Nerd Litter

Mixtape for my sweetheart, the drunk #26

2008-10-08T20:11:00.015-04:00

1) "You Will Miss Me When I Burn" - Palace Brothers from Days In The Wake [Buy it]
2) "Leave The City" - Magnolia Electric Co. from What Comes After The Blues [Buy it]
3) "Steal The Crumbs" - Uncle Tupelo from Anodyne [Buy it]
4) "Round and Round (It Won't Be Long)" - Neil Young with Crazy Horse from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere [Buy it]
5) "Stay Inside" - Vic Chesnutt from Silver Lake [Buy it]
6) "I Believe In You" - Lambchop from OH (ohio) [Buy it]
7) "Lost and Lonely" - Ezra Carey from The Fire Keeps Us Warm [Buy it]
8) "Well, Benjamin" - Shearwater from Everybody Makes Mistakes [Buy it]
9) "Not A Heel" - Phosphorescent from Aw Come Aw Wry [Buy it]
10) "Does Me No Good" - William Elliott Whitmore from Hymns For The Hopeless [Buy it]
11) "Holding Back The Year" - Lou Barlow from Emoh [Buy it]
12) "Alphabet City Blues" - Spider Bags from A Celebration of Hunger [Buy it]
13) "One Hundred Thousand Bridesmaids" - Centro-matic from South San Gabriel Songs/Music [Buy it]

Or you can download the full mix as a .zip here.

The writing on the wall #43

2008-10-08T19:29:00.008-04:00

The writing on the wall #42

2008-10-08T18:52:00.009-04:00

So many things that get me angry

2008-09-24T15:42:00.010-04:00

Photo by Martin Fuchs
Reading the front-page headlines is starting to become more like the obituaries. Fifty-three dead in a Pakistan bombing, tens of thousands of Chinese children poisoned by tainted milk, American and global markets teetering on the brink, intermittent dispatches from largely forgotten wars. It's a pretty rough time, and the national mood is growing darker than ever. Yet as difficult as it'll be to pull through some of the crises we face, there's another task that's nearly as daunting: producing art that effectively speaks to the times.

Political music is fraught with pitfalls, resulting in songs that end up artless, didactic, simplistic or uninspiring. And for every successful attempt at smart protest we get--I'm thinking of Sleater-Kinney's "Combat Rock" or El-P's "Dear Sirs" for example--there've been dozens of really dumb ones (even after you discount Toby Keith and will.i.am entirely). It's also notable that, in a decade where political music should be having a huge impact on pop culture, the main reverberations have come from off-the-cuff comments by Kanye West and the Dixie Chicks. That's a pretty pathetic legacy.

Still, one bright spot among all that gloom has been The Bug's "Angry." It's the summer single that should've caught on big, dominating radio and clubs as a late-double-zeroes anthem. It gives our collective frustration a powerful voice--that of Brixton reggae veteran Tippa Irie--but even more impressively, it manages to sound almost... fun. "So many things that get me angry/and so many things that get me mad,/so many things that get me angry,/and I gotta say!" the chorus declares over a booming bassline. It doesn't just make you want to storm the streets, but also work off your aggression on the dancefloor.

Interestingly, the very same lyrics, "When I think about Bush and I think about Blair, how my people livin' in fear," would sound excruciating coming from most other singers. Without that cool jungle beat and Tippa Irie's dancehall patois, "Angry" would lose most of its power. But much like hip-hop's takes on inner-city life, reggae has a rich legacy of making protest music a popular (and populist) art form. By fusing contemporary woes with a future-tilting reggae, The Bug can register his points without losing his cool. And in uncertain times like these, we need just that kind of real, honest music, speaking not only to us but for us.

* MP3: "Angry" - The Bug ft. Tippa Irie from London Zoo [Buy it]

This is what: an interview with Justin Ringle

2008-09-22T00:03:00.024-04:00

Back in New York, I'm wearing jackets and even sweaters again. The frost of fall's setting in, but what's really put the chill in my bones is the new Horse Feathers album. House With No Home, a stunning follow-up to the stunning Words Are Dead, is a record that'll mess with your body chemistry. Hearing those elegiac strings or Justin Ringle's tender voice might make your heart murmur or your posture slacken. Its soft, soaring melodies might prompt Thoreau-style walks in the woods or fingers inching toward the repeat button. But most of all, as the songs take hold, House With No Home will raise the hairs on your arms and goosebumps on your skin, no matter how many layers you're wearing.

Here's my conversation with Horse Feathers frontman Justin Ringle:

Nerd Litter: So tell me about how this new album came about. The inspiration behind it, what you were trying to do with it.

Justin Ringle: A lot of it was an evolution from the last record. I think there was a little bit more of a deliberate approach. I wanted to make it a little more fleshed out, not quite as spare. And it just turned out that a lot of the tunes and the tempos ended up being a bit more up. This record didn’t turn out to be quite as dour as the last one. But I didn’t necessarily start working on this record with the intent of making it really cling. It just happened to be the music that I was writing.

NL: Are there any songs on the album that particularly stand out to you or have any special significance?

JR: Yeah. The first track, "Curs in the Weeds," is one of my favorites, as well as the last track, "Father." "Father" was spurned on by a really awful experience I had concerning a friend’s cousin, who I'd known for a long time, dying this last year. So that one has some pretty personal elements to it. But "Curs In The Weeds," I had just gotten back from our second national tour. I got home and I’d written that song right after, and... I don’t know, I just like it. (Laughs.)

NL: Something I’ve noticed about "Curs in the Weeds" specifically but also about your music in general is that the lyrics tend to be oblique or impressionistic. You know, I kind of get a sense of what’s going on in the song, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. So I’m wondering if that’s a conscious aesthetic you’re working toward or if that's just the way you naturally write.

JR: A little bit of both. I actually try to stay away sometimes from pure storytelling because in terms of the types of music that I play and listen to, I’ve always felt that particular brand of songwriting is pretty well-covered. (Laughs.) And I’m interested in how words work together, as opposed to a purely narrative approach to songwriting. I really want the words to work with the melodies and reinforce each other. But yeah, I try to stay away from being too literal with it, so that's conscious. Though I do just write that way as well.

NL: The style tends to remind me of a lot of contemporary poetry. Is that something that’s influenced your songwriting?

JR: Somewhat. I am a fan of poetry... You know, that’s been brought up before, but it’s not like I’m purposely trying to fuse them. I’m more really interested in how words sound as opposed to creating some kind of narrative framework with concepts. So it does end up being impressionistic, but I know what those things mean to me, and I know the feelings, the impetus, for writing those things. But it’s really painstaking for me as a songwriter to say exactly what they mean, because it allows whoever’s listening to it to own it more.

NL: Well, going along with those ideas, you have instrumental tracks on both of the albums, and
I’m wondering what the logic behind that is.

JR: Some of that came from Peter and Heather [Broderick], who I’ve collaborated with for both of these records. They’re both big fans of instrumental music. The first record, we wanted something that created a mood that was different from what we were doing, as a segue. And on this record, we wanted to do something again on the second side, but what we came up with is actually the vocal melody to the last track played on the piano. And I like it. I think it rounds out the second side of the record in a nice, succinct way. It’s only two minutes, but it changes the feeling there.

NL: It’s interesting because the reprise comes before the actual song. It’s a strange choice. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that before.

JR: Yeah. Actually, that’s funny. You’re the first person to bring that up. We initially planned to have “Father” start the second side of the record, and then cap the record with the instrumental. But it just ended up that I liked it better before and we’d already named it that way. Musically, it is the reprise, but it kind of becomes the intro. It’s a preview, I guess.

NL: How does the songwriting process work between you and Peter and Heather? How do the songs get their starts with the three of you?

JR: It’s worked lots of different ways. And I’d say every song is slightly different in terms of how it came to fruition. Oftentimes, I come to the table with songs in terms of verses and choruses and the main melodies, and then I’ll throw them at them. Usually Peter first to see how he responds. And then sometimes we’ll amend the arrangements to account for what he’s doing. We might make the instrumental part go a little longer, and then he and Heather will, once it’s established, they’ll work together on the string interplay. At that point, we’re usually all working on it, but that’s only for half the songs. Some of them are more like "this is it," and they play to it from there and come up with their parts. So it’s all different types of ways. This time, we also worked a bit more in the studio and that was interesting.

NL: What does interesting mean?

JR: This record had somewhat of a timeline. We started in the summer and then went out on tour and then got signed to Kill Rock Stars. And when we came back, the record had to be done by a specific date so I got home from the tour and started to write. When Peter came back, we recorded for two weeks in December, January, and then I worked on the record until the end of February. Kind of a weird process, having to write like that, but that’s the way it goes... I’m usually pretty slow. I write songs over six-month periods, not a couple of months. I’ve always liked working on things, but rarely do I sit down and write a whole song at a time. I’m usually working on six ideas at once.

NL: How did playing live influence the recorded versions? Did that change the process for you?

JR: Somewhat... Not really. We’ve played some of the songs live for quite a while before we recorded them. And some of them we never played live at all. Some of them we got a pretty good idea of what we were going after, just because of how we played them live. And the ones that weren’t, it's funny, now we’re doing the backwards approach. Now we’re trying to reconstruct it to make the songs for a live situation.

NL: Tell me a little about your work with the Portland Cello Project.

JR: Well, I’ve done a couple shows with them. They basically take a tune and arrange it for multiple cellos. For us, it’s easy, well it's not easy, but a little easier than their work with some rock bands, because we already have the strings there, there’s already a basis for some of that. One of the songs we’ve done was released on an EP that they recorded this summer, the song “Mother’s Sick” off the last record. They’re really a community project, they’re pretty ingrained with the local music community here and it’s really cool what they’re doing.

NL: Do you feel pretty connected to the music community in Portland?

JR: I do. I’ve been here for about four years now. It doesn’t take too long to be known, by everybody in the community and for you to know them. You run into people in Portland constantly, it’s almost small town-ish in that way. So yes, definitely. I don’t necessarily feel completely musically connected, although there are other things here in a similar vein. Ever since we started touring nationally, I’ve felt a little more disconnected just because you don’t play the constant local shows and play with your friends all the time. It does change once you play out of town, but I think that’s typical for people.

NL: Do you think there’s some Portland influence or Idaho influence in your music somehow?

JR: I would say so. It’s hard not to be. Any place, the things you hear have a lot to do with the weather in terms of different moods. The winter here is pretty much spent indoors and it’s gray for about seven months. Musically, Idaho definitely influenced me much more, because I lived there a lot longer. Idaho, the most influential thing about it is that it’s culturally a vacuum. I spent a lot of time inside listening to music, practicing and seeking out things and writing in much more than I would have if I would’ve lived here at a younger age. Here, in a city like this, you attach yourself to things a lot sooner and it’s a lot more available. So living removed from that really influenced me. Here, you’re kind of forced to become an introvert. The whole town becomes introverted come January. I think that’s always been a major component of Northwest music overall; you have a lot of people who've spent a lot of time playing in basements in the winter.

NL: Going along with that, you have the cover image of the album, which is really striking. How did you end up choosing that?

JR: I was trying to figure out how to do the artwork, and I contacted this local designer. He did a bunch of illustrations for me, and I didn’t really feel like they fit. But he was like, I found this picture and you should really see it. He was like, this is what I think the record looks like. And I saw it, and I was like, yep! (Laughs.) That’s it. And so we contacted the photographer out of Seattle and he let us use it for free. It’s kind of dark but I think it’s a really succinct image for what the record sounds like.

NL: It’s interesting because I was just reading a review of the album in Local Cut, and the reviewer was talking about how it sounds incredibly autumnal to him, and I’d been listening to it at the end of summer so for me it feels like an end-of-summer record. So it’s interesting that you think it’s so deeply embedded in winter. Do you think that it’ll make more sense to me in a few months?

JR: Mmm... maybe. I could definitely see that. I’ve always felt that our music feels a little bit more like fall. Slower, more contemplative stuff makes sense with a change of seasons. But we got a lot of that from our last record too. It came out about the same time of year, and it started to go to press people right before it was released, and with the first people out there, there was the same talk of the hazy end-of-summer sound. But then as soon as the record came out, it decidedly became a fall record. (Laughs.) So I don’t know. I’d like to think it can work in all seasons, but it’s a pretty subjective thing.

NL: Well, I’m going to rent a cabin in a few months and give it a try. I'll let you know what happens.

JR: (Laughs.) You should. You’re in New York City?

NL: Yeah, but I just spent the summer up in Montreal, so everyone kept telling me how I was there at the prime time. How they spend spend six months indoors because it’s so brutally cold. So I can relate to what you’re saying about everyone living for this one season, this one surge of creativity, because otherwise, life largely shuts down.

JR: We were there last year for a tour, and I heard a similar story.

NL: So what have you been doing since you’ve come back from tour?

JR: I’ve pretty much been preparing for the record to come out. And I have some different personnel now. The live shows are more of a rotating cast than they have been before. The tour that I’m doing this fall, I’m going to have three different incarnations of the group. There’s pretty much a different group for every tour. Not entirely different, but people are rotating in and out. I’ve been working on that. Just getting ready for that. It’s been a bit of transition working with Kill Rock Stars too, so I’ve been getting into the work flow with them.

NL: Are you going to do a national tour for this?

JR: Yeah. The record came out on September 7th and we’re doing a couple of regional things. And then starting on the second of October, we’re starting a West Count launch. Then we’re flying to England to tour the UK for a while. We’re doing the first part of the tour with José González. I’m really excited about that.

NL: They can probably relate to the gloomy weather too.

JR: (Laughs.) Maybe that'll work in our favor. And then, let's see, we’re flying to Chicago and we’ll do two-and-a-half, maybe three weeks in the East. We’re doing a stretch with this band from Portland on Sub Pop called Blitzen Trapper, and do some things maybe in the East, maybe the Southeast. I’m pretty excited. But it’ll be long. It’ll be pretty intense.

NL: How do you fare on the road? Do you enjoy the touring life?

JR: Yeah, it's all right. It's not easy all the time, that's for sure. We're a different breed in some ways, because it's not like we're not a rock band. We're not playing crazy indie-rock situations or anything, so it's definitely pretty mellow on the road. We don't go too hard.

NL: I could see that. Incidentally, I talked to your old tourmate Kevin O'Connor a few years back when Beat Romantic came out and I asked him if he could have anyone sing on a Talkdemonic record, who he'd pick and he said you. So I'm wondering if that's something that's been discussed or might even happen.

JR: Yeah, actually. Kevin and I have been talking about starting a project for a while. He's one of my best friends. But frankly, both of our bands are pretty full-time so it's been hard to get anything off the ground. In the future, we might try to do some things, but right now, things are so busy for us. There's so much going on at the moment already.

* MP3: "Curs In The Weeds" - Horse Feathers from House With No Home
* MP3: "Rude To Rile" - Horse Feathers from House With No Home [Buy it]
* MySpace: Horse Feathers

Video Tuesday #57

2008-09-16T22:33:00.001-04:00

"Molten Light"
Chad VanGaalen

"Delivery Man"
The Cool Kids

"Idyll"
Benoît Pioulard

"Wrestlers"
Hot Chip

"Her Disappearing Theme"
Broken Social Scene

"Summertime"
Wiley

Listening booth #41

2008-09-16T11:16:00.006-04:00

Photo from Vintage Photo (via Avi Abrams)
* MP3: "March Movement" - Talkdemonic from Eyes At Half Mast [Buy it]
* MP3: "Delivery Man" - The Cool Kids [Buy other Cool Kids]
* MP3: "Un Día" - Juana Molina from Un Día [Preorder it]

You can check out more vintage photography on Vintage Photo and Avi Abrams' Flickr and his History: Cold War collection.

I wish I was a poet

2008-09-12T15:45:00.008-04:00

Photo from ggaabboo

I miss letters. My address scrawled out on the envelope. The twenty-three-cent stamp voided with grill marks. The folded looseleaf and lines of blue script. Chatty paragraphs from pen pals or long-distance girlfriends updating me on their lives. I's dotted with stars; the vague scents of foreign places. I don't remember the last time I've received a letter, and I don't remember the last time I've written one. It seems like a relic of a bygone century now, a time when we'd condense months of information and thoughts and emotions into a few pages. A time when my mailbox contained more than wedding invitations and Netflix envelopes.

I miss missing people too. Sure, I have cross-country friends I'd love to see more than biannually, but there's no deep sense of loss. Between cellphones, email, Skype, Gchat, Facebook wall postings, Twitter, and oh yeah, Blogger, it's almost harder to detach yourself than to keep in touch. We're all within reach, with every banal thought and bowel movement ripe for mention. With communication becoming so immediate, we've lost the chance for our thoughts to stew. We've lost the poetry of distance.

However, that poetry's at the heart of Samamidon's "Saro," a gentle reworking of an old folk ballad. Set in 1849, the song is narrated by an immigrant who had to leave his wife behind. Like singer Sam Amidon's delivery, the lyrics are spare but deeply stirring: "'Tis not this long journey that grieves me for to go/ Nor the country that I'm leaving, nor the debts that I owe./ There's one thing that grieves me and bears on my mind/ That's leaving my darling pretty Saro behind." Set against Nico Muhly's sweeping strings and our knowledge that this couple may never reunite, "Saro" strikes a raw nerve. It makes me want to find a girl that beautiful, or feel a loss that vast. Most of all, it makes me want to write letters until my hand cramps and my heart is light.

* MP3: "Saro" - Samamidon from All Is Well [Buy it]
* Also: The Torture Garden on Samamidon

My love, my love for you

2008-09-09T12:23:00.012-04:00

Photo by Stephanie Goulding

Tricky's Knowle West Boy isn't Maxinquaye or Pre-Millennium Tension. But I think it should get a decently good reception, because it's also not Vulnerable or Blowback. No, it lands somewhere between those poles, alternating between old genius and more recent embarrassment. On this new album, Tricky is most successful at reviving the dread and alienation that made his debut such a classic. Where he stumbles more are the songs themselves, which try to evoke but can't really compete with his earlier work. Still, there's one glaring exception among the lot, "Past Mistake," which sounds as good as anything he's done.

One of its key features is that it's not sung by Tricky, but his surrogate and ex-girlfriend Lubna. The obvious callback is "Makes Me Wanna Die," featuring his former lover Martina Topley-Bird. On both tracks, Tricky relegates himself to background whispers and murmurs. That puts the focus on the beautiful and aching vocals, while still adding the gruffer texture of his baritone below. Because Lubna is French-Moroccan, there's also a sexy, beguiling lilt in her delivery. When she sings of "lying eyes," it sounds more like "lion eyes." When she coos about "my love for you," it sounds like a somewhat foreign concept.

The song, which is all about doomed devotion, has its autobiographical elements. As Tricky reveals on his website, "It's funny... me and Lubna wrote 'Past Mistake' when we were just turning from good to bad. One day much later we were in bed listening to it and we realised that it was about us going horribly wrong." Even without knowing that, you can hear the apprehension and unease in the spooky accompaniment. The drums clap down like deadlines, the eerie strings sound like elevator music in a deserted hospital. The more and more Lubna insists of "my love for you," the more valedictory it grows. Even Tricky starts to sound uncharacteristically affected, as if realizing this "Past Mistake" can make up for some of his others.

* MP3: "Past Mistake" - Tricky from Knowle West Boy [Buy it]

All of the people, where are they coming from

2008-09-08T11:03:00.015-04:00

Photo by Arndalarm
"Sort of like a dream. No, better," Air France sang earlier this year on "Collapsing At Your Doorstep." I don't know what subject they had in mind, but it should've been Blue Sky Black Death's fourth album Late Night Cinema. This set of gauzy dreamscapes effortlessly drifts between the waking and unconscious, a glyercine-drip of moving moments and indelible ephemera. Though BSBD's members, Kingston and Young God, have a background in hip-hop production, their new work goes far beyond genre parameters. Late Night Cinema is the Deadringer follow-up RJD2 would've written at midnight in a perfect world; it's Moby's Play chopped and screwed or an agoraphobic's Endtroducing...

Late Night Cinema is also an album in the way fewer and fewer LPs are these days, meaning that some out-of-context samples or cursory listens won't do it justice. It's a work that needs your full attention, atmospheric enough for ambient listening but deserving of the foreground. It needs time to fully seep into your circulatory system, steeping deeply in a) the cool autumn air, b) a cumulus cloud of weed, or c) the woozy black-blue stretch of hours before daybreak. Nonetheless, a few tracks do stand out as especially revelatory, hovering in some lovely median between heartache and memory.

"Lord of Our Vice" is a love song that truly evokes love's messy abstractions. As a plaintive singer insists, "I'll always love you," she also can't help but add, "And nobody... and nobody..." The song's strength lies in those ellipses, that hint of the ineffable hovering over every word. What she's trying to say is left up to us to decode (And nobody [else]/ And nobody [can change that]/ And [yet] nobody/ And nobody [knows]), giving it a potent open-endedness. Other dispossessed voices also drift in and out of the mix, haunting the beat and howling in sympathy. It's a track fraught with passion and sorrow, celebrating a love complicated enough to merit the term.

Even more adrift and existential is "My Work Will Be Done." It's probably the purest summation of the album's intentions, and certainly the most affecting. The singer from "Lord of Our Vice" is now asking, "All of the people, where are they coming from?" as a soulful man keeps replying, "You were dreaming." It's a strange and impressionistic conversation, with an internal logic well-suited for a David Lynch sequence. Musically, the key attractions are the majestic strings and manic drum programming, which meld together with a similar grace. There's also a guitar section saturated with reverb, further underscoring how Late Night Cinema sounds like one of the sweetest dreams you've ever had. No, better.

* MP3: "Lord of Our Vice" - Blue Sky Black Death from Late Night Cinema
* MP3: "My Work Will Be Done" - Blue Sky Black Death from Late Night Cinema [Buy it]

My mom is only my mom until I'm eighteen

2008-08-27T12:45:00.012-04:00

Photo by Bob Richards
Well, this is it. The suitcase is out of the closet; the months of crusty dishes are simmering in the sink. A cold wind's already threading through the Montreal nights, confirming the creep of fall. Tomorrow, I'll be back on the Amtrak, taking in the green landscapes before they're shedding their dead leaves. After a three-month high, I've been errantly wandering this city these last few days. I've been getting all contemplative and shit, reflecting on my run here, wishing I could somehow prolong this truant summer a little bit.

It's not quite an extended vacation, but Mas Y Mas's new EP, Sum-mer, might just do the trick. Besides the à propos title and the swimming-pool-blue cover, this Virginia band ably sums up the spirit of the season. Their songs are all about headstrong youth and impetuous antics, with music just as gleefully raucous to match. The EP's pretty ephemeral too--five songs cranked out in just over ten minutes--emphasizing the P far more than the E.

Three of the tracks are live versions from the highly-acclaimed Proud Sponsors of Pepsi, usually a lazy cash-in tactic but one that really works here. The songs document how Mas Y Mas transforms in concert, hypercharging album cuts into faster, meaner, hardcore-inspired terrors. When lead singer Vinny howls, "No talent, no rhythm, no guts, we're the kind of band that America wants!" on "Hi!," it sheds its usual aloofness and irony for a kind of undistilled desperation. It feels young and stupid and brash and alive all at once.

My favorite moment though is their new song, "Summertime Runaway." It renders their attitude of rebellion and escape explicit, while carrying over some of their live energy to the studio. It also sports their signature playfulness, opening with overenthusiastic wails of "Whoa-oh-oh!" and a crude take on realizing when you're all grown up: "Fuck holding a grown man's hand." It's about living for weekends and stretches of freedom, about mixing things up and being mixed up. It's extremely fun and sunny and even kind of sad, and just like the time that inspired it, it's over before you're quite ready.

You can order Sum-mer on vinyl for just $4.50 from the band's website here or download it for free on their label Sound/Friends here.

* MP3: "Summertime Runaway" - Mas Y Mas from Sum-mer EP
* MP3: "Hi" (Live) - Mas Y Mas from Sum-mer EP [Buy it]
* Website: Rock So Tough
* MySpace: Mas Y Mas

In related news, you really need to watch this video, which has media insiders already buzzing about Oscar shortlists and which A.O. Scott recently called "one of the most important short films since 1962's La Jetée." Nerd Litter is proud to present the music-blog premiere of Archie Coates' "Mas Y Mas dancing on my parents' countertops."

Video Tuesday #56

2008-08-26T17:32:00.004-04:00

"Kim and Jessie"
M83

"In Our Talons"
Bowerbirds

"Just A Friend"
Biz Markie

"You're Everything"
Bun B ft. Rick Ross, David Banner, 8-Ball & MJG

"Radio Ladio"
Metronymy

"Sunflower"
Low

The writing on the wall #41

2008-08-26T16:40:00.017-04:00

Montreal edition #15

Thirteen ways of looking at Lindstrøm's Where You Go, I Go Too

2008-08-23T00:17:00.013-04:00

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's long-anticipated official LP debut, this album features three sprawling songs that range between ten and twenty-nine minutes. It's epic and expansive where most electronic music of this ilk is built around immediate payoff, patchy and challenging and moody where most others aim to please.

The natural intersection between dance as ambient and ambient as dance.

III

The score for an hour-long meteor shower.

A funeral procession for a disco legend. Black chiffon, elbow-high gloves, and neon boas on parade. Raccoon eyes spiked with tears and red nostrils dusted with white powder. Regret tempered with miles of glitz.

A proof of Newton's First Law of Motion.

The extended version of a theme song for a mid-'80s cop drama. A lead character named Dirk Rockland, a moustache thick enough to bury contraband in, a fondness for catch phrases and former cheerleaders. Glossy shots of gritty downtown corners lit up at night, obligatory slo-mos of getaway vehicles going airborne. Police Chief Morton will slam his desk and order Dirk to play by the rules at least once per episode.

VII

God running a marathon.

VIII

Spilling out of the club in droves, outstretched like banners along the curbs, bodies still frosted with sweat and AC. The four a.m. blear of a tincan sky, eyes squinting into n-dashes, basslines still pumping behind distant walls, our skin still twitching electrically.

Spangly.

A cheerleading routine choreographed by methheads.

Crowd surfers gliding over sound waves. Maneuvering a crest of hands at high tide, flecked with the spume of six-dollar beers, tipping back into the pull of the omnivorous current.

XII

What a young Søren Kierkegaard would throw on at his Thursday night house parties.

XIII

The best dance-ish album since LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver and a must-hear for 2008.

If I could just reverse time, I would

2008-08-21T13:08:00.013-04:00

Photo by Xris Manteris
The stalest trope in hip-hop criticism used to be the plight of the female MC. Why there weren't more, why they didn't get more attention, why they weren't better. It was trotted out in the early days of MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, and Salt 'N Pepa and revived for the bitch-hop heyday of Foxy Brown and Li'l Kim. But at this point, I'm almost starting to miss the cliché. There are so few woman rappers of note today that no one's even around to call attention to their absence. It's shocking and frankly kind of weird. If I were listing the ten best, I'd probably be forced to include that woman calling out "Papadonna" on Outkast's "Mamacita."

The sad thing is that it's not just a matter of Title IX or anatomical equality. As I've noted before, women rappers, when they're not trying to outgun their male counterparts, do rap differently. They have largely different concerns and a different approach that hip-hop still rarely accommodates. Outside of, say, known softies like Lyrics Born or Common, swagger inherently outweighs sensitivity. More pressingly, because hip-hop's such a vital conduit of the young black experience, the narratives of its urban females are going underrepresented and unheard.

I couldn't ask for a better example of its power than Jean Grae's new song, "My Story." It's a subject far outside of the typical rap tale that still engages the genre's traditions on its own terms. Taking on a favorite approach--the hardscrabble coming-of-age saga--Grae defuses the bravado and pride of street survival we've come to expect. Instead, her harrowing track is all about doubt and gnawing guilt, self-hatred and self-destruction. With painfully precise details of abortions and miscarriages, Grae doesn't glamorize anything about her rough choices. All this autobiography tries to do is explain why and ask for forgiveness.

"And you don't know what it's like in waiting rooms," she says, before articulating the experience for us. "[O]utside, the picketing pictures can slay you/ They scream at victims and spittin' till they shame you/ I hold my head low and shiver, push my way through./ They put you in a room where you can change into/ Your gown and shower cap, shaking like a fiend would do." Grae applies that same bared-soul approach throughout, relaying her story so honestly it's hard to bear at moments. The part that gets me the most is this post-op observation: "And then you wake up in another room with plenty others/ They call it Recovery, you thinking, 'We ain't mothers.'"

"My Story" is so raw that its chorus, a soggy Mary J. Blige-like hook, feels conventional and out of place. More in keeping with the song's themes are the stray moments when Grae's doubts even disrupt her flow. Contemplating what she'd do with a second chance, she tries to be definitively declare, "If I could just reverse time, I would." But absent of easy answers, she has to circle back and admit, "I don't know what I would do/ Honestly, it's not good." And even more disarming is the outro in which she just repeats, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry" like her conscience finally breaking through. It's a sentiment you rarely hear in hip-hop, from a voice that reminds me how much we've been missing.

* MP3: "My Story" - Jean Grae from Jeanius [Buy it]

Listening booth #40

2008-08-20T16:17:00.005-04:00

Photo by Reem
* MP3: "What Was Raymond Doing With His Hands? (A Soundtrack for a Real Swinger of a Nightmare)" - Steinski (via The Village Voice)
* MP3: "Get It Up" - Esau Mwamwaya, Santogold, M.I.A and Radioclit [Buy other Santogold] [Buy other M.I.A.] [Buy other Radioclit]
* MP3: "My Work Will Be Done" - Blue Sky Black Death from Late Night Cinema [Buy it]

You can check out more of Reem's photography at Flickr here as well as at DeviantArt here.

Adventures in LARPing series

2008-08-20T14:46:00.015-04:00

Parc Jeanne-Mance, Montreal, 8-17-08

Come on over, turn me on

2008-08-19T13:30:00.015-04:00

Photo by Stefano Corso

Sometimes, you need night songs. Lullabies gentle enough to ease you into sleep, or seductive enough to strike a different tone. Mark Lanegan and Isobel Campbell's second collection together, Sunday at Devil Dirt, is steeped in just such nighttime moods--lassitude, ache and more than a little libido. With their contrasting vocal styles, the singers ably embody all those competing desires. Lanegan, formerly of grunge asterisks Screaming Trees, sounds like a grizzled trucker coming home from a marathon drive. Campbell, once of Belle & Sebastian, opts for breathy and lusty, purring like a perfume ad. It's sandpaper against silk, the darkness nestling up against daybreak.

As the title suggests, the album flirts with Biblical themes, but it's at its best when it sticks to more secular flesh. On one of its highlights, "Come On Over (Turn Me On)," the duo melds together to lovely effect. "Is it any wonder/ Is it any wonder/ I lay awake all night," they sing at their most needful. Between Lanegan's growl and Campbell's sigh, they really convey how deep their stirrings are, how hungrily they're awaiting their lovers' arrivals. They further build the mood with a slinky jazz-lounge piano and a sinister guitar caterwauling at the margins. It's another sharply drawn contrast that reveals how well opposites attract, and that every night's a gateway to many inviting possibilities.

* MP3: "Come On Over (Turn Me On)" - Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan from Sunday At Devil Dirt [Buy it]

Which motherfucker wanna see my dogs die

2008-08-15T04:24:00.010-04:00

Art by Stallio
Violent times call for violent measures. And Venetian Snares, with its free-form carnage and propulsive energy, certainly fits that bill. From Aaron Funk's new album title, Detrimentalist, to the genre he's a leading figure in, breakcore, the focus is firmly on destruction over deconstruction. In his crosshairs, furied electronics detonate the line between song and noise. His hyperactive beats batter around meanly and dizzily like punchdrunk moshers. Pushing further and faster than peers like Aphex Twin and Autechre, this is music driven by pure unchecked id. It's coke-fueled binge, temper tantrum, and aerial assault all messily mashed together.

Of course, that's pretty much been Funk's M.O. throughout his prolific decade-long career. (So far, he's managed to release fifteen EPs and, with Detrimentalist, a staggering seventeen full-length albums.) What separates this new work is his heavier reliance on vocal inserts and a restraint in indulging his more annoying experimental tendencies. Both those factors help make the music just a little more palatable, giving the breakneck abstraction a hint of shape. It also helps that the samples he's picked this time are uniformly cool, from KRS-One's dis track "Phucked" in "Gentleman" to the Massive Attack-esque dub joint in "Eurocore MVP."

Two of the album's best songs, "Gentleman" and "Eurocore MVP" also splice fun stylistic flourishes into the relentless snarl. And even better, they aggressively reinforce the album's themes of anarchy and anomie. "Gentlemen, I'm here 'cause I fucked...," a heavily accented voice declares. "Somebody jump in my computer server and take the information out." Here, it's as much a smackdown of musical hacks as computer hacks, a declaration of war against Venetian Snares' pale imitators. In the latter song, against a minefield of explosive spikes, a mad rapper barks, "Which motherfucker wanna see my dogs die?" As his voice rises to a grotesque pitch, it's clear the senseless bloodshed's just getting started.

* MP3: "Gentleman" - Venetian Snares from Detrimentalist
* MP3: "Eurocore MVP" - Venetian Snares from Detrimentalist [Buy it]

To live in a house with no home

2008-08-13T15:48:00.015-04:00

Photo by Damiao Santana
Sit in a patch of wild grass and slip on your headphones. Throw back a slug of whiskey lemonade and watch the sun deflate like a punctured yolk. Think about your most private regrets and your most secret desires. Feel the pale wind slip in and out of your T-shirt sleeves. And most importantly, put on "Curs in the Weeds," the new track from Horse Feathers' upcoming House With No Home. It's an ideal accompaniment to summer's end, ripe with spectacular but understated beauty, peaceful and serene but tinged with loss. It speaks to all the things we never got a chance to do, all the people we never got a chance to become.

Put the song on repeat. Watch the violet bruise of dusk overtake the the last spots of yellows. Marvel at the petty miracle of fireflies. Feel the wind get more aggressive and maybe even shiver a bit. By now, the full magic of "Curs in the Weeds" should be starting to sink in. Like its closely related brethren on Horse Feathers' tremendous debut, Words Are Dead, this is music that can't be rushed. The first listen might wow you, but it's going to grow deeper and more poignant with every play. Like the dark, it'll drip in slowly until you find yourself fully immersed.

Follow the trail back by the light of a scrap of moon. Feel the pebbles grinding into your soles. Toss back the last drops of alcohol. Admit to yourself the things you've long tried to elude. In that total solitude, you can feel the full effect of Justin Ringle's incredible voice. You'll be able to notice how placidly it seems to float above the music, lacing all the other elements together. How Peter Broderick's evocative strings keep switching between wistful and urgent, gentle and resurgent. How it serves as a perfect counterpoint to Ringle, and as another summer slouches toward its end, gives us a perfect song to memorialize what we're left with.

* MP3: "Curs in the Weeds" - Horse Feathers from House With No Home [Preorder it]
* MySpace: Horse Feathers

Around the world #10

2008-08-12T13:01:00.011-04:00

Photo by Christian Gates, from the Montréal Graffitis pool
* It's time to GET YOUR WAR ON!!!!!!! [236]

* I can't believe I haven't mentioned how good the new Ear Farm looks. Go check it out, but promise you won't compare it too much to this blue piece of shit, k? [Ear Farm]

* Because I can't be everywhere this summer unfortunately. [Flickr]

* Heh heh, Facebook. I get it. [McSweeney's]

* Oh hey look, Tricky's back. Even if Knowle West Boy isn't his best album (duh), at least he's quit hanging out with those guys from Live and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. [The Wire]

* New short story by Joshua Ferris. If you haven't read And Then We Came To The End, go do that first and then you'll see why I'm excited. [New Yorker]

The writing on the wall #40

2008-08-12T03:54:00.012-04:00

Montreal edition #14

Everything is forgotten in a bliss

2008-08-11T04:31:00.008-04:00

Photo by Tookie
All that mopey, glacial, utterly transportive music? It turns out that Sigur Rós was kidding all along. They're really party boys at heart, trading in their hallucinogens for Xanax-and-Ecstasy cocktails. At least that's what "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur" suggests, their brightest and most gleeful departure to date. It's a spaz-out jamboree, with a Top 40 drumbeat and parade-route energy. Literally translating to "In me, a lunatic sings," it's a celebration of humanity's wild-eyed heights, all the shudders and shivers of visceral pleasure.

It's lucky that the band sings in Icelandic, because the English translation does come off a little hokey. It reminds me mostly of a breathless teenager scrawling in her unicorn-cover journal: "My best friend, whatever may happen/ I swallow a tear and breathe in your hair/ Causing commotion, we cry in each other's arms/ When we meet/ When we kiss/ Lips burning, holding each other's hands." And yet as delivered by Jónsi Birgisson, his delicate voice brimming with emotion, the jubilant music booming behind him, it feels genuinely inspiring. Even more to the point is when he insists, "Allt gleymist í smásmá stund," or "Everything is forgotten in a bliss," the song buoyantly ramping up toward ecstatic crescendo.

* MP3: "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur" - Sigur Rós from Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust [Buy it]
* Website: Sigur Rós

Mixtape for my sweetheart, the drunk #24

2008-08-06T22:35:00.001-04:00

1) "Southern Girl" - Erykah Badu ft. Rahzel from Make The Music 2000 [Buy it]
2) "They Say I'm Different" - Betty Davis from They Say I'm Different [Buy it]
3) "Fish In My Dish" - Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings from Naturally [Buy it]
4) "More Than A Woman" - Aaliyah from Aaliyah [Buy it]
5) "You Don't Know Me At All" - Bettye Lavette from The Scene of the Crime [Buy it]
6) "Eyes On The Prize" - Mavis Staples from We'll Never Turn Back [Buy it]
7) "Lose My Breath" - Destiny's Child from Destiny Fulfilled [Buy it]8) "Things Got To Get Better (Get Together)" - Marva Whitney from It's My Thing [Buy it]
9) "Barry Farms" - Me'shell N'dgeo'cello from Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape [Buy it]
10) "When Hearts Go Cold" - Candi Staton from His Hands [Buy it]
11) "Young, Fresh N' New" - Kelis from Wanderland [Buy it]
12) "Dream" - Alice Smith from For Lovers, Dreamers and Me [Buy it]
13) "Mr. Bojangles" - Nina Simone from Legends [Buy it]

Or you can download the full mix as a .zip here.

Video Tuesday #55

2008-08-05T04:42:00.004-04:00

"The Escapist"
The Streets

"Honey"
Erykah Badu

"In Step" (Unofficial)
Girl Talk

"A Cause Des Garçons"
Yelle

"Segertåget"
Maskinen

"Fragment"
Max Richter

The writing on the wall #39

2008-08-05T01:58:00.001-04:00

Montreal edition #13

It's the right thing to do

2008-08-03T12:12:00.015-04:00

Art by bijijoo
A few years ago, I was on a cruise as war between Lebanon and Israel broke out. Between greasy buffets and ports-of-call, I had to rely on nothing but CNN to keep up. The coverage was relentless but oddly uninformative--the biggest developments were the back-and-forth accusations between official spokesmen. Hard data and substantive analyses ceded to soft-lit man-on-the-street interviews; each side tried their best to play the victim, and both seemed to believe it. With every passing day, the clash of media relations took precedence over military formations. It felt like less a battle of bodies than a war for hearts and minds. PR agents were the new ground troops; loaded images (regardless of how true or representative they were) were the new weaponry of choice.

This blurring of military campaign and ad campaign was even more explicit in the Bush administration's 2003 scramble to war. From Colin Powell's presentation before the UN, to constant appearances by top-ranking officials on news shows, to headlines blaring cherry-picked evidence, the run-up to conflict was rolled out just like a Hollywood blockbuster or a worldwide product launch. Hazy aerial shots of supposed chemical labs were broadcast over and over like corporate logos. Talking-point slogans ("weapons of mass destruction" "mushroom cloud," "slam dunk") and suggestions (Iraq = 9/11, Nigerian yellowcake uranium) were repeated with the faithfulness of taglines.

The roots of this stylized warfare can be largely traced back to the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991. Although far more primitively, that war was also carefully managed and selectively represented. After the messiness of Vietnam, Americans were treated to night-vision explosions that looked as clean and fun as 16-bit Nintendo games. They could root for clear-cut heroes like Generals Schwarzkopf and Powell, and against villains like Saddam Hussein. (For the sequel, we were given an entire deck of villains to oppose.) But in a prelude to embedded journalism, most of the information reported to the public came directly from the military, and both coverage and access were subject to governmental pre-approval and censorship.

That's the funny thing about public opinion. People's views are far more malleable than they'd like to admit, and advertising is far more influential than we realize. As media's reach becomes even more pervasive and multifaceted, it's far easier to run whisper camapaigns. It's far easier to distort the truth just by repeating the lie enough times. (According to a recent Pew poll, 12% of surveyed Americans still think Barack Obama is Muslim. 25% doesn't quite know what he is and 1% is pretty sure he's Jewish.) It's become about defining your opponents in two or three catchy terms, burying the inconvenient subplots to sell the public clear narratives.

As a former TV adman, Steinski understands how the game is played. His music is as much a critique of mass media as a celebration of its profound influence. In his song, "It's Up To You" (Television Mix), he pays tribute to the the idiot box while also thoroughly undermining it. And not unlike Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, he calls out showmanship with the skill of a showman himself. He does this by slicing together the views of pop-culture, establishment-culture and counterculture figures like Howard Beale, George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Jello Biafra and Mario Savio, letting them collide with a bumper-car glee. He also sets that echo chamber of ideas to snappy beats, making it go down as palatably as a fast-food jingle.

Steinski's most subversive act is to push you into thinking critically. By repeating Bush insisting of the Gulf War, "It's the right thing to do," we're left with a feeling of ambivalence. Put in a speech, that line might really inspire assent, but looped out of context, it sounds more like propaganda. It's even more thrillingly confusing when the title sample keeps promising, "It's up to you." In the most basic sense, that may be true, but that an outside voice has to remind us makes the statement suddenly suspect. That the phrase keeps repeating drains it of meaning, reducing it to a motivational speaker's mantra or advertising posing as self-empowerment ("Obey your thirst [as long as it wants Sprite].") Steinski adding in a wicked laugh midway through even makes you question his intentions, which, of course, is exactly what he wants.

Still, even as Steinski satirizes (and reflects) the noise of mass-media, he does reserve his best shots for Bush I. He follows a public service ad for the American Mental Health Fund ("Sometimes, extreme behavior can be the warning sign of a mental illness. Learn to see the sickness.") with the President justifying the use of force. Steinski also intercuts/undercuts Bush's argument for war with his own acidic asides. "I am certain our cause is just" is quickly followed by Bush himself adding, "a gallon of gas," presaging exactly what YouTube collagists would be doing a decade later. Steinski treats "and I am certain our cause is right" even more derisively, interjecting a snippet from David Mamet's House of Games: "Give me the goddamn money."

However, the most telling quote is Bush's first appearance when he declares, "Americans know power belongs in the hands of people." In other words, he's advertising ideals like plurality and democracy to sway popular opinion for his own agenda. And yet, in his own persuasively roundabout way, Steinski is making a similar case and luring us to buy into it. He's also using the media to create and disseminate his persona. And he's also winning us over by flattering us and playing on our emotions. The fact that he manages to include that many complicated levels of discourse (and self-awareness) in something that still sounds so playful is what separates and elevates his art. That he manages to reveal the strings of so many talking heads, to expose conventional wisdom as pitch and to render the subliminal supraliminal, is why I find Steinski so brilliant. Of course, whether or not you choose to agree, that's up to you.

* MP3: "It's Up To You" (Television Mix) - Steinski from What Does It All Mean?: A 1983-2006 Retrospective [Buy it]
* Previously: Something is wrong here, something is terribly wrong
* Website: Steinski

Something is wrong here, something is terribly wrong

2008-07-31T16:12:00.022-04:00

Art by THANKS
Welcome to snippet culture. With the click of a few buttons, you can get your news pre-sliced, your art pre-chewed, and your opinions predigested. Follow a YouTube link of a talk show clip to an excerpt of a thinkpiece retort to a real-time message-board backlash. For better and/or worse, we're living on scraps, soundbites, and hype(r)links these days. We've forgone phone calls for four-word texts and newsfeeds for actual updates from friends. It's a field full of teal deers, where we're more widely informed but only as deep as the headlines.

Blah blah blah etc etc etc. If you've read this far, you may have noticed that cultural criticism is a tough thing to do. Registering your points can mean coming off as didactic or out-of-touch or hopelessly traditional. Or even worse yet, boring. So yeah, it's getting pretty clear we're oversaturated and that our attention spans are fraying under all this stimuli. But the more important question then becomes how to present that information in a potent and meaningful way. How to resonantly reflect your times, and yet produce something of lasting substance.

The answer for many musicians nowadays is to make snippet music. In the last decade, we've seen great work from sample connoisseurs such as The Avalanches, The Books, and Girl Talk. In their own distinctive ways, they've made piecemeal collages that evoke the past but sound fiercely present. Voraciously consuming and processing data, they've shown little respect for genre boundaries or conventional contexts. And with information becoming more liquid by the minute and mixing technology ever-advancing, it also increasingly makes sense from a technical standpoint.

However, if one man epitomizes the heights of snippet music, it'd have to be Steinski (né Steven Stein). Long a bootlegged, namedropped pioneer, he's finally getting his mass-market due with Illegal Art's new What Does It All Mean?: 1983-2008 Retrospective. At first, I was skeptical this album could stand up to the years of hype I'd heard, but it easily exceeds all of my expectations. At its core level, it's a monumental tour through hip-hop history. In Steinski's and partner Double Dee's classic first work, a remix contest entry called "Lesson 1 - The Payoff Mix," you can feel just how kinetic and fresh early rap sounded. You can hear the deep love they invested in each meticulously chosen ingredient. But just as remarkable is how indelibly it inspired future innovators like DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, who both paid homage with their own early '90s Lessons.

After taking on old-school hip-hop, Steinski extended his sensibility in more explicitly political directions. In 1987, he created "The Motorcade Sped On," his take on the JFK assassination. It's a brave--and brazen--topic to address, but if the song's treatment seemed flippant at the time, it sounds downright appropriate today. Steinski's reliance on quick cuts and gratuitous loops are a perfect representation of the 24-hour news cycle. Observations both gain and lose meaning as they're subjected to constant repetition. The moments of real, shocking tragedy are buffeted between a funky drum break (from the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman") and initiated by pop-culture punchlines (Ed McMahon's "Heeeeeeeeere's Johnny" and Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner.") Steinski even darkly equates gunshots with drumbeats, further flattening the event.

And yet in this reconstructed version, it's hard not to feel affected. The overload of effects creates a sense of chaos, and the leapfrogging between playfulness and horror makes the latter even more disarming. Hearing Walter Cronkite stuttering to make sense of the situation makes its own kind of messy sense. What at first seems offensive begins to feel like a 21st century tribute. It most closely resembles channel-surfing during a major news event--seeing the same flickers of images repeating across the dial, hearing every talking head regurgitating the information thus far, watching the scene play out from different camera angles. To get our heads around something as scarring as assassination, Steinski has to break it down first. He has to put his own personal spin on a massive act to effectively address it.

Interestingly, Steinski's subject is pretty much ideally suited for that treatment. At a time when a television in every home was still somewhat novel, the Kennedy assassination was, before the moonwalk, the preeminent image in the national consciousness. Yet, because everyone experienced it a little differently, every American could construct his own individual narrative. With the Zapruder home video, the act took on even more overt subjectivity and shared iconography. (Consider Don DeLillo's Underworld, in which the characters attend a party with hundreds of TVs playing the video on a continuous loop.) And with the rampant conspiracy theories, no other 20th-century moment has been as exhaustively dissected, jumbled and reassembled. Beyond its immediate implications, Kennedy's death essentially exploded the notion of a neat, linear-threaded history.

On its own terms, "The Motorcade Sped On" is a strange, jarring take on a searing event. But heard in a grander scope, it plays like a harbinger of our current climate. Steinski's music isn't just present but prescient. It doesn't just comment on the message, but turns the medium inward on itself. Beyond breaking new ground at the time, What Does It All Mean? is essential because it manages to sound even more relevant twenty-one years later. It positions Steinski not just as an important figure of his era, but, in this cut-and-paste culture, an artist that deserves to stand apart as one of the all-time legends.

Up next: Part 2 of my Steinski writeup, discussing "It's Up To You"

* MP3: "The Motorcade Sped On" - Steinski from What Does It All Mean?: A 1983-2006 Retrospective [Buy it]
* Website: Steinski

Listening booth #39

2008-07-30T15:11:00.004-04:00

Photo by Byron Edwards
* MP3: "The Escapist" - The Streets from Everything Is Borrowed [Buy other Streets]
* MP3: "Sparrowfield" - Benoît Pioulard from Enge EP (Reissue) [Buy it]
* MP3: "Big Belly Guns" - Tony Matterhorn from Top Ranking: A Diplo Dub [Buy it]

Check out more photography by Byron Edwards here.

There ain't no life for me on land

2008-07-28T15:37:00.010-04:00

Photo by Laura Thorne
The file you find below shouldn't be an MP3. No, if the costs weren't prohibitive, I'd send each and every one of you Ezra Carey's "Riverbed" on dusty, timeworn vinyl. That seems like the ideal way to appreciate a song that sounds so beautifully behind the times. It sounds like some forgotten treasure you'd salvage from your parents' record collection, excavated from an attic crate. And while the digital information insists it's from 2008, all I hear are '60s bonfires and communal nightswimming, dank weed clouds and pawnshop guitars. I see a record sleeve jaundiced with age, and a track listing (divided on two sides) eroding into palimpsets.

That's not to say that "Riverbed" is a relic. Even as it mines a distant decade, it feels completely vital today. Along with peers like William Elliott Whitmore and Oakley Hall, Ezra Carey makes a strong case that folk music still has plenty of kick left in it. And I'm not talking about avant-folk or folk-punk or anti-folk, but the traditional, least fashionable strand based around sensitive voices and quiet strumming. It's the kind of music that doesn't fit into our noisy, adrenalized culture anymore, which is exactly why it's such a necessary detour.

Of course, there's also the plain fact that "Riverbed" is a magical song. In large part, that's due to the vocal pairing of Ezra Carey and Mallory Posedel. The two complement each other terrifically, his earthbound twang giving texture to her dreamy echoes. It recalls Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Dawn McCarthy on The Letting Go, but somehow feels even prettier here. There are also the smartly spare lyrics, suggesting either great escape or deep despair. "The river is rising, rising/ Above my chin, above my chin/ and I open my mouth and let it in," the duo spellbindingly sings. "Yes, the river is rising, rising/ Above my head, above my head/ And she lays me down... upon her bed." In Ezra Carey's hands, that sounds like such a profoundly graceful option, a welcome refuge from the world these days.

* MP3: "Riverbed" - Ezra Carey from The Fire Keeps Us Warm [Buy it]
* MySpace: Ezra Carey

The greatest #8: The Dreaming

2008-07-25T15:42:00.015-04:00

Let's waste no time here: The Dreaming is some bizarre shit. If you're looking for tame, well-behaved pop, move on right along. This album is jagged and messy art-rock, and definitely not suited to everyone's taste. It's the sound of Kate Bush coming into her own, both figuratively (ratcheting up the artistic stakes skyward on her fourth work) and literally (self-producing her album for the first time). With no censor and new technology at her disposal, the twenty-four-year-old Bush could indulge any whim that struck her. She pretty much chose to cram them all in, creating a dense, theatrical fantasy world still unequaled today. The Dreaming sounded just as unique and puzzling in 1982, becoming the worst-selling album of Bush's thirty-year career. But as time has shown, it's also gone on to be her boldest and her best work.

There are two essential elements of The Dreaming: Bush's vocals and the Fairlight CMI. Though the use of synthesizers became an '80s hallmark, nothing from that decade sounds even close to Bush's shriek. (The closest we've come since to matching the interplay of harsh and lovely is Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender.) Lulling the listener with a sweet melody, Bush quickly switches to something like a primal scream. On her song, "Pull Out The Pin," she uses her voice as nothing less than a weapon. Recounting the Vietnam War from the other side, she silkily sings, "You learn to ride the Earth,/ When you're living on your belly and the enemy are city-births./ Who needs radar? We use scent./ They stink of the West, stink of sweat,/ Stink of cologne and baccy, and all their Yankee hash." But setting that false trap, she detonates in the chorus, howling, "Just one thing in it/ Me or him/ And I love life, so I pull out the pin." All the pain and rage she conveys sound just as explosive as her character's actions.

On "Night of the Swallow," Bush goes even further. She uses her expressive voice to create a dialogue between a criminal and his lover, playing both parts. The woman desperately urges him to abandon his mission, as he unctuously assures her he'll be all right. "'Though pigs can fly, they'll never find us/ Posing as the night, and I'll be home before morning,'" he says, with Bush supplying the requisite confidence. As the lover, she starts out angry and demanding, but finally settles on pleading. By the end, his cool front breaks down too, imploring her, "Give me something to show for my miserable life.../ Let me, let me go." It's a one-woman-show, a shadowy film noir and a three-act relationship drama masterfully condensed into a single song.

As potent as her vocals are, Bush's music is just as important and idiosyncratic. It melds pedestrian instruments like guitars and pianos with uillean pipes and didgeridoos. It complements the album's wide scope of topics with equally catholic styles. "There Goes A Tenner" bops like an old-world waltz, and "Suspended in Gaffa" nimbly hops around like a harvest dance. Album opener "Sat In Your Lap" hits hard with forceful drum machines, sounding almost like a strand of industrial music. But the album's connecting force is that aforementioned Fairlight CMI, rooting the work firmly in the early '80s.

For better or worse, The Dreaming doesn't sound as time-stamped as other Fairlight alumni, like Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Relax" or Peter Gabriel's "Shock The Monkey." Bush integrates the synthesizer more organically into her soundscapes, though it still clearly registers. The reason it works so well here is its wonderful contrast with Bush's voice, its smooth contours countering her sharp-edged wail. It's also used in lots of different and creative ways, evoking almost as many moods and settings as Bush herself.

The most exciting mix of vocals and music arrives at the very end, with "Get Out of My House." Inspired by Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, the song finds Bush at the height of her sorceress powers. Over her repeated scream of [a door] "slamming," and the driving pound of percussion, Bush manically begs "Get out of my house!" The song is about possession in every sense of the word, and it's a performance as searing as Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance. As the music viciously thrums forward, Bush reveals, "This house is full of my mess/ This house is full of mistakes,/ This house is full of madness/ This house is full of, full of, full of, full of fight." That's just as true of The Dreaming in its entirety, where weirdness is beauty and both those forces are overflowing.

* MP3: "Pull Out The Pin" - Kate Bush from The Dreaming
* MP3: "Get Out of My House" - Kate Bush from The Dreaming [Buy it]

Got my drink and my two-step

2008-07-23T16:40:00.014-04:00

Photo by Matt Handy
Summer is for sequels. From Batman to Hellboy to The Mummy and even to Hamlet, everywhere you turn there's new chapters to old stories. Not to be outdone, Girl Talk is joining in the spirit of the season with a sequel all his own. Sure, Feed The Animals doesn't technically carry that designation, just like Amnesiac wasn't officially called Kid B, but it's pretty clear we're getting a tried-and-true formula here. Sample upon sample engineered for maximum nostalgia, disparate genres gleefully mashed together, the old-school and new bumping heads like a dysfunctional family reunion.

But is that enough? While The Dark Knight brilliantly built new ground on Batman Begins' foundation and hey, at least The Mummy's moving to China, what is Gregg Gillis' new album offering that Night Ripper didn't? (Even his pay-what-you-want release strategy is pretty much a Radiohead redux.) The main (and inevitable) difference here is he's updating us on the last two years of music, reminding us that oh yeah, "Roc Boys" and "Umbrella" were big songs last year. Because his last album was such a pivotal development, I was hoping for something equally singular this time around. Instead, Feed The Animals feels a little too easy, an album that could've just as convincingly been made by a Girl Talk enthusiast.

Of course, the counterargument is that none of that really matters. The point is to have fun, to dance, and to rock out to all the big beats and wacky juxtapositions. Dr. Dre and Styx!? Lil Mama and Metallica!!?! When I disconnect my music-critic circuitry, and just enjoy the songs as songs, it is a helluva lot of fun. And ignoring the existence of Night Ripper and the idea that artists should be continual innovators, it is really well done. Gillis has retained his talent for pairing and paring, and few musicians in any genre can match him in sounding so full-on joyous.

For me, the far-and-away best demonstration of that is "Still Here," a perfect four-minute introduction to Girl Talk at his best. There's so much that works about the track, but just some of its choicest features: the torch-passing tête-à-tête of "No Diggity" and "Flashing Lights," the trunk-rattling "oh shit" snippet from "London Bridge," and the brilliantly bizarre union of The Band and Yung Joc. However, none of that touches its very best moment arriving at 2:10. When Ace of Base's "All That She Wants" collides with "My Drink n My 2 Step" by Cassidy featuring Swizz Beatz, it's pretty much incredible. It's thrilling, fresh and so much better together than either of those shitty songs separately. Even if Feed The Animals does somewhat disappoint as a whole, that moment achieves exactly what a sequel should: it leaves me really excited to see what's coming up next.

* MP3: "Still Here" - Girl Talk from Feed The Animals [Buy it]

The writing on the wall #38

2008-07-23T14:08:00.012-04:00

Montreal edition #12

I have done my time on this one

2008-07-21T00:12:00.010-04:00

Photo by Richard Holt
Leave it to Hello Damascus to try dampening expectations. Their latest title, "Iterative At Best," sounds more like an excuse or an apology. Iterative--meaning repetitive or reiterating--is one of the last adjectives I'd apply to this sad, gorgeous song. But then, this Portland band has always trafficked in modesty and understatement. Their 2006 album, Harvest Dolls, was a slow-blooming wonder, full of soft-spoken melancholy and quiet grandeur. That album's lead-off track, "Randy," didn't just stealthily rend hearts; it was capable of performing quadruple bypasses.

Fortunately, "Iterative At Best" is a worthy successor to "Randy," and the band's best song since. It shares a similar mood--wise but wounded, hopeful but weary. Its lyrics are vague, centering on crime and guilt in some loose existential sense. "I don't need a hearin',/ I have done my time on this one,/ It comes down to who you're with and when," Matt Lounsbury sings like an workaday Atlas. His delivery reminds me of Matt Berninger on some long-lost National B-side, which, around here, is pretty high praise.

Musically, Hello Damascus is operating just as much at the top of their game. Contrasting Lounsbury's soul-searching vocals, the accompaniment brightly sways and struts between verses. Jason Madore's piano and Jeff Hardison's drumming brim with life, nicely accented with touches of warm brass. It's not only the most excitable this four-piece has sounded to date, but also the largest. Every instrument registers its full capacity, making its presence deeply felt. Every woozy melody line and jazzy bridge feels proud and vital.

Ultimately though, the song's best feature is its vast replayability. Like all eight tracks on Harvest Dolls, it only gets better with time and multiple listens. It expands and strengthens, showcasing different winning aspects on different occasions. Sometimes, it'll be the way Lounsbury's bandmates join in on certain lines like the last proponents of a failing cause. Other times, it's that triumphant piano, bravely charging uphill despite its Sisyphean task. Yet other times, it'll be those last few chords, so eager to chug out on a high note. Iterative at best? After twenty-five plays and counting, it sounds more like iterative at its very best.

* MP3: "Iterative At Best" - Hello Damascus
* MP3: "Randy" - Hello Damascus from Harvest Dolls [Download the album]
* MySpace: Hello Damascus
* Previously: Out in front: Hello Damascus MP3s

The writing on the wall #37

2008-07-21T00:03:00.001-04:00

Montreal edition #11

The writing on the wall #36

2008-07-21T00:01:00.002-04:00

Montreal edition #10

The best albums of 2008 so far

2008-07-09T03:36:00.012-04:00

Photo from Josh Nunn
Most years, it's somewhat of a struggle to compose a halfway-there albums list. There are always the far-and-away favorites, but rounding out the total with a worthy ten takes some extra work. Not this year. In fact, the greater challenge was culling the list to just an extended fifteen. And unlike the songs and singles bests-of, this one proved to be more well-rounded and multivariate. Dance and hip-hop works do make a deep dent, but there are also strong showings for folk, rock, soul, pop, and all the bastard hybrids contained therein. There are albums on major labels, indie labels, micro-labels, and even one that's self-released. And the list is almost evenly split between Americans and Europeans. As the music scene continues to splinter and proliferate, it'll be harder than ever to keep track of all of its developments. But if it keeps hitting such varied highs, I'm more than willing to make that effort.

15) Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust - Sigur Ros
In time, I think Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust will be seen as Sigur Ros's transition album. The one where they cautiously starting loosening their structure and inviting more pop sounds in. Even though traces of the ambient Ágætis Byrjun era linger throughout, many of the songs have become noticeably shorter and lighter. It's an tantalizing turn, especially since my favorite tracks here like "Goobledigook" and the incredible "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur" follow the newer model. It really makes me want to hear their full-length take on joyous Icelandic pop, but for now, this album only foretells possible futures.
* MP3: "Goobledigook" - Sigur Ros from Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust [Buy it]

14) Lavalogy - Hot Lava
Some people take antidepressants; I take daily doses of Hot Lava. It's that joyous and that joy-inducing, a bolt of sunshine straight to the cranium. The band's melodies are big and lustrous, with choruses that practically implore you to sing along. The lyrics are silly and surreal, often conflating love, technology and monsters with a toddler's whimsy. And the music shimmies and boogies with tireless joie de vivre like a sock-hop on coke. After a few spins of Lavalogy, it's pretty hard not to feel cheered up, let alone to resist dancing at your desk.
* MP3: "Apple Option Fire" - Hot Lava from Lavalogy [Buy it]
* Previously: You might as well be off to dreamland

13) Santogold - Santogold
* MP3: "Creator" - Santogold from Santogold [Buy it]

12) Jim - Jamie Lidell
Oh, if only Jamie Lidell were a heroin addict with a beehive and a propensity to punching fans. Then maybe he'd be getting the plaudits for giving blue-eyed soul its modern sheen. But even if his mug isn't plastered across checkout tabloids, Lidell's expanding a reliably solid genre to whole new audiences. He melds an old-school devotion with new-school arrangements, backing his croon with refreshingly funky accompaniments. But even as his music bops and bounces in the present, his voice is a ticket back to the heyday of classic soul records.

11) II Trill - Bun B
Fact is, I have trouble putting rap albums on lists like these. My favorite albums are those you can digest from start to finish, without ever once seeking out the skip button. Rap albums, on the other hand, usually operate in direct opposition to that aesthetic. They're overloaded with a mix that ranges from the incredible to the pleasant to the passable to the downright intolerable. (Paging Dr. Carter...) Bun B's II Trill is a pretty classic example of this rule, though his hit-to-miss ratio is impressively high. Knockouts like "Swang on 'Em," "Underground Thang" and the wrenching "If I Die II Night" more than make up for clunkers like "Good II You" and "If It Was Up II Me," totaling an effort that's impossible to skip by.
* MP3: "Swang on 'Em" - Bun B ft. Lupe Fiasco from II Trill [Buy it]

10) Chuckmore: The Mix II - Chuck Dollarsign
Is this even an album? An EP? A single song? At thirty-two minutes and change, it's a little of each, but whatever categorization you pick, it's singularly awesome. Even among Chuck Dollarsign's distinguished back catalog, this recent mix represents a new peak. For its entire run, Chuckmore: The Mix II bangs out straight heat like a New York summer. Seamlessly fusing his electronic, hip-hop, and pop affections, Dollarsign is making dance mixes for now--pluralistic, schizophrenic, and breathlessly ecstatic. Get on this.
* MP3: Chuckmore: The Mix II - Chuck Dollarsign [Visit him]
* Previously: Blood rain
* Previously: Chuckmore

9) The Midnight Organ Fight - Frightened Rabbit
Credit Frightened Rabbit for coining the least sexy euphemism for sex to date and then naming their album after it. Scott Hutchinson has even more cold showers in store when he declares, "You must be a masochist to love a modern leper on his last leg" and "[You] won't find love in a hole,/ It takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm." Fortunately, his crippling loss of self-esteem is our gain, with songcraft that's both potent and virile. With every song, your urge to raise a pint and shake your fist will grow, as Hutchinson's voice soars and every other part of him shrinks.
* MP3: "Old Old Fashioned" - Frightened Rabbit from The Midnight Organ Fight [Buy it]

8) Rising Down - The Roots
* Previously: I I I can't help it

7) Heretic Pride - The Mountain Goats
After the disappointingly limp Get Lonely, John Darnielle charges back with a full-throated return to The Sunset Tree template. It's a further evolution of his latter-day sound, swapping out the lo-fi sound for increasingly pretty orchestrations. Not unlike The Midnight Organ Fight, these are songs that creep up on you and slowly bloom into outsider anthems. The details are rich and crisp, telling stories of fringe characters and sensitive souls freighted with feeling. It's also subtly political, capturing a troubling time and place through the lens of the troubled.
* MP3: "Sax Rohmer #1" - The Mountain Goats from Heretic Pride [Buy it]

6) Third - Portishead
Just think how much has occurred in the last eleven years. Hell, think how much has gone down in only five. That much time out of the musical slipstream usually means you've run out of ideas; a long-delayed comeback usually means your moment has passed by. If acts are lucky, they've waited long enough for the culture to cycle back to nostalgia. But Portishead wasn't content to cannibalize their old sound or go on tired reunion tours. They've not only stepped forward boldly; they've moved well past their peers. Even as Third represents a potent sound of now, it also feels so beautifully timeless.
* Previously: For I am guilty for the voice that I obey

5) Saturdays = Youth - M83
* MP3: "Graveyard Girl" - M83 from Saturdays = Youth [Buy it]
* Previously: We are right to fall

4) Pop-Up - Yelle
It's a happy confluence this album would come out as I was learning French. Even to the uninitiated, the exuberance and joy that Yelle puts into her work can't be missed. And the buoyant dance tunes and Yelle's pop persona are alone worth the listen. But paying attention to the words adds a whole other layer of charm, as Yelle brings as much manic energy to her lyrics. They also suggest a deep debt and reverence to American pop, though with Pop-Up, Yelle is leaping and bounding above her stateside contemporaries.
* MP3: "Amour du Sol" - Yelle from Pop-Up [Buy it]
* Previously: Frappe tes mains, bouge ton corps

3) Lie Down in the Light - Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Contentment should be boring. No one wants to hear how happy or comfortable others are for forty-five minutes, and the idea of framing an album around peaceful feelings sounds pretty excruciating. But Bonnie "Prince" Billy not only masterfully pulls off the positivity, he delivers one of his career bests in doing so. (The other, I'd argue, is Palace Music's Viva Last Blues.) Even as he radiates gladness, he sounds captivating. He dispenses little flecks of wisdom like a rocking-chair deacon. The spare instrumentation echoes him like a congregation. And when he sings, "Every time I look around, I am the king of infinite space," nothing has ever seemed so alluring.
* MP3: "Easy Does It" - Bonnie "Prince" Billy from Lie Down in the Light [Buy it]
* Previously: Good, earthly music singing into my head

2) Made in the Dark - Hot Chip
* MP3: "We're Looking For A Lot of Love" - Hot Chip from Made in the Dark [Buy it]
* Previously: Review #7: Made in the Dark by Hot Chip

1) Rook - Shearwater
Hymns for epic heroes, requiems for civilizations. Now that the stakes are woefully higher, Shearwater's songs have grown even more delicately rendered. The stories Rook tells, via Jonathan Meiburg's lush vocals, are richer sketches of a vicious world. The music has become even more enchanting and special, evoking arias and orchestras almost as much as indie-rock theatrics. This has yielded an album that can't be heard passingly or casually--it requires your rapt attention, and it rewards every moment of investment threefold.
* MP3: "Rooks" - Shearwater from Rook [Buy it]
* Previously: Desert shores and the forest green and a limitless life

Mixtape for my sweetheart, the drunk #23

2008-07-07T01:32:00.005-04:00

1) "Green Shirt" - Elvis Costello and the Attractions from Armed Forces [Buy it]
2) "Miracle Drug" - A.C. Newman from The Slow Wonder [Buy it]
3) "Old Old Fashioned" - Frightened Rabbit from The Midnight Organ Fight [Buy it]
4) "The Music Next Door" - The Lucksmiths from Warmer Corners [Buy it]
5) "I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms" - The Modern Lovers from The Modern Lovers [Buy it]
6) "Summer Vacation" - Desmond Reed [Visit him]
7) "Too Drunk To Dream - Magnetic Fields from Distortion [Buy it]
8) "Parallel or Together?" - Ted Leo and the Pharmacists from The Tyranny of Distance [Buy it]
9) "Don't Ask Me To Explain" - Of Montreal from Cherry Peel [Buy it]
10) "Lovestain" - José González from Veneer [Buy it]

11) "I Want The One That I Can't Have" - The Smiths from Meat Is Murder [Buy it]

12) "Two Ways" - The 1900s from Cold & Kind [Buy it]
13) "I'm A Cuckoo" - Belle and Sebastian from Dear Catastrophe Waitress [Buy it]

Or you can download the full mix as a .zip here.

The best singles of 2008 so far

2008-07-02T18:49:00.025-04:00

Photo from Rob Ireton

To my slight surprise, almost all of my favorite singles of 2008 so far as electronic in nature. No doubt that's due in large part to my changing tastes (you can see the transition occurring here, here, here and here), but it's also due to the renaissance in electronic music taking place over the last few years. Once-marginal acts are getting mainstream attention, and genres are blending to a point of becoming irrelevant labels. In fact, the electronic tent has grown so wide that it's tough to cite too many similarities between the songs listed here. Some are dancefloor-driven, others are quieter explorations, while yet others are uniquely experimental. To me, that breadth of options is a very encouraging development, and I, for one, can't wait to see what's up ahead.

15) "C.Y.O.A." - HEARTSREVOLUTION
* MP3: "C.Y.O.A." - HEARTSREVOLUTION from "C.Y.O.A." EP [Buy it]
* Previously: You say you want revolution

14) "Beeper" - Count and Sinden ft. Kid Sister
Along with The Cool Kids' "Gold and a Pager," this seems to be the year to celebrate outdated technology. If so, I'm looking forward to seeing a A-Trak track called "56K Modem" or a Ocelot club-banger called "Rotary Telephone." If not, we've still got the supremely likable "Beeper" to enjoy. It's got some mid-section verses from Flosstradamus sis Kid Sister, who rhymes just like her name suggests--affable, cute, non-threatening. But it's the chorus that wins me over most, stuttering out "beep-uh-beep-uh-beep-uh" onomatopoetically to the chirp of those dinosaur devices.

13) "U.R.A. Fever" - The Kills
You can practically smell the cigarette smoke wafting from their lips. VV's pharmacy lipstick smeared messily across her mouth, Hotel sweating in a vintage suede jacket. "U.R.A. Fever" sounds grungy, punctuated with wayward noises and a sinister drum machine. Both singers come off as jaded and louche, with VV especially purring out every line like a femme fatale. And when they talk of debauched fates like "livin' in a suitcase" and "eyes like a casino," unlike other performers, it sounds like they know exactly what they're talking about.
* MP3: "U.R.A. Fever" - The Kills from "U.R.A. Fever" EP [Buy it]

12) "Graveyard Girl" - M83
"Graveyard Girl" is a portal back in time, to decorated lockers, gym streamers and bag lunches. Not only is its sound Members Only '80s, but its Goth girl infatuation is an instant callback for quarterlifers like me and Anthony Gonzalez. Every school had its clique of eyeliner-abusing, funeral-ready sulkers, and M83's tribute to them is appropriately poetic and sensitive. "She worships Satan like a father, but dreams of a sister like Molly Ringwald," he says, in one of many dead-on descriptions. Even better at capturing a teenager's overwrought drama: "I'm fifteen years old and I feel it's already too late to live." And just like that, Gonzalez distills a hundred late-night diary entries into one pitch-perfect line.
* MP3: "Graveyard Girl" - M83 from "Graveyard Girl" EP [Buy it]

11) "Motor" - SebastiAn
Surely the most divisive song on this list, "Motor" is four-minutes-plus of electronic noise. Whether that prospect excites you or irritates you, it's hard to remain neutral on a track so proudly in-your-face. French DJ Sebastian Akchoté simulates a motor revving over and over, like some Formula One snippet with the needle skipping. A pounding bass thumps in and out of the mix too, giving the song an additional punch. And it even squeals and creaks as if it's hitting sharp turns. All these effects sound pretty good at my desk, but in a club, speeding out of a powerful soundsystem, is when "Motor" really kicks into overdrive.
* MP3: "Motor" - SebastiAn from "Motor" EP [Buy it]

10) "Wait for the Summer" - Yeasayer
This is the kind of song that they'll use to sell air freshener someday. Much like Royal Caribbean co-opted Iggy Pop's heroin ode "Lust for Life" to peddle cruises, "Wait for the Summer" sounds ripe for misinterpretation. It's gleefully summery, with soaring vocal melodies and a thick appliqué of tambourines. But its happy handclaps can't hide its dark exterior, a Eminem-esque tale of shooting your wife in a drunk stupor and being haunted by her murder. Knowing that story radically recasts the music, not as a celebration but a desperate escape. Not that I expect that should bother the ad execs. Let the bidding wars begin!
* MP3: "Wait for the Summer" - Yeasayer from "Wait for the Summer" EP [Buy it]

9) "Ready For The Floor" - Hot Chip

8) "The Healer" - Erykah Badu
After Baduizm's multi-platinum success, Erykah Badu could've easily shed her weirder eccentricities. Like a political candidate tilting toward the center, she could've Diane Warren-ed it up and offset her quirks with syrupy ballads. Remarkably, she's veered even further off-kilter, getting more anti-commercial with every release. "The Healer" is the best product of that idiosyncrasy (Worldwide Underground the worst), a track that could only have originated from Badu. It's hypnotically strange, unfurling over Madlib's minimal beat and invoking an ideology that's both impenetrable and defiantly personal.
* MP3: "The Healer" - Erykah Badu from "The Healer" EP [Buy it]

7) "Invaders" - DSL
* MP3: "Invaders" - DSL from "Invaders" EP [Buy it]

6) "Paper Planes" - M.I.A.
Everyone lost their shit over "Paper Planes" in 2007, but it wasn't officially released as a single until March. I didn't mind since "Down River" and "Jimmy" were always more my jams anyway. Still, there's no denying this song's luster any more than you can downplay its ubiquity. Acts as acclaimed as Holy Fuck, DFA, Adrock, and Bun B lined up to put their unique stamps on it, and it appeared on virtually every playlist of every party I attended. The only competitor even coming close in indie hype-lah last year was Justice's D.A.N.C.E. Now that the noise has faded, it remains an amazingly addictive track hitting every pleasure center in sight. An oh yeah, guess what, it's got gunshots!

5) "Lovely Allen" - Holy Fuck
This song makes me miss San Francisco. It's the kind of music I'd listen to when I'd set off on long walks to nowhere, exploring Golden Gate Park or Tenderloin crack alleys to a sympathetic soundtrack. But even more central to my wandering was the city's landscape, packed with tremendous hills and dips. Walking up a steep slope, seeing the cyan-sky city unfurl around me, it felt like an epiphany. And that's how I feel about "Lovely Allen," which builds and builds majestically until cresting open into mini-revelations. It's the upward climb to the horizon line, but also the euphoria of learning just how much beauty surrounds you.
* MP3: "Lovely Allen" - Holy Fuck from "Lovely Allen" EP [Buy it]

4) "Je Veux Te Voir" - Yelle
Frankly, Jay-Z's "Takeover" and Company Flow's "Linda Trip" don't come close to touching the toxicity of "Je Veux Te Voir." As dis songs go, this one is so plainspokenly cruel and dismantling that I for one will never mess with Yelle. Tearing apart Cuizinier of Parisian hip-hop group TTC, she opens with "avec ton petit sexe entoure de poils roux/ Je n’arrive pas a croire que tu puisses croire qu’on veuille de toi." (Roughly: "With your tiny dick surrounded by red pubes,/ I can't believe you can believe anyone wants you.") From there, she compares his member to a French fry, calls him a Li'l Jon fan mimicking American rappers, and even advises, "Garde ta chemise, ça limitera les degats, batard." ("Keep your T-shirt on, it'll limit the damage, bastard.") And on top of all that, the song samples "Short Dick Man." But the very worst revenge? Making "Je Veux Te Voir" so poppy and playful that it became a huge single.
* MP3: "Je Veux Te Voir" - Yelle from "Je Veux Te Voir" EP [Buy it]

3) "Royal Flush" - Big Boi ft. Andre 3000 and Raekwon
In my more skeptical moments, I think the reason I love "Royal Flush," "Int'l Player's Anthem (I Choose You)" and "Da Art of Storytellin' Part 4" so much is the law of supply. With Big Boi and Andre 3000 trickling out tracks so painfully piecemeal, diehard fans like me will take whatever we can get. And of course, it's easier to obsess over a certain track when you only have that track. Still, even in perspective, both of Outkast's last at-bats have all been unqualified home runs, standing up to the best of the group's catalog. "Royal Flush" finds this "Skew It On The Bar-B" reunion easily continuing the win streak. All three men rhyme like rappers hungry for fame rather than established legends, and their flows mesh as perfectly as ever. It almost makes me wish Outkast tracks would only appear in six-month intervals.

2) "Creator" - Santogold
It was my #5 song of 2007, and time has done nothing to blunt its frenetic goodness. From its intro, where Santi White emotes like a cat in heat, to the chorus, where she punches out every word like a phonetics exercise, the vocals on "Creator" are exactly what this song requires. They're brave, they're bizarre, they're unapologetic. Switch and Freq Nasty's beat steps up to the challenge, matching Santogold's prickly weirdness with their own bells-and-whistles. Their production slinks and seesaws through a gauntlet of electronic effects, merrily tossing in every trick in the book. And so "Creator," an anthem for all the artists coming up, ultimately pays the biggest tribute to its own up-and-coming stars.
* MP3: "Creator" - Santogold from "Creator" EP [Buy it]

1) "Machine Gun" - Portishead
Stand back or run for cover. This is "Machine Gun"'s moment, a glorious endpoint for these endtimes. Effortlessly synthesizing industrial, pop, avant and electronic, it draws on the past to decimate the future. With every malevolent snare, drum slap, and rat-a-tat-tatting machine, it lays waste even as it mourns the fallout. Beth Gibbons has never sounded more gorgeous, trying to eulogize her own self-destruction. But even she can't survive the heavy shelling occurring around her. The last minute becomes purely instrumental, led by a synthesizer singing a dirge. Like Gibbons, it sounds conflicted, unsure whether to continue the bloodletting or accept an inevitable surrender.
* MP3: "Machine Gun" - Portishead from "Machine Gun" EP [Buy it]
* Previously: For I am guilty for the voice that I obey

Up next: The best albums of 2008 so far

The best songs of 2008 so far

2008-06-27T15:54:00.025-04:00

Photo from Corey Meredith

Another half-year is through, and I'm feeling pretty hopeful. Thus far, it's been a promising six months with lots of great music originating from all sorts of sources. If you've been willing to put in the effort and diversify your tastes, rich rewards lurk in just about every niche. As this list of song list attests, my ear has been largely tuned to electronic and hip-hop in 2008, both of which are showing encouraging signs of life. Hip-hop in particular is on track to have its best year in a while, with great work coming from all over the map. Since I usually find the second half of the year even stronger, there's good reason to believe 2008 will go down as an excellent and far-flung chapter in the annals.

15) “Golpe de Estado” – Immortal Technique ft. Temperamento and Veneno
When Felipe Coronel trills his r's, you can almost feel the venom flecking off his tongue. His rage is so immense, it practically pounds out of the speakers. There's nothing subtle about his delivery or his topics, no room for misunderstanding. This is hip-hop at its most nakedly didactic. It's a protest speech delivered through a megaphone, a punch simultaneously directed to the gut and the brain. Though political rap has largely languished during Immortal Technique's long absence, with "Golpe de Estado," Coronel makes up for lost time. He pronounces every word like it's the last he'll ever get. He doesn't spit fire, he exhales it, incinerating any motherfucker dumb enough to stand in his way.
* MP3: "Golpe de Estado" - Immortal Technique ft. Temperamento and Veneno from The 3rd World [Buy it]

14) "Philly Codes" - Nico the Beast ft. Zilla Rocca and 2ew Gunn Ciz
Although I recently devoted five fat paragraphs to it, that still wasn't enough to point out everything I like about Nico the Beast's "Philly Codes." For one, I didn't get to mention Alex Wood's limber, spirited production, which gives the track a lot of its momentum. It's a full-bodied beat, loaded up with stirring claps and flourishes, but one that never distracts from the three able rappers. Another feature I didn't mention enough is the chorus, which finds Nico tough and territorial as ever but also allowing a nice touch of sentimentality to peek through. If I had more room, I'd also reiterate in greater depth how powerfully Zilla and 2ew Gunn Ciz rock their verses, but once again, "Philly Codes"'s positives just can't be contained in the space allotted.
* MP3: "Philly Codes" - Nico the Beast ft. Zilla Rocca and 2ew Gunn Ciz from No Beast So Fierce [Buy it]
* Previously: Home of the cheesesteak, the beef piled sky high

13) "Back It Up" - Feadz ft. Spank Rock
* MP3: "Back It Up" - Feadz ft. Spank Rock from Ed Rec Vol. III [Buy it]
* Previously: And do that stuff that your mama calls smut

12) "Dirty and Hard" - Djedtronic ft. Spoek
Just above everything you need to know about French DJ Djedjotronic's "Dirty and Hard" is right there in the title. It's steered by a messy, grubby groove, the aural equivalent of hangover bedhead. And it bangs reliably under your feet, full of deep bass and slip-and-slide electronics. Add in South African MC Spoek's flow, which is essentially just one long, satisfying hook, and "Dirty and Hard" feels like a dancefloor dream. Because this song's designed to get you grinding and sweating, it'll definitely get you dirty. As for the second part, well, I guess that's up to you.
* MP3: "Dirty and Hard" - Djedjtronic ft. Spoek [Visit Djedjtronic] [Visit Spoek]

11) "Hoobity Blah" - El-P
"Settle down, skipper, that's so September tenth of you," sneers El-P on the opening track of his tour-only mixtape. He's clearly mocking the fat-headed politicians and pundits who offer similar lines with straight faces, who try sparking culture wars with jihadist zeal. But it's also a middle finger to the rappers who act oblivious and don't speak to their times. In contrast, El-P rhymes like he hasn't slept a wink since that dark morning. He's become our bleary-eyed prophet, our sign-waving James Cole, presaging hell around every corner. It's clear he's been irreparably affected by current events, after seven years still bravely voicing a damage so monstrous and fantastic.
* MP3: "Hoobity Blah" - El-P from Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixx2 [Buy other El-P]
* Previously: Get it poppin' like epileptics on bubble wrap

10) "Wrestlers" - Hot Chip
Although IDM (intelligent dance music) typically refers to such acts as Orbital and Aphex Twin, I think the genre label would fit Hot Chip more aptly. After all, the London quintet is as smart as they are smart-alecky, thumbing their noses and grinning madly through much of Made in the Dark. Their song "Bendable Poseable" is as much about their malleable aesthetic as anything else, and "Wrestlers" is even more on the nose. "Hit you in the sweet spot," Alexis Taylor sings right before the music obliges with a viscerally pleasing riff. Like its subject, "Wrestlers" is all about theatricality, agility, and bouncing goofily from corner to corner. Sure, it's mostly one colossal joke, but under all that showmanship, there's also serious technique on display and even some glimpses of real pain.

9) "Home Life" - Shearwater
* Previously: Desert shores and the forest green and a limitless life

8) "Wedding Ring" - J-Direct
A delicious slice of hip-hop cheese, "Wedding Ring" finds J-Direct MC Fitzgerald in full loverman mode. "I don't lack lust, that's a cute brunette,/ I'm all over that thing with my wet palate," he croons at a bar like a last-call lothario. But what could be a simple tale of a one-night-stand grows into a terrific dialogue full of intimate details and real-life desires. It gets better and better with every line, reminding me of other great give-and-takes like "I Got A Man" and "You Got Me." It culminates with the perfect chorus, in which Fitzgerald proclaims the cause of his lust: "Your wedding ring keeps turning me on, ah-ah-on ah-ah-on." Paired with Jason Griffin's clever sample of The Flaming Lips' "All You Need Is Now," the song is hilarious, sexy, honest, and most surprisingly, oddly poignant.
* MP3: "Wedding Ring" - J-Direct [Buy other J-Direct]

7) "Mecca and the Ox" - Vast Aire ft. Vordul Mega
Dueces Wild's main accomplishment is making The Cold Vein look even better by comparison. The first way it does this is by being a mostly mediocre album with mostly mediocre production. But the other way is having "Mecca and the Ox" as its high point, a song that sets up a mini-reunion of heyday Can Ox. Reunited, the pair complements each other with strong back-to-back verses and some sharp rhymes. It's not so much yin and yang, as yang piled on top of more yang, which sounds even better to me. Now if only someone could tell Vast how to spell "deuces."
* MP3: "Mecca and the Ox" - Vast Aire ft. Vordul Mega from Dueces Wild [Buy it]

6) "20K Money Making Brothers on the Corner" - Re-Up Gang
* MP3: "20K Money Making Brothers on the Corner" - Re-Up Gang from We Got It For Cheap, Vol. 3 [Buy it]

5) "Get Busy" - The Roots ft. Dice Raw, Peedi Crack and DJ Jazzy Jeff
Outgunning Jay-Z's "99 Problems," "Get Busy" is the best song Rick Rubin never produced. It's got his trademark boombox thump, that hard rock vibe with the hip-hop attitude. Or as Black Thought puts it, "part Melle Mel, part Van Halen." But The Roots don't stop at mere homage and even with masterful production. Like the overachievers they are, we also get Black Thought and Dice Raw at their most ferocious, some old-school scratch samples from Jazzy Jeff, and best of all, a brilliant verse from Peedi Crack. He's freewheeling and light-hearted where the other two rappers are heavy, proving there's more than one way to kill a killer beat.

4) "Driving Down The Block" (Remix ft. Bun B, Pusha T, and the Cool Kids) - Kidz in the Hall
* MP3: "Driving Down The Block" (Remix ft. Bun B, Pusha T, and the Cool Kids) - Kidz in the Hall from The In Crowd [Buy it]
* Previously: Crank up my alpine, and my bass crazy kickin' it

3) "Swang on 'Em" - Bun B ft. Lupe Fiasco
If the "Drivin' Down The Block" remix is my go-to jam for suburban joyrides, "Swang on 'Em" is my essential song for walking down the street. I know, I know, most people don't need a soundtrack to cross a sidewalk, but it's really their loss. With my oversized headphones draped like earmuffs and my Ray-Bans on, nothing gets my heart rate revving like this pop-rap stunner. From the brassy drumline beat to its bouncy meter, from Bun B's blustery confidence to Lupe Fiasco's stealth-genius guest spot, "Swang on 'Em" has loads of energy to spare. Every time I put it on repeat, it ensures I'll wind up miles from home.
* MP3: "Swang on 'Em" - Bun B ft. Lupe Fiasco from II Trill [Buy it]

2) "We're Looking For A Lot of Love" - Hot Chip
Hot Chip's always been about modulation, but Made In the Dark finds them slowing their pace more than ever. Four full songs feature their weird take on pop-soul ballads, with "We're Looking For A Lot of Love" being the marvel of the lot. "You see me everywhere," Alexis Taylor sings, somewhere between the Four Tops and Flight of the Conchords. "I see you in my boots and in my hair." That's a bizarre admission for a love song, but the ache in Taylor's voice sells it as eerily true. Lately, it even has me revising my policy on Hot Chip's slower tracks. Whereas I once skipped past them to get to the dance songs, "We're Looking For A Lot of Love" has become the destination I'm racing to reach.
* MP3: "We're Looking For A Lot of Love" - Hot Chip from Made In The Dark [Buy it]

1) "Vanished" - Crystal Castles
I used to be one of the cynical masses, sneering at remixes as lazy cash-grabs. Tinker slightly with the beat or slap on a few extra verses, and you can stick it on a fifteen-dollar import single. But if I've learned anything from doing this blog (dubious but possible), it's that remixing is just as delicate and vital an art as songwriting. "Vanished" is the perfect example, transforming a decent Van She song into sonic gold. Just by altering the beat and expanding the musical sections, Crystal Castles makes "Vanished" exponentially more gorgeous. Compared to the original, it glitters and swaggers with whole new life. I can't imagine any song sounding better in 2008, but just in case, I'm going to wait for the remix.
* MP3: "Vanished" - Crystal Castles from Crystal Castles [Buy it]
* Previously: Come see the city with me

Up next: The best singles of 2008 so far

Let their kingdom come tonight

2008-06-26T12:13:00.014-04:00

Shearwater @ Club Lambi, 6-22-08

"Leviathan, Bound"

"Century Eyes"
* MP3: "Rooks" (Live) - Shearwater from Live on University of Minnesota's Radio K
* MP3: "Leviathan, Bound" (Live) - Shearwater from Live from University of Minnesota's Radio K [Buy Rook] (MP3s via The Torture Garden)

Listening booth #38

2008-06-26T02:53:00.013-04:00

Photo by opobs

* MP3: "No Love" - SoKo [Visit her]
* MP3: "Mi Viejo" - Ratatat from LP3 [Preorder it]
* MP3: "A Cause Des Garçons" (TEPR Remix) - Yelle [Buy other Yelle]

You can check out more of Mike's photography here.

Behind the blog: The Torture Garden

2008-06-24T16:52:00.015-04:00

Like many of you, I first stumbled upon The Torture Garden while in search of hardcore fetish photography. When my disappointment finally subsided, I realized the website I'd found might be even better. Despite its blatant lack of wooden pony torture, here was a MP3 blog that combined lovely music with lyrical writing, captivating imagery, and a clear commitment to quality. You can sense the enthusiasm and passion its author Shane invests into every post. You can hear the evidence of a well-defined aesthetic in his song selections. And you can witness the creativity and thought that so eloquently separate his site from the multitudes of others--both pornographic and otherwise. Here's my conversation with the man behind the blog:

Nerd Litter: Hey.

The Torture Garden: Hey.

NL: So to kick things off, why did you originally start your blog?

TTG: Well, I knew I liked writing, and I thought it might be an interesting outlet (though it took months before I actually started writing properly on it). I was also a fan of several MP3 blogs, and I knew I liked the idea. It was pretty much on a whim.

NL: Which ones were you reading when you started out?

TTG: Most of them are defunct now. I read a lot of You Ain’t No Picasso and Take Your Medicine, the old Nothing But Green Lights, and Gorilla Vs. Bear. Stereogum too, I think. But also lots of little ones that are gone now.

NL: When I started out, I thought there was, like, five music blogs and decided, oh, well I can be the sixth. I really had no idea what I was doing.

TTG: Same here. There was a pretty nice sense of community between ten or so of us, before we realised how many there really were.

NL: What's interesting though is your early posts champion music I could still see you liking today. Do you think your tastes have changed as a result of writing The Torture Garden?

TTG: I'd say so. A bit. I'm definitely more discriminating. There are bands I would have had more time for back then, whereas now I sometimes neglect bands that I feel I've heard before. That isn't always the best move, but I'm happy with the ways my taste has changed.

NL: What would be the best way for a band to get your attention today? What would guarantee a post on your blog?

TTG: It varies. A band that writes an interesting email, has some links or a MySpace page I can check out. It really all depends on the first music I hear from them. Sometimes I know immediately and sometimes I get a feeling I'll like the band before I hear them, based on what they say. They have to be self-deprecatingly witty obviously.

NL: Are there particular genres or styles you find yourself gravitating toward posting? Is there a characteristic sound?

TTG: I think there is. I definitely like slightly Romantic stuff. Emotional without being pompous or overdramatic. The band that comes to mind right now is The Luyas—I loved them the first time I heard them. They’re earnest but fun at the same time and original.

NL: How did you find out about them? And where do you find out about most of your bands?

TTG: I think I downloaded a bunch of music one day, from blogs and emails, and played it all at once at night. Then I searched my inbox to see if The Luyas had written to me, and as I was searching, I got an email from them. That was very nice. I find out about bands I like from friends first—online and off—and blogs.

NL: What blogs are you reading today that you really like?

TTG: Well, Said the Gramophone is probably my favourite in lots of ways—their writing is always interesting and sometimes beautiful—and my taste overlaps with theirs very often. Perhaps suspiciously often. That Luyas MP3 I first heard was from there incidentally. I like blogs that can convince me with good writing to download a song by a band I've never heard. Gorilla vs. Bear can do that and Mike at NBGL and Lost In Your Inbox too.

"It's a real kick in the pants from God."

NL: How has your blogging changed over the last three years? How has your approach to it changed?

TTG: I've gotten both better and lazier. As in, I often try to put more effort into the writing and the music I pick, but I don't seem to post as often.

NL: Well, your house was on fire, right?

TTG: Yeah, that was this week. That's exactly the kind of thing that hinders blogging, man.

NL: Can you elaborate on what happened a little?

TTG: Last Halloween, some kids threw fireworks into my parents' backyard, and the heating system exploded. Three rooms were destroyed. So we tidied up, and renovated the house, and moved a lot of things into the attic. And this last week, some electrical fault in the entirely new attic went wrong and the whole attic went on fire. The smell of smoke here is pretty awful.

NL: Is it possible your mother is really just a pyromaniac?

TTG: I had considered it, but all her matches and fireworks were lost in the last fire, so she's in the clear on this one.

NL: Ha right. Well, I’m sorry to hear about the damage. Did you lose anything irreplaceable?

TTG: Yeah, pretty much everything personal that my parents own. It was their bedroom. The worst bit is that this new room had just been finished the day before. It's a real kick in the pants from God.

NL: That's pretty terrible. I would consider an igloo next.

TTG: Good advice, apart from that whole global warming thing. On the plus side at least, the fire brigade knew their way around the house, and went out of their way to minimise water damage.

NL: I suppose that's a plus.

TTG: Yeah, we’ll be okay.

NL: I hope so. While we're talking about home, tell me a little about Berlin and Ireland. What brought you to Berlin first of all?

TTG: Well, the course I'm just finishing at university here required a year spent at a uni abroad and my girlfriend lives in Berlin, so I got to live there for a year while studying. That was until last summer. It was such a great year, I'm planning on moving back there in October or so.

NL: What about it attracts you?

TTG: It's very far away from Ireland. That can be pretty attractive. My girlfriend lives there. And I get to do so many more things: go to concerts every week, stay in pubs as late as I like, speak German which I can actually do these days.

NL: Why can't you do those things in Ireland? Other than the speaking German.

TTG: Well, I go/went to college in the second biggest city here, Cork, which is really great but just can't compete. Bands on tour very, very rarely stop there, though it has a pretty fine music scene for its size.

NL: Oh, I see. Yeah, I guess that's the advantage of New York. Although the amount of choice can be pretty stultifying sometimes.

TTG: That's what I miss about Berlin. Stultification.

NL: This band I went to see was telling me this rule that bad towns make for great shows. Because the kids are just so happy to have them there. Whereas in a big city, everyone’s too busy to care.

TTG: That sounds very familiar. Cork is a lot like that. Sometimes I would go see a band I half-knew just because a good gig was rare, whereas in Berlin I would get lazy. “Meh, Low will come around again.” And I still haven't seen Low.

NL: What are you studying at uni?

TTG: Language and Cultural Studies, which basically means German and History with the emphasis on German. I quite like it. Liked it.

NL: Are you ready for school to be over?

TTG: That's a tough question really. I'm definitely going to miss it, but I’m looking forward to seeing what happens. Whatever that is.

NL: Plus, God is telling you to leave home. That's a pretty strong endorsement.

TTG: Yeah, he's getting ever less subtle.

NL: What’s something you think your readers would be surprised to learn about you?

TTG: That's a good question actually. I don't really know. Umm… fuck. I swear a lot, but maybe that's not a surprise.

NL: I had a sense.

TTG: Shit, really?

NL: Yeah, I’ve always imagined you foul-mouthed, but maybe that's because I picture every Irishman that way.

TTG: It's a fairly accurate stereotype, I must admit.

NL: And I never did before, but I've just decided you look like Conan O'Brien.

TTG: Ha. Way off. Only in the way that all slightly Irish men look distinctly rough. Rough diamonds. Hmm… I have a beard.

NL: That’s somewhat surprising.

TTG: Although, considering the Nietzsche and Mirbeau thing, maybe not.

NL: I have a moustache. It started out ironic, but now I can't even tell anymore. Maybe it's the most sincere part of me at this point.

TTG: Wow, irony can get really confusing sometimes. I honestly don't know why I have a beard. I've had it for years. Maybe I couldn't afford a razor.

NL: Is it a Nietzsche-esque affair? I kind of want a Nietzsche moustache, but my follicles won’t oblige.

TTG: Good god, no. Well, it depends what I've been up to. There was a moment mid-studies where I looked pretty haggard. I get called different names depending where I am. In Berlin, I'm told I resemble the young Marx. Here, it's Jesus or Bobby Sands. I'm not convinced.

NL: Okay, I've Googled Bobby Sands and I now know what that means. You have to keep in mind I’m an ignorant American.

TTG: They're all dead, hated, and followed by weirdos. I mistakenly turned up to a fancy-dress party one night. I got a bit of a speech from a drunken nationalist. Oh, Ireland. Drink and nationalism don't mix very well. Maybe that's why I like Berlin. Much easier.

"Yeah, I'm nostalgic for a country
that can't exist anymore."

NL: Tell me about some of your favorite albums this year.

TTG: One CD I just bought is Samamidon's album. It's a fine CD. Actually, it's brilliant. And I love Michael Knight's new record. Samamidon plays new arrangements of old folk songs. A lot of immigrant songs. They're amazing. Michael Knight is an Irish musician living in Berlin. His album is pretty spectacular. It's a little epic in a pop brokenhearted way.

NL: Let's talk about Shearwater for a minute.

TTG: Let's.

NL: Holy shit, it's good. Okay, now you say something.

TTG: It really, really is. I hadn't even heard the last record.

NL: I wasn't that into Palo Santo. I loved the first few songs, but then it trailed off for me at the tail-end. Whereas this one, I can't break its hold on me.

TTG: I know. It just keeps turning up in my head. Various bits of different songs on the album.

NL: Now that I think about it, Rook fits pretty neatly into your description of The Torture Garden's sound. How did your interview with them come about?

TTG: I was lucky enough to get help with some answers to the questions from a very nice woman at Matador. Not a very romantic answer, I'm afraid… I did send the questions by carrier pigeon to the Falklands though. The carrier pigeon was named John. I think that's important.

NL: It will be noted. I hope Jonathan Meiburg sent back a parrot that squawked all his responses.

TTG: Nah, he sent a fuckin’ albatross with a CD strapped to its back. It looked kind of painful.

NL: He sounds like a supervillain. An indie version of the Penguin.

TTG: He does have a song about the fall of mankind due to birds. Unless “Rooks” isn't about avian flu.

NL: It only confirms what I’ve suspected all along. All birds are evil and want to peck out our souls.

TTG: Wow, this interview really went off track.

NL: Not really. I had all these observations written in advance. Tell me about some of the books you've been reading lately.

TTG: I've been catching up on reading since I finished college, though I am going through the last of Victor Klemperer's diaries. He was a German Jew living in Dresden during the Third Reich. His books are phenomenal. His best one is called LTI. It's about the Nazi abuse of the German language. I did my history dissertation on it. I also just finished The Gathering by Anne Enright. She won the Booker this year. It's really great. Very bleak but very good and reassuringly Irish. I also recently read The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien, which is brilliant.

NL: What does reassuringly Irish mean?

TTG: Sometimes when I was reading it, whatever little detail she mentioned reminded me of something I had always seen but never noticed. Especially stuff from my childhood that no one sees anymore. A lot of it is set in the past. The country has changed quite a bit. My friends and I get pretty nostalgic sometimes. I think it's a lot more like that than it was twenty years ago.

NL: Sounds like America. Except I'm not nostalgic for Reagan either. I’m probably nostalgic for an America that never existed.

TTG: Yeah, I'm nostalgic for a country that can't exist anymore.

NL: Have you been to the US?

TTG: I have. A super tourist holiday about seven years ago to Florida. It was weird. It was November and Disney World was pretty quiet and the airports were very surreal. The atmosphere was odd somehow, but I really liked it. I'd love to go back, especially to New York. Never seen it.

NL: Yeah, Orlando is probably not the best encapsulation of America. Though I'm not sure what the hell would be.

TTG: I think I'd like New York. It's probably the most like Berlin anyway. Maybe more conservative.

NL: There are few places on this planet less conservative than Berlin.

TTG: Yeah, I really loved that aspect of it.

NL: But New York and San Francisco are certainly our great liberal bastions. We’re like Europe’s ears taped to America’s face. What is Cork like, other than unexciting?

TTG: It's not that bad. It suffers from being just a bit too far from Dublin. I had some great times there, and there is a lot of fun to be had. It's spectacularly multicultural, more so than most Irish towns or cities, Dublin aside. And it's beautiful in a lot of places. Apart from the lack of gigs, and the general issues with Irish cities, it's great. I guess I just often compare it to Berlin.

"I just think that song is great enough
to conceivably shake all your opinions
about music. Or at least this music."

NL: Right. Speaking of Berlin attitudes, the first Google result for "torture garden" is something that bills itself as "the world's largest fetish club."

TTG: Yep. Sometimes, I worry. Living in the small town I am in right now for the summer, where my parents live, I worry the people in the post office will start Googling it, and form a bad opinion of me.

NL: I imagine a lot of people get misdirected trying to find you.

TTG: Oh, they do. The search terms can be brilliant sometimes. I now know what wooden pony torture means. I don't think I'm any better off for it though.

NL: In that case, I'm not going to ask.

TTG: Please don't.

NL: What are some of the most gratifying responses you've gotten from musicians or readers?

TTG: Well, whenever anyone writes to let me know they liked something, that's really great. And when I posted about Samamidon, I made some pun like “the unbearable lightness of being apart,” which is kind of awful but also kind of nice. And sometimes he draws cartoons on his site, so he drew one about the unbearable lightness of being a duck and left the link in the comments. That was pretty cool.

NL: Didn't Grizzly Bear also put up your girlfriend's artwork on their MySpace photos?

TTG: Yes, they did! Ed really liked it. Her artwork is a big hit on various MySpace pages. Timothy Dick loved the one she did for “Florence." That was his MySpace image for a while.

NL: That's impressive. I like creative people approaching other creativity. It’s like one big Kumbaya circle at an artist’s retreat.

TTG: Quite like what MP3 blogging can be about.

NL: Yep, it’s one big circle-jerk of back-pats. What do you think The Torture Garden has in store for the future?

TTG: I'm looking forward to having more time for it. Much more time. And more stories maybe. I had my 600th post recently and kinda forgot about it. I've just been so busy.

NL: Congrats on the milestone. What got you this far?

TTG: I guess I just like writing. That's why I post less: I try to keep the writing interesting, which isn't as easy as just talking about some song and how you found it.

NL: I can relate. Not to sound like an old man, but blogging's current state is getting depressing. Blogs should be about isolating what's special, but with the twenty thousand out there, there's less selectivity and more noise than ever.

TTG: It's probably as easy to get people to read a blog that's basically just an aggregator, or an echo of what people like than one that could stand without the music if it had to.

NL: That’d be an interesting experiment. If MP3 blogs couldn't post MP3s. Which ones would still be worth reading? I’d still read yours for instance. I've been migrating away from those genres more lately, but I still often enjoy the stuff you post.

TTG: I'm glad. I like the fact that I never necessarily know what I might download from yours.

NL: Right, although I wonder if that’s detrimental to readership. Sometimes, I think I should just cover one thing very narrowly. Like, say, all Bryan Adams all the time.

TTG: That would get you a very dedicated readership. And it would take the pressure off with regard to writing clever stuff.

NL: I really have an urge to post that Three Musketeers song with Sting and Rod Stewart: “All For One, All for Love.”

TTG: God, I think that was #1 here for half the year.

NL: If that is not the greatest song of the ’90s, I will eat my hat. I’ll eat my moustache. On that note, do people in Ireland generally like good music? Or is the radio complete shite like it is here?

TTG: It's pretty shite here too, I'm afraid. Probably mostly the same stuff. There are a lot of good Irish bands, though we also have a pretty shameful tradition of hugely successful manufactured bands to excise. I'm hopeful.

NL: Who are some of the good ones?

TTG: Cathy Davey, for one. Her album is phenomenal.

NL: I knew you were going to say that! And next, you’re going to make a case that Arcade Fire is somehow Irish.

TTG: Well, Richard Reed Parry does have quite a lot of red hair. You can't argue with science. Also, they’re freakishly popular here, like more than anywhere else possibly.

NL: One day, you'll have to explain to me why Neon Bible isn’t crappy.

TTG: Three words: “Ocean of Noise.”

NL: So you concede the rest of the album is crappy?

TTG: I do not. That song is just spectacular.

NL: Hold on, let me listen to it right now.

TTG: I just think that song is great enough to conceivably shake all your opinions about music. Or at least this music.

NL: The other day, I listened to Funeral, because I'm currently in Montreal. I wanted to see if it made more sense out here.

TTG: And?

NL: Surprisingly underwhelming. The hype has somewhat destroyed it for me, although I was never that wowed to begin with. Some albums that everyone loves, I just feel strangely little for.

TTG: I can't listen to it that much anymore, because when I first had it, I played it for about six months straight before getting sick of it.

NL: Okay, after refreshing my memory, I’m reluctant to tell you what I think of this song. But I’ll also give you three words, one of which is hyphenated: late-era Springsteen Xerox.

TTG: God.

NL: I know, I'm sorry. I mean, they did make their Springsteen adulation pretty explicit and maybe that’s colored my impression of the album.

TTG: I don't hear it on this song really. It's the brass that gets me.

NL: No, I will say the music isn’t bad. It’s the lyrics and vocals that make it tough for me. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone down this road.

TTG: Maybe not. It could end badly.

NL: At heart, I just hate whatever's popular, so you can take solace in that. Ask my roommate how sad I was when The National started getting glowing reviews for Boxer.

TTG: But man, I can't bash Boxer or even Alligator.

NL: Yeah, it’s best not touch Alligator in my presence.

TTG: Their new DVD did leave a bit to be desired, though I love La Blogothèque. It was just too much of nothing going on.

NL: Agreed on both counts. As for Vincent Moon, I like when two things I really like also like each other. Like the fact that the guys in Menomena and The National are friends also makes me happy. And I’m sure this Nerd Litter/Torture Garden crossover will send some hearts aflutter. So one more question, Shane: what's the best part of doing what you do? What still makes it worthwhile?

TTG: Well, I really, really, really like it when I do it well. When I write something good, something I would read again. There are about ten posts I’m quite very fond of (1, 2, 3), just because I think I wrote something nice. When that happens, the feeling I get is exactly why I enjoy it so much.

* MP3: "Saro" - Samamidon from All is Well [Buy it]
* MP3: "Dumb Blood" - The Luyas from Faker Blood [Buy it]
* MP3: "And The Party Was My Suggestion" - Michael Knight from I'm Not Entirely Clear How I Ended Up Like This [Buy it]
* Previously: Behind the blog: Blogs are for Dogs
* Previously: Behind the blog: Shake Your Fist
* Previously: Behind the blog: The Passion of the Weiss

The writing on the wall #35

2008-06-24T16:02:00.001-04:00

Montreal edition #9

The writing on the wall #34

2008-06-23T21:06:00.012-04:00

Montreal edition #8

Underground legend

2008-06-22T20:58:00.005-04:00

A few weeks ago, I was walking around my neighborhood photographing graffiti. In front of the mural I'd planned to shoot, I found a unicyclist doing tricks. He was pulling off some pretty amazing maneuvers, and after I stood there gawking in admiration for a while, we struck up a conversation. Turns out his name is Sam Haber, and he has numerous videos documenting his unicycle acrobatics. Impressively, the movies are almost as good as the moves themselves, sharply filmed, well-edited and exciting to watch. With talent like this, I think it's fair to say Sam Haber isn't just a unique athlete--he's singlehandedly reinventing the wheel.

NYC - "Session 1"

"Natty Street"

"The Triton"

"Back in the Game"

You can check out more of Sam Haber's work at Uneed Films and his Vimeo channel here.

Desert shores and the forest green and a limitless life

2008-06-18T02:45:00.014-04:00

Art by SkyShaper
Last year, I wrote about the decline of mystery. It led off a discussion of one of my favorite albums, Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece, but it's also a topic I've been thinking about generally ever since. In this era of accessibility, so few albums are willing to risk being just a little inscrutable. Whatever they have to offer is laid bare on the first few listens, and repeat spins rarely yield anything new. There's no slow bloom of songs unveiling their layers. There's no sense of something lurking beyond the horizon line, just out of reach.

That's why I'm so thankful for Shearwater's recently released Rook. In just over thirty-eight minutes, it's an album that feels refreshingly epic. It's not just a collection of songs, but a genuine song-cycle with overarching themes, recurring images, and an arc of moods. It eludes as much as it evokes, often venturing into the realm of myth and allegory. The music is beautifully impressionistic too, rising and ebbing like symphony suites. Lush strings swell into the action, the woodwind sections flutter up weightlessly, and Thor Harris' drumming alternates between urgency and omen.

In fact, in spite of the oft-repeated (and deserved) comparisons to Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, the album Rook reminds me most of is Veedon Fleece itself. Like Van Morrison, lead singer Jonathan Meiburg knows how to wring the most out of his voice's upper range. Like his predecessor, the bulk of his lyrics address the strange, often transformative overlaps between nature and human nature. Both write vividly about anti-heroes, dreamers, and wayfarers, one part Romantic poet for every two parts rock musician. And most significantly of all, both inject serious doses of mysticism and mystery into their works. In a telling tip-off, Meiburg acknowledges the debt by starting "Home Life" with the opening line from Veedon Fleece's "You Don't Pull No Punches, But You Don't Push The River": "When you were a child, you were a tomboy."

"Home Life," like Morrison's song, is the longest track and one of the album's key centerpieces. The song opens with a girl looking out of her window, conjuring up the world's possibilities. "You were tracing the lines of the globe with your fingers--/ Cool rivers, white waste, desert shores, and the forest green/ And a limitless life/ In the breath of each tide and the bright mountains rising," Meiburg sings at the threshold of revelation. His voice swims up like plumes of smoke; a gentle dulcimer and shy piano sound perfectly matched together.

With every verse, Meiburg expands his scope as the music follows suit. The girl comes of age, witnessing how destructive humanity can be. But in a turn toward the fantastic, she also receives her destiny at a river's edge: "'You are bound to your life like a mother and child,/ You will cling to your life like a suckering vine,/ And like the rest of our kind, you will increase/ And increase past all of our dreaming.'" It sounds hopeful at first, full of bounty and prosperity. But the more I hear it, the more it also takes on sinister connotations--confinement, overgrowth, and, with the vine imagery, expanse at the expense of other life. Even after my fortieth listen, the lines still haven't become any less beguiling or revealing. The only greater mystery is how Shearwater managed to produce songs this thrillingly limitless.

* MP3: "Home Life" - Shearwater from Rook [Buy it]
* Website: Shearwater

Video Tuesday #54

2008-06-17T13:15:00.000-04:00

"Hit and Red"
Ghislain Poirier

"Tell Me"
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

"Hey Ladies"
Beastie Boys

"Mirando"
Ratatat

"Another Day"
Jamie Lidell

"Ladies of the World"
Flight of the Conchords

The writing on the wall #33

2008-06-17T13:10:00.001-04:00

Montreal edition #7

* Previously: The writing on the wall #22
* Previously: The writing on the wall #21
* Previously: The writing on the wall #20
* Previously: The writing on the wall #19
* Previously: The writing on the wall #18
* Previously: The writing on the wall #17

Still I walk in darkness

2008-06-16T04:16:00.011-04:00

Photo by Emiliano Stefanelli
The first thing you'll probably notice about Daniel Clay is his voice. Crisp and smoky, it has a richness reminiscent of other folk singers like Danny Schmidt or Horse Feathers' Justin Ringle. Throughout The Protestant, it also sounds assured and unwavering, a transmission of the faithful. But on Clay's collection of railyard ballads and backroad hymns, all kinds of doubts sneak in even as his register rises. In the most startling example, he sings, "Though I claim your name, I curse it every day." Though that should sound like blasphemy, Clay's earthy timbre somehow still sells it as devotional.

Those lines comes from "You Prepare My Way," the best example of Clay's mission. It treats religion not as some paint-by-numbers salvation, but a path equally fraught with challenge and reward. Casting himself as a wayward follower, Clay thoughtfully explores the many contradictions embedded in modern belief. But like his choir-boy delivery, the structure he uses to do this is both surprisingly traditional and thematically ingenious. Guided by a simple guitar strum and a recurring melody, every lyric connects to the next like a psalm or a scripture. His opening verse, "Though I walk in darkness, I will fear no evil.../ Though I fear no evil, I still cry and tremble.../ Though I cry and tremble, I refuse your comfort.../ Though I refuse your comfort, still I claim your name," is an especially poignant look at the contours of faith.

It's important to remember the second meaning of "protestant" when listening to this album: one who protests. Before Protestantism became the dominant Christian body, it was an alternative, a reformation to the bloat and corruption of Catholicism. Today, in the age of megachurches and million-dollar televangelists, Clay seems to again be advocating a return to deeper, more meaningful purpose. On his most overt confession, the closer "Zion," he sings, "I can see no difference between Christians and consumers,/ I can tell no difference between the preachers and public officials,/ I can see no difference the Bibles and billboards.../ I can tell no difference between my neighborhood and the kingdom." Even at his most critical, he sounds reverent and hopeful that things will change for the better. Whether or not we ascend to heaven, he seems to say, the meek have a lot of work to take up here and now.

* MP3: "You Prepare My Way" - Daniel Clay from The Protestant
* MP3: "Zion" - Daniel Clay from The Protestant [Buy it]
* Website: Daniel Clay
* MySpace: Daniel Clay

Home of the cheesesteak, the beef piled sky high

2008-06-13T12:32:00.016-04:00

Photo by pwbaker
Rap is about place, pure and simple. More than any other musical genre I can think of--more than blues, more than jazz, more than country--it absorbs and documents the world around it. You can find that geography in sound, from the manic loopiness of Yay Area hyphy to the languid drawl of Houston's Chopped and Screwed to the hybrid house-thump of Baltimore's club scene. Even more likely though, you'll hear rappers flaunting their hometowns in their lyrics like they were sitting members of the Chamber of Commerce. It's not just a point of pride however; because rap is so often rooted in autobiographical nostalgia, the cities aren't just settings for stories but become full-on characters themselves.

Think how impossible it would be to disassociate Nas from "coming outta Queensbridge," the Roots and their Illadelph half-lives, or Lil Wayne and his "lost city of New Or-leans." Kanye West even literally personalizes his city's streets on "Homecoming," rapping: "I met this girl when I was three years old/ And what I love most, she had so much soul/ She said, 'Excuse me little homie, I know you don't know me,/ But my name is Windy, and I like to blow trees.'/ And from that point, I never blow her off." But more often, you discover the smells, sounds and sights in the sharp details rappers convey, such as Talib Kweli's iconic offering on Black Star's "Definition": "Brooklyn, New York City, where they paint murals of Biggie/ In cash we trust 'cause it's ghetto-fabulous, life look pretty/ What a pity, blunts is still fifty cents, it's intense/ Tree scents is dominant, can't be covered with incense."

"Philly Codes," off of Nico the Beast's new solo album, No Beast So Fierce, is another potent example of civic boasting at its best. In keeping with the brotherly love theme, Clean Guns' Nico gets assists from fellow residents 2ew Gunn Ciz and Zilla Rocca, to rep his South Philly stomping grounds. 2ew Gunn Ciz wastes no time on his guest spot, laying out his intentions with this really smart pronoucement: "If it ain't the P on the fitted, you get it in the flow/ I paint my city's pictures like I'm Vincent Van Gogh/ So I don't make albums, I create a art show." Zilla also rocks his time on the mic, delivering one of his very best efforts to date. It's hard to isolate just a few good lines, but his observation, "City sleepin', row homes, phone lines squeezin',/ After twelve, you'll find a parking spot the same time you find Jesus" is especially precise and terrific.

Lines like that also help reveal just why hometown hip-hop is so often so well-done. Because rap can veer too abstract, vague or general, speaking about specific streets and specific eras forces rappers to get particular. It enables them to tell vivid, memorable stories using all the information they intimately know. Consider this part of Nico's verse, where the toughness he generally brags about in the chorus gets a closer look: "Men will respect you here/ Eventual death is here/ Sent to the resting plot, what you expect to hear?/ The mayor is crooked too/ And he does a look at you, like, 'Where the fuck you from?'/ Maybe they'll take your jewels." With just that brief section, he provides a pretty deep characterization of Philly--everyone, it seems, from the underclass to the top officials, has to hustle to get by here.

That weird complexity is another reason that hometown hip-hop is worth hearing. In one breath, a rapper indicts his city for its shortcomings and failings, while in the very next, pledges his proud allegiance. But it also rings true, capturing the uneasy process of coming-of-age and staying alive in some of America's roughest urban centers. When Nico observes, "Heart of the city: strong,/ Dark and it's shitty, y'all/ The projects here are pretty raw./ The jungle is hot and waiting/ And tenants are not complacent/ Our menace an occupation/ Awaiting the population," he's evoking all the tough experiences that have brought him this far. You can hear the weight of knowledge but also the profound admiration in every line he spits. That South Philly has shaped so much of his character is clear, but the fact that he, along with Zilla Rocca and 2ew Gunn Ciz, imbues Philly with so much character is the real tribute.

* MP3: "Philly Codes" - Nico the Beast ft. Zilla Rocca and 2ew Gunn Ciz from No Beast So Fierce [Buy it]
* MySpace: Nico the Beast
* Previously: 2-1-5, prepare for glory
* Previously: Regarded as great: Clean Guns MP3s
* Previously: Good, clean fun: Clean Guns MP3s

Around the world #9

2008-06-11T14:57:00.008-04:00

Art by Jan Von Holleben, from Ruby Mag
* Weiss goes from L.A. to the L train with his Best "Indie" Songs to Get An Asymmetrical Haircut To mixtapes (No hipster). [The Passion of the Weiss]

* Attention Brooklyn girls: this is how all of you will be dancing by next year. [YouTube]

* Chris asks lots of famous musicians to name their favorite albums of '08 thus far. In related news, not a single one of them has ever heard of Nerd Litter. [Gorilla vs. Bear]

* A cool retrospective of fifteen artists featured in Ruby Mag's previous issues. [Ruby Mag]

* Reading Nabokov in The New Yorker!? Why, you're just a monocle away from being an elitist! [The New Yorker]

* A great interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, where he touches on listening to Leonard Cohen and hitchhiking across America. [The Paris Review]

Video Tuesday #53

2008-06-10T21:38:00.003-04:00

"The Rip"
Portishead

"I'm Good, I'm Gone"
Lykke Li

"Council Estate"
Tricky

"Hummingbird"
Caribou

"Lay and Love"
Bonnie "Prince" Billy

"Toejam" (NSFW, sort of)
The BPA ft. David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal

Listening booth #37

2008-06-10T14:45:00.005-04:00

Drawing by Jason Das
* MP3: "Bump" (JAPATTACK! Big Time Remix) - Spank Rock from GET REAL PHILLY NOW: Remixtape Volume 1 [Download the mix] [Visit JAPATTACK!]
* MP3: "Summertime Runaway" - Mas y Mas [Buy other Mas y Mas]
* MP3: "Our Time" (Tom Neville Remix) - Ocelot from Scion CD Sampler 21: IHEARTCOMIX Remixed - Franki Chan Mixtape [Download the mix] [Visit Ocelot]

Check out more great art by Jason Das at Gas Water Nothing.

The writing on the wall #32

2008-06-09T20:31:00.010-04:00

Frappe tes mains, bouge ton corps

2008-06-06T16:24:00.006-04:00

Photo by Joana Linda
Yelle's "Amour Du Sol" could be thirty seconds long, and I'd still love it. In that first half-minute, it charts a mood more inviting than most pop songs manage in four minutes. Warm, bubbly synths sweep in first, to the syncopated chime of robo-bells. Soon, Yelle's voice trickles into the mix, singing "amour" over and over with the same layered affect. That one word echoes under reverb, sounding remarkably optimistic and pure for something so studio-driven. It's not just a song about being in love; it feels like we're hearing someone falling in love.

When the intro cedes to the main beat, "Amour Du Sol" becomes more conventional but no less winning. Yelle, otherwise known as 25-year-old Breton singer Julie Buidet, delivers every line like a slumber-party teen singing into a hairbrush. Her enthusiasm's unflappable, and pairs nicely with the giddy electronics pogo-ing beside her. She's so confident that she adopts a sort of hip-hop cadence for the verses. And lyrics that might sound ridiculous in English ("Devant toutes mes copines, on va bouger nos 'ass'," which roughly means, "In front of all my girls, we're gonna move our asses") sound downright winsome.

At the two-and-a-half-minute mark, the song moves into a bridge that sounds something like a Brazilian parade route. A percussive Latin beat leaps with renewed vigor, as a whistle pipes out the catchy chorus's melody. It's another unexpected detour, tweaking the pop standard even as it pledges its allegiance to the genre. Though the bridge only lasts twenty-three seconds, it leaves a lasting impression much like the intro. It confirms that Yelle knows how to maximize her moments, transforming every measure into a labor of love.

* MP3: "Amour Du Sol" - Yelle from Pop-Up [Buy it]

Montréal

2008-06-06T15:00:00.006-04:00

Get ready for daily reports of Celine Dion's chest-thumping and Spencer Krug's moustache progress, because I'm in Montreal for the next three months! That's right, from here on out, it's going to be a wacky, poutine-glutted, Unibroue-fueled, graffiti-intensive tour into that friendly Quebecois capital I like to call France Jr. You'll get a front-row seat as I stroll the seedy boulevards and try to figure out why hockey is interesting. You'll watch in awe and vicarious enjoyment as I get a tattoo of Win Butler's face (complete with lyrics to "Crown of Love," natch) down the length of my back. You'll kindly but firmly tell me to stop when I put up nothing but AIDS Wolf for weeks and weeks. And of course, you'll rock out with me when I post the bouncy, charming wonder of Ariane Moffatt's "Montréal" to announce that's where I'm spending this summer.

* MP3: "Montréal" - Ariane Moffatt from La Coeur Dans La Tête [Buy it]

Mixtape for my sweetheart, the drunk #22

2008-06-05T20:53:00.004-04:00

1) "The Partisan" – Leonard Cohen from Songs From a Room [Buy it]
2) "Fille à Plumes" - Malajube from Trompe-L'œil [Buy it]
3) "Sea Foam" - Land of Talk from Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP [Buy it]
4) "Blazin’" (Modeskeletor Remix) - Ghislain Poirier ft. Face-T [Buy other Ghislain Poirier]
5) "A Bit of You" - Rufus Wainwright from Rufus Wainwright (Japanese edition) [Buy it]
6) "Non Stop" - We Are Wolves from Non-Stop Je Ne Plie en Deux [Buy it]
7) "The Radio’s Hot Sun" – Handsome Furs from Plague Park [Buy it]
8) "Singapore Slang" – Call Me Poupée from Western Shanghai [Buy it]
9) "Do The Knife Fight" - The Unicorns from Three Inches of Blood [Buy other Unicorns]
10) "Needy Girl" (DatA in Beverly Hills Remix) – Chromeo [Buy other Chromeo]
11) "Throw it on a Fire" - Bell Orchestre from Recording a Tape the Colour of Light [Buy it]
12) "Mange Avec Tes Doigts - Les Georges Leningrad from Sangue Puro [Buy it]
13) "Are You Swimming In Her Pools?" – Swan Lake from Beast Moans [Buy it]

Or you can download the full mix as a .zip here.

Good, earthly music singing into my head

2008-06-04T16:39:00.013-04:00

Photo by Reinfried Marass

Swaths of green are rolling past my window. Shining lakes and gem-blue waterways are gliding by. The train's pulling into Ticonderoga, and all the distance holds are a few squat hillside homes. It's been a long time since I've seen a small town; after a year-and-a-half in New York City, I'd almost forgotten that neon and skyscrapers and subway rattle aren't inevitable parts of the landscape. Out here in the upper scoops of the state, it's almost scarily quiet. Just as I think I'm about to adjust, the train chugs back into gear and shuffles on toward the next station.

On my way up north, I've been listening to Bonnie "Prince" Billy's Lie Down in the Light on repeat. It's been the ideal travel companion, not only soundtracking my trip but heightening it. Sure, it sounded magnificent in my apartment to begin with, but here, it's damn near awing. Like my scenery, it's a testament to spareness and space, to simplicity and the essential. Stripped down, gentle, and unhurried, the album often resembles an ode to small-town American life. As Will Oldham blissfully states in the aptly named opener, "Easy Does It," "There's my brothers, my girlfriends, my mom and my dad/ And there's me, and that's all there needs to be."

Throughout Lie Down in the Light, Oldham projects that same steady air of peace. It feels as if he's fought his battles, and now he's content with whatever meager victories they've yielded. I get that same sense from the music, which mostly strums and sways placidly beneath him. It's backed up by many of his lyrics too, which come off not just as wise but reverent and biblical. "Well, the glory goes to those who do not seek it," he intones solemnly on "You Remind Me of Something." Later, on "Missing One," he mourns a lost love with a near-saintly acceptance: "[M]y fullfillment will be to do what I do/ as you taught me to."

Like all of Oldham's projects, throughout his various incarnations, Lie Down in the Light isn't a genre project. It's primarily informed by country music, but it'd fit as awkwardly on Music Row as, say, Neko Case. It has a strong rooting in folk as well, both in the traditional version and its more avant mutations. I even think back to old pop ballads during Oldham's soaring duets with Ashley Webber, a welcome inheritor of Dawn McCarthy's The Letting Go vocals. But the most glaring change, and one of the most affecting, has to be the closing hymn, "I'll Be Glad." Concluding with an choir, and featuring Oldham at his most triumphant, the song sounds like front-porch gospel, Thoreau by way of Kirk Franklin. Listening to it over and over, I look out at the weathered roofs and quiet roads of upstate towns, and everything ahead of these atheist eyes feels holy for a minute.

* MP3: "Easy Does It" - Bonnie "Prince" Billy from Lie Down in the Light
* MP3: "I'll Be Glad" - Bonnie "Prince" Billy from Lie Down in the Light [Buy it]
* Previously: Today I started celebrating again: Bonnie "Prince" Billy MP3s
* Website: Bonnie "Prince" Billy

The writing on the wall #31

2008-06-04T15:21:00.004-04:00

The writing on the wall #30

2008-06-04T11:19:00.014-04:00

Five Pointz edition #7

Blogiversary #2

2008-05-27T11:17:00.006-04:00

Photo by John Wu
So yeah, Nerd Litter turned two on Sunday. Since its inception, it's grown beyond its humble origins as a furries enthusiast site into the proud behemoth you see before you today. I'd be lying if I said I didn't appreciate the many backstage groupies, bedazzled tourists shaking my hand on the G train, and semi-weekly Meetup groups that have sprung up to celebrate this site. I can only imagine what the coming year will hold, but as long as it involves many graven idols of my likeness and sweeping the Bloggies, I'll be a satisfied man.

And now, without further ado, here's a self-congratulatory look back at some (okay, most) of my favorite posts from the last year:

June: The best 10 singles of the mid-year, The best 10 songs of the mid-year
July: The best 10 albums of the mid-year, I'll sleep when you're uploaded #2, The greatest #5: Dummy, The writing on the wall #19, The thick of it, One of these days I'm gonna be a big noise
August: It's winter again and New York's been broken, Review #6: Kala by M.I.A., Behind the Blog: Blogs Are For Dogs, Everybody, just clap your hands, The greatest #7: Veedon Fleece
September: Thank you very much, and for now, siyonara
October: Kuala Lumpur series
November: Oh God, I miss you, This Is England
December: Saigon series #1, The best 30 songs of 2007, The best 30 singles of 2006, The best 30 albums of 2007
January: Angkor Wat series
February: Review #7: Made in the Dark by Hot Chip, 51 Birch Street, 2-1-5, prepare for glory, The best 15 films of 2007, The writing on the wall #24, The greatest #7: "On the Nature of Daylight", Mixtape for my sweetheart, the drunk #19
March: Guilin series, Way down in the hole
April: Darkness in my heart: an interview with Dan McGee, For I am guilty for the voice that I obey, Blood rain, Come see the city with me
May: Mixtape for my sweetheart, the drunk #21, I I I can't help it, Crank up my alpine and my bass crazy kickin' it

Huzzah. Here's to at least another year of highly illegal activities!

Get it poppin' like epileptics on bubble wrap

2008-05-25T13:15:00.001-04:00

Photo by Bastian

Listen up, because this is what the opening track to a hip-hop album should sound like. Never mind that it opens an exclusive 500-copy tour-only mix (yeah right, not these days), because El-P can't be stopped. He's a one-man sonic bulldozer. He's a killbot without an off-switch. He stomps out hard and fast on "Hoobity Blah," with enough bluster to back up his blistering productions. Sure, we've heard grotesque soundscapes like this before, on high points like "Smithereens (Stop Cryin')" and Cannibal Ox's "Ridiculoid," but the chaos still feels painfully relevant here. The drum machines crash down like riot gear on jawbones; the electronics spike and writhe like thousand-volt electrodes clamped to sensitive areas. And in a deft new touch, a jazzy High Water (Mark) piano line ebbs in and out like the last innocent bystander. It's Stravinsky's Peter and the Wolf by way of Hieronymous Bosch.

El-P also rhymes viciously, attacking hard and often like a man with a vendetta. He sounds especially confident on "Hoobity Blah," wasting no time or breath. Or as he blithely asserts at one point, "I'm more than just confused; I'm an asshole." He definitely spits enough bile to make a convincing case, but I think another line comes closer to the truth. Toward the end of the track, he says, "I'm lovin' it, I'm lovin' it, I'm lovin' it" like a McDonald's jingle malfunctioning. And for all the vitriol, paranoia and bravado, he really does sound infatuated. For his decade-plus run in the rap game, he still sounds enchanted by the way his words fit together and his beats beat down all comers. From the first verse, from the first note, he sounds like he's found his place--wholly comfortable but never complacent.

* MP3: "Hoobity Blah" - El-P from Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixx2!! [Buy other El-P]

Crank up my alpine, and my bass crazy kickin' it

2008-05-22T16:23:00.016-04:00

Photo by Ryan Andrew Mihalyi
I don't know how to drive. I couldn't give proper directions down a one-way street. I failed my exam in near-record-time when I almost slammed into an oncoming car. And as my friend Sarah will happily tell you, her favorite nickname for me is 'Ol Two Legs. Yet when I hear the Pusha T-Cool Kids-Bun B remix for Kidz in the Hall's "Drivin' Down the Block," all I want to do is run out and buy a car. Any car as long as it's got a punishing soundsytem and fridge-sized subwoofers to pump this anthem at full blast. And if it happens to come tricked out with some 22-inch rims and vintage tailfins, hey, all the better.

No wonder the song sounds so good: "Drivin' Down the Block" was already a sturdy leadoff single from Kidz in the Hall's mainstream-tilting The In Crowd. With its Tribe Called Quest shoutout, ATLiens callback, and indie-crib of Nelly's nursery-rhymes singalongs, it's an eager, earnest, if slightly too calculating, attempt at a hit. Its chorus, sampled from Masta Ace's "Born to Roll," is just about perfect too, a simple, bass-heavy beat designed for windows-down blaring. Still, as likable as the song is, the remix manages to improve on it dramatically. By keeping its essential features and upgrading with a few choice extras, the remix is the souped-up premium series to the original flavor's economy-class model.

Most striking are the guest turns, who bring a jolt of confidence and personality to the track. It's weird/brave that Kidz in the Hall would bring in the Cool Kids, considering they're so often compared and so similarly named. Kidz' MC, Nawledge, has also been getting some Clipse-without-the-coke callouts, so the appearance of Pusha T is another odd/interesting choice. All of them together either sound very consistent or kinda homogenous, depending on your perspective. I happen to think they fit together really well, especially since everybody seems intent on dropping strong, smart, to-the-point verses. And of course, it helps that there's also the palate-cleansing interruption of America's favorite trump card, Bun B.

It's refreshing/disconcerting that regional differences in hip-hop have been erased to the point of obliteration like this. Whereas rappers used to beef about turf, they're now content to invite guests on tracks almost irregardless of reasoning. The most egregious example was last year's "Hello Brooklyn," which had Lil Wayne inexplicably paying homage to Jay-Z's native borough. Another bizarre (and better) recent pairing found Dizzee Rascal and UGK comparing notes on what it means to be a transatlantic gangsta. Because Bun B's appearance on "Drivin' Down The Block" is nowhere near as strange, his gruff Southern slang and hard-edged presentation provide a sharp, welcome contrast to the other rappers. It's novel without being a novelty, a well-placed rumble strip to keep heads awake.

Since car culture seems to transcend hip-hop divides, it's fun to see how different artists respond to the same basic cue. For Pusha T, his ride becomes a status symbol housing all his other labels; for Bun B, it's a vehicle to obtaining endo, chickenheads and candy paint. On a separate remix, El-P presents his car as cage, yet another tracking device and institutional deathtrap trapped in the grid. (It would've been more effective if he hadn't already done it even better last year on "Drive.") It'd be cool to see how other iconic rappers imprinted their own versions, getting, say, an freewheeling auto-erotic fantasia from Ghostface or a nostalgic, R&B-hooked cruise down Marcy Ave. from Jigga. Whatever else may follow it though, this current remix is already guaranteed a spot on my 2008 summer rotation. I'm sure it'd sound fantastic thumping out of a speeding convertible, but for now, it even kills on two legs and a bus pass.

* MP3: "Drivin' Down the Block" (Remix ft. Pusha T, Bun B and the Cool Kids) - Kidz in the Hall from The In Crowd [Buy it]

Around the world #8

2008-05-21T15:50:00.005-04:00

Photo by Bryan Derballa

* Bryan goes to Israel and brings back some incredible photographs and stories from his trip. I was in Israel in January, and now I just feel embarrassed. [lovebryan] (via Fecal Face NYC)

* Just one more reminder of why I miss San Francisco so much: twelve kilometers of city-sanctioned insanity. [San Francisco Chronicle]

* Greencine's festival coverage is once again excellent and thorough, with a roundup of all the Cannes action. Some of the films I've been keeping an eye on include The Headless Woman, Ashes of Time Redux, 24 City, Soi Cowboy, and Waltz with Bashir. [Greencine Daily]

* Errol Morris pens a potent essay about Sabrina Harman's smile to go along with his potent new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure. [New York Times]

* Pull up a lawn chair, put a mini-umbrella in a cool drink, and enjoy this spring mix from the Round Table Knights. [The Fader]

* Or better yet, get in your pants, eat some crisps, and enjoy season five of Peep Show, the best Anglo export since The Office. [YouTube]

Mas y mas y mas y mas

2008-05-20T18:05:00.021-04:00

Mas y Mas, America's fourteenth best band, played up in Brooklyn on two consecutive weekends. They were touring the East Coast in honor of the vinyl release of Proud Sponsors of Pepsi, their debut full-length and my tenth favorite album of 2007. They promised to give me a free copy, but they never did, so now those fucks are all dead to me. Here are some highlights of the festivities:

Trash Bar, 5-10-08

"Hi"

"Raises Questions"

"Rock So Tough"

"Out of It"

Death by Audio, 5-17-08

"Hi"

"Pepsi"

"SIDS"

"Rock So Tough"
* MP3: "DC Instead" - Mas y Mas from Proud Sponsors of Pepsi
* MP3: "You Can't Play Without Ice" - Mas y Mas from Proud Sponsors of Pepsi [Buy it]
* Website: Rock So Tough
* Previously: Mas y Mas @ Trash Bar 8-24-07
* Previously: Rock so tough: Mas y Mas MP3s
* Previously: Filed under beautiful genius: Mas y Mas MP3s

The writing on the wall #29

2008-05-20T13:38:00.012-04:00

Five Pointz edition #6

Listening booth #36

2008-05-16T11:13:00.009-04:00

Art by Chris Goodwin
* MP3: "Machine Gun" (Zilla Rocca Remix) - Portishead [Visit Zilla] [Buy Portishead]
* MP3: "Leviathan, Bound" - Shearwater from Rook [Preorder it]
* MP3: "Underground Thang" - Bun B ft. Pimp C and Chamillionaire from II Trill [Preorder it]

Check out more of Chris Goodwin's work on Flickr and at his website.

And do that stuff that your mama calls smut

2008-05-14T16:54:00.023-04:00

Photo by Micah Carmody
Dance music should be dumb. It should be dirty and visceral and commanding--in short, it should make you want to dance. Feadz' "Back It Up" covers those bases from the outset, opening with chords that boom like warning shots. Spank Rock's assist on the track is just as eager to please, declaring apropos of nothing, "You a down-ass bitch, you a down-ass bitch, you a down-ass bitch." Those unsubtle choices won't surprise anyone who's heard Feadz or Spank Rock before, but somehow, the combo works perfectly here. Feadz's boundless energy gives Spank Rock's horny come-ons new spark, and Spank Rock's garish lines make the song that much more memorable.

Even as an instrumental though, "Back It Up" would make an excellent dance track. For all its crowd-pleasing tendencies, the beat features lots of great, even nuanced choices. The way it ramps up, building from slower, more percussive verses to jittery, hyperactive bridges, keeps it exciting throughout. The little electronic bloops it randomly tosses in add some nice variation and fun extra textures. And I love the way it progressively incorporates new elements into the structure, like a snowball rolling down a mountain. It's stupid, ass-shaking music done intelligently, and it sounds miles ahead of your average club banger.

But Spank Rock also does his bar-raising part by bringing his own crypto-intelligence. All his pronouncements come off like simple instructions for ass-shaking ("Here we go again: bend. You need to back it up now"), but they could just as easily be metacommentary. As Spank Rock implores the audience to bend, the beat obliges with key changes and contortions in pitch. As he tell us to back it up, his vocals loop back on repeat and first-verse techniques get reprised. Even the catchiest suggestion, "And do that stuff that your mama calls smut" takes on another meaning, as the beat becomes more sexual on command. And of course there's the title too, winkingly hinting you head back to this song as soon as it's over. Between the extremely dynamic music and fun throwback rap, the irresistible summons to the dance floor, and the interplay of idiocy and smart calls, you'd be dumb to turn it down.

* MP3: "Back It Up" - Feadz ft. Spank Rock from Ed Banger Records, Vol. 3 [Preorder it]