Category: Music

As 2011 draws to a close, it’s time to look back at the year in music. Below is my list of Top Ten albums for the year; following that is some commentary about good albums that didn’t quite make it, and bands I’m going to be looking at closely in 2012!

As always, remember that this list is about complete albums and not individual songs. Yes, there may be songs out there from 2011 that I liked better than anything on this list… but, as a whole, the following ten albums are my favorite of the year!

#10: M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.

M83 is a band I always wanted to like. Why not? They’re all French and sophisticated, doing their own special brand of electronic shoegaze. But I’ve never met an album of theirs I liked all the way through… until now. Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. is a delight from start to finish. And I’m happy for them! The music of M83 (named after spiral galaxy Messier 83) has been featured in dozens of films, TV shows and video games; I’m glad to see them put out an excellent product.

#9: Julianna Barwick – The Magic Place

Julianna Barwick is an American musician who was born in Louisiana and grew up singing in church choirs before moving to (where else?) Brooklyn. It’s kind of hard to pin down her exact sound. To me, she certainly sounds a bit like Elizabeth Frazer of the Cocteau Twins singing over the late 70s\early 80s ambient work of Brian Eno or Harold Budd. But it’s not that simple. There’s certainly some Björk, Enya and maybe even some Danielle Dax thrown in for good measure. In spite of all the comparisons, I think she has a totally unique sound that’s both ethereal and otherwordly. It sounds like something 4AD would have put out in 1984… and I mean that as the highest possible compliment! On the negative side, Elizabeth Frazer\Enya singing over very mellow Eno\Budd isn’t something you can throw on at a party or on a whim. But that’s cool. Different is good sometimes.

#8: Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes

Swedish musician Lykke Li (real name: Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson) has been an indie favorite ever since her tune “Little Bit” hit the scene in 2007. But her second album, Wounded Rhymes, just hit it out of the damn park. Like Björk, Li has a tendency to kind of go all over the place with her music, a trait that was held in check better by this disc. And I don’t know why, but I just love this woman’s lyrics: cold, dark, and sometimes just plain clever. “Like a shotgun needs an outcome” is my favorite line for all of 2011.

Continue reading “My Top Albums of 2011”

Brooklyn-based band Asobi Seksu came to Charlotte last night! Here’s a picture of me with lead singer Yuki Chikudate:

 

My current obsession:

One of my all-time favorite bands, R.E.M. have broken up after 31 years together!

From the band’s official website:

As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening.

Even though I haven’t really kept up with them in the past few years, it’s still sad news. They were just one of those bands I always expected to be around forever. It therefore only seems fitting to send them out with their first big hit:

Good luck guys. God bless, and thanks for all the great tunes over the years! Fables of the Reconstruction will always be one of my all-time favorite discs!

Such a pretty song… too bad it’s almost forgotten.

You met a new friend in the Canyon or so you wrote,
On a blanket in the cooling sand you and your friend agreed;
That the stars were so many there, they seemed to overlap.

The Painted Desert can wait till summer,
We’ve played this game of just imagine long enough, wait till summer.
When I am sure the rain has ended, the blooms have gone,
Everyone killed by the morning frost.

Was a cactus blooming there as you watched the native boy?
In a Flagstaff trailer court you wrote the line,
‘He kicked a tumbleweed and his mother called him home
Where the Arizona moon met the Arizona sun’.

I wanted to be there by May at the latest time,
Isn’t that the plan we had or have you changed your mind?
I haven’t read a word from you since Phoenix or Tucson,
April is over will you tell me how long before I can be there?

 

A couple of quick music news items today:

– Man, the guys from New Order really hate each other, don’t they? In this piece from The Guardian, journalist Rob Fitzpatrick sits down with Peter Hook on one phone line and Gillian Gilbert, Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner on the other to try and figure out what happened. There’s still something that happened on the band’s last tour of Brazil that no one will talk about, but it seems that the seeds of discontent were sown much earlier, and involved Haçienda, the famed nightclub built with New Order money. According to Hook, band manager Rob Gretton suggested to the band that they buy the rights to the Haçienda name, and so Hook gave him £5,000 to do that. According to the rest of the band, Hook “stole” the name for himself. Hook counters that he faithfully attended Haçienda business meetings for years, while Sumner and the others didn’t, and didn’t care about the club at all until 1994, until it became possible to make money off the club’s name. It’s all depressing and sad. Read more here.

– I was a fan of The Smiths for a few years back in the 80s and early 90s… but I’ve never been much of a fan of Morrissey’s solo work. It all seemed so… self-indulgent, in the same way that the rest of 10,000 Maniacs seemed to keep Natalie Merchant’s propensity for sad, mopey songs in check. Anyway, it looks like Moz is really starting to lose it. David Tseng, founder of Morrissey-Solo.com, one of the largest and oldest Moz fansites on the web, flew 5,000 miles from LA to Copenhagen to attend a Morrissey show. But he was thrown out (without a refund!) before the show began? Tseng’s crime against Moz? Allowing commenters on his website to say less then flattering things about Moz. So if you have your own music fansite, make sure to heavily edit what people post… or just don’t support such a whiney and needy “artist” in the first place. Read more here.

If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably heard of the “30 Day Music Challenge”. Basically, you post a link to a song or YouTube clip every day for a month. Some versions have silly rules, like “Day 1 — A song that makes you think of your best friend”. While I have accepted the challenge, I’m not following those rules. I’m just making it up as I go.

Here are the songs for days 21-30; part 1 is here and part 2 is here.

Day 21: “Hair and Skin” by Mazzy Star

Around thirteen years ago I had a massive crush on French supermodel Laetitia Casta. And thanks to software that automated the downloading of pictures from websites and newsgroups (alt.binaries.pictures.supermodels.laetitia-casta!), I soon had a collection of 5000+ pictures of her. Sometimes, late at night, I’d smoke and cue up a slideshow of the pics, with each picture set to display for a fraction of a second. I’d then put on some headphones and crank up this song. It was my way of indulging in my own obsession.

Bonus info: This song was originally written and performed by the LA band Green on Red, whose drummer, Keith Mitchell, left the band to join Mazzy Star. So I guess that’s why they covered it.

 

Day 22: “We Used to Be Friends” by The Dandy Warhols

Yeah, I know it’s just a TV show. And yeah, I know was FOUR YEARS AGO, too. But you know what? Dawn Ostroff can still burn in hell for canceling Veronica Mars. There, I said it.

Day 23: “Skin” by Madonna

Madonna’s Ray of Light album helped me get through a really dark period of my life. Sure, the album won 4 Grammys, won the praise of music critics everywhere, made Rolling Stone’s “500 Best Albums of All Time” list, and sold 20 million copies. But even with that, it’s still a criminally underrated album. Here’s one of my favorite songs from the album, the non-single track “Skin”.

Continue reading “The 30 Day Music Challenge (Part 3)”

If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably heard of the “30 Day Music Challenge”. Basically, you post a link to a song or YouTube clip every day for a month. Some versions of the challenge have silly guides, like “Day 1 – A song that makes you think of your best friend”. While I have accepted the challenge, I’m not following those rules. I’m just making it up as I go.

Here are the songs for days 11-20; part 1 is here and part 3 is here.

Day 11: “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes

I went to the skating rink a lot in my grade school years… only I never really skated all that much. I’d take the $4 my mom would give me for skate rental and play pinball and video games instead. However, there was one time when a bunch of kids from my school were there, and they convinced me to get out on the rink. I was wobbling around out there, like you do, when suddenly “Bette Davis Eyes” came over the speakers. All the kids from my school who weren’t skating let out a squeal and rushed to the rink. But, more importantly, the older folks rolled their eyes and skated off. I did a couple of laps around the rink, staring at the reflected disco lights on the ceiling and surrounded by my friends. Although I was only 10 at the time, I had just discovered the generation gap, and realized that there was much as thing as “my” music versus “their” music. And for some reason this made me deliriously happy. This song, this moment in time and space were mine, not theirs. I wobbled around the rink throughout the song in a daze with a giant grin on my face. Although I was unaware of it at the time, it was the same feeling people at Woodstock or people who saw Blondie’s first shows at CBGB must have felt, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Day 12: “Pump Up The Volume” by M\A\A\R\S

Shortly after I got a car, I got a job delivering flowers for Flowerama at Gwinnett Place. My high school sweetheart Jodi worked there too, and so it was nauseatingly sweet all around. But then Valentine’s Day came. My boss bought an entire (tractor) trailer full of roses and rented a vacant storefront as a staging area. He also hired Cindy Bollegar as a temp. I had been working for 18 hours straight when my boss asked me to get some roses from the trailer and take them to the staging area. I got the flowers and took them to the room, where Cindy worked alone. We made some small talk for several minutes, and then I signaled my intention to leave by letting out a deep sigh and unenthusiastically singing “Pump up the volume, pump up the volume, pump up the volume…” To my complete shock, Cindy looked at me with one of the most come hither looks I’ve ever seen and sexily said “Dance! Dance!”. I leaned in to kiss her. She leaned in to me. And just then the door opened, and Jodi walked in. I don’t think she saw anything, and if she did she certainly never mentioned it. A small part of my mind was FURIOUS with me for almost cheating on my girlfriend. Another small part was FURIOUS that I wasn’t able to seal the deal with Cindy. The other 80% of my brain, the part that hadn’t been to sleep in 30+ hours by this point, just wanted the other parts to shut up and leave it alone. To this day, every time I hear this song, I think of Cindy’s blue eyes, and that devilish smirk of hers saying “Dance! Dance!”

Day 13: “Caro mio ben” by Cecilia Bartoli

I saw Cecilia Bartoli at Emory in 1995 and she did this song for her third or forth encore. Every single neuron in my mind was intently concentrated on her persona and her voice, and every hair on my neck and arms stood at attention. I knew enough Latin to roughly translate it on the fly (it’s the saddest song ever written), but I was just BLOWN AWAY by her voice. It’s sometimes hard to believe that so much beauty can exist in this world.

Continue reading “The 30 Day Music Challenge (Part 2)”