Moody Blues - Your Wildest Dreams Steve Winwood - Back in the High Life Again Steely Dan - My Old School Joe Jackson - Steppin' Out Nothing says END OF THE SUMMER like Labor Day weekend and a trip to the dentist's office, right? Maybe just Labor Day. But I've been thinking a lot about the way music is used for different purposes, and this reverie was kickstarted by my re-listening [...]
Oneida - Up With People Just a few loose propositions about this song: It will rev you up, but do not try to run while listening to it. Too much strain on the heart. Maybe if you're like a suburban Usain Bolt, you could run to the first half minute or so (alternately if you're like a Prefontaine clone, you could run to the whole thing, but at an adjusted pace; not synchronized with the beat). || The conjunction of dirty riffs and cymbal hits can, under certain circumstances, have adverse effects upon [...]
Babyshambles - Killmangiro FWP: So what inspired you to open the tanning salon? [cascading sound of something being spilled] FWP: What are those? Pete: These white tablets? FWP: Mmmhmm. Pete: Do you want one? FWP: Wow, there's a lot of them on the floor now. Pete: Don't fret. So this girl Ashley, she was deeply tan. Fucked like a policewoman. Kind of a trash. Big, white teeth. Do you know [...]
The Kills - No Wow Someday in the future when I'm teaching mp3blogging courses at West Albany Technical State University, I will have to answer my future-students' questions about what things were like when people first started writing about music online. I'll smile, maybe erase a word or two from the blackboard (laserboard), then sigh and lean heavily on the lectern. "Things were different," I'll say. "People didn't know what to think at first. They were confused. Songs and writing at the same time, it was just...too much content, too much media for people to [...]
The Kills - No Wow Someday in the future when I'm teaching mp3blogging courses at West Albany Technical State University, I will have to answer my future-students' questions about what things were like when people first started writing about music online. I'll smile, maybe erase a word or two from the blackboard (laserboard), then sigh and lean heavily on the lectern. "Things were different," I'll say. "People didn't know what to think at first. They were confused. Songs and writing at the same time, it was just...too much content, too much media for people to [...]
Brides of Funkenstein - When You're Gone To say that this song reminds me of CBS' classic sitcom, WKRP In Cincinnati , would be a vast understatement. Something about the strings (alternately wan and viscous), and the staggering desperation in Dawn Silva's and Lynn Mabry's voices when they sing, "In this world/all of my dreams/one by one/they all fell through," really captures the sort of febrile weariness I felt while watching re-runs of the show as a kid. I would be lying if I said that, in listening to this song so intently over [...]
I'm going to use this space from time to time to re-run some of my favorite mp3blog writing from the past six or seven years. There are, of course, about as many mp3blogs now as there are people with internet connections (exaggeration), but back in the crazy fucking days of the early 2000s, there were only, say, 400,000,000 mp3blogs that were essential reading, and of those, there were only about a dozen whose authors wrote with style, energy, and coherence. [Here's pt. 1 and pt. 2 , in case you missed them] [...]
Les Savy Fav - Sleepless in Silverlake Besides Wale's "Mixtape About Nothing" (which referenced Seinfeld), I can't think of many recent examples of music about television shows, though I don't listen to the radio anymore, so maybe there are tons of elegiac ballads about Lost and sweet little pop songs about The Real Housewives of ______. But I'm convinced that "Sleepless in Silverlake" is about The Hills, about the people-characters on the show. Tim Harrington says, in the very first line of the song, "We hit the hills/and we hit 'em hard/with [...]
Recoys - Shake Off Your Nerve The Recoys were the band that nurtured the talents of Hamilton Leithauser (Walkmen lead singer and Recoys frontman), and Pete Bauer (Walkmen bassist/keyboardist). 'Shake Off Your Nerve' is definitely proto-"Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone," i.e., replace the harmonica in this song with an organ, and you've got yourself a Walkmen track (which actually, "Blizzard of '96," and "That's the Punchline" were both written as Recoys songs). "Shake Off Your Nerve" features a galloping drumbeat and a sheer wall of harmonica lament to accompany [...]
Beachwood Sparks - The Good Night Whistle If the world divides into facts, with no remainder, then it's tempting to think that certain things that happened could not have happened any other way. George always said about his meeting Sylvia: "Even though we met because of a machine, I would have loved her before the Industrial Revolution." That was their horrible little joke. One of a hundred tiny isthmuses that connected her to him--bound them together during their long periods of separation. She was working the cash register at a coffee [...]
The Thieves of Kailua - The Thieves of Kailua This song deserved a prime spot on the soundtrack to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." In fact, if it were up to me, I would've re-written the movie around this song, which gives you an indication of why I am not a top Hollywood executive. Jason Holstrom sings of his encounters with the titular thieves, so the song lyrically is like Bresson's "Pickpocket" transposed to Hawaii. I'm surprised, come to think of it, that there aren't more songs about muggings, pickpocketings, etc. It's a pretty emotional [...]
AFX - Crying In Your Face Dubnium has been called the "saddest of elements." Only one specimen has ever been found in the wild--in Michigan in 1986, a surveyor came upon a Dubnium filament roosting in the hollow of a tree. No caretaker was present, and perhaps most notable, there were no signs of abuse. The Dubnium expired in captivity shortly thereafter, primarily due to stress from prolonged exposure. Joan Simmons, who has written a book on the incident, the outstanding "Dumb and Alone" says that although disheartening, the loss of the element was not [...]
Fiery Furnaces - Evergreen Elise, for instance, occupied us with her talk of her home in southern California, the sun, the hills, the beaches, and the indigenous blond-haired boys who either skateboarded or surfed along the landscape everywhere, as ubiquitous as chaparral or seagulls. She kept a rigorous countdown of the days until each school break, and couldn't help but point out, whenever in sight of a sunset, that the light on the East coast was a white, fluorescent imitation of the sunlight she had grown up with. Elise was also, as some knew, an [...]
Jan Jelinek - Music to Interrogate By Robert Shaw, the actor, does not want anyone to know that Robert Shaw, the man, is terrified that he will die during the filming of this movie--set about by callow strangers and the hideously rude Richard Dreyfuss--while far away from his wife and children. He sits on the edge of a park bench, writing in a clean, white tablet of notepaper. The Indianapolis. He intones the word, the name of the ship, and thinks about the aesthetics of its constituent syllables. What an ugly name [...]
Belle and Sebastian - (My Girl's Got) Miraculous Technique This pop jewel is from the same 2001 Peel session that spawned 'Shoot the Sexual Athlete' (a.k.a. Stuart raps about the Go-Betweens), 'The Magic of a Kind Word', and 'Nothing in the Silence', all of which were finally released on the "BBC Sessions" . Also from the era when Isobel Campbell was still rocking the cello and harmonizing with Stuart and Sarah (I will say that I miss Isobel's voice, if not her songs). Perhaps the most alluring element in this [...]
New Moods - Holiday It's interesting to think of this song as its own discrete self-contained place, populated only by singer, girl, and music. The singer says, "I'll do my best to keep this love we have alive." But listen to that tone: there is a serious disconnect between the content of that lyric and sound of it as it's sung. No surprise that the next phrase is "But won't you help me, girl, help me, please." Lots of scenarios obtain in the possible world of this song: he's distracted, bored, and tired, just wants [...]
Circulatory System - Woodpecker Greeting Worker Ant Nonsense Version Woody Woodpecker--the primal, manic Woody--wages a war on a pair of mockingbirds (this is not a canonical episode, btw.). They've been stealing and hoarding his food. What can he do? He knows two cold facts about mockingbirds. They love imitating owls because it lends them a bit more gravitas. And they hate the sound of distorted drums. So he blasts this song, US vs. Noriega-style, day and night, until the mockingbirds, deafened, irritated, bewildered into incoherence, come stumbling out of their [...]
Tussle - Night of the Hunter This is for the dirtiest dancing. In actual dirt and trash. You should probably be sheathed in scrap metal before dancing to this song. Hang a rusted Honda "H" from your neck. Bring some antique styrofoam cups (from the 70s at the latest). Make a fainting couch out of old toilet seats. Feverishly consult those back issues of Readymade. Can you: build a functional turntable out of used-diaper elastic, paint cans, and thumbtacks? or concoct serviceable ketamine from Claritin leftovers, your own gastric acids, and a little bit of [...]
Max Richter - Infra 3 St. Micah the Sauropinnede lived in the area around Crocodilopolis, in Middle Egypt, from 265 to 290. Crocodilopolis was a strange city, the home of the Petsuchoi, the formerly bejeweled crocodiles whom the ancient Egyptians worshipped. In St. Micah's time, people no longer believed that they should bestow diamonds, rubies, and tail-laces to the crocodiles by the river--there was nothing to be gained from that, no boon or blessing--but they didn't believe in anything else either. Everyone in the city thought of themselves as mere figments, barely animated, barely potent, [...]
Blood Brothers - Metronomes 'Metronomes' is from the sessions the band did for "Crimes", and it's a crazy shame that this was left off the album. Although I can see where it might have been too similar to the title track (just listen to those drums: they are the slower, dirtier, more insensate cousin of the vengeful percussion on 'Crimes' [the song]), the band (arguably) still could have made this work. Every element in 'Metronomes' seems to only work within a variable of the verb "creep": the drums crawl, the bass slinks, even the mandolin [...]
Molars
Miike Snow – Paddling Out (Jacques Lu Cont Remix)
Beyonce Introduces Blue Ivy Carter On Tumblr (Photos)
