The Faint “Machine In The Ghost” – The Faint are at their best when they side-step rock music, and simply imply rock dynamics with their synthesizers and programming. “Machine In The Ghost” is bouncy and lithe, and the arrangement conveys a coy, non-committal tone that suits the lyrics rather well. If I’m understanding them in this song, I reckon that their stance on understanding the universe is similar to my own: We can’t understand the universe. We can pick it apart with science and glean some insight into how things work, and that will only get us one step closer to knowing the unknowable. The band’s insistence that we are not privy to the answers of the great cosmic mysteries is open-minded and humble, but they can’t help but seem a bit smug when they run down a list of people who devote their lives to explaining the world and what may lie beyond it, all with the implication that their efforts are largely futile. They don’t outright dismiss all of these people, but even in a sideways, passive-aggressive sort of way, they are expressing some contempt for their hubris. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

White Pony featuring Josephine Philip “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” – I wish that I were not posting this so soon after the indie folk version of “Ass N Titties,” but so be it. White Pony’s take on the Ol’ Dirty Bastard classic steps beyond parody and sprints full-speed toward inspired madness. Whereas the original by ODB contrasted its nursery rhyme style with its filthy lyrics and grimy production, White Pony take the song’s inherently child-like quality to an absurd extreme, and the result is an extremely silly day-glo Europop tune that comes across like the soundtrack to a demented kid’s show. Though the knowledge that these people are perverting an already perverse song adds to the pleasure, it holds up rather well as a composition in its own right, particularly if you have a taste for manic, super-charged pop cheese. (Click here for the White Pony MySpace page.)

The BPA featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal “Toe Jam” – Norman Cook writes music like an advertising genius. His best songs hit the listener’s pleasure centers with a sort of blunt precision — the sound is huge and obvious, but it is nevertheless carefully calibrated and skillful in its manipulation of your thoughts and emotions. He’s very good at loading his tracks with somewhat vague musical signifiers that mean very little in abstract, but nudge the audience toward making positive unconscious associations. Specifically, Cook wants to make you feel like you’re a star when you’re listening to his songs — a swaggering, omnipotent celebrity action hero who lives in a perfect, glamorous world. In this track, David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal show up to play that role, and live it up in Cook’s fantasy land. Byrne is goofy and cheerful, and mostly sings about dancing around in Cook’s version of New York City. Dizzee drops in for a quick verse about flirting with girls at a club, and though it’s maybe one of his more prosaic rhymes, his speedy, exuberant delivery taps directly into Cook’s brand of wish-fulfillment pop, and kicks the song up to an even higher level of giddiness. (Click here for the BPA MySpace page.)

The Matt Smith “Ass N Titties” – A little over a week ago, Vicky had a status message on her IM that read “I have the dulcet tones of “Ass N Titties” stuck in my head.” We ended up chatting about that, and I started thinking about how amusing it would’ve been if Elliott Smith had recorded a cover of the song, a version that sounded as haunted, fragile and angst-ridden as his original material. I posted a snippet of our conversation to the tumblr, and within an hour of the conversation, The Matt Smith had recorded and uploaded this version of the song, which is about as close to the ideal of a dour indie folk take on DJ Assault’s ghettotech classic as one could hope for shy of resurrecting Elliott, or drafting that guy from Iron & Wine. This is the beauty of the internet: From New Zealand to New York to Milwaukee to the internet in about an hour, and a simple joke that holds up surprisingly well to repeat listening. Enjoy.

Fluxcast #5 – I’m rather pleased with how this episode turned out, though, uh, I’m sure you’ll pick up on some verbal tics that plague my back-announcing, especially as it moves along. This one includes music from The Make Up, Cornershop, Dead Prez, Deerhunter, and Ce’cile, among others. The full tracklist with links will be available on the Fluxcast site in a few days, though if you are feeling impatient, you can find the playlist in the mp3’s metadata. (In iTunes, you can check under ‘lyrics.’)

Deerhunter @ McCarren Pool 8/3/2008
Calvary Scars / Never Stops / Spring Hall Convert / Hazel Street / Nothing Ever Happened / Fluorescent Grey / Operation / Saved By Old Times / Strange Lights

When I saw Deerhunter play an early afternoon set at the Pitchfork festival last year, the music didn’t feel quite right, and the band seemed awkward and exposed in the sunlight, in front so many people. That was the old Deerhunter. The new Deerhunter is polished and experienced, and surprisingly outgoing for a band that draws on shoegazer and art-drone influences. Bradford Cox has abandoned his provocative tactics of the Cryptograms period, and has become comfortable being exactly who he is: A sweet, funny, earnest young guy who wants to rock out and sing songs about passivity. 

Women “Black Rice” – In 2008, any semi-competent person can make a recording that sounds pretty good for a relatively small sum of money. No one needs to be “lo-fi” anymore, but it’s still an aesthetic choice available to artists. Some bands, such as Times New Viking, are intentionally abrasive, and coat all of their songs in a tinny, in-the-red din. They go for novelty, and the quality of their music is rather hit or miss. Women, a band from Calgary, use the lo-fi sound to a different end. For them, it’s a distancing device. They aren’t trying to push away the audience, but rather to separate themselves from a wave of superficially similar artists, most of whom happen to be on Sub Pop’s current roster. Whereas acts such as the Shins and Fleet Foxes deliver their tunes with crisp precision and ruthlessly tasteful production values, Women opt for a sense of extreme immediacy and intimacy. Their songs are just as pretty, and their influences and arrangements are not dissimilar to many of their contemporaries, but their material has the benefit of feeling raw, alive, and fully present. “Black Rice” in particular is gorgeous, but it’s not especially graceful — there are moments when the lead guitar part feels somewhat hesitant, and the piece as a whole seems ambivalent about its own beauty. That subtextual tension feeds into the content of the song, adding to its potent yet murky mix of emotions. (Click here for the Women MySpace page.)

Golden Silvers “Arrows Of Eros” – Nobody writes them like they used to, so it may as well be the Golden Silvers. There are traces of August Darnell, Tom Tom Club, The Clash, Madness, and a number of bubbly early 80s pop hits in “Arrows Of Eros,” but it all blends together so gracefully that it doesn’t seem like yet another obnoxious throwback. The band are exceptionally gifted at tapping into one of the most crucial yet rarely remarked upon qualities of late 70s/early 80s pop music: A playful, silly tone balanced by a slick, elegant professionalism. “Arrows Of Eros,” right on down to its punny title, is equal measures classy and trashy, and truly, it sounds like a fine tailored suit made out of day-glo fabric. (Click here to buy it via the Golden Silvers’ MySpace page.)

Primal Scream “The Glory Of Love” (Single Version) – It’s not as if Primal Scream were ever a band to deny themselves or their listeners of pleasure, but “The Glory Of Love” still comes as something of a surprise. If they had recorded it when they started off in the ’80s, it could have been a huge hit, but so late in their career, it just seems like a gleeful surrender to boppy, carefree and uncomplicated pop. The song bears a passing resemblance to Bruce Springsteen’s perkiest chart hits, but Bobby Gillespie’s voice changes the mood and the tone. As with many of the best Primal Scream songs, he sounds like a wide-eyed enthusiastic kid gone to seed, and that mix of innocence and debauchery is very well suited to this simple, sincere song about true love balancing out our dysfunctional lives and self-destructive behavior. (Click here to buy it from Amazon UK.)

Menahan Street Band “Home Again!” – When I was young and growing up in the Hudson Valley, I listened to a lot of radio from New York City. In part, this was because I didn’t really have many other options — all of the local tv and radio stations were in fact the New York City stations. All of the media was focused on the city and so I became fascinated with this place that was so close, but so completely different from where I lived. I suppose I picked up on the notion that interesting and relevant things happened in this place, and I was stuck living in a town that was nice, but totally boring and unimportant. Listening to the radio became a way to travel to the city without leaving my house, and I slowly pieced together my own mental image of the place based on the news, television shows and movies, comics, and the radio.

In retrospect, out of those things, it’s amazing how much the radio shaped my understanding of New York City, whether it was listening to talk personalities such as Bob Grant, Howard Stern, and Lynn Samuels, or just taking in the names of places on traffic and news reports. I still can recall images and impressions from when I was a kid, and when I encounter things that remind me of them in real life — usually things that feel old and weathered and lost in time — it’s one of the most peaceful and satisfying feelings that I know.

Similarly, when I hear music that reminds of the sounds I associate with this imagery, I can’t help but fall in love. For one thing, whenever I hear the Empire Carpet jingle, I am overcome with a feeling of comfort and nostalgia. Also, any time I hear a version of “Am I The Same Girl,” a song commonly used as bed music at the time, my mind immediately shifts into this grimy, beautiful version of New York that is simultaneously abstract and filled with freakishly specific details, as if I’m remembering some place that’s around here somewhere, but I’ve never really been there. Or maybe it’s someplace where I have been and it’s not really the same anymore?

This song — or really, this entire album — by the Menahan Street Band evokes the same sort of mood. I can’t listen to it without having my mind’s eye flooded with images culled from memories of city over the past fifteen years, all scrambled up to the point that I don’t know what I’m remembering, but I recognize and love every unidentifiable bodega, random subway platform, and anonymous brownstone. It’s not any particular time or place, just an abstract impression based on loving the entire place, and what it represents to me, past, present, and future. It used to be some kind of escape, and now it’s just home. (Click here to buy Menahan Street Band music from Dunham Records.)

Fluxcast #4 – The fourth Fluxcast is ready to go, with music from The Kills, McLusky, Squeeze, Girls Aloud, Out Hud, of Montreal, and others. For some reason, I had a lot of trouble getting words out when I was recording this, so I stammer over easily pronounced words, and at one point, totally screw up the correction of someone else’s spelling. (It’s embarrassing, but I didn’t notice the mistake until well after everything was done, and I couldn’t be bothered to fix it.) The full tracklisting will be on the Fluxcast site within a few days, but for now, you just have to rely on back-announcing.

Nas “Queens Get The Money” – As an album opener, “Queens Get The Money” feels deliberately tentative and uncomfortably candid. The music has the sound of a modern documentary score — it’s all atmosphere, beeps, and ticks; the sort of music you might use in a scene showing your protagonist feeling thoughtful and conflicted late at night. As a result, it feels as if Nas is sneaking you into his record in the wee hours of the night, and telling you very important things that you’ll only half-remember at dawn. Though the majority of Nas’ new album — it is officially untitled, but you probably know its real name — confronts anxiety about race and the media head on, the intimate, elliptical “Queens Get The Money” is more effective, mainly because it hits its points with a stealthy precision whereas other cuts on the record opt for an overblown, melodramatic seriousness that suits the subject matter, but feels far too obvious. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Lackthereof “Doomed Elephants” – Given that Danny Seim’s drumming in Menomena tends to be rather busy, flashy, and foregrounded, one might reasonably expect that his one-man-band project Lackthereof would be more or the same, or even more drum-tastic. Well, not quite: His drumming style is still immediately recognizable, but the bombast has been dialed down significantly. He focuses on keeping the songs in a tight pocket, and leaving a great deal of negative space for fluid, rumbling bass lines that roll along with a mesmerizing grace. “Doomed Elephants” is especially gorgeous in the way its trebly elements just sort of hover loosely around the groove, implying an extreme depth of field that complements Seim’s lyrics about highways, oceans, and wide-open skies. As his words contemplate the enormity of those things, and confront the relative insignificance and fragility of his life, the music conveys equal measures of dread and awe. (Click here to buy it from Barsuk.)

Elsewhere: I made a tumblr for the Fluxcast, complete with playlists for each podcast. You’re probably better off not reading those before listening, though.

Oxford Collapse “Electric Air” – The dudes in the Oxford Collapse spend most of their time in “Electric Air” singing the words “I can’t remember things” again and again, and the funny thing is, even though the song gets more rocking and they sing other words, I somehow have a hard time remembering that when the song is through. The music just whips by you, like a car zooming down the road, heading off to some exciting thing that is almost immediately forgotten. It’s a song about road trips — and it seems specific to family vacations — but it’s refreshingly unsentimental, and just focused on this strange yet relatable mix of thrill, boredom, and confusion. (Click here to buy it from Sub Pop.)

Fluxcast #3 – As promised, here is the third episode of the Fluxcast. This is my favorite one so far,  and it includes music by artists such as Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, Scissor Sisters, Christina Aguilera, Guided By Voices, Lykke Li, Hans Appelqvist, and the Meters. This project is still a work in progress, so feedback is very helpful. Enjoy. I’m looking into having this set up so that you can subscribe to it via iTunes or whatever.

Inara George & Van Dyke Parks “Accidental” – Van Dyke Parks’ arrangement is in constant motion — swirling, twirling, dancing off in tangents. Nevertheless, the piece feels strangely static, as if Inara George’s whimsical reverie was confined to a very small space, like a large scale musical theater production in a studio apartment. George comes across like a neurotic young woman wishing herself into the role of the romantic ingenue, and largely succeeding despite an inability to shake off her anxiety, or totally dial down her bitterness. (Click here to pre-order it — and listen to the album in its entirety! — on the Everloving Records site.)

Passion Pit “Sleepy Head” – Even though it’s not doing anything particularly radical, this song feels very fresh to me. Basically, what we’ve got here is Kanye-style pitched-up samples melting into colorful, rocked-up synth riffs, and a lead vocal part that’s very excited-indie-dude-circa-the- late -00s. Everything in the song fits together so intuitively, and the song just effortlessly flows from this mildly anxious psychedelic sequence to this lovely electro riff that sounds tentatively heroic in context. As a whole, it feels like an intimate, almost painfully sincere moment on some sort of Ditko-esque astral plane. (Click here for the Passion Pit MySpace page.)

Ill Ease and the Racket “Here Comes Trouble (To The Tune Of Pretty Woman)” – The song just keeps moving forward, driving on in a straight line until it just stops cold at the end. It picks up a bit of speed, but it’s not in any particular hurry. It just moves ahead, with a head full of ambivalence and indecision, and no real sense of purpose. It’s right in the middle of pleasure and anxiety, and it’s never clear whether the singer feels like the driver, or the person going along for the ride. (Click here to pre-order it from Ionik Recordings.)

Starfucker “Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second” – I want to find these guys and shake them and make them give me a good answer as to why they call themselves Starfucker. I don’t want to like a band called Starfucker, and you probably don’t either. Maybe the joke is that they don’t really seem like the type of band to take the name Starfucker, or perhaps it’s that in this sort of counterintuitive way, they kinda sound like actual star fuckers. I’m not talking about people who pursue celebrities for their own gain, mind you. What I mean is, on their best songs, they get a bit cosmic but also very chill and smooth, like some sort of celestial being that seduces and then has something roughly analogous to sex with actual stars. (Click here to pre-order it from Badman Recording Co.)

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks @ Siren Music Festival, Coney Island 7/19/2008

The very fact that I went to this show is a testament to how much I love Stephen Malkmus and his Jicks. I really can’t emphasize enough how much I loathe the Siren Festival — it’s gross, overcrowded, always has terrible sound, and it’s totally out of the way. (It took me about 90 minutes to get there, which is about the same amount of time it would take for me to go visit my parents in the Hudson Valley.) I was there out of love, but I’ve got to say, I did feel a bit of resentment about having to go out to this thing.

CSS “Believe/Achieve” – In retrospect, I suppose a lot of people were justified in assuming the worst of CSS when they arrived in America a few years ago. There was already a glut of hedonistic hipster-centric dance-rock bands, and we hardly needed another one, much less a band with songs that name-checked the likes of Paris Hilton and Death From Above 1979. CSS were exactly what they appeared to be, but they happened to have two major advantages over their peers: Their songs were well-crafted and relatively diverse, and they had a frontwoman called Lovefoxxx (!!!) who was capable of investing lyrics about crushes and hipster culture with soul and humanity. 

Gospel Supremes “Do, Lord, Remember Me” – Art Rosenbaum recorded the music found on the Art of Field Recording box set over the course of five decades, and as a result, the quality of the audio varies from track to track. There are some unexpected, unintentional benefits to this approach. For example, some of the more recent digital recordings document singers such as Mary Lomax, who performs unaccompanied traditional ballads dating back hundreds of years. Those records are clear and pristine, and place the emphasis on her voice and the words rather than an aural patina of oldness. On the other hand, the relatively poor quality of this recording of the Gospel Supremes from 1977 serves to compensate for the fact that the song’s arrangement is one of the most modern sounds in the set — the band play electric instruments, and the gospel tune is clearly shaped by R&B influences. The fidelity may be shaky, but the recording gives us a strong sense of time and place, and that context adds quite a bit to the charm of this already brilliant performance. (Click here to buy it from Dust-To-Digital.) (Originally posted on 12/24/2007)

Elsewhere: I’m going to be idolatin’ on Idolator today. Come see.

Breakbot “Happy Rabbit” – Most of the time, a groove starts with the bass line, and builds up to a point where the bass is guiding the composition, but you’re probably thinking about something else in the arrangement. “Happy Rabbit” flips that dynamic. The grooves pile on from the start, but when the bass comes in, it’s so bold and prominent that it may as well be a lead vocal. The bass part is immediately ingratiating — it’s just tight enough to to snap into the beat, but loose enough to have a swagger that sets it apart from the other elements in the mix. It certainly sounds more tactile than the other sounds in the recording. Whereas the keyboard parts feel a bit airy and removed, you can almost feel the sensation of the bass strings vibrating beneath your fingers, or flopping casually above the fretboard. The rest of the song sounds like a fantasy, but that bass — it feels so real, like something actually happening to you. (Click here to buy it from Moshi Moshi.)

Elsewhere: One Person Trend Stories is one of the best usages of the internet that I’ve encountered all summer.

Simone White “I Didn’t Have A Summer Romance” – This song was originally written and performed by Carole King, who sang the song with the declarative melancholy of a person who very much wants you to notice that they are sad and is fishing for some consolation. Simone White’s version is a bit more straightforward. Her voice is soft and she lacks King’s assertive edge, making her come across more like a traditional wallflower. She plays the character as someone who is just painfully lonely, and is heartbroken by her lack of heartbreak, and exhausted by living vicariously through friends and fiction. She doesn’t seem bitter or overly depressed — if anything, she just seems like this easygoing person who truly appreciates romance and intimacy, but rarely gets her shot at it. You hear the song, and you imagine this girl, and I think you’re supposed to feel something like “wait, why didn’t anyone tell me about her?” Whether or not you actually had a summer romance, you start to wish just a bit that it had been with her. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Fluxcast #1 (NEW LINK, NEW FILE) – Over the weekend, I made this demo podcast. It’s basically an hour-long show in the college/freeform radio format. I’m not going to tell you what songs are in it because that sorta defeats the purpose, but it’s a mix of new material (much of which will be familiar to regular readers) and some wild card oldies. Let me know what you think — if enough people enjoy/find a use for this, I’d be happy to continue making these things on some kind of regular basis. You just have to tell me that you liked it, or I’ll assume that you didn’t.

Regular posting resumes tomorrow.