For the longest time I thought he was a skinny white kid.
“I am not your savior…”
forget it
ooh la la
“You’ll have to learn, just like me…”
dry the rain
Sometimes life kicks you square in the face. Sometimes you need a rising build.
“Say it alright it will be okay…”
coffee
Amelia Meath got her start harmonizing a capella in Mountain Man. Here she is as Sylvan Esso on KEXP, performing a diametrically different breed of smooth, weaving, melancholic pop.
“Sentiment’s the same but the pair of feet change…”
oh! sweet nuthin’
Maybe the single most influential band in modern American music.
“Say a word for Charlemagne, he ain’t got nothing at all…”
you goin’ miss your candy man
Terry Callier and a funky bass line. It builds.
“Where you gonna go when it starts to storm…”
the last good day of the year
“Don’t tell me…
…that you get sick of living”
when the lights go out
What do you know, or think you know, about the Black Keys?
Once upon a time they were a revelation.
“You’ll know what the sun’s all about…”
ashamed
A heartbreaking song about how fucking hard it can be to buy a Christmas tree.
In the end, it’s not so serious.
“What a crying shame…”
b-side: i’m standing in the light
Dr. Dog, long ago, live and un-released.
“…well I’ve done my time for the ills I’ve caused,
and I’ve paid my dues in the bits I’ve lost…”
A-Side: Mystery to Me
snow days
Real Estate, another band I saw on my birthday– This time in Brighton, living day to day on £5 bottles of wine at Tesco express.
Can you hear it?
Another time,
another place,
another life.
feel good hit of the summer
When I hear this song, the fleshy pile of demons in my head stirs, and an old familiar face crawls yawning from their midst. With a demented grin, he rubs his little red potbelly, raises his black-tasseled spear, and starts to dance by the flame in my mind. I’ve never known whether I’m going to fight him or join his dance. It gives me such nostalgia, I can’t help but smile.
in dreams
“a candy colored clown they call the sand-man
tip-toes to my room every night
just to sprinkle stardust and he whispers
go to sleep
everything
is alright.”
my kind of woman
Principal Skinner: Uh oh, two independent thought alarms in one day. The students are overstimulated. Willie, remove all the colored chalk from the classrooms!
Groundskeeper Willie: I warned ye! Didn’t I warn ye?!
“oh, baby…”
i live my broken dreams
a Daniel Johnston song
black balloon
A song about heroin, clearly and entirely,
can be metaphor for many things.
“Let the weather have its way with you…”
things fall apart
“The lineaments, the heart that laughter has made sweet,
These, these remain, but I record what’s gone. A crowd
Will gather and not know that through its very street
Once walked a thing that seemed, as it were, a burning
cloud.”
-William Butler Yeats
the battle of hampton roads
The Monitor is a concept album so grandly ambitious that I’m a little overwhelmed just trying to talk about it. That being said, it’s also up there with Hospice as one of my favorite concept albums, ever. So I will try. From where I’m sitting, the fundamental premise seems to take the American Civil War as a metaphor for a betrayal, and a break-up. The South seceded from the union, then the North declared war in pursuit of reconquest and restoration. This is the central conceit that ties the whole thing together.
The Battle of Hampton Roads is both the climactic finale to the story of this relationship, and the literal battle between the Merrimac and the Monitor, two of the very first ironclads, and the first to ever fight each other. After pounding cannon balls off their respective armor at point-blank range for hours, they both limped home with exhausted, inconclusive sighs. Can you picture a couple screaming at each other? Hurting each other? The futility of it? It’s complex, carefully crafted, and littered with excellent writing.
These are just broad strokes, there’s so much more here. Titus Andronicus–named after Shakespeare’s lone amateurish play–somehow mashed together literary intellectualism with a drunken punk rock mentality to produce something awesome in scope and utterly their own. I cannot stress it enough: Get this album. The Monitor is a masterpiece. I’ll leave you with the quote from Abraham Lincoln upon which it opens:
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River, or set a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be it’s author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever,
or die by suicide.”
Now that’s a metaphor.
diamond heart
A crystalline tessellated sadness; like the cracking of ice on a lake.
the rip
In 1994, Portishead came out with Dummy, this sort of smoky, noir-lady-singing-in-a-dive-bar-over-hip-hop-beats, sound. It was a melange that was novel, head-nodding, and haunting, and it became a seminal formative influence on an entire generation of musicians. Always averse to publicity, they put out one more album then went silent for nearly a decade. When they reappeared with Third in 2008, instead of re-treading their now famous tropes, they released a sort of psychedelic rock album. Despite all the ways in which that could’ve gone wrong, I found instead I could see her there as much as ever: singing sweetly in that smoky dive bar, a melancholic shining in the gloom.
we bros
Weird and wild and vaguely evil, Wu Lyf is the World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation. Seriously. Though they recorded this in a church, what I see instead is a vast subterranean cavern, the ceiling lost in darkness, the walls lit by flickering torches while a swarm of bats swoop high across the airy blackness overhead. This is where they belong: the rising reverberating sounds of Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, the pounding of dancing feet.
B-side: Dirt
rain on
Music is such a wonderful marker for memory, tied to the images, the emotions, the little crystallized fragments of our lives. It’s better than any journal. When I hear this song I go hurtling back in time to fall in love. It was the day after Halloween, sitting in the back of a taxi on my way home from her place, back to my rooftop apartment in Taipei. Everything was grey and streaks of rain ran down the glass. He sang his shame and I smiled out the window. I didn’t know it yet, but that moment marked the start of something profound. In hindsight it was also very fitting.
“Oh, how the days will rain on you…”
B-Side: Don’t Pass on Me
little fang
David Portner of Animal Collective, in his side project Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks. While listening to this song, it occurred to me for the first time that Animal Collective never used a bass. I could be wrong, but if I am I don’t know where. Weird, that. He certainly uses it here. This song is like peeking into some parallel universe in which an icon of experimental screaming instead wrote pop. Really good pop.
listening man
Sorry about the ads, the copyright trolls are out in force on this video from 2007 with 7,000 views. I’m trying to give your languishing client free exposure, and your priority is preserving the sanctity of pop-up ads? Copyright law lets artists eat, and yet you assholes are why people pirate music. Clutch, clutch, clutch with both hands, until you have it all and there’s nothing left and you clutch your chest and die.
Sigh. Anyways, enjoy The Bees. No garbage. Just plain, simple, sweet.
“Tell me something, away from trouble and doubting…”
i live my broken dreams
And then of course there’s Daniel Johnston, a guy who made it, despite crippling mental illness. His became a spiraling, out of control schizophrenia that eventually had him on stage proselytizing and shouting about the devil. My favorite moment involving him is the scene in Kids, when his “Casper the Friendly Ghost” plays in the air over Washington Square Park. Man, what a movie. He’s so earnest it breaks my heart.
books on tape
Milton Melvin Croissant III, like Howlround, was just another nobody who never made it then disappeared. A little looking and I found a website that says he’s doing commercial animation and design now in Brooklyn. In any case, I got his stuff from Paul Bain, who went to a show where Milton was alone on stage and Paul was alone in the audience. Afterwards he bought a cassette tape the guy was selling out of his trunk. Not for nothing, Mr Croissant, but I’ve been listening to these songs for years. In the end it’s not a choice– That has to be enough.
.
tank!
Cowboy Bebop, the brainchild of Shinichirō Watanabe, is a masterful work of art. Don’t be fooled by the medium. If a space western about bounty hunters, done as film noir, set to jazz, isn’t your thing, well… Then try his next work, Samurai Champloo, the story of two elite ronin and a girl traveling across feudal Japan, armed with swords and upgraded animation, set to hip-hop. And if that’s not your thing either, well, what the hell is wrong with you?
“See you space cowboy…”
new slang
So the statue of limitations ended on Garden State, meaning it’s okay to go back again and listen to this song. I watched the movie as well, wondering why I hadn’t liked it all those years ago for the first hour or so. Then I remembered it’s a movie gussied up to look like it’s about mental illness– Then is the opposite of that. He’s been medicated by his misguided psychologist father his whole life for no reason. He doesn’t need medication, he’s fine! Well, huzzah for you, Zach Braff. He’s also such a bad actor that I found myself giggling at the movie’s most self-important confessional monologues. Am I ranting? Nah, it’s not such a bad flick, aside from its central premise. Anyways, this is about The Shins.
handkerchief tied to stick 