Sun Kil Moon “I Love My Dad”

I made a joke yesterday about how this new Sun Kil Moon record sounds a little like a very dour Adam Duritz solo album, and I didn’t necessarily mean that as an insult. Mark Kozelek’s voice is similar, much more restrained – the emotive excess is dialed back, and there’s more grit in his tone. But I think there’s a similar investment in the richness of words – Kozelek is a better lyricist, though – and in conveying a direct, unvarnished emotion. “I Love My Dad” is the song that stands out for me, partly because it’s more up-tempo than a lot of the other songs, but mostly because I don’t hear a lot of guys sing so honestly and lovingly about their father. This is a very nuanced and not always flattering tribute to his dad, and it goes into a lot of concrete details about his experience, but I think in doing that it gets at a LOT of men’s relationships with their father. They are rarely perfect and are often aloof or send confusing messages, but there’s always that part of you that only really remembers the really good advice they’ve imparted.

Buy it from Amazon.

Gardens & Villa “Bullet Train”

Gardens & Villa changed their sound so much between their first and second records that they could’ve fully justified changing the name of the band. Their debut was very stark and desolate – I described one of the songs as sounding “sorta like the Shins dying slowly in the middle of an endless desert” back in 2011 – and the new one is basically an American spin on gloomy Thatcher-era synth pop. I particularly like “Bullet Train,” which I think is very in touch with the aims of the best ’80s synth pop acts in the way it filters funk and soul moves through this icy palette and uptight sensibility. There’s some really great chilly keyboard tones in that – so cold that it feels like a blast of frigid air over the groove.

Buy it from Amazon.

St. Vincent “Digital Witness”

I haven’t really decided how I feel about St. Vincent’s new record. I feel a little disappointed in that she hasn’t done much to change from where she was at on her previous album, but I like that she’s refining a very distinct style, and she pushes all of her tics to the extreme on most of her new songs. It’s more twitchy, more synthetic, more aloof. It works, but as she moves in this direction, the music feels less and less…human. And that’s a big part of her art – she’s clearly obsessed with the idea of the uncanny valley, and making affectless normalcy seem jarring and absurd. But maybe that works a little better with visuals? A lot of what made her older work, particularly Actor, so exciting was how there was this very human anxiety under it all, and a lot of the art was about that being buried.

“Digital Witness,” one of the best new songs, puts all that anxiety right on the surface, and the lyrics are a fairly judgmental portrait of someone whose intense FOMO has ironically metastasized into full-blown social media addiction and a distance from active life. But even if she sings the song in the first person, I can’t shake the feeling that any anxiety in this song doesn’t come from the character so much as Annie Clark being anxious about people like this existing. It’s fear of the new normal.

Buy it from Amazon.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor “Runaway Daydreamer”

Sophie Ellis-Bextor has spent the vast majority of her career making dance pop for the U.K. market, sort of like a b-list homegrown version of Kylie. Her new record is a change of direction for her – she’s abandoned dance beats, and has embraced a very stately and grand sort of orchestral pop. It works pretty well for her: She’s always had a prim voice that I never found too compelling in the context of dancey stuff, but fits the orderly, uptight tone of this music. “Runaway Daydreamer” isn’t nearly as deep as it’d like to be, but the melody is just lovely and even if it has the trappings of “mature pop,” it’s still very bubblegum at its core.

Buy it from Amazon.

TV on the Radio “Million Miles”

For some reason I didn’t really notice that TV on the Radio actually released a couple singles last year – I thought that blogs were just posting live videos of unfinished songs and I generally ignore that kind of thing. But no, “Million Miles” came out for real last summer, and it’s one of the best songs they’ve ever done. It’s a ballad that mourns the ending of a once lovely relationship, which is a topic they’ve touched on before in Tunde Adebimpe’s “You.” But whereas that song expresses confusion as to how and why it happened, Kyp Mallone’s perspective is both far more sentimental and hugely pessimistic. By the end of the song he’s so defeated by realizing that all love eventually fades away that he’s swearing it off forever – “Don’t you let love break your heart / Givin’ all your power to a flame that falls apart.” But in context, you can sense that his words are very hollow, and he’d easily fall in love all over again without hesitation.

Buy it from Amazon.

Mouse On Mars “I See Dizzy”

I love the way this track sounds as if Mouse On Mars are poking and prodding the soundtrack of a vintage video game til it screams, or bouncing it off the walls like a rubber ball. They’re geniuses of making you feel like you’ve been tossed into some insane cartoon world, and the rules of animation apply to pretty much everything except for you. Everything’s bending and shifting and bouncing around you, and you just have to dance around it somehow.

Buy it from Amazon.

Yacht “Plastic Soul”

It’s funny how artists who seem very concerned about us all losing touch with some kind of authentic humanity never seem all that bothered by all the ways previous generations have made life “inauthentic.” It’s always about whatever the popular technology is around at the time – in the 80s and 90s it was always people convince that television was destroying everything, now it’s all about the internet and social media. No one ever wants to roll back the clock much further than what they remember of their childhood, or what they imagine their parents or grandparents’ lives to have been like based on what they’ve gleaned from…media. The video for this song really hits this idea home – the music is very “we’re all like computers now, maaaan,” but the footage is very nostalgic for the late ’80s and early ’90s. I can’t tell whether the band is thoughtlessly undermining itself, or they are intentionally contrasting these ideas to make a point. I do think the song is far, far better than the video, which is so shoddy and devoid of imagination that it threatens to ruin the music by association.

Buy it from DFA.

Dum Dum Girls “Too True To Be Good”

It occurred to me the other day that the songwriter Dee Dee from Dum Dum Girls has the most in common with is actually Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian. They both adhere to a very classic sense of pop songwriting and structure, and their respective catalogs follow a loose timeline of trends in 20th century pop, as though they could not consider doing different sorts of pastiche out of chronological order. Too True is the Dum Dum Girls’ ’80s album, and the aesthetic suits Dee Dee very well. In the broadest sense, the record is like a Bangles album produced for 4AD, or if The Go-Gos merged with The Cure. She’s always done best with songs that have a bit of romance, and the rich, echoey ambience of ’80s pop is ideal for that. A lot of the songs on the record are about some transcendent emotion or lust cutting through the murk and gloom of life. “Too True To Be Good,” a particularly Cure-ish number, really drives this idea home — it’s basically about being fascinated with a woman who makes you feel more alive until you start to suspect she’s draining something from your life.

Buy it from Amazon.

Adult Jazz “Am Gone”

Adult Jazz is a self-deprecating name, I guess? Because this is certainly an adult type of pop music, and while it’s not jazz, the musicians are definitely invested in a balance of precise chops and loose, expressive performances. “Am Gone” reminds me a lot of Grizzly Bear – it’s there in the melodies and guitar tone, and in the way they let melodies and percussive sounds linger in the air. It’s a very beautiful song, but sort of hard to peg emotionally. Though that’s sort of the point – the lyrics are full of ambivalent phrases and questions, and the singer opens the song by telling you straight up that they have a history of running away from problems, but aren’t doing much better by taking a new approach as a “forgiver.”

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Angel Olsen “Hi-Five”

Loneliness is that corrodes your life very slowly, gradually dissolving your hope for connection until it’s entirely gone and you forget it was ever there. “Hi-Five” is about life after the hope is gone, and all you’ve got left is this void you’ve given up on ever filling. It’s a sad, bitter song, and the joke is that at the end she recognizes the same loneliness in someone else and sarcastically offers a high five while feeling like she’s stuck with them, as if life was just one long draft and you just get stuck with other unwanted people in the end.

Buy it from Amazon.

Against Me! “Unconditional Love”

“Unconditional Love” is as happy as the songs on Against Me!’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues get, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that it was actually the last song written for the record. Most of the record is focused on the intense anguish of experiencing dysphoria, or struggling to shift your identity and relationships with people you’ve known for years. “Unconditional Love” isn’t a resolution of any kind, but it’s a little further along the process of change and upheaval – it’s at least at a place where unconditional love is being offered by those closest to you, and realizing that while that’s good and useful, it’s just not enough to make it. If self-loathing runs deep enough, it blocks out everyone else’s love. You disqualify it, you doubt it, you twist it into something else. But even in knowing that, the song still feels a bit jolly and triumphant. “Unconditional love” is still a lot more than Laura Jane Grace was expecting.

Buy it from Amazon.

Places to Hide “Love Song”

This is such a totally unromantic love song, to the point that I assume the band knows this and the title is meant to be a little ironic. It’s not that there isn’t love in there somewhere, but that the singer is so confused and overwhelmed that every tentative step towards adulthood — thinking about paying off student loans, trying to have a serious girlfriend — has him stumbling around gracelessly. But it’s like this for most everyone – after all, it’s not as though anyone really shows you how to do any of this stuff right. This song works well mainly because it acknowledges the humor of this hapless dude while also honoring his feelings and understanding what it’s like to fuck up something you thought you were close to figuring out.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Hospitality “I Miss Your Bones”

I closely associate the first Hospitality record with the dead of winter, and so it’s not a surprise that their second album suits that time just as well. Trouble is a lot more minimalist and chilly than the debut – about half the songs sound like they’ve scraped out a lot of the arrangement with a scalpel, and even a relatively robust track like “I Miss Your Bones” has little embellishment beyond the sound of a few core instruments and a lot of implied negative space. There’s a vague anxiety in this music – it comes out most obviously in these occasional manic bursts of melody, but it’s mostly there in the empty air. It’s an uncertain feeling that isn’t specific, so it just ends up coming out sounding like an absence.

Buy it from Merge Records.

Beyoncé featuring Frank Ocean “Superpower”

Out of all the songs on Beyoncé’s excellent new album, “Superpower” doesn’t come up a lot – it doesn’t really have any super-quotable lines, it’s not an obvious hit, it’s not at all flashy. But it may be the best ballad she’s ever recorded, and also the most subtle: The song seems to move in a slow motion circle around her vocal performance, which is quite solemn and intense. It’s a love song, but it’s framed in political terms – she evokes Civil Rights-era language; she makes having a stable relationship seem like a challenge to the world. This is a song about true partnership. It wasn’t very long ago that Beyoncé sang about love in economic terms – “Upgrade U” makes her marriage sound like it’s based mainly on corporate synergy. But she’s matured a lot since then, and I think a lot of the songs on her last two records are the work of an artist who has become unafraid of expressing deep love and affection in her music – maybe she thought of it as a weakness when she was younger, a threat to her autonomy and identity. But now she sees it as a strength, and that’s exactly what she’s singing about in “Superpower.”

I wrote a lot more about Beyoncé’s new album here.

Buy it from iTunes.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks “J Smoov”

Malkmus hasn’t written many songs like “J Smoov” in his career – “Motion Suggests Itself” and “Blue Arrangements” are at least in the ballpark, but don’t commit as fully to this sort of low key country-soul vibe with a full-on horn arrangement. The song reminds me of mid-’70s Al Green in particular, but this is Malkmus, so this performance is about as good it gets for him in terms of technical vocal prowess, and the structure and lyrics skew away from standard tropes even when it seems like he’s embracing them.

“J Smoov” has a loungey, relaxed feeling to it, but the instrumental parts feel very elliptical, like he’s just waiting something out or drifting off into a pensive daze. The lyrics seem flirtatious and romantic at first, but once you pay attention, it all takes a turn – he’s singing about a mutual attraction that both parties know can’t be acted upon, and when he thinks about consummating it, his language gets impatient and unsexy: “At this point darling, I must say / that the seeds unsown are gonna grow anyway / rent a room, get it over with / in a race to the inside of your face.” The line that really gets me is at the start of the refrain when he sings “you’re afraid of me,” if just because it raises the question of whether the other person was really pursuing him at all.

Buy it from Amazon.

This 10-disc, 184-song mix is a survey of some of the best and most notable music from 2013. For an even more broad overview of the year’s music across many genres, I encourage you to check out the many lists I made in collaboration with Aylin Zafar, Caitlin White, Maria Sherman, Alex Naidus, and several other writers over at BuzzFeed.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Ariana Grande “Honeymoon Avenue” / Miley Cyrus “We Can’t Stop” / Haim “The Wire” / Kanye West “Bound 2” / Vampire Weekend “Don’t Lie” / King Krule “Neptune Estate” / Neko Case “Night Still Comes” / Sky Ferreira “I Blame Myself” / Laura Mvula “Make Me Lovely” / Beyoncé “Flawless” / Saint Pepsi “Better” / Disclosure featuring Ed Macfarlane “Defeated No More” / Maria Magdalena “CVMC (Cada Vez Mas Cerca)” / Phoenix “S.O.S. In Bel Air” / Laura Marling “Master Hunter” / David Bowie “The Next Day” / My Bloody Valentine “New You” / Nine Inch Nails “Find My Way”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

Justin Timberlake “Pusher Love Girl” / Foxygen “Oh Yeah” / Cults “I Can Hardly Make You Mine” / Janelle Monaé “Dance Apocalyptic” / Brown Eyed Girls “날아갈래” / Coco O. “Where the Wind Blows” / Mariah Carey featuring Miguel “Beautiful” / Eleanor Friedberger “I’ll Never Be Happy Again” / Deerhunter “Dream Captain” / Fear of Men “Ritual Confession” / One Direction “Little Black Dress” / Superchunk “FOH” / Pink featuring Nate Ruess “Just Give Me A Reason” / Killer Mike and El-P featuring Big Boi “Banana Clipper” / Earl Sweatshirt featuring Vince Staples and Casey Veggies “Hive” / Kelela “Enemy” / Rhye “Open” / Goldfrapp “Alvar” / Glass Candy “The Possessed”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Chvrches “The Mother We Share” / GEMS “Medusa” / Lorde “Royals” / Vic Mensa “Orange Soda” / Pusha T featuring Kendrick Lamar “Nosetalgia” / Wet “Dreams” / Darkside “Metatron” / The Field “Cupid’s Head” / Major Lazer “Bubble Butt (Remix)” / Pitbull featuring Ke$ha “Timber” / Queens of the Stone Age “Smooth Sailing” / The Preatures “Is This How You Feel?” / Tricot “おちゃんせんすぅす” / Unknown Mortal Orchestra “So Good At Being In Trouble” / Action Bronson featuring Big Body Bes “72 Virgins” / Boards of Canada “Nothing Is Real” / Baths “Ironworks” / Tim Hecker “Virginal II” / Scout Niblett “Can’t Fool Me Now”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

A$AP Rocky “Long Live A$AP” / Four Tet “Parallel Jalebi” / Blood Orange “You’re Not Good Enough” / James Blake “Retrograde” / Yo La Tengo “Cornelia and Jane” / Kacey Musgrave “Merry Go Round” / Iron & Wine “Grace for Saints and Ramblers” / Eminem featuring Kendrick Lamar “Love Game” / M.I.A. “YALA” / Icona Pop “All Night” / Lady Gaga “Applause” / Basement Jaxx “Back 2 the Wild” / Duke Dumont featuring A*M*E “Need U (100%)” / Betty Who “Somebody Loves You” / Alan Braxe “Time Machine” / Britney Spears “Til It’s Gone” / Jai Paul “Str8 Outta Mumbai” / FKA Twigs “Papi Pacify” / Beck “I Won’t Be Long”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Okkervil River “Stay Young” / Elvis Costello and the Roots “Sugar Don’t Work” / Big Sean featuring Kendrick Lamar and Jay Electronica “Control” / Sage the Gemini “Gas Pedal” / Le1f “Plush” / Jessy Lanza “5785021” / Eric Copeland “Rokzi” / Kurt Vile “Walkin’ On A Pretty Day” / Florida Georgia Line “Get Your Shine On” / Brandy Clark “Stripes” / The National “Don’t Swallow the Cap” / Yvette “Cuts Me In Half” / Grouper “Cloud in Places” / Tove Lo “Habits” / Lone “Airglow Fires” / Dawn Richard “Frequency” / The Weeknd “Belong to the World”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Autre Ne Veut “Play By Play” / Atoms For Peace “Default” / La Big Vic “All That Heaven Allows” / Pretty Lights “Color of My Soul” / Majical Cloudz “This Is Magic” / Juveniles “Strangers” / Mount Kimbie featuring King Krule “You Took Your Time” / Schoolboy Q featuring Kendrick Lamar “Collard Greens” / Tyler, the Creator “Jamba” / Bibio “You” / Thee Oh Sees “Toe Cutter – Thumb Buster” / of Montreal “Belle Glade Missionaries” / Marnie Stern “You Don’t Turn Down” / Sophie “Bipp” / The Knife “Full of Fire” / Doldrums “She Is the Wave”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

Sleigh Bells “Bitter Rivals” / Teen Girl Scientist Monthly “Summer Skin” / Danny Brown “Dip” / Cakes Da Killa “Break Em Off” / Drake “Hold On, We’re Going Home” / San E “이별식탁” / AlunaGeorge “Body Music” / Oneohtrix Point Never “Zebra” / Lana Del Rey vs Cedric Gervais “Summertime Sadness” / Seven Lions vs. Myon & Shane 54 featuring Tove Lo “Strangers” / Octo Octa “His Kiss” / Au Revoir Simone “Crazy” / Alpine “In the Wild” / Phosphorescent “Ride On/Right On” / Burial “Rival Dealer” / VÅR “Begin to Remember” / Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Despair”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Chance the Rapper “Good Ass Intro” / Knife Party “Power Glove” / Ciara featuring Nicki Minaj “I’m Out” / Migos featuring Drake “Versace” / The Juan Maclean “Feel Like Movin'” / The Julie Ruin “Cookie Road” / Grass House “The Colours in the Light May Obscure” / Charli XCX “You (Ha Ha Ha)” / Jay Z “Somewhere In America” / J. Cole “Forbidden Fruit” / The Blow “I Tell Myself Everything” / The Range “Loftmane” / Speedy Ortiz “No Below” / Kate Nash “Part Heart” / Electric Six “Show Me What Your Lights Mean” / Paul McCartney “Queenie Eye” / Unmade Beds “Go the Whole Way” / A$AP Ferg featuring A$AP Rocky “Shabba” / Robin Thicke featuring Kendrick Lamar “Give It 2 U” / Dënver “Revista de Gimnasia”

DOWNLOAD DISC 9

G-Dragon “미치GO (GO)” / Arcade Fire “We Exist” / Daft Punk “Get Lucky” / The Head and the Heart “Summertime” / Fleetwood Mac “Sad Angel” / Pearl Jam “Infallible” / Waxahatchee “Brother Bryan” / Future of the Left “The Male Gaze” / DJ Khaled featuring Drake and Rick Ross “No New Friends” / Rudimental featuring Foxes “Right Here” / Classixx featuring Nancy Whang “All You’re Waiting For” / Giant Drag “90210” / The Dismemberment Plan “No One’s Saying Nothing” / Luke Bryan “Crash My Party” / The Last Hurrah “Lonely Whistle Call” / Sebadoh “Love You Here” / Savages “I Am Here” / Jason Derulo featuring 2 Chainz “Talk Dirty” / MellowHigh “Get’n Drunk” / Sandy Lam “无言歌”

DOWNLOAD DISC 10

Tegan and Sara “Closer” / Fol Chen “A Tourist Town” / Franz Ferdinand “Right Action” / Destroyer “El Rito” / The Flaming Lips “Sun Blows Up Today” / Lee Ranaldo and the Dust “Key-Hole” / Mazzy Star “In the Kingdom” / Julia Holter “Maxim’s II” / Lightning Dust “Diamond” / Rizzle Kicks “The Reason I Live” / Toro Y Moi “Say That” / Bflecha “B33” / Cassie featuring Jeremih “Sound of Love” / Daughn Gibson “The Sound of Law” / Anna Calvi “Love of My Life” / Cass McCombs “Big Wheel” / Chelsea Light Moving “Heavenmetal” / Candy Claws “White Seal – Shell & Spine” / Factory Floor “Here Again”

Maria Magdalena “CVMC (Cada Vez Más Cerca)”

One of the nice things about listening to songs in languages I cannot understand is that I get to enjoy it on a purely musical level. I can infer a bit from contextual clues, or seek out a translation of the lyrics, but even still the vocals just sort of wash over me, and it’s mostly just abstraction to my ears. This is a nice change of pace – I maybe spend too much time letting my experiences with music be shaped by lyrical intention, when that’s only a portion of what’s happening in most songs. “CVMC” is definitely the kind of song that doesn’t really need words to get across an emotion – it basically sounds like Kate Bush collaborating with Giorio Moroder in the early ’80s, and it’s at this perfect intersection of dreamy joy and mild melancholy.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Breeders @ Webster Hall 12/19/2013
New Year / Cannonball / Invisible Man / No Aloha / Roi / Do You Love Me Now? / Flipside / I Just Wanna Get Along / Mad Lucas / Divine Hammer / S.O.S. / Hag / Saints / Drivin’ on 9 / Roi Reprise / Glorious / Doe / Happiness Is A Warm Gun / Oh! / Hellbound / When I Was A Painter / Fortunately Gone / Iris / Opened / Only In 3’s / Lime House / Metal Man // Walking With A Killer

The Breeders “Saints” (Live in Stockholm, 1993)

I find it kinda weird to watch bands play albums in order – I get the appeal from a marketing standpoint, but it generally goes against the dynamics and pacing that work best for concerts. I do think that Last Splash has a general flow that worked well on stage, but it is very strange to watch a band play their biggest hit one song into a 28 song setlist, and for this very climactic jam song to come five songs in. I’m also not sure why they chose to play Last Splash and then Pod – wouldn’t you want to play them in chronological order, and make the audience wait a bit for the more popular record? And what about all the great Breeders song from after 1993?

But aside from that, this was a terrific show. I hadn’t ever seen The Breeders before but I have seen the reunited Pixies, so it was nice to just see Kim Deal again – she’s got such a pleasant energy on stage. She always seems like she’s having fun up there, and her relaxed, unpretentious vibe deflated anything that’s either pompous or crass about playing your first two albums in full 20+ years after their release. The show was presented as a “celebration,” and it was, albeit in a very low key “hey, cool” sort of way.

Buy it from Amazon.

Duke Dumont featuring A*M*E “Need U (100%)”

In some ways it is odd to think of this as being the work of teenagers, in that this song is made with a very high degree of craft, and the vocal performance seems rather adult to me. But then again, this is music for very young club people, isn’t it? And the lyrics have a charming naivete to them: She’s singing very earnestly about wanting to be loved and demanding public affection, and while that’s not a thing that necessarily fades away with age, this comes across as very sweet rather than maybe a little desperate. It wouldn’t take much to shift the phrasing to make it feel that way.

Buy it from Amazon.

Burial “Rival Dealer”

“Rival Dealer” isn’t a long song so much as it’s an album’s worth of sounds and ideas compressed into nearly 11 minutes. There’s a through line here, mainly in the form of a recurring breakbeat paired with wonderfully ugly distortions, but the track mostly just keeps moving forward, as though you’re walking through a physical space. You pick up on moments of romance and peace, but for the most part it all seems ugly, sordid, and violent. I like to imagine that whenever the beat picks up, that’s when you’re running because you just want to get to the other side of it faster.

Buy it from Amazon.