Belle & Sebastian “I Don’t Love Anyone”

The words of this song are from one point of view, but the perspective of the song is from another. The words are what you say and think when you embrace loneliness and feel fine with the walls you put up between yourself and everyone else. You tell yourself that you don’t feel anything, and you’re happy to be alone. You might not even be lying to yourself about that. Stuart is singing those words from the other side of that mentality, and with a joy and humor that reveals how flimsy those walls really are, and how easy it can be to just knock them down and get on with your life.

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Belle & Sebastian “If You Find Yourself Caught In Love”

It’s funny how Belle & Sebastian lyrics can often be overtly Christian in their themes and reference points, but they’re rarely pegged as a Christian Band. I think this is because Stuart Murdoch is never dogmatic, and always conversational in tone, and his faith is presented as just something that informs the world view of his stories. “If You Find Yourself Caught In Love” is as didactic as he ever gets, but it’s still this breezy song in which he’s mostly just telling the listener to either be thankful for the love they have in their life, or to take charge and find it for themselves. There’s a digression where he condemns war and brutality, but it’s just taking a simple message and increasing the stakes. The lines about surrending one’s will to God can be a bit much for a nonbeliever, but at its heart, the song is really just paraphrasing a far more famous tune: “All you need is love / Love is all you need.”

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Belle & Sebastian “Seeing Other People”

This is the first Belle & Sebastian song that I loved, and the second that I ever heard after “The Stars of Track and Field,” which immediately precedes it on If You’re Feeling Sinister. I bought the record in late 1996 or early 1997, I can’t quite recall when or how, but I was an early adopter based on something I read, either in Spin or CMJ. I bought a lot of stuff back then based on good buzz in print, which is strange to think about now – I mean, when was the last time you went out of your way to spend $18 on a CD of music you’ve never heard because someone in a magazine wrote a short blurb saying that it was good? I imagine that for a lot of the younger people reading this that has never happened once in their life.

At the time I first heard Sinister, it was absolutely unlike anything else in my record collection. The sound of the music was familiar, but just outside my frame of reference. It sounded smart and exotic and delicate and comfy and just a bit pervy, and the melodies were incredible. I’m not sure if I would’ve placed it at the time, but the piano part in “Seeing Other People” was an echo of Vince Guaraldi’s music for the Peanuts cartoons, but the lyrics seemed to flash forward to what could be those characters’ awkward, possibly homosexual fumblings in late adolescence. The specific experiences described in the song, of “kissing just for practice” and taking a lover “for a dirty weekend,” was never much to do with my own life, but this bittersweet song about these two people who can’t sort out the meaning of their intimate relationship resonated with me then, and still does today.

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Belle & Sebastian “Slow Graffiti”

“Listen Johnny, you’re like a mother to the girl you’ve fallen for, and you’re still falling.” That line stings. If it was sung from the first person, it’d be a pathetic “friend zone” whine, but this is coming from someone on the outside looking in. From their perspective, it’s a sad scene – some self-destructive woman who can’t help but to take advantage of some hapless man’s kindness, but is in no position to return it. But he doesn’t seem to care about that, since her drama lends some urgency to his otherwise boring life. Murdoch’s tone is sympathetic, but his concern is less for this guy’s broken heart and more for his lack of dignity.

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Hospitality @ Bowery Ballroom 1/11/2013
Eighth Avenue / The Right Profession / Friends of Friends / Going Out / Betty Wang / Nightingale / Experience / Liberal Arts / Sleepover / Julie / The Birthday / The Drift / Monkey / All Day Today // Half An Apple / Argonauts

Hospitality “Sleepover”

The musicians in Hospitality have a level of skill and craft that isn’t tremendously obvious to the casual listener, and so they’ve very easy to underrate or overlook. They’ve all got chops but play together seamlessly rather than showboat, putting the songs at the forefront. More often than not, this approach yields better bands and better songs, but I don’t think many people come away from Hospitality’s debut thinking mostly about the harmonic structure and rhythmic interplay in their songs. It took me a solid year to really grasp what they’re doing in this music and get beyond the “this sounds a little like…” game, and it took seeing them in concert to get a handle on their dynamic. The album is recorded very plainly, but it somehow obscures the flashier elements of their songs. There’s more drama to their sound in concert, particularly in the new songs, which rock with more flair and sometimes approach a Television-like grandeur. This is exactly the right direction for them – less twee, more assertive and epic. It was already right there, it’s just a matter of what’s being emphasized.

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A$AP Rocky “LVL”

A$AP Rocky is, above all other things, an aesthete and a fashion maven, so it should come as no surprise that he has excellent taste in rap production. On his proper record, Long.Live.A$AP, this ranges from sinister, cinematic RZA-isms, chopped and skrewed vocals and rugged-yet-glossy cuts by Hit-Boy to trendier moves like collaborating with Skrillex. On a purely musical level, the most impressive cut is “LVL,” a Clams Casino production that takes the abstracted CD-skipping sound of The Field and finesses it into a viable rap track without sacrificing any of its ambient qualities. A$AP’s technical skill is most obvious in a track like this, where the beat is almost subliminal and his voice carries the rhythm rather than rides it. He varies his cadence and pitch brilliantly, keeping his parts stable but dynamic as the track shifts between sections that come off like slightly different stages of being stoned out of your mind. As with the rest of the record, though, A$AP’s lyrics are the weak point – if he’s so forward-thinking about tracks and thoughtful about his flow, why are his words nearly always sorta banal? There’s nothing bad about his lyrics, it’s just rap boilerplate as opposed to something more distinctive. It’s not a problem for the music, but it’s just a question it’s hard to avoid when this aspect of his craft seems stunted in comparison to everything else he does.

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U2 “Gone”

U2’s Pop is a very good record but most people don’t know that because the band totally bungled its marketing by insisting that it was a dance record about frivolous modern excesses when it is, in fact, a fairly grim record about dying faith and self-recrimination that happens to have a lot of electronic textures. It’s of a piece with the band’s ’90s material, not some weird attempt to be the Chemical Brothers or something. On top of that, they stubbornly refused to do themselves a favor and release “Gone,” the most obvious hit on the album, as a single, though they put out six singles from the record. I promise you that in an alternate universe, U2 released “Gone” as the first single from Pop and the record did twice as well.

“Gone” would’ve been the conservative choice for a single in that it’s the only soaring arena rock song on the record. U2 wanted to present themselves as ahead of the curve at this moment in time, but they misunderstood that moment, and went against their own interests both in terms of the market, and in accurately representing the tone of their album. “Discotheque,” the actual first single from Pop, is a good song buried in a mess of confused production choices, and its fairly dark lyrical themes are lost in the cognitive dissonance of picturing the guy who sang “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)” hanging around at a dance club. “Gone” rather directly cuts to the heart of Pop, and is probably one of the most brutally honest things Bono has ever written. This is Bono’s meditation on fame, and it’s way more nuanced than you might expect from a guy who embraces his station as rock royalty more than anyone else of his generation. It’s mainly about feeling guilty – for getting “so much for so little,” for betraying people he loves by abusing his privilege, for losing touch with his true self. There’s no conclusion to these ideas, all of the catharsis comes in the music, which builds to a glorious peak and cuts off. It’s a big neurotic freak out that basically ends when he loses energy.

I like to think of this as the bitter conclusion of an arc of three excellent U2 songs with a similar musical tone and lyrical theme. Bono creates the image of the disaffected rock star in “The Fly,” addresses the cost of living in that persona in “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me,” and burns it all down and walks away from it in “Gone.”

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La Big Vic “All That Heaven Allows”

The feeling of La Big Vic’s second album Cold War is not far off from that of Destroyer’s masterpiece Kaputt, but whereas Dan Bejar’s voice can’t help but magnify the ironies and aesthetic tensions at the heart of the music, Emilie Friedlander’s vocals are way more ambiguous. She’s the first singer I’ve ever encountered who splits the difference between Nico/Mary Timony/Liz Phair cool-indie-girl phrasing and Mariah Carey-ish melisma. She doesn’t come close to Mariah’s range or technique, but she does approximate one of her most recognizable tricks – an airy, wordless, trebly squeal that signifies a sort of ecstasy – and pushes it to hazy abstraction. (Grimes does this too sometimes.) I’m not sure if there really is an “irony” in La Big Vic’s music – everyone involved is far too young to be inclined to want to in any way distance themselves from this sort of purely pleasurable sound like the ultra-Gen X Bejar – but there’s a slight unease through the record. The best I can describe it is that it’s like the feeling of going to a really nice place and feeling too poor or underdressed to feel comfortable, even if the point of the place is to be extremely comfortable.

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Waxahatchee “Grass Stain”

This song reminds me a lot of Robert Pollard, and I think you will probably play this and think “oh, because it’s lo-fi,” but no, that’s not really it. Pollard has a few different song types he goes back to over and over, and one of those is “brief acoustic ballad about drinking too much and being sad with a strong melody and no chorus.” (Some of his best songs in this vein happen to be on Waved Out.) I’m really fond of this style, and Katie Crutchfield does it really well, finding the perfect balance of languid despair and bright melody. This kind of song really cuts deep for me – there’s a lot of different ways of expressing depression and sadness in music, but the sentiment and tone of this song and lots of Pollard numbers is the closest to how I actually experience these feelings. Maybe not so much the laments about drinking too much, but definitely the circular self-pity and attempts to rationalize irrational relationships.

Buy it from Amazon.

This 10-disc, 191-song mix is a survey of some of the best and most notable music from 2012. In addition to this downloadable survey mix, I have also put together a similar but notably different Spotify/Rdio playlist version for BuzzFeed Music. That version does not include a lot of obscure or unofficially released tracks, and errs on the side of popular hits rather than personal favorites. (So, like, that one has “Call Me Maybe,” while this one has “Tiny Little Bows.”) It also includes music I simply had not heard before the beginning of December.

This is the 11th in the Fluxblog survey anthology series. You can still download 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Japandroids “Night of Wine and Roses” / Kendrick Lamar “Backseat Freestyle” / Fiona Apple “Anything We Want” / Ellie Goulding “Anything Could Happen” / Carly Rae Jepsen “Tiny Little Bows” / Chairlift “I Belong In Your Arms” / Tame Impala “Apocalypse Dreams” / The Mynabirds “Disaster” / Kanye West featuring 2Chainz, Big Sean and Pusha T “Mercy” / Solange “Losing You” / Schoolboy Q “There He Go” / Grimes “Circumambient” / Wonder Girls (원더걸스) “Like This” / French Montana featuring Drake and Lil Wayne “Pop That” / Le1f “Wut” / Ceremony “Adult” / Sauna Youth “PSI Girls” / Titus Andronicus “In A Big City” / Fun. “Why Am I the One?”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

Skrillex “Bangarang” / The Smashing Pumpkins “Panopticon” / St. Vincent “Krokodil” / Big K.R.I.T. “4EvaNaDay (Theme)” / THEESatisfaction “Existinct” / Kitty Pryde “Okay Cupid” / Nicki Minaj featuring 2Chainz “Beez in the Trap” / Hyuna Kim “Ice Cream” / Usher “I Care For U” / Divine Fits “Would That Not Be Nice” / Father John Misty “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” / Norah Jones “Happy Pills” / Melody’s Echo Chamber “Some Time Alone, Alone” / The Mountain Goats “Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1” / Corin Tucker Band “Groundhog Day” / Patti Smith “Banga” / Micachu and the Shapes “Low Dogg” / Bruno Mars “Locked Out of Heaven” / One Direction “Live While We’re Young” / Dirty Projectors “Swing Lo Magellan” / Lavender Diamond “I Don’t Recall” / King Krule “Rock Bottom”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

The xx “Angels” / Jessie Ware “Still Love Me” / Frank Ocean “Bad Religion” / Passion Pit “Constant Conversations” / Ne-Yo “Cracks In Mr. Perfect” / Meek Mill featuring Drake and Jeremih “Amen” / Major Lazer “Get Free” / Clinic “Cosmic Radiation” / How to Destroy Angels “Ice Age” / Flying Lotus “Phantasm” / Julia Holter “Goddess Eyes II” / Wu-Tang Clan “Six Directions of Boxing” / SHINee “Sherlock” / Opossom “Blue Meanies” / Tennis “Petition” / Joey Bada$$ “World Domination” / Odd Future “Oldie”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

Bat for Lashes “A Wall” / Icona Pop featuring Charli XCX “I Love It” / Girls Generation “Telepathy” / Mouse on Mars “They Know Your Name” / of Montreal “We Will Commit Wolf Murder” / El-P “Drones Over Brooklyn” / Rihanna “Diamonds” / Scissor Sisters “Baby Come Home” / Hot Chip “Don’t Deny Your Heart” / BigBang “Fantastic Baby” / Flo Rida “I Cry” / Azealia Banks “Jumanji” / Muse “Madness” / Metric “Clone” / Felix “Don’t Look Back (It’s Too Sad)” / The Magnetic Fields “God Wants Us To Wait” / Field Music “A New Town” / Poor Moon “People In Her Mind” / She Does Is Magic “Sing With Me” / Frankie Rose “Gospel/Grace” / Florence and the Machine featuring Josh Homme “Jackson”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Ke$ha “Die Young” / Sleigh Bells “Demons” / Death Grips “I’ve Seen Footage” / Miguel “Do You…” / Himanshu “Womyn” / Danny Brown “Grown Up” / David Byrne and St. Vincent “Who” / Calvin Harris and Florence Welch “Sweet Nothing” / Angel Haze “Werkin’ Girls” / Macklemore and Ryan Lewis featuring Mary Lambert “Same Love” / The Weeknd “Echoes of Silence” / Andy Stott “Hatch the Plan” / Alt-J “Tessellate” / Grizzly Bear “Yet Again” / Sam Palladio and Clare Bowen “If I Didn’t Know Better” / Sharon Van Etten “Kevin’s” / Damien Jurado “Maraqopa” / Waxahatchee “Grass Stain” / Swans featuring Karen O “Song For A Warrior” / Blur “Under the Westway” / Bobby Womack “Please Forgive My Heart”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Animal Collective “Moonjock” / Taylor Swift “State of Grace” / Matt LeMay “Compare and Contrast” / Guided by Voices “Class Clown Spots A UFO” / Captain Murphy “Children of the Atom” / Liars “No. 1 Against the Rush” / Matthew Dear “Her Fantasy” / The Kills “Dreams” / Lana Del Rey “Born to Die” / Bruce Springsteen “We Take Care Of Our Own” / Dum Dum Girls “Lord Knows” / Jack White “Take Me With You When You Go” / Dexys “You” / R. Kelly “Fool For You” / Jeremih “773 LOVE” / How to Dress Well “& It Was U” / Sky Ferreira “Everything Is Embarrassing” / A$AP Rocky featuring Drake, 2 Chainz and Kendrick Lamar “Fuckin’ Problems” / Action Bronson “Thug Love Story 2012”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

Godspeed You! Black Emperor “We Drift Like Worried Fire” / Spiritualized “Hey Jane” / First Aid Kit “Emmylou” / Bob Dylan “Narrow Way” / Lee Ranaldo “Off the Wall” / Cat Power “Manhattan” / A.C. Newman “Do Your Own Time” / Hospitality “Eighth Avenue” / Beck “I Only Have Eyes For You” / Nas “A Queen’s Story” / Masta Killa “R U Listening” / Rick Ross featuring Andre 3000 “Sixteen”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Psy “Gangnam Style” / Deerhoof “Breakup Songs” / Madonna “I’m Addicted” / King Louie “Val Venis” / Purity Ring “Fineshrine” / Sylver Tongue “Hook You Up” / The Walkmen “Love Is Luck” / The Lumineers “Classy Girls” / The Band Perry “Better Dig Two” / Poliça “I See My Mother” / G-Dragon “CrayOn” / Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti “Is This the Best Spot?” / Ben Folds Five “Michael Praytor, Five Years Later” / Imperial Teen “No Matter What You Say” / Neil Young “Born In Ontario” / Swearin’ “Kenosha” / Kate Nash “Fri-end?” / Hundred Waters “Boreal” / Exitmusic “The Night” / Zebra Katz “Ima Read” / MDNR “Faster Horses” / Avicii vs Nicky Romero “I Could Be the One”

DOWNLOAD DISC 9

Kool A.D. “La Piñata” / Mac DeMarco “Annie” / Meyhem Lauren featuring AG Da Coroner, Action Bronson and Despot “Pan Seared Tilapia” / Jaipaul “Jasmine” / AlunaGeorge “Your Drums, Your Love” / Disclosure “Latch” / Todd Terje “Inspector Norse” / Killer Mike “Go!” / Mr. Muthafuckin eXquire featuring Gucci Mane “Telephuck” / Domo Genesis and the Alchemist “Power Ballad” / Ab-Soul featuring Danny Brown “Terrorist Threats” / Cadence Weapon “Loft Party” / Porcelain Raft “Put Me To Sleep” / Lotus Plaza “Monoliths” / Savages “Husbands” / METZ “Wet Blanket” / Future “You Deserve It” / Big Boi featuring A$AP Rocky and Phantogram “Lines” / Gorillaz featuring James Murphy and Andre 3000 “DoYaThing”

DOWNLOAD DISC 10

Beach House “Myth” / Rhye “The Fall” / Cody ChesnuTT “Don’t Follow Me” / T.I. featuring Andre 3000 “Sorry” / Alabama Shakes “Hold On” / Perfume Genius “Hood” / Squeeze “Tommy” / Black Bananas “TV Trouble” / Twin Shadow “Five Seconds” / The Shins “Simple Song” / TNGHT “Higher Ground” / John Talabot featuring Pional “Destiny” / Chief Keef “Love Sosa” / Roc Marciano “Flash Gordon” / Thee Oh Sees “Lupine Dominus” / Baroness “Take My Bones Away” / Chromatics “Kill For Love” / Green Day “Oh Love” / Glen Hansard “High Hope”

Ab-Soul featuring Danny Brown and Jhene Aiko “Terrorist Threats”

I’d want to say that the title of this song is no joke, and that Ab-Soul is dead serious about his radical politics in the lyrics, but it is actually a joke on some level because it’s acknowledging that his call for black gangs to unite against the military is both a pipe dream and something more likely to get dismissed as domestic terrorism than any sort of legit political action. So, it’s just a song, and a really good one, but the frustration and bitterness is real. This actually comes off better in Danny Brown’s verse, which mirrors Ab-Soul’s rhyme schemes but goes off on another more personal tangent about feeling disenfranchised and discouraged by the system.

Buy it from Amazon.

Masta Killa “R U Listening”

Masta Killa’s membership in the Wu-Tang Clan has been a mixed blessing for him – yes, he’s a member of the greatest rap group of all time, and a lot of doors have opened because of that affiliation. But he wasn’t fully formed as a rapper in the group’s early days, and only reached full maturity when most casual listeners had tuned out, so his solo work is pretty much only heard by Wu diehards. (If that? I feel like a lot of major Wu fans don’t bother with him.) This is a shame, since he’s an excellent rapper who hasn’t stopped evolving, and I think if he was either a new emcee or a veteran without a huge amount of baggage like Killer Mike or Curren$y, he’d be primed to get a lot more attention. His latest album just came out earlier this month, and while it’s not breaking much ground, it’s firmly in his sweet spot – sad, soulful, grim. His vocals have become a lot more dynamic, stepping away from the nearly monotone inflections of his verses circa The W, and toward a more expressive style that’s closer to that of his mentor, The GZA.

Buy it from Amazon.

Meyhem Lauren featuring AG Da Coroner, Action Bronson and Despot “Pan Seared Tilapia”

I would be perfectly happy if all rap was just emcees trading verses over a moody, subtly shifting beat. No choruses, no hooks, just rapping. This is mostly because Wu-Tang was my first great love in hip-hop, and remains the highest standard for rap to me. I can’t imagine it’s much different for Meyhem Lauren and his collaborators on this track. This sounds like the product of full-on worship of the Wu’s mid-90s material, especially RZA’s production on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. Tommy Mas’ track is fantastic – gritty and stark, but flavored mostly by melodic samples that keep the mood playful, but a bit on edge. All four rappers do good work here, but I really like the bitter petulance in Despot’s voice on his verse.

Get the mixtape for free from DatPiff.

Archers of Loaf “Assassination on X-Mas Eve”

And here you are, the world’s most morbid Christmas song, even more so than “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.” Aside from that odd siren-like harmonic effect on the guitar, my favorite thing about this song is the way Eric Bachmann’s lyrics put this tragedy in the context of the most mundane aspects of its aftermath. The dark humor – and also, the pathos – is in how Christmas is mostly ruined by those little things, and not so much the actual murder of the “hero.”

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Archers of Loaf “Slicks Tricks and Bright Lights”

Eric Bachmann’s voice changed a lot between All the Nations Airports and White Trash Heroes, and I felt very let down about that at the time. This is a funny thing, because it’s not as though he had a particularly nice voice to begin with, though there was something about his delivery that seemed to but an armor on his words. He’s a thousand times more vulnerable on the White Trash Heroes songs, to the point of sounding literally wounded as he sings “Slicks Tricks and Bright Lights.” This makes sense – it is, after all, a sad and epic tune about being betrayed by a false image and losing control of your life. I wonder if, on some unconscious level, he was singing about himself and his art. You know, the guy on stage and the songs no longer matching up with who he was, pushing him to move on.

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Savages “Husbands”

Savages belong to a tradition of extraordinarily tense punk bands with heavily accented female sings, but even in that context, a song like “Husbands” seems especially panicked and urgent. The entire song is just on the edge of hysteria, with lucid thoughts brushing up against abstract visions and a repetition of the title word that blurs the line between terror and arousal. It’s a complicated song to parse, but I’m sure that’s the point – it’s all questions about love and violence, but no answers at all.

Buy it from Amazon.

Bruno Mars “Treasure”

On a lyrical level, this song isn’t much different from One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” in that it’s basically a smooth dude telling a girl how wonderful she is, and how she’s not actually aware of her own beauty. Musically, it’s in a whole other zone, skillfully evoking the perky, confident bounce of disco-era Michael Jackson. Like pretty much everything on Bruno Mars’ new album Unorthodox Jukebox, it is shamelessly retro, but in a very welcome way. Mars and his collaborators are resurrecting the sound of early to mid-80s pop, where R&B and New Wave influences mingled and blurred into charming tunes that managed to pack in elements of just about every strain of pop while seeming glossy, light and effortless. It’s a really clever sound to emulate, not just because it’s so enduring, but because it’s so big tent. It’s definitely one of the best ways to get a lot of people on board in a time of major fragmentation in the music market. I don’t get the sense that Mars is thinking about some abstract market share, though – he just wants to make a lot of people feel good.

Buy it from Amazon.

Bessie Smith “At the Christmas Ball”

This blues number was recorded in New York City in 1925, right around the peak of Smith’s career. It’s a remarkable recording, not just for Smith’s performance, but for the way the microphones picked up so much of the room’s ambiance. There’s a really strong sense of place and space within this recording, and it’s all the more impressive given that the equipment used to capture it was so primitive. But you know, room mics are room mics – as a technique, it’s almost always going to yield a recording with more presence.

“At the Christmas Ball” is basically a song about the Christmas/New Year’s party season, and it’s more about the debauchery of those events than anything to do with holiday. The song is a bit sad, but in a vague sort of way – the lyrics never let on much about anything bad going on, but Smith sings it with a touch of pain and loneliness in her voice, as if to suggest that this merriment is all just a temporary distraction.

Buy it from Amazon.

Squeeze “Tommy”

My love of Squeeze is almost entirely focused on their late 70s and early 80s material. This is the case for most people inclined to listen to Squeeze, really. I’ve just never connected with the later material, and to some extent, it’s a matter of getting my Squeeze fix with the work I know I love. Forcing myself to listen to records like Domino and Some Fantastic Place feels like homework. Anyway! This is a song from the band’s forthcoming album, and unlike a lot of late-period Squeeze, it is a dead ringer for their early 80s style. “Tommy” is rigid and formal in tone, and wonderfully melodic in its composition. This is basically what you look for in a band like this – impeccable, McCartney-like craft with the bitter observational wit of Costello. They’ve got their own character and charm, but really, that’s what it comes down to, and I think they’ve reconnected with that spark.

Visit Squeeze’s official site.

The Smashing Pumpkins @ Barclays Center 12/10/2012
Quasar / Panopticon / The Celestials / Violet Rays / My Love Is Winter / One Diamond, One Heart / Pinwheels / Oceania / Pale Horse / The Chimera / Glissandra / Inkless / Wildflower / Space Oddity / X.Y.U. / Disarm / Tonight, Tonight / Bullet With Butterfly Wings / The Dream Machine / Hummer // Ava Adore / Cherub Rock / Zero

The Smashing Pumpkins “Pinwheels”

This was a wonderful show from start to finish, though I do think it might have been a better idea to jumble up the running of Oceania. I appreciate the integrity and conviction behind playing the new album in its entirety, but I think that in pretty much any case, it’s less fun to see an album sequence performed on stage. The internal logic of a concert setlist and an album are very different, and there were times when the momentum wasn’t right or it might have been a good idea to toss out a hit to keep the more impatient audience members interested. But aside from that, the Oceania material came off very well, most especially “Pinwheels,” which opened up a lot on stage and showed off the particular dynamic of Corgan’s current lineup of musicians.

I won’t lie to you, though: The most exciting part of this show was the second half, with all of the old hits. “X.Y.U.” was the highlight of the night – twice as maniacal and over-the-top as the album version, and with a creepy extended instrumental section in the middle. “Hummer” was exceptional too, with its optimism sounding even more triumphant in the arena setting. I was most surprised by my response to “Tonight, Tonight.” I often skip that song when I listen to Mellon Collie, but in concert it’s just sort of undeniable, and you realize that its sentiment is the key to understanding what Corgan has been trying to do with his music for all these years. It’s a song that blasts cynicism, and rejects the notion that any creative ambition is too crazy to be considered. I can think of a bunch of times recently when I was talking to someone who was really down on themselves, and I had to fight myself not to tell them “life can change, you’re not stuck in vain” because it’s corny to quote a Smashing Pumpkins song to someone who is genuinely distraught. But man, that line is so true. That whole song is so true.

Buy it from Amazon.

Katy B featuring Wiley and Zinc “Got Paid”

“Got Paid” is about getting excited to go out on a Friday after getting a fresh paycheck. This is a pretty banal subject for a song, but Katy B makes it work because she’s so effective in expressing her joy and anticipation. This may be boilerplate for a pop song, but it’s for a reason – there will always be room for songs about wanting to escape from the mundane routine of life, and the one that effectively convey the promise of good times will always be a thrill.

Get it for free from Katy B’s site.

The Smashing Pumpkins “Cupid de Locke (BT 2012 Mix)”

Box sets and reissues come out all the time, and they’re always full of early, messy versions of the songs you love. You think you want to hear a demo or a rough take, but with few exceptions, they aren’t anything special, and you put them away after you satisfy your curiosity. The new Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness actually does contain some truly outstanding early demos that are notably different from the final album recordings, but pretty much all of them have been in circulation as acoustic demos for years, and are already in the collection of the sort of hardcore fans who would be willing to pay $$$ for a Mellon Collie box set.

But that’s not all that’s there. Yes, there’s a lot of fetal versions of songs, but there’s a few revised versions of songs. The best and most remarkable of these is a new mix of “Cupid de Locke,” one of the loveliest and most experimental tracks on the record. Corgan hasn’t done anything to change the character of the song besides omitting the spoken word outro, for the most part it’s the same song with a slightly adjusted arrangement. There’s a bit more space in it now, which gives the lovely melodies a bit more space in the mix. It’s less cluttered, more ethereal. The production on the song always sounded a little ahead of the curve, but now it sounds fully contemporary, well over a decade after it was recorded. The song was always meant to be this over the top vision of idealized love, and now that is just a bit clearer.

Buy it from Amazon.

Animal Collective @ Terminal 5 12/4/2012
Rosie Oh / Today’s Supernatural / Wide Eyed / Applesauce / Honeycomb / Lion In A Coma / Moonjock / Pulleys / New Town Burnout / Monkey Riches / Brother Sport / Peacebone // Cobwebs / My Girls / Amanita

Animal Collective “Monkey Riches”

The current incarnation of Animal Collective resembles a traditional rock band, but only vaguely. Their live show feels more physical and urgent with the emphasis on live percussion, but their aesthetic is too distinct to fit in comfortably with the expectations of rock, even when they’re at their most “rock.” This is mostly a good thing, but their show is a good reminder of how the visual correlation of playing an instrument and immediately recognizing the sound the musician is making is a big part of how we process the drama of live performance. For the most part, it’s really hard to tell what any of them are doing on stage and how it relates to what we’re hearing, even when it looks as straightforward as Avey Tare playing chords on a keyboard or Deakin strumming a guitar. This disconnect was especially interesting in the long drone jam phase in the middle of “Pulleys” – usually a jam section is presented as a way of highlighting the players’ musical virtuosity, but for them, it’s four or five minutes of mysterious hums that may or may not be coming from Avey’s keyboard, Deakin’s guitar or Geologist’s whatever the hell he has up there.

Avey switched up this dynamic by playing chords with a clean tone on an electric guitar on “Cobwebs” in the encore. This was a revelation! They had managed to take one of the most mundane sounds in modern music and make it seem exotic and strikingly beautiful in this context. They should play around with this more often in the future – it’s a largely unexplored thing for them, and I am certain they could do a lot with it without ever sounding like anything but themselves.

Also, as an aside: If you are inclined to like this band and have in some way dismissed Centipede Hz, I really urge you to reconsider it. It’s an excellent record, certainly one of their best, and I promise you that once you acclimate to its odd tonal logic, it all snaps together as a skewed pop album.

Buy it from Amazon.