12 posts tagged “music”
Show us a treasure.
Vox Hunt Challenge is weirdly applicable to the post I was about to write anyway:
It seems like I was the last holdout on truly hating this song, but this is a version I can get into:
I mean, she recorded a cover of the entire The Who Sell Out album. The whole album. Ridiculous.
Only somewhat related: the Bryant Park Project is awesome. Exhibit B:
I seem to always start these the same way: how could it be time again? Here we are, in the last week of 2007, and I humbly present my annual list of favorite albums of the year.
A few notes: last year, I wrestled to narrow my list of favorite albums down to ten, and felt guilty for my exclusions. This year, it felt like I hardly heard anything, though there were still a few entrants who just barely missed the list. In the end, there were eleven albums I simply could not exclude, and I decided that I really did feel equally strongly about two of them (barring the existence of the other, both Kevin Hume's marvelous piece and Elliott Smith's posthumous demo collection would have been number two, so I allowed them to share the spot).
The list of items I had heard a bit but not all of is pared down to the point of being completely omitted, thanks largely to the KCRW feed being blocked in my office; I literally don't know where else to go for music. This also hindered the construction of a list that I haven't had in the past, but Schubin insisted I include: favorite tracks of the year. I think he ended up with 25, while I struggled to get up to 20 and called it a day. The albums are in order but the tracks aren't.
As always, I must reiterate that this list consists simply of my favorite albums of the year -- for those of you music snobs who have lost your souls, that means the ones I liked the most. If you feel that The Reminder was empirically better arranged and recorded than Cassadega, well, you're certainly entitled to your opinion, but I just straight up played Bright Eyes more often. My advice to those people: stop thinking so much and just listen to music because it's awesome.
10 Rilo Kiley - Under The Blacklight
9 Feist - The Reminder
8 The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
7 Bright Eyes - Cassadega
6 Fire Flies - Two New Sciences!
5 Hansel and Gretal - Stories From The Stove
4 Amy Winehouse - Back To Black
3 Beirut - The Flying Club Cup
2 (a tie!) Kevin Hume - The Truth About Ants and Aphids and Elliott Smith - New Moon
1 Radiohead - In Rainbows
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Rilo Kiley - Under The Blacklight
Kevin Hume - Towns Where We Live
Hansel and Gretal - Deeper Than Our Love
Feist - I Feel It All
The Arcade Fire - Keep The Car Running
Amy Winehouse - Tears Dry On Their Own
Coconut Records - West Coast
Beirut - Nantes
Albert Hammond, Jr. - Cartoon Music For Superheroes
The Bird and The Bee - Fucking Boyfriend
Neil Young - Man Needs A Maid/Heart Of Gold (Live at Massey Hall)
Andrew Bird - Plasticities
Ryan Adams - Two
Radiohead - All I Need
The Pipettes - Pull Shapes
Band of Horses - Is There A Ghost
Sea Wolf - You're A Wolf
Five Alpha Beatdown - Ninja of the Nasty
The Sense Offenders - The Life and Times of Doc Holliday
Fire Flies - Call Me Your Darkness
The Grammy nominations were announced today, and as always, they're kind of ridiculous.
For some reason, I never got drawn into the Grammys. This is somewhat illogical, I guess, given my line of work, and my obsessive love of the Oscars. I think it stems from the fact that when I was young enough to think that these awards meant anything, my whole life was about movies, so I formed an early allegiance to the Academy Awards before I got completely engulfed in music. Further, the Grammys are without the pageantry that makes the Oscars so much fun to watch. The Grammys seem to take themselves less seriously, which in the grand scheme is perhaps the better position, but the Oscars exude an overwhelming sense of self-importance: you should be watching, because this matters.
Leading the altogether irrelevant charge are goldenchild of mainstream hip-hop Kanye West and chanteuse Amy Winehouse, for whom, I should mention, the adjective "troubled" is turning into a sort of prefix. Seriously, start looking for it. How did everyone settle on this one word?
What I've heard of Kanye's album reveals that, once again, he deserves the attention. It's a little hard to admit, since he holds this Oscar-like contention himself, but it's true. Though I never get all that excited about his stuff (except "Jesus Walks," which is damn near perfect), I have to concede that he is probably the most creatively adventurous producer in the commercial world at least, and one of the best in all of hip-hop. As Schubin mused upon the release of Graduation, the quality of the record really defies any logical explanation. "This really should have been the strikeout," he said. "The next one will have to be terrible."
The most important task set before us this Grammy season, as responsible citizens, is to reevaluate our feelings about Amy Winehouse. Tabloid exploits? Put them aside. Radio saturation? Try to forget it. Market ubiquity? I'm sorry, simply not at issue presently. What's important is this: Back to Black is a genius recording, top to bottom front to back.
As is so often the case with overplayed singles, it's easy to just see "Rehab" as some pop song; perhaps a novel one, but on the whole dismissable. This is horribly misguided. The level of complexity in its arrangement is unmatched certainly by anything on pop radio, and the same is true pretty much of the whole album. When you look at songs like "Tears Dry On Their Own," "He Can Only Hold Her," and "Back To Black," this record is beyond undeniable. For my money, this is the best produced album of the year easily.
Stuff I was glad to see nominated: Wilco, Arcade Fire, The Shins, Lily Allen, The White Stripes. Stuff I was truly shocked to see nominated: Ozzy Osbourne. What? Ozzy Osbourne released an album this year? I'm dead serious.
I've been having a weirdly nostalgic music day. It started out looking kind of bleak -- for those of you who don't know, DO NOT listen to Bright Eyes first thing in the morning -- but went off in an altogether unexpected direction.
I've been listening to a ton of Mike Doughty this week. He's got a new album coming out in February, and recently did a tour wherein audience members could put questions into a jar and he would answer them onstage. I found two amazing bootlegs from last month on Archive.org, and have been playing them nonstop. Even at the worst of times, Doughty is one of the most electric performers I've ever seen, and on these shows he's at the top of his game. The tone is energetic, experimental, playful. And the new songs are rickdiculous.
So it's not all that shocking that I found myself listening to Haughty Melodic this morning. No, what's really shocking is where that led. Dave Matthews' backing vocals on Tremendous Brunettes made me miss him, and I found myself playing Crash for the first time in I don't know how long. I really got that feeling like I was in 10th grade again. You know, kind of awkward.
As Josh used to say back in the day, there's something inherent in Matthews' voice that makes you vaguely and aimlessly nostalgic. Perhaps that's what did it.
I didn't get all the way through Crash before I had to go answer a call, and I was away from my desk for so long that there was really no hope for my attention to be intact when I got back. Imagine my surprise, though, when I was struck with an indelible desire to listen to David Gray. As if by some strange providence, I found White Ladder on my iPod. This is really beyond explanation, but it was amazing. It's almost like that record only exists in the fall of 2000, and you literally have to go back there to listen to it.
I'm really fascinated by humans' internal clocks, the weird rhythms of our bodies and the strange connections of our subconsciouses. So I'm very serious when I ask, is it possible that some recess of my brain has been jarred by these strange flights of fancy and is actually triggering desires that I had back then? Because I'm very serious when I say that I'm listening to Third Eye Blind's second album right now.
I actually go back to their first record quite a lot; it's incredibly good if you bother to actually listen to it, and remains one of my favorite albums, if only for playing such an important role in my formative years. Say what you will, I was 15, and I'm telling you, listen to it. I cannot say the same of their second record.
Blue is troubled to say the least. There are some real interesting moments, and throughout you can hear that they're trying something, but you never get a real sense of what that is. Like, say, the children's choir singing, "Baby daddy keep your boo;" where are you going with that, exactly? I was a little surprised that there are two tracks, "Anything" and "Darkness," that still seem to hit me dead center. They're both for the most part unfussy, or at least less fussy than the rest of it, and as a result come off as the most earnest parts of the album.
Maybe I'll go home and watch Dawson's Creek.
I've watched the video on this article, like, 40 times today. I love Tom Petty. I love Eddie Vedder. I find myself looking forward to seeing a four-hour-long documentary. The article itself, it should be noted, falls firmly in both of our favorite Times categories: non-trend and non-news.
Perhaps this acts as a counterpoint to seeing The Bravery perform tonight. Really, really wretched. The liner notes for the first album should list "Pitch Correct" as the lead singer. I really liked that one song, too (which they played in the middle of the set. Seriously?). It's a shame really. Marisa told me they sucked when the first album came out. I resisted. Lucky I never bought it.
Literally, literally, literally cannot stop watching this. If you don't watch Take Away Shows, what are you really doing with your life? They're doing Beirut's whole new album, which is beyond words.
Some more weird vibrations: this morning I put The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill back on my iPod, and then I came across this article in the Times. Though the writing is slightly suspect, it's nice to see someone in the press saying something good about Lauryn Hill again. I remember when Schubin said to me, a few months after Unplugged came out, "Did you hear? Lauryn Hill's not crazy anymore."
I really enjoyed the dynamic between the elder and junior Bushes described in this article. I couldn't help thinking of it as a cartoon. They really make it out like Sr. is constantly pestering W, who seems to be pretty severely irritated by it. I got this image of a montage of scenes where W is in meetings, at dinners, at the beach, in bed, and someone keeps bringing him a phone on a tray like in cartoon fancy restaurants. Now picture Bush I as the version of himself from The Simpsons. Kidding aside, it really does seem like Bush I is unhappy with the way things are going, which is a pretty reasonable position; it may be the first time I've agreed with him.
Thought experiment: if Bush Sr. were running for president again, on an Anti-W platform, would I vote for him? No. He's still George Bush. Experiment over.
Finally of note today: under pressure from Fernando, I opened a Twitter account. I wanted to do something fun and interesting, and I came up with an idea that's starting to annoy me already: my life as told in lolcat vernacular. I can has a better idea?
This Times article has been passed around a lot recently, as pretty much everyone I know works at the library and is going to library school.
New Rilo Kiley single, The Moneymaker, is out, and it is ILL. It's all over the blogosphere; here it is on Hype along with a number of other Rilo Kiley gems (cover of Rock and Roll Suicide, what?). Distressing, and distressingly awesome, video here.
The highlight today, I have to say, is this recently-released Nixon memo from 1970, wherein the embattled president complains that people think he's mean. The intro on Slate does a good job of parsing out the brilliance of the piece, but my favorite part is probably where Nixon boasts that he phones people "when they are sick, even though they no longer mean anything to anybody." Poor Dick- this document actually contains the phrase "with regard to the whole warmth business." I mean, with material like this, are we really not supposed to kick him around?
One last thing: when I searched out Rilo Kiley on Hype, I came across this video. It's one of the new batch of Jenny Lewis songs she was doing on tour last year, which are all as good as or better than Rabbit Fur Coat, if you can imagine such a thing. I decided to post this for poor Fernando, who has had to deal with the ABBA nonsense his whole life. I feel you dogg. Important points: Jenny in her standard dress and cowboy boots, your new crush the Watson Twins, and how funny it is that Conan O'Brien is like a head and a half taller than her.
Audio: Show us five CDs or albums that changed your life.
Submitted by redhotmomma.
Oh man. Only five? If I must, these are the ones that are completely undeniable.
Elliott Smith is a songwriter's songwriter, in a class completely by himself. Before I knew anything about how incredibly constructed these songs are, though, his music just meant a lot to me. I fell back on this record a lot, and I still do.
This is another perfect record. To describe Jeff Buckley's genius is a fool's errand. I will never forget the first time I heard "Hallelujah;" Wendy and I were sitting in my car in the parking lot at SUNY. It was one of the most important moments of my musical education. I never looked at music the same way.
When I decided to start the Rev, I was listening to a lot of Bright Eyes. This record sort of inspired me. It is arrestingly beautiful, complicated, dense, beguiling. You never get a chance to think about how great one song is because the next song is just as great. I love every other Bright Eyes album, but none this much.
