Oh, It’s Just Your Precious American Underground

My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site, featuring songs by Alan Singley, Cadence Weapon, and Los Super Elegantes. Also, my review of the girls basketball documentary The Heart of the Game is up on The Movie Binge.

Casper & The Cookies “Krötenwanderung” – If you are curious, the title translates to “toad migration,” which makes some sense out of the opening line “I dream of tadpole life,” and goes to show that there is a German word for pretty much every concept imaginable. The music sets into an odd, loping groove that suits the pensive tone of the lyrics and vocals, and makes the bursts of compressed guitar and keyboard digressions sound like an illustration of a busy, creative mind at work. (Click here to buy it from Happy Happy Birthday To Me.)

Destroyer “Rubies (Live @ The Middle East, Cambridge 2006)” – The cd packaged along with The Believer‘s latest music issue is almost hilariously predictable in its song selection, but I suppose there’s no shame in being your own target audience. Much of the tracklisting’s Pitchforkisms are quite understandable given that the disc was co-curated by P-fork contributor Brandon Stosuy, but also in that, let’s face it, a lot of these artists — Juana Molina, Calexico, Marissa Nadler, Six Organs of Admittance — are ideally suited to being put on in the background while you’re reading something like The Believer. Perhaps in anticipation of the fact that many of the magazine’s subscribers would already be familiar with most of the artists, Stosuy and his partner Matthew Derby kindly included alternate versions of tracks as much as possible, and so the disc is filled with remixes, demos (Remember that solo Feist demo of “Mushaboom” that I posted here a couple years ago? It’s on this cd!), and live cuts. I’m particularly fond of this concert recording of Destroyer’s “Rubies” from earlier this year, which truncates the composition, and adds a bit of manic spark to a song that I felt was a little too fussy and overdone on the LP. (Click here to buy it from the McSweeney’s store.)