February 2012
8 posts
You Either Love Love or You Don't
In the wake of her death, Valentine’s Day seems as appropriate a time as any to write something about Whitney Houston. I think it’s fair to say that she—at least our idea of her, the her portrayed in the songs she sang—loved love. She did not love it like Celine Dion, who makes it a shrine, draping it in crimson silk on a silver pedestal surrounded by sleeping multiracial...
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Fake Outrage
I don’t think there’s much difference between the (ostensible) recording industry giving itself awards and, say, a widely-read magazine/blog putting out a year-end list of favorite albums. People should not treat them differently. Maybe the Grammys just produce a lot more talk because a lot more people pay attention to them, but I worry that since there’s a ceremony on TV where...
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Listening Journal
I have a habit of not pushing myself to hear new releases all the time, waiting around for good records to somehow find their way to my ears, which is not a good way to do things if you want to be an even half-decent critic. So I spent the last couple days playing catch-up on a handful of talked-about albums I’ve been meaning to listen to—some newer than others—taking notes as I...
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Useful things I did on my day off today:
- Finished that Edie Sedgwick piece I’ve been sitting on for a couple weeks
- Finished another cartoon / illustration for a friend’s blog that will be up soon
- Started planning my two-week trip to Florida at the end of April
Useless things I did on my day off today:
- Took a nap
- Ate a pint of chocolate ice cream
- Watched “Best...
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"What Cue?..."
“…’Faye Dunaway’ take two,” mumbles Justin Moyer in a terse moment of verité that kicks off First Reflections, the otherwise spotty and confounding 2001 debut of his Edie Sedgwick project. It’s been a different ‘band’ every album, but in the beginning it was a bass-and-drums duo of Moyer and Ryan Hicks, both stalwarts of the DC Dischord scene. The...
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Good Morning to You →
People seem to like these and it’s been a few weeks since the last one, so here’s another mix tape. I might just be wired differently, but I’ve always preferred Emily Haines’ dour solo work to Metric’s glossy bombast. When given some room to breathe she has a knack for elucidating the tired and helpless sides of adulthood, even to the point of letting the mood become...
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I Listened to the Lana Del Rey Album
I am taking the side that says this is a fatally flawed album, fascinating though it can be. Here are some more thoughts:
- While I hold to my previous impression of it, “Video Games” is indeed the best song on the album. It’s focused and evocative where much of Born to Die is a slapdash grab-bag of signifiers—one of the few that can be said to be about more than just,...
January 2012
11 posts
B Michael Tumblr: It's Not For You →
bmichael:
I’ve had some really good conversations on Twitter today, which really foregrounded a problem with criticism. The idea of a critic landing a cross-genre shot, contre-pied’ing our expectations (think: David Wallace on Terminator 2) is delightful. But it has to be done extremely well, drawn from a decent amount of knowledge and even more empathy.
Most times, when a critic of one type...
jakec asked: "I have to ask you something," the young girl sent over gchat. Reflexively he opened a new tab and clicked the bookmarked link to quickmeme, thoughts racing as to which template would be most appropriate to respond with, but then he got another message. "Serious question." His fingers went limp. His expression sobered. His inner Good Guy Greg took over.
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There is something fatally wrong with digital culture when a person who is asking another person a genuine question has to preface his/her genuineness—“Serious question,” “Not loaded…really interested,” etc.—before it can feel like a real conversation is happening.
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The Shins - "Simple Song"
When a no-longer-topical band comes out with a good new song, it forces us to throw our cards on the table and cop to our core values. Some people call it the Tyranny of the New, others call it Relevance, and many more (me?) don’t call it anything but still behave according to its principles. A few years ago when I started DJing at friends’ parties and such, I had a rule that anything...
“I have no idea what these songs are supposed to be about. The lyrics are...”
– Or, you could like, listen closer and think. It’s not that hard. I like Klosterman, but no music writer is ever anywhere near good when s/he tries to parse why others like an artist without doing the actual messy ethnographic work, or (much worse) to be a sportswriter/political wonk and predict an...
Anonymous asked: when the top 2011 albums post will arrive? :P
Me On Lana Del Rey →
tomewing:
I wrote this for the Village Voice Pazz & Jop issue - very cool to be asked to do an essay, and doubly fun because after a couple of years writing more and more trend pieces it was great to do something digging into a particular song and what’s happening in it.
I don’t necessarily want to keep talking / thinking too much about Lana Del Rey because it’s exhausting and...
They’re shooting for loud, noisy (read: Sleigh Bells-y) R&B, which is not a bad impulse in and of itself, especially since experimenting with modern R&B is the hip thing for indie bands to do right now (Katherine St. Asaph compared “Comeback Kid” to Mya on Popdust yesterday, which is apt). In order to get there, though, they’ve sacrificed much of the exclamatory...
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Rote of Terror
What bothers me about “Comeback Kid,” as well as its predecessor “Born to Lose,” are the ways in which Sleigh Bells’ conception of how a song can work seems to be narrowing. Thinking back to their first cruddy CD-R demos, part of what excited me was the (temporary) sense that they wanted to take a crack at re-imagining not only volume and dynamics, but the ways that...
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All's Forgotten Now
Perhaps in the shuffle of holidays and EOY lists in December you missed One Week One Band’s theme week dedicated to album-closing tracks? It was cool: we got to read a bunch of different writers all following (at least loosely) the same format one right after another. OWOB is itself a bigger version of this, but condensing it helped illuminate the variances in style, taste, and listener...
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Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas, and Happy New... →
This is another mix tape I made for you. If you caught the last one, you can maybe see the habits I’ve developed over the years with these things. I like to keep them around a dozen songs each—long enough to try out some different things but not so long that it loses a sense of cohesion (I like when mix tapes feel like albums and I try to sequence them as such)—as much for the...
December 2011
45 posts
One More Thing About This Year
Here, for posterity and in many ways to remind myself that I did actually accomplish things this year, is a small collection of stuff I wrote in 2011 that I’m not embarrassed to have people read again:
- The White Stripes - “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” - Feb. 3 - An ode to my first-and-favorite song by that band that broke up this year
- Cold Pizza Friday LIII:...
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The Dreaded List, 2011 Edition
I realize the irony in saying this when just a few months ago I moved to Brooklyn, home of the perpetually post-grad, but I like to think that I’ve done some growing up this year. Maybe not “growing up” in the sense of figuring out where I’m going or what to do with myself or how life even works at age 26, but certainly in the sense of gaining a bit of perspective. First of...
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Top Tunes 2011: The Full List
I’ve been working my way through a list of 20 favorite songs of the year this month and today marks the end of it. Here’s the full list in a convenient package, with links to the little things I wrote about each song. Also, I made a (slightly incomplete) Spotify playlist with all the available songs, if that’s something you’re into. Stay tuned for a Top Albums list next...
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Jay-Z & Kanye West - “Ni**as in Paris”
Though Watch the Throne covers more ground than most people want to give it credit for, the gold-plated operative word on the marquis is still king-making (or, if you prefer, superhero-making). The double-edged mass appeal of it can not be overstated—love them or hate them, our collective jaws sit agape at the spectacle of Jay-Z and...
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Twin Sister - “Gene Ciampi”
“If you like Gene Ciampi, you will love his movies!” sings Andrea Estella on a standout track (one of many!) from Twin Sister’s In Heaven. So who the hell is Gene Ciampi, you ask? According to Google, Wikipedia, and IMDb: nobody. Whether so obscure he’s escaped the eye of the internet or (far more likely) just a figment of her...
"Commercial radio—a free alternative to buying... →
marathonpacks:
At the Atlantic, I briefly respond to xkcd’s Christmas-canon-as-boomer-nostalgia comic.
The lesson here: don’t jump to conclusions whenever a graph floats across your dashboard.
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Bill Callahan - “Drover”
We’ve all seen enough movies to know that the cowboy, the lone horseman, the cattle driver (‘drover’ in the old parlance) is one of the most classically conflicted characters in American literature. He’s a grizzled man—hardened by years of life on the move, he carries with him a vague cynicism that spurs him to seek solitude, yet...
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Forest Fire - “They Pray Execution Style”
Most songs on Staring at the X, the slept-on sophomore album from Brooklyn’s Forest Fire, exist in a comfortable place between rough-hewn folk rock and crunch-leaden spaciness. But here, on the record’s standout centerpiece, they deviate furthest from their comfort zone and in so doing stumble upon perhaps the most dangerous and...
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Phantogram - “Don’t Move”
Where they once worked in dark, hard-boiled beats largely inherited from Portishead, Phantogram are now taking steps toward the livelier end of the night. The collage of clipped little samples that litter “Don’t Move”—watery orchestra hits, luxurious soul horns, an impassioned vocal wail—create a swirling effect that...
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Big K.R.I.T. - “Dreamin’”
In the grand tradition of songs like “Juicy,” this is a self-contained origin story paired with a light kiss-off to everyone who ever doubted Justin Scott, a.k.a. Big K.R.I.T. But rather than harp on his success (in part, perhaps, because he’s still something of an up-and-coming figure) “Dreamin’” finds K.R.I.T....
Brian Wilson Reunites With the Beach Boys for New... →
In the spirit of the holidays, I react to this in My Best Jimmy Stewart Impression: Aw…aw n-naw, naw-naw-naw!
The Beach Boys have been a perennially-touring joke for at least half of the 50 years they’re celebrating. I remember seeing that they were coming to Florida a few years ago, only to recoil in horror when I realized they were playing at Cypress Gardens, which was a theme park...
JAKE CLELAND: 52 Albums: #37 →
jakec:
popcornnoises:
jakec:
Do you ever consider that the positive contrarianism that’s led to greater pop appreciation brings with it a pressure to find greatness in all pop music while denying that you just might be totally indifferent to it?
Replace “positive contrarianism” with “culture” and “pop” with “[any genre of music.]” BOOM! Minds blown.
Personally I think exaggerated cynicism...
JAKE CLELAND: 52 Albums: #37 →
jakec:
Do you ever consider that the positive contrarianism that’s led to greater pop appreciation brings with it a pressure to find greatness in all pop music while denying that you just might be totally indifferent to it?
Replace “positive contrarianism” with “culture” and “pop” with “[any genre of music.]” BOOM! Minds blown.
Gain Damage →
mactra:
Today’s Atlantic piece adds some interesting new research nuggets to the shitpile of evidence that da yoots are deafening demselves with dose damn iPods!
Audiology doctoral candidate Cory Portnuff used an electronic monitoring device to see the actual gain levels and timespans of people’s headphone use. It has long been known that volume x time = extent of damage, but people don’t...
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Battles - “Ice Cream (feat. Matias Aguayo)”
At their best, Battles sound like a happy kid with a new set of Legos. The finished product—in this case, a scratchy, lank-limbed groove that boogies like the world’s pinkest sugar high—is cool and fun, but the real delight is in building the thing, in sorting out the right pieces and savoring the uniquely tactile pleasure...
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I Made You a Mix Tape →
Because I like you. But also because I wanted to try out this Spotify thing everyone’s so keen on. Plus, I needed a mental break from year-end list things. The songs on this mix are ones I’ve enjoyed recently that—for the most part—are either older than one year or aren’t really in consideration for listing / blurbing. A few songs here border on cheese (Huey, Alessi),...
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Dum Dum Girls - “He Gets Me High”
I never quite bought into Dum Dum Girls’ leather-clad, switchblade-carrying shtick. Save for one or two songs on their debut album last year, that vintage sense of toughness rarely comes through in the music. Which is okay! Framing their sound against the backdrop of their image is a big part of what makes them a charismatic band. But if...
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Destroyer - “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker”
Maybe “Suicide Demo” isn’t the ideal song to pick from Kaputt—not the catchiest, most concise, or most redolent of the compositional shifts Destroyer has undergone—but it’s the first time on the album that Dan Bejar intentionally halts his momentum and allows his band to wander through the pale, smoky,...
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Wye Oak - “Holy Holy”
Is it just me or should a day at an amusement park look more fun than this? Over the course of their roller-coasting clip for “Holy Holy,” Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack remain strictly po-faced, even while swinging and swooping high off the ground, as if something were eating away at their minds and distracting them from all the lights and calliope....
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tUnE-yArDs - “My Country”
Since it’s the first track on w h o k i l l, “My Country” acts as a declaration of fearlessness (though fearlessness is the primary attribute of all of her music), conflating Merrill Garbus’ performance with the social imbalance she decries. Her voice gains intensity as she navigates the verses, slipping into a near-screech on lines...
Tom's final Poptimist column →
marathonpacks:
dubdobdee:
Plus his useful three-part FE guide to how and why (1, 2 and 3): exemplary exploration of tactics, strategy, aims achieved and (occasionally) not, in all an opportunity seized and very well used first to last.
If you’re a music-writing geek, a plain old music geek, or a geek who likes to geek out about others’ geekdoms, you have to check these links. Tom Ewing...
“If I ever give up on pop music, I suspect that it will not be due to having lost...”
– Glenn McDonald, quoted by Katherine St. Asaph in her Singles Jukebox entry on, uh, Rebecca Black. Wow.
desnoise:
Shabazz Palaces - Are you… Can you…...
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Toro Y Moi - “How I Know”
Like it or not, Chaz Bundick is pretty much stuck with the chillwave label, being one of the biggest acts the non-scene/non-movement has produced. “How I Know,” like much of Underneath the Pine, even sees him steering toward sounds that don’t fall under that umbrella term (because, duh, no one wakes up with “chillwave artist”...
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Purity Ring - “Ungirthed”
Purity Ring’s not a bad name for a band, but it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with how this music sounds, does it? I’d suggest something along the lines of Megan James The Friendly Ghost. See, James and bandmate Corin Roddick are always fiddling with human voices—pitching them up/down and EQ-ing them into bass lines and...
Does anyone remember who wrote about how they thought of chillwave and witch-house as two sides of the same aesthetic coin? I am interested in this idea but can’t for the life of me recall where I saw it. (It appears my brain, like Tumblr, needs a better ‘search’ function.) Help?