Archive for December, 2006

Gruff Rhys "Candylion" - This is a far cry from the Super Furry Animals' high water mark "The Man Don't Give A Fuck" -- it barely rocks at all, lacks profanity and Steely Dan samples entirely, and is awash in a sea of whimsy rather than piss and vinegar. (Whimsy smells better, sorta like strawberries and laundry.) "Candylion" is basically straight up, totally unapologetic children's music, and pushes Rhys' penchant for gentle acoustic lullabies to a logical extreme of cuddliness. The lyrics are full of charming nonsense, but it's not nearly as twee as it seems on the first listen -- there's a subtle and somewhat inexplicable darkness to the song, even in its most sunny and harmonic moments. (Click here to buy it from Amazon UK.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site with mp3s from Simian Mobile Disco, Luke Vibert, and the Specific Heats.

The New Pornographers "Dreams (Live @ Webster Hall 10/12/2005)" - The band sounds a bit under-rehearsed and Neko Case giggles her way through a few lines, but it's still a treat to hear the New Pornographers tackle this Fleetwood Mac classic. The arrangement plays it faithful and straightforward, and the emphasis is placed on Neko's voice, which already sort of resembled that of Stevie Nicks. Some cover selections reveal hidden influences, but this highlights the obvious in the most pleasurable way, and comes off as a sort of fanboy fantasy crossing over into reality. (Click here to buy it from the New Pornographers' store.)

Elsewhere: Slate's Dana Stevens is right on the money about Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men. I agree with most everything that she has to say, though I'd like to add that if there has been a better science fiction film made in the past twenty years, I certainly never heard about it.

James Brown "Cottage For Sale" - James Brown's greatest gift to the world was his ability to express an undiluted yet highly stylized sexuality via a funk so intense and visceral that it served as the foundation for entire genres of music, but that was not the limit of his talent, only just the summit of his achievements. His performance on the standard "Cottage For Sale" is a perfect example of his fearlessness as a vocalist -- whereas most everyone who has recorded the tune has done so with a mannered stiffness that is far too polite and aloof for a song expressing such great sorrow and regret, Brown presented the lyric with a robust, wounded humanity that absolutely nailed its sentiment without any trace of over-emoting. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Elsewhere: Six years ago yesterday, Douglas Wolk (the author of the Live At The Apollo book in the 33 1/3 series and all-around awesome guy) recorded this six-hour all-James Brown radio show for WFMU. If you were only slightly familiar with the man's work, that archived program would be a wonderful place to begin.

Shrag "Stop The Revelry" - Set to a tacky, cheap sounding track that seems as though it was made to evoke bad Christmas music and cheap holiday junk, Helen Shrag sings an anti-Christmas carol about a character who must suffer through the day alone with a family that she loathes, and without booze to "block out all the misery." Delightful holiday misanthropy! (Click here for the Shrag MySpace page.)

Ed Shepp "Scenes From A Life: A Lonely Christmas" - Christmas may be a lovely time for many people, but being forced to bask in the glow of other's joy and togetherness can drag less fortunate people down into the darkest depths of despair. In this clip, WMFU radio personality Ed Shepp tells the story of the most miserable Christmas of his life. (Click here for the Ed Shepp Radio Experiment archives, which include several recent Christmas episodes.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site and features holiday themed mp3s from the Where Will You Be Christmas Day? compilation and the Mary Timony Band, plus the Christmas miracle that is "Santa Claus Is A Black Man."

Evanescence "Call Me When You're Sober" - It won't be long before my ballots for both the Jackin' Pop and Pazz & Jop critic polls will be available online, and so I figured now might be a good time to preemptively explain how this Evanescence song ended up on both of my singles ballots in spite of never being mentioned on this site ever. I did write about the Evanescence record for Urge, but I'm probably correct in guessing that most of you never read that, though maybe that will change once they start putting the blogs on the Urge site rather than just having them embedded in an online store that can only be read if you have the current Windows Media Player on your computer.

I'm probably also correct in assuming that even though "Call Me When You're Sober" ranks among the biggest rock hits of 2006, a majority of the people reading this either actively avoid any mainstream outlet for rock music (this is generally not a bad call if you live in North America) or tuned this out if they have heard it for, among other potential reasons, the simple fact that it is a song by Evanescence. I'm not going to front -- it took two years or so for my feeling about them to shift from initial disdain to benign indifference by the time "My Immortal" was a crossover hit, and so I can understand why a person may have a problem with a Christian rock band that sounds more or less like Tori Amos and Tool collaborating on a musical theatre production of a semi-goth teenage girl's livejournal.

I'm still not particularly fond of their previous album, and I suppose my new fondness for them is tied in with the fact that the band's songwriting is now dominated by singer Amy Lee, and that Ben Moody, the chief architect of Fallen, is long gone. That guy's tendency for the maudlin and the bloated weighed down several otherwise catchy numbers from that record, and though the new songs stick with the enormous, melodramatic sound that made them rich, the arrangements seem far more agile and lithe.

"Call Me When You're Sober," their best song and the lead single from The Open Door, is an immense power ballad that harnesses their heavy dirge riffs and penchant for extreme dynamic shifts in service of a powerhouse vocal performance by Lee that reveals her to be Kelly Clarkson's nearest peer in contemporary rock music. It's a perfectly constructed and highly effective song, especially in the way it pulls the listener into its emotional reality whether you relate to the tough love break-up scenario in its lyrics or not. I certainly can't identify on a literal level, but the words and the music ring so true that it seems to be tapping into something archetypal like few other hits from this year. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Phoenix "Napoleon Says" - The other night, I was coming home a bit drunk (this is pretty rare!) from a Christmas party, and I made a note to myself that I should write about this song because, I don't know, it just sounded really awesome at that moment. Maybe something similar happened to roughly half of the staff at Pitchfork too, because the album from which it is taken has somewhat inexplicably placed in the top 15 of their year-end albums list for 2006. Inexplicable because I know a lot of those people and didn't realize they were fans; inexplicable because I don't recall the publication giving Phoenix much flattering coverage in 2006; inexplicable because, let's face it, it's not their best album and it's placing seventeen slots ahead of Belle & Sebastian's The Life Pursuit, and that actually IS their best album, and by a considerable margin.

I've spent most of this year stuck in my own weird, withholding relationship with It's Never Been Like That. I've never disliked the music though I can't get over the way it totally hits a wall in its final third, which is sort of ironic given that the last three songs on Alphabetical represent the peak of their career to date. It would be difficult for me to overstate how much I love Alphabetical -- I really do think it's one of the best albums from this decade, and it kinda sucks that it never actually found the sizeable audience of grown-up pop fans that it deserves. I'm not sure what I wanted them to do next, but at least initially, everything aside from the somewhat Alphabetical-ish lead single "Long Distance Call" wasn't it, though it all sorta fits together in hindsight. They couldn't keep going in that Timberlake-meets-Steely Dan mode without seeming repetitive, and applying their pristine aesthetic and carefully calculated arrangements to post-Strokes rock was a sensible creative choice, not to mention a more commercial avenue for them given that no matter how deeply un-indie their music got, they were invariably marketed to indie rock people.

Ultimately, the staying power and general appeal of It's Never Been Like That is the same as its predecessors, i.e. Phoenix approach pop music with a highly developed sense of both craft and style analogous to a haute couture fashion designer. To the untrained eye, a suit is a suit is a suit, but with impeccable design, fine fabric, meticulous construction, and deliberate fitting, a suit can be quite profound and beautiful. As David Raposa says in his blurb accompanying the album in the Pitchfork list feature, the songs seem inconsequential at first but eventually display remarkable endurance and timelessness. Everything is just so, and their skill is such that they can imply a certain raggedness and looseness of spirit in spite of every moment being planned so thoroughly and executed with super-professional precision. It's a delightful illusion of throwaway rock music, and now I'm glad to say that they had me fooled for so long. (Click here to buy it from Amp Camp.)

Elsewhere: Maura Johnston ponders the class allegiances of today's journalists, Ken Freedman presents the "The Alternative Jesus Christ Superstar," Frank Kogan dissects CSS' "Let's Make Love and Listen To Death From Above," and the Face Knife examines the learnings of Borat.

Girl Talk "Smash Your Head" - Like even the best mash-ups and DJ mixes, Girl Talk's Night Ripper loses some of its initial thrill power once you become familiar with its twists and juxtapositions, but like the best of them, it retains its listenability because the tracks are more than a collection of reference points -- nearly all of them stand up as perfectly composed pop songs in and of themselves. "Smash Your Head" in particular comes across like a scale prototype of a future pop utopia in the way it flows from one idea to the next every few bars, yielding a surprisingly cohesive piece of music with its own character that nevertheless is in a constant state of mutation. As Eppy says, since artists like Gillis do not have to actually write the brilliant hooks of their source material themselves, they are free to focus entirely on structure, and as such can find new ideas that would be unlikely to emerge while working within the traditional songwriting paradigm. Obviously, this is fun for a person like me who is simply listening to the Girl Talk record as though it's any other album, but I really hope that people who are actually writing their own music respond to this sort of challenge and attempt to apply its concepts to their original material. (Click here to buy it from Illegal Art.)

Also: If you were very curious about what I played in my DJ sets at the Delancey on Friday, here you go:

Set 1: The Waitresses "Christmas Wrapping" / Belle & Sebastian "We Are The Sleepyheads" / Peter Bjorn & John "Young Folks" / Velella Velella "Alex Boom Selector" / Klanguage "Never Over" / Cristina "Mamma Mia"

Set 2: Au Revoir Simone "Stars" / Of Montreal "A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger" / August Darnell "Christmas On Riverside Drive" / Amy Winehouse "Rehab" / Spank Rock "Sweet Talk" / Bollywood Freaks "Don't Stop Til You Get To Bollywood" / Missy Elliott "Can't Stop" / The Make Up "Pow! To The People" / The Pipettes "Pull Shapes"

Set 3: Talking Heads "Psycho Killer (White Girl Lust edit)" / In Flagranti "Genital Blue Room" / Clipse "Wamp Wamp (Pistol Pete remix)" / Spektrum "Don't Be Shy" / Bonde do Rolê "Ma´quina de Ricota" / LCD Soundsystem "North American Scum" / Beyonce "Get Me Bodied" / CSS "Let's Make Love and Listen To Death From Above" / The Knife "We Share Our Mothers' Health"

JoJo "The Way You Do Me" - With each new track, Swizz Beatz is beginning to seem like an American equivalent of Britain's Xenomania production team in the way that his arrangements pound bombastic hooks into the listener with merciless intensity while also coming across as sleek, slinky, and seductive. "The Way You Do Me" is a characteristically efficient machine, and it forces the generally middleweight JoJo to double her efforts on a song that could have just as easily fallen into the lap of a powerhouse like Beyonce. She does a good job, and it's not her fault that she's ultimately a secondary presence to Swizz on this track. I've heard this song at least forty times since October, and the thing I always remember is not her voice but rather the way the beat accelerates into the chorus like someone chasing a departing bus. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Elsewhere: Apologies to anyone who may have their feelings hurt, but Marathon Packs' year end list is pretty much the only one worth reading thus far in 2006. The list element is besides the point -- it's just great to see the guy nail one record after the next with a remarkable economy of language.

Also: I will be DJing tonight for the Neon Lights party at the Delancey in Manhattan. I will be doing a little bit between the last two bands, and a full dancey set around midnight. The bill includes Olga Bell, Lismore, Thieves Like Us, The Ballet, and DJs Earfarm and Colleen Crumbcake.

Charlotte Gainsbourg "The Operation" - If this track was not actually co-written by Jarvis Cocker, one would be forced to accuse it of flagrant Cocker mimicry. Gainsbourg has no choice but to deliver his words with an approximation of his cadence and droll comic timing, but her breathy femininity is a welcome twist on his old formula. The singer imagines intimacy as a complicated and messy surgery that she performs upon her partner, and thoroughly navigates the metaphor as it cycles through moments of eroticism, sadism, and spirituality before reaching its bitter conclusion. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site, with mp3s from White Magic, Velella Velella, and Lullatone.

Ghostface Killah with Redman & Shawn Wigs "Greedy Bitches" - Okay, More Fish is kinda spotty and Ghostface surrenders a bit too much time to his proteges, but they don't all need to be classics! At this point in his career, the guy has clearly stopped chasing success and aside from a token nod to the mainstream here and there, he's content to just pump out records and follow his muse. That's totally cool and totally valid and if it means every once in a while we get something as consistently amazing as Supreme Clientele and Fishscale, how can you argue against it?

Hip hop is dead set on killing its idols, but both that culture and music at large has a lot to gain from following its best artists beyond their commercial prime and into largely uncharted territory as they age. Jay-Z, whose Kingdom Come is a disappointment but by no means a total failure as an album, seems to be angling to grow into rap's Frank Sinatra, and I sincerely hope that he eventually settles into that role. Ghostface on the other hand is more of a Neil Young type -- restless, eccentric, prolific and capable of expressing virtually anything within his self-defined limitations.

Oh, and hey, Ghostface was kind enough to reserve some space on More Fish's best track for the sadly unemployed Redman, who is as delightfully boorish as ever on his third of the song. Also, as you can probably imagine, the lyrics of this song are not safe for work, so be careful, alright? (Click here to buy it from Amp Camp.)

Elsewhere: J. Robbins (who you may know from his work with the Channels, Burning Airlines and Jawbox) and his wife Janet (also of the Channels) are seeking donations so that they can explore further treatment for their infant son who was recently diagnosed with Type 1 SMA. The disease is rather dire, and the cost will very likely wipe them out financially. As you probably know, indie musicians are very seldom rich or particularly well-insured, so any support would be gladly welcomed by the Robbins family. If you have any money to spare, please consider a donation.