Prince @ Madison Square Garden 12/18/2010
Welcome 2 America / Dance (Disco Heat) / Baby, I’m A Star / The Beautiful Ones / Let’s Go Crazy / Delirious / Let’s Go Crazy (reprise) / 1999 / Shhh / Uptown / Raspberry Beret / Cream / Cool / Let’s Work / U Got the Look (with Sheila E) / The Glamorous Life (with Sheila E) / Nothing Compares 2 U / Purple Rain // Kiss /// A Love Bizarre (with Sheila E and a cavalcade of dancing celebrities.)

This was my first time seeing Prince in concert, and the show was as close to a best case scenario as I could have hoped for. As you can see, it was a two hour hit parade focused on material from 1980 through 1987, the period when he was an untouchable pop genius. His creative peak may be behind him, but he remains an absolutely brilliant performer. He has a high level of energy, craft, and pure showmanship, but beyond that, he is possessed of a superhuman charisma that is captivating even from up in the cheap seats. A lot of the time I was just standing there in awe of his presence, and the seeming effortlessness of his performance. The moment that stands out in my memory is so simple, but so iconic — I remember looking up at the big screen, in tight close up on his face as he did one of his famous impish smirks. I feel like this experience was mostly about simply bearing witness to Prince, and that was like the pinnacle of Prince-ness.

Prince played my all-time favorite Prince song at this show, and so let’s talk about that one.

Prince “U Got the Look”

“U Got the Look” is, for me, the platonic ideal of a Prince song. It’s blends elements from funk, new wave, and rock so seamlessly that it stands apart from other genres, it’s really just Prince music. Every sound in the track is vibrant and crackling with energy, like a transmission from some better, sexier world. It’s an extremely playful song, full of charming lyrics that set the highest standard for flirtation in the context of a pop song, or quite possibly the context of anything at all. It’s an ideal balance of flattery, sweetness, humor, and overt sexuality. You get silly voices, you get sexually charged vocal interaction, you get the ridiculous, wonderful concept of the World Series of Love. My favorite part is probably when he catches himself in a contradiction and offers a retraction: “My face is red, I stand corrected!” Everything about the song is fun. It’s inspiring that way. It makes you want to shed all insecurity and be as confident and funny and smooth as Prince. It makes you realize that it really can be as simple as “if love is good, then let’s get 2 rammin’.” Truly, this song is the dream we all dream of.

Buy it from Amazon.

Sleigh Bells “Kids”

The basic high concept behind Sleigh Bells is bold, exciting, and strangely, something that hasn’t really been done before: Extremely catchy hardcore/metal riffs dropped over crunk beats and topped off with airy bubblegum vocals that contrast a cool femininity with the macho, amped-up quality of the music. Like a lot of the best ideas in pop, it’s a triumph of simplicity and novelty, and the appeal is immediate and intuitive.

That collision of familiar styles is not the only big idea on Treats, though. What really pushes the music over the top is the way it is recorded and mastered to convey an impossible loudness by deliberately narrowing its dynamic range to the point of clipping the sound even at moderate volumes. I am fairly certain that Treats is the first album to fetishize the negative consequences of the Loudness War. It’s not simply designed to sound good on bad headphones, car stereos, and computer speakers; it’s made to emulate the way overly hot recordings sound on those devices when you turn them all the way up, and to tap into our positive connection to that distortion because we only turned the music up so high because we liked it.

To some extent, it’s a meta conceit not unlike the way lo-fi and chillwave artists present their songs with a deliberate patina of age and grit intended evoke the aesthetics of recording and playback devices of the past. The obvious difference is that Treats is not concerned with the past, but rather how we experience music in the present. It plays on memories of interacting with music that are so fresh we’ve only begun to process them. It’s rather like how Phil Spector devised his famous “wall of sound” style by tailoring the arrangements and recordings to sound good on transistor radio. They found a way to not only take advantage of the limitations of the devices on which the songs would be heard, but to make something beautiful and exciting out of technical flaws and the misguided, market-driven impulse to master music at a ridiculous volume.

The important thing to stress is that this clever angle isn’t used as a distancing device, and it’s not some purely intellectual aesthetic. It’s mostly just the answer to the question “How can we take these awesome songs and make them even more awesome?” When the sound of it gets intense, when the loudest bits clip to the point of abstraction, the effect is purely physical. On a conscious level we recognize this as the sound of the music getting too loud and coming out “wrong,” but mostly you’re just hit by noise, and the way it vibrates through your body and around the room. It’s a record that forces you to be aware of your response to it. It’s a celebration of loudness, of loving something so much that you don’t mind damaging your hearing a bit, of the way it feels to be physically overwhelmed by sound.

In this Sleigh Bells record, I hear a blueprint for rock music going into the next decade. It’s a new way of being loud and aggressive and powerful that doesn’t throw out the raw essentials of rock so much as it reconfigures them for the era we are in. I really hope other musicians out there recognize this, and do what they can to put their own spin on these basic ideas.

Buy it from Amazon.

R. Kelly “Just Like That”

Over the past decade, it’s been easy to focus on R. Kelly’s most absurd pop songs. It’s understandable; a lot of his best songs have moments of distinct, inspired, hilarious weirdness. It’s something that makes him a singular, fascinating artist. However, it’s easy to overlook or underrate him when he’s playing it totally straight. “Just Like That,” one of the best tracks from Love Letter, has no interesting lyrical hook. It’s a sweet, smooth R&B love song, as sentimental and straightforward as it gets. This is R. Kelly’s specialty, and even though it’s the kind of song he can no doubt write and produce without much effort, it’s an extremely effective piece of music. It aims for pure pleasure, and hits that mark with startling accuracy. Well-made genre exercises may not be extremely exciting on an intellectual level, but sometimes you just have to marvel at the work of a master craftsman.

Buy it from Amazon.

Teen Daze “Let’s Fall Asleep Together”

I look at the band name Teen Daze and the EP title Beach Dream, and I can only think about how it looks like the off-brand version of Beach House’s Teen Dream. You know, like at the supermarket where Cinnamon Toast Crunch becomes Cinnamon Toasters, and Dr. Pepper becomes Dr. Thunder and a thousand other sodas with doctorate degrees. That said, despite their generic quality, the names are very well-suited to the music, which aims for a type of innocent dreaminess that has been very common in the past few years, but ends up sounding more assertive and more effortless in its beauty. “Let’s Fall Asleep Together” isn’t a mind-blower, but it’s very easy to enjoy. It’s an uncomplicated, familiar pleasure for people who like graceful, pretty indie pop.

Buy it from Teen Daze at Bandcamp.

Liz Phair @ Bowery Ballroom 12/13/2010

Supernova / 6’1″ / Help Me Mary / Divorce Song / May Queen / Never Said / Nashville / And He Slayed Her / Polyester Bride / Perfect World / Mesmerizing / Oh Bangladesh / Extraordinary / Flower / Stratford-On-Guy / Fuck and Run // Don’t Hold Your Breath aka If I Ever Pay You Back / Soap Star Joe / Hot White Cum / Johnny Feelgood

This was my first Liz Phair show, after something like sixteen years of being a fan. The songs from her first two albums (plus about half of her third) are seared into my memory, they’re a part of me. If I hear them, I sing along. They’re some of my favorite songs to sing, actually. I certainly wasn’t alone in singing along at this gig. This wasn’t some Dashboard Confessional type of thing, just a lot of fans respectfully singing along at a low volume as not to overwhelm Liz or disturb our neighbors. Pretty much everyone who came out for this show was obviously a big fan, and showed her a lot of love through the whole show. This was the kind of crowd that gave songs from Funstyle a round of applause, full of the type of people who would request an impromptu performance of “Hot White Cum.” Liz was clearly heartened by the positive response. She was a little stiff at first, but by the time she got into “Divorce Song,” she was feeding off the energy and giving it back. It was a really nice show.

The highlights for me were fairly deep cuts. “Perfect World,” the song that always breaks my heart into a billion pieces. “Help Me Mary,” maybe not as obscure, but a song with one of my favorite simple melodies. Most especially “Nashville,” possibly my favorite track in her catalog. Here’s what I wrote about “Nashville” back in 2007. It’s one of my favorite things that I have written on this site.

Liz Phair “Nashville”

Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong writers or speaking to the wrong people since the early 90s, but it seems that almost no one ever mentions that the guitar parts on Liz Phair’s first two albums are more often than not as poetic as her words. The tone in “Nashville” is drowsy and nearly serene, but its churning rhythm is nervous and unsteady in a way particular to feeling terrified about losing something in which you’ve invested too much. It’s an interesting subtext for a song that depicts a relationship in its most uneventful yet most emotionally loaded moments, and proclaims “I won’t decorate my love” at the end like a mantra, a promise, and a manifesto.

Of course, when she sings those words, the arrangement contradicts the notion with some sentimental adornment in the form of a few faded saxophone notes and some distant twinkling sounds, presumably an echo of the sweetest thing that Phair sings in this, or possibly any other, song: “They don’t know what they like so much about it / they just go for any shiny old bauble / and nobody sparkles like you.” It’s a genuinely beautiful thing to say, but it’s grounded in an elitism that I find to be human and true, and it speaks to the reality that who you fall in love with is a matter of taste, and some people have better taste than others. Ultimately, this is a song about pride, and the way that it makes love both more difficult in that it keeps you from opening up to just anyone, and more rewarding when you find someone with whom you can feel safe enough to drop your defenses.

Buy it from Amazon. Originally posted 2/6/2007.

Kanye West with Rick Ross “Devil in a New Dress”

Have you heard about this new Kanye West album? It’s pretty good!

The majority of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is just outside of Kanye West’s comfort zone as a producer. He’s pushing for something grand, something that we all immediately understand to be ambitious and exciting. Despite all that, I think the most musically interesting and emotionally stirring track on the record is “Devil in a New Dress,” a song that’s something of a throwback to the style the “chipmunk soul”/recombinant funk style that put him on the cultural map at the start of the last decade. “Devil” expands a brief moment of gorgeous raw emotion from Smokey Robinson’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” into a sustained meditation on conflicted affection, speeding up the sample but stretching its feeling out over nearly six minutes. It stays in the same space for all that time, but the construction of the track is very subtle and sophisticated, with gentle shifts in dynamics and additional instrumentation that lends the piece a bit of glitter in the piano and a touch of grime in the guitar. The bass is what really gets to me. The melody line is a flourish lifted directly from the Robinson tune, but in this context, it’s the sweet, creamy core of the composition. West and Rick Ross come off as cold and vain in their verses, but that bass line counters their words, indicating all the warmth and humanity that they’re holding back in their rhymes.

Buy it from Amazon.

Just as I know almost nothing about Unknown Mortal Orchestra aside from that they hail from Portland, Oregon, I have no idea what the story is with this song. It sounds immediately familiar, like something I have known for years, but I can’t place it. Some brilliant lost soul-funk tune, something like that. That said, I have no reason not to believe that this in fact an original tune. Maybe it’s stealing something from somewhere, but I don’t know. It could just be that these people are just flat-out brilliant. I mean, I can glean that just from how they capture this perfectly warm, slightly worn sound, and this fluid, lively, spontaneous sound in their recordings. “How Can U Luv Me” is funky and catchy, but in a loose, relaxed sort of way. It’s groovy, not uptight. The mystery adds something to this, too — I like the idea that somewhere out there, these people are in a small room knocking out these amazing songs, and there are few clues as to who they are and almost no one knows about it.

EDIT: I had to take this down by request of the prospective US label, but I urge everyone to check this out, and buy it now if they feel inclined.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

The Divine Comedy “At the Indie Disco”

You might assume that a chamber pop song titled “At the Indie Disco” would be arch or biting, but Neil Hannon proves you wrong. It’s actually quite sweet! This is a song about a young man who is enjoying the time he has been spending with a girl at the indie disco and wondering if there is a possibility that their fun, friendly relationship may blossom into a romance. He’s polite, gentle, shy, considerate — the stereotype of a guy you’d expect to be at an indie disco, but instead of mocking this guy, Hannon’s song celebrates him and his minor drama. The music at the indie disco is given the same respect. When the lyrics mention the likes of Morrissey, Blur, the Cure, New Order and the Wannadies, it is not delivered with a dismissive sneer, but instead the same reverence the subject would have for those acts.

Buy it from Amazon.

Anika “Yang Yang”

Anika’s debut album, a collaboration with Geoff Barrow and the members of Beak, is essentially a love letter to the output of 99 Records and Ze Records in the early 80s. It’s all in the rhythms, the drum fills, the tones, the melodies, the vocal style, and most especially the negative space. A lot of this album comes out sounding like ESG if they had been fronted by a drowsy, more heavily accented version of Cristina. This is catnip for record nerds, but its appeal goes beyond mere pastiche. Barrow is a genius of texture and composition, every sound has the perfect ring to it — never too fuzzy, never too crisp, always just so without seeming fussy. In some ways, you can look at a song like “Yang Yang” as a variation on what Portishead did on Third, but with a looser, more playful tone. Anika’s voice adds a great texture to the songs and the music was clearly composed to complement her style, but there’s no question that you come to this record for Barrow.

Buy it from Amazon.

The New Pornographers @ Terminal 5 12/6/2010

Moves / Slow Descent Into Alcoholism / It’s Only Divine Right / Crash Years / All the Old Showstoppers / The Laws Have Changed / Jackie Dressed in Cobras / Miss Teen Wordpower / We End Up Together / Adventures in Solitude / Twin Cinema / Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk / Go Places / Hey Snow White / Your Hands (Together) / Mass Romantic / Testament to Youth in Verse / Use It / The Bleeding Heart Show // Challengers / Up in the Dark / Sing Me Spanish Techno

In short, this was an excellent double-bill featuring two of the best power-pop bands on the planet today. I can’t help but feel that both Ted Leo and the New Pornographers have reached a phase in their career in which they’ve come to be under-appreciated. It’s Spoon syndrome — consistency, professionalism, and a distinct creative voice taken for granted by an indie audience more concerned with chasing baby bands in pursuit of firsties than celebrating career artists. I feel like Ted Leo gets this especially bad. He couldn’t possibly ask for more respect from music fans without going back in time to join Sonic Youth, but it seems like the reception for the Brutalist Bricks, arguably his finest record and probably the best straight-up rock album of 2010, has been frustratingly tepid. If you’ve been sleeping on this, give it another chance.

The New Pornographers “We End Up Together”

“We End Up Together” has more or less the same theme as Spoon’s “The Mystery Zone,” and that may have something to do with why I’ve connected with both so deeply over the past year. Both songs are concerned with contingency phases in our lives, and “the times that we met before we met.” Looking back on the past knowing what we know now, and trying to imagine what life was like before it all happened. “We End Up Together” is the more fatalistic of the two songs. There’s a sense of inevitability throughout the lyrics, this retrospective notion that our genes, our engagement in culture and society, our every stupid decision leads to some unavoidable point, and then we die. It’s not romantic. It’s not beautiful. It does, however, have a ring of truth, particularly in the context of this sweeping anthemic tune. When the song reaches its climax, just as Carl Newman sings the title phrase, I tend to think of the wordless backing vocals as some kind of disagreement, an act of rebellion against some rigid fate. It may be good that we are together, but do you really want to just end up together?

Buy it from Amazon.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists @ Terminal 5 12/6/2010

The Mighty Sparrow / Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone? / I’m a Ghost / The Angel’s Share / Where Was My Brain? / The One Who Got Us Out / Even Heroes Have to Die / Bridges, Squares / The Stick / One Polaroid a Day / Bottled in Cork / Timorous Me / The Crane Takes Flight

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists “One Polaroid a Day”

Did you read this article in Time Out New York wondering whether social media is ruining New York culture, and by extension culture in general? Have you read any of the probably hundreds of similar articles and blog posts that express more or less the same notion? They always come off as tedious and reactionary, but with some bit of truth buried under all the sanctimony and tunnelvision. Anyway, in this song, Ted Leo gets at that idea with far more grace. To paraphrase: You take yourself out of the moment when you attempt to document it or frame it in yourself when it’s really about something much bigger. It’s more fun when you let go, when you just let things play out. You can come back and think about it later. Memories are more fun than a digital photo gallery! Ted gets at all of this, but he does it with a smile, and a smooth, lightly funky groove. It’s so much better that way.

Buy it from Amazon.

Fight Like Apes “Come On, Let’s Talk About Our Feelings”

When MayKay sings the phrase “come on, let’s talk about our feelings,” she is mostly being sarcastic. It’s a defense mechanism, a way of cutting through her own earnestness and sentimentality. The jokes, the irony, the dismissive tone — it’s all about finding a way to deal with having “too many feelings.” No amount of sarcasm could ever extinguish the fire in her voice, or temper the passion in her band’s music. They’re too hyper, too committed, too in love with their bold, colorful alt-rock tunes. This internal conflict and tonal contrast is exactly what makes Fight Like Apes so compelling. It’s that Irish thing, you know? Big bleeding heart, dry cutting wit.

Buy it from Fight Like Apes.

Ne-Yo “Champagne Life”

At the start of “Champagne Life” Ne-Yo welcomes the listener to his world, “where dreams and reality are one and the same.” That’s a pretty quick summary of what he’s up to on this song, and his current project in general. The song is a fantasy of easy-going luxury, the album and its accompanying music videos support a strange, only slightly coherent narrative about a trio of garbage men who are given amazing superpowers to protect their city in exchange for giving up the ability to fall in love. In either case, he’s going for extreme escapism, actively rejecting the negativity and limitations of the real world in favor of feel-good fantasy. Even the downside of his superhero scenario isn’t all that bad — it opens his characters up to hedonistic pursuits, and obviously they’ll end up falling in love anyway! That’s how these things work — setting up a melodramatic boundary only to knock it down. Love conquers all! Pleasure is king! What makes this work is a combination of Ne-Yo’s impeccable craft, and his total commitment to his own ridiculousness. He never lets the mask slip, and there are no cracks in the facade. If you enter his dream world, you’re going in all the way.

Buy it from Amazon.

This eight-disc, 157 song mix is a survey of some of the best and most notable music from 2010. It’s fairly comprehensive, covering indie, pop, rock, punk, folk, rap, R&B, soul, dance, country, modern classical, ambient and electronic music, and in many cases, hard-to-classify genre hybrids. I inevitably had to leave out some things, but I think you’ll find that this serves as both a helpful guide to some of the year’s most exciting music and a surprisingly listenable series of mixes. Discover new stuff! Rediscover familiar artists in a new context! Jam out to ten and a half hours of world-class tunes! If you enjoy this, please do pass it on.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Owen Pallett “Midnight Directives” / Vampire Weekend “White Sky” / Spoon “The Mystery Zone” / Joanna Newsom “Good Intentions Paving Company” / Liars “Scarecrows on a Killer Slant” / Janelle Monae featuring Big Boi “Tightrope” / Sleigh Bells “Rill Rill” / Robyn “Dancing on My Own” / LCD Soundsystem “I Can Change” / Sky Ferreira “One” / Bat For Lashes and Beck “Let’s Get Lost” / Arcade Fire “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” / Twin Sister “All Around and Away We Go” / Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti “Round and Round” / Caribou “Odessa” / Rihanna “Only Girl (in the World)” / Kanye West featuring Pusha T “Runaway”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

Yelawolf “Billy Crystal” / Gorillaz featuring Mos Def and Bobby Womack “Stylo” / Goldfrapp “Alive” / Alphabeat “Heatwave” / The-Dream “Love King” / of Montreal featuring Solange “Sex Karma” / Dominique Young Unique “Music Time” / Waka Flocka Flame “Hard in Da Paint” / Stereolab “Two Finger Symphony” / The Russian Futurists “Hoeing Weeds Sowing Seeds” / Glasser “Apply” / Shapes and Sizes “Too Late For Dancing” / Marnie Stern “Transparency is the New Mystery” / James Blake “I Only Know What I Know Now” / Tracey Thorn “Oh, the Divorces!” / Victoire “I Am Coming For My Things” / A Sunny Day in Glasgow “Drink Drank Drunk” / Azari & III “Reckless With Your Love (Tensnake Mix)” / Best Coast “Our Deal”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Scissor Sisters “Invisible Light” / Matthew Dear “You Put A Smell On Me” / Ne-Yo “Champagne Life” / Alicia Keys “Un-Thinkable (I’m Ready)” / How to Destroy Angels “The Believers” / Gold Panda “Snow & Taxis” / These New Puritans “Three Thousand” / Usher featuring Nicki Minaj “Lil Freak” / Beyonce “Why Don’t You Love Me?” / Fol Chen “In Ruins” / Kylie Minogue “Better Than Today” / Club 8 “Dancing With the Mentally Ill” / Britta Persson “Meet A Bear” / Clinic “Bubblegum” / Wavves “Idiot” / Past Lives “Don’t Let the Ashes Fill Your Eyes” / Crystal Castles featuring Robert Smith “Not In Love” / Big Boi featuring Big Rube “General Patton” / M.I.A. “XXXO” / First Rate People “Girls’ Night” / Baths “You’re My Excuse to Travel”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

The New Pornographers “Moves” / Ted Leo and the Pharmacists “Bottled In Cork” / The Roots “How I Got Over” / Phosphorescent “It’s Hard to Be Humble (When You’re From Alabama)” / Sabbath Assembly “Glory Hallelujah” / Erykah Badu “Turn Me Away (Get Munny)” / Kings Go Forth “High on Your Love” / Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings “Money” / Die Antwoord “Enter the Ninja” / T.I. “I’m Back” / Chromeo “When the Night Falls” / Beeda Weeda “Baserock Babies” / California Swag District “Teach Me How to Dougie” / Free Energy “Free Energy” / Los Campesinos! “Romance is Boring” / My Chemical Romance “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)” / Nicki Minaj “Girls Fall Like Dominoes” / Ghostface Killah “Together Baby” / Unknown Mortal Orchestra “Ffunny Ffrends” / Beach House “Walk in the Park”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Hot Chip “Thieves in the Night” / Reading Rainbow “Always on My Mind” / Dum Dum Girls “Rest of Our Lives” / The Knife “The Height of Summer” / The Mynabirds “Ways of Looking” / Deerhunter “Helicopter” / Guido featuring Aarya “Beautiful Complication” / School of Seven Bells “Windstorm” / Avey Tare “Ghost of Books” / Laura Marling “Alpha Shallows” / White Hinterland “Bow & Arrow” / Laetitia Sadier “One Million Year Trip” / Society of Rockets “We” / Lil Wayne “I Am Not A Human Being” / Rick Ross featuring Gucci Mane “MC Hammer” / Roach Gigz “Magic Gas” / Titus Andronicus “Titus Andronicus Forever” / Superchunk “Digging For Something” / Serena-Maneesh “I Just Want to See Your Face” / The Magnetic Fields “We Are Having a Hootenanny” / Rose Elinor Dougall “May Holiday”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Four Tet “Angel Echoes” / Pantha Du Prince “Bohemian Forest” / Panda Bear “You Can Count On Me” / Women “China Steps” / Gonjasufi “Duet” / Flying Lotus “Do the Astral Plane” / Prins Thomas “Ørkenvandring” / Tame Impala “Solitude Is Bliss” / Slow Club “Giving Up On Love” / Cee-Lo Green “Fuck You” / Belle & Sebastian “The Ghost of Rockschool” / Jay Electronica “Exhibit C” / Black Milk featuring Royce Da 5’9 “Deadly Medley” / Charlotte Gainsbourg “Looking Glass Blues” / Zola Jesus “I Can’t Stand” / Wolf Parade “Little Golden Age” / Mr. Dream “Knick Knack” / The Fall “Y.F.O.C./Slippy Floor”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

Thrushes “Crystals” / Bullion “Say Goodbye to What” / Justin Bieber featuring Ludacris “Baby” / Drake “Karaoke” / Sade “Soldier of Love” / Katy B “Katy On a Mission” / Teengirl Fantasy “Cheaters” / CocoRosie “The Moon Asked the Crow” / Dirty Projectors and Bjork “On and Ever Onward” / Deloreon “Real Love” / The Smashing Pumpkins “Freak” / Warpaint “Undertow” / The Morning Benders “Promises” / Emeralds “Candy Shoppe” / Kelis “Acapella” / Discodeine featuring Jarvis Cocker “Synchronize” / We Love “Ice Lips” / Twista featuring Raekwon “The Heat” / Gil Scott-Heron “New York Is Killing Me”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Field Music “In the Mirror” / Electric Six “After Hours” / Das Racist “Rappin 2 U” / Curren$y “A Gee” / Antony and the Johnsons “I’m In Love” / The National “Bloodbuzz Ohio” / Candy Claws “Warm Forest Floor” / Sufjan Stevens “I Walked” / William Brittelle “Vivid Culture” / The Chemical Brothers “Snow” / Brian Eno “2 Forms of Anger” / Stornoway “I Saw You Blink” / Mose Allison “My Brain” / Elaine Lachica “Tumbleweed” / Taylor Swift “Mine” / Weezer “Trainwrecks” / Jenny and Johnny “Big Wave” / No Age “Valley Hump Crash” / The Walkmen “Angela Surf City” / Scout Niblett “Duke of Anxiety” / Dom “Jesus” / How to Dress Well featuring Yuksel Arslan “Decisions”

Yelawolf “Billy Crystal”

Yelawolf has a strange and compelling voice. It’s bright in tone, but oddly choked and constricted in a way that seems slightly alien. This works for him, especially when he’s in observational mode, as in this creepy ode to a rural meth dealer called Billy. He sounds like a fascinated outsider with an eye for detail, an offbeat sense of humor, and no particular interest in judging his subject. The track is alternately dazed and melodramatic, and filled out with harsh electronic textures that sound literally sick, as if the song has caught some kind of painful sci-fi flu. It’s great, highly evocative stuff — without doing anything drastic, this strikes me as a very distinct strain of hip hop that recasts familiar tropes about drug dealers and economic desperation for a different but no less depressing milieu of American culture.

Buy it from Amazon.

My Chemical Romance “Planetary (GO!)”

I’ll be very honest with you: I definitely never anticipated loving a My Chemical Romance record this much, but then again, I also never thought they’d be the band who’d try to make Andrew W.K. seem sluggish and morose. “Planetary (GO!)” is a super-concentrated shot of thrill power, totally overwhelming in its barrage of gleeful, hyperactive hooks. You don’t get a second to breathe. It’s like — POGO! POGO FASTER! DON’T STOP POGOING OR THE ENTIRE MULTIVERSE WILL EXPLODE!!! It’s not exactly a surprise that Grant Morrison turns up in the video for this album’s lead single. My Chemical Romance are clearly taking cues from his most energetic and surreal works of superhero fiction, aiming for an absurd, goofy extreme of modern pop-rock merged with over-the-top comic book mythologies and the stylistic excesses of J-Pop and trippy children’s television. Most of the time, they totally nail it. This is something worth freaking out about.

Buy it from Amazon.

Curren$y “A Gee”

Curren$y’s second album of 2010 is better than the first, which is saying something, since the first Pilot Talk was a pretty solid effort. Whereas that album settled into a stoner rap niche, its sequel has a smooth, late night funk sound to it, mellow and jazzy and highly melodic. This brings out the best in Curren$y, whose raps come out sounding more fluid and intuitive than ever, as if his well-crafted verses could be entirely effortless. Remember a couple weeks ago when I wrote about how Stereolab are good at making music that has a good “earfeel”? Pilot Talk 2 is very much like that, it’s just such a pleasure to hear, it’s like eating some rich, insanely delicious comfort food. However, despite the cozy warmth of its sound, there’s a chilly center to this music. Curren$y has an aloof vibe, he plays it up well in his lyrics. The killer line to this effect is here in “A Gee,” it’s one of my favorite lyrics from anything this year: “No matter where you go / one place you’ll never be / is close / even if you move right next to me.” Cold!

Buy it from Amazon.

LCD Soundsystem “Pow Pow” (London Session)

This live recording of “Pow Pow” includes a fair amount of lyrical improvisation on the part of James Murphy, and as such, he cuts out some of the words from the album version. One of the things that didn’t make it into this performance are the two lines that make the song sorta difficult for me to hear at times. This bit:

But honestly — and be honest with yourself — how much time do you waste? How much time do you blow every day?

This freaks me out because I know what the answer is, and the answer makes me feel horrible about myself. It makes me feel like a joke, a loser, an underachiever. Lazy, scared, boring. A person who is actively betraying and sabotaging himself on a daily basis. At this particular moment in my life, this is my greatest fear — that I’m wasting my time, and it’s all my fault.

Anyone could say these words, but not just anyone could say them and have the same impact on me. When James Murphy says this, you hear the blunt truth because you know he is doing it right. He’s always working, always pushing himself. He’s cracked the code, and he’s trying to give us tough love. He knows what he’s doing here, he knows how much it will pain some people to think about how much time they’re wasting not doing what they wish that they could. He knows how many good ideas never end up being fully realized because people are afraid to commit, or too tied up in things that ultimately don’t matter very much.

Listening to the the song without those lines is a small relief, but I am aware that they are gone, so I think about them anyway. I also think about how Murphy is waffling through the whole song, looking at things from multiple perspectives and acknowledging the validity of all of them. These words are a respectful debate going on in his head, spilling out into this song. He goes off on tangents enough times that it’s hard to tell what his main point may have been. He’s exhausted, frustrated by how touring disrupts his life. He’s concerned about using up his desire for discovery. Maybe that’s the point here: You need discovery in your life, but you can’t overload on it. It has to be meaningful. It needs context. It has to take you by surprise. You waste your time, and that’s a crime, but it sets you up for discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery. There just has to be a first step between passivity and the thrill of new things.

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Russian Futurists “Hoeing Weeds Sowing Seeds”

I like a lot of songs that sound like they are hurtling forwards, eagerly zooming into the future, and this is certainly one of those. The intro sounds like a warm-up — jogging in place before the drum fills comes in like a starter pistol, and it’s off. I like the implied velocity, but most of the charm is in the voice and the melody — somehow all of these words and notes come together to sound like a smile. A smile running off into the unknown, optimistic about whatever is off in the distance or moving in its direction.

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Sky Ferreira “One”

The first two times I heard this, it didn’t really work. The keyboards and vocal delivery were a bit too familiar from the past decade of icy dance pop music, and I didn’t feel like I needed more. But even the first couple times, that staccato repetition at the end of some lines stood out. And then, on the third and fourth and fifth and thiry-seventh listen, the particular charms of the song sunk in, gaining power and poignancy and ridiculous weapons-grade catchiness with each successive spin. Once it snaps together, even the most shopworn elements of the arrangement seem vibrant. The bright notes that punctuate the chorus while Ferreira’s digital voice repeats one clipped syllable is unexpectedly gorgeous, like a garish Christmas display warped into a glowing abstraction. So yes, listen to this. Listen to it a few times, at least.

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Dum Dum Girls “Rest of Our Lives”

“Rest Of Our Lives” is one of the best love songs I’ve heard in the past few years. It’s drowsy and dreamy, and sung mostly in sighs even as it hits its swooning peaks in the choruses. It’s basically a song about finding exactly the love that you had always dreamed of, and hoping to hold on to that comfort and stability forever. It’s a ’60s girl group pastiche, but there is not the faintest trace of irony or cynicism in the music, the melody, or the lyrics. It’s just aching, beautiful sincerity, and a sound that feels like innocence and true love. “Rest Of Our Lives” is almost overwhelming in its sweetness, but it’s not cloying, or just some girl bragging about her perfect relationship. To borrow some words from Sonic Youth, it feels like a wish coming true. It feels like angels dreaming of you.

Buy it from Amazon. Originally posted March 30th 2010.

The Knife featuring Lærke Winther “The Height of Summer”

“The Height of Summer” is the final song on Tomorrow, In A Year, and it serves as something of a narrative coda. It is not an opera song or some impressionistic composition, but instead a pop ballad very much along the lines of what is typically expected of the Knife. It’s a strange, beautiful piece of music that has an unlikely yet graceful balance of flutter and bounce. The tone is wistful and nostalgic; it is essentially a piece of correspondence set to song. Lærke Winther’s voice is cool and understated, but she comes across as thoughtful and imaginative, like a person who spends a great deal of time in her head, but is making the effort to check in on the outside world. Darwin the man may be a distant, fond memory for her, but his ideas still resonate for her in the seemingly minor details of life, and in how she imagines a world without her.

Buy it from Amazon. Originally posted February 17th, 2010.

The Mynabirds “Ways of Looking”

“Ways Of Looking” is about dealing with disappointment, or more precisely, admiring the way another person processes setbacks and bad news. The song is gentle and languid, with Laura Burhenn sounding wounded yet calm over guitar chords that evoke overcast skies and recall the Velvet Underground. It’s nearly serene in tone, so it can be easy to miss that it’s also a love song. There’s no drama or turmoil here, only respect for someone’s strength and gratitude for their support. Amidst all the risk and uncertainty, “Ways Of Looking” finds comfort in the moment, and a healthy perspective on the past, present, and future.

Buy it from Amazon. Originally posted June 4th 2010.