Category: Music

fall from grace

In 2011, Future Islands came out with an album, On The Water, that hit me like a crashing wave.  It was deep and warm and wise, a broken man talking others through heartbreak, over time, emerging safe and whole again on the other side.  Then last year, playing scrabble in Tanzania with their new album spinning, I looked up, distracted, “is the guy from Future Islands… screaming?”  He was.  It felt a bit like David Foster Wallace taking his own life, after all his attempts to counsel us from his pain through our own, to show us the beauty, all the reasons why it’s worth it.  He wanted to help us survive, and in the end it ate him up just the same.  The guy from Future Islands is screaming.  It is dark, and sad, and beautiful.

“Please pardon my reflection
in the mirror at your feet
before you go, please tell me
was it all inside of me?”

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this beard is for siobhan

While Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon may be his opus, my favorite Devendra Banhart jam has always been this early little ditty off Rejoicing in the Hands.  There’s something touchingly old-timey to it that tickles me just right.  If you were wondering, it’s pronounced “shuh-vawn.”  Irish.  Go figure.

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zebra

Beach House, a band close to my heart.  Their three excellent albums all came out during my time in Taipei, lending my secret life of subway rides and taxi journeys an ever evolving dream-haze quality.  They’ve remained a dependable companion in nostalgia ever since.  Emotional, calming, rocking, soothing, sublime.  I am very, very fond of them.

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colors and the kids

“By the time she would weave onstage, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, Ms. Marshall, 34, was wasted. And it showed. It would seem that every fan has a Cat Power concert story: the time she mooned the audience, cursed out techies, talked to a squirrel (outdoors), played three chords and changed her mind (song after song) or played fragments of a few songs and then told everyone to get out, even encouraging fans to sue her.”
-New York Times review, Cat Power

“It is foolhardy to describe a Cat Power event as a concert,” citing “rambling confessions” and “[talking] to a friend’s baby from the stage.”
-New Yorker review, Cat Power

And there, from the ruins of herself, she made this.

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Valerie June

Been wondering for a long time how to showcase Valerie June.  Unable to choose just one song, I finally found her here, doing 25 minutes of pure, unadulterated joy. Her hair, her voice, her heart, her fingers flying on those strings– I can’t look away.  Stick around until the eight minute mark and you will be rewarded with what would have been my choice.  Valerie is a voice from the ether, a specter of old blues singers long dead.  She doesn’t know it yet, but I’ve sworn off all other women and devoted my life to her.  Half joking.  May you enjoy her as much as I do.

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tacobel canon

Chilling, fucking, sleeping, reading, raging, writing, driving — a day without Ratatat is a day I’ve done wrong.  Wait for the bass to come backwards.

B-Side: Breaking Away

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le loup (fear not)

Truly an unusual band, Le Loup never really got the recognition I thought they deserved, and now they are defunct.  Over the years I’ve had a wide range of reactions to playing them for people, a surprising number frankly nonplussed.  Well, I am and have always been plussed.  The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ General Millennium Assembly is a little masterpiece of weird, foot-stomping wonder.  Give it a spin, maybe you’ll be plussed too.

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oblivion

Those dark synths and this adolescent girl fever dream of masculinity and violence of a video get me in the gut every time.  Ominous, unsettling, good.  Grimes.  Weird little MDMA-head with a lisp.  I sort of love her.

“See you on a dark night…”

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hellhole ratrace

“I’ve got a sad song in my sweetheart…”

The story goes that Christopher Owens was born into a fundamentalist cult in Texas called the “Children of God,” where he wasn’t allowed outside music.  As a teenager he took off and became a street kid, discovering punk and hardcore music for the first time, eventually becoming a ward of Stanley Marsh 3– a man implicated in a number of lawsuits for sexually assaulting underage boys.  Later Owens began busking, moved to San Fransisco, got heavy into heroin, and met Chet “JR” White.  They started a band.  That band was Girls.

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the staunton lick

Open the windows, beat the rugs, air your heart out.  Winter is melting away, swelling all the little waterfalls.  Life will bloom again.

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the way home

80s synths aren’t dead, they just went for a really long walk.  It makes you wonder, does this mean turtle necks are coming back too?  They went for cigarettes ages ago…

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mystery to me

Though they have tailed off in recent years, this band managed to buck the trend of one-and-effectively-done album releases that plague so much modern music.  I hate to use the term Beatles-esque to describe anyone or anything — the Beatles were unique, a scientific singularity — but damn if this doesn’t merit it anyways.  One of the great joys of my music discovery odyssey, an old friend over all the years, I give you: Dr. Dog.

B-Side: I’m Standing in the Light

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david bowie i love you (since i was six)

Say what you will about Anton, and there’s plenty to say, but he was, in his way, a genius.  He never compromised.  Not for anyone or anything.  Do yourself a favor and watch Dig!  It’s wonderful.  I’ll wait here, with this.

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reptilia

The 90s was a rough musical time to come of age without guidance.  It was the era of Lite97 FM, Total Request Live, boybands, easy listening, ClearChannel worming its slimy tendrils throughout the radio world, homogenizing everything into its pay-for-play formulaic paste.  Creed and Knickleback got a lot of air time.  Blink 182 and Sum 41 were the closest things I had to rock and roll on the radio, which was my only conduit to music.  I always knew there was more, that it was out there, but I just couldn’t see how to get to it.  Then one day, out of nowhere, The Strokes came over the speakers.  In the backseat of my parent’s car, everything changed.

I remember later lying comatose, half on a couch, half on the floor, too drunk to continue, as this song came on in the other room.  I didn’t know it, and couldn’t make the necessary motions to get up and find out what it was.  But fuck if I didn’t like it.  I reconciled myself to never knowing, relaxing into the stupor and enjoying the moment.  It was a beautiful philosophical epiphany about being present and letting go.  Of course I heard it again later, and to my utter lack of surprise, it too was The Strokes.  Though they never really made good music again after these albums, Julian Casablanca and company will always hold a place in my heart.  It was the 90s.  I was a child looking for something.  They were it.

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brains

My empty living room in Brighton, my empty campsite in Yunnan, my empty house in Tanzania, my empty bedroom in St. Louis.  I have danced naked to this song on four continents.  That’s about all I have to say about that.

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people don’t change blues

Of all The Growlers’ prolific output to choose from, I’ve gone with this, from their very early days.  I’m not sure it’s even Brooks singing, but there is something unpolished and simple and trancey here that gets to the essence of what they are: Weird, poor, self-destructive, and under-appreciated.  One way or another, these things never last.  Here it is for 3 minutes and 8 seconds, pure.

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god’s bathroom floor

Some throwback hip-hop to keep things eclectic.  Beyond the sweet little jazz beat, beyond Slug’s distinctive delivery, beyond it just being a great song, it is also one of my favorite poems:

“Well here I be, within a pool of my drool, sedated, windows dilated– Comatose, life overdose.”

or

“So call management to seek some reimbursement for the nerve endings that burnt from the first hits.”

Yeah, that.  What he said.

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two

In 2009, The Antlers put out a very strange album.  Urban legend says the lead singer locked himself away in his apartment for months, letting all his relationships wither, then emerged one day holding this.  This thing.  It’s a concept album, revolving around a relationship between a hospice worker and his terminal cancer patient, who may or may not be a… child.  It is weird as fuck.  It is also, top to bottom, one of the most complete breakup albums I’ve ever heard.  His falsetto can shatter glass.  I can’t recommend it enough.

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dark, dark, dark

This little beauty was introduced to me through a cover by the variously talented Colleen Young.  Since she has been remiss in her recordings of late, we’ll have to settle here for the original.  It too, is good.

Oh, the unspeakable things.

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ed busking chester

When I first discovered this video, I thought busking was Ed’s middle name — turns out I wasn’t terribly wrong.  It was my first experience with the term, with electric violin, and with the unbelievable potential of looper pedals.  Ed’s story is he went on tour with a band, made money, put out albums, then for whatever reason gave it all up to go play in the street.  There is something pure and wonderful about that. This video is terrible, but somehow discovering him through a poorly edited vacationer’s home movie makes it all even better.  His name is Ed Alleyne-Johnson.  He built that purple electric violin. He is a symphony unto himself.

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i get along without you very well

So I was playing Catan with my parents, providing them with some vintage jazz ambiance to soothe them as they bowed to the inevitable.  In a fit of pique, my father remarked that Chet Baker had a terrible voice.  I… disagreed.

You had a lovely voice, Chet.

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