What Is In Her Mind?

Light Bulb Project “If I Liked Sports, I’d Be One” – From what I can tell, this appears to be an unreleased song from a recently defunct Swedish girl group. The music itself is enjoyable if not very distinct Euro pop, but the lyrics about making a futile attempt to enjoy sports put it over, especially when the girls deliver lines like “the worst thing that I tried was archery / it felt wrong” with charm and just the right measure of self-awareness. It’s also very amusing that the sports in question are not organized team sports, but rather things like figure skating, fencing, sailing, tennis and golf. What sort of effete country club guy are they trying to impress? (Click here for more songs on what seems to be their official site.) (Thanks to Jessica!)

Angel Corpus Christi “Caroline Says II” – I’d say that this is a brilliant arrangement for the song, but it’s more like excellent casting. The vocals and accompaniment are ideally suited for Lou Reed’s character – sympathetic and damaged, but strangely upbeat while lost in a self-medicated haze. Contrast this with Antony and the Johnson’s maudlin take on “Candy Says,” and you can hear the difference between a nuanced, thoughtful realization of a character and vain, ham-fisted Oscar baiting. (Click here to buy it from Gulcher.)

Elsewhere:

The Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll for 2005 is online. If you are interested in how I voted, my ballot is right here. Something that you ought to take into consideration when examining my singles ballot is that it is not intended to be understood as a list of my favorite songs from 2005. When I filled out the ballot, I was following a few self-imposed rules in order to narrow down a few hundred songs that I loved from the year to a tiny list of ten. The criteria for the list were as follows:

1) The song must have been released as a single or pushed by the label to radio and video outlets in 2005. (Without the option of album tracks, several amazing songs were disqualified.)
2) No songs from artists on the albums list.
3) Only one song per artist. (This is why Mike Jones’ “Back Then” did not make the list.)

I wanted to include R. Kelly’s “Trapped In The Closet” for the singles list, but there was a rule stipulating that each part of that song was to be counted as a discrete entity, and since I couldn’t single out a favorite chapter and had no desire to split the song’s vote, I opted to omit it from my list entirely.

Overall, I’m actually somewhat pleased with the results of this year’s poll. Several of my own picks scored very highly, with four of my top ten albums landing in the top 15. I am absolutely thrilled that Kanye West and M.I.A. beat out Sufjan Stevens, though I am still a bit aggravated by the fact that he scored so highly with an album as awful as Illinois. However, I feel a bit vindicated by the high placement of Fiona Apple. I’m also happy to see that several records that I would have voted for if my ballot could extend up to twenty or thirty did just fine without my vote – The White Stripes, LCD Soundsystem, Kanye West, and Sleater-Kinney, for example. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have assumed that lots of people were going to vote for Missy Elliott in the albums poll, since that clearly was not the case. (She hit #95, well below loads of mediocre albums by unremarkable artists.) Though I quite like “1 Thing” and “Gold Digger,” I feel that Kelly Clarkson was robbed on the singles chart. Nevertheless, #3 is pretty spectacular for the winner of a televised singing competition in a critics poll.