The latest and greatest season mix

"Almost Anything" - Spring 2011

1. Friendly Fires - Live Those Days Tonight
2. My Morning Jacket - Holdin' on to Black Metal
3. Here We Go Magic - Hands in the Sky
4. Dodos - Good
5. Beastie Boys ft. Nas - Too Many Rappers
6. Land of Talk - Hamburg, Noon
7. Tune-Yards - Bizness
8. LCD Soundsystem - Pow Pow
9. Wild Nothing - Chinatown
10. The Mountain Goats - Estate Sale Sign
11. Junip - In Every Direction
12. TV on the Radio - Will Do
13. Peter, Bjorn and John - (Don't Let Them) Cool Off
14. !!! - Heart of Hearts
15. Radiohead - Codex
16. Panda Bear - Afterburner
17. Fleet Foxes - Grown Ocean

Annotations:

-This was a tough one to put together because there were a LOT of close calls. I would've loved to include Crystal Stilts' "Through the Floor", Battles' "Futura", and Iron & Wine's "Your Fake Name is Good Enough for Me", but a CD's only 80 minutes.

-Also Fleet Foxes' "The Shrine/An Argument", which I have the clearest memory of from seeing their concert in May. Awesome show and awesome song, but it was just too long for the mix, and "Grown Ocean" is no slouch at all (the more I think about it, the more it feels like my favorite song on the new album).

-"Pow Pow" is supposedly the last song LCD Soundsystem ever made, so it feels like a fitting representation of the season that saw the band bid us farewell. (Too bad it wasn't actually played at their farewell show, but oh well.) Speaking of, I never got around to writing up a blog entry about the retirement of one of my all-time favorite bands - and experiencing their last show via webcast in a house full of friends - but maybe I'll get around to that at some point.

-John Darnielle does righteous anger better than just about anyone, and I'm not saying this was an angry season for me (could've been, but wasn't), but you can't help but get swept up in his enthusiasm on songs like "Estate Sale Sign". Darnielle sounds more alive here than he has in a good while, and the rest of All Eternals Deck is pretty great, too. Also: Pomona gets another shout out!

-Junip is the new band of Jose Gonzalez - who everyone in the world except me is already familiar with, I think. The production alone on this album, and this song especially, is just incredible. There aren't many albums that make you feel like you're in the room with the dudes while they're playing, but this is one. Now I have to go out and track down Gonzalez's other work, too.

-I dunno if it's a happy accident or I'm just that awesome, but a lot of the transitions just KILL on here. "Good" into "Too Many Rappers" shouldn't work nearly as well as it does, and the fade from "Codex" to "Afterburner" feels sublime to me. Overall I think this is one of my best sequencing jobs yet, so allow me to pat myself on the back.

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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.

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At least the music never stops.

Been way too long since I've posted anything...since I've written anything. That's something I need to rectify. In the meantime, here's my summer mix, finished early but titled late.

"Too Many One-Way Streets": Summer 2010

1. White Rabbits - Percussion Gun
2. Arcade Fire - Month of May
3. The New Pornographers - Crash Years
4. Sleigh Bells - Infinity Guitars
5. School of Seven Bells - Babelonia
6. Janelle Monae - Tightrope
7. The National - Conversation 16
8. Band of Horses - NW Apt.
9. Midlake - Rulers, Ruling All Things
10. Four Tet - And then Patterns
11. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Bottled in Cork
12. Wolf Parade - What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go this Way)
13. Vampire Weekend - Taxi Cab
14. Big Boi - You Ain't No DJ
15. Caribou - Hannibal
16. Broken Bells - Mongrel Heart
17. Tokyo Police Club - Not Sick
18. LCD Soundsystem - Home

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It's that time again.

This was at first really easy and then really hard to sequence. Eventually decided, fuck it, the nine-minute track goes first. Most of these are Coachella bands/songs, though the songs chosen aren't always "oh yeah they played that one well".

"Spring 2010: 7 of Out of 10"

1. LCD Soundsystem - You Wanted a Hit
2. Sleigh Bells - Rill Rill (Ring Ring?)
3. Broken Social Scene - Forced to Love
4. Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside
5. MGMT - Flash Delirium
6. Gorillaz - Empire Ants
7. Vampire Weekend - Giving Up the Gun
8. MUTEMATH - Armistice
9. Pavement - Trigger Cut
10. Dirty Projectors - Knotty Pine
11. Hot Chip - We Have Love
12. Julian Casablancas - 11th Dimension
13. Public Image, Ltd. - Careering
14. The Besnard Lakes - And This is What We Call Progress
15. The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio
16. Spoon - Out Go the Lights
17. Los Campesinos! - This is a Flag. There is No Wind.
18. Working for a Nuclear Free City - The Tree

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Mix well and serve

My seasonal mix-making continues. Tracklist posted without commentary this time, since I've been doing a lot of music writing lately as it is (more short reviews tomorrow and then another nice long one on Friday).

"Live Hard" - Winter 2009/2010

1. Vampire Weekend - Cousins
2. Phoenix - Courtesy Laughs
3. Beach House - Silver Soul
4. Spoon - Mystery Zone
5. Yeasayer - ONE
6. Atlas Sound - Quick Canal
7. Passion Pit - Sleepyhead
8. Hot Chip - One Life Stand
9. Four Tet - She Just Likes to Fight
10. The Twilight Sad - Cold Days from the Birdhouse
11. Bear in Heaven - You Do You
12. These New Puritans - Hologram
13. Neon Indian - Should Have Taken Acid with You
14. Massive Attack - Paradise Circus
15. Los Campesinos! - A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show-Me State, or: Letters from Me to Charlotte
16. Wilco - Everlasting
17. Girls - Lauren Marie

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The Fall 2009 Mix - Now with Annotations!

As you may know, I put together quarterly mixes - I guess "Playlists" except I really do still burn them to CDs - as a kind of musical diary of the previous season. A lot of the music gets chosen because it has some sort of resonance with the people, events and feelings of the time, but some of it also gets put on just because I like it a lot. The actual tracklists for these things only ever get put up on my blogs, so if I lose them I'm boned, but oh well, here's Fall 2009.

I'm also adding short annotations for each song, for the first time. It's kind of a writing exercise for me and I may stick with it or not in the future, so let me know if you like it or think it's horrible.

Music overload after the jump...

"A Few Pebbles Short of an Avalanche" - Fall 2009

1. The Walkmen - Brandy Alexander
"Stop talking and listen to me. I'll tell you of every dream."
I've been listening to a lot of You & Me lately, but for some reason this short slow-burn hidden near the end of A Hundred Miles Off spoke loudest to me this season. Part of that's admittedly because I wanted to try a framing concept with this playlist, to do with dreaming and living and how we try to connect the two. Hamilton Leithauser's no stranger to waxing poetic on exactly this kind of thing, so who better to start with?

2. Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
I like the slow, otherworldly build at the beginning of this song - it's a nice segue from the setup at the end of the last one. It builds into one of Yeasayer's most straightforward pop songs yet, and whether you think that's good or bad is up to you. These guys have kind of unjustly been derided as trying to ape Animal Collective's bid for more centrist freak-rock in 2009, but I don't get that. Isn't there enough room for everyone in this sub-sub-genre right now? Space may be dwindling, but it's clear these guys are having fun while they can.

3. Mew - Beach
Arriving late because you stopped to smell the roses - it's something we can all relate to. Distractions are everywhere, and what at first feels like the most important thing in the world can evaporate like any ephemera. And "Beach" is, appropriately, a sunny, poppy clearing amidst the post-prog hills and valleys of No More Stories..., though no less engaging for it.

4. The Dodos - The Strums
"So children, kill your teachers, kill your parents, then kill your preachers"
There's something kind of amazing about such a blunt statement coming from dudes known for their unironic and typically romantic songs. There probably wasn't a better anti-authoritarian screed anywhere else this year, if only because it came from such an unexpected and understated quarter.

5. Ra Ra Riot - Can You Tell
It's pretty on-the-nose, but I like it. RRR does some really tight, catchy pop-rock that doesn't reinvent the wheel, but still has a welcome place in my library.

6. Bon Iver - Brackett, WI
Its parts aren't much - all haunted vocals and collapsing chord progressions - but like any great Bon Iver song, they add up to much more than you'd expect. Yet another reason I regret being so late to the party for the Dark Was the Night Red Hot compilation.

7. Animal Collective - Taste
"Am I really all the things that are outside of me?"
Continuing themes from another song you might have heard, this song is actually almost its opposite: downtempo instead of dancy, fearful and reactionary instead of triumphant and forward-thinking. Wouldn't make a great single, but it resonates. You look back and, with a realization of horror, you may think: "Is this how I'm going to live my life?" Well, is it?

8. Phoenix - Sometimes in the Fall
I saw Phoenix play the Greek Theater a few months ago. I generally hate big concert venues in L.A., since most of the seats end up getting taken by industry types or celebrities or bored rich motherfuckers or whoever - basically a whole crowd of people who are only there to hear the band play their hit single, if that. Behind me at this show were a group of kids that couldn't help but fill the void between songs by screamsinging "Sometimes in the fall, fall fall FALL!" whenever they could. It wore on me a little, and Phoenix never did play it, but damn if I wasn't right there with them, a few actual fans in the crisp chill of a fall L.A. crowd.

9. The Flaming Lips - Watching the Planets
It's just such a crazy, layered song that that you're constantly finding new things to like about it - the camouflaged bassline, Karen O's shrieks, the pound of drums so heavy you feel they might explode any second. A lot of Embryonic is purposefully obtuse and abstract, but this is the album's perfect entry point - placed, of course, right at the end.

10. Built to Spill - Car
A Spin Magazine article once described a lot of Doug Martsch's songs as (more or less) "epics that sound like throwaways, and throwaways that sound like epics". I always thought the first bit sounded like a back-handed compliment, but the second is right on the nose with this sub-3 minute track from 1994's There's Nothing Wrong with Love. At first understated, it blossoms into a play-to-the-rafters exploration of love, dreams, blissful ignorance and the true nature of all things. And then, not even three minutes in, it's over. Throwaway? Not in the least. Epic? Absolutely.

11. Bear in Heaven - Lovesick Teenagers
"Lovesick teenagers don't ever die. They will live forever."
A spiraling meditation on growing older, wiser, and realizing you haven't changed as much as you thought. Oddly as dark as it it optimistic, it's an appropriate illustration of reaching out and flying as high as you can - before you crash into the ground.

12. Passion Pit - Folds in Your Hands
Don't let sub-par Youtube videos and Talk Show appearances fool you - Passion Pit is a hell of a live band. Playing some songs straight and remolding others ("Seaweed Song" somehow becomes more evocative and unique as a solo piano ballad), the band nailed pretty much everything when I saw them a few months ago. Of particular note was this song - maybe because I wasn't that familiar with it, I was floored when the 1:22 breakdown kicked in, they knocked it the fuck out of the park and I found myself caught up in the joyous current of pogoing hipsters. I hadn't known it well before, but now there's no way I'll forget it now.

13. Yacht - It's Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want
The obvious reason being that my home life is about to be upended as I move to a new apartment, but that's not to belittle this song on its own merits. See Mystery Lights is a hell of a sophomore evolution for a band that used to be a one-man (and fairly one-trick) outfit; their jump to the DFA label isn't surprising, since suddenly they seem to be one of the only groups trying to push the boundaries laid down by label pioneers LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture. You can track the sound's evolution as a microcosm in this track alone, but chances are by the 7-minute mark you'll just want to give in and dance.

14. Islands - Heartbeat
OK, no doubt auto-tune is the Great Satan of 2009, but every now and then it's actually used appropriately - see most of Kanye West's Heartbreak and 808s and, well, this song. The weirdly faux-emotional pitch shifts are a surprisingly good fit for a cheery song about jilting an ex-lover. Not that I want an auto-tune indie trend in 2010 (I really don't), just a nice surprise here and there.

15. Grizzly Bear - While You Wait for the Others
Continuing a theme: there comes a time when even the nice guys of Grizzly Bear have to say "enough is enough". Maybe you tried really hard (or maybe you didn't), but if things don't work out, there will come a time when you're asked, kindly, to make your way. Veckatimest is lyrically a fairly inscrutable album, but this song, tucked away near the end, has enough emotional resonance to make up for the rest of the album all on its own.

16. Health - We are Water
A mercurial murk of hollow vocals and searing guitars, the soundscape of this song is everything its title suggests. How can we, as people, even try to stay in one place, to do one thing, to feel one way? We put up our walls and make our decisions and follow our plans. But underneath it all, we're as temporal as any of the weather. We're slaves to our emotions and our fears and a thousand things beyond our control. We are capricious and petty. We are opportunists and survivors. We are elemental. We are water.

17. Franz Ferdinand - Lucid Dreams
I've spent way too long arguing with my friends over which version of this song is the best. I seem to be in the minority thinking it's the album version (the one included here). Where the single version takes a while to get going, this cut almost blasts out of the gate from the beginning, and doesn't let up until the electronic morass at the end (which, admittedly, I could do without). The tribal drums, too, really set this apart from the band's other work in a way that the single version can't claim. The more I think about it, the more I feel like we're supposed to like both versions together, as if the single cut is there to lay down the groundwork, and the album version is meant as a very specific call-back that still pushes everything forward. Still, if I have to choose one, it's this. So there.

18. Oh No Oh My - I Painted Your House
"Perhaps it's time we grow..."
Somehow, this is one of the saddest songs I've ever heard, a cheerily bittersweet song about genuinely trying hard - and failing. It still gets me most every time. But while it'd be easy to wallow in defeat, the important thing is that this song doesn't. Still, after everything, you've got things to build, places to go. If your painting didn't do the trick? It's OK. You can always come back later with your guitar.

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If it's 100 degrees, it's still summer.

Every season I make a mix tape/mix cd/playlist of the stuff I listened to over those few months. I don't keep a diary or scrapbook or even make very personal entries on web journals like this, so the songs and sequences I choose for these mixes form the closest thing to an autobiographical account of my life as any of us are going to get. Some seasons are more obtuse than others.

I've been doing this since 2003 and haven't missed a season yet (even if I'm late here and there). If you poke around elsewhere on the net (and if you care) you might find previous mixes, but I'm going to start posting them here from now on because why not, I have a blog so why not use the damn thing.

The Summer 2009 mix is called "Chameleonic Tendencies" and it goes like this:

1. Passion Pit - Moth's Wings
2. Department of Eagles - No One Does It Like You
3. Yacht - Psychic City
4. Atlas Sound ft. Noah Lennox - Walkabout
5. Animal Collective - For Reverend Green
6. Volcano Choir - Island, IS
7. Dirty Projectors - Useful Chamber
8. Mew - Vaccine
9. Phoenix - Armistice
10. Miike Snow - Sans Soleil
11. Yeasayer - Tightrope
12. Nine Inch Nails - Discipline
13. Grizzly Bear - About Face
14. White Denim - Regina Holding Hands
15. Los Campesinos! - We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
16. Sufjan Stevens - You Are the Blood

(BONUS QUESTION: I never have more than one song from an artist on a single mix, but I kind of cheated twice - you might even say three times - on this one. Can you find them?)

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