I haven’t done one of these for a few, well, several, years. That’s been the result of multiple factors, but at least some of the blame goes to a downward trend in my acquisition of new music in recent years. I managed to reverse that trend this year with the help of a Don Giovanni Records music subscription (incidentally one of the best musical value propositions I’ve ever availed myself of), so I feel on better footing in rendering some year-end judgments. No weird format experiments this year, just a basic Top 10:
Parquet Courts, Wide Awake!: I was fully on board with the slacker punk of Parquet Courts’ first album back in 2012, but I’ve also appreciated their subsequent maturation, musically and thematically, beyond songs like Stoned and Starving. Wide Awake! feels like a culmination of that growth, full of songs that are rich, varied, and incisive. There are no losers on this album, but I especially love the funk groove of Tenderness, the echo of early-career Elvis Costello in the vocals of Freebird II, and the frenetic energy of Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience, just to name a few.
Speedy Ortiz, Twerp Verse: My first impression of this album was that it reminded me of Guyville/Whip-smart era Liz Phair, which is perfectly fine in my book. Subsequent heavy listening has perhaps made that connection seem more tenuous, but only because the songs have solidified as more distinctly themselves in my mind. Frontwoman Sadie Dupuis’s voice bobs and weaves among the nervously angular rhythms of these songs, carrying them with expressivity even when the lyrics get a bit opaque. Top tracks: Lucky 88, Alone with the Girls, Sport Death.
Wussy, What Heaven Is Like: I probably shortchange Wussy a bit because their output has been of such consistently high quality that I’m no longer surprised when they release yet another outstanding album. The things you’d expect from a Wussy album are all here: the densely layered, droning guitars; the brooding, Midwestern Gothic lyrics; the tense interplay of Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker’s contrasting vocal styles. The overall effect seems darker: the bleakness of songs like One Per Customer and Oblivion is that of a pervasive despair rather than particular regrets. One perhaps under-appreciated aspect of Wussy is their genius as a cover band: prior to this album all their covers appeared only on scattered singles and EPs. Their version here of the Twinkeyz’ There’s Aliens in Our Midst is the most affirmative song on the album, made all the more relevant by the inflection current politics has put on the “aliens” of the title. Other top tracks: Tall Weeds, Cake.
Weakened Friends, Common Blah: This was one of the fruits of my Don Giovanni subscription, and one that I would have been unlikely to run across on my own. At first glance, this debut album by the Portland, ME-based trio seemed like fairly straightforward, guitar-heavy indie rock, but it proved remarkably infectious, and it didn’t take long for it to shoulder other records aside and become one of my favorite releases. I think what sells it for me is the snarling drawl with which singer Sonia Sturino delivers lyrics like I’ve got a-a-a-aches in my bra-a-a-ain. Top tracks: Aches, Common Blah, Younger.
Shopping, The Official Body: Three albums in, I should probably be finding something more to say about this London dance-punk trio than the inevitable Gang of Four comparison, and yet the comparison is so available and so tempting. So I’ve tried to at least earn the right to the comparison by actually re-listening to all the Gang of Four I have on hand (mostly Entertainment! and Solid Gold and the parts of Hard I could tolerate), and I can report that while the similarities are indeed undeniable, some distinctions can be made. Lyrically, the best Gang of Four has a satiric bite (as in Anthrax or I Found That Essence Rare that Shopping never quite manages. Musically, both have the characteristic rhythmic jaggedness that invites these comparisons, but in Shopping the jaggedness resides primarily in the guitar which cuts into and across the more conventional (not to say uninteresting) dance grooves being laid down by the rhythm section. The result is a fusion of the authority-defying aggro of punk with the booty-shaking beat of disco which sets Shopping apart from both predecessors and peers. Top tracks: Control Yourself, Overtime, Suddenly Gone.
Courtney Barnett, Tell Me How You Really Feel: I’ve been trying to put my finger on what I find so charming about this Australian singer-songwriter, and I think it comes down to confidence, which is an odd thing to say about an album that features a (great) track titled Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence. But for as much as Barnett may write about her feelings of doubt and uncertainty, her singing and playing are never hesitant or tentative. Rather, she glides through her songs with the easy grace of a top athlete. There is an economy to her music that is less a matter of being “laid-back” (as I have seen her characterized) than of knowing exactly where and how much she needs to press to hit the emotional effect she wants. Other top tracks: Charity, Walkin’ on Eggshells.
Snail Mail, Lush: Released a week before her 19th birthday, Lush is an impressive debut for Baltimorean Lindsey Jordan. Her songs of (mostly) heartbreak are sincere and naive in a way that perhaps only a teenager’s can be, as when she promises she’ll never love anyone else in Pristine, but they are never maudlin or overwrought. Jordan’s delivery is assured, and the music is, indeed, lush, such that the result are 10 indie rock gems of almost aching intimacy. Top tracks: Heat Wave, Full Control.
Car Seat Headrest, Twin Fantasy: A hi-fi, full-band reworking of an album originally released in 2011 (when Will Toledo comprised the entirety of Car Seat Headrest), this is an ambitious record. The title announces a recurring theme of doubling or mirroring, which plays out as song titles, lyrics, and melodies that appear and then reappear, reflected or distorted, across the album. I enjoy the overall effect, but it makes it hard to single out individual parts of the album for praise or comment. Also, because I mostly listen to music on shuffle, I’ve hopelessly jumbled up my experience of a record that, I suspect, is meant to be a sequential experience. Nevertheless, I like and endorse everything here. Top tracks, such as they are: Beach Life-in-Death, Sober to Death.
Hop Along, Bark Your Head Off, Dog: I fell in love with Philadelphia’s own Hop Along when I saw them open for the Thermals back in 2013. What caught my attention then and what remains their greatest strength are the gutsy vocal gymnastics of singer Frances Quinlan. She can leap from breathy whisper to soaring lyricism before tumbling down into a raspy growl, all in the course of a single song. I had some initial qualms that on this, their third album, Quinlan’s voice had been reined in and sanded smooth in favor of a poppier sound, but with further listens, it’s still there, unruly as ever, though perhaps sharing the spotlight with other aspects of the music, which is more varied in tone and instrumentation than on previous records. Top tracks: What the Writer Meant, Prior Things, Not Abel.
Izzy True, Sad Bad: Another of my Don Giovanni acquisitions and another band that was completely unknown to me previously, Izzy True walk the well-trodden path of dreamy, melancholy indie rock. What distinguishes these upstate New Yorkers is the level of craft that goes into the songs and the streak of defiance that steels what might otherwise be somewhat limp fare. Crawl in your hole and stay, chastises singer/guitarist Isabel Reidy to the unspecified antagonist of Clover. How how how dare you, they demand of another in the album’s closer. The specifics of these grievances are only hinted at; what we are meant to attend to is the strength they find to put those who have hurt them in their places. Top tracks: Funny Thing, How Dare U.
Special acknowledgment is due to Screaming Females for their A.V. Club Sessions single, which contained my only (as of this writing) Perfect Song of the year, their stunning remake of Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off, which transmutes the pop pabulum of the original into anthemic rock with both groove and attitude. The B-side of that release, a cover of Sheryl Crow’s If It Makes You Happy, is fine as well, though less transformative.
I’ve put together selections from all of the above as an 8tracks playlist. Also included are standout tracks from a number of albums that didn’t crack my top 10, including releases by Bad Moves, Alice Bag, Dusk, Ex-Vöid, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Screaming Females, Blizzard Babies, Bat Fangs, Jeffrey Lewis, Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires, Roadside Graves, Swearin’, Fat Tony, Superchunk, Neko Case, Vacation, Yo La Tengo, Hprizm, and Waxahatchee.
Back in the 70s, one of the Philadelphia UHF stations dedicated its Saturday afternoon airwaves to B-grade horror and science fiction movies. Horror Theater and Mad Theater (the show name varied according to the genre of movie being shown) were presided over by local personality Joseph Zawislak, aka Dr. Shock, an amiable vampire/mad scientist hybrid. Perhaps it is exposure to this program during my formative years that has always blurred the distinction between horror and sci-fi for me. In any case, it is with a tip of the cap to the good Doctor that I offer up a double bill of Halloween-ish playlists.
Some years ago—enough that don’t recall exactly when—I compiled an iTunes playlist of “Halloween” music. rather loosely defined. I assume my method was my typical one for creating thematic lists: start with a handful of songs I knew I wanted to include, and supplement by doing a bunch of title searches for likely keywords. In this case, I know I took a pretty broad approach, as the range of plausible Halloween content spans psychos to Satan, cemeteries to candy. Over the years, I added to the list irregularly by doing similar searches on new additions to my library.
Going into this year, “Scary Monsters”, as I called it, had just under 200 songs, but as I started updating it for the 2018 season, I became increasingly aware of a number of omissions, songs I knew fit the theme of the list but which had never made it on. So I did an even deeper dive into my library to look for these stragglers, and “Scary Monsters” ballooned out to over 250 entries, which got me thinking that maybe it could do with a little pruning.
“Allhallowtide” is the product of that pruning. I kicked out songs that were starting to feel like a reach thematically or that I just didn’t like very much. I also got it into compliance with 8tracks’ limit of only two songs from any single artist or album (a restriction that impacted some artists more than others: the Mekons, Tom Waits, and the Gothic Archies could each populate a modest Halloween soundtrack all on their own). By then, I had cut my list down by almost 50%, to 8 hours worth of reasonably spooky-sounding songs I feel like I can stand behind.
Because of the length, I'll forego a full track listing and offer up some demographics instead. Among the 131 songs, one can find: 16 ghosts, 15 devils/demons, 12 graves/burials/cemeteries, 10 deaths (personified and literal), 9 vampires, 8 dark nights, 8 miscellaneous monsters and beasts, 7 zombies, 7 corpses (or other remains), 6 killers, 5 acts of black magic, 4 hauntings, 4 damned souls, 3 cannibals, 3 werewolves, 3 Frankensteins, 3 generalized fears, 2 hangmen, 2 witches, 2 pieces of candy, and 2 mentions of Halloween itself.
While trimming down the “Allhallowtide” playlist, I ran across a few songs referencing space creatures of various sorts. I opted to omit them from that list as being a little too far off-theme, but it got me thinking about alien creatures in music (Wussy’s excellent cover of the Twinkeyz’ Aliens in Our Midst from this year’s What Heaven Is Like being very much on my mind of late), which led me down yet another playlist-building rabbit-hole. I broadened criteria a bit to a more blanket “sci-fi” theme but tried to be more rigorous about songs actually being on theme rather than simply referencing it. After trimming for 8tracks-compliance (sorry Man or Astro-man?, whose entire discography could probably have qualified otherwise), I had what seemed like a fairly tight 42-song playlist, “Little Green Men”.
Tracks:
Game Theory (with Donnie Jupiter), Aliens in Our Midst [live] (Blaze of Glory, 1984)
Man or Astro-man?, Destination Venus (Destroy All Astromen!, 1994)
Veronica Falls, Shooting Star (Waiting for Something to Happen, 2013)
The B-52’s, Hallucinating Pluto (collected on Time Capsule: Songs For a Future Generation, 1998)
Wussy, Asteroid (Strawberry, 2011)
Yo La Tengo, Satellite (May I Sing With Me, 1992)
Man or Astro-man?, Junk Satellite (Made From Technetium, 1997)
Lou Reed, Satellite of Love (Transformer, 1972)
Patti Smith Group, Space Monkey (Easter, 1978)
Ass Ponys, Astronaut (Some Stupid with a Flare Gun, 2000)
Mekons, Ghosts Of American Astronauts (So Good It Hurts, 1987)
Sonic Youth, Silver Rocket (Daydream Nation, 1988)
Shonen Knife, Riding on the Rocket (Pretty Little Baka Guy + Live in Japan, 1986)
The Baseball Project, Ichiro Goes To the Moon (Volume 2: High and Inside, 2011)
Sugar, Man on the Moon (Copper Blue, 1992)
Yo La Tengo, Moonrock Mambo (Summer Sun, 2003)
Jonathan Coulton, Redshirt (collected on Jonathan Coulton’s Greatest Hit (Plus 13 Other Songs), 2012)
The Only Ones, Another Girl, Another Planet (Why Don’t You Kill Yourself?, 1978)
The 5.6.7.8’s, My Boyfriend From Outer Space (collected on Bomb the Rocks (Early Days Singles 1989 to 1996), 2003)
Lora Logic, Martian Man (Fanfare in the Garden, 1982)
The Modern Lovers, Here Come the Martian Martians (Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers, 1976)
Chavez, Little Twelvetoes (Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks, 1996)
The Byrds, Mr. Spaceman (collected on Greatest Hits, 1966)
The B-52’s, Planet Claire (collected on Time Capsule: Songs For a Future Generation, 1979)
The Magnetic Fields, Alien Being (The House of Tomorrow [EP], 1999)
Le Tigre, Phanta (Le Tigre, 1999)
The Pretenders, Space Invader (Pretenders, 1980)
Blue Öyster Cult, Godzilla (Spectres, 1977)
Sufjan Stevens, Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois (Illinois, 2005)
Hüsker Dü, Books About UFOs (New Day Rising, 1985)
The Rezillos, Flying Saucer Attack (collected on A Reference Of Female Fronted Punk Rock 1977-89, 1978)
Creedence Clearwater Revival, It Came Out Of the Sky (Willy and the Poor Boys, 1969)
Adam WarRock, I Will Do Science To It [kHill remix] (I Will Do Science To It [single], 2011)
Thomas Dolby, She Blinded Me With Science (The Golden Age of Wireless, 1982)
Parliament, Dr. Funkenstein (The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, 1976)
Rhett Miller, Happy Birthday, Don’t Die (Rhett Miller, 2009)
Jonathan Coulton, The Future Soon (collected on Jonathan Coulton's Greatest Hit (Plus 13 Other Songs), 2012)
The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1 (Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, 2002)
Daft Punk, Robot Rock / Oh Yeah (Alive 2007, 2007)
Gorillaz, Starshine (Gorillaz, 2001)
Wooden Shjips, Other Stars (Back to Land, 2013)
Wussy, Aliens in Our Midst (What Heaven Is Like, 2018)
Let there be fright!
Semicentenary
(permalink)
I turn 50 this year, a milestone that is neither particularly unusual nor particularly difficult to reach. Nevertheless, custom seems to dictate that I mark such an event in some way. So I rolled out of bed one morning, recalled the Magnetic Fields’ 50 Song Memoir from last year, and decided if Stephin Merritt is allowed the indulgence of writing a song for every year of his life, I could at least get away with making a playlist of songs from every year of mine.
Somewhat uncharacteristically for me, I tried not to overthink my selections: I simply went through my iTunes library “Perfect Songs” list year by year, grabbing songs more or less by gut instinct. My one constraint was to allow only one song per artist, but I resisted the temptation to use that as an excuse for second-guessing earlier choices. A few years didn’t have any 5-star rated songs, and that did require a bit of extra deliberation. I also had to make a couple adjustments when I discovered that songs I’d chosen had been filed under the wrong year, but for the most part, I was able to stay true those initial gut reactions. Here's the full list:
1968: The Rolling Stones, Sympathy For the Devil (Beggars Banquet)
1969: Fairport Convention, Matty Groves (Liege and Lief)
1970: James Brown, Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine (Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine [single], collected on Star Time)
1971: Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Pieces Of a Man) — 4-star song
1972: Al Green, Let's Stay Together (Let's Stay Together)
1973: Bruce Springsteen, Wild Billy's Circus Story (The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle)
1974: Big Star, September Gurls (Radio City)
1975: Bob Dylan & The Band, You Ain't Goin' Nowhere (The Basement Tapes)
1976: Michael Hurley/The Unholy Modal Rounders/Jeffrey Frederick & The Clamtones, Jacknife/The Red Newt (Have Moicy!)
1977: Parliament, Flash Light (Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome)
2015: Sleater-Kinney, Bury Our Friends (No Cities to Love)
2016: The Goon Sax, Telephone (Up to Anything) — 4-star song
2017: Thurst, Distance (Cut to the Chafe) — 4-star song
2018 (one to grow on): Screaming Females, Shake It Off (The A.V. Club Sessions [single])
The reasons behind the specific choices are varied and idiosyncratic. They aren’t necessarily the “best” songs of their respective years, nor even of their respective artists, but it’s safe to say that I’ve obsessed over all of them at one point in my life or another. In many cases, a song is indelibly tied to a particular time in my life, but a fair number (especially in the first third of the list) are anachronisms I only discovered years, even decades, after they were released. Some of the choices may have been skewed by the “vinyl limbo” effect (there are a number of albums—particularly from the 70s and 80s—that I dearly love but which aren’t in my iTunes library because I own them on vinyl and won’t let myself re-purchase them on CD or digitally). In short, there is a story behind every one of these songs. Perhaps I will get around to telling those stories one of these days.
A murder of crows
(permalink)
A not-so-new, but perhaps seasonally appropriate playlist. This had a long gestation period, like most of my mixes, but in an unfortunate coincidence of timing, I was finalizing it on 8tracks just as news of the the Orlando nightclub shootings last June was breaking. By that point, I was kind of wedded to the title, but it seemed in very poor taste to publicize it, so I let it sit. I still like the playlist, even if I strayed outside the Corvidae family to populate it.
Los Campesions!, The Black Bird, The Dark Slope (Hello Sadness, 2009)
The Mountain Goats, Magpie (The Sunset Tree, 2000)
The Gothic Archies, Crows (from The Vile Village) (The Tragic Treasury: Songs from A Series of Unfortunate Events, 2006)
Yo La Tengo, Tiny Birds (Summer Sun, 2003)
Peter Gabriel, This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds) (So, 1986)
The Ramones, Surfin’ Bird (Rocket To Russia, 1977)
The Coathangers, Jaybird (Larceny & Old Lace, 2011)
Neko Case, Magpie To the Morning (Middle Cyclones, 2009)
Doc Watson & Merle Watson, Cuckoo Bird (More Music from the Florida Folklife Collection, 1977)
The White Stripes, Little Bird (De Stijl, 2000)
Neil Young & Crazy Horse, (Zuma, 1975)
Ass Ponys, Dead Fly the Birds (The Known Universe, 1996)
Quasi, Bye Bye Blackbird (American Gong, 2010)
Flexion
(permalink)
My neglect of this poor old blog has been an ongoing source of shame for me. The meager trickle of new content over the past few years is one aspect of that neglect. There are multiple reasons for the lack of output, but I will save that discussion for another time. Nearly as embarrassing has been the state of the site’s plumbing, which was still largely based on the HTML templates I cobbled together back in aught-three. Table-based page layout may have been acceptable back then, but they’ve been a thorn in my side for a number of years now. I’ve tried, at various points, to move to a tableless layout, but all the solutions I could find either were hacky, or I couldn’t figure out how to adapt them for my needs.
Then CSS Flexbox came along, or more specifically, Philip Walton’s Solved By Flexbox demos came along and finally worked their way through the internet grapevine to somewhere I would actually hear about them (a few months ago). It took me some time to try out Walton’s methods and get confident about using them myself. It took a while more to get them to do more or less what I wanted them to do. And because I was going to be ripping out the guts of my templates anyway, I wandered down some side-paths about improving my typography and some other aspects of the design. Finally I had to dive into the templates themselves, remind myself how they all fit together, and brush up on my rather rusty Tinderbox skills. Altogether, I’ve spent about 3 weeks on the modernization project, but, with this post I can finally unveil my all-new, mobile-friendly, responsive blog layout. Huzzah!
To be sure, there are probably a few rough spots lurking in these pages. I’m still, at best, a mediocre typographer, and I suspect my choice of color scheme is deeply offensive to someone with a more refined visual palate than I’ll ever possess. But as far as I can tell, the new stuff basically works, and I at least don’t have to be ashamed of my janky old tables any more. It’s a start.
Errata
(permalink)
Despite what the timing might suggest, this is not a Valentine’s Day mix, unless you equate Valentine’s Day with mistakes, regrets, and apologies, in which case I guess it is, albeit a few days late. Just one more thing for me to feel sorry about.
