September 08, 2009
I translate the Bible into velociraptor
Started working in an office last week, something which I thought I'd never do again. Not much sounds good right now except this:
A song I've listened to perhaps 200+ times in the few years since the Avalanches posted it on their website. I know it takes a while to clear samples, etc., and I'm surely no expert on intellectual property law and copyrights, but really, you'd think the modern process wheels could be greased by record company money. Been almost nine years since Since I Left You. Even Daft Punk's quicker.
Posted by Kevin at 10:11 PM
August 27, 2009
Can I Interest You in Walnut, Teak, Ash, or Beech?
Pas/Cal - Cherry Tree (Suite Cherry pt. 2)
I don't know how this record didn't become more popular. What a great title!: I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura. What tremendously catchy songs! This album is like an indie pop Ulysses--the band hops from style to style, and all the sounds are so painstakingly rendered and recorded. It's pleasing and rich. Casimer's lyrics are both clever and funny. I will never not love this song, which is pretty close to being flawless, I think. Reminds me in a weird way (via its tiny perfection) of the Joseph Brodsky poem, A Polar Explorer:
All the huskies are eaten. There is no space
left in the diary, And the beads of quick
words scatter over his spouse's sepia-shaded face
adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek.
Next, the snapshot of his sister. He doesn't spare his kin:
what's been reached is the highest possible latitude!
And, like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude
queen, it climbs up his thigh: gangrene.
Buy "I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura"
Buy Joseph Brodsky's "To Urania"
Posted by Kevin at 01:28 PM
August 24, 2009
Techno Dude-Pop Goes Dada
Not to cast aspersions on this young Minnesotan's artistic efforts, but, wow, is it just me or do these lyrics seem manufactured out of the tossed-off lines and unmetered verse of the past decade's most maudlin emo/meaningfulcore/turbo-earnest songs? To me, it's as if this dude behind Owl City spent a whole lot of time studying and analyzing Hallmark greeting cards, Chicken Soup for the Soul books, Dashboard Confessional albums, and Ben Gibbard's lyrical and vocal 'style,' then wrote some shit down in his Moleskine notebook, recorded some bloops and bleeps, and sang, and whispered, and sang. The first time I heard this, I wondered whether or not this song even meant anything to the guy who wrote it--the lyrics are so nothing, so impersonal and devoid of personality, it's almost as if he were using the cut-up technique of Burroughs or trying to make a lyrical collage, etc. Maybe that is the case and I'm not giving the song enough credit. It's more likely that he's just imitating his favorite artists in the course of trying to find his own songwriting voice, and probably every young artist has to struggle with that.
The more interesting question, to me, is one of substitution. This band's music, right now, seems like it could serve as substitute music for the fans of Postal Service who, by all accounts, will be waiting a long time for another P.S. album. And there are many other bands like this, surely--I remember Muse initially being hyped as a perfect stop-gap for Radiohead fans when that band was in its pre-Kid A cocoon. The Swedish band Starlet was supposed to be a nice Belle & Sebastian replacement. If I remember right, Kingsbury Manx was oddly compared to Elliott Smith (they toured together, but still). Some of these bands (Kingsbury Manx, Muse) have grown out of that pigeonholing, and some have not (Starlet? I don't even know if they still exist). It'll be interesting to see whether Owl City becomes its own thing or just stays on this Gibbard-biting trajectory.
Posted by Kevin at 08:25 PM
August 12, 2009
Avocados of Affection
Down in FL again, momentarily (for a week). Some things on the horizon: Mount Eerie & DFW; Dentist's Office Mix (Prayer Against Cavities); the definitive analysis of Black Eyes ex-members' new bands. For now, check out Donald Barthelme's reading list/syllabus, annotated somewhat for the Believer by Kevin Moffett, a great, funny writer himself.
Posted by Kevin at 03:14 PM
July 28, 2009
Intermission (moving again)
Ra Ra Riot - St. Peter's Day Festival
Beulah - The Battle Cry of the West
Moving from FL to PA this week. Lots of sweating to do! And driving. If you've never had a crisis of identity and really want to, hop in your car and drive for 17 hours in any direction. I assure you that the experience will make you question yourself in crazy, otherwise unimaginable ways. Every time I make the drive from Florida to Pennsylvania, there's a point, maybe 3/4s of the way through, when I ask myself in delirious earnestness, Who Am I? (this is usually after taking a nap at a rest station, etc.). When I arrive home, I always feel like I've been trapped in a sensory deprivation tank. Three song mix, all good & salutary in their own ways.
Posted by Kevin at 05:20 PM
July 24, 2009
"Like Buddha" is my least favorite simile
Haruomi Hosono & Tadanori Yokoo - Hum Ghar Sajan (from Cochin Moon)
Everything must be on the internet now, as Jaime said, because I was finally able to find this album, Cochin Moon, that I've been searching for longer than I care to remember. The story behind this LP, as I understand it, was that Hosono took a trip to India and came back so inspired that he wrote the soundtrack to a non-existent Bollywood movie. This track in particular is a good example of Hosono's meshing of his own weird sounds with classic Indian pop song features, e.g. this is very much like something you'd hear in a movie like Dil Se or Lagaan (maybe not) re-recorded by Black Dice circa their Miles of Smiles EP. More on this later.
Posted by Kevin at 03:46 PM
July 21, 2009
What Happens to Teeth, Motherfucker--
Many are probably familiar with that first track, Dream City, which bites just a tiny bit on T. Rex to my mind (esp. the beginning), but probably not with the second (and arguably better) track, Get Real. That Hockey Night album, Keep Guessin (on Lookout Records, I think), is a total gem. Although when I first heard it (after hearing the Free Energy track in May), I thought, wow, sounds like the singer really loves Malkmus a whole lot. But he doesn't sing like that in Free Energy now, at least not in the three tracks of theirs I've heard. What happened? I'd like to know. Perhaps Paul Sprangers grew supremely tired of being hit with the Malkmus tag and decided to sing in a totally different way. I've been thinking about this a little bit lately--the effect of criticism on an artist's development (mostly b/c of something John Banville said in this cool interview he gave for the Paris Review)--and the emergence of Free Energy as a bizarro classic rock band after the break-up of Hockey Night might be a good example of an artist's aesthetic trajectory being altered severely by the feedback he (they?) receives. I suspect, for no justifiable reason, that that third, unreleased Hockey Night album might've shown some more weirdness/individuality than is evident in the stuff that's being released in the lead-up to Free Energy's Stuck on Nothin' (or maybe not).
You can download Hockey Night's Keep Guessin here.
Posted by Kevin at 08:15 AM
July 19, 2009
Sir G.: girdle-wearing badass.
This feels like something the Green Knight would have listened to in order to get pumped up for an elective beheading. On his (green) in-helmet mp3 player. I suspect you'd have to choose your pre-decapitation music very carefully, since you'd want to get yourself psyched, but you wouldn't want to be so pumped up that you get wild and preemptively chop off the other person's noggin. Does it even matter though, if you're a magical knight and can just pick your shit up from the ground, dust it off, and ride away? This is the kind of thing I think about when I go for a long run, in a sort of exhaustion-delusion state.
[BUY]
Posted by Kevin at 08:36 PM
May 15, 2009
The Steeliest of Dans, the Juniorest of Boys
I can't remember when I heard this track for the first time (maybe near the end of January), but it has stuck with me for five months, and there is almost nothing that sticks with me for that long any more, that demands so much attention. I don't think a week has gone by when I haven't listened to this album (Begone Dull Care) or this track. It's hard for me to pin down exactly why that is though--it's surely superficially catchy (viz. the music-box tones that oscillate throughout the track; that deep, systolic percussion), but it's also intensely thick (there have got to be like sixty fucking instrumental tracks on this thing, the way the loops interact with each other is unbelievable--they're like those submarine rivers that run along the bottom 90% of the ocean: dense, powerful, circulative). A lot of my affection for this song centers on that gut-punch at 2:43, when Greenspan sings "Don't say goodnight/No/don't say goodnight" and that lovesick bass rolls into the foreground. The two halves of this song are like two different versions of the protagonist in transformative teen movies, e.g. that first part = good, but shy and unsure, then second half = showing up at the prom with sweet, cosmopolitan hair, total fuck-what-everyone-else-thinks-I'm-amazing confidence, and improbably hot dance moves. This song almost makes me long for the whole family of burning-heart sensations that accompany long-term, seriously nourished crushes (e.g. the kind that turn you into an augur of small omens and prompt earnest thoughts like, "holy shit, her last name ends in the letter Y and my middle name has a Y in it, jesus we are meant to be together forever." etc.)
The only other album that's held my attention like Begone Dull Care is the Phoenix album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, which I cannot get enough of, for different reasons. But definitely buy or somehow obtain Begone Dull Care, because this album rewards any effort you put into it. I know I'm most likely in the minority here, but I think it's the best thing Junior Boys have done--it's both comforting and sexy, and I don't think many albums can deliver that combo.
Posted by Kevin at 12:10 AM
April 14, 2009
Loaves of Love
Finished with grad school, at last.
I'd like to get back into writing about music, since I suspect that doing this blog was one of the things that actually made me a better writer (not that this sentence really shows that, yikes).
I've been on a kick of listening to this song, which came to me via Phoenix's great Kitsune mix. Doesn't that beginning purify you for the rest of the song? Those quick strums? This song is haunted by the specter of that saxophone jag (which the guitar tries to echo but, alas, cannot). Would you feel a greater or lesser affinity for this song if the title were spelled 'Pajamarama' (that's five As)? The Roxy Music orthography feels somehow more exotic, more in keeping with the origins of the clothing. The title alone suggests all sorts of cool shit (a sleep-over festival; bedspread dances; nighttime excursions). Is there a section of the Ramayana that discusses sleepwear?
Posted by Kevin at 06:43 PM