Mixtape for my sweetheart, the drunk #26

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

The writing on the wall #42

So many things that get me angry

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

Montreal edition #15

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

I 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. II The natural intersection between dance as ambient and ambient as dance. III The score for an hour-long meteor shower. IV 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. V A proof of Newton's First Law of Motion. VI 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. IX Spangly. X A cheerleading routine choreographed by methheads. XI 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

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

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

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

Come on over, turn me on

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

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]