Yr Girlfriend Do What Yr Boyfriend Can’t

Excerpt from Cut Copy Fabric Live 29: New Young Pony Club “Get Dancey” / In Flagranti “Bang Bang” – DJ mix cds err heavily on the side of tedium, with many of them degenerating into a beatmatched zombie lockstep that may work on a dancefloor but is not much fun at all when played on a home stereo. Cut Copy’s entry in the famed Fabric series is several steps above the competition, presenting a top notch electropop party that glides from hook to hook and emphasizes melody, humanity, and fun as well as beats and continuous flow. (Click here to pre-order it from Fabric.)

Thom Yorke “The Clock (Live on KCRW)” – On The Eraser, “The Clock” seems to recede into the background a bit, lost in a haze of electronic textures too similar to its neighboring tracks. On an album of songs that reveal themselves slowly, I find it to be the most stubborn and dense. This live acoustic version (that many of you have no doubt already heard if you happen to look at the ads on Stereogum and Pitchfork) cracks the song open, boiling the studio recording’s tangle of sounds down to a mesmerizing guitar rhythm and Yorke’s plaintive voice. The result is a track that sounds more anxious than anything Yorke has previously recorded, which is obviously quite an accomplishment given his discography. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)