Hinds “Chili Town”

Hinds is a band of charming, effortlessly cool Spanish girls, and “Chili Town” is their most charming and effortlessly cool song. I’m sure there are people who would hear this and actually wish they’d put a bit more effort into it – it always sounds like one thing could go wrong and collapse at any moment, and their voices have a…sorta casual relationship with the notion of singing in tune. But that lead guitar part really nails a relaxed yet vaguely nervous feeling, and I don’t know if these lyrics about being so flirty and bratty to mask underlying feelings of uncertainty and impatience would come off as perfectly if they didn’t sound so very cool. The lyrics are fantastic too, full of vivid language like “amazing feelings juice,” “my laugh is oversized,” “saliva mixed with lies,” and “I am swimming in the dark because all your friends are sharks.” I like that they just state the subtext of their actions in the song, because in the actual moment, they’re just doing everything they can to keep it buried because they want some dude to catch a hint.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Car Seat Headrest “Times to Die”

A thing I really love about Will Toledo’s music is how often the songs sound like they’re being made up on the spot. This is a major feature of Car Seat Headrest’s live show, where I’m pretty certain I have literally seen them improvise new material on stage, but it’s apparent in a song like “Times to Die,” which has a very eccentric, nonlinear structure. It is in fact a highly structured song with very deliberate lyrics, but the feeling in the recording is that Toledo keeps remembering that he has more things to talk to you about, and so he keeps adding a bit more time to your trip, like “Fuck it, let’s drive another few blocks.” He’s got a lot on his mind, though! “Times to Die” is about him getting signed to Matador, and the Book of Job, and feeling like your friends have more adult lives than you, and grand ambitions, and the peculiarities of organized religion and sacraments, feeling on the outside of things, literally dying, metaphorically dying, and probably seven or eight other things. He piles on the hooks and bridges and asides and ideas as though this is the only song he’ll ever write, but the beautiful thing is that this is all coming from a hugely prolific songwriter who’s got an entire other record in the can as his Matador debut comes out this week. He’s very interesting, to say the least.

Buy it from Amazon.

Peaches “Dumb Fuck”

Peaches sings this song from the perspective, more or less, of the sort of person Heather Havrilesky has been telling people to be over the past few years of her Dear Polly column. Which is to say, she’s being direct and honest and not buying into the insecurity-masquerading-as-politeness that allows tepid dudes to keep on being flakey and indecisive with impunity. Peaches isn’t fucking around here – she wants to define the relationship, or move on. She doesn’t really want to dump the guy, but she’s flustered by how dense he’s being. So what do you do if he doesn’t have a clue? You just call him a dumb fuck over and over until the exasperation turns into catharsis. Yet another great lesson from the teaches of Peaches.

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Eleanor Friedberger “False Alphabet City”

“False Alphabet City” is basically a song in which Eleanor Friedberger deals with the frustration of having nostalgia for a version of a neighborhood that doesn’t really exist anymore, and feeling like maybe you don’t really belong in that space anymore. This could easily be a more maudlin or angry song, but the feeling of the music is very relaxed, and at least to me feels like going home. Everything sounds familiar – the shape of things, the sense of space, even if the details are off. It sounds like a much looser version of the aesthetic The Fiery Furnaces had on Widow City and I’m Going Away, with the more rigid rhythmic structures swapped out for groovier bass parts and a lot more hi-hat. You can’t really go back but you can get close enough sometimes.

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Beach House “One Thing”

It’s easy to write Beach House off as a one trick pony; they have a very narrow aesthetic and never stray from it. Releasing two albums in the span of a couple months might seem like overkill, and maybe it kinda is, but it’s a clever move in that it highlights just how different their records can be while essentially being iterations of the same thing. Thank Your Lucky Stars sounds more open and airy than the highly claustrophobic Depression Cherry, and it feels more dirty, worn, and scuffed-up in comparison. The previous record sounded like hiding from the world; this one is more about being weathered by it. Also, unlike the three Beach House records before it, Thank Your Lucky Stars sounds like it’s made by people willing to make eye contact with you.

“One Thing” is the most abrasive and beautiful thing on the record, and maybe their entire catalog. It’s built on a chugging chord pattern, and centers on guitar rather than keyboards. There’s a wonderful ambiguity to the mounting tension – is it fear, is it anticipation, is it lust, is it violence? Is it all of it at once? It’s a very sexy and romantic song without being obvious about anything, or even slightly sentimental. Victoria Legrand’s lyrics hint at a tension and some kind of sexual and emotional entanglement, but the lack of clarity seems to be the point. It’s never clear exactly what’s happening, and that’s why it’s such a powerful experience, or strong feeling.

Buy it from Amazon.

This is the second in my series of 1980s survey mixes, which are designed to give more context to the music of that decade. Most versions of ‘80s history focus on specific niches and canons, but mostly ignore or write off parallel and overlapping cultural trends. My goal in doing this project is to highlight all the different things going on from year to year, to better understand the original context of familiar songs and to highlight a lot of the music that has faded from cultural memory.

There’s a lot going on in 1988, but the thing that really hit me was how much of what was going on at that moment was in some way transgressive or deliberately abrasive. I think that’s all a very obvious reaction against the ultra-glossy music of the mid-‘80s and the hyper-conservative politics of the Reagan era. A lot of that vibe is still going strong in ’88, but if you listen to this set, you can feel the overall mood shifting towards the aesthetics of the early ‘90s, particularly in terms of alt-rock and hip-hop.

A word about chronology: I am trying to stick to the things that were actually released for the first time in each year, but am allowing some major records that were promoted over a few years to be represented in both. That’s why George Michael, INXS, Guns N’ Roses, Belinda Carlisle, and Michael Jackson are featured in this set. UB40’s “Red Red Wine” was originally released in 1983, but the mix included here was issued in 1988 and became a #1 hit in the United States.

Thanks to Sean T. Collins, Chris Conroy, Chris Ott, and especially Paul Cox for their assistance in putting this set together. The 1987 set should be ready to go sometime in November before Thanksgiving. You can find the 1989 survey mix here.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Sonic Youth “Teen Age Riot” / Public Enemy “Bring the Noise” / Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock “It Takes Two” / Salt-n-Pepa “Push It” / L’Trimm “Cars with the Boom” / Lita Ford “Kiss Me Deadly” / R.E.M. “Orange Crush” / Guns N’ Roses “Paradise City” / Erasure “A Little Respect” / Wire “Kidney Bingos” / Sugarcubes “Birthday” / Bobby Brown “Every Little Step” / Marley Marl featuring Masta Ace, Craig G, Kool G Rap, and Big Daddy Kane “The Symphony” / Tracy Chapman “Fast Car” / Lucinda Williams “I Just Wanted To See You So Bad” / Dwight Yoakam “I Sang Dixie” / Metallica “One”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

N.W.A. “Straight Outta Compton” / Eric B and Rakim “Lyrics of Fury” / Jane’s Addiction “Mountain Song” / Slayer “South of Heaven” / EPMD “You Gots to Chill” / Ultramagnetic MCs “Ease Back” / Front 242 “Welcome to Paradise” / The Fall “Big New Prinz” / Morrissey “Every Day Is Like Sunday” / Anthrax “Antisocial” / Samantha Fox “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)” / Paula Abdul “Straight Up” / Red Dragon “Duck Dance” / Slick Rick “Children’s Story” / The Dead Milkmen “Punk Rock Girl” / Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Deanna” / The Bangles “In Your Room” / Belinda Carlisle “I Get Weak” / Brenda Russell “Piano in the Dark” / U2 “All I Want Is You”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Enya “Orinoco Flow” / Cocteau Twins “Carolyn’s Fingers” / When In Rome “The Promise” / George Michael “Father Figure” / Boogie Down Productions “My Philosophy” / D.J. Magic Mike and The Royal Posse “Magic Mike Cuts the Record” / Talking Heads “(Nothing But) Flowers” / KMFDM “Don’t Blow Your Top” / Teddy Pendergass “Joy” / MC Lyte “Paper Thin” / Matthew Shipp & Rob Brown “Sonic Explorations (Section 4)” / Glenn Branca “Symphony No. 5 – Second Movement” / My Bloody Valentine “Lose My Breath” / Pixies “Where Is My Mind?” / Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians “What I Am” / Michelle Shocked “Anchorage” / Kip Hanrahan “Gender” / Kronos Quartet “Four, for Tango”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

Information Society “What’s On Your Mind (Pure Energy)” / Johnny Kemp “Just Got Paid” / Pet Shop Boys “Always On My Mind” / Prince “Alphabet Street” / Natalie Cole “Pink Cadillac” / Ornette Coleman “Bourgeois Boogie” / Prefab Sprout “The King of Rock and Roll” / Highway 101 “(Do You Love Me) Just Say Yes” / Throwing Muses “Mexican Women” / Pere Ubu “George Had A Hat” / Butthole Surfers “Ricky” / Bongwater “David Bowie Wants Ideas” / Jungle Brothers “Straight Out the Jungle” / Billy Ocean “Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car” / George Harrison “Got My Mind Set On You” / Patti Smith “People Have the Power” / Unrest “Christina” / The Church “Under the Milky Way” / Cowboy Junkies “Sweet Jane”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Fugazi “Waiting Room” / Dinosaur Jr “Freak Scene” / Big Daddy Kane “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’” / S’Express “Theme from S’Express” / 2 Men A Drum Machine and a Trumpet “Tired of Getting Pushed Around” / Ministry “Stigmata” / Inner City “Good Life” / Duran Duran “Good Life” / Robert Palmer “Simply Irresistible” / They Might Be Giants “Ana Ng” / 2 Live Crew “Move Somethin’” / Kid N Play “Gittin’ Funky” / Siouxsie and the Banshees “Peek A Boo” / Sly & Robbie “All Aboard” / Scritti Politti “Boom! There She Was” / Michael Jackson “Man in the Mirror” / George Strait “Baby Blue” / Poison “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” / Neil Young and The Bluenotes “This Note’s For You”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Living Colour “Cult of Personality” / New Kids on the Block “Hangin’ Tough” / Eazy-E “Boyz N The Hood (Remix)” / Bomb the Bass “Beat Dis” / My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult “…And This is What The Devil Does!” / Run-D.M.C. “Run’s House” / UB40 “Red Red Wine” / Admiral Bailey “Jump Up” / Kylie Minogue “The Loco-Motion” / Leonard Cohen “First We Take Manhattan” / Elton John “I Don’t Wanna Go On with You Like That” / A.R. Kane “Crazy Blue” / James “What For” / The Travelling Wilburys “Handle with Care” / The Go-Betweens “Streets Of Your Town” / The Mighty Lemon Drops “Inside Out” / A Guy Called Gerald “Voodoo Ray” / Womack & Womack “Teardrops” / INXS “Never Tear Us Apart”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

Mudhoney “Touch Me I’m Sick” / Danzig “Mother” / Ciccone Youth “Into the Groove(y)” / Joan Jett and the Blackhearts “I Hate Myself for Loving You” / Game Theory “Room For One More, Honey” / Let’s Active “Bad Machinery” / Julian Cope “Charlotte Anne” / Sam Phillips “I Don’t Want To Fall In Love” / Kathy Mattea “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” / Megadeth “Liar” / Napalm Death “From Enslavement to Obliteration” / Halo of Flies “Drunk (In Detroit)” / Royal Trux “Zero Dok” / Pussy Galore “Adolescent Wet Dream” / Soul Asylum “Down On Up To Me” / The Timelords “Doctorin’ the Tardis” / Ice-T “High Rollers” / King Tee “Act A Fool” / Sir Mix-A-Lot “Posse On Broadway” / Sade “Paradise” / The Beach Boys “Kokomo” / Y Kant Tori Read “Cool On Your Island” / k.d. lang “Sugar Moon”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Daniel Johnston “Walking the Cow” / Beat Happening “Indian Summer” / Galaxie 500 “Tugboat” / Doug E Fresh “Keep Risin’ to the Top” / Stetsasonic “Talkin’ All That Jazz” / DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince “Parents Just Don’t Understand” / Pretty Poison “Catch Me (I’m Falling)” / Trevor Sparks “Bye Bye Love” / Fishbone “Ma and Pa” / Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 “Mr. Tuna’s Big Old Place” / The Primitives “Crash” / Caifanes “Te Estoy Mirando” / Camper Van Beethoven “Eye of Fatima (Pt. 1)” / Felt “Apple Boutique” / Pantera “Down Below” / Ultra Vivid Scene “Mercy Seat” / Spacemen 3 “Walking with Jesus” / The Smithereens “Only A Memory” / MC Hammer “Turn This Mutha Out” / Diamanda Galas “Double-Barrel Prayer” / GG Allin “Anti Social Masterbator” / Bobby McFerrin “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”

Deerhunter “All the Same”

Deerhunter’s Fading Frontier feels like coming out of a very dark part of your life and appreciating that the worst is over, but not quite knowing where that leaves you in the moment. You’re not all better, you’re still working on taking care of yourself, and peace isn’t the same as happiness. “All the Same” opens the record and sounds like the winter gradually shifting into spring; there’s something in the chords that implies brightness with a slight chill, and something in the rhythm that feels tentative and cautious. The lyrics are all about a shift in perspective, or a shift in expectations – realizing some things don’t matter to you anymore, observing change in other people, figuring out that your weaknesses can become strengths. The song is all liminal space, and it hinges on knowing that things are changing but having no idea where it’s all headed. A lot of Deerhunter’s music in the past has been about similarly passive states, but I think this time around, it’s a little more optimistic. Just not a lot more.

Buy it from Amazon.

Yacht “I Wanna Fuck You Til I’m Dead”

The style of this song reminds me a lot of pop music from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s; it has a very particular type of gloss and punchiness to it that comes off as oddly aggressive. Back then, I think there was this general vibe in pop that the stakes were too high, and you had to beat people down with your hooks and the crispness of your beats. It was sink or swim. This Yacht song doesn’t have that subtext, but I think on some level it mines that perky intensity to really hammer home the deeply unsubtle message of this song, which is clear from the title. There’s a poetic quality to the words in the verses, but it’s all euphemisms and flirtation – this is just a proud expression of lust, and while it can be a little harsh on the ears, I really appreciate the boldness of this on every level.

Buy it from Amazon.

Neon Indian “Dear Skorpio Magazine”

“Dear Skorpio Magazine” is a crush song, and even if you couldn’t understand the lyrics you’d still probably pick up on that in the way the tempo goes staccato in the verses, like a heartbeat spiking with rising nerves. Alan Palomo’s arrangement and production style makes the song sound like it comes from an ‘80s in the future, which as it turns out is a pretty romantic vibe. The quality is mostly in the writing, though, and the way it moves you through these melodic moments like they’re a physical space, and you’re just some silly teenager wandering in a loop around a mall, just hoping to get another glimpse of the one you fancy so you can excitedly report to whoever will listen that you “made eyes!”

Buy it from Amazon.

Electric Six “Two Dollar Two”

One of the best things about Dick Valentine is the obvious delight he gets from sicking like a fucking badass. There’s always several layers of irony in what Electric Six does, but as much as he’s mocking the fragile artifice of American masculinity, that hamminess is 100% real. I think that’s a lot of why I find this band so compelling – they really love what they do and embrace the inherent ridiculousness of ego and bluster. Even if it’s based in stupidity, there’s something admirable about creating an identity for yourself that’s based in swagger and pride. “Two Dollar Two” is a great showcase for the power of Valentine’s voice and his incredible commitment to the bit. Remember when Courtney Love sang “I fake it so real I am beyond fake?” That’s him now, though given his obsession with poking holes in a macho front, maybe he’s actually faking it to un-make it.

Buy it from Amazon.

Janet Jackson “Gon’ B Alright”

Janet Jackson works through a lot of grieving and uncertainty over the course of Unbreakable, but she wraps up the album with this celebration of love and joy in the style of Sly and the Family Stone and The Jackson 5. Janet’s only touched on ‘60s and ‘70s R&B styles a couple times before in her career, and in the case of a song like “Whoops Now,” she was going for a more light and feminine sort of song. This pushes her in a very different direction, with several multi-tracked versions of herself covering a variety of timbres ranging from androgynous to overtly masculine. She does a lot of this pitch-shifting on the record, in part because it’s just so uncanny how much she sounds like her brother Michael when pitched down just a bit. It’s her way of channeling him, and bringing him back to us. I think if anyone else could do that, it’d just feel creepy and wrong, but with her, it’s genuinely poignant. I love the way “Gon’ B Alright” feels like Janet paying tribute to her brothers, and after all this time getting her turn to be a member of the band rather than just a baby sister.

Buy it from Amazon.

Born Ruffians “Stupid Dream”

If you squint a bit, you can pretend this is a brand new Vampire Weekend song. I know that’s unfair to Born Ruffians, but at the same time that is VERY HIGH PRAISE coming from me. And a big step up for them – their songwriting has really leaped forward since the last time they came around, and while you can hear a lot of VW in “Stupid Dream,” there’s a lot of interesting borderline abrasive textures that you might not find in one of their tracks. I love the way the main guitar riff comes in so hot but still has a crisp, clean tone, and the way the bass groove seems to elbow its way to the front of the arrangement for the verses. Luke Lalonde’s vocals are a revelation here, his performance is so vibrant and extroverted, and his frustration in singing “I am not the cream of the crop, and I am never rising up” is so present and real even if he maybe shouldn’t feel that way.

Buy it from Amazon.

Arcade Fire “Soft Power”

A couple weeks ago, Arcade Fire quietly released one of the best songs of their career as a bonus track on the deluxe edition of their album from two years ago. So much time has passed since Reflektor that I wonder why they didn’t just bank this material for another record – maybe they just want a clean break, maybe they don’t think it’s good enough. But “Soft Power” is excellent, and its ragged but graceful sound nods in a direction that honors the anthemic past of the band while giving Win Butler a lot of room to grow old and wearier. It’s a very solo John Lennon sort of song, and though there’s a trace of “Imagine” in it, it’s mostly Butler’s version of “Isolation.” But you never get the wild catharsis of that track – this is a more relaxed piece of music, and the melody just sorta loosely winds around, implying less conviction as it goes along. The most famous Arcade Fire songs are empowering, but this one is about passivity, and getting a feel for how the world really works and knowing there’s not much you can do about it. He doesn’t sound defeated, but he certainly seems deflated.

Buy it from Amazon.

Bad Bad Hats “Say Nothing”

“Say Nothing” is one of those songs that come along and you just wish the band could somehow take it back in time to the point where it could’ve been a huge hit. And while I do think “Say Nothing” could – and should – take off today, it’s pretty clear that the point in time where it would’ve made Bad Bad Hats very rich is somewhere in the mid to late ‘90s. This is a flawlessly constructed alt-rock song, and the kind that hangs together so well that it feels ragged and off-the-cuff even though it’s rather polished. Kerry Alexander’s lyrics are also precise yet casual, and in this song she’s basically talking her way out of a relationship with someone who becomes silent and emotionally withholding in a clear attempt to force her hand to break up. The tension in the song is in her stubbornly refusing to do what they want, even if she knows it’s the only way out of it. So she at least tries to get a moment where she’s the silent, withholding one: “stop, let me be the one to say nothing!”

Buy it – or download the album for free – from Afternoon Records.

White Hinterland “Chill and Natural”

Casey Dienel’s music has changed dramatically over the course of her career, and though her new single “Chill and Natural” isn’t a drastic departure from the elliptical, atmospheric electronic music of her last album, Baby, its industrial pop sound and overtly feminist lyrics are a world away from the twee, introverted piano tunes of her debut from a decade ago. I first heard this song while working on the 1989 survey and was listening to Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like A Hole” all the time, and I immediately recognized it as a cousin to those songs. A lot of that resemblance is in the aggressive, confident tone of the music, and the way the intensity of the sound seems to escalate on a constant 60 degree angle. But where those songs come from a place of incredibly certainty, Dienel’s singing about being driven crazy by straight men’s inconsistent yet inflexible expectations for women and their bodies. Her tone switches between droll sarcasm – “Tom says he likes girls who are down for whatever / down for whatever, yeah, that’s me” – and total exasperation at both the women who play along with these arbitrary rules and the men who can’t grasp that their preferences are tied up in contradictions and come off more like demands. The humor and anger in this song is balanced just right, and it perfectly captures that feeling when you’re so impatient and confused that you think you’re losing your mind, but you know it’s not your fault.

Buy it from iTunes.

This is the first in a series of survey mixes designed to give more context to the music of the 1980s. The frustrating thing about we typically deal with cultural history is to focus on specific niches and canons, but in doing that, we lose track of parallel and overlapping cultural trends. I hope to create a set of collections that will give you – and me! – a better understanding of chronology for the music of this era, and to highlight a lot of music that for whatever reason usually gets cut out of retrospectives today.

I’ve decided to start with 1989 and move backwards towards 1980 because it feels a lot more interesting to me that way – the end of the ’80s isn’t nearly as canonized as the start, and before making this, I felt like I had a more vague grasp on what came out in 1989 despite that being a pretty crucial year for me in terms of becoming a young music obsessive. (I was the sort of kid who would make a point of listening to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem every Sunday morning.)

Also, you know, there’s the Taylor Swift factor. There’s been a lot of half-baked writing about how much today’s biggest pop stars are drawing on the ’80s, but I think if you really go through this survey you will find that those artists may be inspired by the blockbuster aesthetics of the ’80s but sound very much like right now, and the artists who really sound like 1989 tend to be the more indie/alt/undergournd artists.

Thanks to Rob Sheffield, Sean T. Collins, Paul Cox, Chris Conroy, Tom Ewing, Douglas Wolk, and Ivan Onosov for their assistance in curating this mix. If you have ideas about what absolutely needs to be included in future ’80s surveys, please let me know. The 1988 survey should be out sometime in October.

NOTE: EVERYTHING HAS BEEN RE-UPPED SINCE THE FIRST UPLOADS MAXED OUT.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Madonna “Express Yourself” / Nine Inch Nails “Head Like A Hole” / Prince “Electric Chair” / Digital Underground “The Humpty Dance” / Roxanne Shanté “Feelin’ Kinda Horny” / Janet Jackson “Miss You Much” / Al B Sure “Nite and Day” / Aerosmith “What It Takes” / The Cure “Lovesong” / Liza Minnelli “Losing My Mind” / E-Zee Possee “Everything Starts With An E” / Ministry “Burning Inside” / Red Hot Chili Peppers “Higher Ground” / Big Daddy Kane “Warm It Up, Kane” / Special Ed “I Got It Made” / YZ “Thinking Of A Master Plan” / A Tribe Called Quest “Description Of A Fool” / Soul II Soul “Back to Life”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

Neneh Cherry “Buffalo Stance” / Beastie Boys “Shadrach” / Biz Markie “Just A Friend” / De La Soul “Eye Know” / Fine Young Cannibals “She Drives Me Crazy” / Michael Penn “No Myth” / Roy Orbison “You Got It” / The B-52’s “Love Shack” / Pixies “Here Comes Your Man” / Love & Rockets “So Alive” / 3rd Base “The Gas Face” / Public Enemy “Fight the Power” / 2 Live Crew “Me So Horny” / Superchunk “Slack Motherfucker” / Tom Petty “I Won’t Back Down” / Lyle Lovett “Cryin’ Shame” / Lenny Kravitz “Let Love Rule” / Babyface “Whip Appeal” / The Bangles “Eternal Flame”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Depeche Mode “Personal Jesus” / Technotronic “Pump Up the Jam” / Young MC “Bust A Move” / Native Tongues posse “Buddy” / Ten City “That’s the Way Love Is” / Chris Isaak “Wicked Game” / Syd Straw “Future 40’s (String of Pearls)” / Indigo Girls “Closer to Fine” / Beat Happening “Cast A Shadow” / Debbie Gibson “Electric Youth” / Adamski “N-R-G” / Meat Beat Manifesto “God O.D.” / EPMD “So Wat Cha Sayin’” / Emmylou Harris “Heaven Only Knows” / Pere Ubu “Waiting for Mary” / Morrissey “The Last of the Famous International Playboys” / The Verlaines “Whatever You Run Into” / Blake Babies “From Here to Burma” / Kate Bush “This Woman’s Work”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

The Stop the Violence Movement “Self-Destruction” / Consolidated “Consolidated” / Nitzer Ebb “Hearts and Minds” / Public Image Ltd “Disappointed” / The Stone Roses “I Wanna Be Adored” / The KLF “Kylie Said to Jason” / Billy Joel “We Didn’t Start the Fire” / 10,000 Maniacs “Trouble Me” / The Replacements “Achin’ to Be” / George Strait “Ace in the Hole” / k.d. lang “Full Moon Full of Love” / Guns N’ Roses “Patience” / Neil Young “Rockin’ in the Free World” / Lou Reed “Busload of Faith” / Def Jef “Poet with Soul” / Chubb Rock “Ya Bad Chubbs” / Black Box “Ride On Time” / Kylie Minogue “Hand On Your Heart” / Orbital “Chime”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Spacemen 3 “Revolution” / Mudhoney “Here Comes Sickness” / Mötley Crüe “Same Ol’ Situation (S.O.S.)” / Bailter Space “Grader Spader” / Fugazi “Margin Walker” / New Order “Round and Round” / Jody Watley “Real Love” / Nice & Smooth “Early to Rise” / Jungle Brothers “Doin’ Our Own Dang” / Malcolm McLaren “Deep in Vogue” / Lil Louis & The World “French Kiss” / Frazier Chorus “Dream Kitchen” / Milli Vanilli “Girl You Know It’s True” / Cyndi Lauper “I Drove All Night” / Sugarcubes “Regina” / Snapper “Death and Weirdness in the Surfing Zone” / XTC “The Mayor of Simpleton” / The Cult “Fire Woman” / Warrant “Heaven”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Roxette “The Look” / Phil Collins “Two Hearts” / David Byrne “Marching Through the Wilderness” / Elvis Costello “Veronica” / Wire “Eardrum Buzz” / Lush “Thoughtforms” / Natalie Cole “Miss You Like Crazy” / Mary Chapin Carpenter “Never Had It So Good” / Don Henley “The End of Innonence” / Divine Styler “Ain’t Sayin’ Nothin’” / Queen Latifah “Wrath of My Madness” / Erasure “Stop!” / Crucial Robbie “Proud to be Black” / Phish “You Enjoy Myself” / The Sundays “Here’s Where the Story Ends” / Throwing Muses “Dizzy” / Straitjacket Fits “She Speeds” / Cannanes “Vivienne” / Richard Marx “Right Here Waiting”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

Soundgarden “Big Dumb Sex” / Jesus and Mary Chain “Head On” / Dolly Parton “Why’d You Come In Here Lookin’ Like That?” / Clint Black “Killin’ Time” / The The “The Beat(en) Generation” / Hugo Largo “Hot Day” / Galaxie 500 “Strange” / Tears for Fears “Sowing the Seeds of Love” / LNR “Work It to the Bone” / Rhythm Device “Acid Rock” / Low Profile “Pay Ya Dues” / Gang Starr “Words I Manifest (Remix)” / Ice-T “You Played Yourself” / MC Lyte “Cha Cha Cha” / Clement Irie “DJ in My Country!” / Pet Shop Boys “It’s Alright” / Slint “Darlene” / Faith No More “Epic” / Operation Ivy “Knowledge” / Nirvana “About A Girl” / Sebadoh “True Hardcore”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Queen “I Want It All” / Cher “If I Could Turn Back Time” / Tone Loc “Wild Thing” / LL Cool J “Big Ole Butt” / Schooly D “Gangster Boogie” / Frankie Knuckles “Tears” / Maurice “This Is Acid” / Starlight “Numero Uno” / Bonnie Raitt “Nick of Time” / Daniel Lanois “The Maker” / The Neville Brothers “Yellow Moon” / Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ “Honeysuckle Blue” / Half Japanese “Daytona Beach” / Yo La Tengo “Barnaby, Hardly Working” / Mekons “Memphis, Egypt” / Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians “Flesh Number One” / Pavement “Box Elder” / Guided by Voices “Liar’s Tale” / The Vaselines “Sex Sux (Amen)” / Skid Row “I Remember You”

Disclosure featuring Lorde “Magnets”

There’s a lot of songs about cheating, or being the other man/woman, but I like the particular tension in this one. Lorde is basically singing about going after a coupled person and knowing it’s the ~wrong~ thing to do, but enjoys feeling like she has some sexual power, and can’t help but get excited about it. The really potent line in this song is “pretty girls don’t know the things that I know,” which you can unpack in many ways but every time, it’s from the point of view of someone who’s internalized the idea that they aren’t sexually attractive. Disclosure’s track keeps the mood sexy, but subtly tense and unstable – you get the feeling of excitement, but also the nerves and nagging conscience. When she sings a line like “let’s embrace the point of no return,” it’s like someone playing a role, and trying out an identity to see if it fits. If you change the tone a bit, this scene can easily be played as a comedy.

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Julia Holter “Sea Calls Me Home”

“Sea Calls Me Home” is a song about “getting away from it all” and finding some peace and clarity on the water, but it’s also not quite as simple as that. There’s a strange, ambiguous feeling to the music – pleasant, but still uncertain. For one thing, the character says she can’t swim. That’s an issue, maybe. But the real emotional punch of the song is when she sings “it’s lucidity, so clear!,” and then there’s just this feeling of “OK, and then what?” It can be so hard to know what to do with a nice feeling. The second verse has her pledging to “forget all the rules I’ve known,” but she’s still grounding that in some practical details. You can escape places, but maybe not the mundane trappings of life.

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Kurt Vile “Lost My Head There”

“Lost My Head There” is a song about dealing with “bugging’ out” and “funky psychosis,” but you just don’t feel those vibes at all in the music. This is about as laid-back and easy-going as it gets, with Kurt Vile singing his lines with a smirky stoner drawl over a crisp beat and a loose piano groove. But this isn’t really a song about an existing mental state so much as the one you aspire to when you’re freaking out. Vile sings about the creative process in self-deprecating terms – “I was feeling worse than the words came out / fell on some keys, and this song walked out of me” – but he’s acknowledging how making art can be something that can take you away from yourself rather than just display your worst feelings. He’s tired and feeling down, and he’d “much rather levitate.” I think he gets reasonably close to levitating in this song.

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Chvrches “Clearest Blue”

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about Lauren Mayberry’s voice that is so compelling for a while now, and I think I’ve got it: It’s all in the way she projects this assertive confidence while also allowing herself to seem transparently vulnerable. This is especially powerful because most of her lyrics come across like one half of an argument or discussion, so she always sounds like a person who is very emotionally invested in a relationship or friendship, but isn’t willing to give up too much of herself and is able to see things very clearly. I love the certainty in her voice, and the way the clean, bright tone of it cuts through the metallic timbre of the sort of keyboard and drum machine settings the band favors.

The particular effect of Chvrches songs isn’t so much in the contrast of Mayberry’s voice and the rest of the music, but in how similar they are. The music never undermines her, and the overall sound is very unified in its forthrightness. Mayberry’s shifts in mood and sentiment are directly mirrored by the contours of the track – listen to how the nagging doubt at the start of “Clearest Blue” gradually transforms into ecstatic physicality as her voice becomes more emphatic, culminating in this joyful and cathartic instrumental break in the final third of the track. That break is one of the most incredible things I’ve heard in music this year; it’s the kind of sound that just jolts you alive and makes life feel exciting and full of possibility. I love that this feeling comes in a song that’s mostly about Mayberry trying to figure out where she stands with someone in the middle of some crisis. There’s a lot of ways you can respond to a crisis, but this is definitely the most optimistic and thrilling.

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