Seaworthy Southeast Thesaurus

2007-06-20T11:57:00.000-05:00

Notice: this site will no longer be updated. This one will.

2007-05-18T10:38:00.000-05:00

I haven't yet decided what to do with this blog (i.e., whether I should just let it slip into obsolescence instead of half-heartedly reviving it periodically), but I thought I should at least mention the first Stylus article I've written since last summer, on Bjork's "Cocoon." (I am indebted to the editors for providing with me with the opportunity to publish my thoughts there, so it seems niggling to note that, having written a paper on E.E. Cummings in 12th grade, I had capitalized his name, now lowercased in the article, with some intention).

2007-05-13T16:27:00.000-05:00

Maybe these were all rejected from the Jukebox because I couldn't muster enough excitement about any of them to give them more or less than a 7?

Devin the Dude ft. Snoop Dogg and Andre 3000, "What a Job"

None of these dudes, Devin or otherwise, are on the top of their form (Devin doesn't even sound like he's trying), and the novelty of a song about the workaday life of the rapper as recording artist eventually wears off when you realize they haven't got much to say. Still, it has such a light, summery bounce that I can't write it off entirely.
[7]

Kate Bush, "Babooshka"

The career of Tori Amos obviously owes a lot to Kate Bush, and it's particularly apparent on this daintily jaunty song, parts of which can be heard as a model for early Amos fare like "Leather," while the rest is its own wonderfully weird, witchy clatter.
[7]

Kate Bush, "Wuthering Heights"

I'm a fan of the sort of pretentious art that inevitably results from precocious 20-year-olds titling songs after Victorian novels and involving, like, harpsichords and shit, but it's also true that Bush hadn't yet learned restraint on her debut, as her high, fluttering, birdlike voice and relentlessly florid, tinkling piano almost overwhelm the song's inherent prettiness.
[7]

Also: The new Kelly Clarkson single, "Never Again," isn't as monstrously good as "Since U Been Gone" (I mean, what is?), but I swear to God when it came up randomly on my iTunes, I thought it was Sleater-Kinney.

2007-03-30T10:15:00.000-05:00

Hi. I haven't been here in a while.

Here's some singles blurbs from the last few weeks that didn't make the cut:

Lil Mama, "Lip Gloss"

For the same reason I like “Drop It Like It’s Hot” better than “Wait (The Whisper Song),” I prefer “Hollaback Girl” to this song—musically, it needs something sweet or lush to counteract that relentless drum cadence. Still, it’s cute that it’s about lip gloss, which also makes it a more plausible jump-rope song than Gwen’s.
[6]

The Stooges, "My Idea of Fun"

I've never had much use for the Stooges' crude blues-derived proto-punk, so the fact that this new single only harkens back to the glory years in its playful nihilism, but otherwise resembles Dirty-era Sonic Youth (Iggy even seems to mimic Thurston Moore's flat sing-song), is a nice surprise.
[7]

Kanye West, Nas, KRS-One, and Rakim, "Better Than I've Ever Been"

Since the all-star team assembled here had me worried at first that the track would be an overblown mess, I'm pleased that it's so lean, giving each rapper plenty of room to represent and rhyme alongside the beat's stylish glide. I just wish there was a hook, though, since that same restraint also makes it lapse into monotony.
[6]

All of these reviews, to varying degrees, reveal the extent to which I prioritize sonic elements over lyrical/thematic ones, which sometimes troubles me. I mean, it's not as if it's a conscious decision, it's just what I notice first. One of the first pop songs I ever reviewed on this blog (Lil Kim's "Magic Stick") focused almost exclusively on the melodic structure of the chorus and dropped the term "major triad." These days, I try to avoid more egregious displays of music theory, but my tendency to isolate individual instruments, in describing how they contribute to an overall mood, is what led me to wonder if this approach could be classified as formalism.

It sort of strikes me as New Criticism-influenced, not dissimilar to the way I examined contemporary poetry in Conrad Hilberry's class in 1997: picking apart how each semi-colon, each use of consonance, contributed to the whole. (I had a lot to say about the anapestic meter in Stephen Dobyns's "The Music One Looks Back On.") And all of that is fine, except in cases like that song with all the rap legends, when surely it might've done me good to force myself to pay attention to what they were actually saying. (There's a potential tangent here about why I'm able to pay attention to words when they're on paper and not when they're in my headphones, but I'll skip that for now.)

Somewhat related: I don't think Timbaland's "Give it to Me" is worth much more than the 7 that I gave it last month, but realizing that it's a Scott Storch diss track makes me appreciate it on a whole new level. The presence of Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake as guest vocalists always seemed like a show-off move ("I'm so great, I can get two of the biggest pop stars in the world to do cameos for me"), but now it just so seems so much more in-your-face, and I like that it makes Nelly and Justin complicit in the beef. Even if Storch wasn't likely to work with Timberlake again, anyway, there's a riskiness to it that's attractive.

2007-02-23T13:23:00.000-06:00

Stylus had a spotlight on "sophisti-pop" yesterday, complete with a Jukebox full of classic mid-80s singles. I had a couple of blurbs included, but a surfeit of contributors meant that another couple got cut.

Without further Adu:

Sade, "Smooth Operator
The best song on offer here, and not just because it’s the only one I’ve heard a million times (though I am irrationally affectionate toward songs I’ve heard performed by lounge bands at divey bowling alleys). It’s also a smooth jazz song—maybe even the one that codified the genre’s name—that nevertheless avoids the aimless vapidity of most of its peers. This is sometimes achieved through a climactic sax trill but mostly through Sade Adu’s marvelously creamy voice (dig the supple hiccups on the “coast to coast” part). As a character study, it lacks the emotional component of some of her later singles, but it’s an exceptionally worthy debut.
[9]

Aztec Camera, "Somewhere in My Heart"
After hearing lounge-pop also-rans The Legendary Jim Ruiz Group reference Aztec Camera as an inspiration in “Goodbye to All That,” I had high expectations, but my first encounter with Roddy Frame (via Todd Hutlock’s “The Sound of Young Scotland” mix CD) was a stripped-down disappointment. Turns out there’s more to the band than just clever jangle, though, and the insistent beat and dramatic sparkle of this later effort go a long way toward making me revise my initial opinion.
[7]

As a bonus treat, here's another unpublished blurb from a while back:

Arcade Fire, "Black Mirror"
Though the Arcade Fire's strength has always been less in their wailing melodies than in their ability to build tension and enforce a sense of dynamics, Win Butler's transformation of the song's title into a tiresome mantra means that the usual slow burn of plunking piano and ramshackle drums flickers out before a sudden burst of French can save it.
[5]

I'm still looking forward to Neon Bible, though. Sasha Frere-Jones's profile of the band in this week's New Yorker is particularly good, although using Ian McCulloch as a reference point for Win Butler's voice would've been a fresher insight if my friend Dan hadn't made the same connection (upon hearing Echo and the Bunnymen for the first time) two weeks ago.

2007-02-07T12:24:00.000-06:00

(NOTE: Revised in light of Matos's announcement that there were 503 Jackin' Pop voters, not 497.)

So Pazz and Jop is out now, and I thought it would be interesting to see if my prediction that it would reward more conservative tastes (rock dinosaurs, singer-songwriters) came true. At first glance, this does appear to be the case: while Jackin' Pop had Bob Dylan's Modern Times in the #6 slot, Pazz and Jop elevates the album to its top position.

In order to get a better look at the rest of the list, I constructed the following formula:

((((PJ*503)/494)-JP)/JP)

where PJ = Pazz and Jop points
JP = Jackin' Pop points
494 = number of Pazz and Jop voters
503 = number of Jackin' Pop voters

The voter totals are remarkably similar, but they're not equal, so the first part of that equation ((PJ*503)/494) represents a weighted Pazz and Jop vote, i.e. what we would expect if nine more people had voted. The rest of the equation calculates the percentage change in points from Jackin' Pop to Pazz and Jop.

In analyzing the 51 albums that garnered at least 200 points on either poll (this still isn't a perfect comparison, since Pazz and Jop allowed voters to give up to 30 points per album, while Jackin' Pop set a max of 15), here are the ones that did much better on Pazz and Jop:

Artist	JPpts	P&Jpts*	%change
E. Costello/A. Toussaint	78	240	213.2
Roseanne Cash	94	277	200.0
New York Dolls	106	205	96.9
Tom Waits	341	608	81.5
Raconteurs	174	281	64.4
Ornette Coleman	206	314	55.2
Bob Dylan	749	1123	52.7
Beck	157	235	52.4

Naturally, I then reversed the equation to see which albums performed better on Jackin' Pop:

Artist	P&Jpts	JPpts*	%change
Love Is All	103	226	115.5
Beirut	113	235	104.2
DJ Drama/Lil Wayne	113	226	96.4
Girl Talk	212	420	94.6
Hot Chip	307	529	69.2
Mastodon	199	342	68.8
Justin Timberlake	274	470	68.5
Destroyer	231	395	67.9
Knife	355	607	67.9
Grizzly Bear	164	274	64.1
Liars	136	226	63.2
Clipse	673	1057	54.2
J. Dilla	249	384	51.5

*this figure is unweighted

I think the results speak for themselves.

2007-02-02T10:53:00.000-06:00

Everyone's already been linking to it, so there's a good chance you've seen it already, but the Stylus Singles Jukebox has converted to a blog format. It's great news because it means I can review songs more or less as they come along, instead of having to commit for a whole batch that all too often took up my Sunday afternoon. So far, I've written blurbs for Alan Jackson, Musiq Soulchild, Linda Sundblad, Mike Jones, Akon, and the Shins. (Speaking of whom, Wincing the Night Away is, horrible title notwithstanding, much better than I'd been expecting. "Sea Legs" reminds me of Beck's "Paper Tiger" -- which itself rips off Serge Gainsbourg, as I recently noticed when listening to L'Histoire de Melody Nelson for the first time -- but I dig that taut guitar strut slathered in ascending strings.) Here's my blurb for Amerie's "Take Control," my favorite single of 2007 so far, which didn't make the cut:

Female-led R&B these days seems to rely on either a cool robotic sheen (Ciara) or a commanding belt-'em-out style (Beyonce), so it's refreshing to hear a woman who's a) got some grit in her voice but b) doesn't resort to histrionics. In fact, Amerie often reminds me of an early Michael Jackson (it's in that raw tug right after the chorus: "I said 'baby!'") and on "Take Control," the creeping spy-movie guitar and horn blasts do little to play down the resemblance to something like "Off the Wall." This is energetic, infectious stuff that proves "1 Thing" was no fluke. [9]

I almost bought Touch the other day, not least because her pose on the cover is so hot, but also because I don't really listen to many hip-hop/R&B/pop albums, which doesn't seem fair. With hip-hop, this is a pragmatic choice, since 90% of the time I listen to music, I'm also doing something else (like copyediting or reading or composing blog posts), and it's just too distracting for an hour-plus at a time (I actually like that new Clipse album, but I've barely gotten around to listening to it more than twice). With pop and R&B, I think it's partially a rockist assumption that nothing's going to be as good as the singles (even though I have heard some solid albums qua albums, like Brooke Valentine's debut), and partially the fact that I don't have as much access to it: these aren't the kind of albums that are put up on Luisterpaal or that I can gank from friends who are otherwise all too willing to burn me the new Bloc Party or Wilco discs (I had to drive all the way to Milwaukee to see a Brewers game with Matt Cibula to get my hands on Brooke Valentine!).

Of course, after Noah Berlatsky, in a recent Chicago Reader article, called LeToya's debut "one of the most accomplished and creative recordings I've ever heard, in any genre," I wanted to seek it out immediately. (Something about the article as a whole bugs me, though: even though I understand that its premise is a defense of a genre that's probably maligned by much of the paper's readership, it sometimes reads like a persuasive essay for a freshman comp class. With pat formulations like "contemporary R&B does have something to offer" and "The best thing ... isn't the lyrics, though. It's the music," I half expected the article to conclude with the old high-school paper stand-by, "Try it, who knows you just might like it." As it stands, "And it's right on the Top 40 station of your choice" isn't much better. I'm not entirely sure what would've improved the piece, but I'm sort of left wondering where all this nervous protestation sprang from.)

2007-01-22T16:36:00.000-06:00

Stylus was gonna do a year-end podcast a couple weeks ago, but apparently all the other podcasters were still hung over from New Year's or something, so the plan was scotched. But not before I already recorded myself rambling for several minutes about one of my favorite unheralded songs of 2006, Calle 13's "La Jirafa."

Get the goods here (the second half of the mp3 is the song itself).

2007-01-11T17:52:00.000-06:00

Question to self: Do I really like John Legend's "Show Me," or did I just get caught up in all the "OMG R&B DUDE LOVES JEFF BUCKLEY" buzz? I'm worried it's the latter, since I know Kaki King's "Jessica" (which succeeds "Show Me" on my 2006 mix) is the better Buckley bite, anyway: its slow, hazy chords mimic "Lover, You Should Have Come Over," but with this shy, diaphanous voice and reverbed build-up that reminds me of Slowdive, too.

2007-01-08T12:46:00.000-06:00

So the inaugural Jackin' Pop music critics' poll is out, and Michaelangelo Matos deserves high praise for organizing it and corralling nearly 500 writers to contribute. That's only 300 fewer critics than participated in the Village Voice's long-running Pazz and Jop poll last year, and because of that, I had hoped that Jackin' Pop would serve as meaningful competition, maybe even going so far as to poke a hole in the old guard and soon replace it.

(Side note: I don't like the idea of two competing music critics' polls any more than college football fans like the confusion that arises from an equally weighted sportswriters' poll and coaches' poll. For over 30 years, Pazz and Jop had ably filled the role as the yearly consensus among (mostly American) music critics: the P&J archives on Robert Christgau's site give a fascinating glimpse of what sparked the discourse in any given year. But when New Times took over the Voice in late 2005 and proceeded to fire Christgau, who started the poll, and music editor Chuck Eddy, who commandeered it in recent years under Christgau's tutelage, P&J ceased to carry the same measure of prestige and credibility for many people as it once did. When Idolator announced they'd be running a new poll, with Matos as editor, I decided to hitch my wagon to that particular train instead of voting in both.)

However, looking at the results, I share Matos's briefly stated concern that (with the exception of Bob Dylan at #6) it all seems a little too ... Pitchfork. And even though that means it probably rewards albums I voted for (half of my top 10 finished in the overall top 20), a lot of what was so great about Pazz and Jop was being able to escape momentarily from the blog/webzine circus to notice that "whoa, people actually care about Drive-By Truckers?" You had the sense of being a part of a much larger circle, one that included boring workaday graybeard critics at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and as a 20-something, it was fun to root for records you loved but knew couldn't compete, because they were too electronic/European/whatever (cf. #41 finishes for Junior Boys in 2004 and Isolee in 2005). Maybe when P&J comes out later this month, I'll have my illusions shattered—like maybe Silent Shout is a top 10 record everywhere—but given that the majority of people who boycotted the poll seem to be exactly the kind of young Internet-savvy freelancers whose tastes are most in sync with mine, I kind of doubt it.

In his essay accompanying the 2003 Pazz and Jop poll, Christgau complained that the P&J rolls were larded with "part-timers who buy many records and miss many more," as well as "newbies who learned to write from literary theorists and honed their opinionizing skills in the dog-eat-dog cenacles of college radio." It's hard not to read that second extract as a diss on the bloggers, ILMers, and Pitchfork writers that were beginning to make their mark on the poll, thus elevating the "middling indie" records Matos also finds discouraging. But I had hoped that the solution to that predicament would be to accept the great democratic movement in music criticism and maybe be a bit more judicious about which blogs make the cut (I like Ally Kearney, but I'm not sure that musings on ILM and on a sporadically updated blog are enough to earn you a ballot; hell, I don't know that I qualified the first year I voted, either)—not to have the online contingent start its own poll.

The idiocy of the New Times management forced the creation of a P&J alternative, but if Jackin' Pop going to succeed in establishing the same exhaustive consensus as P&J once did, it's going to have to cast an ever wider net, pulling in the genre specialists and the folks on the daily-newspaper and mainstream-magazine beat. (I notice, with some disappointment, the absence of Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune, Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times, Jon Pareles and Kelefa Sanneh of the New York Times, Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone, and the venerable Greil Marcus.) I'm probably being too hard on an enterprise that's only in its first year, but the day P&J came out used to be known as "Christmas morning for rock critics," and I'm already missing that sense of excitement and surprise.

2007-01-04T13:42:00.000-06:00

From Carina Chocano, in Slate.com's annual Movie Club:

Also—and this is minor, but when else will I get the chance to ask?—did anyone else have a weird reaction to the kids [in Babel] being named Mike and Debbie? As far as I know, there is no such thing as a Mike or a Debbie under the age of 35 in California. It's Kai and Brianna now.

Ha. Yeah, I had that reaction. Not to Mike, since I know plenty of them, but Debbie? No way.

2007-01-04T12:14:00.000-06:00

Two years ago, buoyed by my invitation to participate for the first time in the storied Village Voice-run Pazz and Jop poll, I wrote a grand overview of the music I encountered over the past year, with a style partially jacked from copy I was editing at my day job, and submitted it as my comments. Though none of it was excerpted for publication (not enough bite-sized pull quotes or references to Iraq/George W. Bush, I reckon), it's still one of my favorite things I've written for this site. Last year, I declined to craft a 2005 version, mostly because I was burnt out by assorted year-end assignments for Stylus -- but I figured that just gave me more time to prep new posts and articles for the coming year.

At the beginning of 2006, however, my proposal for the EMP Pop Music Conference (on indie bands who cover pop songs) was rejected, and later in the year I was let go from the Stylus staff for not writing enough. I'm over the initial disappointment of both of these events (lots of critics I admire didn't get into EMP, for one) -- but they had the joint effect of making me wonder whether I was cut out for this hobby. Since it is indeed a hobby, I have to squeeze it in between my 9-to-5, my ever-more-serious band, and my new (as of spring) girlfriend, and so it's entirely possible that if I had more time to devote to writing, I'd be more successful at it. But when I asked the Stylus editor in chief, in a friendly e-mail exchange, why he hadn't warned me and allowed me to formulate a pitch or two before giving me the boot, he suggested that my failure to do so voluntarily indicated a lack of enthusiasm from the start. And there was something to that, too: I was worried about my declining output, but I often couldn't think of much I wanted to write about (especially not anything that others couldn't do better), and as my life busied, even the practice of keeping up with new music began to feel like a chore.

So why bother with a 2006 wrap-up then? Because, put simply, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be doing this, and I need some closure. After all, even though I haven't written much, I have been actively listening to music in the last twelve months (nearly 100 albums with a copyright date of 2006 somewhere in the world), and there's some things I want to say before I make the decision whether or not to give a shit about 2007. (LCD Soundsystem's new [March '07] album has been on my iPod for weeks, but I couldn't even bear to listen to it before the calendar changed, or else I'd already be giving in.)

***

That said, I don't know that I had a whole lot of epiphanies in 2006, in the sense of genres newly discovered or listening habits fundamentally changed. For the first time in four years, I heard about the same amount of music as I did the year before. (Which is possibly what contributed to the disillusionment I felt: after several years of immersing myself in music in order to better write about it, I had reached an end-point of sorts.)

On the other hand, I did give mainstream country more of an ear than usual. There are only four Nashville singles represented on my year-end mix below, compared to three from 2005, but those three were pretty much the only country songs I heard, whereas this year I paid attention to at least a dozen. And since my trips to the laundromat where the radio's set to US99 were only every couple of weeks, I picked up a lot from the Stylus Singles Jukebox, which was revamped and expanded in 2006 to include plenty of songs that didn't reach the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100. I've already mentioned Steve Holy's "Brand New Girlfriend" as an exemplar of infectious enthusiasm (long before my mom and I hollered along with it on our way to central Illinois for Thanksgiving), but Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" rivals Gretchen Wilson's barn-burners (or hell, most of Lily Allen's three-minute snark-fests) for piercing detail: vivid lines like "white-trash version of Shania karaoke" and "dabbing three dollars worth of that bathroom Polo" made me grin like crazy.

Of course, the other major beneficiary of the new Singles Jukebox format was international pop. After Robyn leapt into my heart in 2005, no one needed to tell me adorable Scandinavian women went hand in hand with immaculately crafted pop songs (actually, ABBA probably proved that 30 years ago, and I can't be the only one who still has a soft spot for Roxette) -- but I'm not sure I would've come across the sunny Marit Larsen ("Don't Save Me") or the coy Linda Sundblad ("Oh Father") otherwise: both made me want to don leg-warmers and lip-sync in front of the mirror with a hairbrush, and I mean that as a high compliment. I also heard, via the Jukebox as well as via Krista (who works with Spanish speakers and occasionally flips the radio to La Kalle 103.1 FM), a fair amount of pop en español, and though not much of it stuck, one act that did impress me was reggaetón duo Calle 13, who shun the taunting monotone shouts that characterize most of the reggaetón that makes it onto U.S. hip-hop radio in favor of slinky melodicism ("Atrevete-te") and lush, dreamy arrangements ("La Jirafa").

What I didn't listen to as assiduously as I did in 2005 was electronic dance music, apart from Ellen Allien and Apparat's Orchestra of Bubbles (with its mix of fierce cello and floating female vocals) and about half of Booka Shade's Movements. (I'm also not counting obvious indie crossovers like Junior Boys and the Knife.) I was actually thinking about this a couple months ago, when I happened to put on Total 7 on the way home from work and was surprised at how good it was. Surprised because I'd heard it once before, when I first acquired it, but hadn't been compelled to listen to it again until that night, when it all fell in line: supple beats, dark and shiny synths, subtle transitions, etc. But then I realized that I didn't love Superpitcher's Today immediately, either, and the primary reason it ended up on my top 10 of 2005 was because I listened to it so often while falling asleep, and its crystalline textures became familiar, a small comfort of sorts.

This year, because of aforementioned girlfriend, I rarely used music in this way (I think I put on Immer once, and she complained that it was the opposite of falling-asleep music; after that, I learned my lesson) -- which only confirms my belief that our musical diet is much more contextual than we often like to admit. I'm by no means a fanatic about post-punk, but this fall the confluence of watching Marie Antoinette (note the comment), reading Simon Reynolds's admirably comprehensive Rip it Up and Start Again, and riding the el on slate-gray mornings, as the last leaves clung to their skeletal branches, had the effect of making nothing sound as good as the anxious clang of Gang of Four and Joy Division.

***

When I filled out my Jackin' Pop ballot last month, I didn't even have to think twice about the best-artist-of-the-year category. Not only was Timbaland was responsible for the much-vaunted makeovers of Nelly Furtado (their flirtatious duet "Promiscuous" ruled the summer) and Justin Timberlake (whose FutureSex/LoveSounds lacked dazzling peaks like "Rock Your Body" but also felt more like a work of art, with every track uniformly dark and meticulously stitched together), but he also produced Omarion's "Ice Box," a late-in-the-year single that transposed the frozen echoing synths of "My Love" onto vocals that are more haunting and emotionally resonant than anything JT has done (if not quite as fun). Since I missed Timbaland's first wave of creativity, with Missy Elliott and Aaliyah, I originally considered him inferior to the Neptunes (especially since I preferred slick disco to arty minimalism), but at this point, he has the better track record.

All that notwithstanding, I found 2006 to be a disappointing year for singles -- or maybe it's just all been downhill after the amazing first three months of 2005 (seriously, two of my honorable mentions [The Game and M83] eventually ended up in my top 20 that year). Of course, the biggest sensation was Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," and I even considered putting it as my number one, in part because I'm kind of in awe of weird songs like "Hey Ya!" that somehow appeal to multiple demographics and become culturally inescapable. (I sympathize with Rahawa Haile, who muses, "Perhaps I’m drawn to songs destined for numerous covers because it implies some sort of inherent excellence.") But even though I nodded along to it plenty, and frequently imitated Cee-Lo's rich tenor ("Hahaha now bless your soul"), it never adrenalized me the way "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" did, and its sui-generis status made it seem like a predictable choice. And so I listed it below Nelly Furtado, Panic! At the Disco (whose nervous syncopation was a lot more viscerally interesting than the newfound bombast of fellow emo clowns My Chemical Romance), and T.I.'s "What You Know," which combines the kind of stately, soulful orchestral swoops that I can't help but be attracted to in hip-hop (also see Lupe Fiasco's wistful "Kick, Push") with an obvious love of language, if a line like "fresh off the jet to the 'jects where the G's at" is any indication.

Perhaps my nostalgia for the promise of 2005 is what made me fall so hard for Girl Talk's Night Ripper, which weaves a handful of recent hip-hop hits into its tapestry of samples, but none more recent than "Laffy Taffy." An album that symbolized my schizophrenic listening habits seemed a fitting choice for my best of the year, to say nothing of the nifty aesthetic scenarios it made possible. The rest of my top 10, on the other hand, feels like a straight-up flashback to 2004, with Sonic Youth, Junior Boys, and Joanna Newsom once again finishing strong, and Grizzly Bear arguably filling Animal Collective's position. I guess this is what happens when your tastes ossify, huh? It's also a pretty hivemind-oriented list, which is partially why I sneaked Kaki King's ...Until We Felt Red on there at the last minute: her wounded whisper and restless fretwork reminded me of a time before ILM and probably spoke to me more than whatever I bumped down to #11, anyway (the Knife, I think). One of my resolutions for 2007: to listen to more older stuff, and not just the canon fodder when it's on sale for $7.99 at Tower (RIP), but strange and beautiful music I can obsess about and fall in love with.

2007-01-04T12:06:00.000-06:00

2006 YEAR-END MIX

Might tweak this a little before I'm done, but here's my annual year-end mix. (For reference: 2004, 2005.) As always, let me know if you want a copy: it fits on one mp3 disc.

1. Be Your Own Pet, "Adventure"
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Gold Lion"
3. The Rogers Sisters, "Emotion Control"
4. Love Is All, "Felt Tip"
5. Tokyo Police Club, "Be Good"
6. The Fake Fictions, "Do the Dance"
7. The Futureheads, "Skip to the End"
8. Arctic Monkeys, "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor"
9. The Hold Steady, "Chips Ahoy!"
10. The Strokes, "Juicebox"

11. Rhymefest, "Devil's Pie"
12. Girl Talk, "Smash Your Head"
13. J Dilla, "Workinonit"
14. Cassius, "Rock Number One"
15. Escort, "Starlight"
16. Kelis, "Bossy (Alan Braxe and Fred Falke Remix)"
17. MSTRKRFT, "Easy Love"
18. Dr. Octagon, "Trees"
19. DJ Shadow ft. Q.Tip and Lateef Truth Speeker, "Enuff"
20. The Coup, "Laugh Love Fuck"

21. Prince, "Black Sweat"
22. Beck, "Cell Phone's Dead"
23. Omarion, "Entourage"
24. Pharrell, "How Does It Feel?"
25. Christina Aguilera, "Ain't No Other Man"
26. Beyonce, "Deja Vu"
27. Jay-Z, "Show Me What You Got"
28. OutKast ft. Sleepy Brown and Scar, "Morris Brown"
29. Mark Ronson ft. Alex Greenwald, "Just"
30. John Legend, "Show Me"

31. Kaki King, "Jessica"
32. Brighton, MA, "Bet You Never Thought"
33. Midlake, "Roscoe"
34. Loose Fur, "Wanted"
35. Steve Holy, "Brand New Girlfriend"
36. Carrie Underwood, "Before He Cheats"
37. Richard Hawley, "Just Like The Rain"
38. Sara Evans, "Bible Song"
39. Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins, "Rise Up with Fists"
40. Taylor Swift, "Tim McGraw"

41. Cat Power, "The Greatest"
42. Joanna Newsom, "Cosmia"
43. José Gonzalez, "Heartbeats"
44. Beirut, "Postcards from Italy"
45. The Decemberists, "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)"
46. Belle and Sebastian, "We Are the Sleepyheads"
47. The Flaming Lips, "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song"
48. Yo La Tengo, "Mr. Tough"
49. Peter Bjorn & John, "Young Folks"
50. Stereolab, "'Get A Shot Of The Refrigerator'"

51. Lily Allen, "Everything's Just Wonderful"
52. Nouvelle Vague, "Ever Fallen In Love"
53. Marit Larsen, "Don't Save Me"
54. Linda Sundblad, "Oh Father"
55. CSS, "Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above"
56. Morningwood, "Nth Degree"
57. Aly & A.J., "Rush"
58. The Pipettes, "Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me"
59. The Research, "Lonely Hearts Still Beat The Same"
60. Miranda, "Don"

61. Rihanna, "SOS (Rescue Me)"
62. Fergie ft. Will.i.am, "Fergalicious"
63. Nelly Furtado ft. Timbaland, "Promiscuous Girl"
64. LL Cool J ft. Jennifer Lopez, "Control Myself"
65. Ciara ft. Chamillionaire, "Get Up"
66. The Clipse, "Momma I'm Sorry"
67. Calle 13, "La Jirafa"
68. Lupe Fiasco, "Kick, Push"
69. T.I., "What You Know"
70. Three 6 Mafia, "Poppin My Collar"

71. "Weird Al" Yankovic, "White And Nerdy"
72. Lady Sovereign, "Love Me or Hate Me"
73. Justin Timberlake ft. Timbaland, "SexyBack"
74. Ghostface Killah ft. Theodore Unit, "Jellyfish"
75. Field Mob Ft. Ciara, "So What"
76. Cassie, "Me & U"
77. Junior Boys, "The Equalizer"
78. Booka Shade, "Night Falls"
79. Ellen Allien and Apparat, "Way Out"
80. Coldplay, "Talk (Jacques Lu Cont Mix)"

81. Madonna, "Sorry"
82. Herbert, "Something Isn't Right"
83. Sally Shapiro, "I'll Be by Your Side"
84. Sapporo 72, "Architecture of Love"
85. Luomo, "Really Don't Mind (Radio Edit)"
86. Kleerup ft. Robyn, "With Every Heartbeat"
87. Nathan Fake, "Charlie's House"
88. Basement Jaxx, "Take Me Back To Your House"
89. Hot Chip, "Over and Over"
90. New Young Pony Club, "Ice Cream"

91. The Rapture, "The Devil"
92. Justin Timberlake, "My Love (DFA Mix)"
93. Chicken Lips, "Without Sound"
94. Gnarles Barkley, "Smiley Faces"
95. TV on the Radio, "Hours"
96. Xiu Xiu, "Boy Soprano"
97. The Knife, "We Share Our Mother's Health"
98. Barbara Morgenstern, "The Operator"
99. 120 Days, "Keep On Smiling"
100. Thom Yorke, "Black Swan"

101. Mogwai, "Travel Is Dangerous"
102. Grizzly Bear, "Colorado"
103. Final Fantasy, "This Lamb Sells Condos"
104. Joan As Policewoman, "Christobel"
105. Panic! At The Disco, "I Write Sins Not Tragedies"
106. The Killers, "When You Were Young"
107. Sonic Youth, "Incinerate"
108. The Whitest Boy Alive, "Burning"
109. The Changes, "Water Of The Gods"
110. Phoenix, "Consolation Prizes"

2007-01-02T09:47:00.000-06:00

Why "Fergalicious" is superior to "London Bridge": Missy Elliott imitations that lack Missy's goofy charm and queen-bee authority absolutely miss the point, whereas JJ Fad's "Supersonic," for all its amateur exuberance, becomes even more of a treat with pristine 21st-century production. (Thanks to Morgan for pointing out the obvious similarity.)

2006-12-22T10:17:00.000-06:00

I must confess, I don't understand how Ciara's "Promise" has become the only single this year by the so-called crunk'n'b diva worthy of having praise heaped upon it: it's #47 on Stylus's year-end list, #42 on Pitchfork's, and Andy Kellman's AMG review calls it "tremendous, one of the sexiest, slow-tempo, non-breakup songs of the past ten years" and one of the only real highlights on The Evolution.

It's not that it's bland*, at least in terms of instrumentation and production: the slathered-on vocoder certainly speaks to me (even though T-Pain is making better use of it these days), and I'll even buy Alex Macpherson's argument that Ciara's vocal limitations are capable of creating a certain emotional effect (even though it's hard to hear her usual breathiness here as anything other than weak and unengaging). It's just kind of muddled, and there's little about the song that sticks with me at all.

Which would be par for the course as far as a lot of modern R&B goes, except for the fact that this is Ciara, and she's had two far superior singles in 2006 alone! I can sort of understand critics ignoring "So What," since it's not technically her song, although she dominates it so much, both in personality and sheer time behind the mic, that the mere "ft." credit she receives hardly seems fair. Not to mention how the blase, sing-song refrain is perfectly suited to her glamorous reserve: the Field Mob dudes sound scrappy, but she's too cool to even eke out the entire word "you" at the end of a line, rhyming "thug in yuh" with "here for yuh" as though swallowing a yawn.

The melancholy air of "Get Up" is reminiscent of last year's brilliantly simmering "Oh" (although not quite as much as Cherish's "Do It to It," which is a copy right down to the creeping chord changes), and it features the same midtempo dance-floor exhortations as "1, 2 Step" -- but it's also perhaps Ciara at her most joyous. For instance, note the playful way Ciara doubles that light pizzicato line that's introduced as counterpart several bars earlier: the tick-tock cadence ("the. club. is. jum-. pin'. now.") works as a neat build to the excited rush of "Get up!" And then what about the way that Chamillionaire's fluid rap transitions into him suddenly singing the third verse? It's unexpected -- since when does the cameo rapper ever step on the singer's turf? -- but it flows so naturally, it's a sweet bonus.

2006-12-19T10:44:00.000-06:00

Yay, Jody Rosen and I have the same least-favorite song of 2006. This along with other year-end revelations can be found at the Slate Music Club, where Rosen is joined by Jon Caramanica, Ann Powers, and Carl Wilson.

Of major music scribes, Wilson is probably the single biggest champion of Final Fantasy, but I'd assumed that enough bloggers and webzine critics would have been into He Poos Clouds to guarantee it a placement higher than #49 on Stylus's Top 50 or anywhere for that matter on Pitchfork's, where nearly three-quarters of my personal top 20 placed. If I'd been allowed to vote on the Stylus list, I might've been able to shake things up a bit, but probably not too much.

2006-12-18T11:19:00.000-06:00

2006: THE ALBUMS

I did a top-five list with blurbs for Scenestars.net last week (although it hasn't gone up on the site yet), and while I was at it, I figured I could fill in the rest of the ballot that I submitted to the Jackin' Pop poll. (Still torn about whether or not to contribute to Pazz and Jop this year. On one hand, there's the genuine thrill of inclusion the last couple of years: "Ma, I'm in the Village Voice!" On the other, we're talking about a paper that has fucked over Robert Christgau, Chuck Eddy, and Michaelangelo Matos, three of the best, most consistently interesting music critics in the world. I guess there's always Hinder.) And so here we are:

10. Hot Chip, The Warning

An uneven record from a gang of pasty white British dudes that still contains some of the past year's most rewarding pop pleasures, from the energized, anthemic refrain of "Over and Over, " to the alluring blue-eyed croon and insistent twitch of "Boy from School."

9. Herbert, Scale

On paper it sounds like disco: lavishly sweeping strings and anonymously fabulous singers both subservient to a dance beat -- but for Herbert, fine details matter more than grand statements, and so his Technicolor orchestra here is microscopic, wrapped in a warm blanket of mellow clicks and glitches, and no less captivating for all the tweaking that implies.

8. Kaki King, ...Until We Felt Red

It's hard for me to dislike an album whose antecedents seem to be the kind of moonlit, back-porch post-rock I loved at the turn of the century: Tara Jane O'Neil's Peregrine and Papa M's Live in a Shark Cage, most obviously -- but the young guitar whiz also demonstrates her versatility by interspersing meditative, finger-picked instrumentals with eerily poignant vocal numbers like "Jessica," which borrows some of Jeff Buckley's compelling reverie.

7. Grizzly Bear, Yellow House

They've been said to resemble the softer side of Animal Collective, and this ensemble indeed copies the celebrated noise-folk outfit's wondrous harmonies and acoustic trance, but Yellow House is redolent less of the bounties of nature and more of the shadows of the past, with the hushed, creeping "Marla" seeming not so much a cover as a palimpsest, all the dusty, wine-stained markers of the attic where it was discovered still preserved and seeping through.

6. Destroyer, Rubies

Dan Bejar is the only New Pornographer I've ever had any use for, and though I admired the bold romantic artifice of Your Blues, his previous record under the Destroyer moniker, it was the sprawling Rubies that really sold me on him: an organic tangle of ramshackle piano and bleeding guitar, overlaid with endless strings of words that Bejar clearly relishes, as they build upon his own mythology.

5. Joanna Newsom, Ys

Girl's getting a lot of guff and p-word drops for her long song-suites, but pretentious only makes sense within the insular realm of indie rock: no one would dare diss Philip Glass, say, for ten minutes of hypnotic harp figures. Plus, the expansiveness only enhances the thorny beauty of these fairy tales: amid the colorful swaths of orchestration, it lets them linger and breathe.

4. Junior Boys, So This is Goodbye

Two years ago I swooned for the tricky rhythms and gorgeously frozen sighs of the electro-pop duo's debut, Last Exit, and though this one's more streamlined, that may ultimately be to its advantage: the persistent beat and elastic laser synths on "In the Morning" prompt fantasies of dancing all night, eyes lifted to the darkened sky.

3. Final Fantasy, He Poos Clouds

Owen Pallett's palette consists of the polite tools of the trained composer: contrapuntal cello and ornate piano intricately darting past each other, for instance. But he's as likely to spiral into cries of anguish as he is to dwell on his own prettiness (just as the album title conflates the heavens with literal shit), and the appearance of the Charlie Brown children's chorus on "This Lamb Sells Condos" all but encapsulates the record's consuming melancholy.

2. Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped

Twenty-five years on, and these boho rock stars not only haven't lost the plot, they're making some of the best music of their career: here they condense the bright, dreamy jams of their last couple records into crisp, shimmering pop songs, albeit with plenty of detuned arpeggios and breathy art-school poetry that'll probably always serve as a signature, since it still sounds so good.

1. Girl Talk, Night Ripper

In 2006 the gimmicky fun of the traditional mash-up gave way to a more transcendent pleasure: hearing dozens of my favorite radio hits stitched together, one snippet after another, for over 40 breathless minutes. Even when the name-that-tune factor lost its novelty, I was still left with a cavalcade of thrilling new contexts that unexpectedly stuck in my craw, and as the sort of dilettante who loves Ciara nearly as much as Sonic Youth, I couldn't help feeling like the mix was designed just for me.

Runners-up: The Knife, Silent Shout; Ellen Allien and Apparat, Orchestra of Bubbles; Belle and Sebastian, The Life Pursuit; Phoenix, It's Never Been Like That; Justin Timberlake, FutureSex/LoveSounds; The Changes, Today is Tonight; Booka Shade, Movements; LCD Soundsystem, 45:33; The Rapture, Pieces of the People We Love; Luomo, Paper Tigers.

[cross-posted on The Funky Funky 7]

2006-12-12T10:59:00.000-06:00

So the Stylus Top 50 Singles list is up this week, and I've got two blurbs in the 31-40 range: Sonic Youth's "Incinerate" and Panic! At the Disco's "I Write Sins Not Tragedies," both of which were in my personal top 10. Can't wait to see what else makes the list: as you might know, I'm a total whore for all this year-end nonsense. (Only last year did I finally throw out all my Entertainment Weekly yearly wrap-up issues that I bought at the newsstand for most of the '90s.)

2006-12-05T10:14:00.000-06:00

New single reviews.

And a query: does anyone know of any good CD compilations of what we usually call "standards"? I'm talking Tin Pan Alley, Broadway showtunes, that sort of thing. I mean, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Gershwin Songbook is probably a good start, but I'm looking for a record (or box set) that has Ella doing "Someone to Watch Over Me" and Peggy Lee doing "The Lady is a Tramp" and Sinatra doing "Fly Me to the Moon" -- because as much as I love these songs (I spent a good part of my adolescence learning to play them on the piano), I've got practically zero recordings. Could make for a good Christmas gift, hint hint.

2006-11-17T14:38:00.000-06:00

2006-11-16T17:12:00.000-06:00

2006-11-16T16:52:00.000-06:00

This blog would be better if I didn't read any other blogs at all, if I had no ASPIRATIONS. (Irony alert: the thought occurred after reading this.)

2006-11-15T18:19:00.000-06:00

2006-11-14T18:06:00.000-06:00

Me and Matthew Fluxblog stake out separate positions on melons. (I didn't even realize that was Ted Leo!)

2006-10-31T09:55:00.000-06:00

Some singles reviews this week, plus a couple that didn't make the cut:

Jay-Z, "Show Me What You Got"

The shout-out to James Brown ("Give the drummer some!") near the top is apt: as with Brown's merciless funk workouts, "Show Me What You Got" goes straight for a singular, self-aggrandizing statement, rather than muck about in story, and the dense, celebratory orchestration is meant to underscore the rapper's supposed virtuosity. However, this Vegas-style razzle-dazzle, complete with glamorous brass, show-offy piano glissandos, and snaky Wreckx-N-Effect sax, is intoxicating enough on its own to distract the listener from Jay-Z's laziness on the mic. It's an effective first single in the sense that it raises excitement for Kingdom Come, but its purpose feels limited to promotion (it's also in a new Budweiser ad, with Hova hollering from a convertible), and if its place on the album is as something other than an intro, I'll be worried.
[7]

Carrie Underwood, "Before He Cheats"

As someone who disdains the predictable trad-rock trappings that generally characterize the sound of contemporary country, I'm constantly surprised at how the genre routinely wins me over. Most of the time, it comes down to two elements that country has in abundance: strong, charismatic performers and clever, richly detailed lyrics. On "Before He Cheats," Underwood snarls about a "white-trash version of Shania karaoke" and "three-dollar bathroom Polo" in a big, pliant voice that seethes with contempt at the right moments. If the sonic palette is rather conventional, that's fine: it makes the song's real charms all the more apparent.
[8]