School of Seven Bells “Windstorm”

Upon hearing School of Seven Bells’ second album, my first impression was that they were wise to drop the haziness and shoegazing, since they didn’t need it and there are too many young musicians masking their timidity and weak skills in that sound. However, when I revisited their first record, it was all sharper and more polished than I had remembered. There’s nothing blurred or muted about Disconnect From Desire — the band is still dreamy, but there’s no soft-focus on this beauty. The vocals are up front in the mix, the singing is confident but not showy. It makes me think of when you see artistic nude shots of fashion models, and their nakedness is so matter of fact and devoid of vulnerability or need to appear particularly sexy. Their body is just there, a natural state that seems totally unnatural in the absence of social convention and the neuroses that go along with it. “Windstorm”, like most everything else the band does, projects a clear-eyed calm in the middle of an arrangement that implies wide-scale drama. They sound enlightened and peaceful, but it seems almost non-human, like the emotional equivalent of a sculpted body shot in crisp black and white. It’s striking in its lovely coldness.

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Ted Leo and the Pharmacists “Where Was My Brain?”

A big problem with being an idealist is that not only are you guaranteed a life of bitter disappointment, but you’re stuck always envisioning some better way of living and wondering why everyone went the other way. Wasn’t it obvious? Couldn’t you see it? “Where Was My Brain?” vents the frustration of doing what you think is right but always being on the wrong side of history. The song has a sense of humor, but the joke is very sad and self-deprecating: Why did I ever think everything was going to get better? Even with that notion as a central hook, you can’t shake Ted Leo’s optimism and determination. This isn’t a song about giving up. Not at all. If anything, it’s just about setting up realistic, adult expectations for positive change, and learning to make do with “the best in an imperfect world.”

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The Roots “How I Got Over”

How I Got Over sounds more or less exactly like the sort of hip hop record a band of guys who have become accustomed to performing in nice suits every day would make. It’s clean, it sounds expensive and “classy.” Relaxed and content, but concerned and engaged. To some extent, it’s The Roots being The Roots, but it’s also a different direction for them, something that looks to the future of what they can become as they age, and as their methods change with their day job as a late night television house band. They’ve sounded darker, they’ve sounded hungrier, but this new sleek, adult tone suits them well, and if someone was going to explore this territory for hip hop, I’m glad that it’s them.

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Scissor Sisters “Running Out”

“Running Out” is all about stress and pressure — to keep yourself happy, to keep other people happy, to make sure that the gravy train you’re all on continues to run smoothly despite the possibility that your luck could suddenly run out — but it’s hardly a drag. The song sounds like a David Bowie aerobics video; the mood is sassy and focused. There’s always the fear that success is finite, that the other shoe is about to drop, but this song isn’t about giving into that fear but instead using that awareness of impending failure as a motivation to keep moving, keep thinking, keep smiling, keep dancing. Upbeat pop for the generous workaholic!

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Kylie Minogue “Better Than Today”

Last year I wrote about how it seemed like the sheet music for Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love” could just be a row of exclamation points on a staff. With that same concept in mind, I think the sheet music for Kylie’s “Better Than Today” would be all smiley faces, rainbows, shooting stars, and maybe a few unicorns on the bridge. This is Kylie in hyper-Pollyanna mode, and I love it. Kylie is always at her best when she seems sweet, positive, and generous, and this is basically a song in which she makes a case for the pragmatism of optimism over delightfully bouncy hooks. This is neither aggressive or oppressive in its joyfulness — if anything, it’s just an open door to a path to something other than frustration and misery. You can walk through it, or pass on by. It’s kinda hard to turn Kylie down, though.

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Gay Genius “Spit It Out”

Gay Genius is a collaboration between Tyler Martin of James Rabbit and Nessie of Nessie and Her Beard. It may be a bit silly to point this out given how obscure both of them are, but given the fact that I have written about James Rabbit several times over the years, I figure at least some of you would be interested in knowing that. “Spit It Out” has the same charming informal professionalism of Martin’s recordings, but the style is much different, shedding the manic glee of James Rabbit in favor of a mellow approximation of Erasure. Nessie’s voice and phrasing comes close to that of Andy Bell, but the music is far more relaxed and low-key than a typical Erasure tune. It’s more of a slow burn, which makes the urgency of the vocals seem a bit more impatient and anxious. The passion is there, but it could be futile.

Get the Gay Genius album via Tyler on the James Rabbit site.

Goldfrapp @ Hammerstein Ballroom 6/23/2010

Crystalline Green / I Wanna Life / A&E / U Never Know / Head First / Number 1 / Dreaming / Believer / Alive / Soft & Warm / Train / Ride A White Horse / Ooh La La // Utopia / Black Cherry /// Rocket / Strict Machine

Goldfrapp “Head First”

I’ve seen Goldfrapp a few times over now, and I’m pretty sure this was the first time I’ve seen Alison in a good mood on stage. It could just be a result of performing the new songs, which convey so much love, gratitude, and relief. Head First may not be her band’s best work, but it’s a lovely record and its high points are so effective in expressing — and spreading — this hard-won bliss and optimism. The concert felt much more celebratory than past Goldfrapp shows, which felt more formal in the Supernature era, and a bit stuffy and sad when they toured for Seventh Tree. Alison changed costume a few times, starting out in a gown that looked like an unfurled VHS tape, and ending up draped in what appeared to be long, pink Muppet hair. She was beautiful and commanding, and it was nice to see her smile a few times.

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Goldfrapp “Ride A White Horse” (iTunes session version)

At the end of the main set, the band swung hard into electro-glam mode. Goldfrapp can do many things very well, but this particular sound — “Train,” “Ride A White Horse,” “Ooh La La,” “Strict Machine” — is something that is all their own. Halfway through “Ride A White Horse” I found myself feeling a bit annoyed that no one else is doing this sort of thing. Yes, there were a few copycat blips on the radar, like Rachel Stevens’ excellent single “Some Girls”, but my major disappointment is in bands. I realize that not just anyone can pull this off, but this is like a new blueprint for rock music, at least on a textural level. Harsh, glamorous, precise, sexy, feminine, enormous in scope yet tightly focused. We could learn a lot from Goldfrapp.

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The Chemical Brothers “Snow”

We hear a lot about love lifting people up in pop music, and when we do, the music typically illustrates the height rather than the depth. “Snow” goes the other way, implying a slow upward drift from the bottom of some emotional nowhere. It’s mostly static and noise sculpted into a lightly pulsating, percussion-free rhythm, with washes of ugly sound entering the mix, making it feel as though you’re gently levitating through dark clouds of pollution on your way to a cleaner, brighter place in the sky.

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Bat For Lashes featuring Beck “Let’s Get Lost”

I’m willing to forgive whatever flaws the Twilight series may have simply because that franchise sparked the creation of this song. Beck and Natasha Khan have distilled the essence of the series’ appeal — intense longing for forbidden sexuality and drama — into four minutes of perfectly realized dark, hyper-romantic pop. This is much more like a Bat For Lashes song with Beck as a guest than vice versa, and the sound of it isn’t far off from what Natasha was doing on Two Suns. Nevertheless, Beck is ideally cast in this duet. Natasha sings with passion and desperation, but he’s cold and aloof, there but just out of reach. There’s an ache in his voice, but he mostly comes off as this fascinating and unknowable object of desire. The song makes a virtue out of something in Beck that has put a damper on his most recent albums, and it flows seamlessly into Natasha’s distinct aesthetic. It’s a incredibly sexy and beautiful piece of music, and it’s all the better for taking its cues from this sort of dubious yet compelling pop culture phenomenon.

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The New Pornographers @ Terminal 5 6/19/2010

Sing Me Spanish Techno / Up In The Dark / Myriad Harbour / Use It / Crash Years / Jackie Dressed In Cobras / A Bite Out Of My Bed / Adventures In Solitude / Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk / Go Places / All The Old Showstoppers / Jackie / Moves / Your Hands (Together) / Twin Cinema / My Shepherd / The Laws Have Changed / Silver Jenny Dollar / Mass Romantic / The Bleeding Heart Show // Challengers / Electric Version / Slow Descent Into Alcoholism / Testament To Youth In Verse

I’m not even going to get into another rant about how much I loathe Terminal 5. Everything about the venue is horrible, music should never be performed there, fuck Bowery Presents, etc, etc, etc. If you’ve been there you know how bad it is, and if you’ve never been, you should do whatever you can to avoid it.

You should see the New Pornographers, though. Five albums into their career, they are at the point where a 100 minute show comes out sounding like a hit-packed extravaganza even if they skip over “Letter From An Occupant,” “It’s Only Divine Right”, and “My Rights Vs. Yours”. Whereas the other times I have seen the full band in concert – all the regulars plus Dan Bejar, Neko Case, and whatever auxiliary players are on hand to play strings, horns, and whatnot — the shows were a bit stiff and mannered, this one was more relaxed and free-wheeling. Given that they were playing Terminal 5, a lot of the nuances in the arrangements were lost to horrible sound, but when they went for grandeur and oomph on “Moves,” “Myriad Harbour,” and “All The Old Showstoppers,” they pulled it off beautifully. “The Laws Have Changed,” now and forever the band’s greatest song, was another highlight, as was the cheery, Dexy’s Midnight Runners-esque “A Bite Out Of My Bed.”

The New Pornographers “Moves”

I just want to put it out there that I wish I had given Together a slightly better review. At least a few decimal points higher. I still don’t think it’s on par with the first three albums, but it’s pretty great on its own terms, and a number of the songs have grown on me a lot since I last wrote about the record. “Moves”, in particular, has become a favorite, and I’ve really fallen for the way it shifts between moments of bombast and this sort of dazed affect. The latter is what really draws me in — the “slo-o-o-ow do-o-o-own la-a-a-a-die-e-e-es slo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ow do-o-o-o-o-o-o-own” hook is one of Carl Newman’s all-time best and most inventive hooks, not just for its novelty value, but for the way it seems to push the song upward towards the next catchy bit, like an escalator moving between floors.

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Baths “You’re My Excuse To Travel”

There’s a fair amount of negative space in this track, but it’s mostly just to leave enough room for the vocals, which push to the outer limits of shrill emoting without crossing the line into being unlistenable. That said, I’d totally understand if the singing here was a deal-breaker for you. I think this song is mostly sweet, despite the lyrics being fairly difficult to decipher. The general mood is bittersweet and a bit a impatient, the track kinda rocks back and forth between this humid post-rain feeling and nervous passion. If you think of songs as being like a snapshot of a person in the middle of some kind of emotional experience, I get a very good sense of who this is and what’s going on from this piece.

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Emeralds “Candy Shoppe”

Emeralds build most of their songs around lovely arpeggiated melodies that seem to spin gently like pinwheels in the breeze. This lends their music a pretty, tuneful quality that informs all of their compositions, and provides a musical through-line that is a lot more structured and “pop” than what you’d typically expect from ambient music. I hear echoes of Terry Riley in this stuff, but rather than develop themes for long stretches of time, Emeralds mostly do succinct pieces like “Candy Shoppe” that resolve in some sort of cathartic crest before hitting the five minute mark. They’re not the first to do this sort of friendly miniature minimalism, but they’re quite good at it. Each time I’ve heard this particular track, I’ve come away from it with a happy glow.

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Beeda Weeda “Baserock Babies”

DJ Fresh’s track for “Baserock Babies” is a marvel of retro-’80s electro-funk that somehow sounds fresh and modern despite its clear roots in the aesthetic of another era. Beeda Weeda embraces the period vibe by making the song about kids born into the ’80s crack epidemic. He’s setting the scene for a flashback, but also taking back the sound that defined the culture he was born into, making himself the conclusion to a full-circle narrative. You can kinda take this as being something of a happy ending for that cycle — it’s not exactly triumphant in tone, but it’s certainly a song that expresses a certain amount of pride in dubious beginnings, and some kind of relief that things got a little bit better rather than a whole lot worse.

Visit the Beeda Weeda MySpace page.

Dominique Young Unique “Music Time”

Dominique Young Unique’s Domination mixtape is quite a jolt. The songs are short, the tempos are quick, the hooks fire at you like a barrage of laser gun zaps. For a record with a very consistent tone, the switch-ups in keyboard textures and rhythm style leave you without a sense of steady footing, so her youthful charisma on the mic holds is crucial in holding it all together in a way that feels totally confident and natural. The keyboard sounds are phenomenal on this — very French, very house, but filtered through the Miami aesthetic. It’s like blasting neon colors through speakers. This is great hip hop; it’s amazing mutated dance music.

Get it for free from Dominique Young Unique’s MySpace page.

Gorillaz “Superfast Jellyfish”

The conceit of the Gorillaz has always involved animation, but Plastic Beach is the first Gorillaz album that actually sounds something like a cartoon to my ears. Even aside from the Saturday morning breakfast cereal commercial in the intro, the very sound of “Superfast Jellyfish” implies the aesthetics of animation — a certain bounciness, a roundness to the lines, an extremity of character, a boldness in the color palette. It’s all very stylized and smooth, and the inherent silliness of the music blurs with its more serious themes, not to dilute those ideas, but to make them less shrill. It’s basically a song about how commercial culture damages our bodies and the environment in the interest of convenience and cheap thrills, but it’s not argumentative or even particularly judgmental. It’s mostly just an illustration of how easily important things become abstracted by distractions. (Like, say, seductive advertising, or cartoon images of natural life that disrupts or confuses our understanding of actual reality.) The song itself is an abstracted distraction full of big hooks like the perky yet emotionally illegible chorus by Gruff Rhys, and smaller, stickier bits of phrasing in the rapped verses by De La Soul. (“While you dine like rabbits on the crunchy crunchy carrots, gotta have it!”) It’s a very carefully balanced piece of music — it could easily just topple under the weight of its own stylistic absurdity and high concept, but instead it wobbles and bops with the charm of perfect pop.

Buy it from Amazon.

Gorillaz “Superfast Jellyfish”

The conceit of the Gorillaz has always involved animation, but Plastic Beach is the first Gorillaz album that actually sounds something like a cartoon to my ears. Even aside from the Saturday morning breakfast cereal commercial in the intro, the very sound of “Superfast Jellyfish” implies the aesthetics of animation — a certain bounciness, a roundness to the lines, an extremity of character, a boldness in the color palette. It’s all very stylized and smooth, and the inherent silliness of the music blurs with its more serious themes, not to dilute those ideas, but to make them less shrill. It’s basically a song about how commercial culture damages our bodies and the environment in the interest of convenience and cheap thrills, but it’s not argumentative or even particularly judgmental. It’s mostly just an illustration of how easily important things become abstracted by distractions. (Like, say, seductive advertising, or cartoon images of natural life that disrupts or confuses our understanding of actual reality.) The song itself is an abstracted distraction full of big hooks like the perky yet emotionally illegible chorus by Gruff Rhys, and smaller, stickier bits of phrasing in the rapped verses by De La Soul. (“While you dine like rabbits on the crunchy crunchy carrots, gotta have it!”) It’s a very carefully balanced piece of music — it could easily just topple under the weight of its own stylistic absurdity and high concept, but instead it wobbles and bops with the charm of perfect pop.

Buy it from Amazon.

How To Destroy Angels “The Believers”

You don’t need to hear Trent Reznor’s voice to know that you’re listening to his music. Over the years, he has developed a particular combination of rhythms, textures, melodic cadences, and tones that mark all of his work. I don’t have the technical background to explain it, but the man certainly has a distinct palette. “The Believers,” a song written with his wife Mariqueen Maandig and his regular collaborator Atticus Ross, take the familiar elements of his music and nudge them just beyond his comfort zone. This composition isn’t far off from much of Year Zero, but its layers of rhythm and electronic noise are tighter, while also a bit more relaxed in terms of mood. There’s a violence and tension to the piece, but it’s essentially calm, almost glassy-eyed. Maandig’s phrasing is almost exactly the same as Reznor in whispery mode, but the simple fact of her femininity softens the tone, and lends the music a sexuality that is different from Reznor’s usual brooding dude vibe. It’s a nice twist on a good formula.

Get it for free — or buy it — from the How to Destroy Angels site.

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti “Hot Body Rub”

One of my favorite unrealistic fantasies is to have the means to travel backwards in time for brief visits to various points in the 20th century, mostly in NYC. It’s mostly a desire to walk around and experience the environment first hand, and to focus on small details – the look and sound and feel of things, the internal logic of culture in the moment. These things get captured in art, but it’s always skewed by interpretation. This Ariel Pink song has that sort of time travel feeling to it, but it’s really more like an impression of a time and place passed down and warped by endless replication and recontextualization that it’s more like a shared memory of something that wasn’t ever quite real. I mean, the effect of this piece almost certainly has more to do with cinematic representations of the ’70s and early ’80s than anything else, but it’s vague enough that it doesn’t come off as a reference to any specific thing. Nevertheless, you can hear this and feel as though you’re somewhere vaguely familiar, that somehow these sounds have something to do with the past. (Maybe that’s why the album it is from is titled Before Today.) It’s no time machine, but it will do.

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Drake “Karaoke”

Hip hop is a genre full of totally reprehensible people, but it usually doesn’t matter because the rappers are charming, funny and compelling. Drake is not any of those things. On the scale of things, he’s not a bad dude, but he may be the least likeable rapper I’ve ever encountered: Dull, uncool, excruciatingly whiney. If you listen to Thank Me Later from start to finish, it is obvious that hanging out with this guy would be kind of a nightmare. At his best, he comes off like a character in the sort of fiction where the point is that everyone is a horrible, narcissistic douchebag. At his worst, he just seems like he’s out of reality television.

Drake mainly writes about being uncomfortable with the fame and money he worked hard to attain and being heartbroken by women. Most of the songs on the record owe a huge stylistic and thematic debt to Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, though he doesn’t come close to that record’s mixture of vulnerability, humor, ambiance, and artistic risk-taking. Kanye is no less petulant, but he’s a character. He bitches and moans, but he can get you on his side. Listening to Drake drone on can be like getting cornered by a self-absorbed bore at a party. The mystifying thing is how in spite of his unpleasant persona, lack of charisma, and mediocre talent as a rapper and singer, I still basically like a lot of his music, and the album works as a whole. How does this make sense?

“Karaoke” makes sense because the tone of the piece is plaintive and shell-shocked enough to mitigate Drake’s icky sense of entitlement. It sounds cold, but very human. He’s trying to figure out what’s going on in his life, to suss out what is “real”. The basic emotion of the song and the record as a whole is always up front, even if Drake articulates himself in a way that makes him come across as an ass: He just wants to feel grounded. We all wanted to feel grounded, right? Sure, you might make this emotional connection in spite of Drake, but it’s still there in the music.

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Connie Converse “Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains)”

This song was recorded sometime in the mid-1950s, and was essentially lost to time until it was reissued last year by Lau derette Recordings. Connie Converse was a songwriter living in New York City, she was totally unknown in her time, and eventually disappeared without a trace. That’s a good story, but this is a great song, and easily one of the best I’ve ever heard about the virtues of living a lonely life. There’s no self-pity in this music. Her solitude is a choice, and she sings about not feeling alone, because she senses the presence of her former partner in everything around her. She is playful and witty, but doesn’t entirely downplay her feelings so much as remove the intensity. She sounds totally at peace with her life.

The melody of the song is lovely, the structure is slightly odd and rather poetic. She begins the song by singing “in between two tall mountains / there’s a place they call lonesome / don’t see why they call it lonesome / I’m never lonesome when I go there” and this refrain bookends the main body of the song, with its descending melody leading us down into the supposed valley of lonesomeness.

Can someone please pass this song along to Annie Clark of St. Vincent? She would sound amazing covering it, and ought to record it. Lyrically and musically, it’s really not too far off from a lot of music she’s written herself!

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