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Born Ruffians “Stupid Dream”

If you squint a bit, you can pretend this is a brand new Vampire Weekend song. I know that’s unfair to Born Ruffians, but at the same time that is VERY HIGH PRAISE coming from me. And a big step up for them – their songwriting has really leaped forward since the last time they came around, and while you can hear a lot of VW in “Stupid Dream,” there’s a lot of interesting borderline abrasive textures that you might not find in one of their tracks. I love the way the main guitar riff comes in so hot but still has a crisp, clean tone, and the way the bass groove seems to elbow its way to the front of the arrangement for the verses. Luke Lalonde’s vocals are a revelation here, his performance is so vibrant and extroverted, and his frustration in singing “I am not the cream of the crop, and I am never rising up” is so present and real even if he maybe shouldn’t feel that way.

Buy it from Amazon.

Arcade Fire “Soft Power”

A couple weeks ago, Arcade Fire quietly released one of the best songs of their career as a bonus track on the deluxe edition of their album from two years ago. So much time has passed since Reflektor that I wonder why they didn’t just bank this material for another record – maybe they just want a clean break, maybe they don’t think it’s good enough. But “Soft Power” is excellent, and its ragged but graceful sound nods in a direction that honors the anthemic past of the band while giving Win Butler a lot of room to grow old and wearier. It’s a very solo John Lennon sort of song, and though there’s a trace of “Imagine” in it, it’s mostly Butler’s version of “Isolation.” But you never get the wild catharsis of that track – this is a more relaxed piece of music, and the melody just sorta loosely winds around, implying less conviction as it goes along. The most famous Arcade Fire songs are empowering, but this one is about passivity, and getting a feel for how the world really works and knowing there’s not much you can do about it. He doesn’t sound defeated, but he certainly seems deflated.

Buy it from Amazon.

Bad Bad Hats “Say Nothing”

“Say Nothing” is one of those songs that come along and you just wish the band could somehow take it back in time to the point where it could’ve been a huge hit. And while I do think “Say Nothing” could – and should – take off today, it’s pretty clear that the point in time where it would’ve made Bad Bad Hats very rich is somewhere in the mid to late ‘90s. This is a flawlessly constructed alt-rock song, and the kind that hangs together so well that it feels ragged and off-the-cuff even though it’s rather polished. Kerry Alexander’s lyrics are also precise yet casual, and in this song she’s basically talking her way out of a relationship with someone who becomes silent and emotionally withholding in a clear attempt to force her hand to break up. The tension in the song is in her stubbornly refusing to do what they want, even if she knows it’s the only way out of it. So she at least tries to get a moment where she’s the silent, withholding one: “stop, let me be the one to say nothing!”

Buy it – or download the album for free – from Afternoon Records.

White Hinterland “Chill and Natural”

Casey Dienel’s music has changed dramatically over the course of her career, and though her new single “Chill and Natural” isn’t a drastic departure from the elliptical, atmospheric electronic music of her last album, Baby, its industrial pop sound and overtly feminist lyrics are a world away from the twee, introverted piano tunes of her debut from a decade ago. I first heard this song while working on the 1989 survey and was listening to Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like A Hole” all the time, and I immediately recognized it as a cousin to those songs. A lot of that resemblance is in the aggressive, confident tone of the music, and the way the intensity of the sound seems to escalate on a constant 60 degree angle. But where those songs come from a place of incredibly certainty, Dienel’s singing about being driven crazy by straight men’s inconsistent yet inflexible expectations for women and their bodies. Her tone switches between droll sarcasm – “Tom says he likes girls who are down for whatever / down for whatever, yeah, that’s me” – and total exasperation at both the women who play along with these arbitrary rules and the men who can’t grasp that their preferences are tied up in contradictions and come off more like demands. The humor and anger in this song is balanced just right, and it perfectly captures that feeling when you’re so impatient and confused that you think you’re losing your mind, but you know it’s not your fault.

Buy it from iTunes.

This is the first in a series of survey mixes designed to give more context to the music of the 1980s. The frustrating thing about we typically deal with cultural history is to focus on specific niches and canons, but in doing that, we lose track of parallel and overlapping cultural trends. I hope to create a set of collections that will give you – and me! – a better understanding of chronology for the music of this era, and to highlight a lot of music that for whatever reason usually gets cut out of retrospectives today.

I’ve decided to start with 1989 and move backwards towards 1980 because it feels a lot more interesting to me that way – the end of the ’80s isn’t nearly as canonized as the start, and before making this, I felt like I had a more vague grasp on what came out in 1989 despite that being a pretty crucial year for me in terms of becoming a young music obsessive. (I was the sort of kid who would make a point of listening to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem every Sunday morning.)

Also, you know, there’s the Taylor Swift factor. There’s been a lot of half-baked writing about how much today’s biggest pop stars are drawing on the ’80s, but I think if you really go through this survey you will find that those artists may be inspired by the blockbuster aesthetics of the ’80s but sound very much like right now, and the artists who really sound like 1989 tend to be the more indie/alt/undergournd artists.

Thanks to Rob Sheffield, Sean T. Collins, Paul Cox, Chris Conroy, Tom Ewing, Douglas Wolk, and Ivan Onosov for their assistance in curating this mix. If you have ideas about what absolutely needs to be included in future ’80s surveys, please let me know. The 1988 survey should be out sometime in October.

NOTE: EVERYTHING HAS BEEN RE-UPPED SINCE THE FIRST UPLOADS MAXED OUT.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Madonna “Express Yourself” / Nine Inch Nails “Head Like A Hole” / Prince “Electric Chair” / Digital Underground “The Humpty Dance” / Roxanne Shanté “Feelin’ Kinda Horny” / Janet Jackson “Miss You Much” / Al B Sure “Nite and Day” / Aerosmith “What It Takes” / The Cure “Lovesong” / Liza Minnelli “Losing My Mind” / E-Zee Possee “Everything Starts With An E” / Ministry “Burning Inside” / Red Hot Chili Peppers “Higher Ground” / Big Daddy Kane “Warm It Up, Kane” / Special Ed “I Got It Made” / YZ “Thinking Of A Master Plan” / A Tribe Called Quest “Description Of A Fool” / Soul II Soul “Back to Life”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

Neneh Cherry “Buffalo Stance” / Beastie Boys “Shadrach” / Biz Markie “Just A Friend” / De La Soul “Eye Know” / Fine Young Cannibals “She Drives Me Crazy” / Michael Penn “No Myth” / Roy Orbison “You Got It” / The B-52’s “Love Shack” / Pixies “Here Comes Your Man” / Love & Rockets “So Alive” / 3rd Base “The Gas Face” / Public Enemy “Fight the Power” / 2 Live Crew “Me So Horny” / Superchunk “Slack Motherfucker” / Tom Petty “I Won’t Back Down” / Lyle Lovett “Cryin’ Shame” / Lenny Kravitz “Let Love Rule” / Babyface “Whip Appeal” / The Bangles “Eternal Flame”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Depeche Mode “Personal Jesus” / Technotronic “Pump Up the Jam” / Young MC “Bust A Move” / Native Tongues posse “Buddy” / Ten City “That’s the Way Love Is” / Chris Isaak “Wicked Game” / Syd Straw “Future 40’s (String of Pearls)” / Indigo Girls “Closer to Fine” / Beat Happening “Cast A Shadow” / Debbie Gibson “Electric Youth” / Adamski “N-R-G” / Meat Beat Manifesto “God O.D.” / EPMD “So Wat Cha Sayin’” / Emmylou Harris “Heaven Only Knows” / Pere Ubu “Waiting for Mary” / Morrissey “The Last of the Famous International Playboys” / The Verlaines “Whatever You Run Into” / Blake Babies “From Here to Burma” / Kate Bush “This Woman’s Work”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

The Stop the Violence Movement “Self-Destruction” / Consolidated “Consolidated” / Nitzer Ebb “Hearts and Minds” / Public Image Ltd “Disappointed” / The Stone Roses “I Wanna Be Adored” / The KLF “Kylie Said to Jason” / Billy Joel “We Didn’t Start the Fire” / 10,000 Maniacs “Trouble Me” / The Replacements “Achin’ to Be” / George Strait “Ace in the Hole” / k.d. lang “Full Moon Full of Love” / Guns N’ Roses “Patience” / Neil Young “Rockin’ in the Free World” / Lou Reed “Busload of Faith” / Def Jef “Poet with Soul” / Chubb Rock “Ya Bad Chubbs” / Black Box “Ride On Time” / Kylie Minogue “Hand On Your Heart” / Orbital “Chime”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Spacemen 3 “Revolution” / Mudhoney “Here Comes Sickness” / Mötley Crüe “Same Ol’ Situation (S.O.S.)” / Bailter Space “Grader Spader” / Fugazi “Margin Walker” / New Order “Round and Round” / Jody Watley “Real Love” / Nice & Smooth “Early to Rise” / Jungle Brothers “Doin’ Our Own Dang” / Malcolm McLaren “Deep in Vogue” / Lil Louis & The World “French Kiss” / Frazier Chorus “Dream Kitchen” / Milli Vanilli “Girl You Know It’s True” / Cyndi Lauper “I Drove All Night” / Sugarcubes “Regina” / Snapper “Death and Weirdness in the Surfing Zone” / XTC “The Mayor of Simpleton” / The Cult “Fire Woman” / Warrant “Heaven”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Roxette “The Look” / Phil Collins “Two Hearts” / David Byrne “Marching Through the Wilderness” / Elvis Costello “Veronica” / Wire “Eardrum Buzz” / Lush “Thoughtforms” / Natalie Cole “Miss You Like Crazy” / Mary Chapin Carpenter “Never Had It So Good” / Don Henley “The End of Innonence” / Divine Styler “Ain’t Sayin’ Nothin’” / Queen Latifah “Wrath of My Madness” / Erasure “Stop!” / Crucial Robbie “Proud to be Black” / Phish “You Enjoy Myself” / The Sundays “Here’s Where the Story Ends” / Throwing Muses “Dizzy” / Straitjacket Fits “She Speeds” / Cannanes “Vivienne” / Richard Marx “Right Here Waiting”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

Soundgarden “Big Dumb Sex” / Jesus and Mary Chain “Head On” / Dolly Parton “Why’d You Come In Here Lookin’ Like That?” / Clint Black “Killin’ Time” / The The “The Beat(en) Generation” / Hugo Largo “Hot Day” / Galaxie 500 “Strange” / Tears for Fears “Sowing the Seeds of Love” / LNR “Work It to the Bone” / Rhythm Device “Acid Rock” / Low Profile “Pay Ya Dues” / Gang Starr “Words I Manifest (Remix)” / Ice-T “You Played Yourself” / MC Lyte “Cha Cha Cha” / Clement Irie “DJ in My Country!” / Pet Shop Boys “It’s Alright” / Slint “Darlene” / Faith No More “Epic” / Operation Ivy “Knowledge” / Nirvana “About A Girl” / Sebadoh “True Hardcore”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Queen “I Want It All” / Cher “If I Could Turn Back Time” / Tone Loc “Wild Thing” / LL Cool J “Big Ole Butt” / Schooly D “Gangster Boogie” / Frankie Knuckles “Tears” / Maurice “This Is Acid” / Starlight “Numero Uno” / Bonnie Raitt “Nick of Time” / Daniel Lanois “The Maker” / The Neville Brothers “Yellow Moon” / Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ “Honeysuckle Blue” / Half Japanese “Daytona Beach” / Yo La Tengo “Barnaby, Hardly Working” / Mekons “Memphis, Egypt” / Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians “Flesh Number One” / Pavement “Box Elder” / Guided by Voices “Liar’s Tale” / The Vaselines “Sex Sux (Amen)” / Skid Row “I Remember You”

Disclosure featuring Lorde “Magnets”

There’s a lot of songs about cheating, or being the other man/woman, but I like the particular tension in this one. Lorde is basically singing about going after a coupled person and knowing it’s the ~wrong~ thing to do, but enjoys feeling like she has some sexual power, and can’t help but get excited about it. The really potent line in this song is “pretty girls don’t know the things that I know,” which you can unpack in many ways but every time, it’s from the point of view of someone who’s internalized the idea that they aren’t sexually attractive. Disclosure’s track keeps the mood sexy, but subtly tense and unstable – you get the feeling of excitement, but also the nerves and nagging conscience. When she sings a line like “let’s embrace the point of no return,” it’s like someone playing a role, and trying out an identity to see if it fits. If you change the tone a bit, this scene can easily be played as a comedy.

Buy it from Amazon.

Julia Holter “Sea Calls Me Home”

“Sea Calls Me Home” is a song about “getting away from it all” and finding some peace and clarity on the water, but it’s also not quite as simple as that. There’s a strange, ambiguous feeling to the music – pleasant, but still uncertain. For one thing, the character says she can’t swim. That’s an issue, maybe. But the real emotional punch of the song is when she sings “it’s lucidity, so clear!,” and then there’s just this feeling of “OK, and then what?” It can be so hard to know what to do with a nice feeling. The second verse has her pledging to “forget all the rules I’ve known,” but she’s still grounding that in some practical details. You can escape places, but maybe not the mundane trappings of life.

Buy it from Amazon.

Kurt Vile “Lost My Head There”

“Lost My Head There” is a song about dealing with “bugging’ out” and “funky psychosis,” but you just don’t feel those vibes at all in the music. This is about as laid-back and easy-going as it gets, with Kurt Vile singing his lines with a smirky stoner drawl over a crisp beat and a loose piano groove. But this isn’t really a song about an existing mental state so much as the one you aspire to when you’re freaking out. Vile sings about the creative process in self-deprecating terms – “I was feeling worse than the words came out / fell on some keys, and this song walked out of me” – but he’s acknowledging how making art can be something that can take you away from yourself rather than just display your worst feelings. He’s tired and feeling down, and he’d “much rather levitate.” I think he gets reasonably close to levitating in this song.

Buy it from Amazon.

Chvrches “Clearest Blue”

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about Lauren Mayberry’s voice that is so compelling for a while now, and I think I’ve got it: It’s all in the way she projects this assertive confidence while also allowing herself to seem transparently vulnerable. This is especially powerful because most of her lyrics come across like one half of an argument or discussion, so she always sounds like a person who is very emotionally invested in a relationship or friendship, but isn’t willing to give up too much of herself and is able to see things very clearly. I love the certainty in her voice, and the way the clean, bright tone of it cuts through the metallic timbre of the sort of keyboard and drum machine settings the band favors.

The particular effect of Chvrches songs isn’t so much in the contrast of Mayberry’s voice and the rest of the music, but in how similar they are. The music never undermines her, and the overall sound is very unified in its forthrightness. Mayberry’s shifts in mood and sentiment are directly mirrored by the contours of the track – listen to how the nagging doubt at the start of “Clearest Blue” gradually transforms into ecstatic physicality as her voice becomes more emphatic, culminating in this joyful and cathartic instrumental break in the final third of the track. That break is one of the most incredible things I’ve heard in music this year; it’s the kind of sound that just jolts you alive and makes life feel exciting and full of possibility. I love that this feeling comes in a song that’s mostly about Mayberry trying to figure out where she stands with someone in the middle of some crisis. There’s a lot of ways you can respond to a crisis, but this is definitely the most optimistic and thrilling.

Buy it from Amazon.

Sexwitch “Ha Howa Ha Howa”

Natasha Khan describes herself as a perfectionist, and you can hear that in Bat for Lashes’ music – it’s not overly fussy, but it is very intentional and precise. This is part of why her songs can be so emotionally devastating; she makes every feeling and mood sound so incredibly accurate. Khan is moving away from that in Sexwitch, and to a large extent that comes from interpreting other artists’ work. All of the tracks are adaptations of old, mostly forgotten psychedelic records from around the world. Their versions of these songs aren’t exact replicas; it’s more about using them as a map to get to a particular vibe, and loosely translating the lyrics to unlock something in Khan. The result is intense, wild, and unreservedly sexual. “Ha Howa Ha Howa” is pure lust from the rhythm on up to Khan’s vocals, which range from orgasmic wails to breathy, ritualistic chanting. The main lyric here is “he addicted me with a thousand kisses, and I addicted him,” and in context it’s a description of seduction that is itself totally seductive. It’s all very loose and you can really get a sense of Khan giving in to the music, but the funny thing is, it’s just as precise in invoking a specific emotion as anything else she’s done.

Buy it from Amazon.

Lana Del Rey “Terrence Loves You”

Lana Del Rey keeps writing essentially the same ballad about doomed love with distant, charismatic men, but in her endless iteration, she finds new extremely specific emotions to express in song. The feeling in “Terrence Loves You” is so precise that it’s difficult to put into words, but you hear the way her voice trills on “I lost myself when I lost youuuuu” and deepens slightly on “I still get trashed, darling, when I hear your tunes,” and it’s almost painful to recognize it. It’s such a hopeless form of love, a sort of love that’s built on feeling like you’re never good enough, and grateful for whatever scraps of affection you can get from some person you’ve decided is totally magical. But it’s also the sound of finding comfort in feeling so small in relation to someone else, and wanting in some way to be consumed by their identity. It’s falling in love as a way of hiding from yourself.

Buy it from Amazon.

Against Me! “Don’t Lose Touch” (Live)

The most clever thing about “Don’t Lose Touch” is that Laura Jane Grace embedded a self-critique about getting too caught up in a rock star trip in a song that is built to get the audience moving and singing along and worshipping your every move. It’s the sort of punk anthem that pulls you in whether you want to or not; the song is just nonstop rising momentum with a dance beat. And she calls that out too – “manipulation in rock music, fucking nausea!” It’d be easy to read this song as a self-loathing thing, and maybe there’s a trace of that in the original studio recording, but this live version from last year feels like a celebration. Now it sounds more like a pledge than self-admonishment, even when she’s belting out “I’m loooooooosing touuuuuuuch!” It’s also like a contract with herself and the audience – if you think I’m losing touch, call me out. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Buy it from Amazon.

Telekinesis “Courtesy Phone”

There’s a brief breakdown near the end of this song in which Michael Lerner clears away the treble and sings “you forget the feeling of magic / you forget feeling emphatic” over a simple beat and a chugging bass line. I know this feel, Michael! It’s surprisingly easy to go long stretches of time without feeling many strong emotions as an adult – sometimes it’s a matter of falling into a depression that blanks everything out, and more often it’s a steady OK feeling that turns into extended complacency. The former is awful and soul-deadening, the latter is fine but totally unrewarding. “Courtesy Phone” lies on the periphery of this emotional dead zone, with Lerner fighting against the impulse to stay in that plateau, and pushing himself to risk dealing with the lows in order to get some highs. You can hear that tension in the music itself – the beat is stiff and robotic, but the structure of the music pushes against that to build a thrilling momentum.

Buy it from Amazon.

Martin Courtney “Vestiges”

I’m not sure why Martin Courtney decided to make Many Moons a solo record when it basically sounds like the fourth Real Estate album. I’m sure he has his reasons, but as a listening experience, it is pretty much identical to Real Estate, except that the arrangements are maybe 25% more lush and there’s a touch of ‘70s AM radio vibes about it. I suppose the reality is that Courtney is so loyal to his chill melancholy muse that he can’t help but write nothing but gentle, wistful tunes in any context. This would only be a problem if he wasn’t a master of this form. “Vestiges” is one of the best songs he’s ever written, and approaches his recurring theme of nostalgia from the perspective of someone who can’t escape the detritus of his past. The song doesn’t get too heavy, but you can sense the vague dread of mortality as time seems to slip away, and a nagging fear that life is passing this guy by as old friends move on and he’s stuck living amongst the stuff that everyone else left behind. I think this song is about trying to make peace with those feelings, and looking at the coming and going of things like a tide that ebbs and flows. But I don’t know if anyone is really convinced by that, let along the character in the song.

Buy it from Amazon.

Hands In “The Company”

I have a real weakness for songs like this, which have a recognizable structure and feeling, but are otherwise totally abstracted and incoherent. “The Company” sounds like it ought to be this romantic ballad, something people could slow dance to, but the vocals are so warped by pitch and echo that it’s all just some vague indication of sentiment without any specificity. I’m reasonably sure most of this is sung in English, but it feels more like listening to pop performed in a language where you can only understand a few words here and there. Maybe that is frustrating for some people, but I really like that abstraction and disconnection.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Battles “Summer Simmer”

The two previous Battles albums had some vocals that could become the center of songs like in traditional rock music, but on their third record, they’ve moved away from that entirely and essentially have placed Ian Williams’ miscellaneous guitars, keyboards, and mysterious electronic sounds as the focal point of their compositions. “Summer Simmer” follows a pattern that holds through most of La Di Da Di – John Stanier and Dave Konopka lay down a complex, ever-shifting rhythm, and Williams cycles through various instruments and equipment, adding melodic and textural parts in reaction to the beat. Williams’ parts are incredibly expressive, particularly this plaintive keyboard (?) lead that comes in about two minutes into the track, but gets replaced around the three minute mark by a brighter and more cheerful-sounding guitar hook. They’ve packed a lot into this track, but the pacing is just right, and the emotional and rhythmic shifts feel totally natural, not jarring.

Buy it from Amazon.

Dianas “I’m With You”

Most of this Perth band’s material is focused on guitar, so this piano-centric tune is an outlier. But maybe that shouldn’t be the case going forward, as there’s something about the way these melodies circle the beat that is both gorgeous and sort of unnerving. The vocals are girlish and ghostly, and so high pitched and breathy that the lyrics are almost entirely unintelligible. But despite that, it’s pretty easy to understand the feeling of the song, and this feeling that if you connect yourself to this other person, you won’t feel so totally adrift and confused. I love the way it’s implied that the circular melodies are like this maze, and they’re just trying to get out of it.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Prince “X’s Face”

Prince’s new record – for now only available on the streaming service Tidal – is the most consistently excellent album he’s put out in some time. I know that something like every fourth Prince release gets hype like that, but HitNRun Phase One is sexy and strange in a way that he’s mostly avoided over the past decade or two. A lot of this is owed to the fact that this is a very rare record in which Prince is in full collaboration with a producer, Joshua A. M. Welton, who gets co-producer and co-songwriting credits. Prince sticks to vocals, guitar, and bass on this album, and allows Welton to go wild with contemporary synths and beats. It’s interesting to hear Prince concede keyboard and beat programming, two elements of his sound that he’s completely mastered, to a younger musician. There’s not a lot that Welton does that would seem out of place on a Prince record, but he reconnects Prince with a synth-based edginess that was once at the center of his sound. Welton pushes Prince away from fussiness and towards an off-kilter funk that perfectly suits the more playful and seductive aspects of his voice. That really comes through in “X’s Face,” which plays his falsetto against a lurching, nearly abrasive bass synth part. I think it would’ve fit in pretty well with the funky digital minimalism of the Sign O the Times era.

Get it from Tidal.

PWR BTTM “Dairy Queen”

I felt compelled to mention this when I wrote about Diet Cig, and I feel like I have to reiterate it here in writing about PWR BTTM: It is amazing to me that I have been writing this site since 2002 and I can probably (still) count on one hand the times I’ve featured bands from the Hudson Valley, which is where I’m from. It’s crazy that all of a sudden there’s a music scene forming in the area where I grew up – where the hell was all this when I was a kid?? – but also totally logical in that it’s a place very close to New York City where young musicians can live a lot cheaper and have a lot more practice space and generally have this sort of suburban-bohemian lifestyle. More bands should move there.

PWR BTTM are a joyful and openly queer rock band, but carry themselves in this very ‘90s casual indie boy sort of way. It’s an interesting balance, for sure. “Dairy Queen” is a very suburban rock song, both in vibe – that clinky metallic riff just feels like being in a shitty car driving to nowhere in particular to me – and in sentiment, which is mostly about fantasizing about doing super cool things and settling for making your own fun. It ma be a song about living with compromises and practical concerns, but it’s not hung up on that stuff. It’s more about really throwing yourself into the sorts of fun you get to have, and that’s usually a lot more satisfying.

Buy it from Amazon.

Animal Collective “What Would I Want? Sky (Live 2013)”

It was a good idea for Animal Collective to release an official document of their 2013 tour, if just to show off what a good live band they had become at that point in time. This was the first time in their career where they really figured out how to blend live and pre-recorded/electronic elements seamlessly into their performances, and how to present their best-known songs in a way that was satisfyingly faithful to the original recordings without entirely sacrificing the semi-improvisational elements that had been key to their live shows up to this point. I think this came out of a new professionalism that came in the wake of the success of Merriweather Post Pavilion, but also just an increasing confidence in their technical skills and a desire to show off the more disciplined structures of their more recent songwriting. You really get the best of all that in this version of “What Would I Want? Sky,” as it follows the same pattern as the studio version from dramatic ambience to tightly composed pop song, but there’s a wild energy to the performance that brings out the life in both sections.

Buy it from Domino.