFA. Le sigh. Oh well. Guess I'll just have to file that one away for my next interview. With James Murphy. Who I interviewed.

AND THERE YOU FUCKING GO. That's like eighty megs of music for YOU, gentle reader; now git offa mah lawn.

But I Was There: The Long Blondes @ the Echo, 6/15/07; Hot Chip @ the Henry Fonda, 6/13/07

2007-07-04T15:16:00.001-07:00

Sorry, Ms. Jackson, but I am for real

The Long Blondes, "Five Ways To End It" - Ever since the Arcade Fire broke (relatively) huge a couple of years ago, there's been a lot of talk about "record-collection rock", a blanket description for a wildly disparate group of subgenres which all operate under the perfectly reasonable assumption that their audience isn't missing a single reference. Like most blanket descriptions, it's more or less useless; not only does it extend far beyond rock at this point (We Got It 4 Cheap, anyone?), but more often than not it doesn't even have anything to do with either the audience's or the artists' respective musical histories. Is, for instance, Neon Bible a more enjoyable record when you're able to parse it down to its influences? Can you enjoy Beach House without ever having heard a Nico record? Is there any substance to From Here We Go To Sublime beyond the deciphering of its samples? The answer to all of these questions, of course, is a big, unironic HELL YES; I could more or less give copies of each of those records to my mom and she'd more than likely be able to discern the appeal of each of them without a whole lot of effort (not that she'd necessarily like them, of course - my mom may be cool, but I can't really see her digging into the Kompakt aesthetic too willingly). Ironically, the Long Blondes rarely get classified alongside records like these despite being the referential peer of any of them; more often than not, they just get tarred with the same Nu Britpop brush that's been applied to everyone from the Guillemots to the Futureheads simply because they share the same aesthetic. Needless to say, I see things differently - I see the Long Blondes as the most explicitly (and certainly the most effectively) allusive band working today with the possible exception of LCD Soundsystem. And last month, I got proof. Twice.

As you can probably infer from the title of this post, one of those forms of proof was their show at the Echo, a show which, but for an encounter with a buncha Frenchies a few weeks earlier, would have run away with the title of best show I've seen this year and never come back. To say that the Long Blondes understand their fanbase is an understatement of historic proportions; I've seen millionaire televangelists preach to their flock with a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the implicit understanding that the Blondes - and especially Kate Jackson - demonstrated that Friday night. I hasten to add that they didn't necessarily have the whole crowd eating out of their hand; Los Angeles being the way that it is, whenever some buzzworthy British band shows up to do a show, at least a quarter of the crowd is going to consist of (1) industry fuckers approaching the event as an excuse to do some tax-deductible drinking and (2) scenester turds who'll all hopefully break their backs in the shower and starve to death from the resulting neglect some day, and this show was no exception. The difference, however, was obvious in everyone else - in the way they sang along with every line to their favorite songs, or the way they broke out in rapturous applause whenever Jackson set herself apart through a moment of divinely inspired howling, or, most tellingly, the way they recognized even the most obscure b-sides within a few bars. I mean, before that night I wasn't sure anyone else in Los Angeles had ever even heard "Fulwood Babylon", but I'll be damned if the crowd didn't outright erupt as soon as Jackson started hissing about people thinking she was being perverse on purpose. Well done, Los Angeles. Back of the net.

BUT, and this is important, the river does run both ways - it's very clear that the Long Blondes are just as cognizant of their audience as their audience is of them. Most bands touring in support of their recently-released album tend to play as much of that album as they can possibly manage to fit into their allotted time onstage; this way they get to reinforce the superiority of everyone in the audience who's already heard it while offering up an enticing taste for all the newbies who've just heard a song or two on the radio. They'll also tease their big songs, arranging them into sets which play to a different energy than the albums from which they're culled to make the experience seem distinct from the one offered up by the record; this is why Franz Ferdinand used to (and may still - I dunno) close their shows with "Darts of Pleasure". The Blondes, on the other hand, were having none of that shit; blessed with an awareness of how their songs work on their audiences, they put together a set stuffed full of b-sides (although it would be unethical to point out that some of these b-sides, including "Five Ways To End It", made it onto the bonus disc of the American release of Someone To Drive You Home) arranged to elicit the same effect that they would at at home or in the car - opening their set with "Lust In The Movies", using "You Could Have Both" as the anchor of the latter half of the collected songs, etc. It helps, of course, that they all turned out to be just as good at playing those songs as their records had promised - seriously, Jackson's voice could fill an empty room and still keep oozing through the cracks in the siding - but it was clear from note one that the sine qua non for their capacity to play as well as they did in the first place was their recognition of their songs' withering effectiveness on an audience who'd acquainted themselves with the process of losing their shit to them.

Well, actually, that's not quite the whole truth, which brings me to the second form of proof of their incomparability afforded to me last month. A few days before they showed up to raze the Echo to the ground, I was lucky enough to interview Jackson for a feature in the Rockit (which just went up a few days ago - dig in), which more or less confirmed every preujudice I'd already entered into with regards to the Long Blondes. For one, it turns out Jackson really is the single most intoxicatingly alluring woman on the face of the earth, just not in the way I'd been expecting - over the phone, every shred of the carefully-cultivated, immaculately-manicured edge she projects in her music morphs into the most confoundingly charming concoction of articulate forthrightness and good-humored self-effacingness imaginable. I mean, I might as well have interviewed Pam from The Office, only Pam wouldn't hang up the phone and begin dropping note-perfect intonations about the tenability of happy endings. More to the point, however, Jackson might have been the canniest subject I've ever interviewed, a statement which doesn't cover much time but does include both Al P from MSTRKRFT and James motherfucking Murphy, two dudes who most emphatically know how to do the D.A.N.C.E. with inquisitive music critics. I don't think I asked her a single question for which she didn't seem to have an elegantly-couched response, a result I'll acknowledge owes a substantial debt to the fact that I'm hardly the first stuttering dork to ask her about what it's like being from Sheffield as long as I'm able to get the point across that holy crap does this lady ever understand the conditions of her band's commercial existence. There were moments when I legitimately wondered whether I was simply playing Jeff Gannon (er, minus all the dude-fucking) to her Dubya.

The more I think about it, though, that might just be the whole point of the Long Blondes as an artistic endeavor. As bizarre as this is going to sound coming from someone who's spent the last eight months screaming at everyone in earshot about the virtues of a band that name-checks Scott Walker as a totem of self-enforced loneliness, I'm starting to think that the touchstones which make up so much of the Blondes' body of work aren't really the primary sites of identification for their audience - rather, it matters less that they invoke Arlene Dahl effectively than the fact that they invoke her in the first place. After all, the only thing over which the crowd at the Echo was bonding was the presence of the Long Blondes; the band's insanely nuanced references might have gotten their foot in the door, but it was their immaculate conception of their own specific brand of art that got that crowd going berzerk. Take, for instance, their inclusion of "Five Ways To End It" in their set: given both its relative obscurity and the degree to which Erol Alkan's production played a role in the effectiveness of the original, they'd have been completely forgiven if they'd just chosen to play something else instead. But no; during my interview Jackson kept insisting on "Five Ways" as one of her favorite songs to perform due to both how much she enjoyed performing it and her simple, fan-ish appreciation for the way the synths swirled all over the track, and by the time she got done performing it for the crowd at the echo, you'd have been hard-pressed to find anyone who'd have disagreed with her. Ever since then, I've been thinking that maybe that's the secret of effective record-collector rock, then: it's not so much about knowing who else is on your audience's shelves so much as knowing for damn certain that you're in the mix and in no danger of being replaced. (Click here to buy the American edition of Someone To Drive You Home, which includes a bonus disc featuring four of the Alkan-produced b-sides, from Amazon)

Hot Chip, "Ready For A Fall" (Live at Bonnaroo, 6/15/07) - Believe me, I'm as surprised as you to see the B-word mentioned on this site; you've got my word that if there were any other proof of this song's existence (especially a better recording of it), I'd gladly be using it instead. But oh well - having heard some of the songs performed live, I feel pretty safe in reporting that Hot Chip's forthcoming album damn well ought to be the best album of whatever year in which it ends up being released. I mean, their live show is incredibly good and they certainly do know how to switch up their songs for a live audience (at the risk of spoiling their show for anyone who hasn't caught it yet, don't be surprised if you walk out with a renewed appreciation for New Order's "Temptation") and holy HELL can the little guy sing, but c'mon; the news of the day was the fact half of their set consisted of new stuff, and all of it sounded atrociously great. All of it, however, bowed down to "Ready For A Fall", a song I would have no problem calling Hot Chip's best song ever if I weren't a little gunshy after dropping that same tag on "My Piano" just a few weeks before (not that I'm necessarily wrong, mind you - "My Piano" is fucking TREMENDOUS). As with all the best Hot Chip Songs Ever, it comes down to the Chip's apparent ability to seemingly flip a switch and have their song absolutely roar to life; I'm a big fan of their Stone Grooves, Maaaaan like "Boy From School" and "From Drummer To Driver", but I'm an exponentially bigger fan of their more thrilling moments, like the bit on "Over and Over" where the drums kick in on the chorus or when That Bassline first pokes its head out on "Playboy", so it's probably not too surprising that "Ready For A Fall", which contains arguably the most emphatically devastating moment of OH SHIT HERE COMES THE WHOLE SONG-ness in their entire catalogue. Again, the recording is not the greatest here; you'll have to endure a fair amount of hooting hippies for a while and the band comes across as kinda muffled, but stick with it; you'll wind up with a pretty damn good idea of what I'm talking about. I mean, we're talking about a song good enough to force me to acknowledge the existence of Bonna-fucking-roo here; this is clearly unimaginably crucial territory for you to explore. I seriously cannot wait to give someone money for this album. (Click here to visit Hot Chip's homepage, or click here to buy The Warning from Amazon.com if you're the last dumbass on earth who doesn't own it already.)

Della Humphrey, "Dream Land" - In what I can only conceive of as a direct response to my bragging about my ability to decipher the musical metatext of Soul Jazz' Studio One reggae compilations, a while back the label put out Studio One Women, quite possibly the most misleading title in the history of the series. It's a million miles away from bad, naturally, but most of it turned out to be traditional reggae, which of course is perfectly
fine but just not my personal cup of tea; I vastly prefer the kind of reggae which makes an effort to employ the kind of commercial strategies which could have earned its exemplars playtime on American radio, so I'd been hoping for Studio One Women to have featured a couple of dusty old gems in the vein of Susan Cadogan or Dawn Penn and, unsurprisingly, never really made it very far into the record. Luckily for me, I'm both lazy and an idiot, and as a consequence of my half-assed attitude towards streamlining the contents of my iPod found "Dream Land" popping up randomly one night, only to be repeated roughly eighty squillion times since. It still barely sounds like American music, of course - I guess you can kinda hear echoes of songbirds like, I 'unno, Dusty Springfield in the clarity of Mrs. Humphrey's voice, but the song itself is such a stuttering, loping little jaunt that it's hard to imagine it catching Berry Gordy's ear. This is mostly due to the song's distinctive dynamic - after all, for a song that barely cracks the two-and-a-half minute mark, it sure takes its sweet time in getting to the chorus - but just as much due to the stripped-down sound; aside from Humphrey's vocals, the only instrument really on display here is arguably that twangy guitar. But it's more than enough; when traditional reggae's firing on all cylinders, it doesn't need to be showy; it can rely on the logic of its trademark arrangements to carry the day, and lord knows that's precisely what happens here. Seriously, just give this a shot. (Click here to buy Studio One Women from Amazon.com)