Archive for the ‘Tunes’ Category

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Streetlights

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Kanye West – Street Lights

It wasn’t a classic album, or a great one. It’s not even that it was a bad album; it wasn’t. It was alright. “Paranoid” is great. (“Baby, don’t worry ’bout it! Hey there, don’t even think about it! You worry ’bout the wrong things, the wrong things!”) Auto-tune that heartbreak, Kanye, never mind if your voice was already grating to begin with. But “Street Lights”, yeah. “Street Lights” is a good song. It’s not complicated. There’s no bravado, no chest-beating Louis Vuitton Don boasts, not even an “I’ma let you finish” kind of interruption. It’s slow, it builds and falls, it beep beep ba beep beep beep beeps and Life’s Just Not Fair, you know your destination but you’re just not there. [808s.]

Posted on October 26, 2010 - Tunes - 3 Comments » Share

And he smiled, while

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Kate Micucci – Mr. Moon

This is just impossibly cute. [Buy.]

Posted on October 25, 2010 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

The one where we stumble around friendship

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LCD Soundsystem – All My Friends (Radio Edit)

My friend Tom is the only guy I know who can successfully pull off a tight vest and scarf combination without looking like an absolute Park Slope jackass. He’s also the person who showed me I can organize my iTunes collection by the number of times I’ve skipped a song. These two facts are unrelated. They merely functioning as a way into a story about how yesterday (Tuesday) I learned that “All My Friends (Radio Edit)” was the most-skipped song (38x) in my 4,150 item, 19.48 GB music library.

(When I stumbled upon this information, I wasn’t wearing a vest. I was sporting Tom’s Cincinnati Reds hat that’s black with the a white “C.” It’s much too large for my head.)

If your friends are like my friends, “All My Friends” has at some point since its UK release on May 28, 2007 played a prominent role in your life. If you’re really like my friends (maybe even are my friends), you may still jump around like happy idiots when it comes on, yell the chorus along with James Murphy, and occasionally get thrown out of Brooklyn bars for repeatedly demanding that the man pouring drinks play it. It’s all in good fun, barkeep.

Here’s another fact: I don’t really like “All My Friends.” Hence, I think, the skips. I enjoy the idea of it – the jumping, the yelling, the friendship – but as an actual song: eh? “North American Scum” strikes me as more poignant; “Around the World” and “Daft Punk Is Playing In My House” more important; “Dance Yrslf Clean” flat-out better.

Pitchfork, the blogsphere, and most of my friends would disagree. But my iTunes skip counter doesn’t lie. Neither does the play counter, which hit 78 as I typed. Over and over, again. [Buy.]

Posted on October 24, 2010 - Tunes - 2 Comments » Share

Dragons

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Karl Blau – Before Telling Dragons

Komodo dragons grow up to 10 feet in length, half of which is tail, and can weigh over 150 lbs.

Komodo dragons can stand on their hind legs, using their tails as a prop.

Komodo dragons can live over 50 years.

Komodo dragons can climb trees when young.

Komodo dragons can sprint over 12 mph, belying the methodical pace with which they slither-crawl around when relaxed.

Komodo dragons use their “flexible skulls and expandable stomachs” to swallow anything up to 80% of their body masses. After digesting, Komodo dragons will regurgitate a vomity mass of horns, hair, feathers, and teeth.

Komodo dragons have two penises which are held inverted in the body and rotated between hot sexin’ times.

Komodo dragons kind of scare me.

[Buy Nature’s Got Away.]

Posted on October 22, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Fall be kind

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Animal Collective – What Would I Want? Sky

There’s an ocean floor quality to Sky; that blurry drama, the blue, the sway – and the expectant listener, too, waiting for emotive explosives. It’s the Collective outdoing their previous best. Its birth breathing “good deeds” and its death longing for an answer and response to the question “What would I want? Sky”, both in mantra swing. Avey Tare wants, for brief moments if allowed, the release from thought and the carried rest of God’s arms. It’s to be withdrawn from the not-knowing and the out-of-control rush of the everyday. Or, in its surrealist state, maybe it’s just jargon – words to melodies so precious and melodies to sounds of an underwater robot forest. “Do you get up-up-up? Clouds stop and move above me. Too bad they can’t help me. When I stop and look around me, grey is where that colour should be. What is the right way?” [Domino.]

Posted on October 20, 2010 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

Open mouth, look up now

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S. Carey – In The Stream

Copper. All We Grow.

Posted on October 19, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

OR I’LL EXPLODE

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Radiohead – Talk Show Host

1:52am: bored teenagers gather around the public bathrooms on the north east corner of Hyde Park. Some lie down, others light cigarettes, and the rest stand hands in pockets in the cold murmuring. Nothing is happening tonight; even the rats hidden well throughout the scraggly bushes aren’t rustling. The bathrooms are empty, washed in graffiti and urine.

Across the door of the third stall from the left, someone sometime earlier had scrawled Shakespeare in Sharpie ink.

R: Is love a tender thing? It is too rough,
Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.

M: If love be rough with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.

Below that somebody drew a picture of a dick in red marker.

In one of the stalls there’s a half-eaten ham sandwich wedged between the pipes and an assembly of ants marching to and fro with bits of bread and ham, marching for the Queen. Are there rogue ants? Ants that cry for revolution, sitting by the wayside with torn abdomens and lazy eyes screaming YOU WANT ME? FUCKING WELL, COME AND FIND ME, I’LL BE WAITING.

[$$$]

Posted on October 18, 2010 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

AMERICAN LIFE

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First Rate People – American Life

Is it possible that a pair of 20 year olds from Toronto, Canada best captured what it feels like to be American in 2010?

Yes. In fact, it’s not only possible; they did.

Jon Lawless and Jess Kropf are two impossibly cute kids in an impossibly cute band. (There are three other adorable members in First Rate People, but their presence isn’t required for our purposes here.)

On “American Life,” they trade verses while a simple piano riff carries the song. It’s an elegant formula: Take a track, strip it down, build it back, and press record.

The American dream was never intended to be so complex. Sam Adams didn’t fight Tea Partiers; he threw tea. Now he brews beer.

Less so: “I never find the words for what I want to say / My head always wanders off the other way / Don’t ask and I won’t tell you / It’s better off that way.”

We’d all be better off if two Twilight fans (probably?) from the Great White North explained this great country to us.

[Where on Earth can you buy this?]

Posted on October 17, 2010 - Tunes - 4 Comments » Share

I’ve come 500 miles…

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José Gonzalez – The Nest

“This next song is about nationalism and paranoia,” said Gonzalez in two-thousand-and-seven. Opening seconds give way to the slightest of inhale-exhale action, subtle to the Nest’s air – soon swamped by plucked notes of meandering-water delivery. “Saw them gathering sticks from the ground by the thicket while assembling the nest.” Through the production, hearing the strings rattle is as vital to this song as hearing a pianist’s pedal feel the brunt of a slamming dusted foot on any instrumental. It’s what puts you in the same room, “Building frantically without any rest.” There’s not enough time to be taken whole by this song, but it’s stupefying in its short availability, and caring in its stranglehold of the resounding thumb-thump of E. “Walls grew dense and blocked out the sun, caving in everyone.” [Rough, In Our Nature.]

Posted on October 16, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

IT’S ALL GOOD BABY BABY

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Notorious B.I.G. – Juicy

It’s mid-May, ’94. “Juicy” is throbbing from stereos in every avenue. Somehow it’s as if this is exactly your life. Toes tapping, shoulders swaying to Mtume’s sampled mid-tempo instrumental. “Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis / When I was dead broke, man, I couldn’t picture this.” Knocking fists with your friends in the backseat of their beat-down ’71 Chevy Nova, laughing when you meet lines (“Now honeys play me close like butter plays toast!”). Alleyway steam muddling fantasies of extravagant living, golden-bottled alcohol, and a kind of papered freedom. Years away from worrying about men in blue suits and bow ties clutching 9mm pistols. [Ready To Die.]

Posted on October 14, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

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