Pretty Goes with Pretty

January Mix

I didn't hear a lot of new albums this month, but I did keep up pretty well with hearing new tracks via PR and my favorite blogs. Here's a mix of favorite finds, old and new, that I haven't already written about this month. Special shoutout to the blogs who hepped me to some of these tracks—Aquarium Drunkard (Reparata & the Delrons), For the Sake of the Song (White Fence, Etta James, and Woodpigeon), and the Rising Storm (Dave Davies). (I came across the rest via Pitchfork and innumerable other blogs in my RSS feed.) This mix is best played in order.

Juliana Barwick: Never Change

Etta James: Seven Day Fool

Disappears: Replicate

Zammuto: F U C-3PO

White Fence: When There Is No Crowd

Dave Davies: Do You Wish to Be a Man

Woodpigeon: For Paolo

Lower Dens: Brains

Reparata and the Delrons: Boys and Girls

Also of note, I wrote about three more songs I heard this month that I thought were great: The Shins' "Simple Song"; the Dirty Three's "Rising Below"; and Julia Holter's "Marienbad."

Favorite Songs of 2011

By now you've made your way through all the end-of-year lists you can stomach, I'm sure. But wait! There's more: my favorite songs of 2011. I've made a mix of my 24 favorite tracks, excluding anything from my favorite albums of the year because it's a given that those albums each contain multiple favorites. The tracks below are not ranked, but are ordered for an ideal two-hour mix. (And for what it's worth, I don't think a lot of these tracks showed up on others' lists, so hopefully a lot of this will be new to you.) Click play on the first track to listen in sequence—or download all the songs  and listen to them however you want. [Part I] [Part II]

My Morning Jacket: Circuital

Matthew Cooper: Expectation

Panda Bear: Last Night At The Jetty

Fujiya & Miyagi: Ventriloquizzing

Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Thought Ballune

White Rainbow: Captain Sandwich Patrol

Digits: Because It's Wrong

Ray and the Prisms: Astrograph

Roedelius Schneider: Single Boogie

Nicolas Jaar: Space Is Only Noise If You Can See

Julia Holter: Goddess Eyes

Cass McCombs: County Line

Little Scream: The Heron and the Fox

Moon Gangs: Sea

The War on Drugs: Come to the City 

Dirty Beaches: Lord Knows Best

 Kurt Vile: Jesus Fever 

John Vanderslice: The Piano Lesson

Lia Ices: Love is Won

Tinariwen: Tenere Taqqim Tossam

Bombino: Tigrawahi Tikma (Bring Us Together)

No UFO's: Less Or Maybe Even...

Gang Gang Dance: Glass Jar

Kyle Bobby Dunn: Dropping Sandwiches in Chester Lake

Favorite Downloads: December

I found a lot of great music this month, more than I can (or wish to) fit on this playlist. I purposefully ignored everything I featured in this post, also all discovered this month and highly recommended (and ps, some of these songs come from the same sources).

Shugo Tokumaru: Lahaha [via Rawkblog]
Centro-Matic: Only In My Double Mind [via Pop Headwound]
Jason Urick: The Crying Song (Album Mix)
The Passenger: Entitled One [via 20 Jazz Funk Greats]
Prince Arky & The Westerners: Ten Horned Devil [via For the Sake of the Song]
Kurt Vile: Jesus Fever
Moon Gangs: Sea [via 20 Jazz Funk Greats]
Kim Jung Mi: Toward the Sunlight [via The Decibel Tolls]

Favorite Downloads: November

It's a short mix this month—I didn't hear a lot that got to me—and it's a bit somber, too, starting with the stunning version of "Cotton Eyed Joe" by Terry Callier.

• Terry Callier: Cotton Eyed Joe [via The Rising Storm]
• Fennesz Sakamoto: 0318 [via Pitchfork]
• The Louvin Brothers: Knoxville Girl [via For the Sake of the Song]
• Grapefruit: Phase Accidents [via 20 Jazz Funk Greats]
• Ray and the Prisms: Astrograph [via 20 Jazz Funk Greats]

Favorite Downloads: October

For no real reason, this month's mix happens to be the least eclectic and also contains zero electronica or ambient—the genre that, until now, has felt like the unifying thread of all my monthly mixes. At any rate—as usual, this mix is meant to be listened to in order.

Aside from the Andrew Bird track, everything here dates from 1972 or earlier, and most fall on the narrow spectrum between folk and country. So be it! If you like any of these songs, visit my sources to hear more.

• Blossom Toes: I'll Be Late for Tea (via The Rising Storm)
• The Turtles: Chicken Little Was Right (via Aquarium Drunkard)
• Johnnie & Jack: For Old Times Sake (via For the Sake of the Song)
• Vashti Bunyan: Diamond Day (via Motel de Moka)
• Tony, Caro and John: Waltz for a Spaniel (via Aquarium Drunkard—fantastic mix here)
• Andrew Bird: Hospital
• Lonnie Donegan: Frankie and Johnny (via 20 Jazz Funk Greats)

Favorite Downloads: September

Putting together these monthly mixes has become one of my favorite things to do on Pretty Goes with Pretty. It's not like putting together a typical mix, which usually has some unifying theme. No, these are mixes made with strict rules:

1. all the songs were downloaded within the last month
2. all are new to me, and it should go without saying that I think they're all great
3. the mix is intended to be listened to straight through and should be a satisfying experience
4. (The fourth, til-now-unspoken rule is that each month's mix must also flow from last month's mix, because I keep a single mega-playlist of the year's mixes on my iTunes)

This sounds simple but in many months can be quite challenging. First, I'm letting my tastes dictate what must be included in the mix—whether it's country, soul, ambient, indie, whatever. Then I need to figure out how to make that all run in a way that seems natural. This month was probably the most challenging all year. I must have listened to these ten songs in varying orders for the last two weeks, before finally settling on this one tonight. It's probably not my most elegant mix, but I do like some of the weird juxtapositions, especially hearing the sound of the keyboard in Roedelius Schneider's "Single Boogie" echoed by the sound of the Equals' guitars).

Anyway, have at it: press play on song #1 and just let the rest go. Hope you enjoy. If you want to hear the other mixes I've done this year, click here and scroll through the various "Favorite Downloads" mixes.

• Gene Clark: The American Dreamer [via The Rising Storm]
• No UFO's: Less Or Maybe Even... [via 20 Jazz Funk Greats]
• Roedelius Schneider: Single Boogie [via Altered Zones]
• The Equals: Diversion [via The Adios Lounge]
• The Field: Then It's White [via Pop Headwound]
• Joy Lovejoy: In Orbit [via For the Sake of the Song]
• Lloyd & Glen: That Girl [via Aquarium Drunkard]
• Oneohtrix Point Never: Sleep Dealer [via Altered Zones]
• Atlas Sound: Te Amo [via You Ain't No Picasso]
• Dion: Now [via The Rising Storm]

Soundtrack to a Marriage

Today is our tenth wedding anniversary. Ten years! A few things have happened since then: moved from Arizona to New York to start our life together. Found great jobs and great friends while we were there. Jill schooled me on classic films. We lived in a giant empty loft in an industrial building in Williamsburg with little more than a mattress and two incredibly uncomfortable kitchen chairs. We moved to another part of Brooklyn and had a super named Ralph who'd say things like "Yous Guys." I tried to write a novel. We went to Paris in 2004--Jill's first time to Europe. We lived in Nolita in an apartment with a fantastic closet but a bed three feet from the ceiling. We moved to Los Angeles in 2005 and put some roots down, moved our careers forward. We embraced the beauty of LA--hikes through the hills, beaches in the fall. We got lost in a bamboo forest on Maui. We started doing weird things like exercising. I became a tennis fan. We went to Greece for two weeks and it was the most beautiful trip I've ever been on. We had Cooper. Jill became a runner--she went from not being able to run for more than a couple minutes to running a half marathon in a little over two hours, eight months later. Among other things.

I could make a hundred different mixes to describe our last ten years together, but I've settled on this one because it feels like time traveling. For every year that we've been married, I've chosen a song or an artist that we, as a unit, played the hell out of in that year. Some of these songs we still play the hell out of, others we haven't listened to in forever. Some years had a lot of contenders, others didn't.

• 2001 | Bjork: Hidden Place
• 2002 | The Decemberists: Shiny
• 2003 | The Radio Dept.: Where Damage Isn't Already Done
• 2004 | Feist: Mushaboom
• 2005 | The Ruby Lee: Skies as Blue
• 2006 | Midlake: Head Home
• 2007 | Andrew Bird: Heretics
• 2008 | Little Joy: The Next Time Around
• 2009 | Animal Collective: Bluish
• 2010 | The Radio Dept.: This Time Around

I don't think there is a qualifying song for 2011, or not yet. So let's conclude the mix by taking it back to this day, ten years ago, to our first dance.

• Low: Two-Step

60s Six Pack

I love my iTunes smart playlists, especially my "60s Best" group, which gathers every song in my library made between 1960 and 1969 that I've rated four or five stars. Currently that count sits at 1,280 songs. Of all my smart playlists this one most consistently turns in great mixes. I was playing it yesterday and it spun out this series of gems, including my favorite Donovan song and Hearts & Flowers' "Try for the Sun," which I realized on hearing last night might be one of my top five all-time favorite songs.

• Monks: Monk Chant (1966)
• Donovan: To Sing for You (1965)
• Reparata & The Delrons: Whenever a Teenager Cries (1965)
• The Melodians:Rivers Of Babylon (1969)
• Townes Van Zandt: I'll Be Here in the Morning (1969)
• Hearts & Flowers: Try for the Sun (1968)

Favorite Downloads: August

After months and months of scrolling through the muddle that is my RSS feed, I finally weeded out a bunch of blogs that I realize I'm just never interested in, and I also created a new sub-category for "trustworthy sources," which are the six or so blogs that, for me, consistently display solid taste. Now it's a lot easier for me to make sure I don't scroll past those posts that have a high chance of scratching my itch. For most of the tracks below, I've included my source; if you like what you hear, check those links for more from the same artists, or nice mixes, or just a heads up that you should be following those blogs regularly.

All that said, this month's mix of favorite downloads is a little more packed than usual. This month's batch is heavy on 2011 releases (though a few from '67, '68, '71, '07, '10 sneak in too). As with every month, it's meant to be listened to in order, so click the play button in the corner and let it go for the next 67 minutes or so. If you like psyche, ambient, nü-kosmiche, and good ol' fashioned songwriters, there oughta be something in here for you.

• Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Thought Ballune [via Aquarium Drunkard]
• Bo Grumpus: Yesterday's Streets [via The Rising Storm]
• Woodsman: Tone Cloak [via Altered Zones]
• Tinariwen: Tenere Taqqim Tossam [via Aquarium Drunkard]
• Cass McCombs: The Same Thing
• Digits: Because It's Wrong [via 20jazzfunkgreats]
• Rene Hell: Med School Prince [via Altered Zones]
• Harmonizer: 5th World [via Altered Zones]
• Graham Nash: I Used To Be A King [via For the Sake of the Song]
• Jasper TX: Summer [via Swan Fungus]
• Beirut: East Harlem
• Dave Van Ronk & the Hudson Dusters: Both Sides Now [via The Rising Storm]

Favorite Downloads: July

This month's favorite downloads skew toward songwriters, as opposed to electronica or ambient (though there's still a little of that too). As usual, this mix is best experienced in the order given. Starting this month I'm also going to begin sharing these mixes via Spotify (if they carry the songs), so follow me over there if you're on the site—my username is scottpgwp.

Credit where it's due: three of these tracks come courtesy of Rawkblog—Lia Ices and Chad VanGaalen come from the same mix that yielded the Little Scream track I mentioned yesterday, while the Geotic track came from this mix. I heard "Bells of Harlem" on the radio one night this month and immediately knew who it was, despite not knowing that Dave Rawlings ever put anything out under his own name. Coincidentally I came home that night and found a great introductory mix to Gillian Welch on tumblr, and it included this track. Also on tumblr, the always excellent Singing in the Wire posted a nice intro to Francoise Hardy. As for the rest: Acquarium Drunkard pointed out the Millenium track, the ever-dependable For the Sake of the Song posted the wonderful "Hello Sunshine," and my buddy Swan Fungus posted the Terry Riley track. Finally, I don't recall where I came across the Wooden Shjips track—it's from their new album.

• Lia Ices: Love is Won
• The Millennium: I Just Don't Know to Say Goodbye
• Relatively Clean Rivers: Hello Sunshine
• Geotic: Beaming Husband
• Dave Rawlings Machine: Bells of Harlem
• Francoise Hardy: Pas Gentille
• Chad VanGaalen: Sara
• Terry Riley: In the Summer
• Wooden Shjips: Lazy Bones

Hip Hop Moment

I had a little Tribe Called Quest moment this week, seeing the trailer for the new documentary, watching this video of Q-Tip and Kanye West doing "Award Tour" in Brooklyn, and then hearing Midnight Marauders when my brilliant wife happened to put it on. I don't really listen to hip hop that often, but this three-fer sent me down a little rabbit hole of nostalgia for some of my favorite hip hop albums of that era. Join me in the rabbit hole, won't you?

• A Tribe Called Quest: Excursions
• Camp Lo: Luchini
• The Pharcyde: Ya Mama
• Digable Planets: Dial 7 (Axion of Creamy Spies)/NY 21 Theme (Feat. Sarah Anne Webb)
• The Beastie Boys: Pass the Mic
• Fugees: Zealots
• Latyrx: Say That
• De La Soul: I Am I Be

Favorite Downloads: June

Despite last month's paltry mix and last week's confession re my lack of listening, I've somehow managed to come up with eight new-to-me tracks in the last month, crafted into a tidy mix for your listening pleasure. In truth this collection came more or less from just three sources: apologies/props to my friends at the Cargo Culte, from whom I pilfer many tracks every month (this month, Steve Moore and Harald Grosskopf); shout-out to Swan Fungus, whose top ten of the year so far clued me in to the Tape track; and a special nod to Miles at The Notes for his mix of favorites of the year so far, which yielded the opening and closing ambient tracks, the PJ Harvey (which technically I heard before but I didn't hear it) and the Dirty Beaches ditty (though its best quality, as my brillant wife pointed out, is the Francios Hardy track it samples); the Bjork track, I saw in about forty-two different places.

• Kyle Bobby Dunn: Dropping Sandwiches in Chester Lake
• Bjork: Crystalline
• Steve Moore: Infinite Resignation
• Harald Grosskopf: Transcendental Overdrive
• Dirty Beaches: Lord Knows Best
• PJ Harvey: Hanging in the Wire
• Tape: Hotels
• Loscil: Stave Peak

Favorite Albums of 2011, So Far

On the spur of the moment I threw down this list on my tumblr earlier today, so I thought I'd re-post here, since I have the freedom to make a little mini-mix for you (re-ordered for better flow).

It’s a short list (with the caveat that I heard a lot of albums that were good, but you all want something better than good, right?):

1. Low: C’mon
2. Mountains: Air Museum
3. Rene Hell: The Terminal Symphony
4. Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972

A good indicator of where my head is at, since all the rock/songwriter records I’ve heard fall into that “good” category, seemingly incapable of rising to the next echelon. I guess this means if all you chillwave acts would just drop the vocals altogether and maybe turn the synths up in the mix, I’ll like your records more.

As the rest of 2011 wears on and we go through the glut of fall releases and the scrambling to hear everything possibly missed before making our year-end proclamations, I’m sure this list will morph. I can tell you this: C’mon will still be at or very near the top of the list. It’s beautiful.

• Tim Hecker: Analog Paralysis, 1978
• Rene Hell: Lighthouse Marvel
• Low: Majesty/Magic
• Mountains: Backwards Crossover

Favorite Downloads: May

Every month after I do my album rundown, I like to put together a mix of all my favorite random new-to-me downloads. Well, I guess I didn't spend much time surfing the blogs in May because it turns out I barely downloaded anything all month. So, here you go—four whole songs! (And a note re the Eleanor Friedberger song: what can I say? The chorus sucked me in too deep, I couldn't reject the song once the sax came in. I guess it's the exception to the rule.)

• Television: Glory (Early Version)
• Eleanor Friedberger: My Mistakes
• The Easybeats: Wait a Minute
• Buffy Sainte-Marie: Guess Who I Saw in Paris

Music Diary: Monday

As this morning's post makes clear, I can get pretty anal about tracking what I listen to. Coincidentally, Nick Southall has appealed to anyone who'll participate to spend this week keeping a music diary. So of course I'm in. For this week only, I'm going to get even more detailed about my daily listening habits. If anything, it will show just how skewed my weekly Soundtrack posts are (since they only track albums I listen to from beginning to end). Here's how Monday shaped up:

6:35 am: I'm up when my alarm clock, aka Cooper, says it's time to get up. Knowing that the new Paul Simon, Low, and Panda Bear are all streaming on NPR this week, I head over and choose Simon's So Beautiful or So What to soundtrack breakfast and a little post-meal playing.

8:40 am: Running a little late for work I come out of the shower and hear snippets of Low's C'mon, also streaming from NPR, which my wife put on. I've been looking forward to hearing this and was l looking forward to hearing it in full once I got settled into work. Hearing snippets of a couple tracks feels slightly like I'm spoiling the record.

8:48 am: I'm out the door, iPod on, walking to work: Low, Drums and Guns. I'd already had it in my head that I'd listen to this on my walk, in anticipation of hearing the new one. I arrive to work at track 10, "Your Poison." After ten minutes of getting settled in, I put the headphones back in and finish the last three songs while catching up on email and work twitter in my office. The last three tracks are, after all, the best three tracks.

• Low: Your Poison

10:20 am: Low, C'mon, while working. I make it through five songs before being interrupted—I'm getting a new computer at work. Once it's all set up—it takes about 30 minutes—I head back to NPR, plug in my headphones, and start the album over again. Only the sound is blaring out of the computer speakers as if my headphones aren't plugged in. This won't do; my plans for listening to Low and Panda Bear all day are foiled. I go music-less for a bit.

12:10 pm: Over the weekend I'd downloaded a couple of playlists from Singing the Wire, plus a few Merle Haggard tracks from the Adios Lounge. I dumped them all into one playlist and hit play. I make it through Sir Douglas Quintet's "Texas Me," Billy Joe Shaver's "Honky Tonk Heroes," Jerry Jeff Walker's "Sangria Wine," Kris Kristofferson's "From the Bottle to the Bottom," and Ray Wylie Hubbard's "(Up Against the Wall) Redneck Mother" before being interrupted.

• Kris Kristofferson: From The Bottle To The Bottom

1:14 pm: I need to write, so I put on my "Writing" playlist—all instrumental, mostly ambient/electronic/krautrock—and hit shuffle: Icebreaker International's "Phillipine Sea," Chopin's "Nocture #4 in F," Holy Fuck's "1MD," Neu!'s "Hallogallo," Brise-Glace's "Stump of a Downer," Cluster's "Umleitung," and Manuel Göttsching's epic "Echo Waves."

• Icebreaker International: Philippine Sea

2:22 pm: When Tortoise's "The Lithium Stiffs" comes on, I decide to listen to It's All Around You in full. I'm about to segue into Beacons of Ancestorship but I only make it through "High Class Slim Came Floating In" before being interrupted.

• Tortoise: The Lithium Stiffs

4:48 pm: Looking for nothing special while I do some near-the-end-of-day emailing, I set my "Top Rated" playlist to shuffle: The Shins' "Gone for Good," Neil Young's "Birds," Sufjan Stevens' "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" and the Futureheads' "The Return of the Berserker." Interrupted.

5:28 pm: Heading home, this time on the bus instead of walking. I return to my country playlist. "Sangria Wine," "(Up Against the Wall) Redneck Mother" and "Texas Me" all repeat, along with Great Speckled Bird's "Calgary," the Monkees' "Sunny Girlfriend," Merle Haggard's "I'm Gonna Break Every Heart I Can," and Little Feat's "Willin'."

5:55 pm: I walk in the front door just as Sam Prekop's "So Shy" comes on. My brilliant wife and I start dancing and singing along with Prekop's "Hey / Ba-da-ba-pa," trying to get Cooper to dance too. He didn't dance but it was fun anyway. "So Shy" is the last song on Prekop's self-titled album so the iTunes library flowed right into Who's Your New Professor as we went through the evening routine of detoxing from a long day, giving Coop a bath, and getting him ready for bed. Eventually the iTunes library keeps chugging along: more country with Sammi Smith ("Help Me Make it Through the Night," "Today I Started Loving You Again," "Kentucky"), reggae with Sammy Dread ("Road Block"), and an awful cover of "Louie Louie" by the Sandpipers.

• Sam Prekop: So Shy

7:25 pm: Back to NPR, I finally put on the new Panda Bear album. But I only make it through two songs before we decide to make dinner instead. The rest of the night carries on without returning to the play button.

Favorite Downloads: March

Here's a mix of my favorite new-to-me mp3s I downloadead from various blogs in the last month. I must say I didn't do so well keeping up with the blogs this month. The Art Garfunkel track came from one of Aquarium Drunkard's L.A. Burnout mixes; the two 1960s Asian girl groups came from the ever-dependable Cargo Culte, and the rest came from miscellaneous corners of the web. For the record this mix is intended to be listened to in order.

Stray thoughts:

1. I've never sought out an Art Garfunkel record; perhaps I should? 
2. I hear people compare the new Belong record to shoegaze, but surely Flying Saucer Attack is the more appropriate reference point if "Never Came Close" is any indication?
3. Need to get that Rene Hell full length stat.
4. I hated Gang Gang Dance way back when they first came around, but I can't stop listening to "Glass Jar."

• Art Garfunkel: 99 Miles from L.A.
• Robin Pecknold (w/ Ed Droste): I'm Losing Myself
• Thành Mái: Tóc Mai Sợi Vắn Sợi Dài (Long, Uneven Hair)
• Belong: Never Came Close
• Rene Hell: E.S. Des Grauens In Fifths
• Gang Gang Dance: Glass Jar
• Dara Puspita: To Love Somebody

Circling

By happenstance I heard a nice little run of songs on shuffle that led me to this idea. Enjoy the mix: 35 minutes of circling rythms at varying speeds and degrees of complexity.

• Oneohtrix Point Never: Hyperdawn
• Four Tet: Circling
• Air: Mike Mills
• Tortoise: Ten-Day Interval
• Paul Simon: Can't Run But
• Philip Glass: Floe
• Emeralds: Candy Shoppe
• Nick Drake: Horn

Favorite Downloads: February

And now a playlist of my favorite random new-to-me tracks I downloaded in the last month. Most are from new releases or yet-to-be-released albums, with a couple classics tossed in for good measure. Shout out to the Cargo Culte for hipping me to three of these tracks (Fugiya & Miyagi, Hawkwind, and Spacemen 3). Also, the Atlas Sound track came from a great mix by Kenny Bloggins at the Decibel Tolls. (I've been remiss on checking out much Atlas Sound due to being only lukewarm on Deerhunter, but "Quick Canal" has me reassessing that omission.) The rest came either from a zillion other blogs or via Altered Zones.

Unlike yesterday's sampling, this playlist was assembled with the intention of working like a playlist, so I encourage you to press play on the first track and let it cycle through. You can hear the January mix here.

• Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues (2011)
• Panda Bear: Last Night At The Jetty (2011)
• Hans-Joachim Roedelius: Staunen im Fjord (1979)
• Fujiya & Miyagi: Ventriloquizzing (2011)
• Atlas Sound (w/ Laetitia Sadier): Quick Canal (2009)
• Hawkwind: Web Weaver (1974)
• Spacemen 3: Take Me to the Other Side (1987)
• White Rainbow: Captain Sandwich Patrol (2011)
• Low: Try to Sleep (2011)

Recent Favorites

I'd intended this as a complement to my albums rundown from last week but was waylaid in getting it together. As I hope to do every month, here is a mix of my favorite individual tracks, old and new, I came across in the last month (or, in this case, going back to mid-December). The majority of these tracks came from a handful of other people's mixes—namely The Decibel Tolls and Swan Fungus, as well the Mindbending Motorway Mix created by Broadcast's Trish Keenan, which went around the internet after news of her untimely passing hit. The last track, which kinda sticks out from the rest of the mix but I think makes a nice ending to the whole thing if you listen to it straight through, came from Rawkblog.

• Rene Hall: Gas
• Twice as Much: The Spinning Wheel
• Benoit Pioulard: Sault
• SND: Vandyk-k Integ Paradise 1
• Glenn Branca: Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar
• Houses: Endless Spring
• Emerald Web: Flight of the Raven
• Prins Thomas: Nattønsket
• Phantogram: Mouthful of Diamonds
• Loscil: Showers Of Ink
• Carl Hauck: Martial Riesling

Up Low

A confluence of Low references on various message boards, twitter feeds, blogs, and actual conversations has got me thinking about the band again. After going back and re-reading what I wrote about all their albums and EPs released between 1994 and 2001, I started to feel winsome—the way you feel when you start thinking about someone who used to be your best friend but for some reason, no real reason, you lost touch.

So I've been attempting to get back in touch with the band. I downloaded Trust, which is the first Low album I didn't pay attention to upon release. It's a good album, not deserving of my ignorance. I'd always thought of it as being the first Low album that just kinda sounded like other Low albums, but I realize now that's not the case. It's a tense record. It's the first one they'd done where they let multiple songs stretch to great lengths. It broods like other Low songs brood, but it broods a lot. There are a few light moments, relatively speaking—"La La La Song," for instance—but for the most part Trust strikes me as a spacious and dark album.

I don't know the record that well yet, to be honest. I still feel like we're trying to reconnect with each other. We've both grown, we're different people. Did we have differences before? Was that why we lost touch? Or did I just move away? I have The Great Destroyer and Drums and Guns on my eventual to-buy list too. I've heard select tracks from each and had previously thought they were okay, or bad. But for some reason I feel I want to try again. Oh, also, the new album. C'mon. They just dropped a track from that record, "Try to Sleep," which is lovely.

Coincidentally I had my iTunes library on shuffle the other day and "Venus" came on, which was originally a 7" single from 1997 and is now found on the Lifetime of Temporary Relief set. I hadn't heard it in a long time but it's really just a great little pop song. Which got me thinking about all the other great little pop songs they've done. So perhaps in response to the edginess of Trust, or because of hearing "Venus," or due to my enjoyment of "Try to Sleep," or simply of the spirit of trying to reignite an old friendship, I made a playlist of a bunch of my favorite "poppy" Low songs. 

• Venus (1997)

• Starfire (from Secret Name, 1999) 

• Try to Sleep (from C'mon, 2011) 

• California (from The Great Destroyer, 2005) 

• Those Girls (Song for Nico) (2001)

• Dinosaur Act (from Things We Lost in the Fire, 2001)

• Immune (from Secret Name, 1999)

• Hatchet (Optimim Version) (2007)

• La La La Song (from Trust, 2002)

• Don't Carry it All (2000)

   

   

Buried Vocals

Ever since I wrote it, I've been thinking about the way I framed my recent Walkmen post:

Compelling frontmen with strong voices and a grasp of emotional and lyrical nuance are a rare breed in indie rock, a genre that has typically favored effacing the lead vocal through reverb, distortion, a low mix, nonsensical lyrics, or an enigmatic personality for the better part of twenty-five or thirty years.

This line of thought has stuck in my craw for a few reasons, none of which relate to the Walkmen. First, I grant that it's too broad a statement. There are plenty of dynamic and compelling singers in indie rock. Nevertheless indie—I'm using this term as an umbrella for a lot of sub-genres—seems to have more than its share of bands who use an obscured or effaced vocal as part of its aesthetic. (It's also more than indie: contemporary hip hop has been big on obscuring vocals via vocoder for a few years now.)

But as common as it is—as pervasive as it is—I don't find many people thinking of obscured vocals as an aesthetic that has been passed down through decades of music (beyond referencing shoegaze and leaving it at that). Compare to the way critics might analyze, say, harmony—an utterly fundamental element of songwriting, yet something that can be placed within different traditions. This band harmonizes like the Beach Boys, that band like the Beatles, those guys like the Everly Brothers. This act is influenced by doo-wop, that act by choral music. Three-part, four-part, fifths, thirds. Obscured vocals, on the other hand, don't seem to be thought of as being part of a tradition—or, I should say, the tradition has not been formalized or canonized.  

There are some obvious touchstones, of course: the Jesus and Mary Chain, Galaxie 500, My Bloody Valentine, the entire shoegaze genre. But I don't think it's that narrow. Nor does it get at the many ways in which bands might choose to blur or subvert their vocals—extra reverb being only one avenue to travel. For instance, I was thinking similarly about the anti-frontman, low mixes (and/or the lo-fi aesthetic), and spoken word as I was writing my Spiderland book. That too is part of the larger tradition in indie rock of obscuring the lead vocal. It's one part studio affectation, one part anti-rock-star persona.

I've been mulling this over for a couple of weeks or so now, digging through my collection and my memory in search of some kind of thread, trying to discover how this aesthetic developed. Clearly it's a pandora's box: I came up with a good 50 or 60 songs stretching back to the 1960s, and that's just what's in my own collection. In fact the whole project has become so overwhelming to me that I'm almost ready to throw up my hands; I was looking for trees but by now all I see is forest.

This is something I'll probably be thinking about for a long time going forward, and may revisit here or elsewhere in a bigger way. But for now I just want to throw the idea out there in hopes some of you readers might think about it too.

Rather than tackle the big picture in one blog post, I'd rather start with a few antecedents as examples of the various threads I have winding through my mind, in some attempt to hone in on this aesthetic and how it has evolved from an experimental recording technique into full-blown musical genres (plural!). Am I forgetting anything? Let me know in the comments.

 

1. Turn Up the Reverb

• The Flamingos: I Only Have Eyes For You (1959)
• Buffalo Springfield: Expecting To Fly (1967)
• The Monkees: Porpoise Song (1971)

Reverb has been a staple of the studio for decades, and in fact dates even further back to the natural echo supplied by singing in cathedrals or opera houses. It's used on about a million classic songs, so it's hard to say what was the turning point from an artificial studio effect that took away some of the dryness of a cold microphone to its use in a more extreme fashion. These are three songs by acts who didn't regularly indulge the echo, but the effect clearly impacts the loveliness of these individual songs.

2. The Anti-Frontman

• The Velvet Underground: The Black Angel's Death Song (1967)

There are countless ways in which the Velvet Underground were the anti-Beatles and the anti-Stones, and Lou Reed's whole persona as a frontman is definitely one of them. Reed's New York cool was tough and stylish, but it didn't swagger like Jagger or preen like McCartney. Reed's vocals had their hooks and melodies, but they also sometimes veered toward monologue. His voice was also sometimes subsumed by the music; cacophony was often the point for VU songs, and Reed's voice is kept low in the mix (relative to, say, Mick Jagger always front and center). It's an approach that has had a long-lasting influence on countless bands who willingly reject the cliche Rock Star persona and its flamboyant lead singer, to the point that being an anti-rock star is just as much of a cliche.

3. All about the Atmosphere

 

• Can: Yoo Doo Right (1969)
• Silver Apples: Oscillations (1968)

Around the same time as the VU, the so-called "cosmic music" movement coalescing in Germany was exploring all variety of ways to break down the traditional song form. Repetition and improvisation were major components for all of these krautrock bands, many of whom were instrumental. Can was not. "Yoo Doo Right," from Monster Movie, their first official album and the only one to feature U.S. transplant Malcolm Mooney on vocals, is a 20-minute, side-long epic; it's rhythmic, hypnotic, and constantly forward-moving. Mooney's voice, like Reed's in "The Black Angel's Death Song," is usually equal in the mix to the other instruments, only occasionally reaching above the fray. His repetitive lyrics and melody become just as mesmerizing as the rhythms and the guitar textures.

"Texture" is a key word. It's not surprising that many of the bands and genres that would later embrace effaced vocals are also musically spacious and atmospheric. The Silver Apples are probably the first space rock band (if that's different from cosmic music); the music they made was vast and otherworldly, helped along by Simeon's massive synthesizer set-up and Dan Taylor's steady but unobtrusive drumming. Though the duo didn't exactly treat their voices with effects, their near-monotone harmonies were layered over every song. Each track on their debut album seems like a variation on the same idea. Their twin vocals ultimately fold into the atmosphere of the overall album.

4. Distortion!

• The Sonics: Shot Down (1965)

As far as I can tell the first use of distorted vocals wasn't acheived through adding a special effect, but rather by simply pushing the recording levels into the red. Garage acts like the Sonics were loud and raucous, and if that meant screaming at full lung a little too close to the microphone, so be it. Push the needles into the red—that's how you know they're not fucking around!

How does this all lead to chillwave and Grizzly Bear and Radio Dept. and the myriad bands today cluttering the indie landscape (for better or worse)? It's a long and winding road, to be sure. To me it seems a fascinating road to travel, even if at times it borders on something so pervasive as to be mundane. At any rate this is something I'll likely return to in future posts (famous last words, I know). If any of you out there have your own theories or input or know of others who have already traced this trajectory, let me know!

 

My 90s

First, some good news: my Spiderland book is pretty much done. I'll be sending my final edit back to Continuum this week and then it's off to the printer. It will be out in November (and it looks like you can already pre-order it!).

I've been working on this book in one way or another for almost two years now, going back to when the idea of the pitch first occurred to me at the end of 2008, to finding out I got the deal in spring 2009, to researching and writing that summer, then conducting my interviews in the fall, then writing, re-writing, and re-re-rewriting all winter and spring (taking into account one major distraction).

In thinking about Slint and the context in which Spiderland existed—both as a culmination of influences from the 80s and an influence itself in the 90s—my head has been fully re-immersed in the music of my teenage and college years for a while now. Not only have I been revisiting a lot of my personal touchstones (obvious acts like Fugazi, less obvious acts like Craw, etc.), but I've also been getting better acquainted with bands and albums that didn't resonate with me then but clearly loomed large for other people—Dinosaur Jr., Pavement, etc. None of this specifically factored into the book itself, other than to get me into what I felt was the proper headspace in which to write.

All of this is to say that looking back on the 90s has been on my mind for a long time now. Reading Pitchfork's Top 200 Tracks of the 90s list last week underlined for me something I'd already identified about myself—"my 90s" are not really the 90s that are being canonized. I mean, yeah, Slint was on the list and so were a lot of other bands I was into. But a lot weren't. And as far as Pavement topping the list goes, for me personally it just doesn't resonate at all. Yet I don't really want to argue it, in part because I think something Matthew Perpetua said last week is true:

I have been steeped in Pavement fandom for more than half of my life now and “Gold Soundz” always just seemed like the Pavement song, the one that really communicated what was so special about them. You can argue about what the best one is — it’s definitely not my personal favorite — but that’s the one that sums it up and always has a lot of appeal for casual listeners. I think it’s also the indie rock song. If someone is like “hey, what the fuck is indie rock?”, you could play “Gold Soundz” and they’d have a pretty good sense of it. So given that Pitchfork is ultimately an indie-oriented site, it makes perfect sense that the #1 song of the 90s is by the artist that will always define the indie rock of the 90s.

I could split hairs and maybe point to something by Sebadoh as the quintessential "indie rock" song, but at any rate this gets at something I felt even in the 90s. "Indie Rock" was both generic and specific. I listened to indie rock, but I didn't listen to Indie Rock, as described the way Matthew does above. I listened to post-rock, space-rock, and slowcore. My friends listened to emo—both the Mineral/Christie Front Drive variety and the Shotmaker/Indian Summer variety. There was powerviolence and all the San Diego/Gravity Records stuff. There was twee—Sarah Records, Trembling Blue Stars. There was straightedge and metalcore. Krishna-core! Pop punk, ska. There were weird prolific acts about whom I knew very little other than that there were super hardcore fans who bought it all: Coil, Azuza Plane, Muslimguaze, Namlook, Laswell. There was noise. There were awesome German labels like Haus Musik, Kollapse, and Payola—there was a whole scene in Germany that was like a doppleganger to the incestuous Chicago scene. There was IDM, drum and bass, illbient—illbient!—acid jazz. There were alt country giants like the Jayhawks and Uncle Tupelo. That doesn't even get at the stuff the Pitchfork list covered fairly well—alternative, hip hop, straightahead indie. And even still, there was more.

Even though it caused a little cognitive dissonance seeing Boyz II Men and Len on a list that also included Refused and Bonnie "Prince" Billy, I still grasped why Pitchfork's list was all over the map, and I commend them for trying to grapple with the layers upon layers of music, both mainstream and underground, in one catchall. I wouldn't think to put Bell Biv Devoe's "Poison" on a list for my 90s, but it certainly was pervasive when I was in eighth grade in 1990 and I definitely watched the video all the time, and to this day will sing, totally unprovoked, "smack it, flip it, rub it down"—so I guess that means something.

Still, the list can't help but fail if it's trying to identify all the different directions music went in during that decade. And the inevitable downside to that is that lots of music that belongs to genres that today, for now, aren't as in vogue, get pasted over.

I can't begin to paint a better portrait of the 90s, but I can offer up a playlist for you. These are twenty-five songs that meant something to me during that formative decade. Consider this a mixtape and not a ranked list. For that matter, these aren't my top twenty—I made a point to stick to one song per artist (with one exception), as well as to omit any artist who was included on Pitchfork's list, for the sake of variety. I also eliminated any songs that I happened to put on this playlist not long ago—though all of those songs should be considered here too (eg Craw, Karp, and Unwound). Lastly, if you want an even more in-depth look at my 90s, I recommend you head over to my currently dormant blog Do You Compute—start at the oldest post and go forward.

• Shellac: My Black Ass (from At Action Park, 1994)
• Camp Lo: Luchini (from Uptown Saturday Night, 1997)
• Blonde Redhead: I Still Get Rocks Off (from La Mia Vita Violenta, 1995)
• Pernice Brothers: Overcome By Happiness (from Overcome by Happiness, 1998) / Scud Mountain Boys: Grudge Fuck (from Massachusetts, 1996)
• The Sea & Cake: Parasol (from Nassau, 1995)
• American Analog Set: Magnificent Seventies (from From Our Living Room to Yours, 1997)
• Bedhead: More Than Ever (from Transaction de Novo, 1998)
• The Fugees: Fu-Gee-La (from The Score, 1996)
• Le Tigre: Deceptacon (from Le Tigre, 1999)
• Rodan: Everyday World of Bodies (from Rusty, 1994)
• Hoover: Electrolux (from The Lurid Traversals of Route 7, 1993)
• Seam: Road to Madrid (from The Problem with Me, 1993)
• Califone: Pastry Sharp (from Califone, 1999)
• Codeine: Sea (from The White Birch, 1994)
• Dazzling Killmen: Blown (Face Down) (from In the Face of Collapse, 1994)
• GodheadSilo: Multiple Organic (from Elephantitus of the Night, 1995)
• Nation of Ulysses: Aspirin Kid (from 13-Point Plan to Destroy America, 1991)
• Heavy Vegetable: I Owe You (from Frisbee, 1995)
• Dirty Three: Sea Above, Sky Below (from Ocean Songs, 1998)
• Photek: Smoke Rings (from Modus Operandi, 1997)
• Squarepusher: Vic Acid (from Hard Normal Daddy, 1997)
• Third Eye Foundation: Corpses as Bedmates (from Ghost, 1997)
• Low: Words (from I Could Live in Hope, 1995)
• My Morning Jacket: The Bear (from The Tennessee Fire, 1999)
• Drive Like Jehu: Luau (from Yank Crime, 1994)

Will the Night Last Forever?

• Low: Will the Night
• The Kinks: I Go to Sleep
• R.E.M.: I Don't Sleep, I Dream
• Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: Awake
• Dr. Dog: Wake Up
• American Analog Set: Don't Wake Me
• Big Star: Nightime
• Nancy Sinatra: My Baby Cried All Night Long
• Kevin Shields: Are You Awake?
• Low: Sleep at the Bottom

Songs for the Suburbs

 

• Talking Heads: Once in a Lifetime
• Feist: Mushaboom
• Big Star: In the Street
• Jonathan Richman: Rockin' Shopping Center
• The Monkees: Pleasant Valley Sunday
• Jeannie C. Riley: Harper Valley P.T.A.
• Earlimart: Parking Lots
• Weezer: In the Garage
• Drive Like Jehu: Future Home of Stucco Monstrosity

Tour America With Me, Won't You?

• Cat Power: American Flag
• Doris Day: That Jane From Maine
• Matt Pond PA: New Hampshire
• Scud Mountain Boys: Massachusetts
• Blossom Dearie:  Rhode Island is Famous For You
• Simon & Garfunkel: The Only Living Boy In New York
• The Mountain Goats: Going To Maryland
• Nation of Ulysses: You're My Miss Washington, D.C.
• Ryan Adams: Oh My Sweet Carolina
• Dean Martin:  Just a Little Bit South of North Carolina
• The Gosdin Brothers: Georgia
• Neil Young: Alabama
• Jimmie Rodgers: Miss the Mississippi and You
• Les Paul & Mary Ford: Tennessee Waltz
• The Beau Brummels: Old Kentucky Home
• Joe Pernice: Up In Michigan
• Andrew Bird: The Giant of Illinois
• Low: Missouri
• Greg Brown: The Iowa Waltz
• Big Black: Jordan, Minnesota
• Doris Day:  The Black Hills of Dakota
• Jack Guthrie: Oklahoma Hills
• Ernest Tubb: Waltz Across Texas
• Brightblack Morning Light: New Mexico
• The Ruby Lee: AZ Song
• Grizzly Bear: Colorado
• JP Haynie: Wyoming
• Josh Ritter: Idaho
• Knife in the Water: Nevada Spider
• Dr. Dog: California
• Brian Wilson: In Blue Hawaii
• Johnny Cash: When it's Springtime in Alaska (It's Forty Below)
• Violent Femmes: America Is

Soundtrack for a Shit Week

AKA, perhaps not coincidentally, "The Nine Baddest Ass Bands of My Youth."

• Karp: Bacon Industry
• Hose Got Cable: Fuck
• Jesus Lizard: Gladiator
• Jaks: Cock of the Walk
• Craw: 405
• Fugazi: Rend It
• Drive Like Jehu: Atom Jack
• Sonic Youth: Hey Joni
• Unwound: For Your Entertainment

This mix is firstly a reflection of what I've been listening to lately—too much work + too much stress + not enough decompression = a strong desire to listen to ass-kicking music from the era in my life when I most felt some urge to kick ass, in a primal sort of way. Not that I was ever that primal of a person. Or an ass-kicker an any remotely literal sense of the phrase.

Secondly it's an extension of the question I asked the other day: could there ever be another Fugazi? Likewise could there ever be another Drive Like Jehu? Another Karp? Another Jesus Lizard? Do these successors exist and I'm just deaf to them because I have no need for others in my life? Probably. Probably I'm just a nostalgic crank. At the same time, these songs inspire me to say, simply and directly, screw you—I don't care!

Coop's Listening Minutes

 

  

Usually around the three-month mark of the year I do my quarterly listening report. Well, I totally missed that one this time around. Been busy, as you might suspect. I do hope to do some kind of roundup, maybe not as detailed as usual.

Meanwhile I've been a whole lot less interested in what I'm listening to and a whole lot more interested in what Cooper's listening to. He's three months old, as of Thursday. So perhaps we ought to do a different kind of quarterly report.

As best I can tell, Coop's favorite song of ALL TIME is the theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. He gets immeasurable pleasure when I sing it to him, and lately has tried his hand at singing along. He's got the words right; all he lacks is rhythm and tunefulness.

• Ennio Morricone: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Main Title)

For a while there Coop's fussier moments were alleviated by my singing the Lovin' Spoonful's "Rain on the Roof" or the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love." Lately though one of us, I'm not sure who, has grown tired of those songs.

• The Lovin' Spoonful: Rain on the Roof

Coop's latest favorite—rivaling the Morricone—is Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer." We discovered this when some moaner on American Idol took it upon himself to butcher the song into a kind of tortured Nickleballad. Still, the Idol version did enough to put the song in our heads and we started singing it to Cooper. He seems to especially like it when we simulate the booming drums in between all the "Lie-la-lie"s.

• Simon & Garfunkel: The Boxer

We've got an unspoken rule—actually we've spoken this rule a couple of times—that we don't really want to subject ourselves to actual children's music until we absolutely must. And yet we both skirt that rule in strangely contrarian ways. My wife likes to sing "Surfin' Bird," which is stupidly hypnotic and ever repeating and usually hilarious. I like to sing "Witch Doctor" ("Ooh-eee, ooh-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla bing bang"). Somehow these songs are more palatable than Old McDonald.

 

 

Then there are all the fragments of songs and stray lines that seem to crop up with some frequency. When he has gas I like get all Fugee and say "How many farts do we rip on the daily?". When he's got a particularly dirty diaper my Baha Wife inevitably asks "Who let the poops out? Coop, Coop, Coop." When he's being kind of a punk I tell him he's getting "buddy buddy buddy all up in my face."

• Tribe Called Quest: Award Tour
• Fugees: How Many Mics

1930s Playlist (Good Morning)

Yesterday morning was lovely. One of those Sunday mornings where you wake up and the sun is out and the light in the house is perfect and there's nothing else going on. The Sunday paper was waiting on the driveway, coffee brewed, and the baby was happy. We sat an enjoyed the morning for many hours, listening to a playlist I'd made that was solely comprised of music from the 1930s and 40s, which only added to how pleasant everything felt. Here's a taste of it--ten songs from the 1930s. In my house music from the 30s means mostly country music but also a little Django and some old French chansons (and one avant-garde piece for good measure). Enjoy.

• Jimme Rodgers: Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standin' on the Corner)
• Cliff Bruner's Texas Wanderers: When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You)
• Jean Sablon: J'attendrai
• Bill Monroe: What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul
• Olivier Messiaen: Oraison
• Frehel: Du gris
• The Carter Family: Blackjack David
• Django Reinhardt: The Sunshine of Your Smile
• Patsy Montana: I Wanna Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart
• Coon Creek Girls: Sowing on the Mountain

Playlist Under Big Star's Shadow

Listening to a little bit of #1 Record and a little bit of Radio City and a little bit of Third/Sister Lovers reminds me how varied Big Star were from record to record, and how vague it can be to describe their influence. To say they inspired the "power pop" genre is true enough, but also takes a narrow view of the band—one that begins and ends with Radio City, if not simply "September Gurls." What about all those 70s rockisms of the first album? What about the gentleness of a song like "Thirteen"? What about the morose, sometimes bizarrely morose, songs that crop up over and over on Third?

Here are eight songs that I pulled out of my iTunes library that, to me, contain the spirit of some element of Big Star. There are tons more, but here's what I got so far.

• Wilco: Can't Stand It
• Elliott Smith: Amity
• Cass McCombs: Not the Way
• Earlimart: Parking Lots
• Scud Mountain Boys: Lift Me Up
• Matthew Sweet: Everything Changes
• Quasi: The Sword Of God
• Meat Puppets: We're Here

Here's Where the Obsessive Part Happened

1. The more ambient stuff I've been getting into, coupled with the renewed desire for more krautrock and early electronica pioneers, has led me to finally giving Klaus Schulze a try. I've never really given Schulze much serious consideration before—a quick look at this 100+ album discography was enough to scare me off—but he's been on my periphery for a while. With no real sense of how to enter such a sprawling discography that spans 40 years, I figured the best thing to do was start at the beginning and pick up Irrlicht, from 1972—three tracks adding up to fifty minutes, notable for being droney ambient soundscapes but using no synthesizers or electronic instruments. It's a good album, in an intellectual sort of way—I'm not going to bust it out at parties, in other words. But it's a promising beginning.

2. I was at Amoeba a week later and, despite no longer being able to load CDs onto my ancient Mac and only being able to hear them while driving (something I don't do often), I bought more new-to-me krautrock: Harmonia's Deluxe and Ash Ra Tempel's Join Inn (which I mistook for their debut because I saw that Schulze was in the lineup, and I'd just read that, as he'd done with Tangerine Dream, he left the group not long after forming it; in fact he briefly returned for this two-track record).

3. Geeking out about my new purchases, despite being unable to hear them, I started wasting time on Wikipedia and ILM. Because frankly, the web of krautrock connections in the 70s is baffling. Schulze started Tangerine Dream with Conrad Schnitzler, who was simultaneously in Kluster with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Then Schnitzler and Schulze quit Tangerine Dream and Schulze started Ash Ra Tempel, which he then quit (and who eventually, years later, changed their name to Ashra). Then Schnitzler quit Kluster and they changed their name to Cluster and continued as a duo. Then Cluster teamed up with Michael Rother of Neu! and the trio called themselves Harmonia, which functioned simultaneously with Neu!. Then they made a record with Brian Eno and called themselves Harmonia 76. Then Neu! broke up and Harmonia broke up and Cluster kept making records and Michael Rother went solo and his partner in Neu!, Klaus Dinger, started La Düsseldorf. Then Cluster made their own record with Eno, which they called Cluster & Eno, then they made another and called it Moebius Roedelius Eno. Or something like that? Meanwhile Schulze kept making a million solo records, and so did Schnitzler, and I haven't even gotten to other iconic bands who were more on the organic psyche-rock tip than they were electronica, like Can and Faust and Guru Guru and Amon Düül and Amon Düül II and Amon Düül UK. And then, you know, Kraftwerk. And I even read somewhere that the Scorpions of all bands factored in somewhere though I don't know if that's all true.

If you've ever read Homer's Iliad, you know there's this ridiculous chapter early on where Agamemnon inspects his ships before they go to war, and something like 852 different characters are introduced, all of whom factor into the epic at one point or another, so good luck remembering who's who when they show up for their turn in the spotlight. Reading about all the different krautrock permutations sort of felt like that chapter.

4. Now seems like a good time to remind you of my obsessive nature. When I realized I loved Graham Greene, I decided that I needed to read each and every one of his twenty-eight novels. In a row, in chronological order. (Almost done.) When I realized I loved the Byrds, I decided I needed to buy their albums in chronological order, roughly spacing out each new acquisition to correspond with how much time separated their original releases, so that I would go through the cycle of consuming, digesting, and craving that a Byrds fan in the 1960s/70s would. For God's sakes I keep track of every single album I listen to every single week, and I do this manually—none of this automated last.fm bullshit. And then every three months I look at this list and analyze it statistically. All that is to preface this: I made a list.

5. Quick interjection: I said to my brilliant wife the other day, in all seriousness, "I fear I may be a dilettante." 

6. In an effort to wrap my head around the environment in which all these records were made, I tracked down all these bands' discographies, mingled them all together, and organized them by year. I find this immensely helpful as far as tracing the roots of the electronica strain of krautrock and also just seeing what came first for all of these bands, in a "you can't have Sgt. Peppers without Pet Sounds and you can't have Pet Sounds without Revolver" sort of way. I can't expect to get all of these—I'm not that crazy—but this list does give me a kind of road map as to what to get first, etc.

So, presented for your benefit and/or bemusement: krautrock, 1969–1979. If I forgot any seminal or otherwise noteworthy acts that factor into this universe, let me know so I can update my list.

1969
Amon Düül: Psychedelic Underground and Collapsing/Singvögel Rückwärts & Co.
Amon Düül II: Phallus Dei
Can: Monster Movie
Holger Czukay: Canaxis

• Can: Father Cannot Yell
• Holger Czukay: Boat-Woman-Song

1970
Amon Düül II: Yeti
Can: Soundtracks
Embryo: Opal
Eruption (aka Conrad Schnitzler and friends): Eruption
Guru Guru: UFO
Kluster: Klopfzeichen
Kraftwerk: Kraftwerk
The Organisation (aka Kraftwerk): Tone Float
Popol Vuh: Affenstunde
Tangerine Dream: Electronic Meditation

• Amon Düül II: Burning Sister
• Embryo: You Don't Know What's Happening

1971
Amon Düül: Paradieswärts Düül
Amon Düül II: Tanz der Lemminge/Dance of the Lemmings
Ash Ra Tempel: Ash Ra Tempel
Can: Tago Mago
Cluster: Cluster
Embryo: Rache
Faust: Faust
Guru Guru: Hinten
Kluster: Zwei-Osterei
Popol Vuh: In den Gärten Pharaos
Tangerine Dream: Alpha Centauri

• Faust: Meadow Meal

1972
Agitation Free: Malesch
Amon Düül: Disaster
Amon Düül II: Carnival in Babylon and Wolf City
Ash Ra Tempel: Schwingungen
Can: Ege Bamyasi
Cluster: Cluster II
Embryo: Father Sons & Holy Ghosts
Faust: Faust So Far
Guru Guru: Känguru
Klaus Schulze: Irrlicht
Kraftwerk: Kraftwerk 2
Neu!: Neu!
Popol Vuh: Hosianna Mantra
Tangerine Dream: Zeit
Timothy Leary & Ash Ra Tempel: Seven Up

• Klaus Schulze: Satz Gewitter Energy Rise Energy Collaps
• Tangerine Dream: Zeit

1973
Agitation Free: 2nd
Amon Düül II: Vive La Trance and Utopia
Ash Ra Tempel: Join Inn and Starring Rosi
Can: Future Days
Embryo: Steig aus, Rocksession, and We Keep On
Faust: The Faust Tapes
Faust & Tony Conrad: Outside of the Dream Syndicate
Guru Guru: Don't Call Us, We Call You and Guru Guru
Klaus Schulze: Cyborg
Kraftwerk: Ralf und Florian
Neu!: Neu! 2
Popol Vuh: Seligpreisung
Tangerine Dream: Atem

• Guru Guru: 200 Cliches

1974
Agitation Free: Last
Amon Düül II: Hijack
Ash Ra Tempel: Inventions for Electric Guitar
Can: Soon Over Babaluma
Cluster: Zuckerzeit
Faust: Faust IV
Guru Guru: Dance of the Flames and Der Elektrolurch
Harmonia: Muzik von Harmonia
Klaus Schulze: Blackdance
Kraftwerk: Autobahn
Popol Vuh: Einsjäger und Siebenjäger
Tangerine Dream: Phaedra

• Cluster: Caramel

1975
Amon Düül II: Made in Germany
Ash Ra Tempel: La Berceau de Cristal
Can: Landed
Embryo: Surfin
Guru Guru: Mani und seine Freunde
Harmonia: Deluxe
Klaus Schulze: Picture Music and Timewind
Kraftwerk: Radio-Activity
Neu!: Neu! 75
Popol Vuh: Das Hohelied Salomos and Aguirre
Tangerine Dream: Rubycon and Ricochet

• Neu!: Seeland

1976
Amon Düül II: Pyragony X
Ashra: New Age of Earth
Can: Flow Motion
Cluster: Soweisoso
Embryo: Bad Heads & Bad Cats
Guru Guru: Tango Fango
Harmonia 76: Tracks and Traces
Klaus Schulze: Moondawn
La Düsseldorf: La Düsseldorf
Popol Vuh: Letzte Tage - Letzte Nächte

• Harmonia 76: Welcome

1977
Tangerine Dream: Stratosfear
Amon Düül II: Almost Alive…
Ashra: Blackouts
Can: Saw Delight
Cluster & Eno: Cluster & Eno
Embryo: Apo Calypso
Guru Guru: Globetrotter
Klaus Schulze: Body Love and Mirage
Kraftwerk: Trans-Europe Express
Michael Rother: Flammende Herzen
Popol Vuh: Herz aus Glas
Tangerine Dream: Encore

1978
Can: Out of Reach
Cluster & Eno: After the Heat
Hans-Joachim Roedelius: Durch Die Wüste
Klaus Schulze: X
Kraftwerk: The Man-Machine
La Düsseldorf: Viva
Michael Hoenig: Departure from the Northern Wasteland
Michael Rother: Sterntaler
Moebius & Friends: Liliental
Popol Vuh: Brüder des Schattens - Söhne des Lichts and Nosferatu
Tangerine Dream: Cyclone

• Popol Vuh: Brüder Des Schattens

1979
Amon Düül II: Only Human
Ashra: Correlations
Can: Can
Cluster: Grosses Wasser
Embryo: Embryo's Reise
Guru Guru: Hey du
Hans-Joachim Roedelius: Jardin au Fou and Selbstportrait
Holger Czukay: Movies
Klaus Schulze: Dune
Richard Wahnfried (aka Klause Shulze): Time Actor
Michael Rother: Katzenmusik
Popol Vuh: Die Nacht der Seele
Tangerine Dream: Force Majeure

Where Did It Go From There?

1. Simultaneous to how it all started, in fact simultaneous to everything I've been listening to for the last year or two, was my ongoing if slow consumption of all things krautrock—a genre I thought I was "into" many years ago but upon further reflection all I really was "into" was Tago Mago and, like, Tortoise. So after grabbing the Neu! and La Düsseldorf discographies and beginning to do the same with Faust and Amon Düül II, I started itching for new catalogs to sink into. 

I don't know what made me search Cluster on eMusic for the fifth time since joining a year ago, but I did and was happily surprised to find that they'd added a bunch of their records. I'd snatch up a Cluster immediately no matter when I saw it, but this instance happened to dovetail with when I bought the Mountains album, so my ratio of instrumental spacey shit was increasing at a quick clip. I went for the earliest one on offer, Soweisoso. Since picking it up I've been going back to it over and over again as it continues to reveal itself to me. Cluster belongs on the "pioneering electronica" side of the krautrock coin, as opposed to the "pioneering prog/psychedelic" side, and from what I've heard they seem to do it better than the various Klaus Dinger-related projects. They're not as funny, nor as repetitive—Neu!'s two most definitive qualities—and they're more compelling for it.

• Cluster: Sowiesoso

2. Simultaneous to my purchase of Soweisoso and the Mountains record, my brilliant wife and I were having a conversation about music and our impending baby, due any day now. (In fact, I've been posting a song a day for Baby Tennent on my Tumblr, in case you don't follow me there.) This got my brilliant wife to repeat her desire for Raymond Scott's Soothing Sounds for Baby. Scott, if you're not familiar with him, was a pioneer of electronic music back in the 60s (as well as a jazz player who composed soundtracks for cartoons). He made three Soothing Sounds albums at the time—abstract sound works meant to lull your baby to sleep (each of the three albums was meant to be played at different points in the baby's development, with the sounds and patterns getting more and more complicated as the baby gets older). Again I went to eMusic and again I was surprised to find that they were available, despite my certainty that I'd looked once before and came up empty. I downloaded volume 1 and was pleasantly surprised to find that it... kinda sounded like Cluster! (Though the Soothing Sounds are about ten years older than Soweisoso.) Honestly, I had them on shuffle—yes, I even put my ambient music on shuffle sometimes—and I wasn't always sure who was who. That's a good thing, and I don't really give a shit if this soothes Baby Tennent or not. It soothes me!

• Raymond Scott: Sleepy Time

3. Simultaneous to these purchases—this is roughly that week between Christmas and New Years—I received the first Silver Apples album as a gift. I'd put it on an Amazon wishlist about three years ago and never revisited the wishlist again. My Sister-in-Law has just been winnowing down the wishlist every year and has finally gotten to the point where everything on the list is totally obscure and mysterious to her, so she took a shot with this one—thank God! Silver Apples gets a little repetitive after a while--at least two songs seem to use the exact same bassline—but all such negatives are erased by the constant reminder that these guys were making this record in freakin' 1967. This got me thinking about the similarly pioneering United States of America along with the Raymond Scott and Cluster records, and I got this notion that not only do I need to return to electronic music—a genre I'd once been pretty into, some time back!--but I needed specifically to immerse myself in the genre's origin point. What a great and inspiring world to explore, don't you think? Then I was directed to this blog which is uploading 62 discs worth of 60s-70s electronica and I was overcome by fear of what that would do to my hard drive. I mean, that's an amazing resource but I think I need to take baby steps. I'm going to act like I didn't see it.

• Silver Apples: Program

4. Simultaneous to that, I keep checking in on my friends' blog the Cargo Culte, which consistently has excellent mixes (not counting, okay, when they do powerviolence clusterfucks, but that's just me). I don't know how many random songs I picked up from them over the course of that week, but it was a bunch and they too fit this mold of instrumental, ambient, drone, space, electronic.

• The Bug: Freak Freak
• Oneohtrix Point Never: Hyperdawn

5. Simultaneous to that, I was reading that Coke Machine Glow blurb for Mountains' Choral, which noted that 2009 was a really excellent year for ambient records, so I scribbled all their recommendations down and generally kept an eye out specifically for other sites' mentions of the genre's 09 peaks. Most often championed seemed to be Emeralds, so I gobbled up What Happened; and I also started hearing of White Rainbow, so I tracked down New Clouds. The latter speaks to me more; there's something cold and unwelcoming about the Emeralds disc, though it is good, whereas White Rainbow's four twentysomething-minute tracks manage to be hazy and dense and spacious and varied and immersive all at once.

• Emeralds: Up in the Air
• White Rainbow: Major Spillage

2009: Portrait of a Listener

As I mentioned yesterday, my attention this year, as far as music goes, has been diverted in a variety of ways. Doing a 2009 playlist seemed to miss the thrust of what my year was all about (and probably redundant with every other blog out there); doing a collection of old yet new-to-me stuff would have missed all the music that wasn't new to me that I spent so much time with. So instead I offer this: a 75-track playlist that comes as close as I can to giving some impression of what my listening year has really been like.

The playlist is really meant to speak for itself—though I can't resist tossing in a few comments here and there, if you want to read a few scattered thoughts as you scroll down the list. This adds up to a bit more than four hours of music, so I recommend you click on the play button (it's down in the lower-left corner),  minimize this screen, and let me be your soundtrack as you go about your day today. I can promise it's going to go in a lot of different directions, some of which you may or may not expect, so despite my rambling I'm sort of hoping you'll ignore all this talk and just let the music play.

The way I see it there were about five different narratives driving my listening time this year:

1. The Slint book. I spent a lot of time hunting down albums from the 80s that I knew the guys I'm writing about were into at the time (based on various interviews I'd read), or that were just in the air in that era. In an effort to get into the proper headspace, I sought out a bunch of old punk and classic indie stuff--some of it I'd never heard, most of it I knew but just didn't own. So, Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, Big Black, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr. Other stuff. Also stuff that happened concurrently or not long after, like Bastro, Bitch Magnet, Galaxie 500; and post-Slint stuff like the For Carnation and Papa M.
2. Nostalgia. Overlapping but not exactly the same, my revisiting Slint so intensely sparked a nostalgia in me for all the shit I was listening to around the time of my discovery of Spiderland, which I found accidentally back in 1994. This put me on a big ol' 90s kick, taking me back to high school and college and working in a indie record store and booking shows and all that. So, Jesus Lizard. Karp. Fugazi. Other stuff.
3. 2009! Yes, I still tried to keep up.
4. Filling in more musical blind spots. My continued desire to fill in my krautrock collection, to buy more Byrds and Byrds-related stuff, to simply continue educating myself about the many great albums that I've yet to hear.
5. Country music. Midway through the year a little angel dropped about 500 classic country songs (circa 1925–1985) into my inbox, and I've been trying to process them ever since. It's been a treasure trove of amazingness; many songs I've always known, many that were totally new to me.

So, what does that all add up to? Brand new shit. 80s and 90s punk/indie. Classic country. Krautrock. And a handful of other things sprinkled throughout. Somehow that all made perfect sense to me this year. (As I've said many times: there's a reason this blog is called Pretty Goes with Pretty.) This playlist is intended to be listened to in the order I've presented, in hopes that you'll hear some of the resonances that I have even when jumping from Seefeel to Big Black or from George Jones to the 13th Floor Elevators. Enjoy.   

• Slint: Ron (1989)
• Amon Düül II: Wolf City (1972)
• Tortoise: Yinxianghechengqi (2009)
• Harlem Shakes: Strictly Game (2009)
  If I were making a strict list of favorite songs from 2009, this would definitely be in there, along with the John Vanderslice track below.
• Dr. Dog: Uncovering The Old (2008)
  Dr. Dog's Fate was one of my favorite albums of 08, but I think I listened to it even more this year than last. If I were remaking last year's list today, this would probably be #1.  
• John Vanderslice: Too Much Time (2009)
• Kraftwerk: The Model (1978)
• Seefeel: Starethrough (1994)
• Big Black: Steelworker (1982)
• Akron/Family: River (2009)
• Animal Collective: What Would I Want? Sky (2009)
• Engineers: Sometimes I Realise (2009)
• Neu!: Neuschnee (1973)
• Scratch Acid: Owner's Lament (1984)
• The Fall: Jawbone and the Air-Rifle (1982)
• Wavves: No Hope Kids (2009)
• GodheadSilo: Multiple Organic (1995)
  I've mentioned it before but when I first heard Wavves earlier this year I immediately heard a kinship with GodheadSilo. There's a kind of suburban punk mentality that permeates both bands' material. Making a lot of noise—a lot of noise—about important issues like the ability to drive. Compare, for instance, "Got no car / Got no money" vs "Under 18 and I just got my permit / I need a licensed driver on the passenger side!" 
• Milkmine: Breathe (1994)
• Jesus Lizard: Gladiator (1992)
• Jaks: Dumbwaiter (1994)
  The above four tracks—from GodheadSilo to Jaks—are a good representation of my intense bout of nostalgia for the days when I first fell into the bottomless pit that is my love of indie. My conversion took place some time in 1994, and all of these bands were among the first I stumbled into. Revisiting them now, I just wanna say I think Jaks especially is due a little revisionism. Their complete discography is available on eMusic and is worth discovering.
• Del Shannon: The Swiss Maid (1962)
• Karp: We Ate Sand (1997)
• Faust: Giggy Smile (1973)
• Moon Mullican: I'll Sail My Ship Alone (1950)
• The Shelton Brothers: Just Because (1935)
• Iron & Wine: Each Coming Night (2004)
• Papa M: Napoleon (1995)
• The National: Green Gloves (2007)
• Andrew Bird: Oh No (2009)
• Kings Of Convenience: Boat Behind (2009)
• Hank Snow: I Don't Hurt Anymore (1954)
• Ernest Tubb: Thanks A Lot (1963)
• Bad Brains: Big Takeover (1982)
• Hüsker Dü: The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill (1985)
  Generally speaking I'm really not a big fan of Hüsker Dü. This song, though, is pretty great.
• Squirrel Bait: Tape From California (1986)
  Man did I listen to a lot of Squirrel Bait this year. More than is healthy, I think. This is the last song from their second album (and a Phil Ochs cover, no less!). I dig it though overall I prefer their first, self-titled album. 
• La Düsseldorf: White Overalls (1978)
• Minutemen: Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Truth (1984)
• Slint: Nosferatu Man (1991)
• Fugazi: Fell, Destroyed (1995)
• Bitch Magnet: Douglas Leader (1989)
  Bands sounded "Slinty" before Slint did. Minutemen did for one song, at least. And Bitch Magnet's first full length, Umber, pre-dates Spiderland by a couple years (though what really came first is a bit more complicated than looking at an album's release date... something I may touch on very briefly in the book.) Also, I've always been a little amused by how much "Fell, Destroyed" went for that sound.
• Mission of Burma: Dead Pool (1982)
• Wye Oak: Tattoo (2009)
  I feel like I'm the only guy who listened to Wye Oak this year and thought "Motherfucking 90s!" Seriously, put this band on a mixtape full of bands like Rex and June of 44 and Victory at Sea and I swear you won't think it came out in 2009. 
• Grateful Dead: High Time (1970)
• Emitt Rhodes: With My Face On The Floor (1970)
• Glen Campbell: Gentle On My Mind (1967)
• The Byrds: Ballad Of Easy Rider (1969)
• Meat Puppets: We're Here (1983)
• US Maple: Breeze, It's Your High School (1999)
• Animal Collective: Winters Love (2004)
• Karen Dalton: Something On Your Mind (1971)
• Neko Case: Magpie To The Morning (2009)
  No one dropped an F-bomb better this year than Neko, on this song. 
• Brightblack Morning Light: Everybody Daylight (2006)
  I had dismissed this band when I heard them back in 2006, but some time this year my brilliant wife brought their self-titled album home and we've been under its spell ever since. I can't say I'm very familiar with the album's second half; we tend to put the album on at night and we're both out cold by about the third or fourth track. But I mean that in an incredibly positive way.
• Low: Laser Beam (2001)
  Probably my favorite thing I wrote all year was my weeklong series on Low, most of which was posted at my short-lived Do You Compute blog. Now that that blog is kaput I've been meaning to gather all those posts and re-compose them here, if for no other reason than posterity. In the meantime, this post is a good place to start if you missed them. 
• Big Mama Thornton: Guide Me Home (2004)
• Ray Charles: Busted (1963)
• Yo La Tengo: If It's True (2009)
• Margaret Whiting & Jimmy Wakely: The Gods Were Angry With Me (1950)
• George Jones and Brenda Carter: Milwaukee Here I Come (1968)
• 13th Floor Elevators: Levitation (1967)
• The Seeds: No Escape (1966)
• Bedhead: More Than Ever (1998)
• Cass McCombs: Lionkiller Got Married (2009)
• The For Carnation: I Wear The Gold (1996)
• The Sea & Cake: Parasol (1995)
  I hadn't listened to "Parasol" in I don't know how many years, though it's always been in my mind as Sam Prekop's best moment. Hearing it again all these years later, I still hold that opinion. This song is just beautiful.
  
• R.E.M.: Aftermath (2004)
  Earlier this year when I did a post that presumed to make one great album from the good songs on the last two R.E.M. albums, this is the number that I think benefited the most. Somehow I'd just never really heard "Aftermath" before. It's a great tune.
  
• The Wooden Birds: Sugar (2009)
• Bastro: Recidivist II (1990)
• Fugazi: Smallpox Champion (1993)
• Bastro: Recidivist I (1990)
• The Feelies: Crazy Rhythms (1980)
• Galaxie 500: Temperature's Rising (1988)
• Fennesz: Year in a Minute (2006)
• Phoenix: Love Like a Sunset (2009)
• Animal Collective: Also Frightened (2009)
• The Blue Sky Boys: Down On The Banks Of The Ohio (1936)

Country Playlist

Since my weekly soundtrack posts only reflect full-length albums I've listened to, the amount of country music I've been listening to for the last few months has been invisible among all my stat keeping. The truth is I received from a friend the equivalent of three or four box sets worth of country music spanning, more or less, the 1920s–80s. I've thus been immersing myself in a country music education, though I've only scratched the surface of all those songs. Here are fifteen songs that have so far jumped out and grabbed me.

• Bob Willis & His Texas Playboys: Stay a Little Longer (1947)
• Pee Wee King & His Golden West Cowboys: Slow Poke (1951)
• Jimmy Martin: 20/20 Vision (1954)
• Gene Pitney: (The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance (1962)
• Jimmy Wakely:  One Has My Name (The Other Has My Heart) (1948)
• Marty Robbins: El Paso (1959)
• Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters: Pistol Packin' Mama (1943)
• The Blue Sky Boys: Down on the Banks of the Ohio (1936)
• The Carter Family: Worried Man Blues (1930)
• Floyd Tillman: I Love You So Much It Hurts (1948)
• Hank Snow: (Now and Then, There's) A Fool Such As I (1952)
• Leon Payne: I Love You Because (1949)
• Patsy Montana: I Wanna Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart (1935)
• Webb Pierce: Slowly (1954)
• Chuck Wagon Gang: After the Sunrise (1940)

My Listening Hours: Favorite Downloads, July–September

I must admit I bookmarked a ton of good-looking blog posts with every intention of going back to listen and/or download the mp3s, but I utterly failed to follow through. Still, I did manage to find eleven new-to-me songs that really knocked me out. Many of these tracks came from the Cargo Culte and For the Sake of the Song. I recommend you follow them if you're not already.

Don't forget, there's a convenient little mp3 player down in the lower-left corner. just press play and kill forty-five minutes. The songs might look a little random but I actually think this makes a pretty cohesive playlist.

• Wooden Shjips: I Hear the Vibrations (2009)
• Steve Young: One Car Funeral Procession (1981)
• Theoretical Girls: You Got Me (1978)
• Phoenix: 1901 (2009)
• John Vanderslice: Too Much Time (2009)
• Guru Guru: Next Time See You at the Dalai Lhama (1970)
• The Delmore Brothers: I'm Lonesome Without You (1946)
• Cowboy Junkies: Working On A Building (1988)
• Cluster: Caramel (1974)
• Harmonia: Watussi (1974)
• The Modern Lovers: Government Center (1976)

Think about a Lullaby

Tucked into yesterday's post you might have noticed a little announcement: the pgwp household is expanding. Starting in late January my listening hours are going to shift from krautrock to Kidz Bop.

So if you're keeping score at home, that means I need to finish writing a book (including, hopefully, a trip to Louisville), move into a new place, and otherwise prepare for a kid, all in the next six months or so (oh yeah, and work that pesky full-time job). Stressed? Me? Nah...

Well, seriously, okay, a little. But more so I'm just excited. Bearing in mind that my prior experience in handling infants is 100% theoretical (I did hold one once... once), I have a lot of visions of the days following baby pgwp's arrival. Nearly all of them involve me singing my favorite songs to it. (Optimistically, none of my visions feature tantrums or foul odors.)

Since learning of the impending event, I've had a little checkbox in the back of my mind every time a song comes on—could this work as a lullabye if I sang it softly enough? I mean, I can't drive myself crazy singing "Rock-a-bye Baby" to a tiny being who doesn't understand what I'm talking about anyway, right? The only question, it seems to me, is whether the melody has the right effect. Music-obsessive parents in the audience, feel free to share your wisdom on this front. What are/were some of your favorite non-nursery-rhyme lullabys? I'm forming an untenably long list in my head (and in an iTunes playlist, of course) of any and all contenders. Here's the tip of the iceberg:

• The Byrds: Mr. Tambourine Man
• Low: Peanut Butter Toast and American Bandstand
• The Lovin' Spoonful: Rain on the Roof
• Andrew Bird: Oh No
• The Kinks: Waterloo Sunset

Missed Disconnections

Today I gave my brilliant wife a ride to work. She works on the west side and has to be in early in the morning—by 6 am. Once I dropped her off I couldn't resist stopping by the beach since I was so close and had plenty of time to kill.

The beach in the early morning is probably my favorite thing about Los Angeles (rivaled only by the beach in winter, at any time of day). The air is cool, barely anyone is around, and the light is perfect—the sky almost blends right into the sea. You're subsumed by these three expanses—the sky, the ocean, the vast beach, smoothed out by the now-receded tide and unsullied by people or their tracks. There's nowhere better to just sit and be silent. It was good for me.

• Hearts & Flowers: Try for the Sun

*

On the way home I listened to Grizzly Bear's Vekatimest in the car. It was the closest I've ever come to connecting with this band. I don't know why I haven't, and honestly it flummoxes me that I can't. They've got all the ingredients that should go into my ideal band—beautiful harmonies, great atmospherics, an equal appreciation of 50s–60s pop and rock and contemporary art-rock, riding the fence between easy earworms and dramatic walls of sound. If I were to start a band today, it would probably sound a lot like Grizzly Bear. Yet I just cannot settle up to what they're serving. Too pretentious? Too self-conscious? Too quote-unquote arty? Maybe.

Sometimes you just need the right environment, mixed with the right mood, for a record to click. I came close this morning. I was feeling disconnected—from myself, from the world in front of my face. So maybe hearing a band who also strike me as disconnected—from me, perhaps from their own ability to hit on any kind of nuanced emotion amidst all their dramatic compositions—was the right thing. I floated on their harmonies, rode the waves of their ups and downs,  felt oddly unsettled yet comforted by their borg-like lack of humanity. I was feeling just slightly alien, was just barely outside of my own body. I was feeling about myself the way I feel about Grizzly Bear. Disconnected.

• Grizzly Bear: Cheerleader

*

On Saturday I was home alone, working on a freelance project, when I suddenly became distracted and started sifting through my iTunes to make a new playlist. I'm not sure what triggered it—maybe it was a Galaxie 500 song, or a Deerhunter track. I don't know. But I started scrolling through my library, pulling every song that "fit," though I wasn't really working with a theme. When I was done I had about forty tracks and the whole thing, I realized, resembled the first portion of this playlist, which I made last year. Here's how I described what I was drawn to at the time:

I'd find myself gravitating to a certain kind of music. It was hazy, hypnotic, gauzelike, perhaps with some percussive undercurrent. So, a lot of krautrock. Animal Collective's "For Reverend Green" fit the bill in a big way. Of course I wasn't in the mood for happy music, but I also wasn't in the mood for sad music. I wanted some sort of emotionless music. Something that could envelop me and keep the world on pause or at a distance.

Lately I've been drawn to that sound again. Perhaps not as propulsive, perhaps with less simmering tension. Something a little more numb. I don't know why.

• Galaxie 500: Temperature's Rising
• The Eloise Trio: Island Woman
• Deerhunter: Little Kids

*

I know why. It's not anything special—it's work stress. It's a feeling of not being productive enough outside of work. It's the feeling of hurtling through a busy year full of personal and professional hurdles. You know, the same shit everyone else goes through.

• The For Carnation: Tales (Live from the Crypt)
• The Electric Prunes: General Confessional

*

We watched (500) Days of Summer on Sunday. It was a great movie, recommended. There was a scene, though, where a line out of Zooey Deschanel's mouth had the accidental effect of reminding me of my dad. I went into a funk for the rest of the day and, as of today, haven't really risen out of it. I will, I will. There's enough wonderful things happening in my life right now that I will. But it's a strange feeling to be pulled—forcibly, imperceptibly—into a mood or mindset that you weren't expecting. No external event really triggered this. It's not his birthday, not father's day, not anything. I just felt a memory.

It's not really something to explain. I expect it will happen many times in the future, for the rest of my life. My brilliant wife asked me about it last night, asked if I wanted to talk about it. Well, no. There's not really anything to say—"I miss my dad." Okay. That's it and that's also hardly it. There are no words to articulate how I feel—there's only the search for the right song to connect to.

• Seam: Autopilot

 

Bored at Work?

Just thought I'd point this out: in the bottom corner of this blog there is an mp3 player that allows you to play all the mp3s on the page without actually downloading anything. If you're looking for a quick and dirty mix, try clicking on any of the categories to the right, press play, and see what you get. A couple days ago I selected the This Week's Soundtrack category, minimized the page, and just let the player cycle through about 50+ songs. It was quite a nice little playlist!

Great Touch

A week or two back when I took in Moon—excellent movie, by the way—I saw the preview for a new documentary called It Might Get Loud. The premise is simple: Jimmy Page, the Edge, and Jack White all get together and talk guitar. They jam. They discuss their approach to the instrument. Their egos drape over them like suits of armor. Here's the trailer:

Though I'm not a big fan of any of these guys or their bands, the doc still looks appealing to me. It seems like it's trying to get at the craft of playing the guitar rather than a full-on cock-off. I've rarely seen movies (documentaries or fiction) that truly capture what it feels like to make music or to think about music—that giddy feeling you get when you put the right two chords together or eke a new sound out of your instrument by hitting a string in a certain way or finding the perfect balance between your effects pedals and your own playing ability. There's this incommunicable joy in making music—different from writing songs or listening to an album or seeing a show. Once is probably the last great movie to get at this feeling. And my hopes are up for this film, too.

That said, I know I'll leave this film at least a little unfulfilled because I really am not a fan of any of these guys—them, their bands, or their playing styles. I was joking with my wife that I'd love to see a do-over of this documentary that instead features Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, Kevin Shields, and J. Mascis. If you want to get inter-generational then bring in John Cale and Lou Reed and Tom Verlaine. Talk to Ian Williams of Don Caballero and Battles. Maybe Bradford Cox of Deerhunter or David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors for the latest generation. (I didn't mention this in my Dirty Projectors take last week, but I do really respond to Longstreth's guitar playing—it's probably my favorite aspect of Bitte Orca).

I've talked about my favorite kind of guitarists before; they're the guys who focus as much (if not more) on textures as on technical ability. I was reminded of my bias all over again when I saw that trailer, then a week later picking up US Maple's 1999 album Talker. I haven't heard Talker for a good eight or nine years, but returning to it just reminded me all over again how brilliant this band was. Sure, they didn't make the kind of records you want to put on at a summer barbecue—Al Johnson's voice might the quintessential acquired taste—but fuck if they're not geniuses when it comes to sheer musicianship. Every US Maple song feels like it's held together by paste and band-aids. Each player—Pat Sampson on drums and Mark Shippy and Todd Rittman on guitars—feels like he wants to walk off in a different direction, yet they somehow adhere just enough to keep their songs moving forward. They never devolve into aimless noise.

• US Maple: Go to Braises

If you ever watch tennis then you've probably heard the commentators say that a player has "great touch" or "great hands." What they mean is the player has a skill and finesse in his game that goes way beyond a monster serve or a power forehand. A player with great touch knows how to adjust the pace of a match mid-point, to shift from defense to offense, to place a shot anywhere on the court with as much delicacy as it requires. (If you watched this weekend's Roddick/Federer classic then you can see it: Federer has amazing touch; Roddick not as much.) This is a good analogy for what I love in a great guitarist. Great touch. They know how to go out of tune gracefully, they know the difference between volume and intensity—not always related—and they know when to play loose and to when to stay tight. When I listen to US Maple I can practically visualize Shippy and Rittman's fingers on their fretboards, applying pressure—but not too much, almost none at all—to the strings as they alternately stumble and shimmy through a track. White, Page, and the Edge warn that "it might get loud"—to me that's like a tennis player (Ivo Karlovic or Andy Roddick, say) claiming that they'll beat you with their serve. Okay guys, let it get loud. A loud, ripping bluesy solo can have its magic, but it doesn't tell me you have great touch.

Five more songs with great touch:

• US Maple: Breeze, It's Your High School
• Dirty Three: Stellar
• Jesus Lizard: Then Comes Dudley
• The Walkmen: In The New Year
• Deerhunter: Nothing Ever Happened

My Listening Hours: Favorite Downloads

In three months, I only downloaded about a dozen new-to-me songs from various corners of the internet—a shockingly low number, but that seems to be the way it's been ever since starting up with eMusic and just generally being busier in my real life. Nevertheless, here are six great songs I've come across in the last few months:

• Scratch Acid: Owner's Lament (via eMusic)
  Technically not new to me, but it's been probably fifteen years since I last heard this album and I'd completely forgotten about this song and how awesome it is—almost entirely due to Rey Washam's drumming.

• Brian Eno: Baby's On Fire

 

• Gene Clark: Elevator Operator (via Groover's Paradise)
  It's a little strange that one of the original Byrds would turn out a song that seems like it owes a debt to the Monkees—but then again, so what?

• 13th Floor Elevators: Levitation (via For the Sake of the Song)
  Why don't I own Easter Everywhere yet?

 

• The Seeds: No Escape (via For the Sake of the Song)

• Sonic Youth (with Lydia Lunch): Death Valley 69 (via eMusic)
  I've got my share of Sonic Youth in my collection, but it's spottier than you might think. So I'm going back to the beginning and moving forward—downloaded this single a month back and also picked up Evol just a couple days ago. This song though... ugly, dirty, pretty rad.

RIYL MPP

Random bits and pieces of Merriweather Post Pavilion have me thinking of a few kindred sounds. None of these are direct soundalikes to what Animal Collective are doing, but I hear elements of each mixed into their stew.

• Faust: Krautrock (from Faust IV, 1973)
  This one might be a more accurate reference for Strawberry Jam than MPP; nevertheless I think Faust IV a safe recommendation to anyone who likes the last couple Animal Collective albums. The two bands feel like kindred spirits, separated by an ocean and almost four decades. Both are unpredictable, experimental, dramatic, and funny.

• Raymond Scott: Cindy Electronium (1959)

• Philip Glass: Floe (from Glassworks, 1982)
  Listen to the opening of "My Girls"—it reminds me of Glass's circular patterns (though I'm probably giving Animal Collective too much credit; "Floe" is infinitely more complex).

• Bjork, Oceania (from Medúlla, 2004)
  Between the beats and the backing vocals—Wooo!—I hear a direct connection between this song and MPP.

• Tough Alliance: 1981 (from A New Chance, 2007)
  The first time my brilliant wife heard "My Girls" she texted me: "WTF - new Animal Collective is totally Tough Alliance." There are clear surface similarities, though the Tough Alliance are obviously way more interested in teh 80s synth-pop aesthetics.

• Oskar Sala: Concertando Rubato from Elektronische Tanzsuite (1959)
  Something about the intro to "Daily Routine"—maybe it's just those first tentative, random hits of the keyboard, not to mention the tonal similarity. 

For your comparison:

• Animal Collective: Daily Routine

And the video for "My Girls":

My Listening Year: Favorite Downloads V

Here it is, the fifth and final mix of the week. If you missed them, here are parts one, two, three, and four. Happy holidays!

• The Dukes of Stratosphear: Vanishing Girl (1987)
• The Balancing Act: Red Umbrella (1988)
• Dylan Mondegreen: Wishing Well (2007)
• The Who: I'm a Boy (1966)
• Annuals: Sore (2008)
• The Rosewood Thieves: Lonesome Road (2006)
• Louie & the Lovers: I Know You Know (1970)
• William Bell: You Don't Miss Your Water (1961)
• 13th Floor Elevators: Slip Inside This House (1967)
• Buffalo Springfield: Expecting to Fly (1967)

Favorite Downloads IV

If you've been listening to Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday's mixes, you've heard a little country mixing in with the rest. That was the tip of the iceberg: I was introduced to so much great country music this year (almost entirely thanks to Setting the Woods on Fire), I had to dedicate an entire day's mix to it. If I had to pick just one or two tracks to urge you listen to... I'd have a really fucking hard time. But the Hank Willams, Buck Owens, and Lefty Frizzell tracks are all great fun. The John Hartford song is wonderful. If you liked the Dillard & Clark song on Monday or the Hearts & Flowers song yesterday, then be sure to check the Gene Clark & the Gosdin Brothers track today.

• Jimmie Rodgers: In The Jailhouse Now (1928)
• Lefty Frizzell: Always Late with Your Kisses (1951)
• Hank Williams: Long Gone Lonesome Blues (1952)
• The Louvin Brothers: If I Could Only Win Your Love (1959)
• George Jones: A Girl I Used To Know (1962)
• Buck Owens: I've Got a Tiger by the Tail (1964)
• Gene Clark & the Gosdin Brothers, Keep on Pushin' (1966)
• The International Submarine Band: Luxury Liner (1968)
• Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys: That's What I Like About the South (1973)
• John Hartford: In Tall Buildings (1976)

My Listening Year: Favorite Downloads III

Another day, another ten songs. Here's part one and part two if you missed them. Part four will come tomorrow, part five on Friday.

Today's batch includes my biggest earworm of the year ("Carrie-Ann"), the cruelest lyric of the year ("I've had her; she's nothing"), and the brilliantly arranged "My World Fell Down." Finally, I don't usually even pay attention when I see blogs throw up some contemporary indie act covering a well-known song, but after seeing Jens Lekman do "You Can Call Me Al," one of my all-time sentimental favorites, I had to hunt down an mp3 version of the song. (Anyone paying attention to the lyrics may notice the inspiration for my doings elseweb.)

• The Hollies: Carrie-Anne (1967)
• Them: I Can Only Give You Everything (1966)
• Simply Saucer: Instant Pleasure (1974)
• Harry Nilsson: The Beehive State (1970)
• Jens Lekman: You Can Call Me Al (2008)
• Phil Ochs: I've Had Her (1967)
• Young Killer: The Wrestler (1958)
• Adam & the Amethysts: Bumble Bee (2008)
• Sagittarius: My World Fell Down (1968)
• The Monkees: Porpoise Song (1971)

My Listening Year: Favorite Downloads II

Here's round two. I stumbled into a kind of weather theme today, for no good reason. Especially since this week has been the kind of shitty weather I thought was illegal in Southern California. Special shout-out to the Michael Nesmith track (2009 will hopefully see me pick up one/some of his solo material) and the beautiful Hearts & Flowers song. Enjoy! See you tomorrow with ten more.

• Michael Nesmith: Roll with the Flow (1972)
• The One AM Radio: Wayward Wind (2008)
• Margo Guryan: Sun (1968)
• Hearts & Flowers: Try for the Sun (1968)
• The Sunrays: I Live For The Sun (1966)
• The Explorers Club: Last Kiss (2008)
• Joe Jackson: Friday (1979)
• Gilberto Gil: O Canto da Ema (1972)
• Nouvelle Vague: In a Manner of Speaking (2004)
• The Limeliters: Take My True Love by the Hand (1960)

My Listening Year: Favorite Downloads I

No annual recap is complete in this day and age without a look at all the random singles you downloaded all year long. This week I offer you fifty songs, ten per day, that I discovered in 2008. The tracks range from the 50s through 2008—and one from 1928—from country to psychedelia to tropicalia to calypso to indie, and probably a few things in between. I should also take a moment to thank Paul at Setting the Woods on Fire and Brendan at the Rising Storm, who were easily the source of most of the songs you'll find here this week. Hopefully you're already reading their blogs regularly.

If you're reading this post in your RSS reader, I'm obliged to point out that I do have a convenient little mp3 player on my site—just press play, minimize the window, and go about your business. Let me soundtrack the next hour or two of your day. (The player will hit every mp3 on the site—this post and every post from last week too.)

Here are the first ten. Enjoy and keep coming back all week. Thanks. 

• The Millennium: Prelude/To Claudia on Thursday (1968)
• The Eloise Trio: Island Woman (1956)
• Fugiya & Miyagi: Knickerbocker (2008)
• Silver Apples: Lovefingers (1968)
• The Clean: Tally Ho (1981)
  
• Jose Gonzalez: How Low (2007)
• Scott Walker: Mathilde (1967)
• Dillard & Clark: Out On The Side (1969)
• Joel Alme: The Seven Islands (2008)
• JP Haynie: Wyoming (2008)
    

No Better Time for a Mix Than the End of the World

By now the Large Hadron Collider has begun its test, though it won't be a couple weeks until it reaches its fullest power—you know, when it recreates the big bang. It's been nice knowing you: go out dancing.

• Elvis Costello, Waiting for the End of the World
• Chris Mills, Atom Smashers
• Andrew Bird, Dark Matter
• Fred Astaire, Dancing in the Dark
• R.E.M., It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
  
• The Every Brothers, Bye Bye Love (Hello Emptiness)
• Roy Orbison, It's Over
• Tod Dockstader, Apocalypse part 2
• Andrew Bird, Yawny at the Apocalypse
• Les Paul & Mary Ford, Vaya con Dios (May God be with You)

If you want to keep up with whether or not those looney scientists have destroyed the Earth, keep your browsers pointed here (thanks to Tumbledore for the link).

Recent Awesome Downloads

God, looking down my recent posts list, it's a little sad. Six weeks nothing but those soundtrack posts. And August came and went without a My Listening Hours post, which back in July I said would start coming monthly instead of quarterly. Well, I'm rethinking that. I'm rethinking a lot of things. I think I'm spreading myself too thin, with the many blogs thing (not ready to kill anything yet, though). Related, I think I've fooled myself into thinking only a certain kind of post belongs on pgwp. Well, that's all gonna change, I think. Though the last thing you should ever believe is a blogger making promises. Something between the gargantuan multi-part posts here and the no-thought-required posts at I&A will start happening in these parts, soon. This week maybe. Meantime, here are some of my favorite downloads of the last 30 days. Just press play on the media player below and let the mix run while you go about your important business and/or time-wasting.

• Jose Gonzalez, How Low
  Here's yet another album from last year I sorely need to get. I've downloaded probably half of it as I've come across mp3s in the last ten months or so, and it's all excellent. Hearing this one, though, I've finally kicked In Our Nature to the top of my priority list.
• Benji Hughes, Waiting for an Invitation
  Hughes owes a lot to Beck for his slacker delivery and indie rock/mainstream pop–straddling sound. I've heard a few songs from his double-album debut and most of them are good but not essential. I do like this one a lot though, as well as the first song I heard by him (don't even know the title!).
• The Eloise Trio, Island Woman
  My brilliant wife brought this into our collection when she went on a calypso spree right before our trip to Hawaii. I don't know much about the Eloise Trio but every track we have is as good as this one.
• Fugiya & Miyagi, Knickerbocker
  I'll say this first: I love this song. I can't stop singing it to myself. I'm definitely interested in hearing Lightbulbs when it comes out (or did it come out already?). But—I don't know how I'll feel about hearing a full length by F&M. They need to be more than krautrock impersonators.
• Gene Clark & the Gosdin Brothers, Keep on Pushin'
• Hearts & Flowers, Try for the Sun
  I made a gargantuan iTunes playlist—nearly 800 songs—modestly called the "Awesome Mix"; it's all five-star songs that are hopelessly fun and impossible not to sing along with and enjoy. It's perfect. Well, I think it's perfect. My brilliant wife loves about 90% of it, but she complained that I put too many band in there that sound like the Byrds but aren't the Byrds. Tough shit for her: I just added two more tracks to the mix.
• Pete and the Pirates, Ill Love
• Joel Alme, The Seven Islands
  Finally, a couple more contemporary indie rockers. The Joel Alme track in particular is really sticking with me, though maybe it's just more Hawaiian vacation glow. Assuming there are seven islands making up Hawaii and that's what he's singing with. Don't tell me if I'm wrong.