Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Iron & Wine “Me and Lazarus”

Though Lazarus is a name with some very specific associations, it’s not entirely clear to me why Sam Beam is using it in this song. The best I can come up with is that the singer is envious of his friend’s ability to redefine and transform himself — in a sense, resurrected like the Biblical Lazarus. It could just be something that sounds nice in the melody, which is fine by me, especially since the main feature of the song is it gorgeous melody and relaxed arrangement. The sound is rich and comforting without seeming heavy, smothering or overdone. The emotional tone is muted and polite, but there’s a complex set of mixed feelings being articulated in the melody and texture. I hear bemusement in the way the melody climbs upward at the end of the verses, resignation in his wordless “oh-oh-ohs,” caution in the slow walk of the bass and assertiveness in the saxophone leads that weave in and out of the composition.

Buy it from Amazon.

Wire “Please Take”

Is there anyone better at writing sober, emotionally distant songs about feeling betrayed and aggrieved than Wire’s Colin Newman? “Please Take” is prime late-period Wire — icy, unforgiving and very direct in its sentiment, but so aloof that the kiss-off seems more brutal than if he’d conveyed even the slightest bit of emotional investment. This is the sound of a guy who is making sure that you know that he is totally finished with you and is not bluffing for a second. The music is tuneful and serene, but it can’t sweeten the incredible bitterness of this piece.

Buy it from Amazon.

Anna Calvi “No More Words”

I recommend that everyone love this and get as much as they can from it before it starts turning up on the soundtrack of every borderline television show, movie and ad campaign that requires a song that immediately signals romantic yet edgy sexiness. Not that the song would necessarily be diminished by such a thing — actually, it could be enhanced if it ended up in a truly inspired scene — but there’s just something about this that is so immediately powerful and evocative that it’s hard to imagine it not getting snapped up by eager music supervisors. This is a brilliantly realized track. Anna Calvi’s voice has both the ferocity and the restraint of a young Polly Harvey, as well as a natural flair on guitar. The atmosphere of this song is thick from the start but the transition into the second half is totally inspired. It’s like a big puff of colorful smoke that somehow turns into delicate metallic clanging.

Buy it from Domino Records in the U.K. Pre-order it from Amazon in the U.S.

Lia Ices “Little Marriage”

Lia Ices has a frigid, brittle sound that suits her name very well. When I hear “Little Marriage” I imagine an elaborate sculpture of incredibly thin icicles — beautiful, perfect and extremely delicate. But even if the music conveys fragility, the emotion of the piece seems a lot more resilient. The song is mournful in tone, but Ices does not seem shattered by heartbreak and trauma. If anything, she sounds as if she’s found a way to harden her heart to compensate for an outward vulnerability.

Buy it from Amazon.

Deerhoof “The Merry Barracks”

A lot of indie rock music is based on contrasting highly expressive guitar parts with deadpan or understated vocal performances, but Deerhoof push that dynamic to an absurd extreme. The guitar parts are always extremely flamboyant and tied in with rhythms that bounce all over the place. The music carries all the emotion, while the vocals by Satomi Matsuzaki are like a blank slate. She can be rather playful, but it’s hard to get a read on her. Emotionally illegible, totally unknowable. This throws the music off in a way that is sometimes fascinating and exciting, but more often than not, I find it frustrating. Their songs are packed with musical ideas that I admire and sometimes envy, but I don’t know how to connect with it. A song like “The Merry Barracks” is incredibly satisfying on a cerebral and physical level, but there’s this important part of me that feels left out of the fun.

Buy it from Amazon.

Destroyer “Poor in Love”

She took me aside and said

“Look, I don’t do this every day,

you’ve got style…

All you’ve got is style,

I can see it from a mile away

There are probably a thousand unnameable emotions and anxieties that cluster up in the ten second pause between “you’ve got style” and “all you’ve got is style.” You seem to pass through the feelings in slow motion, slower at least than it would take for someone to actually say it. It’s a split second rendered in great detail before snapping back into what can be understood as “real time” within the song’s loose narrative. The songs takes about a minute to recover from that blow, but once the shock waves dissipate, the groove kicks in and Dan Bejar’s bohemian swagger returns. It’s beautiful, really. This is a truly gorgeous and affecting piece of music, and I don’t think I have ever heard anything quite like the graceful dissatisfaction in the sound of this, though I suppose people like Stephen Malkmus and Bob Dylan have spent a lot of time in this zone over the course of their careers.

None of this is exactly new for Bejar either, but there’s something magical in this song and the rest of Kaputt in comparison even to previous triumphs like Destroyer’s Rubies or “Myriad Harbour.” The album announces itself as a very special record — an instant classic! — in the way that it so perfectly conjures an immediately recognizable but totally ineffable set of feelings, images, concepts and arguments without seeming familiar. It’s so specific but it resists description. Really, a lot of why this is so moving is because it’s articulating complex thoughts and emotions that just do not make sense when you type them out.

Buy it from Amazon.

Pearl Jam “The Fixer” (Live on Ten Legs version)

I don’t really remember why, but I never got around to writing about Pearl Jam’s last album Backspacer. I suppose I just wasn’t up for it at the time it came out, things were kinda rough and it didn’t connect. I did like “The Fixer” more or less immediately. It’s undoubtedly one of the group’s best latter day singles, an energetic, compact composition that showcases their generally underrated gift for pop songwriting. (Has any other band written so many memorable radio hits while rarely getting credit for writing catchy, well-constructed songs?) A lot of what makes “The Fixer” work is the way the song plays off of the heroic quality of Eddie Vedder’s voice and stage persona. In this song, he’s an earnest, old fashioned guy who wants to save everyone and everything, and to preserve cherished things from the past that he fear may be lost forever. There’s a sense of humor in this, a touch of self-parody, but for the most part, this is the sound of the guy proudly owning his character, messiah complex and all.

Buy it from Amazon.

Chain and the Gang “Not Good Enough”

There are countless love songs, but tough love songs are kinda rare, especially when they have nothing to do with sex and romance. “Not Good Enough” delivers a harsh message with a cheerful, friendly tune: “If you feel like you’re not good enough then you’re probably not, and you never, ever will be.” Ian Svenonius sings the words with no particular malice or venom, he mostly comes across like someone who respects the listener enough to not sugarcoat a hard truth. It’s important to note that he’s not telling anyone that they can’t do something, only that it’s impossible to accomplish much without believing on some level that you can do it.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Esben and the Witch “Marine Fields Grow”

“Marine Fields Grow” is slight and airy, but it has an intense gravity to it. It’s the kind of song that reaches out and pulls you into its sad, weary, romantic emotional zone. The vocals sound pained and impossibly sad as they echo within these circular, hypnotic melodic patterns. It sounds like she’s singing around a void, or singing to something that is no longer there. It’s horrible to realize when something or someone is gone, and that you suddenly need to restructure the way you live to avoid falling into this hole that cannot be filled. Other songs are about moving on from that loss, but this one feels like it’s only about the pain of realizing that it’s there in the first place.

Buy it from Amazon.

Scott Miller was the frontman and primary songwriter for two great indie pop bands — Game Theory in the ’80s, and the Loud Family in the ’90s. I’m especially fond of the latter, mostly because the Game Theory albums are kinda hard to come by and so I’ve just spent a lot more time with the Loud Family. His aesthetic is consistent over the course of all those records: Sharp melodies, unusual song structures and chord changes, and carefully composed, postmodern, often very witty lyrics. If you’ve never heard his music, I strongly recommend listening to this mix I made collecting highlights from the Loud Family discography.

Miller began writing about music on the Loud Family website sometime in the late ’90s. Music: What Happened?, his first book of music criticism, was just released and I can’t recommend it highly enough. As it turns out, Miller is just as clever and insightful as a critic as he is as a lyricist. The book is pretty simple: He selected 20 favorite songs from every year between 1957 and 2009, and wrote a bit about every song. The format is actually very close to what you get on this site, but without the mp3s. I loved it, and I think that if you enjoy what I do, you’ll get a lot out of Scott’s writing.

(more…)

R.I.P. Trish Keenan.

Broadcast “Michael A Grammar”

My name is not Michael, but it’s very common for people to think that it is. It’s not far off from Matthew, I suppose, and it’s a nice enough name, so I’m never very offended. (I mean, if people were accidentally calling me Mike or Mikey or Mickey, I might take some issue.) The only time I ever wish that my name was actually Michael is when I hear this song. Trish Keenan sings the name with a quiet grace and gentle authority – Michael could just as well be her child as it as a lover, a brother, or a best friend. Lyrically as well as musically, the track is intimate and woozy, like a disjointed half-asleep late night conversation set to song.

Buy it from Amazon. Originally posted 11/22/2005)

Yelle “Safari Disco Club”

I think she’s singing about animals dancing, but it doesn’t really matter. Like most Yelle songs, this is about the bounce of the beats, the brightness of the synthesizer tones, and this particular quality to her voice that is very captivating but sorta hard to explain. I love her assertive style, the way she kinda declares every line, but what really excites me is something in the very timbre of her voice. I like the way her vocals are treated here — it’s mostly her natural tone, but at some points it’s warped and extended. I imagine her voice hardening, becoming something like a force field. Everything just bounces off it, you know?

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Fergus & Geronimo “Girls With English Accents”

When I saw this title on the back cover of this CD, I really wanted to like the song because like most any reasonable person, I have a major soft spot for girls with English accents. Thank goodness this is a fitting tribute. The sound of it very mid-60s British rock, but filtered through a loose, stoned, free-wheeling American vibe. When they sing about wanting to visit England, they seem as if they’ve spent all their time listening to British Invasion records fantasizing about the bands’ groupies.

Buy it from Amazon.

Smith Westerns “Weekend”

The harmony in the chorus of “Weekend” is so perfect, so familiar, so gentle and sweet. The rest of the song is like a shiny, sparkling frame for that gorgeous swoop of melody. The words mostly just narrate the vibe — the spiritual lift of minor excitement and the bummer of slight disappointment tied in with an earnest but low key infatuation. Like a lot of the best indie rock and power pop bands, Smith Westerns are good at evoking the magic in a small moment. Chances are, you either hear this and immediately identify with it in the moment, or you hear a bit of yourself from the past. I’d be sad for anyone who hasn’t ever felt some variation on this feeling. It’s a nice thing.

Buy it from Amazon.

Excerpt from Patton Oswalt’s Zombie Spaceship Wasteland featuring Michael Stipe

As a consumer you have three options in terms of buying and experiencing Patton Oswalt’s new book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. I am telling you right now: Unless you are deaf, there is a correct choice to be made. You have to buy the audiobook.

If you buy Zombie Spaceship Wasteland for your Kindle or some other similar device, you’re getting the bare minimum experience. I cannot recommend this unless you are deaf and/or you really love using your Kindle or other similar device. The only positive thing I can say about this experience is that it does not involve paper, shipping, etc and that is good for the environment. But then again, the same is true of downloading an audiobook so that is a shared advantage.

If you buy Zombie Spaceship Wasteland as a physical book, you will have a tactile experience and something you can put on a shelf. I recognize these as generally positive things, and this is certainly my preferred method of consuming books. I’m sure you can get a lot of out a traditional reading experience with this particular book. Oswalt is a fine writer — and not just “for a stand-up comedian,” he is a rather brilliant prose stylist — and the book jacket is a pleasing shade of blue. Also, there is a comic book chapter and comic books are best read on actual paper. That said, you are simply not getting the best possible Zombie Spaceship Wasteland experience in this format. You will be missing something very important.

Patton Oswalt reads the audiobook of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. This is a major advantage that makes the other formats comparatively irrelevant. Oswalt is one of the great oral storytellers of our era. Why would you pass up the chance to hear his rhythms, cadences, intonation? Why would you not want to hear all that nuance, all the additional asides? The difference between reading this on the page and listening to him speak is like the difference between listening to a great piece of music and reading the sheet music.

This isn’t some guy just reading a book out loud. It’s a true performance and a complete work of art. He takes advantage of the form — a chapter of faux-academic writing about hobo folk songs is complemented by fake field recordings of the songs in question performed by Michael Penn; the opening story in which R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction pushes Oswalt toward an epiphany that leads him out of his dull life in Northern Virginia includes lyric passages read by Michael Stipe himself. All that, and you get a .pdf of the comic! You can’t lose.

The R.E.M. sequence is brilliant, by the way. I never knew Oswalt was a fan, but from the moment he mentioned Fables, it made perfect sense to me that it would be his favorite. Given the themes in his body of work, how is he not going to love the album about small town loners and a desire for escape?

Buy it from Amazon.

I resisted and/or ignored the Replacements for years, and it was mostly because I didn’t have a place for them in my life. There’s a lot of other major canonical acts I came around to sort of late, and I think that’s normal and fine. A nice thing about art is that most of it isn’t going anywhere, and whenever you’re ready for it, it’ll still be there waiting for you. The right moment might come even with music you’ve written off in the past.

I definitely wrote off the Replacements for a long time. They were always sold to me in a way that did not and still does not appeal to me: Messy, debauched fuck-ups with loud, blunt music, like an 80s indie rock Ke$ha. When I was a teen and first exploring the rock canon, this was very unappealing. I was an uptight kid, effectively straight edge into my early 20s, and the idea of a pretty basic rock band whose primary hook was nonstop inebriation did not arouse my interest. Over the years I developed some appreciation for their best known songs, but aside from putting “I Will Dare” on one of my favorite iPod playlists, I never felt inclined to explore their catalog until fairly recently.

Going deeper into the Replacements catalog I found that while that lowlife midwestern party boy vibe is indeed a big part of their deal, there were better reasons to like the band. They may have been legendary for haphazard concerts, but Paul Westerberg’s songs were focused, disciplined things. Like Pavement and Guided by Voices a few years down the line, the Replacements could get away with being loose and sloppy because their songs were so sturdy and tuneful. They had a solid foundation and a singer with a strong voice for rock and roll. Westerberg never sounds like he’s ever trying too hard to sound as soulful as he does on his best songs. He’s a natural.

Here are two of my favorite Replacement songs. The first is glaringly obvious, the second only slightly less so. Maybe you’ve never heard them before. If that is the case, I think you’re in luck.

The Replacements “Alex Chilton”

I was listening to this song and thinking about how easy it is to imagine it arranged and recorded in the style of Spoon. Then I flipped the thought and realized that this song is in a lot of ways a crucial part of the blueprint for Spoon, specifically the vocal phrasing and rhythmic attack on the guitar in the chorus. Maybe the song would sound better if it was recorded in the Spoon style, but I quite like the way the band’s rawness is filtered through a mid-80s production aesthetic. There’s a nice tension in the way the bombastic sound of some elements contrasts with other parts that signal raggedness and intimacy.

“Alex Chilton” is, of course, about Alex Chilton of Big Star. Or really, it’s about being a fan, and imagining an artist as this larger-than-life figure. In Westerberg’s mythology, Chilton isn’t an obscure figure on the fringe of rock history but instead a beloved pop icon on par with the Beatles. It’s a song where the real world doesn’t matter half as much as one man’s personal passion. It’s quite beautiful and sweet, and it serves a great advertisement for Chilton and Big Star. I imagine that quite a few people went out looking for Big Star records after hearing this song. Someone should write a similar tune about Paul Westerberg and call it “Paul Westerberg.”

Buy it from Amazon.

The Replacements “Swingin’ Party”

“Swingin’ Party” is a gorgeous expression of self-loathing. The lyrics are basically a string of self-deprecating one-liners delivered with a wounded sincerity over an arrangement that makes the sentiment seem lovely and romantic in spite of itself. It’s the moment when someone lets their guard down, and makes themselves vulnerable — the mood is sad, but there’s this feeling of possibility. You’re opening up, and that could change your relationship with whomever you’re addressing. It could get more intimate, or it could just get more awkward and strained.

Buy it from Amazon.

Jessica Lea Mayfield “Tell Me”

Jessica Lea Mayfield mainly operates in a sort of alt-country mode, but on a few of the songs on her second album she kinda wanders off, bringing her sad twang into less obvious musical surroundings. “Tell Me” is one of those tracks, a strange art pop composition with a careful arrangement that sounds like someone trying to find their way out of a maze of mixed emotions. Mayfield sounds a bit exhausted, but willing to work hard to find her way through self-doubt (“failure is proof that I am not brave”) or get beyond this vexing emotional stalemate. The sound is this song is so specific — pensive, mildly anxious, carefully calibrated to a precise balance of subtle emotional shifts. It has a very complete character.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

The Dø “Gonna Be Sick!”

The start of “Gonna Be Sick!” is a bit plodding and monotone, but as the song progresses, it becomes far more lively and colorful. Also, and the title may be a giveaway here, it gets to sound a lot more nervous. The emotional shifts are a bit jarring, and follow along with the piece’s unusual tonal and rhythmic transitions and collisions. (I actually hear a lot of Can influence in this arrangement. Do you?) Olivia Bouyssou Merilahti’s voice is especially great and expressive, investing her anxious words with enough drama to be emotionally engaging while just humorous enough to undercut the tension with some dark self-aware wit. The song pulled me in right away, but even still I feel like this is very much the type of track that can seem minor at first, but is quite astonishing when you spend a bit of time paying close attention to its details.

Buy it via The Dø’s site.

M.I.A. “Gen N-E-Y”

So yeah, I didn’t like ///Y/ very much. And because of this, I wonder if a lot of my enthusiastic approval of Vicki Leekx is based on just feeling relieved that M.I.A. is once again focusing on her strengths rather than her weaknesses. Whereas ///Y/ was a messy, joyless slog, the mixtape repositions her as a brilliant curator of beats and the kind of vocalist who knows exactly how to make her bitterness and anger sound like a very good time. “Gen N-E-Y” is a highlight of the mix, and it’s one of the most brutal tracks she’s ever done. She’s tearing someone apart — some people are saying it’s a Diplo dis track, which sounds about right to me — and her spite sounds incredibly focused. There’s some very well-applied filter effect on her voice, and it intensifies the nastiness in her tone, as if her words have been sharpened to a point being plunged into the person she’s addressing on every hard beat. It’s vicious, but weirdly fun. Misanthropic glee, I guess.

Get the full mixtape for free from M.I.A.

Janet Jackson “Escapade”

It occurred to me the other day that “Escapade” is Janet Jackson’s equivalent to her brother Michael’s monster hit “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Most obviously, both songs are perky, optimistic, and flirty in tone, and tend to be considered among their most frivolous singles. More specifically, the two songs have nearly identical subject matter and sentiment. The lyrics come from the perspective of working class people who are trying to fit romance into their lives, and are getting very excited about spending time with the object of their affection. It’s all very banal, but that’s kind of the point, and not simply in terms of writing something that a broad range of people can relate to in some way. Michael sings about “working from 9 to 5;” Janet “worked so hard all week” and just cashed her check so she has some money on her weekend getaway. If you put this in the context of the singers’ very unusual upbringing and phenomenal careers, the most ordinary details start to come across like a fantasy of normalcy. They invest these songs with so much effervescent joy and enthusiasm, and I think on some level it’s because they really yearned for something so simple, fun, and uncomplicated. Of course, we do too! The singer and audience may be thinking of the some thing from different perspectives and economic means, but the expression puts them right in the same place.

Buy it from Amazon.

of Montreal “Girl Named Hello”

It’s hard to find the emotional center of this song. It’s a groovy tune, but like a lot of music derived from Afrobeat, there’s a moodiness underlying the joyful physicality of the rhythm. Kevin Barnes’ vocals and lyrics are all over the place, veering between playful, goofy lines and some intense self-loathing. Or rather, perspective on intense self-loathing: “If I treated someone else the way I treat myself, I’d be in jail.” I like the way the piece feels stuck in an emotional limbo, a bit self-conscious about the past and totally unsure of the future. Barnes makes the best of this in-between tone in the album sequencing, bookending it with the joyful, earnestly flirtatious “Sex Karma” and the bitter, spiteful “Famine Affair.” It’s an entire side on the vinyl edition, and in three songs it is a microcosm of False Priest‘s manic depressive version of romance.

Buy it from Amazon.

Veronika Fischer “He, Wir Fahr’n Mit Dem Zug”

The title translates to “Hey, we ride the train.” I’m not sure, but I think that might be the official motto of Germany. Anyway, this is a prime bit of East German disco from the late ’70s. I responded to this song immediately. For one thing, it is comprised of so many familiar disco signifiers that it seems as if the band and the producers were attempting to make the ultimate disco track. But despite the somewhat overstuffed quality of the arrangement, every bit is extremely well executed and distinct. There’s a lot of color and contrast to this song. Also, not for nothing but there is a keyboard part in this track that seems to anticipate the chorus melody of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” (I’m not alone in hearing that, right?)

Buy it from Amazon.