Blog: Shake Your Fist

Update

Apr 2, 2010, 9:56am Shake Your Fist
I'm now blogging about music (as well as books, art & other interesting things) at Anything Could Happen . Please join me.
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Fin

May 18, 2009, 1:50pm Shake Your Fist
It's time. I always said that when Shake Your Fist became more obligation than pleasure, I would quit. Even if I could make time to write posts, I don't have the hours to deal with all the peripherals (emails, hosting, site upkeep, PR people, blog networking, etc.). And four years is enough. Thank you to my dear friends Jon and Joe for their early contributions and continuing support. Thanks to those fellow mp3 bloggers who, to my astonishment, took me and this little site seriously. I can't possibly express how much I appreciate the [...]
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The moon tonight

Apr 28, 2009, 11:00pm Shake Your Fist
The moon tonight Image: Your personal moon River's Edge - Great Lake Swimmers Put There by the Land (live) - Great Lake Swimmers Great Lake Swimmers is a maddening band to invest anything-- time, money, energy-- in. For the several here-and-there brilliant, breathtaking songs ("Moving Pictures, Silent Films," "Where In the World Are You," "Your Rocky Spine") there are many times that number in [...]
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Artist:Crooked Fingers
Title:Sleep All Summer (Featuring Emma Pollock of The Delgados)
Link Text:Sleep All Summer
File Name:Sleep.mp3
Bitrate:183 kbps
Year:2005
Artist:Crooked Fingers
Title:Your Control
Link Text:Your Control
File Name:Control.mp3
Bitrate:160 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Great Lake Swimmers
Title:Put There By The Land (Live)
Link Text:Put There by the Land (live)
File Name:Land.mp3
Bitrate:199 kbps
Year:2007
Artist:Great Lake Swimmers
Title:River's Edge
Link Text:River's Edge
File Name:Rivers.mp3
Bitrate:178 kbps

Winter's end

Mar 31, 2009, 8:00pm Shake Your Fist
Winter's end Image: Christopher Davidson Iceland - Bark Cat Bark It's been a long, hard winter. But I don't need to tell you that; it's been a long, hard winter for you too. And even as gray rain slushes my windows to say spring has (sort of) arrived, I don't think winter is over just yet. You know what I mean. So does Bark Cat Bark (Josh Todd), a man of no decided abode who calls [...]
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Artist:Bark Cat Bark
Title:Iceland
Link Text:Iceland
File Name:Iceland.mp3
Bitrate:128 kbps
Year:2009
Artist:Boy In Static
Title:Candy Cigarette
Link Text:Candy Cigarette
File Name:Candy.mp3
Bitrate:239 kbps
Year:2009

Soul of the machine

Mar 20, 2009, 10:30pm Shake Your Fist
Soul of the machine Hiroshi Sugito Strider - Paper I've heard the first album this year that I can say absolutely unequivocally will make my year-end best list. "Strider" is one of the awesome tracks from it. Just to show you how awesome: Cept for the first two seconds (the song starts like something from Suicide--but don't worry!), this track is vocals-free--and I'm almost always partial to the human voice. I hesitate to call "Strider" instrumental because, like a lot [...]
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Artist:Paper
Title:Strider
Link Text:Strider
File Name:Strider.mp3
Bitrate:230 kbps
Year:2009

Girls rule

Mar 8, 2009, 11:40pm Shake Your Fist
Girls rule Image: Susan Seubert Correspondence Course - The Hermit Crabs You don't hear a lot of musical a-ha -moment stories, conversion narratives or even conversations in which music is an end to itself--as opposed to a gateway to friendship or romance or opportunity for personal branding--from and among girls. That might be changing, what with Lavinia Greenlaw's pointedly titled memoir The Importance of [...]
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Artist:The Hermit Crabs
Title:Correspondence Course
Link Text:Correspondence Course
File Name:Course.mp3
Bitrate:320 kbps
Year:2008

Foreign dispatches

Mar 2, 2009, 7:45pm Shake Your Fist
Foreign dispatches Image: Squareamerica Sinkership - Sin Fang Bous Economically speaking, Iceland makes the U.S. look like it only needs to borrow some quarters for the soda machine (pay ya back tomorrow!). I hope the financial meltdown doesn't pop these Icelandic kids' balloon, because Clangour is a, yes, clangorous bounty of breathless folk jangle and electronic pitter-pattered joy. It's a pop record. There's tambourine. "Sinkerships'" beats, harmonies and a [...]
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Artist:Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson
Title:Rattlin' Bones
Link Text:Rattlin' Bones
File Name:Bones.mp3
Bitrate:236 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Sin Fang Bous
Title:Sinkership
Link Text:Sinkership
File Name:Sinkership.mp3
Bitrate:186 kbps
Year:2009

Don't make me a target

Feb 15, 2009, 4:45pm Shake Your Fist
Don't make me a target Image: Gush O. Like other music bloggers, I've started to think about the best songs of the decade. After doing a fast, rough sweep, I culled more than 200 songs--and that doesn't include anything from 2009!. Many that won't make my personal top 50 or 100 or whatever are still excellent, and, more important when you're writing about music, interesting. So I'm hoping to jot down thoughts on some of them over the course of the year (and several top-of-the-list tracks too, of course). No promises that [...]
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White nights

Feb 5, 2009, 1:10pm Shake Your Fist
White nights Image: holgabot Thousand Crazy Nights - Music Go Music From Warm in the Shadows ( eMusic , Amazon ), Myspace Image: Byron Barrett Keep a Secret - The Whitest Boy Alive [...]
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Artist:Bruce Peninsula
Title:Satisfied
Link Text:Satisfied
File Name:Satisfied.mp3
Bitrate:203 kbps
Year:2009
Artist:Cut Off Your Hands
Title:Expectations
Link Text:Expectations
File Name:Expectations.mp3
Year:2008
Artist:Elvis Perkins In Dearland
Title:Shampoo
Link Text:Shampoo
File Name:Shampoo.mp3
Bitrate:192 kbps
Year:2009
Artist:Music Go Music
Title:Thousand Crazy Nights
Link Text:Thousand Crazy Nights
File Name:Thousand.mp3
Bitrate:274 kbps
Year:2009
Artist:School Of Seven Bells
Title:Chain
Link Text:Chain
File Name:Chain.mp3
Bitrate:192 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:The Pains of Being Pure at Hea
Title:Young Adult Friction
Link Text:Young Adult Friction
File Name:Friction.mp3
Year:2009
Artist:The Whitest Boy Alive
Title:Keep A Secret
Link Text:Keep a Secret
File Name:Secret.mp3
Bitrate:189 kbps
Year:2009

Plan for rain

Jan 21, 2009, 10:00pm Shake Your Fist
Plan for rain Image: Susan Schwake Children of the Polka - Children of the Wave This being Chicago and me being half German, I've obviously heard and, more importantly, witnessed--in all its pink petticoated glory--polka. Trust me, this isn't polka proper. Generated by a clutch of conceptual-minded Australians, it's more like hearing polka's lusty shuffle and twirl through a thick wall as it bleeds into the lackadaisical murmur around you, winds through the hiss and sputter of espresso machine, clings [...]
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Artist:Burning Hearts
Title:I Lost My Colour Vision
Link Text:I Lost My Colour Vision
File Name:Colour.mp3
Year:2009
Artist:Children of the Wave
Title:Children of the Polka
Link Text:Children of the Polka
File Name:Polka.mp3
Bitrate:191 kbps
Year:2008

Retrofuturist fantasy

Jan 13, 2009, 8:35pm Shake Your Fist
Retrofuturist fantasy Image: Dark Roasted Blend You know that 2008 best-of list? I take it back--not gonna happen. 2008 was a rotten year for music overall and I'm not motivated to extend it any longer than necessary. But 2009--shaping up to be awesome!!! Aw, just kidding. You know better than to expect ADDed enthusiasm round here. Read on for the usual hedged rah rah and ambivalent approbation. Tunnelvision - Here We Go Magic [...]
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Artist:Here We Go Magic
Title:Tunnelvision
Link Text:Tunnelvision
File Name:Tunnelvision.mp3
Bitrate:256 kbps
Year:2009
Artist:Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
Title:Woodfriend
Link Text:Woodfriend
File Name:Woodfriend.mp3
Bitrate:203 kbps
Year:2008

Pick-up shots

Dec 19, 2008, 11:01pm Shake Your Fist
Pick-up shots Image: Michelle Caplan Some songs that won't make my 2008 list, but are still pretty awesome. Shitty Little Disco - Arms Guitars stutter then slide, keys weep, bass pogos and someone rides cymbals into the night. Moods and manners are all so cleverly synthesized that you don't realize "Shitty Little Disco" is as miscegenated, and in almost the same way, as all that indie dance music that [...]
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Artist:Arms
Title:Shitty Little Disco
Link Text:Shitty Little Disco
File Name:Disco.mp3
Bitrate:169 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Blackblack
Title:The Most! The Best! The Greatest!
Link Text:The Most! The Best! The Greatest!
File Name:Most.mp3
Bitrate:189 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Let's Wrestle
Title:Song For Man With Pica Syndrome
Link Text:Song for Man with Pica Syndrome
File Name:Pica.mp3
Bitrate:198 kbps
Year:2008

Oops

Dec 1, 2008, 12:30am Shake Your Fist
Oops Image: Caitlin Atkinson Yowzers -- didn't realize it had been more than a month! As I've said before, I don't make excuses here -- blogs being totally optional and therefore not worthy of guilt, let alone hair-shirt-donning. But if anyone still reads this old thing, you might want to know what keeps me from punching "create new post" with any regularity. To a few of you this is old, old news, but I' ve been writing record reviews for Pitchfork [...]
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Artist:The Raveonettes
Title:Come On Santa
Link Text:Come on Santa
File Name:Santa.mp3
Bitrate:293 kbps
Year:2008

Country & western

Oct 24, 2008, 1:30pm Shake Your Fist
Country & western Image: National Photo Company Collection The Treehouse Song - Ane Brun These are days of miracles. I n less than two weeks -- bar catastrophe -- Barack Obama will become this country's next president. And Tuesday night, I, with a couple hundred other exhausted E6 followers [...]
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Artist:Ane Brun
Title:The Treehouse Song
Link Text:The Treehouse Song
File Name:Treehouse.mp3
Bitrate:174 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Micah Blue Smaldone
Title:A Drink
Link Text:A Drink
File Name:Drink.mp3
Bitrate:256 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:The Rumble Strips
Title:Cowboy
Link Text:Cowboy
File Name:Cowboy.mp3
Bitrate:197 kbps
Year:2008

Midnight, sapphire, cerulean, teal

Oct 12, 2008, 3:45pm Shake Your Fist
Midnight, sapphire, cerulean, teal Image: Franziska von Stenglin Midnight Blues (live at Planet Claire) - Liz Green Midnight Blues - Liz Green Thanks to Blogotheque for reminding me (a month ago, things on on a 30-day delay round here) about Liz Green, a Northern English lass with the haunted timbre and cadence of a lost, nameless American Southern blues singer [...]
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Artist:Gentle Soul
Title:See My Love (Song for Greg)
Link Text:See My Love (Song for Greg)
File Name:See_Greg.mp3
Year:2007
Artist:Headless Heroes
Title:See My Love
Link Text:See My Love
File Name:See.mp3
Bitrate:185 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Liz Green
Title:Midnight Blues
Link Text:Midnight Blues
File Name:Midnight.mp3
Bitrate:137 kbps
Year:2007
Artist:Liz Green
Title:Midnight Blues
Link Text:Midnight Blues (live at Planet Claire)
File Name:Midnight_live.mp3
Bitrate:320 kbps
Year:2008

Natural's not in it

Sep 21, 2008, 11:45am Shake Your Fist
Natural's not in it Image: Alexis Rockman Eternal Day - Henegar-Union Sacred Harp Convention Kedron - Sam Amidon From Awake, My Soul: Original Soundtrack ( Amazon ) Image: Rachel Denny [...]
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Artist:A Shoreline Dream
Title:Neverchanger (Feat. Ulrich Schnauss)
Link Text:Neverchanger
File Name:Neverchanger.mp3
Year:2008
Artist:Coal Beautiere
Title:Oh Sky!
Link Text:Oh Sky!
File Name:Sky.mp3
Bitrate:246 kbps
Year:2007
Artist:Henagar - Union Sacred Harp Convention
Title:Eternal Day, 383
Link Text:Eternal Day
File Name:Eternal.mp3
Bitrate:160 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Northern Portrait
Title:The Fallen Aristocracy
File Name:Fallen.mp3
Bitrate:276 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Parenthetical Girls
Title:Avenue Of Trees
Link Text:Avenue of Trees
File Name:Trees.mp3
Bitrate:160 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Sam Amidon
Title:Kedron, 48b
Link Text:Kedron
File Name:Kedron.mp3
Bitrate:160 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:The Shaky Hands
Title:Settle On
Link Text:Settle On
File Name:Settle.mp3
Bitrate:160 kbps
Year:2008

Glorious fuzz

Sep 3, 2008, 7:30pm Shake Your Fist
Glorious fuzz Image: Mokona73 Private Amber - Rosemary Krust Nico's smoky slur & drawl dances an uneasy lap with an opiated guitar strum. Instead of sun-baked, this field of poppies is traced with frost. Brittle petals crumble in a pinch. The cold wants to see you shake , she sings. And you do. Myspace Tell the World - [...]
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Artist:Rosemary Krust
Title:Private Amber
Link Text:Private Amber
File Name:Amber.mp3
Bitrate:320 kbps
Year:2008

The real

Aug 21, 2008, 8:50pm Shake Your Fist
The real Image: Shelby Nycole Let's Talk About It - White Denim White Denim's (first? new?) album is a package bus tour of 70s rock, breezing through psychedelia, glam, hard rock, prog, soul, post-punk -- even waving at disco. Ya know, if it's Tuesday it must be Bowie. At several points their enthusiasm seems kinda feigned and mocking, and at other stops they're palpably enthused. "Let's Talk About It" is White Denim's spiked, angular Buzzcocks/Wire/Minutemen nod. But instead [...]
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Artist:Ida Maria
Title:Oh My God
Link Text:Oh My God
File Name:My_God.mp3
Bitrate:160 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:NERVE CITY.
Title:DISASTER
Link Text:Disaster
File Name:Disaster.mp3
Artist:NERVE CITY.
Title:DOGS
Link Text:Dogs
File Name:Dogs.mp3
Artist:White Denim
Title:Let's Talk About It
Link Text:Let's Talk About It
File Name:Talk.mp3
Bitrate:226 kbps
Year:2008

Saturn rising

Aug 3, 2008, 12:05pm Shake Your Fist
Saturn rising Image: Jayme McGowan Perception Stick - Talbot Tagora Hyacinth Grrls - Abe Vigoda "Perception Stick" is what screenplay pitchers refer to as high concept . Just sort of beats you into entertained submission with a, um, stick: point blank metaphor, rigor mortis beats (think Meg White), massive low end and [...]
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Artist:Abe Vigoda
Title:Hyacinth Grrls
Link Text:Hyacinth Grrls
File Name:Hyacinth.mp3
Bitrate:276 kbps
Artist:Noah And The Whale
Title:Shape Of My Heart
File Name:Shape.mp3
Bitrate:261 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Talbot Tagora
Title:Perception Stick
Link Text:Perception Stick
File Name:Perception.mp3
Bitrate:320 kbps
Year:2008

Red eye

Jul 19, 2008, 1:00pm Shake Your Fist
Red eye Image: aptrick Lotus Flower - One Little Plane Myspace Image: Lauren Greenfield Your Red Dress - Alaska in Winter Myspace [...]
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Artist:Alaska in Winter
Title:Your Red Dress (Wedding Song at Cemetery)
Link Text:Your Red Dress
File Name:Red_Dress.mp3
Bitrate:128 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:John Matthias
Title:Blind Lead the Blind
Link Text:Blind Lead the Blind
File Name:Blind.mp3
Bitrate:178 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Lackthereof
Title:Last November
Link Text:Last November
File Name:November.mp3
Year:2008
Artist:One Little Plane
Title:Lotus Flower
Link Text:Lotus Flower
File Name:Lotus.mp3
Bitrate:192 kbps
Year:2008
Artist:Vetiver
Title:The Swimming Song
Link Text:The Swimming Song
File Name:Swimming.mp3
Bitrate:160 kbps
Year:2008
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Location: Chicago, IL