Five Old-Ass Songs

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)

So Some Music Happened

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)