Garbage “Felt”

So, as it turns out, Garbage can be an exceptional shoegazer band when they want to be one. I kinda wish they wanted to be one more often – whereas a lot of their new comeback record sticks to very familiar ground for them, “Felt” highlights aspects of their sound that were always in the mix, but never quite on the surface. I appreciate Shirley Manson’s bold, snarling personality, but it’s nice – revealing, even – to hear her go soft and ethereal. She conveys a lot of uncertainty in this song, questioning whether her lover “felt anything” with her, and whether she was being fair with their relationship, and whether any of it matters at all. It’s all so open-ended that it’s hard to tell whether she’s still in the thick of this drama, or looking back on it and attempting to figure out what went wrong. It’s a pensive mood and a hazy vibe, but the song has a very solid form – all of the most shoegaze-y moments are punctuated by bold, more typically Garbage-like alt-rock hooks that sound like a mind resetting momentarily to a default position.

Buy it from Amazon.

Opossom “Blue Meanies”

Kody Nielson pulls off something really impressive on the first Opossom record, but it’s rather subtle: The record keeps up a consistent and specific vibe – a relaxed psychedelic funk that falls somewhere between the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the Avalanches’ Since I Left You – but the music itself is constantly shifting its dynamics, so it remains compelling for a solid half hour. This shouldn’t seem like that much of a miracle, but if you hear enough records – especially on the chill end of indie – it’s actually quite rare. “Blue Meanies” is particularly great as its bass line slinks and bobs around a fill-heavy beat that provides a steady form but implies no solid shape. Like everything on the record, it’s clearly defined but feels loose enough to change course completely at a whim.

Buy it from Amazom.

Domo Genesis and the Alchemist featuring Smoke DZA “Power Ballad”

Domo Genesis is a strong rapper, but he’s probably doomed to be forever overshadowed by the more charismatic and/or controversial members of the Odd Future crew. This is a common plight in hip-hop – just look to Inspectah Deck and Masta Killa in the Wu-Tang Clan as a rough analog – and it’s even more common on sports teams and most offices. Like Earl Sweathshirt and Frank Ocean, Domo has made a significant artistic leap this year, but compared to those guys’ breakthroughs, it’s kinda minor. There’s nothing jaw dropping on his Alchemist-produced mixtape No Idols, but his skills have improved considerably, and he’s found a musical context that flatters the tone of his voice and the particular cadences of his rhymes. “Power Ballad” is the standout; he sounds like a harder, more verbally nimble version of Drake framed by a looped lead guitar lick that sounds like it could be lifted from a particularly corny Cinemax skin flick.

Get the mixtape for free from DatPiff.

The Kills “Dreams”

Jamie Hince doesn’t get a lot of credit for being one of the most inventive and distinct guitarists of the past decade, which is sort of aggravating because I get the sense that he’s often underrated and overlooked primarily for his close proximity to the fashion world. But while most every other notable act through the majority of the 00s did their best to either obscure or eliminate the guitar, he obsessed over tone and attack, and tinkered endlessly with digital effects.

This cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” is, sort of unexpectedly, a fine showcase for his style as he basically eliminates every trace of Lindsey Buckingham’s aesthetic in favor of exaggerating his own, emphasizing blunt physical force on the instrument and highly abstracted distortions. Sometimes it just barely sounds musical, but as much as he goes in for this industrial clanging, he never loses the structure of the song itself, so the noise has a loose, gestural quality that suggests the shapes that Buckingham articulated very, very clearly.

Alison Mosshart’s vocals are just as important here: Unlike a lot of singers on this new Fleetwood Mac tribute album, she is actually up to the task of inhabiting a Stevie Nicks song, and can do it without doing an impression. Mosshart comes off a lot tougher than Nicks, who exposed more vulnerability in her earth mother persona, but the moments where she cracks that facade a bit convey so much emotional nuance. There’s a lot of ache just under the surface of her performance.

Buy it from Amazon.

Sauna Youth “Psi Girls”

The words to “Psi Girls” get a bit buried in the mix under the chugging riffs and “la las”, but the singer does his best to get them across, which illustrates the point of the lyrics, in which he expresses frustration in his “inability to communicate” with his partner. But it’s not on a one-way thing: They both struggle with this, and in some way, they’ve bonded over this shared problem. He sounds eager to fix the problem, but also a bit exasperated by the way they’ve found work-arounds for this inarticulate state. He never says it outright, but the title suggests they’ve developed some primitive sort of telepathy, if just through the power of their intimacy.

Visit the Sauna Youth Bandcamp page.

Sky Ferreira “Red Lips”

The last time I wrote about Sky Ferreira here, she was aiming for an icy electro-pop sound with a song that cut up an unaffected vocal line into a mechanical abstraction – romantic obsession rendered as a skipping CD loop. This time around she’s going for 90s alt rock, or to be really specific, a Garbage pastiche. It suits her well: She’s very good at conveying that sort of sullen sexuality, and in spiking her most venomous lines with a bit of pop sugar. The bass and guitar sound nail the aesthetics of the era better than pretty much every faux-90s band I’ve heard in the past year – blunt and violent without obscuring some very catchy hooks. This is likely a bit of bandwagon jumping on Ferreira’s part – she seems to be the kind of young pop singer who ends up casting about for a direction until one sticks – but it suits her extremely well, and better yet, isn’t such a drastic change from her previous singles. I definitely hear echoes of the same person in both “Red Lips” and “One,” and am interested to hear other angles on that persona in other songs.

Buy it from iTunes.

The celebration of the 10th anniversary of this site continues on with this collection of the best and most notable music of 2008. Yes, we are at the point in this project where I am anthologizing the music of the very recent past. Just go with it, it will all make sense when the full decade is complete! Anyway, this is a pretty interesting year in retrospect – you can kinda hear the beginning of trends that are presently dominant in popular music, particularly in the electronic and dance pop tracks. There’s also a lot of terrific obscure stuff in this batch, and without really intending it, I ended up putting a lot of those cuts in prominent positions in the sequencing.

The survey mixes for 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2011 are still up. Check in on September 3rd for a look back on 2009.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Allá “Una Dia Otra Noche” / Stereolab “Three Women” / of Montreal “Triphallus, to Punctuate!” / Erykah Badu “Twinkle” / Santogold “L.E.S. Artistes” / Hot Chip “Shake A Fist” / Girl Talk “Here’s the Thing” / Lil Wayne “Dr. Carter” / Solange “Would’ve Been the One” / Veronica Maggio “Gammal Sång” / Coldplay “Viva La Vida” / Taylor Swift “You Belong with Me” / Lykke Li “Little Bit” / Weezer “Troublemaker” / Fight Like Apes “Jake Summers” / Be Your Own Pet “Becky” / The Breeders “Walk It Off” / Atlas Sound “River Card” Parenthetical Girls “A Song for Ellie Greenwich” / Portishead “We Carry On”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

Estelle featuring Kanye West “American Boy” / Beyoncé “Single Ladies” / Hercules and Love Affair “Athene” / Goldfrapp “A&E” / Wild Beasts “The Devil’s Crayon” / Raphael Saadiq “100 Yard Dash” / Q-Tip “Gettin’ Up” / Cat Power “Aretha, Sing One for Me” / The Raconteurs “Top Yourself” / Al Green “Lay It Down” / Beck “Chemtrails” / Clipse “So Fly (Now We’ve Had Her)” / Ne-Yo “Closer” / Ida Maria “Oh My God” / Voluntary Butler Scheme” / School of Language “Extended Holiday” / The Week That Was “The Story Waits for No One” / Spiritualized “Soul on Fire” / The Smashing Pumpkins “No Surrender” / Sigur Rós “Gobbledigook” / Lindsey Buckingham “Time Precious Time”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Matmos “Polychords” / Electric Six “Flashy Man” / Marnie Stern “Ruler” / Deerhunter “Never Stops” / The B-52’s “Hot Corner” / Girls Aloud “The Promise” / Rox “My Baby Left Me” / The Dø “At Last” / Rose Elinor Dougall “Another Version of Pop Song” / The Mummers “March of the Dawn” / White Hinterland “Lindberghs and Metal Birds” / Adele “Chasing Pavements” / Lloyd featuring Lil Wayne “Girls Around the World” / Jean Grae “#8” / Johnson&Jonson “Wow!” / Kelley Polar “Entropy Reigns (in the Celestial City)” / Crystal Castles “Untrust Us” / The Fall “Senior Twilight Stock Replacer” / The Whitest Boy Alive “Golden Cage (Fred Falke Mix)” / Gang Gang Dance “House Jam” / Four Tet “Ribbons”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

Architecture in Helsinki “That Beep” / Annie “I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me” / Max Tundra “Number Our Days” / Kanye West “Paranoid” / TV on the Radio “Golden Age” / Cadence Weapon “Tattoos and What They Really Feel Like” / CSS “Believe Achieve” / Lady Gaga “Poker Face” / Hemme Fatale “Animal Lover” / Beta Satan “666” / Andrew W.K. “KISEKI” / Little Pictures “I Wish I Could Keep You” / Obi Best “What It’s Not” / Brad Neely “George Washington” / The Tough Alliance “Lucky” / Fuck Buttons “Bright Tomorrow” / Flying Lotus “RobertaFlack” / Dizee Rascal “Driving with Nowhere to Go” / Death Cab for Cutie “I Will Possess Your Heart” / Fennesz “Saffron Revolution”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Fugiya & Miyagi “Knickerbocker” / The Kills “Last Day of Magic” / The Long Blondes “The Couples” / Alphabeat “What Is Happening?” / Britta Persson “Kill Hollywood Me” / Bell “Echinacea” / Nine Inch Nails “Discipline” / Joker “Snake Eater” / LV “CCTV” / Silje Nes “Dizzy Street” / Ladytron “Ghosts” / Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” / The Mountain Goats “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” / The Magnetic Fields “The Nun’s Litany” / Primal Scream “The Glory of Love” / The Veronicas “Untouched” / M83 “Kim & Jessie” / Marit Larsen “If A Song Could Get Me You” / Frida Hyvönen “Scandinavian Blonde” / She & Him “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

The Juan Maclean “Happy House” / Big Boi, Andre 3000 and Raekwon “Royal Flush” / The-Dream “Falsetto” / Wale “The Kramer” / Duffy “Mercy” / Jenny Lewis “The Next Messiah” / Fleet Foxes “White Winter Hymnal” / Women “Black Rice” / Beach House “Gila” / Snoop Dogg featuring Robyn “Sexual Eruption (Fyre Department Remix)” / Wiley “Wearing My Rolex” / Britney Spears “Womanizer” / The Ting Tings “That’s Not My Name” / Wire “One of Us” / The Mae Shi “Run to Your Grave” / Wolf Parade “Call It A Ritual” / Anni Rossi “Venice” / Clinic “Emotions”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

R.E.M. “Living Well is the Best Revenge” / Vampire Weekend “Walcott” / Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks “Walk Into the Mirror” / Destroyer “The State” / Sloan “Witch’s Wand” / David Byrne and Brian Eno “Strange Overtones” / SebastiAn “Momy” / Rihanna “Disturbia” / T.I. “Whatever You Like” / The Roots “Get Busy” / The Bug “Warning” / Skream “Hedd Banger” / Brightblack Morning Light “Hologram Buffalo” / Love Is All “Wishing Well” / Mudhoney “I’m Now” / Paramore “Misery Business” / Cut Copy “Lights and Music” / Kleerup featuring Lykke Li “Until We Bleed” / King Midas Sound “One Ting (Dabyre Remix)” / Air France “Collapsing at Your Doorstep”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Hauschka “Rode Null” / My Morning Jacket “Evil Urges” / Tricky “Puppy Toy” / Murs “The Science” / Rick Ross “The Boss” / The Cool Kids “88” / Mr. Oizo “Two Takes It” / Katy Perry “Hot N Cold” / Little Boots “Stuck On Repeat” / Amadou & Mariam “Sabali” / Zomby “Mu5h” / No Age “Eraser” / Ponytail “Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came From An Angel)” / Fucked Up “No Epiphany” / Jay Reatard “Always Wanting More” / Blitzen Trapper “Furr” / The Walkmen “In the New Year” / Girls “Hellhole Ratrace”

Rick Ross featuring Andre 3000 “Sixteen”

Rick Ross and Andre 3000 spend much of the first third of “Sixteen” lamenting the limitations of a 16-bar verse; kvetching that the format can’t possibly express the full scope of their consciousness. When Ross drops the idea, he just does a pretty standard Rick Ross verse – heavy on fantasy, but with a touch of pathos. It’s good stuff, but nothing that would make you go “Oh, this guy needs to just keep going and going!” Andre 3000, on the other hand, does just that. Over the course of a few minutes, he lays out a marathon rap that starts off with a loose conversational rhythm but gradually builds in both its rhetoric and emotion. 3000 is always excellent with wordplay but his work here is especially impressive in how his intricate structure progresses over a relatively long stretch. This is from Ross’ album, but he’s the one who seems like a guest here – he’s on just a sliver of the overall track, framing 3000’s performance like he’s the host for the evening.

Buy it from Amazon.

Bat for Lashes “Laura”

“Laura” is an odd choice for a lead single, but perhaps I say that only because it’s fairly uncommon for plaintive, genuinely melancholy piano ballads to be pushed by a major label these days. This isn’t new aesthetic ground for Natasha Khan, but it’s a great showcase for her voice, and her skill for conveying a sense of deep emotional connection to her subject. “Laura” overflows with empathy and affection; there are some turns of phrase and inflections that just break my heart because the intensity of her kindness is almost too much to bear. So it gets to me – why does this song sound so sad? What are we not being told about Laura’s life that makes this tribute come across more like a tragedy? She’s singing about someone who seems to thrive in the spotlight – could it be that she’s lamenting that Laura’s best moments come when she’s furthest away from her?

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Fluxblog at Housing Works: 10 Years of Perfect Tunes

You can download a podcast version of the Fluxblog 10th anniversary event at Housing Works in New York City earlier this week above. It was recorded by the kind people at Housing Works, and it sounds really good. The show is being presented with no edits, but there were only a couple little flubs along the way, so it’s no big deal. I’m really proud of how this turned out – everyone was great, and without any of us having an idea of what each other was doing, the songs all flowed together well and there were a lot of complementary themes. (I’m particularly pleased with how the idea I laid out in my intro was resolved in Rob Sheffield’s finale.)

Here is the running order of speakers:

• Matthew Perpetua on Scissor Sisters’ “Paul McCartney” and music as a way of communicating with and connecting to people we’ve never actually met.

• Emily Gould on Martha Wainwright’s “Love Is A Stranger” and songs that keep you from destroying your life.

• Heather D’Angelo of Au Revoir Simone on Electrelane’s “The Valleys” and how creativity triumphs over destruction.

• Mark Richardson on Silver Jews’ “How to Rent A Room” and learning how to enjoy settling down in one place.

• Amy Rose Spiegel from Rookie on the Delays’ “Nearer Than Heaven” and learning how to find music that you love.

• Sean T. Collins on Nine Inch Nails’ “Leaving Hope” and finding peace of mind in hopelessness.

• Amanda Petrusich on Interpol’s “NYC” and adjusting to life in New York City.

• Dick Valentine of Electric Six on Mark Mallman’s “True Love” and how love songs are often not what they seem to be.

• Rob Sheffield on Stephen Malkmus’ “Malediction” and looking to musicians for advice about life, and finding good advice in unexpected songs.

Plus, the entire group discusses the merits of R. Kelly’s classic “Ignition (Remix).”

You can download a mix featuring all ten of the songs here. Please do what you can to support the writers, the artists and Housing Works, which is a terrific charity and worth your time and money.

Nas “A Queen’s Story”

I have never been invested in Nas enough to be disappointed by any of his many records over the years, but I will say this: Life Is Good is a great rap album, and it’s enjoyable mainly because it seems like the guy has finally stopped struggling to do anything besides the sort of music that made him an icon in the first place. I understand why artists want to stretch out creatively or attempt to be relevant to younger audiences, but that can result in losing track of core strengths. The best tracks on Life Is Good, like the majestic “A Queen’s Story,” don’t sound exactly like Illmatic but they have the same essential glow. Nas’ style has shifted a bit too, but he sounds entirely comfortable in these beats – he has worked a lot of bad impulses out of his system by now, and every bit of technique he’s learned along the way is applied to a sort of flow that is entirely intuitive for him. Particularly on this track, he’s reconnecting with Queens, his earliest muse. There’s a touch of defensiveness in the song, but it’s welcome – as a former longtime resident of the borough, I can tell you, it is aggravating when people diminish that place out of laziness. Nas is rapping specifically about Queensbridge, which is not only one of the most fascinating projects in all of the world, but also a crucial spot in the creation and evolution of rap culture. When he raps about this place, you can feel him beaming through the track with a deserved sense of pride.

Buy it from Amazon.

Micachu and the Shapes “Low Dogg”

Micachu is obsessed with abrasive sounds – scrapes, rattles, clangs, distortions, monotones. She’s not alone in that, but she’s rare in her skill for taking potentially irritating sounds and making them seem seductive or calming in the context of her songs. “Low Dogg” leans very hard on industrial noise, but its rhythms have a lulling quality, as if the song takes a macro view of a life she describes as a dull routine – the agitation and restlessness snaps into a predictable beat, and becomes comfortable in its own strange way.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Smashing Pumpkins “Frail and Bedazzled”

The most basic appeal of the Smashing Pumpkins comes from the way Billy Corgan strips out the dull machismo from hard rock and replaces it with sensitive androgyny and ecstatic spirituality. Like a majority of the rock stars of the early ’90s, Corgan rebelled against the dude-ness of his own genre, but thanks to the unavoidable femininity of his voice and his soft baby face, he was able to depart from tradition more dramatically than the more obviously masculine likes of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder. Unsurprisingly, one of the most dramatic, joyous, and definitive moments in the entire sprawling Pumpkins catalog comes on “Frail and Bedazzled” when he declares “all I wanted was to be a man / but since I gave up / I FEEL FREE! / I FEEL FREE! / I FEEL FREE! / I FEEL FREE!,” which each iteration of those last three words seeming increasingly emphatic and liberating.

Buy it from Amazon. Originally posted on 9/12/2007.

Passion Pit “Constant Conversations”

As it turns out, Passion Pit are pretty good with slow jams. That designation is only superficial, though – the tone and texture nods to modern R&B and post-Kanye production, but the lyrics are pure self-pitying white boy. Which is more interesting, really: Michael Angelakos gets into some great nuance here, singing from the perspective of someone whose drinking problem is right at the edge of costing them their relationship. His sentiment shifts through the “constant conversations,” essentially doing a figure eight that keeps passing through moments of moping, belligerence, self-flagellation and defensiveness.

Buy it from Amazon.

Matthew Dear “Her Fantasy”

“Her Fantasy” has a dark, sexually menacing tone, but Matthew Dear’s words are paranoid and insecure, the interior monologue of a guy who is worried that his slick front won’t be enough to protect him from the pains of love. He frets about being unoriginal in his feelings, he obsesses on the cracks in his persona, he wonders “Am I one heartbeat away from receiving a damaging shock to my life?” The title is a bitter joke – you’d have to be pretty cynical to assume that any woman would want to get close to this lothario as he rips his own ego to shreds. As always, Dear’s voice is cold and a bit flat, receding into the music’s sexy ambience and steady beat. The sentiment is more effective this way – the neuroses recede a bit, but are always there buried under the ultra-hedonistic vibe.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti “Only In My Dreams”

Ariel Pink approaches music like an art forger, mimicking precise details in composition and style as well as aura and surface texture. He’s hardly alone in his knack for pastiche, but his work is often captivating because there’s a specific ineffable quality in the sound of his recordings – it all sounds as if it’s coming from a particular time and place, though it’s hard to say where or when it could be. It’s like he’s making all this music that belongs on the same found cassette tape, or something like a Sublime Frequencies compilation. A lot of people have written guitar parts like the Byrds-like guitar lead in “Only In My Dreams,” but Pink makes it sound totally alien and out of time.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Purity Ring “Fineshrine”

Megan James sings about intimacy in grotesque and gory terms in “Fineshrine,” offering to break open her sternum and “pull my little ribs around you.” It sounds like something from a body horror movie, but she sings the words with a tone of genuine affection. Her voice is slightly cold and clipped, giving her a slightly robotic tone – she sounds like she could be an android just past the creepy side of the uncanny valley. With that in mind, the creepy body stuff could just be a glitch, as if the programming just mixed up exactly what humans do when they get close to one another, and took a few things too literally.

Buy it from Amazon.

Usher “I Care For U”

Usher may be hopping on a bandwagon in doing a dubstep track like “I Care For U,” but the execution of the song is exceptional, and his voice seems totally natural in this context. This works mainly because the cold tone and trembling bass echoes the lyrical sentiment, in which Usher sings from the perspective of a stoic guy who has trouble expressing his affection but is trying to show his lover that he truly does care. Usher’s voice is great here, conveying hidden passion without forgetting that his character is still playing it close to the vest. The bass wobble is intense, and dramatizes this feeling of trying to break out of an emotional shell, and being a little afraid of what could happen if that shell shatters completely. The steps toward vulnerability are in earnest, but still very measured.

Buy it from Amazon.

Frank Ocean featuring Earl Sweatshirt “Super Rich Kids”

Jacking the slow piano groove from “Bennie and the Jets” was a good call for this song – there’s something so luxurious about the way it glides from chord to chord, like it has all the time in the world. Ocean and Sweatshirt slip into the groove like it’s a pair of comfy slippers, matching the chill vibe while getting all Bret Easton Ellis in the lyrics, sketching out a portrait of idle, decadent rich kids. As with a lot of depictions of this element, it’s hard to tell whether the dark side of all this is meant to seem shocking and empty, or actually pretty sexy. Ocean interpolates Mary J. Blige, singing that he’s “searching for a real love,” but in context, it rings a bit false for the character. It seems like a pose — they want to seem soulful and deep, but they’re too far gone with all the spoiled indulgences.

Buy it from iTunes.

Joey Bada$$ “World Domination”

Joey Bada$$ draws his inspiration from mid-90s rap in the same way that so many mid-90s rock bands took their cues from 70s rock. This stuff is olllllld to a 17-year-old, but has a way of sounding more pure and natural. Bada$$ was born for this type of rap; he has the rhythms and cadences are so internalized that they just flow out of him. That may be the biggest difference between him and his idols, actually — a lot of vintage mid-90s New York rap has an agitated tone, while he always sounds very relaxed, like he’s just too thrilled to be channeling these vibes to give a little sting.

Get it for free from DatPiff.