Anni Rossi “Candyland”

Anni Rossi has been a strange artist to watch develop over the past few years. She started off violently slashing at her viola and singing in a wildly expressive style punctuated with wordless, orgasmic bleats. Then she rerecorded her material, toning down her quirks and dialing down her manic energy. Now she’s mellowed out even further, to the point that she hardly sounds like the young woman who made the Afton EP. The songs on her new album Heavy Meadow are rigid and minimal, with melodies that seem to connect between tightly snapping beats like taut, thin wires. Her early material seemed totally unhinged, but this is all about deliberate restraint. “Candyland,” the opening track set the tone — light but uptight, sweet but aloof. She comes close to the glassy-eyed bliss of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” but Rossi still has too much fire in her to seem that disassociated and blank.

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Eleanor Friedberger “My Mistakes”

There’s something very particular about the Friedbergers — an unmistakable cadence, a distinct sensibility. Even still, you can tell when a Fiery Furnaces song was primarily written by Eleanor — the lyrics and meters aren’t so overstuffed; her voice shows more softness and vulnerability; the words seem more personal and much less academic. “My Mistakes,” the first song to emerge from Eleanor’s first solo album, plays out like a thoughtful diary entry over a lightly bopping arrangement that leaves plenty of open space for her voice. I find the specific qualities of Eleanor’s voice so endlessly charming and so difficult to describe — I love the depth of character that comes through in her tone, enunciation and rhythm. She has one of those voices you hear and you can intuit so much, a whole person contained in a specific timbre. The best vocalists have this presence, this particular humanity. She’s unquestionably one of my all-time favorites.

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Paul Simon “The Afterlife”

Paul Simon’s version of the afterlife sounds a lot like the life we already know: A lot of mundane encounters and tedious bureaucracy broken up by moments of sublime, confusing beauty. You don’t get any answers, no greater purpose is revealed. You still have to deal with everyone else and jockey for status. And, of course, the closest you get to communing with some divine force is hearing the melody of some silly pop song.

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Hauschka “Radar”

I saw Hauschka in concert at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan on Saturday, and it was remarkable. Haushka — aka Volker Bertelmann — performed as a duo with Samuli Kosminen, a Finnish percussionist who was just as inventive with rhythm as Bertelmann was on the piano. Bertelmann is amazing to behold. There’s a theatrical element to watching him alter his piano with various objects and devices, but even beyond that, his physicality is fascinating. Like a lot of truly great players, his body language appears to be loose and fluid — it all looks intuitive and easy. They played a fair amount of material from Salon des Amateurs, stripping down the arrangements while building the rhythms up to something more thumping and visceral than what is on record. The version of “Girls” was especially great; I wish I could share that with you instead of this studio version. Bertelmann and Kosminen were on to something really special here — the specific tonalities of prepared piano, complex neo-classical melodies, a touch of improvisational energy, the rhythmic intensity of house music. The music on Salon des Amateurs is very close, but a bit mannered. This performance went further. It sounded wild and fresh, like something that could breathe new life into classical, dance, rock, whatever. I recommend that you go out of your way to see Hauschka, especially if you happen to be a musician.

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Fleetwood Mac “Second Hand News”

I’ve heard a lot of pretty graphic and frank songs about sex in my life. When I was 14, I was way into pop songs with lyrics such as “I want to fuck you like an animal” and “I want to be your blowjob queen.” So why is it that as an adult I find that a line like “won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff” strikes me as sooooo much more dirty? I figure it must be the sweetness of the sentiment along with the tension between the specificity of the location and the vagueness of the action.

Rumours is rather famously the product of some very dark times for the members of the band, but it never sounds dreary or depressive. “Second Hand News” sets the tone with its springy rhythm and bright notes — it’s optimistic, it’s confident, it’s sexy. When Stevie Nicks comes in on harmony, she joins Lindsey Buckingham in singing “when times go bad, when times go rough,” and I think that is meaningful. He’s more passive-aggressive and spiteful on “Go Your Own Way,” but in this song there’s at least a chance of reconciliation, even if there’s no hope for a reunion. (“I’ve been tossed around enough.”) This certainly qualifies as a kiss-off song, but it’s worth noting that its climax is self-deprecating: “I’m just second hand news, I’m your second hand news.”

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Lindsey Buckingham “Time Precious Time”

Buckingham’s guitar playing on this song is astonishing, total virtuoso stuff. It’s a gorgeous cascade of finger-picked notes, with each plucked note coming fast but sounding like a slow-moving spiral. When the chorus comes in, it’s physically jarring and stunningly beautiful — his voice seems to move against the guitar notes and a subtle harmony of treated vocals. He sounds like he’s defying time itself, trying to impose his will on something he has no ability to control. At the same time, the piece feels meditative and patient. It’s a swirl of mixed emotions about aging, but at the center there’s some wisdom and clarity.

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Lindsey Buckingham “I Want You”

“I guess I had to prove / I was someone hard to lose.”

That’s an interesting line. He sounds embarrassed by his vanity and insecurity, and maybe even his self-awareness. But this is a common feeling, I think — this desire to make someone regret letting you go.

Lindsey Buckingham wrote the album Go Insane while breaking up with Carol Ann Harris, his girlfriend of six years. They met while she worked as a receptionist at the studio where Fleetwood Mac mastered Rumours. From what I’ve read, the dynamic of their relationship was very different from his romance with Stevie Nicks. When Stevie and Lindsey were down and out in the years before joining Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey insisted upon Stevie being the breadwinner. She supported the both of them as a waitress while he hung around all day, playing his guitar and honing his skills.

Years later, when Lindsey met Carol, he was a big rock star. He supported her for years, and took care of her after they broke up. Despite the differences, both women say they were focused on making him happy. “It was very lonely,” Harris told Rolling Stone in 1984. “I think I lived my life for Lindsey. I really felt it was important for me to be there for him, whether or not he was there physically, but for him to know I was there at home. He needed me there emotionally. It was rough. I don’t think I can remember relaxing the whole time I was with him.”

This context adds a lot to the music on Go Insane. Getting beyond the “someone hard to lose” thing, “I Want You” sounds desperate but oddly happy. He sounds glad to be dependent on someone, and eager to set things right, if just to get back on balance. The music has a manic, antsy quality that is exaggerated by the vocals, which bounce around the channels in a way that makes the track feel as if it has no center. He plays a somewhat straightforward guitar solo near the end, but somehow the sound of a guitar is inexplicably weird in this context. Every time I hear that part it sounds surprising to me. Maybe it’s the expressive high notes in that part — even in a song that can be best described as “light-hearted yet hysterical,” that bit is especially bugged-out.

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Buckingham Nicks “Crying in the Night”

Buckingham Nicks, the album Lindsey and Stevie recorded as a duo before joining Fleetwood Mac, has been out of print for nearly 30 years and has never been issued on CD. At this point, this is just sort of weird. Obviously, we live in the internet era and if you want it, you can find it, but at least on a symbolic level this music should be out there to buy. “Crying in the Night,” a Stevie number, is the album’s best cut. Their personalities certainly come across in this song, but they aren’t fully formed just yet. Stevie sounds great on this — she’d evolve into a more witchy persona later on, but here she’s witty and down to earth. (Something about the way she repeats the phrase “wreck your world” a second time for extra emphasis makes me smile very hard.) Lindsey’s guitar style isn’t quite there at this point, but his guitar parts here are very impressive regardless. The chords have a great breezy quality, and the chord changes are dynamic and ambitious without disrupting the flow of Stevie’s melodies. As it turns out, he was always very good at arranging her songs and framing her voice.

One more Lindsey Buckingham post tomorrow!

The choice of singles from Tusk is totally mystifying to me. I mean, I get that leading with “Tusk” is a show of hubris and that “Sara” is Stevie Nicks’ personal favorite, but there just seems to be a lot of missed opportunities for radio hits. Of the Nicks songs, I would’ve gone with “Angel.” As for Christine McVie, she didn’t really come up with anything too compelling for the record, which is strange since she is otherwise the group’s most reliable hit maker. Lindsey Buckingham’s songs from this period have a reputation for being quite odd, but the truth is, he wrote the best candidates for singles on the record. It’s a shame no one had the sense to give them a push.

Fleetwood Mac “What Makes You Think You’re the One”

In a catalog full of high quality break-up songs, “What Makes You Think You’re the One” is almost certainly Lindsey’s finest kiss-off. It’s brutal and self-righteous and blind to its own hypocrisies. It’s an upbeat, pleasant tune, but the rhythm is as agitated as it is peppy, and his voice takes on a strained, peevish tone. This song is essentially an expression of petty annoyance, and its perkiness comes out of the smug satisfaction of feeling like you’ve got the upper hand in an emotional conflict.

Fleetwood Mac “Walk A Thin Line”

The soft rock hit that never was! “Walk A Thin Line” may be my favorite Buckingham composition. The most striking thing about the song is that it conveys this very powerful sense of isolation, but also this sort of clear-eyed confidence. It’s the sound of a guy who totally believes that he’s making the right decisions, no matter how precarious his position may be. He feels persecuted and judged by his peers, but he’s too proud to back down. Instead he attains a gentle grace and embraces a patient outlook. The music approaches that laid back tranquility, but the high treble notes in his guitar betray a nagging doubt.

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More Lindsey Buckingham tomorrow!

Fleetwood Mac “Monday Morning”

Lindsey Buckingham is a hopeless romantic, and writes almost exclusively about love and relationships. His lyrics are conversational, but usually aren’t the things you actually say to someone. In “Monday Morning,” his first track on a Fleetwood Mac album, he really lays it on the line with some very frank words about a relationship that has run its course without ever really starting. He comes off as more bitter in later songs but here he’s very warm and sweet, expressing his frustrations while quick to remind the woman being addressed that he has nothing but love for her. I love that this song is so kind despite being about someone leading him on and toying with his heart. The sound is so sunny too — it gallops along, a bit chunky in its tones but still light and breezy. Mick Fleetwood’s drumming is key to pulling this off; his fills keep the piece snappy and brisk, particularly when the song seems to plunge into that excellent “I don’t miiiind” bridge into the chorus.

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Fleetwood Mac “Hold Me”

“Hold Me” is a Christine McVie song, but Buckingham is the dominant figure on the recording. Technically the song is a duet between Christine and Lindsey, but her cool voice recedes into the mix as his more passionate phrasing takes the lead. He brings all the fire to this song — after he finishes singing, his guitar solo carries much of the emotion in the piece. This is a breathtaking composition; harmonically sophisticated and atypical in structure without calling much attention to its form. There are so many dazzling bits of melody here — McVie’s piano figures, the lead vocal part, the cascading harmony in the chorus, the subtle chug of John McVie’s bass line. I love the way this plinking percussive part is the earthy counterpoint to the ethereal quality of the chorus. This is a truly an ensemble performance, but I credit Buckingham with getting it all to fit together so perfectly. This is what happens when a brilliant piece of songwriting is realized by a thoughtful producer and a group of musicians who play to their strengths but not necessarily their usual habits.

(By the way, the original demo version by Christine McVie is significantly different — still a very good song, but nowhere near as great as what it becomes once Lindsey gets his hands on it.)

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Stay tuned, there will be more Lindsey Buckingham tomorrow.

Fleetwood Mac “The Ledge”

A huge amount of time and effort went into crafting and recording Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, and yet its sequencing seems totally random. For example, I can’t think of many first tracks less suited to opening an album than “Over and Over,” a country rock ballad by Christine McVie that is so minor and low key that she may as well sing “bury this on side four” in the second verse. This song, one of the most square soft pop tracks in the entire Fleetwood Mac catalog, is immediately followed by “The Ledge,” a Lindsey Buckingham tune that is probably their all-time weirdest recording. The only reason you would front load these two tracks would be to deliberately confuse and alienate the band’s audience, which at this point in time was something in the neighborhood of 16 million people in the United States alone. So yeah, it’s not too surprising that about 15 million of those people took a pass on Tusk.

“The Ledge” isn’t very representative of Lindsey’s material on Tusk — and has virtually no aesthetic connection whatsoever with McVie and Stevie Nicks’ contributions — but it sets a tone for the record and establishes him as something of an eccentric. “The Ledge” is a like a caricature of Buckingham’s persona, exaggerating his trebly tone and high-strung character to the point that it becomes funny and a little grotesque. It’s also a radical deviation from his band’s established aesthetic, casting aside the polished perfection of Rumours for this perverse, intentionally sloppy and manic sound. It’s not as if Lindsey invented weird, arty pop, but there’s something about his weirdness that strikes me as particularly human and distinct. Even when he lets it all hang out, he sounds uptight and wired. That overcharged quality carries through the rest of his Tusk material, even the really pretty ballads. I’m sure you can chalk some of this up to the amount of cocaine he was snorting at the time, but if you look at his entire body of work, it’s obvious that this odd energy is essential to his personality. It’s just dialed all the way up for “The Ledge,” that’s all.

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Lindsey Buckingham “It Was I”

This Gary Paxton cover from Buckingham’s first solo album Law and Order is another good example of his willful perversity. It’s a really sweet and straightforward pop song, but Lindsey pitches everything up a bit for a peculiar effect. It seems a bit more child-like, but also really cheap and plastic. (It’s almost Christmas-y.) The sound is just slightly off, but it makes a huge difference. It’s so much more colorful and evocative than if it had been played entirely straight. You really feel the youthful romance here. You know how in movies flashbacks are often shot with a different film stock or filter or something to signal to the audience that they’re in a different time and place? The treble-heavy tonality of this track does a similar trick.

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Stay tuned. There will be more Lindsey Buckingham tomorrow.

Tune-Yards “Powa”

I don’t know much about Merrill Garbus’ life, but I feel like I know a lot about her voice, which might be a separate thing. Garbus sings like a person who, at some point in the not-too-distant past, stopped caring about holding herself back. “Powa” starts off sorta gentle and demure, but as it progresses, there’s a clear physicality to her vocals — a startling, defiant swagger. Unlike a lot of “swagger” you hear in modern pop music, it’s not a put-on or thinly veiled insecurity. It doesn’t sound like control or a desire to be controlling either. It’s more about self-possession, and making a clear decision to be exactly who you are and go for what you want, and take what you deserve after years of feeling unworthy. “Powa” is a song about sex, and it feels triumphant and glorious, like a long-earned reward. There’s still conflict and angst, but it all disappears in moments of pure pleasure, as when Garbus’ voice shoots up into into high notes, yanking us up with her into her giddy stratosphere. You feel her pleasure along with her, but you know that it’s an abstraction. If you really want it, you’ve got to get it for yourself. You’ve got to be more like Merrill. (Originally posted on January 4th 2010)

I’ve lived with “Powa” for a while now, and I’m pretty confident in saying that it ranks among my favorite songs of all time. I feel like I could gush endlessly about it — in addition to what I wrote over a year ago, I know I could go on and on about every detail in the structure, performance and production of this piece. But the thing that really blows me away is this: “Powa” is a song about love and sex that factors in insecurity about one’s body. When you think about how common it is for people to feel awkward about their bodies — if not outright disgusted by them — it is shocking to realize how rarely this comes up in songs about love and sex. Sex tends to be idealized and abstracted in music, in a way it’s not that different from Hollywood or pornography. “Powa” is astonishing not only because it presents the singer as a fully-formed person with body image issues and stress and real world problems, but because it expresses genuine love and gratitude for someone with whom she has true intimacy. Aside from Carole King’s wonderful “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman,” I can’t think of many songs on this level of quality that articulate this sort of feeling.

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Foo Fighters @ Ed Sullivan Theater 4/12/2011

Bridge Burning / Rope / Dear Rosemary / White Limo / Arlandria / These Days / Back and Forth / A Matter of Time / Miss the Misery / I Should Have Known / Walk / All My Life / Times Like These / My Hero / Learn to Fly / Cold Day in the Sun / Big Me / Stacked Actors / Monkey Wrench / Everlong / The Best of You / This Is a Call

Foo Fighters “Back and Forth”

In the time since The Colour and the Shape, the Foo Fighters became a band that could be relied upon to produce a few quality modern rock singles with each new record, but not a lot more. And this was fine: Dave Grohl is his generation’s equivalent to Tom Petty, and being Tom Petty is no bad thing. Wasting Light, the band’s seventh studio album, breaks this cycle. It’s a solid rock album, one of the best straight-ahead mainstream rock records of the past few years. Almost every song on the thing sounds like it should be a big hit. This resurgence will probably be lost on a lot of people though, because mainstream modern rock is pretty much the least cool genre going right now. I totally get why people have blinders to this stuff — a huge amount of it is total garbage, and even a lot of the decent stuff basically sounds like going to the mall. But Grohl is a master of this genre, and his band delivers simple thrills with remarkable clarity, precision and power. As a critic it is kinda hard to put a thoughtful spin on this music — there’s no clever concept, no novelty factor, and Grohl’s lyrics are so vague that pretty much any song could either be about the death of Kurt Cobain or a conflict with anyone ranging from the love of his life to someone who cut him off in traffic. It’s not easy to frame this music, but framing it is beside the point: It’s catchy and it rocks and sometimes that is all you need.

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Here’s the full concert from last night, by the way:

Panda Bear “Last Night at the Jetty”

What is Panda Bear singing about here? Let me paraphrase: Did we have a good time? I think I had a good time but maybe we didn’t? Didn’t we want to enjoy ourselves? Maybe we did? How can we deny that maybe we had a good time? Etc, etc. If you look at a transcription of the lyrics, it seems like a very bad translation from another language. That said, I like how this slippery, confused emotion is expressed in this sweet, earnest, boyish melody within this icy, pretty arrangement. I love the way this track is just shy of feeling entirely graceful, as if there’s some slightly mechanical glitch keeping this from perfection.

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Sebadoh @ Bowery Ballroom 4/9/2011

Too Pure / On Fire / Skull / Ocean / S. Soup / Mind Reader / Got It / Drag Down / Dreams / Magnet’s Coil / Rebound / License to Confuse / Sister / Drama Mine / Nothing Like You / Crystal Gypsy / Love to Fight / Bird in the Hand / Careful / Together Or Alone / Not A Friend / Beauty of the Ride / Forced Love / Sixteen / Give Up / Junk Bonds / New Worship / Brand New Love // Not Too Amused / Willing to Wait

It’s probably for the best that Sebadoh released their best work before phrases like “TMI,” “emo” and “overshare” became commonplace. Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein are indie rock’s all-time beta male shame spiral champs, a duo of songwriters rivaled only by Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham in their skill for articulating neurotic relationship drama from a straight male perspective in song. Their current tour is focused on the band’s mid-90s peak, back when they were basically the rocked-out male equivalent to Liz Phair’s music from the same time.

Okay, but here’s the thing: Whereas I think a person can gain a lot of strength and wisdom from listening to Liz Phair, it’s better not to relate to Loewenstein and Barlow’s songs. Their music is a catharsis for unflattering feelings — pettiness, jealousy, neediness, foolishness and passive aggression. These are valid feelings, but…ugh, you know? I hear these songs and remember a lot of awful things. Worst of all, I hear similar situations repeating over and over.

Sebadoh “Give Up”

“Give Up” overflows with self-loathing. Each line comes off as self-condemnation: He’s a burn out man, typically bitter, locked into a vicious cycle, a helpless slob in a dead-end day job, a codependent self-styled nightmare. Not long ago, I shifted my perspective on the words and starting hearing it as a sketch of someone else rather than something to be directed inward. Either way it’s totally brutal.

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Sebadoh “Nothing Like You”

I love the way the descending, plodding bass line in this song sounds like the body language of a morose, brooding guy pacing around with slumped shoulders. “Nothing Like You” is about trying to make sense of a complicated, painful relationship that is already over. It’s broken, you barely get along, but you want to salvage it somehow, if only to justify the time and emotion you’ve poured into it. The simultaneous attraction and repulsion is perfectly articulated in the double meaning of the chorus: “There’s a lot of girls in the world that are nothing like you.”

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Hauschka “Cube”

Hauschka’s latest album Salon Des Amateurs finds the German experimental pianist playing with rhythms and structural ideas inspired by dance music. I can hear it in some of the tracks for sure, but as usual, the main appeal of Hauschka’s work is not a formalist appropriation of ideas from another genre but rather the striking, elegant beauty of his compositions and the distinct, remarkable evocative tones created by his manipulation of his piano’s strings and hammers. “Cube” is an especially gorgeous piece. I can’t hear much techno influence on this one, but it could be in there somewhere — I find I get too caught up in its ever-shifting melodies, rhythms and tones to get hung up on trainspotting.

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Katy B “Movement”

“Movement” has the sound of cool sophistication, but that barely conceals its feeling of restlessness and eagerness to break free from an aggravating stasis. Katy B’s vocal performance gets the tone just right, conveying a mild anxiety without overselling it and seeming like a wreck. The sadness in this song is manageable, and possibly even constructive — she sounds like a person with agency who is going to do what she has to do in order to get out of a rut, but is just finding the right moment to act. It could be that she’s waiting for the right beat.

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Destroyer @ Webster Hall 4/3/2011

Chinatown / Blue Eyes / It’s Gonna Take An Airplane / Downtown / My Favorite Year / Kaputt / 3000 Flowers / Painter In Your Pocket / Suicide Demo For Kara Walker / Song For America // Bay of Pigs

Destroyer “Song For America”

There was a guy next to me for most of this show who was very, very drunk and very, very high and very, very loud. He was also very, very, very into Destroyer and took every opportunity to express this feeling. Between each song he shouted stuff like “I LOVE DESTROYER!!!,” louder and more emphatically as the show progressed. He seemed a bit flustered because no one else would join in. Maybe a little bit more flustered because no matter what he did, Dan Bejar would not acknowledge his existence in any way.

It wasn’t just him, though. Despite a small amount of banter, Bejar seemed almost entirely indifferent to the audience. He was present in his songs, singing the words but doing nothing at all to be theatrical. I’ve seen Bejar perform before as Destroyer and with the New Pornographers, so it wasn’t a big surprise to me, though I think there’s still a part of me that lives with these records and imagines a much bigger, more flamboyant character than the low-key bohemian I see on stage. And of course the Bejar we actually get is very much a character too, albeit a life-size one — he’s iconic, magnetic, fascinating. He seems genuinely shy. I’m not sure if he likes being on stage, but he obviously loves the music. Sometimes it looked like he was happy to just kneel down and watch the musicians play. Even when he was reading his words from a page, he sounded totally engaged in the songs, if not the “performance.” I never got the feeling that he was trying to entertain anyone, but I definitely got the sense that he wanted the music to be as amazing and transporting as possible. This maybe explains why I enjoyed this concert most when I closed my eyes.

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LCD Soundsystem @ Madison Square Garden 4/2/2011

Dance Yrself Clean / Drunk Girls / I Can Change / Time To Get Away / Get Innocuous! / Daft Punk Is Playing At My House / Too Much Love / All My Friends / Tired // 45:33 part one / 45:33 part two / Sound of Silver / 45:33 part four / 45:33 part five / 45:33 part six / Freak Out/Starry Eyes /// Us V Them / North American Scum / Bye Bye Bayou / You Wanted A Hit / Tribulations / Movement / Yeah / Someone Great / Losing My Edge / Home //// All I Want / Jump Into the Fire / New York, I Love You

When I was reading through Pitchfork’s excellent You Were There: The Complete LCD Soundsystem last week, I kept thinking that I was glad that I wasn’t a part of that project because out of all the bands that mean a lot to me, LCD Soundsystem is probably the only one where I don’t think I could successfully write about them in a way that was not personal. Also, I’ve never been happy with anything I’ve written about this band. When the early singles were coming out, it was all about the thrill of discovery for me, and I wasn’t good enough back then to articulate what made the music so compelling. Later on, I shied away from getting at why certain songs connected with me because there are simply some things I don’t want to discuss in public, or in many cases, with other people at all.

My favorite LCD Soundsystem songs are tied to some of the most crucial (and often most painful) parts of my life. “Us V Them” and “North American Scum” are connected to little epiphanies; “I Can Change” is tied to a moment of horrible self-awareness. I saw them play “Jump Into the Fire” on the day I learned that my father had cancer and it provided an intense catharsis. “Someone Great” was exactly how I felt when he died, right on down to the description of the phone call.

LCD Soundsystem “Yeah”

The LCD song that means the most to me is “Yeah.” It changed the course of my life. When that song came out I was a recent art school graduate with very little going on in my life, and no direction. This site was still in a very early stage, with a tiny readership mainly comprised of internet friends. At that point in time, it was all enthusiasm. The writing wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t really think of myself as a writer at all. In December of 2003, I posted a leaked mp3 of “Yeah” and it basically put this site on the map. The traffic spiked, and miraculously pretty much everyone stuck around. That set off a chain reaction of press coverage and attention and other people starting similar sites and it completely changed everything for me. It pushed me to take this very seriously, and to become a real writer. I can’t understate the importance of this site in my life: Almost everything good about my life in the past decade is a direct result of doing this site, and I credit LCD Soundsystem and “Yeah” for creating this opportunity for me. At least in some way I owe my career to James Murphy.

“Yeah” happens to be the song that best summarizes what LCD Soundsystem was all about. The major reason why Murphy is an inspiring figure is that he will never half-ass anything. He is all about total commitment, and executing every idea as well as possible. “Yeah” is a song that expresses deep disgust toward those who only talk about their ideas. Murphy houses this loathing and frustration in one of the most ambitious compositions of his career, a work that is even more impressive in concert if just by proving that a live band can absolutely nail a complex house music track with zero compromise. Murphy raises the bar for everyone, not just musicians. His achievement is a challenge to everyone to do better.

In this way, “Yeah” never stops changing my life. I hear the sentiment in this song (and also some very similar words in “Pow Pow”) and I get anxious. His words sting because I know I am implicated and I know he’s right and I just want to prove him wrong. He makes me want to work.

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Britney Spears “How I Roll”

A lot of Britney Spears’ seventh album Femme Fatale sounds like a bunch of talented writers and producers going wild and pushing the limits of what can fly on a mainstream pop album, with Spears mainly acting as muse, mouthpiece and benefactor all at once. Her presence isn’t required, but she can’t be ignored. The best songs take the idea of Britney Spears — or maybe just the representation of her sexuality? — and digitally manipulate it into some kind of abstraction. “How I Roll,” a track by “Toxic” producers Bloodshy & Avant, is especially strange merger of bubblegum pop and electronic tinkering. It’s mad science pop, bursting with energy and unconventional ideas about sound and structure tossed at the audience in a playful but also sort of confrontational manner. Spears isn’t always totally recognizable throughout Femme Fatale, but on this track she sounds exactly like herself, particularly the youthful teen version that everyone remembers and laments in one way or another. Even still, she takes a backseat to the production and the hooks. She’s there to be “Britney Spears,” the zombie celebrity. She’s there to be the eccentric rich person who bankrolls this sort of experiment and puts it out into the world.

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Cam’ron & Vado “Girls Cry”

Cam’ron always raps with a playful cadence; it’s part of what makes him so easy to like even when he’s being a dick. It’s a slick charm — something about his voice tells you that he’s just playing with you and it always rings true. He’s funny too, particularly when he’s being crass. This track has a classy, sparkling sound to it, but he’s goofy and lewd, talking about a girlfriend so possessive that she insists on sniffing his balls when he gets in the house. She’s uptight and obsessive, but he plays it cool and laid back. He leans into the track like it’s a particularly comfortable chair. Vado is another story. When he comes in, he’s angry and defensive. He’s an interesting foil for Cam — harder but less assured. Vado emphasizes Cam’s effortless vibe, which in turn highlights the raw emotion in Vado’s performance.

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Nicolas Jaar “Space is Only Noise If You Can See”

Sometimes when I am alone I sing to myself. I find a snippet of melody that I like and follow it where it takes me — sometimes it’s just a loop, other times it keeps rambling and changing to the point that I can’t recall where I started. I make up the words as I go along and sometimes get surprised by what comes out from my unconscious mind. I do this when walking around, just quiet enough that no one can hear, though sometimes they do and I don’t care. For the first minute of this composition, Nicolas Jaar sounds like he’s doing that, quietly singing to himself phrases that spill out of his head, following the melody in circles. But then it shifts. There’s an amazing keyboard bass line that comes in, the kind of sound and melody that would feel natural on a James Murphy track. Then it keeps going — the vocals multiply and tangle as the arrangement gets deeper and richer, and somehow it never stops sounding lonesome and spacious. There are phrases that stick out, that don’t quite make sense but have a powerful resonance. I think I get what this guy is thinking and how he felt when he made it. It feels familiar to me, anyway.

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James Pants “Every Night I Dream”

This dream isn’t quite a nightmare, but it’s the kind of thing you wake up from thinking “wuh?” and images and feelings from it resurface in your head later in the day and it feels like an actual uncomfortable memory. But not necessarily bad — just something that reveals something in your mind you don’t want to think about or take responsibility for thinking/feeling. I love the way the smooth guitar part in this song signifies elegant sexiness while the keyboard attack has this quality that evokes both strobe lights and nervous agitation. Conflicting vibes, but they somehow complement each other perfectly.

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