This Fall (but without The Fall)

"I'll Sleep When I'm Rich" - Fall 2010

1. Pavement - Box Elder
2. Crystal Stilts - Shake the Shackles
3. Kanye West - Power
4. Shit Robot - Take 'em Up
5. Of Montreal - Enemy Gene
6. Sufjan Stevens - Get Real Get Right
7. Sleigh Bells - Straight A's
8. Hot Chip - Hand Me Down Your Love
9. LCD Soundsystem - Dance Yrself Clean
10. Klaxons - Echoes
11. No Age - Glitter
12. Tokyo Police Club - Bambi
13. Caribou (Manitoba technically) - Skunks
14. Land of Talk - Goaltime Exposure
15. Les Savy Fav - Yawn, Yawn, Yawn
16. The New Pornographers - Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk
17. Los Campesinos! - You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing
18. Arcade Fire - Suburban War

For lack of time and interest in discussing every single song, select annotations below!


-A few years back, I would have killed to see Pavement in concert. And now I've seen them twice in one year, which feels weird, in retrospect. Partly because I was a little underwhelmed the first time I saw them, and kind of apathetic about the second show. Not that they sounded bad; just very ramshackle and lo-fi, which is really how they should sound live, I guess. Both venues I saw them at (Coachella main stage and, worse, the Hollywood Bowl) were way too big for their "just a bunch of dudes" charm - something like the Henry Fonda or (yeah, right) The Echoplex would have been perfect. But I end up feeling like that about most indie rock acts I see at the Bowl, so...who knows. At any rate, "Box Elder" was not a song they played, but is one that I really hoped they would play, so here it is.

-Again on the concert train, I have an Of Montreal song up partially for the Halloween show I attended (and partially because its themes are similar to a script I'm working on right now), but just realized I forgot to include a Janelle Monae song, too. Whoops. Maybe that'll go on the deluxe re-issue 10 years from now. At least this one half-counts.

-Sufjan Stevens is an interesting case. I wasn't really a fan of his, I guess, "singery-songwritery pleasantness" on previous albums (whether that was true or just my perception of him), but his new work, at least since his Dark Was the Night offering "You Are the Blood", has gotten pretty nuts, and "Get Real Get Right" is a pretty perfect example, overstuffed with nervous strings, impending-doom horns and dizzying vocal acrobatics that grab you by the ears and demand your attention. I also realized after maybe a dozen listens that the song has a Christian overtone that's pretty blatant once it's uncovered, but - I can relate to the idea of needing to get your shit together for whatever reason, religious or otherwise. So, many reasons to include it here.

-The Sleigh Bells/Hot Chip/LCD progression is a pretty blatant chronological snapshot of their awesome Hollywood Bowl show a few months back - one of my favorite concerts in recent memory (and maybe of all time). "Straight A's" as a song is about as loud and brief an encapsulation of Sleigh Bells' set as possible, and "Hand Me Down Your Love" is, well, one of the few Hot Chip songs I haven't put on a mix yet. "Dance Yrself Clean" was the first song LCD played, and it immediately knocked me for a loop: I never expected them to play that song, and it signaled the beginning of a show full of awesome surprises, focusing on the best parts of This is Happening with some welcome throwbacks to the band's first singles. And unlike bands I mentioned earlier, LCD is completely wired to play gigantic venues; they play with such force and enthusiasm that they can't help but envelop even the sprawling Hollywood Bowl. Did I mention I was in the fourth row? Yeah, it was a great concert.

-I've been listening to a lot of Caribou lately, but honestly had no clear frontrunner to symbolize this. I feel like a lot of his music works better in album form than individual tracks - I've had Swim on heavy rotation for months, but I'd be hard-pressed to list my three favorite tracks from it. But I've really appreciated "Skunks" for a long time, all the way back to 2003 when Caribou was Manitoba, so it felt as appropriate as anything else.

-Another one of my favorite albums from this year, still, is Romance is Boring, but the Los Campesinos! track this season is from 2008's We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, a strange 2008 release following the band's smash debut album earlier that year. It really is LC!'s Amnesiac, overall not as strong as the album released months prior, but it does feature some of the band's best tracks, from "Ways to Make it Through the Wall" to the title track to the one on this very mix, "You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing". One of the few LC! songs that's a definite grower, this one is less about Gareth's tragicomic character sketches and sugary mixed-gender shoutalongs than it is about the band's secret weapon, multi-instrumentalist Tom Campesinos!, whose melodies keep the songs together when all else seems seconds from bursting at the seams. Even if the song wavers into melodrama occasionally, it's an easy flaw to forgive every time that soaring guitar chorus washes everything else away.

-The Arcade Fire track here was very nearly "We Used to Wait" - and it's tough, when I'm considering a track that got really big and popular and possibly over-played during that season. The hipster part of me says "fuck it, dude, you missed the boat, now it's cliche and you won't even want to hear it again for a long time", while the realist part says "fuck you, dude, you can't pretend you don't sometimes discover a song at the same time as everyone else." And then they fight for a while, until a third part of me shows up and says "uh, dude, it's all about what the song says to you, not anyone else." And this third part is always right. So, whether I missed the boat on "We Used to Wait" or not, here's "Suburban War", another in a long line of Arcade Fire tracks that seems permanently relevant to me and, I'm sure, to a lot of you.