Arcane Gazebo

Yeasayer, All Hour Cymbals

It always happens: people post "Best of..." lists at the end of the year, which leads me to great records that I wish I'd known about earlier (so they could contribute to the annual mix CD). I came across this one a few weeks ago: All Hour Cymbals by Yeasayer.

How to describe it? According to Wikipedia their self-description is "Middle Eastern-psych-snap-gospel," which sort of captures it. They sounds a bit like TV on the Radio along certain dimensions. Apart from that, they don't sound like anything else I can think of. Lots of unusual instruments, and a very unique texture—there's definitely an exotic quality to it.

It's one of those albums where the best tracks are stacked in front: "Sunrise", "Wait for the Summer", and "2080" are all terrific, so if you only download a few songs make it those three. (And two of them are freely available at the band's website.) Here's 30 seconds of "2080" (since unfortunately I can't find a good source for embedding the full song):

Coachella 2008 lineup

I'm a little late blogging this, but the Coachella 2008 lineup has been announced. However, is it just me or is the lineup weaker this year? Or maybe I'm just getting old and don't know who the cool bands are anymore. (There are certainly a lot of unknown-to-me names on the list.) I may skip it this year and just catch Stars on whatever tour date is closest to wherever I happen to be in April. (I've been on a major Stars kick lately—partly their new album from last year and partly a new appreciation of Heart, on which several songs are more relevant than they used to be. They put on an amazing show the one time I saw them live, which was two years ago.)

Last year, when all the high-profile Coachella reunions were announced, I declared at the lunch table that My Bloody Valentine should reunite for Coachella 2008. Then they did reunite last year, and they were rumored to be playing Coachella, but they're not on the list so it looks like I don't get my wish.

It's been a while since I've posted a video so here's "Elevator Love Letter" by Stars, from Heart. (Set Yourself on Fire remains their best album, however.)

2008 iPod divination

It's January 1, and time for the traditional consultation with the iPod oracle regarding the new year. Drawing ten songs at random and interpreting them as in a Celtic Cross tarot reading (key here), I get,

1. The Covering: Belle & Sebastian, "Judy and the Dream of Horses"
2. The Crossing: Junior Boys, "In the Morning"
3. The Crown: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Fancy"
4. The Root: Guided By Voices, "Kicker of Elves"
5. The Past: Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, "Better Dead Than Lead"
6. The Future: Bloc Party, "Pioneers"
7. The Questioner: Stars, "Window Bird"
8. The House: Bloc Party, "Where Is Home?"
9. The Inside: Arcade Fire, "The Well and the Lighthouse"
10. The Outcome: The Hold Steady, "How A Resurrection Really Feels"

Wow. I don't think any commentary is needed here. Sometimes it's just too obvious...

Favorite Songs of 2007: Upward Fall

With blogging curtailed in the last few months due to thesis writing, and a general decline in music reviews on this site over the entire year, longtime readers may be wondering if I will put together a compilation CD of the year's music as I did the last two years. Wonder no longer! Those of you watching my Flickr stream already know that the mix CD for 2007 has been assembled. As usual, it's compiled from my favorite songs of the year (defined by U.S. release date, since I don't tend to seek out imports) and limited to one song per album.

However, this year my music collecting did suffer from my time spent on other pursuits: I didn't get a chance to listen to very many new-to-me bands, and as a result the list of artists on this collection will seem very familiar to those of you who've heard the previous mixes. A number of artists are returning from 2005's Year of the Phoenix: The New Pornographers, Iron & Wine, Spoon, Caribou, The Rosebuds, and Stars (the bonus track on the second version of Phoenix). The Arctic Monkeys are the only band to reappear from Year of the Wolf, but few bands release two albums less than a year apart so this is unsurprising. Anyway, this isn't so bad since I obviously like these bands, so why not keep featuring them? But at the same time, I feel like I probably missed out on a lot of good new stuff. (Be sure to recommend some in comments!)

I didn't have a good excuse to stick with the "Year of the..." naming scheme this year, so I went with the title Upward Fall, which is a phrase from one of the songs ("The Night Starts Here"). In the song it pretty clearly refers to death, and several of the songs invoke either death or falling as themes. I don't mean to be morbid—in fact I don't intend for the yearly CD to be thematically coherent at all (as opposed to most other mix CDs I make), but sometimes these things emerge subconsciously, because particular songs appeal to me because of the situation I'm in. Here the death imagery should be interpreted like the Death card in tarot, as representing a transition: in this case the end of my grad student career, and moving on into a new life, a new career, and (probably) a new city. The uncertainty about what exactly this will entail is reflected in the tension of the last few songs. The final song is perhaps a bit too apocalyptic, but this is what happens when I put together the CD in my last two weeks as a grad student.

If you'd like a copy of the CD, either see me in person (I will probably be carrying a few), leave a comment, or e-mail me—I'm happy to send them by mail to people who I won't see in the next couple months.

Click through for the tracklist and comments on individual songs. I had trouble ranking them this year, so the list is in track order rather than rank order.

Continue reading "Favorite Songs of 2007: Upward Fall"

Words and Guitar

I'm supposed to be writing the concluding chapter (!) right now, but I would be remiss if I didn't link to Carrie Brownstein's review of Rock Band (which I haven't played yet) in Slate. She's a little snobbish about it, but when you played guitar for Sleater-Kinney you're allowed.

She's the one on the left:

(And I still have an appendix to write, so I'm not quite there yet... also the whole "revision" thing.)

Emma Pollock, Watch The Fireworks

The excellent Scottish band The Delgados unfortunately broke up two years ago, but now there's the next best thing to a new Delgados record: an Emma Pollock solo album. Delgados fans should check it out, especially if, like me, you preferred her vocals to Alun Woodward's. Here's the video for "Acid Test":

My favorite track, though, is not this one but "If Silence Means That Much To You". She's opening for The New Pornographers on their US tour this month—that's a bill I'd definitely see, if only they were coming to California...

Instrumental Loveless

I was listening to one of my two favorite albums of all time—My Bloody Valentine's Loveless—when I read that an instrumental band called Japancakes is covering the entire album on a CD coming out in November. This is a highly ambitious project, both from a technical standpoint (see Wikipedia for what was required to make the original), and from a critical one—in indie rock circles Loveless is a consensus choice for one of the best albums of all time, and a cover will almost certainly fall short.

So I was pleasantly surprised that Japancakes' take on the first song ("Only Shallow") is actually pretty good:

I downloaded the mp3 (in the first link above) and will probably buy the album. It certainly won't supplant the original, but it's an interesting twist.

The original version of "Only Shallow" can be found on YouTube but I won't link it; this really is one of those albums that needs to be heard in CD quality (and preferably on good speakers rather than, say, iPod earbuds). If you're unfamiliar with the album, you might still have heard the song "Sometimes" on the Lost in Translation soundtrack (but if you're looking to try out one or two of the songs, go with "To Here Knows When" or "Soon").

Caribou, Andorra

I really like Caribou's latest album, but I'm having trouble articulating what makes it good. Instead I'll just post the video for my favorite track, "Melody Day":

Melody Day, what have I done?
Now our hearts are locked up tight again...

Running against the wind

Stuff I've enjoyed recently:

• Even the filler strips at Dresden Codak are wonderful. The latest (for which a permalink doesn't seem to exist yet, but it's on the main page) is a bit xkcd-esque, but with a healthy dose of surrealism.
  
• "Don't Make Me a Target" is my favorite song off the new Spoon album. The rest of the CD is really good too; other favorites are "Rhthm and Soul", and "The Underdog", for which there's a video:
  
  
• This post at 3 Quarks Daily is equal parts geeky, silly, and poetic: "Among the inert gases lowest on the Periodic Table of Elements is love"

The Long Blondes, Someone to Drive You Home

Apart from Coachella I haven't reviewed any music (or anything else) for about six months; I felt a little burnt-out on writing short reviews of every album I heard. So instead I'll try another format, longer reviews of records I'm really into in which I overanalyze them. Here's a pilot installment.

The Long Blondes: Someone To Drive You Home
This band has been all the rage in Britain for like six months now, but their debut album just came out here at the beginning of June. The British music media seems to find a new Savior of Rock every year or so, thus making me skeptical of massively hyped Britrock bands, but I picked up this CD anyway and have practically put it on repeat all week—it's really kind of addictive. I can't figure out how to categorize the musical style: it's loud and fast and danceable, frequently poppy and with a touch of punk. Play the video below and you'll get an idea.

The lyrics are terrific, and one of the rewards of repeated listens. Clever psychological studies and layers of meaning, in the best traditions of fellow Sheffield artists like Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys. (What is it with that town? Def Leppard aside.) Film noir and the femme fatale archetype are clearly influences, and not just because they're explicitly mentioned. In fact the band knows its cinema pretty well, from the shouted chorus of opener "Lust in the Movies"—Edie Sedgwick! Anna Karina! Arlene Dahl!—to the Billy Wilder reference in "You Could Have Both".

If there's an overall theme to the album it's relationships between women; although most of the romance is heterosexual, the male characters are frequently in the background, with the song focused on the (female) singer's rival. In (my personal favorite) "Only Lovers Left Alive", we learn nothing at all about the man she's got her eye on, but plenty about the girlfriend she plans to take him from.

And many of these songs are ultimately more revealing about the character of the singer rather than their nominal subjects. Perhaps the best song on the album is "Once And Never Again"; here's the video:

I noticed the Wikipedia entry has a section on the song's meaning, which reads:

It has been speculated amongst fans about the meaning of this song. Some have thought of it as playing with lesbian undertones ("Oh how I'd love to feel a girl your age..."), whereas others think it is about self-harm.

Yes, the teenage girl's self-harming tendencies are an element of the song, and it's definitely a thinly-veiled come-on, but as I read it neither of these are what the song is really about. Rather, it paints a picture of an older woman wanting to recapture her youth by latching onto a younger girl. The singer desires the girl in the song because she wants to be her, and her insistence that it sucks to be 19 are ironic because she wants to be that age again herself. Thus, the title line, repeated twice in the song: the first time an assurance that "to be your age" need only be suffered "once and never again", and the second a lament that the singer already had her chance herself. And so the line Wikipedia quotes has a double meaning: what she's really saying is "how I'd love to feel like a girl your age... [but it was] once and never again".

If you like the song, you'll like the whole album—it's good all the way through. The US release comes with a bonus disc that has some of the B-sides from the UK singles, but they're more optional.

Someone to Drive You Home: Amazon iTunes

Coachella 2007: Photos

The photos I took at Coachella are now up on Flickr. Here's the set.

Coachella 2007: Don't Dream It's Over (Day 3 Report)

On a recent trip to Shanghai my girlfriend bought me a Communist-style satchel with a red star and Chinese lettering (visible in yesterday's Project 365 photo). This was the bag I brought with me into Coachella, and I figured it would be a fairly unique fashion choice. As the festival went on, though, I was dismayed to see people wearing a red star on military green, and soon ascertained that, in fact, this is also used as a logo by none other than Rage Against the Machine, the biggest act of the weekend. I wonder if people assumed that the Chinese lettering on my bag just said "Rage Against the Machine", or if they were asking for it at the t-shirt booth. (Apparently the bag actually says something like "For the service of the people".)

Almost none of my must-see acts appeared on the last day of the festival, so I took this as a roaming day. Thus, I saw fewer full sets but more partial sets.

Sets I saw Sunday: Rodrigo y Gabriela, Willie Nelson, Lily Allen, Ratatat
(and some of the Feeling, the Kooks, Crowded House, Rage Against the Machine, and others...)

Details below the fold:

Continue reading "Coachella 2007: Don't Dream It's Over (Day 3 Report)"

Coachella 2007: Ocean of Noise (Day 2 Report)

I haven't reviewed any of these yet, but for context I want to list my top five albums of 2007 so far:

1. The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
2. !!!, Myth Takes
3. Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
4. Blonde Redhead, 23
5. Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, Living with the Living

Four of these bands played at Coachella this year; three of them were on Saturday. Throw in the New Pornographers and the Decemberists and this was easily my favorite day of the festival, even if I had to skip !!!'s set.

Sets I saw Saturday: Hot Chip, the New Pornographers, the Decemberists, the Arcade Fire, Blonde Redhead

Details below the fold:

Continue reading "Coachella 2007: Ocean of Noise (Day 2 Report)"

Coachella 2007: Suffer for Fashion (Day 1 Report)

Didn't get much sleep Thursday night, partly because I arrived late at the campsite, but mostly because other, very loud people continued to arrive even later at the campsite. This was not a problem the next three nights; as everyone was exhausted from the day's events, the nights were very quiet. By about 9 am it became too hot to sleep, and I felt like I was baking in my tent. I spent the brutally hot morning hiding in the shade reading Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb, and sometime after noon ventured into the festival.

Sets I saw Friday: Noisettes, Tokyo Police Club, Of Montreal, Arctic Monkeys, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Jarvis Cocker, Sonic Youth.

Details below the fold:

Continue reading "Coachella 2007: Suffer for Fashion (Day 1 Report)"

Coachella 2007: Verdicts

(Posted first so it's up while I work on the detailed report.)
(And here's last year's.)

Obviously, this only applies to the artists that I saw; I'm sure I missed a lot of good stuff.

Instruments category:
Best vocals: Win Butler (Arcade Fire)
Best guitar (electric division): Mike Stroud (Ratatat)
Best guitar (acoustic division): Rodrigo Sanchez (Rodrigo y Gabriela)
Best bass: This has to be Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), right?
Best synth: Hot Chip
Best violin section: The Arcade Fire
Best brass section: Lily Allen

Flair category:
Best audience participation: The Decemberists
Best band name: Travis
No, seriously: !!! ("chk chk chk")
Best costumes (general): Of Montreal
Best costumes (cetacean division): The Decemberists
Most endearing display of modesty: Thurston Moore introducing the band and the lead song as if no one had ever heard of Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation, or "Teen Age Riot".
Most endearing display of immodesty: Carl Newman (The New Pornographers): "Bow before our new album cover!"
Best celebrity cameo: Scarlett Johansson with the Jesus and Mary Chain on "Just Like Honey"

Organization category:
Best stage: Outdoor Theater
Best day's lineup: Saturday
Most agonizing schedule conflict: !!! vs. The Decemberists

Song category:
Best cover: Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" played by Rodrigo y Gabriela
Bands playing songs that appear in Guitar Hero:
Satellite Party covering "Stop"
The Willie Nelson Family Band covering "Texas Flood"
Rage against the Machine playing "Killing in the Name Of"
(Did RHCP play "Higher Ground"?)
Best performance of a single song: The Decemberists, "The Mariner's Revenge Song"

Band category:
Best band I'd never even heard of: The Feeling
Best band I'd heard of but never really looked into before: Hot Chip
Best band at the festival: Arcade Fire
Best overall performance: Of Montreal

Please Stand By

Arcane Gazebo will return to posting shortly. In the meantime, here is Alanis Morissette performing "My Humps". (No, seriously. It's brilliant.)

Music news for JSpur

The rest of you may also be interested:

Ted Leo's new CD will be released March 20. (Via Atrios, who is not normally a source for music news, but Ted Leo is appropriate.) There's also a freely downloadable mp3 at the link.

Iron & Wine are planning a release in the fall (via Pitchfork).

If you don't know these bands, you need to listen to more of my mix CDs. Speaking of which, I should mail out copies of the 2006 CD to those who didn't get one...

Friday Random 10: Return of Travel Filler

This morning I'm leaving to visit my girlfriend in Connecticut for the weekend; the blog will receive little attention during this period (not that I've been giving it much attention anyway). Project 365 will be updated as usual. Meanwhile, here is a Friday Random 10 (from the four- and five-star playlist).

1. Portishead, "Mysterons"
2. Sleater-Kinney, "Rollercoaster"
3. Architecture In Helsinki, "What's In Store?"
4. The Postal Service, "Such Great Heights"
5. Spiritualized, "Do It All Over Again"
6. Art Brut, "Moving to L.A."
7. My Bloody Valentine, "Off Your Face"
8. Sonic Youth, "Titanium Expose"
9. Zero 7, "Passing By"
10. Art Brut, "My Little Brother"

My iPod appears to be confused about my destination... however, a trip to L.A. is a possibility later in the month.

Any good albums out lately? My only recent purchase is the Shins' Wincing The Night Away, which is decent.

Contact the patent office!

Over coffee I and another grad student had a brilliant innovation: an electric guitar with SQUID pickups! Due to the high sensitivity and low noise of the SQUID, we expect the sound quality to be extremely good. Of course, the guitar will have to be filled with liquid nitrogen (we're assuming high-Tc SQUIDs here) or equipped with a cryocooler. The LN2-filled guitar would have the advantage of producing plumes of fog on demand, and would be especially spectacular when smashed against the stage at the end of the show.

Coachella lineup

Saw the major Coachella news last night, but today the full lineup has been posted. Not only is Rage Against the Machine reuniting for the festival, so is Jesus and Mary Chain.

If I go for just one day it'll probably be Saturday, which has several of my favorite bands. If two days, Friday and Saturday.

Friday Non-random 10: Guess the Theme

I haven't been posting much, but here's something to keep the blog running over the weekend: A variation on the Friday music post which I am totally stealing from Lemming. I've built a playlist of ten songs (plus a bonus track) around a particular theme; below I've listed the artists for each song. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out the theme and the eleven songs. Use of Google and other resources is allowed; some of these songs are obscure and some less so.

1. Belle & Sebastian
2. British Sea Power
3. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
4. Math And Physics Club
5. My Bloody Valentine
6. Pelican
7. The Pipettes
8. The Reindeer Section
9. Stars
10. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
11. Pavement (bonus track)

Essential '80s Albums

Last year I embarked on a project to fill out my collection of '90s music, with the help of your recommendations. This was quite successful, and I will post my list of favorites eventually. But recently I have posted a lot of top music lists, and am a bit burned out, so I'm going to put it off. Instead, I will move on to this year's project, which is to fill out my collection of '80s music.

So: what are the essential albums of 1980-1989? Essential either as a consensus classic or a personal favorite; all genres are open. Here are a few I hear mentioned a lot, just to get things started (inclusion in this list does not constitute endorsement):

• Michael Jackson, Thriller (1982)
  
• Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska (1982)
  
• New Order, Power, Corruption, & Lies (1983)
  
• The Police, Syncronicity (1983)
  
• Prince & The Revolution, Purple Rain (1984)
  
• Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (1984)
  
• The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead (1986)
  
• Guns N' Roses, Appetite for Destruction (1987)
  
• R.E.M., Document (1987)
  
• U2, The Joshua Tree (1987)
  
• Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation (1988)
  
• The Cure, Disintegration (1989)
  
• Pixies, Doolittle (1989)

Black Mirror

The Arcade Fire have posted the first single from their upcoming album, and I give it a thumbs up. Go here, click on "Win", then click on "Win's Scrapbook", then click the album art to start it playing. (Sadly it's just a stream and not an mp3.)

2007 Open Thread

A new year calls for a new divination from the iPod oracle. Last year's reading predicted the encouraging outcome of The Futureheads' "Decent Days And Nights", which is a reasonably accurate description of 2006 (and the rest of the lyrics arguably apply, but they're pretty vague).

Of course, I meant to do this on New Year's Day as I did last year, but didn't get to it until now. Nevertheless, it's worth doing it three days late to see what's in store for the remaining 362 days. As usual, the key is here.

1. The Covering: Feist, "One Evening"
2. The Crossing: Lindstrøm, "There's A Drink In My Bedroom And I Need A Hot Lady"
3. The Crown: Zero 7, "Warm Sound"
4. The Root: Spiritualized, "Stay With Me"
5. The Past: I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, "According To Plan"
6. The Future: The Hold Steady, "Crucifixion Cruise"
7. The Questioner: Sufjan Stevens, "The Seer's Tower"
8. The House: Zero 7, "In Time"
9. The Inside: Ladytron, "Seventeen"
10. The Outcome: Islands, "Rough Gem"

The Crossing is funny, but makes me wonder if my iPod is not being synced properly. The Outcome, in addition to being the best song on the list, starts out talking about worker exploitation in diamond mines, so I'm going to assume this is a prediction that I will take a postdoc job by the end of the year.

Favorite Albums of 2006

My final year-end list: my favorite five albums of 2006. As with last year, the number 1 choice was easiest and the number 5 choice was hardest. Somewhat unsurprisingly, these albums contributed the top five songs from my previous list (in a slightly different order). The criteria here are a little different though: a good average song quality is necessary, but I also weight coherent themes and the ability to enjoy playing the record all the way through, as opposed to just adding the best few songs to my iTunes playlist. This knocked Pretty Girls Make Graves' Élan Vital out of the top five, since it had a lot of great songs but didn't hang together as well as the others.

5. Asobi Seksu, Citrus
This was the year I fell in love with noise pop and shoegazing music, as I looked at classic albums from the '90s, and I was delighted to find that Asobi Seksu is keeping the genre alive, and putting their own stamp on it. I picked "New Years" for the top songs list as the best example of their fuzzy, dreamlike songs, but all the songs on the album have these textures without sounding alike. The best tracks, "Goodbye" and "Miso Asobi" along with "New Years", bring a warm and happy feeling out of the noise and distortion, but everything in between is interesting in its own way. It's one of the most seamless albums of the year.

4. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
This is a highly acclaimed album among rock critics, but unlike Justin Timberlake's, it's for a good reason: it's original, inventive, and excellent. It's hard to come up with something to compare it to, since the sound is so unique—it doesn't even really sound like TV on the Radio's earlier work and represents a major step forward for the band. Perhaps a good metaphor could be drawn from one of the best songs on the album: this record is a dirty whirlwind of music. The maelstrom approaches ominously with "Hours", reaches peak speed at "Wolf Like Me", slows to a calm center for "Method", and then picks up again. Not all the tracks are as good as "Wolf Like Me", but nothing is filler.

3. The Hold Steady, Boys And Girls In America
The Hold Steady topped last year's list with Separation Sunday, and so it is not a surprise to see them on the list again this year. Their latest album is more song and less story than its predecessor, presenting short vignettes instead of an overall arc and with lead singer Craig Finn taking a more melodic approach. This was initially a little disappointing, but I warmed up to it since the songs are very good indeed. Their Springsteen-esque hard rock rocks harder than just about anything else from this year, and with "Citrus" they showed they could do acoustic ballads too. Even though it's not the equal of Separation Sunday, it's still one of the best albums of the year.

2. Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit
This will also be an unsurprising choice, since regular readers know that I hold Belle & Sebastian in high regard. However, this is a standout album even in their catalog, the best since their 1996 release If You're Feeling Sinister. After several albums that felt like poor copies of Sinister, they've tried some new directions starting with Dear Catastrophe Waitress and now, with great success, in The Life Pursuit. The new songs are bright, polished, and sunny (sometimes literally), as well as catchy and infectious. While the pervasive melancholy of their early albums has been left behind, Belle & Sebastian can still write songs that are heartbreaking ("Dress Up In You") or wistful ("Funny Little Frog"). But the best songs here are simply fun, like "The White Collar Boy" and "The Blues Are Still Blue".

1. Islands, Return to the Sea
I'm not seeing this album on very many other year-end lists, but it was definitely my favorite of the year. Maybe their quirky blend of indie-rock and tropical music has limited appeal (ok, probably), but I love it. The first couple of songs are epic: "Swans (Life After Death)" is a metaphorical account of how the band was formed after the dissolution of the Unicorns, something I only discovered after I bought the Unicorns' last album and could decode the references. "Humans" is more straightforward, telling the story of refugees fleeing an (alien?) invasion. After this they move to shorter songs, but no less variety in topics: anorexia, the diamond trade, environmental disaster, and with "Jogging Gorgeous Summer", a simple and beautiful love song. All these disparate themes are tied together with island and ocean metaphors, which tie in perfectly with the musical style. I never got tired of listening to this album and felt like I noticed something new and interesting in the music every time.

Actually, I do have one more music list to post: at the beginning of the year I made a resolution to fill out my collection of '90s albums, and promised to post my favorites a year later. So that list will appear next week.

Other top music lists

If you'd like some other indie-rockish lists of top songs of the year, there's Stylus's top 50 singles and Pitchfork's top 100 tracks. There's some overlap between their lists and mine; "Wolf Like Me" and "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" appear on all three. Also some respectable alternate choices from some of the same albums I drew from. However, both publications appear to have a case of the crazies: Stylus puts Justin Timberlake's "My Love" at #6, and Pitchfork names it the #1 song of the year. So approach these lists with some skepticism.

They also have top albums lists up; I'll do one myself closer to the new year.

Favorite Songs of 2006: Year of the Wolf

Today is mix CD release day, so here's my ranking of my favorite 20 songs of 2006 (which, in a different order, comprise the tracklist of the CD). The CD is entitled Year of the Wolf, copies of which are available upon request. (If I see you during the holidays I'm going to hand you a copy even if you don't request one.) This naming scheme (following last year's Year of the Phoenix) may or may not continue in the future, but since it worked again this year I went with it.

The rules: Only music released in 2006 (or December 2005) qualifies, and no more than one track is selected from a single album. Generally records which were released earlier in other countries (typically the UK) before a 2006 US release are disqualified, but I have been inconsistent in applying this rule.

Special congratulations to the Decemberists and The Hold Steady, who are returning from last year's favorite songs list.

20. "Help Us Out" by the Futureheads (from News and Tributes [US release])

19. "I Bet You Looked Good On The Dance Floor" by Arctic Monkeys (from Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not)

18. "I Feel Space" by Lindstrøm (from It's A Feedelity Affair)

17. "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" by Camera Obscura (from Let's Get Out Of This Country)

16. "Roka" by Calexico (from Garden Ruin)

15. "Way Out" by Ellen Allien and Apparat (from Orchestra of Bubbles)

14. "Conventional Wisdom" by Built To Spill (from You In Reverse)

13. "Summersong" by the Decemberists (from The Crane Wife)

12. "Set The Fire To The Third Bar" by Snow Patrol (from Eyes Open)

11. "Love & Communication" by Cat Power (from The Greatest)

10. "Glasgow Mega-Snake" by Mogwai (from Mr Beast)

9. "Pictures of a Night Scene" by Pretty Girls Make Graves (from Élan Vital)

8. "Marble House" by The Knife (from Silent Shout)

7. "Black Flowers" by Yo La Tengo (from I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass)

6. "Revolver" by Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan (from Ballad of the Broken Seas)

5. "New Years" by Asobi Seksu (from Citrus)

4. "Hot Soft Light" by The Hold Steady (from Boys and Girls in America)

3. "The Blues Are Still Blue" by Belle & Sebastian (from The Life Pursuit)

2. "Rough Gem" by Islands (from Return to the Sea)

1. "Wolf Like Me" by TV on the Radio (from Return to Cookie Mountain)

Christmas by The Knife

Tired of the same old Christmas music? Weird and haunting electronica band The Knife has released a new song online, "Christmas Reindeer". (Actually, it's a reworking of a song from their self-titled debut album.) Via Pitchfork.

Chasing Butterflies [Open Thread]

The 2006 CD is ready! Distribution will begin this week in the Bay Area and continue through my holiday travels. I'll post the list of songs sometime this week. Meanwhile, we continue with our regularly scheduled reviews:

Deja Vu: This is a thriller with a touch of sci-fi, as Denzel Washington plays a detective investigating a terrorist attack with the help of a secret government time machine. It's not terribly profound, and one should not think too hard about the consistency of the time-travel logic, but it's a reasonably fun ride with plenty of explosions and shootouts and car chases. Rating: 3/5

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan: Ballad of the Broken Seas: Isobel Campbell, formerly of Belle & Sebastian, is not the person I'd look to for a great Americana record, seeing as she's Scottish. Nevertheless, that is what she's produced here in collaboration with grunge veteran Mark Lanegan. Campbell provides a soft and ghostly voice which is nicely complemented by Lanegan's deep growl. But both are nearly upstaged by the acoustic instrumentation, which is beautiful. Most of the tracks were written by Campbell; highlights are "Black Mountain", "Deus Ibi Est" (despite the bad pronunciation of the Latin lyrics), and "Honey Child What Can I Do?" which was my runner-up for the Best Romantic Song of 2006. My favorite song, however, is the dark "Revolver" which was written by Lanegan. There's also a cover of "Ramblin' Man" which is a bit cheesy, and is only saved by Campbell's whispered vocals. Several of these tracks are available on MySpace, and two of them are downloadable. (The version of "Revolver" here is different from the one on the album, however.) Rating: 4/5

Friday Non-Random 10: Miscellaneous Song Awards, 2006

It's December and therefore time for lots of meaningless best-of-year lists. I've started putting together the CD with my favorite songs of the year, and will probably post that list at the end of next week. (Really great songs that are released this month will be included in next year's list.) Meanwhile, I want to acknowledge some songs that may not make it onto the CD, but deserve special recognition in a particular category. Some of these categories will likely return next year, but some will be one-shots. I've added links to songs that the artists have made available online.

Pirate Song of the Year, awarded back in September to the best song about pirates:
"Selling the Wind" by Pretty Girls Make Graves

Best Romantic Song, for the song that turns me into a hopeless romantic for three minutes:
"Jogging Gorgeous Summer" by Islands

Best Breakup Song, to balance out the Best Romantic Song:
"Tears for Affairs" by Camera Obscura

Best Bilingual Song, for the ultimate in impenetrable lyrics:
"New Years" by Asobi Seksu (English and Japanese) [mp3 download]
[Dishonorable mention to Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan for "Deus Ibi Est", in which they employ Latin but pronounce it like French.]

Best Protest Song, in a year with plenty to protest:
"Parade" by Pretty Girls Make Graves [MySpace stream]

Best Religious Song, because religion sometimes does inspire greatness:
"Act of the Apostle Part I" by Belle & Sebastian

Best Irreligious Song, because blasphemy is usually more fun:
"Here's Your Future" by the Thermals [mp3 download]

Best Apocalyptic Song, for when it feels like the end of the world:
"Volcanoes" by Islands [MySpace stream]

Best Bonus Track, where too many are just lame filler:
"Really Bad Weekend" by Art Brut

Arrested Development Memorial Award for Multilayered and Allusive Lyrics, for when I need to listen to your previous band's catalog to understand the song:
"Swans (Life After Death)" by Islands

Tune in next week for the best songs of the year! In the meantime, dispute my choices above or create your own categories in the comments.

Gazebo. Arcane Gazebo. [Open Thread]

I meant to post this, like, a week ago. This may be the first December where my posting frequency goes up when I go on vacation. Anyway, I'm going to overuse the 4 rating again in this set of reviews.

Happy Feet: There is no truth whatsoever to the vicious rumor that I saw Happy Feet.

Casino Royale: By now, unless you've been living under a rock, you will have heard reports that this new start for the Bond franchise is really good. And I agree—not just a great Bond movie, but a great spy movie in general. It's gritty and a big step away from the excesses of the Pierce Brosnan films. Casino Royale is a sort of Bond origin-story, which begins with his earning the 007 rank, and shows how he developed into the character we're familiar with. Daniel Craig does a great job playing this unpolished Bond—later we were debating in lab the merits of the various Bond actors, and were only arguing over the #3 slot after an easy consensus on Connery and Craig as the two best. (The sentence "I like Timothy Dalton" was uttered without being intended as a Buffy reference.) Anyway, this is the best Bond film in years. My only complaint is that it is a bit too long, at nearly two and a half hours, but for most of this time it's pretty gripping. Rating: 4/5

Arrested Development - Season Three: On the other hand, my only complaint about this is that it's too short, because Fox canceled the show halfway through the season. This prompts the writers to step up the self-referential humor another notch, with embedded pleas to viewers and other networks to save the series, as well as digs at their competition (Desperate Housewives). Once again there are a few revelations that are foreshadowed in ways that make a second viewing rewarding. Although the second season is the show's peak, it ends on a very strong note. Rating: 4/5

The Decemberists: The Crane Wife: This could be the Decemberists' best album, at least the equal of Picaresque and maybe a little better. Although it doesn't have standout tracks on the level of "The Mariner's Revenge Song", it's much more coherent and has a more professional sound (maybe the result of their move to a major label). There are a couple of epic tracks: "The Island", which has some really excellent sections during its 12 minute extent, and "The Crane Wife 1 & 2", which is fairly good all the way through. I find that I prefer some of the shorter tracks, though: "O Valencia!" is especially good, as well as the final track "Sons and Daughters" which is a little brighter than the others. A stream of the former track, along with "Summersong", is available on their website. Rating: 4/5

Pass the Hatchet [Open Thread]

My brain seems to have gone on vacation already, but I want to move the purity balls down the page. So here's another open thread. Tomorrow I'll be flying to Dallas for the holiday weekend, although historically that's an inauspicious day for visiting that particular city.

Borat: I went into this movie having read various reviews that all called it a brilliant satire on the dark side of American culture. Funny, yes; brilliant satire: not so much. He managed to get some frat boys to say some obnoxious things, and some Deep South types to make some homophobic remarks, but this does not seem like a difficult task. Even his interviews with political figures weren't really that political, just Borat acting bizarre. The movie consists of some disposable plot-related scenes interspersed with footage of Borat walking up to unsuspecting bystanders and generally being a jackass until he wears out their tolerance. Often this is pretty funny, but sometimes he's just being an asshole and you feel bad for his victims. Rating: 3/5

Yo La Tengo: I Am Not Afraid Of You, And I Will Beat Your Ass: Despite the belligerent title, this is a pretty calm and peaceful album. I've been catching up on Yo La Tengo's earlier work through my '90s music project this year—they're now my fifth most-played band, partly because I really like them and partly because there's so much to listen to. This one is a good addition to the catalog, a long, meandering record with a variety of styles and a warm and comfortable feel. It opens with "Pass The Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" which runs for about ten minutes with few lyrics and mostly variations on a single theme, but is still interesting all the way through. This is followed by the upbeat, sunny, three-minute pop song "Beanbag Chair", which is one of my favorite tracks. (Both of those can be freely downloaded at the band's website.) My favorite song here is the beautifully assembled "Black Flowers". Rating: 3.5/5

...and if you're new to Yo La Tengo, the compilation Prisoners of Love is a good place to start. I picked it up for some tracks that were previously only on singles, and found the selection to be very good.

The T-shirt mix

An increasing fraction of t-shirts in my wardrobe were acquired at rock concerts, and I often get asked about them since the bands aren't typically household names. This is good, but I feel lame just saying "It's a band" or even something more specific like "It's a British synth-rock band". What I'd really like to do is somehow convey knowledge of what the band in question really sounds like, and why I like them.

I am tempted to burn a "Guide To Travis's T-shirts" mix CD with all the relevant bands represented, which I can offer to people if they're interested. In practice I won't have a copy of the CD at hand in many instances, but it would work at least some of the time. Counterargument: many people don't care that much, they just want to know what the damn shirt means.

Belated Reviews [Open Thread]

Here's an attempt to take a chunk out of my review backlog, and post an open thread for the first time in a while. I've been seriously neglecting the blog lately, as part of a larger pattern of neglecting most of my personal projects in favor of general indolence. I have ambitions of getting back to posting regularly, but it will depend somewhat on inspiration, and the holidays usually disrupt posting anyway.

Lots of high ratings here, partly because I'm prioritizing items I've really liked recently.

The Prestige: A movie notable for casting David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, and for including the back of Josh's head in the trailer (reports that he appears in the film itself are unconfirmed). The plot itself is centered around two feuding stage magicians in Victorian England who make escalating attacks on each other both within and outside their respective shows. The film opens with Borden (Christian Bale) awaiting a death sentence for the murder of Angier (Hugh Jackman), and the bulk of the story is told in (sometimes nested) flashback. The movie is intricate and clever, but it also telegraphs its secrets so that the alert viewer will figure them out before the final reveal. Still, the ending was well-done even if it wasn't a surprise, and the film as a whole is nicely coherent and thematically dense. Rating: 4/5

Arrested Development - Season Two: Everything I said about the first season applies, only more so: it's even funnier and more cleverly written this time around. The show takes its mastery of the running joke to a new level, and its self-referential humor gets even denser. This show builds up jokes the way a dramatic series builds up the plot, so that it just gets funnier as the season progresses. Rating: 4.5/5

Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria: I don't know how Tri-Ace does it but I find every one of their games extremely addictive. (Except for the original Star Ocean, and Radiata Stories, neither of which I've played.) This game is no exception and devoured approximately 100 hours of my free time over a relatively short span of weeks. It's a worthy successor to the brilliant Valkyrie Profile, maintaining the unique feel of the original while adding its own twists on the gameplay. The combat system in particular is much more sophisticated, and makes for very engaging battles. The side-scrolling dungeon exploration mode remains, but with a teleportation mechanic that allows for more complex (and sometimes maddening) puzzles. What it lacks compared to the original is mostly aesthetic: I found the music and art to be mostly inferior (although there are some expections); the beautiful 2D backdrops of Valkyrie Profile have been replaced by more realistic 3D settings (although, true to the profile concept, movement is still restricted to 2D). In certain locations, however, the graphics are truly spectacular and surpass any setting of the original. Overall, my aesthetic complaints are minor, and this is one of the best games I've played in a while. Rating: 4.5/5

Tad Williams: War of the Flowers: A rare standalone novel from Tad Williams, this one starts in familiar territory—present-day San Francisco—and then transports its slacker protagonist into the world of Faerie. Williams has imagined Faerie as having experienced societal and technological changes parallel to those in the human world; consequently his fairyland is an urbanized, deforested place in the midst of environmental and political crisis. An allegorical reading of the setting is straightforward; more interesting is the personal progress of the hero as learns how he fits in to this world. I found the prose a bit cumbersome, and the pace lags at times, but when it picks up it's quite good, and the plot takes some nice unexpected twists. Rating: 3.5/5

The Hold Steady: Boys and Girls in America: Although it's no secret that I like this album, my review of it is overdue. It's excellent, just a notch below last year's Separation Sunday (which was my pick for album of the year). This album is less like a story than its predecessor, with Craig Finn actually singing instead of just talking most of the time, and the songs relating individual vignettes rather than a single overarching narrative. The album starts out very strong with "Stuck Between Stations"; this and the next two songs are among the best on the record, along with "You Can Make Him Like You" and a surprise acoustic turn on "Citrus". ("Chips Ahoy!", which follows the first track, can be downloaded here.) The slower ballad "First Night" fell a bit flat, however, and I'm not wild about "Chillout Tent". Even with these weak moments, though, the Hold Steady have once again recorded one of the best albums of the year. Rating: 4.5/5

Killer Parties

Live: The Hold Steady with Sean Na Na and Black Fur at the Great American Music Hall: I arrived about ten minutes before the nominal start time of 8 pm and found about ten other people there. This did not give me confidence in the opening band; I was unaware that Black Fur were even on the bill and was expecting Sean Na Na to be the first act. In any case, the lack of people on the floor when I arrived allowed me to get very close to the stage. Black Fur did come across as unprofessional, with problems such as forgetting to plug in the guitarist's pedals and some indeterminate flakiness in the bassist's amp, and their drummer was a jackass who at one point spat beer into the audience. But despite this I actually enjoyed their set (once they got their equipment working). Certainly they sucked far less than the opening act at last year's Hold Steady show. They were followed by Sean Na Na, who didn't make much of an impression on me and I can't really even remember what they sounded like.

The Hold Steady then came on and proceeded to play an outstanding set. Maybe it's just that I was closer to the stage this time, but it felt like they had a stronger stage presence than last year and there was more interplay with the audience. All the songs sounded terrific, although during the first few Craig Finn was almost inaudible until they turned up his mike. Highlights: Of the new songs, I probably enjoyed "Massive Nights" the most—it was in the middle of the set when they were well warmed up and they gave it a great treatment. At the beginning of "Don't Let Me Explode", Finn told the story of the martyrdom of Saint Barbara, who is apparently the patron saint of Not Letting Things Explode (really), hence the line in the song: Saint Barbara I'm calling your name. As the second to last song they played a blistering rendition of "Your Little Hoodrat Friend", during which a string broke on the bass, and the rest of the band improvised while the bassist replaced it, after which they picked up where they had left off.

This was all eclipsed by the encore, where "Hornets! Hornets!" was followed by "Most People Are DJs" during which the crowd was whipped into a frenzy. The song then transitioned smoothly into "Killer Parties", the lead guitarist pulled someone out of the front row and put him on guitar, and then the band members started pulling people on stage as fast as they could. And did I mention I was up in front? As the show ended I was up on the stage with the Hold Steady and a crowd of other audience members, all dancing and singing along to the last lines of the song: I remember we departed from our bodies. We woke up in Ybor City...

It seems to me that any concert that ends this way should get a perfect score. Rating: 5/5

Hold Steady setlist below the fold (I was close enough that I could read it off Craig Finn's copy):

Continue reading "Killer Parties"

Between Stations [Open Thread]

Hmm, maybe I should have bought tickets to see one of Yo La Tengo's shows this week as well, they've got three consecutive nights at the Fillmore. But that would give me no time to devote to Valkyrie Profile. Tonight I'll see the Hold Steady, almost exactly a year after the last time I saw them.

TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain: This album has been widely hailed as a breakthrough record for TV on the Radio, a substantial leap over their previous work. Basically, I agree with all of that, so I can outsource my review to the various glowing pieces that have appeared in music publications. The opening track, "I Was A Lover" is a bit weak, but is followed by "Hours" which is the first of a number of awesome songs. My other favorites are "A Method", "Dirtywhirl", and especially "Wolf Like Me" on which David Bowie makes an appearance (listen here). One of the best CDs of the year. Their live show is also spectacular; they were my favorite act from Coachella this year. Rating: 4.5/5

Live: Ladytron with CSS at the Fillmore: CSS is a band I'd heard of but not actually heard before last night. They are from Brazil and are nearly an all-girl group, with a 1:5 male/female ratio. The music was competent dance rock with a synth and usually three guitars (sometimes two guitars and two basses). Their singer was very bouncy and jumped into the crowd several times, quite the opposite of Ladytron's reserved demeanor. What I could make out of the lyrics sounded pretty amusing, as if Art Brut songs were rendered in broken English.

Ladytron started out with "High Rise", a perfect opening song but performed somewhat anemically. They didn't sound warmed up until they played "Evil" a couple songs later, but from there they were able to keep the energy level pretty high. When I saw them at Coachella the band members maintained an air of aloofness, but here they were a bit more relaxed and interactive, Helen Marnie even dancing around the stage during her singing parts. The bands I've seen at the Fillmore are always overwhelmed by the history and prestige of the venue, and Ladytron were clearly not immune to this.

The setlist was fairly straightforward, most of Witching Hour plus older singles. The only thing really out of left field was a cover of "Send Me A Postcard" by Shocking Blue, a perky song that one wouldn't ordinarily associate with Ladytron, but they did include the original on their compilation CD Softcore Jukebox. "Soft Power" was a highlight: the band had a collection of lights on stage which might have been primarily intended for this song, red arc lights and warm yellow bulbs suggestive of candlelight. The combination of the eerie lighting and the strength of the musical performance really brought out the witching hour aspect of the song, making it feel like an incantation drawing out magical energies. "Beauty*2" came close to this effect as well. They saved "Destroy Everything You Touch" for the very end and pulled out all the stops for a spectacular ending to a strong show. Rating: 4/5

Ladytron setlist below the fold:

Continue reading "Between Stations [Open Thread]"

Friday Random 10: Emergency Filler

I just noticed that I've only posted four times in the month of October. Um... here's a Friday Random 10! (If only I had some cat pictures...)

1. Stereolab, "Percolator"
2. TV on the Radio, "Ambulance"
3. Radiohead, "No Surprises"
4. The Decemberists, "The Engine Driver"
5. The Arcade Fire, "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)"
6. Nirvana, "Stay Away"
7. Radiohead, "Paranoid Android"
8. Sleater-Kinney, "The Remainder"
9. Pixies, "Where Is My Mind?"
10. Franz Ferdinand, "Evil and a Heathen"

This is from the four-and-five-star playlist, which accounts for the very high quality of the selection.

Purify the colors, purify my mind.
Purify the colors, purify my mind,
and spread the ashes of the colors
in this heart of mine.

Unplanned Absences [Open Thread]

Remember when I used to update my blog? You may be wondering if I have been detained by the Bush administration, but in fact I have been distracted by things like science and Valkyrie Profile 2. However, I have once again been getting calls for an open thread, and I'd better start reviewing CDs if I'm going to get through my backlog before the end of the year. Also, I've been playing some video games lately:

Xenosaga Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra: The Xenosaga series was originally meant to run six episodes, but this was overambitious and the sequence was truncated here. This meant that some threads had to be wrapped up hurriedly, and the plot picks up after skipping an entire episode's worth of developments. Fortunately the database from Episode I has reappeared and so the player can at least read about what happened; likewise, one character's backstory is presented mostly in database text where it might previously had been slated to occupy most of an episode. The main storyline is left to play out at double speed (by the standards of this saga, but perhaps normal speed for another console RPG).

As the spiritual successor to Xenogears, Xenosaga labors under certain expectations, especially in its last chapter. Both draw heavily from Gnosticism in their themes, and lay out the plot in a style appropriate to a mystery cult, where the player is in the dark about the true nature of the universe until it is made plain in a series of final revelations. Part of the genius of Xenogears was the way it drew together the threads of Christianity, Gnosticism, and Nietzsche—it was one of the most literate console RPGs ever—into a coherent plotline. (Especially appealing to my philosophical sensibilities was the way it ultimately deferred to a kind of scientific materialism.) Unfortunately, Xenosaga doesn't reach these heights, and in making the competing philosophies more explicit, it loses the coherence in the story. The major revelations near the end thus fall into two categories: the kind that the observant player figured out two episodes ago, and the kind that don't actually help the story make any more sense.

This is probably a consequence of the shortened scope of the project and the departure from Monolith Soft of major contributors to the narrative aspects of the game. It's a disappointment for those of us who came to the series in part because of the strength of it's predecessor's storyline. At a smaller scale things generally work better&dmash;several of the set pieces are very well executed, in particular the chilling weapons test scene that occurs early in the game.

But in some sense all these things are secondary considerations: this isn't a movie, it's a video game, and the actual gameplay is a lot of fun. The battle mechanics depart from the previous episodes somewhat (moving in the direction of Final Fantasy X) but maintain the same crystalline turn-based feel, with good strategic depth but less frustration. Meanwhile the mech battles now resemble a streamlined version of the Xenogears system, as big an improvement over the second episode's approach as that episode was over the first in this department. The dungeons are visually spectacular, satisfyingly intricate, and generally a joy to explore. The biggest disappointment was the lack of any bonus dungeons like the ones in the previous episode. On the strength of the gameplay I'm giving this a high rating even if the conclusion to the story wasn't to my satisfaction (and even if it's not the best dungeon crawler to come out in the last two months—it's hard to compete with tri-Ace in that department). Rating: 4/5

Sonic Youth: Rather Ripped: I assume the venerable noise-rock band needs no introduction. One doesn't generally have high expectations for 25-year-old bands, but they've put out a decent album here that's more accessible than much of their catalog. Their trademark fuzz, distortion, and atonal singing is certainly present but it's put into the service of some catchy tunes, especially "Incinerate" and "Rats". They might be well past their peak but they can still write some good songs. A stream of "Incinerate" seems to be available at Geffen Records. Rating: 3.5/5

Hold Steady stream

The Hold Steady have made their new album Boys and Girls in America available as streaming audio here. It's good. The CD comes out on Tuesday.

Pirates Protest Procrastinated Post [Open Thread]

Pirates demanded a new open thread, so I will comply to avoid walking the plank. I have a bunch of CDs to review, but haven't figured out what to say about them. Here's the first one in the queue:

Ratatat: Classics: Ratatat is a band based on the notion that it would be awesome to make songs blending hip-hop beats, techno synth, and arena-rock guitar. Classics is a broader and more layered take on this concept than their self-titled debut album, and finds mixed success. Some of the more intricate songs, like "Lex", hold together well, but others seem to meander while passing by potentially great moments. One of the great things about their previous record was the way songs would focus on a single brilliant riff and spend three minutes examining it, turning it upside down and inside out. There's less of that here as they reach for a more complex sound. "Wildcat" and "Tropicana" can both be played at MySpace; both are decent with the latter being slightly better. The best song title on the CD is "Tacobel Canon", and the track itself is appropriately Baroque-sounding. Rating: 3/5

Hoist the Jolly Roger! [Open Thread]

Arrr, mateys! It be Talk Like A Pirate Day once again! Of the holidays celebrated here at Arrrcane Gazebo, few be more highly anticipated.

Though my lists of the year's best music won't appear until December, it is now time to announce the winner of the coveted Arrrcane Gazebo Pirate Song of the Year. And the winner is...

Pretty Girls Make Graves, "Selling the Wind"

I buy these winds
to venge my children and their ghosts
I stole their ships
and every castle from their coasts
Need no advice
nor approval from the queen
I live my life
forever hellcat of the seas

Last year's (unannounced) winner was, of course, The Decemberists' "The Mariner's Revenge Song".

Here be a comment thread fer ye scurvy dogs t' parley with each other.

Consequences

Miraculously, none of those Justin Timberlake songs got stuck in my head.

Instead, because I mentioned it once in the review, fucking "My Humps" got stuck in my head. If ever there was a song that could make "SexyBack" sound like an intricate and nuanced work of musical genius...

Return to Cookie Mountain is an effective cure for this malady.

Mainstream Pop Hell: Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds

It's the album the indie kids are raving about! Pitchfork rated it 8.1/10, and Stylus, well, Stylus gave it a B+, but keep in mind that this is the guy so bland that he wrote the theme song for McDonalds, so that's pretty good. Did they send a wad of hundred-dollar bills with the review copies? Or is the album really that good? The only way to know for sure is to actually listen to it.

So I've started a long automated measurement, and I've got a stream of the album ready to go. (I'm going to assume that I'm not missing any subtle sonic nuances by listening to an internet stream over earbuds, rather than a CD on a proper set of speakers.) But first, let's take a look at the album cover.

The Title: On either side of the slash, you have a decent title for an album. Really, FutureSex would be fitting for, say, an Ellen Allien record. And LoveSounds, while somewhat generic, signals a certain mood for the album (and maybe alludes to the Beach Boys). But to use both titles suggests indecision. One imagines a marketing team sitting around a room, brainstorming names for the record, and being unable to choose between these two. "Let's just use both!" It's an indicator that this CD is targeted to the broadest possible audience. But wait, this is also indicated by the fact that the album cover says Justin Timberlake.

The Album Art: Courtesy Amazon, this is the front cover:

Here we see the artist gleefully stomping on a disco ball. Is this because the record is a stunning artistic breakthrough that will destroy the world of soulless, manufactured dance music? I find this unlikely. Turning to the back cover, we find a pair of mirrored images of the disco ball, with the tracklist extending phallicly above it. Perhaps stomping the disco ball is meant to be an emasculating image—a strange choice given the subject matter of the album, unless Timberlake is actually parodying the notion of the horndog pop star. Or maybe he just felt that it was a beautiful day to be stomping on things.

Taking a look at the background, I find that there's no better way to signal "bland and generic" than to use a completely blank, white room.

Well, I can't put this off forever. Let's get started.

1. Futuresex/Lovesound
The title of the album is also the title of the first song and the first lyrics, along with some assorted moaning (ew). Were they short on ideas? It goes on like this for about a minute and a half and--wait, that thing with the synth was actually pretty cool. But then it goes away, and we're back to the title of the song.

Hey, that cool bit came back with the chorus a couple more times. Otherwise, I am unimpressed. Rating: 2/5

2. SexyBack
In future, computers will not have space bars to increase sexy efficiency. This is the big single? It's a chaotic mess. I'm sure it's ubiquitous on the radio, which is why I lined my apartment with tinfoil in order to avoid it. (This is the first time I've heard it.) Indeed, the sexy went somewhere, but I don't think he's brought it back.

Is it still going? This song is about a minute and half too long. Rating: 1/5

3. Sexy Ladies
Justin finds the space bar, and also (apparently) sexy ladies. He's gone to a rapid-fire falsetto, possibly a result of stomping on his disco balls. At first this is a welcome change from the previous track, but it gets old at about 1:27 and now I'm grinding my teeth as the backup singers repeat the word "sexy". I'm going to send Justin a thesaurus. Rating: 0.5/5

4. Let Me Talk To You Prelude / My Love
"Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!" Ok, you've got my attention now. "My love! My love! My love! My love!" This is going to go on for six minutes? What is this, the "My Humps" school of songwriting?

Is that still Timberlake singing? It must take a lot of stomping to reach that octave. But thankfully the lyrics have diversified and there is something that sounds like an actual verse. Following that some digital effect is going "eee! eee! eee!" in the background which is truly obnoxious.

A minute of so of somebody (presumably Timbaland) rapping. It's tolerable, and when verses emerge from this song it's not half bad. However, that eeping thing has got to go. Rating: 1.5/5

5. Lovestoned/I Think She Knows Interlude
Ah! An interlude, excellent. Wait, this track is seven minutes long, I guess there's a song first.

Ok, I'm a sucker for violins. Get rid of Timberlake and this would be a pretty good song. Once again he's only written about four lines of lyrics which get repeated. Then about a minute of beatboxing (but that violin's still around, happily). The vocals return, with the same lyrics of course, but the instrumentation's gone to "cheesy piano". Damn!

This song is so long it needs an intermission, not an interlude. Rating: 2/5

6. What Goes Around.../...Comes Around Interlude
What is that, a shamisen? I was in a Chinese restaurant yesterday where they were playing the Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber on an erhu. Anyway, we're in for another seven-minute marathon here.

"What goes around goes around goes around..." Timberlake is the master of the two word chorus. This song is reminiscent of his N'Sync origins. Because we didn't get enough of that the first time.

There is no excuse for this song being as long as it is. It's like one 30-second clip copied and pasted 15 times. Wasn't I promised an interlude? Oh, there it is. Finally.

In fact, this album is seventy minutes long, with only one song clocking in at under four minutes (and it's 3:58). I'm happy to get long albums from Yo La Tengo or Spiritualized, but does the world really need seventy minutes of Justin Timberlake songs? Rating: 0.5/5

7. Chop Me Up
Timbaland's back. The really good rapper names evoke yuppie clothing retailers. In fact, he's most of this track, with Justin jumping in for the chorus, but it still manages to be one of the blandest tracks yet. Incredibly boring. Rating: 0.5/5

8. Damn Girl
Actually not "Damn girl!" but "Damn, girl!". Hoping for punctuation in this album is somewhat futile, however. Hey, guess what the lyrics are! "Damn, girl! Damn, girl! Damn, girl!" These songs have very low entropy.

There's an electric organ here, which almost sounded cool except that it played a progression suitable for a baseball stadium. Charge! Rating: 0.5/5

9. Summer Love
Mercifully, a four-minute song. Isn't three minutes the canonical length for a pop song? Someone should tell him that.

I think he's under the impression that the word "girl" is punctuation, like an exclamation point or something.

"I can't wait to fall in love/ with you/ You can't wait to fall in love/ with me" I realize not every song can have Belle & Sebastian-quality lyrics, but damn, this is insipid. Rating: 0.5/5

10. Set The Mood Prelude/ Until The End Of Time
"Until The End Of Time" describes how long this song lasts--at 7:33 this is the longest track on the album. The prelude here is two minutes of "ooo ooo ooo", followed by a torturously slow transition into the main song.

Here the lyrics talk about "all the darkness in the world", but exhibit the level of insight into geopolitics displayed by my typical comment spammer. Lots of wailing here. "Everybody sing-- aaaah oooh woooaaaooo yeah!" Did he run out of words?

One minute left and it feels like a year. So slow... this song would be much better if it were sped up by a factor of four. But then JT's falsetto would be pitched outside the range of human hearing... like I said, much better. Rating: 0.5/5

11. Losing My Way
"Can anybody out there hear me, 'cause I can't seem to hear myself?" Yeah, obviously. Here's the sad tale about a guy trapped in a Justin Timberlake song. No, wait, he's a crack addict. Bonus points for having several verses with distinct lyrics, but they are canceled out by repeating the chorus approximately two hundred times. Rating: 1/5

12. (Another Song) All Over Again
Another slow ballad with lots of "woooo yeah". This would normally signal the end of the album except he's already done this two or three times. At least the title is accurate! One of these "I'm asking forgiveness, please give me another chance" songs. In fact, those are the exact lyrics. Naturally there's a sappy piano. An excruciating end to an overly long album, as if he's trying to squeeze every last minute out of the CD format. "Let me start over again," he pleads. Hell, no. Rating: 0.5/5

It's over! At last, blessed silence! Or, blessed hum of mechanical pumps anyway. The first half wasn't as bad as I expected, but the second half was agonizing. And it was so, so long. I think I hit the wall somewhere in track 10. Overall Rating: 1/5

Time to cleanse my brain with My Bloody Valentine.

SexyBlog Alert

By popular demand, I will liveblog my review of Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds tomorrow (Friday), starting around 2 pm Pacific, so be sure to tune in. The truly masochistic can even find a copy of the album and listen along with me...

Drastic Measures

As I struggle with a particularly severe case of writer's block, I am starting to wonder whether, like many writers, I should look for inspiration in personal suffering. And it has been noted that my reviews of CDs and other media tend to be almost uniformly positive, and maybe some negative reviews would be more interesting. So, I am going to consider the interesting and exciting new CDs released yesterday—TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain, Yo La Tengo's I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, the Junior Boys' So This Is Goodbye—and then I am going to ignore them, and instead write a detailed review of Justin Timberlake's new album FutureSex/LoveSounds. I'm hoping that the experience of listening to it will provide enough pain, rage, and existential angst to fill a blog post.

Due to time constraints, it probably won't appear until tomorrow, but you may consider yourselves warned. Maybe I should liveblog it?

Lego Music Videos

Stylus presents a compilation of music videos re-enacted in Lego.

Cassette generator

Via Boing Boing, a website to generate images of custom-labeled audiocassettes. I am totally going to use this for the cover art on a mix CD.

Yo La Tengo and Hold Steady collecting videos

Two of my favorite bands are requesting videos from fans: Yo La Tengo simply want a reading of their upcoming album's title, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass. The Hold Steady have more open-ended instructions: "We want to you know about what you think about the opposite sex, relationships, love, the whole shebang." They're both posting submitted videos on their respective sites.

Video's not really my preferred medium, so I won't contribute to either unless I get really inspired, but I like the concept. The YLT album comes out on September 12, and Hold Steady's on October 3.

Uniformly good [Open Thread]

In which I review something from almost every media category (but I should read more books) and give them all the same rating. Maybe I should go to increments of 0.1 instead of 0.5, so I can make finer distinctions: I would rate Asobi Seksu's Citrus (reviewed last week) slightly higher than The Knife's Silent Shout (in this post) for example.

The Descent: A heartwarming British film in which six women forge strong bonds of friendship during a spelunking expedition. At least, that's what it looks like until monsters show up and start eating them. Hell yes. I mean, we've all been stuck in boring dramas where we wish it would turn into a monster movie and kill off the most annoying characters, and this movie actually does it. Except that it's not boring at all; one thing this film excels at is ratcheting up the tension well before the monsters show up, with a series of plausible but legitimately scary or shocking events leading up to the gory climax. The cave where most of the movie takes place is itself a source of much of this tension, filmed in a way that conveys the claustrophobia and disorientation of the spelunkers. The descent referred to in the title isn't just the literal descent into the cave but also the descent into madness of one of the characters, and this is paralleled in the increasing chaos and confusion as the caving party disintegrates. Overall, a very well-done horror movie. Rating: 4/5

Arrested Development - Season One: I kept hearing that this show was excellent, but didn't really know much about it. Josh was happy to educate me, and we fairly rapidly went through the first season's worth of episodes. The show is best watched in bursts of several 22-minute episodes at a time; it is very self-referential and excels at recurring jokes. Arrested Development centers around the Bluth family, most of whom have freeloaded off the wealthy patriarch George Sr., until (in the first episode) he is arrested for massive fraud. Most of the episodes have Michael Bluth, as the voice of responsibility and moderation, trying to rein in his flakier relatives. It's the quality of the writing that makes the show stand out; the dialogue is very funny on several levels, and a narrative voiceover (by Ron Howard) is used to create an ironic interplay between an omniscient observer and the very self-unaware characters. Rating: 4/5

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow: The portable Castlevania games have been improving incrementally since Circle of the Moon on the GBA, and Dawn of Sorrow is the latest iteration, a refinement of (and direct sequel to) Aria of Sorrow. As with its predecessors it is a side-scrolling dungeon crawl, and preserves Aria's mechanic of earning new abilities from defeated monsters. There are a few token uses of the DS's touch screen (admittedly, finishing off boss monsters by drawing a magic seal is especially satisfying) but otherwise the gameplay will be familiar to veterans of the series. This installment does an especially good job with an interesting dungeon layout, smooth control, and challenging but not frustrating difficulty. The free-fall boss battle is particularly inspired. Rating: 4/5

The Knife: Silent Shout: The Knife, mentioned in yesterday's post, has a new album out this year. Different in mood from "Heartbeats", it's a dark and ghostly record, perhaps another candidate for a Call of Cthulhu game soundtrack. Indeed, Josh and I listened to this in the car before and after seeing The Descent, and it was creepily appropriate to a claustrophobic horror movie. This one strikes a stronger emotional resonance than the similar atmosphere of Liars' Drum's Not Dead, and is also more danceable. Listen to "Like A Pen" and "Silent Shout" at their MySpace page; in further recent-post-synergy, the latter track appears to be a free download for Facebook members this week. Rating: 4/5

Live: Zero 7 with Jose Gonzalez at the Fillmore: Sure, I panned their latest album, but their earlier work is really good and I love going to the Fillmore. (I am ignoring Jessica's suggestion that I post an entry titled "I Went to Zero 7 with Three Hot Girls", but this might also have had something to do with it.) Jose Gonzalez's opening set was a mellow and competent performance on acoustic guitar; afterwards he did vocals for Zero 7 along with Sia Furler. (The band proper is just two British guys on synths, but here they had a backing band and the two vocalists. The lack of their other singers meant certain songs couldn't be played; "In the Waiting Line", which appeared on the Garden State soundtrack, was particularly missed.) Naturally much of the set was devoted to songs from The Garden, but there was a good fraction of older stuff as well so I can't complain too much. Sia seemed pretty drunk (or otherwise chemically enhanced) and her vocals were much more slurred than in the recordings, which detracted a bit. Fortunately they played a number of instrumental pieces, which tend to be my favorites out of Zero 7's catalog. It would have been nice to hear "Speed Dial No. 2", though. Rating: 3.5/5

Fillmore Scene

At the Zero 7 concert, opening act Jose Gonzalez is covering The Knife's "Heartbeats" on an acoustic guitar.

Guy: Does the original version sound like this?
Me: No, The Knife is an electronica band—it's very different.
Guy: When were they big?
Me: Well, currently.
Guy: That's weird, I've never heard of them.
Me: [realizing] Well, "big" in the sense—
Guy: Oh, in that particular scene.
Girl: Travis, are you a scenester?
Me: No! I just... listen to scenester music... by coincidence.

I don't think she believed me. Will "Travis, are you a scenester?" replace "Travis, are you a math major?" I don't get the latter question much anymore.

(The Knife's version can be heard here [except it may not be working, so also try here] and Jose Gonzalez's version here and also in that cool Sony commercial with the bouncing balls in San Francisco.)

Reptiles on an Aircraft [Open Thread]

It has come to my attention that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Ladytron, and the Hold Steady are all playing San Francisco within days of each other in October. I will go to at least two of the three shows, and maybe all of them... (Architecture in Helsinki, opening for CYHSY, is actually the main draw for that show as far as I'm concerned.)

Snakes on a Plane: This movie delivers everything it promises: the reptiles, the aircraft, Samuel L. Jackson in glorious campy form. I saw it in Berkeley on opening night (not at midnight, however) with a pretty enthusiastic audience. As has been pointed out in comments, this is the proper way to see the movie. The film is well aware of its own ridiculousness and delights in providing implausible but gruesome snake attacks, overblown dialogue, and nods to the standard cliches of horror movies. All good for an evening of fun, but with little lasting value. As Samuel L. Jackson famously said, "It's not Gone with the Wind. It's not On the Waterfront. It's Snakes on a Plane!" Rating: 3.5/5

Asobi Seksu: Citrus: As I indicated last week, I've been enjoying this album of sweet-sounding noise pop. It's a bit of My Bloody Valentine, a bit of Yo La Tengo, and a bit of J-pop (the lead singer is a Japanese woman and the lyrics shift between Japanese and English). The whole album is solid and pleasant to listen to, but three tracks in particular stand out: "New Years" [download here], "Goodbye", and "Mizu Asobi". That last one is very catchy and always gets stuck in my head when I'm done listening to the CD. Now I just need to send the lyrics to Josh so he can tell me what she's saying. In addition to the link above they are on MySpace here. Rating: 4/5

New Hold Steady track

Pitchfork has it as a free mp3 download, along with high praise for their upcoming album. Verdict: thumbs up.

Snakes and Wolves [Open Thread]

Ah, finally some good new music. Let me recommend Asobi Seksu's album Citrus in advance of my full review, which will probably appear next week along with Snakes on a Plane. In other media news, I need to clear my schedule for the imminent release of Xenosaga Episode III.

Sunset Rubdown: Shut Up I Am Dreaming: Sunset Rubdown is the side project of Wolf Parade's frontman, and the voice is instantly recognizable, as well as some other instrumental similarities. The sound is more varied: a few tracks could pass as Wolf Parade songs, but most are a bit quirkier and less dense. True to its title, the record as a whole feels like a dreamscape, making slow and smooth transitions between different moods. There's an overall thread of sadness running through the songs but each one has a slightly different take on it. It's not really a CD you'll rock out to, but it's interesting enough that I keep coming back to it. The opening song, "Stadiums and Shrines II", is especially good and is conveniently available as a free download at the band's website. Wolf Parade fans especially should check this out. Rating: 3.5/5

Friday Random 10, plus book answers

I meant to post some filler-type stuff before I left, but lab priorities took over that time. Anyway, my flight to New York was uneventful and I can post the filler now that I'm here. A Friday Random 10, and below the fold, the key to that post from last week with the first lines of favorite books.

1. Fischerspooner, "Invisible"
2. Feist, "Inside And Out"
3. Belle & Sebastian, "I Love My Car"
4. Björk, "I Miss You"
5. Jawbreaker, "Sluttering (May 4th)"
6. Franz Ferdinand, "Come On Home"
7. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, "Restless Sinner"
8. Nirvana, "Lithium"
9. Ratatat, "Breaking Away"
10. Pixies, "Here Comes Your Man"

This one might have made for an interesting divination. Anyway, the books from last week: