War on Radio

Part of the reason I haven’t been writing lately is because I’ve been prepping for an epic 2008 year-in-review kinda post, sorting through the roughly 300 albums I’ve nicked this year and making top album and song lists, among other things.

But before 2008, there was 2007: a year full of great releases. So I thought I’d wander through the dense forest of my iTunes and pick out my favorite songs–not from this year, but from the last one, in order to see what’s held up and what’s faded by the wayside.

The result is a 32 song trip down memory lane. Some of these tracks I’ve talked about before in the Mixtaper column or in other posts, but some, I hope will be a bit fresh. Because of the rather large number, I’ll strive for brevity in my comments on each. Ready? Okay then.

1. American Hearts by A.A. Bondy, from American Hearts
There’s something achingly gorgeous in this relatively simple folk track. Listen to his voice break ever so slightly when he sings the “don’t tread on me” lyric in the chorus. It gives me chills.

2. Coffee by Aesop Rock (ft John Darnielle), from None Shall Pass
The concluding track (excluding the hidden song) on an amazing and intelligent album features two of the best lyricists working today combining their powers. After Aes’s frenetic rapping, John’s ending verse sounds like an old soul sample recovered from a dirty basement. Plus, there’s the zombies.

3.  Fiery Crash by Andrew Bird, from Armchair Apocrypha
This track goes down smooth, driven by a pulsing beat and lilting melody. Even as it starts to build up as it moves along, it retains a very relaxed, urbane charm that characterizes Mr. Bird’s best work.

4. Keep the Car Running by Arcade Fire, from Neon Bible
One of the lighter tracks from Canada’s most melodramatic indie rock orchestra. This song rockets along over light, lush backing track as Win Butler shout-sings with his usual emotive intensity. The result is teeming with life, organic and refreshing.

5. The Ballad of Love and Hate by The Avett Brothers, from Emotionalism
Easily the strongest track from the alt-country band, a spare and haunting effort anchored by its strong and emotionally loaded lyric. The beautiful melody, sung with just the right restraint, coupled with the spareness of the arrangement makes the words that much more effective.

6. Wild Mountain Nation by Blitzen Trapper, from Wild Mountain Nation
This song is basically southern rock on acid. It’s got a stomping beat, twanging slide guitar and an appropriately dirty lead guitar, but the whole things sounds messy and fractured in a spectacular and interesting way. I dare you not to tap your foot to this.

7. Flume by Bon Iver, from For Emma, Forever Ago
The album as a whole is characterized by a haunting, wintry feel, and this song captures the best of that atmosphere. The moody acoustic strumming is buried under droning sounds and layered falsetto vocals that give the song a ghostly presence. I can’t find it, but if you can track down his 9/8/08 performance of this song on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, it blew me away.

8. On the Bubble by The Broken West, from I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
This song practically slaps you in the face with its bright indie-poppiness, right out of the gate. That towering, sugar-sweet riff is only the tip of the iceberg–the handclap beat and bounding guitars support an eager vocal, harmonized in just the right places. It’s like sunshine condensed into two minutes and 40 seconds.

9. Pale Horse by Canon Blue, from Colonies
The song opens with moody backwards riff that’s soon augmented by a hypnotic guitar, etherial piano chording and eventually an electro-backbeat, which kicks up just as the vocal launches into a reverb-soaked chorus. This is music for traveling on trains or walking around in winter–it’s open and chilly, but also inviting.

10. Melody Day by Caribou, from Andorra
There’s something retro about this song, like it’s been brought here from 1967 via time warp, but it’s been dressed in modern clothes. There’s a bedroom-electronic flavour layered under the psychedelic melody, twittering flutes, understated guitar and crashing cymbals. The result is something that’s both alien and familiar in a really peculiar and cool way.

11. Serpentine by Chris Bathgate, from A Cork Tale Wake
The richness of the voice, coupled with the singsong melody is what strikes me the most here. The song appears simple at first listen, but reveals a subtle complexity on each repeat–cellos intone under the gentle piano, just as a violin (or viola maybe) soars above it; it’s easy to not even notice the drums as they come in; the build is really beautifully executed.

12. Saint John by Cold War Kids, from Robbers & Cowards
If one could distill badass into a song, it might sound like this. A jailhouse murder ballad driven by a wicked bass and thundering drums, over which comes a snarling vocal, clearly from the wrong side of the tracks. By the time the honky tonk piano sweeps in, it’s become almost a gospel song in a perverse but awesome way.

13. Going Nowhere by Elliott Smith, from New Moon
Technically this song is at least 10 years old, but it saw its first official release last year and stands as one of the strongest tracks from the articulate, dark world of Elliott’s music. His raw vocal whispers its way through a melancholy melody and over his beautiful guitar, as though he were in the room playing for you, maybe after some drunken party, while your friends are passed out around on the floor.

14. My Moon My Man by Feist, from The Reminder
This was a tough call–the innocent sweetness of “One, Two, Three, Four” or the femme fatale stomp of this track? And it is a stomp; the song is rhythm driven but covered in velvet, especially Leslie’s vocal, wandering through the arrangement like a silk ribbon. It’s dangerous and kinda sexy.

15. Song Among the Pine by Gravenhurst, from The Western Lands
Something about this track has the air of some ancient, pagan hymn. Nick Talbot creates, out of guitar, voice and gentle hums and drones, a snow-covered forest on a crisp sunny day, where mystical things lurk just on the periphery. It’s positively haunting.

16. Your Rocky Spine by Great Lake Swimmers, from Ongiara
Although the album isn’t as strong as their prior two, this banjo-driven love song is one of the band’s better songs. Tony Dekker’s voice is ridiculously beautiful, as usual, and the melody and lyrics embrace you as the song moves forward along its open path with a certain moody sweetness.
 
17. Small Talk by Immaculate Machine, from Fables
Indie pop, yes, but with a tense flavour to it, created by a tight melody and the interplay between lead violins and guitars over an unrelenting bass. The lyrics reflect this tension, talking of secrets worming their way into a conversation that suddenly turns heavy.

18. Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car by Iron & Wine, from The Shepherd’s Dog
The thing about Sam Beam is that he progresses with each release, becoming slowly more complex and adventurous, while retaining the intimate southern charm that made him famous in the first place. This album, like its opening track, features more playful touches–piano runs, gentle beats, distorted sounds–while still sounding like some old uncle telling you a story at a family reunion picnic. The lightness does the music good, it doesn’t get mired in melodrama, although the lyrics retain an emotive character.

19. Teardrop by Jose Gonzalez, from In Our Nature
As with his cover of The Knife’s “Heartbeats,” Mr. Gonzalez manages to strip this Massive Attack song down to its naked spine, retaining the character of the original while also making it very much his own. The song itself lends itself perfectly to his quiet, echo-laden world–its powerful yet still spare.

20. Pink Light by Laura Veirs, from Saltbreakers
There’s something about that guitar riff that’s just irresistible and something literate and intelligent in the singer/songwriter/occasional Decemberist’s voice. Like a lot of the tracks on this list, this one seems to come from its own kind of mythical world where sails are tattered and winter wracks the bones of memory, all under ringing chimes and over skittering beats.

21. Hatchet by Low, from Drums & Guns
“Groovy” is not a word I would usually use to describe the slowcore Minnesotans of Low, but this track definitely qualifies as that. With their usual awesome male/female harmonies, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker intone a wry lyric over a groovy beat and skeletal guitar riff, making this short song one of the most interesting in their catalogue.

22. 99% of Us is Failure by Matthew Good, from Hospital Music
When an album has a name like that, you’ve got to know you’re in for something like this, but this song is still a sucker-punch to the gut. There are a lot of songs about watching a loved one die, but the devil is in the details here; Good’s voice is expressive without being over the top, the lyrics are smart enough to have some pathos and the melody doesn’t hurt the picture, soaring over the ’90s alt-rock callback instrumentation.

23. Fake Empire by The National, from Boxer
There’s a grace to this song. Part of it comes from Matt Berninger’s low voice singing the almost detached melody. Part of it is the unobtrusive beat, driving under the pianos that grow stronger as the song builds. By the time the horn sounds come in, the track has become something else completely–a slice of smooth, modern pop/rock.

24. Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe by Okkervil River, from The Stage Names
This was a tough one–five of the nine songs on the album were under consideration for this list, but in the end, I had to pick this. The metaphor-dripping lyrics, the hurling vocal of Will Sheff, the anthemic nature of the instruments that support him–it’s all there. There’s a reason Okkervil River are one of my favorite bands and this is a great example of it.

25. Overture by Patrick Wolf, from The Magic Position
Now THAT is a violin riff. There’s something suitably epic about this affair; Mr. Wolf’s voice is laden with bravado, the beat pulses and thunders, the strings sweep in grand movements, etc. The contrast of electronic and acoustic instruments creates a cool effect also. Like Sam Beam, Patrick gets better with each successive release, and if this is this good, his next album better be damn well amazing.

26. Romantic Type by Pigeon Detectives, from Wait for Me
There is something appealing about straight-ahead, no frills rock ‘n’ roll and this song delivers on that front. It sounds in kind with the whole Franz Ferdinand-ish, “let’s draw from the late ’70s” thing, chugging forward there 2.5 minutes of crunchy guitars and a frenetic rhythm section, complete with the slowdown on the post-chorus. But it does it all really well, and that’s the key here.

27. House of Cards by Radiohead, from In Rainbows
Amidst all the tales of isolation, geopolitical statements and dystopian ruminations, Radiohead rarely get to write a straight love song, but here they’ve done it. Sort of–there is a certain doom-laden mood here, but it wouldn’t be Radiohead if there wasn’t. Everybody on the planet gushes about Radiohead, so I don’t have to explain why this song is awesome, really.

28. Rehab by Rihanna, from Good Girl Gone Bad
Say what you will, this chick can sing. Although not quite as cool as “Disturbia” (which is ineligible as it came out on the 2008 special edition of the album), there is something really appealing about this. Her voice isn’t being showy here, even though she’s capable of it, and the backing track feature a sweet, whirling piano. Proof that there is hope in the mainstream pop/R&B arena.

29. Overpowered by Roisin Murphy, from Overpowered
Formerly half of the dance pop band Moloko, Ms. Murphy creates the sound of robot sex on this track. It’s danceable, driven by a skittering low pad and plucking stabs over the top of a cybernetic vocal. Yet when she launches into the chorus, it’s with a “come hither” intonation that’s made more startling by the style of the verses. Great stuff.

30. Your Last Chariot by Scout Niblett, from This Fool Can Die Now
One of the shorter songs on Ms. Niblett’s best album since her 2001 debut, its a great showcase for her wailing vocal (see also: “Peoria Lunchbox Blues” by Songs:Ohia). The guitar, like the rest of the song around it, has a dirty, rural feel to it, not unlike ’90s Cat Power (an overused but apt comparison). There’s something dangerous about the affair as she repeats “comin’ to get ya…”

31. Sometimes by Siobhan Donaghy, from Ghosts
A standout track on one of the best pop albums of this century, the former Sugababe flexes her creative muscles, moving down a track that marries her teenybopper roots with Kate Bush-ish eccentricity. Listen to that high, spiraling vocal or the weird noises that dance in and out of the mix. The effect is to turn a simple bubblegum track into something weirdly spectacular.

32. Bouncing Off Clouds by Tori Amos, from American Doll Posse
Proving herself still vital, nearly 20 years after her first album and through a career marked by indulgent quirkiness, Tori put out one of the catchiest songs I can think of in this one. The melody is strong, the backing track isn’t showy but frames the vocal wonderfully, the lyrics… well, they’re Tori, but they’re not over the top. This manages to be both adult contemporary and appealing/interesting, a combination not easily achieved.

So that’s that list. 2007 was definitely a good year. I’m now off, ready to dive back into this year’s offerings–an even more diverse and intriguing set.

This woman’s music confounds me. There are times I hate it profoundly–when it’s nonsensical and self-parodic, when her annunciation is infuriating, etc. Then there are times when I’ll put a record on and feel it, the way you feel the best music you’ve ever heard–when she’s obviously brilliant and her idiosyncratic tendencies are what make her endearing. I’ve been listening on shuffle this afternoon (always an adventure) and the title track from Little Earthquakes came up. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard it, but it called me back to a lot of thoughts…

Even though I was a late comer, I got her records pretty much in order, starting with that one. It’s intricately tied to a lot of memories I have from that period (roughly 13-14). It’s such a perfect album for being that age–”Precious Things” is perfectly angsty, “Leather” is awkwardly figuring out sexuality, “Happy Phantom” has that fuck-it-and-you cheeriness that makes you want to dance in supermarket aisles to confuse the work-a-day staff. Then there’s “Me and a Gun,” which I still can’t listen to–one of very few songs I can say that about–and I have a certain admiration for that; putting an experience like that in a form that communicates it so well takes a lot. The album’s two best songs, though are the title track and “Mother,” each a towering seven minutes long. “Little Earthquakes” is this big, heavy rumination about getting around difficult moments (”Oh, these little earthquakes, doesn’t take much to rip us into pieces”)–I love the way it lumbers forward slowly and the chorus melody is wonderful. “Mother” distills a complex feeling very elegantly, a feeling of transition from one thing to another, excitement mixed with trepidation, the fear of losing one’s self, and the hesitant piano compliments some of her strongest lyrics. This has always been one of my favorite songs.

The best live version I could find of “Mother” (with a great intro)–
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=iPN6MvfJhaU]

Then, around the same period, I got Under the Pink. I remember loving it at the time. I still think it has some very fine songs on it, this being one of them:
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zo45YxVZNrM]
I’m still not sure what the hell she’s talking about for a lot of that, but it has that melancholic feel to it that some of her best work does. But listening to the rest of the album now, I don’t get a lot of it. There are some cool aspects to it–the broken down piano on “Bells for Her” is extremely effective, “Cornflake Girl” is catchy enough and “Yes, Anastasia” hits on some amazing moments, even if it does wander a bit (one of her longest songs at 9:33), but not much else really impacts me. I think this too may relate to memory. The time this was in heavy rotation was also the time I had my first “boyfriend.” It meant the world when it was happening, but with the benefit of a decade of hindsight, I have no idea what I saw in him–it’s not that I dislike him, it’s just sort of… eh. Which is how I feel about this record. It’s nice to remember, there were some good times, but… I dunno, it’s just not quite there.

Boys for Pele, which I got for my 15th birthday, is another matter. This is a willfully difficult album–70 minutes, 18.5 songs (the first track is two songs), an actual bull on backing vocals (”Professional Widow”), etc–which means I tend to feel rather strongly either way about it. Take “Mr Zebra,” (performed here on Jools Holland)
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=unXE3p8NqO4]
There’s a certain preciousness to that, which sometimes you want to step into because you’re feeling smart and silly, but sometimes you want to bitchslap across the face for exactly those qualities. The best tracks on this album come as it gets close to its end. “Doughnut Song” is the most quietly spiteful thing I’ve ever heard and I can think of a couple people I’d like to play that for. Then, two tracks later, “Putting the Damage On” is the flipside to that–it’s shaking and vulnerable in a way that’s difficult to capture without overdoing it (not to mention the great horn part). Naturally, that one got a lot of rotation after that first relationship ended, which makes listening to it now somewhat awkward–I see me saying “Boy, you still look pretty…” and it feels weird. A lot of things get stirred up by this record, which is both a wonderful thing and really annoying.

Also, I can’t not mention this (since it’s off that album and tied to that time). The previously mentioned young man was a big Tool fan, so this was a weird marriage of our worlds. It’s odd to have that represented so clearly.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=jPUZnXbS75s]

From the Choirgirl Hotel I also got for my 15th birthday, but I didn’t get into it until after I explored Pele, which makes sense–it’s less indulgent, but much darker:
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=9D_8GHpkHYU]
That’s actually one of my favorite videos from a purely video standpoint–all these little clues to a mystery that never gets solved, beautiful and hellish all at once. That’s sort of what trying to remember this is like. There are great memories like dancing to “Raspberry Swirl” in my bedroom with a …friend, but then there’s “Playboy Mommy” and the rather difficult personal associations I have with that (that I don’t want to get into in a forum like this). This is a record that’s gotten older with me–”Jackie’s Strength” I understand way more now than I did then, for example (it’s about the perspective of age, among other things), which is interesting. But it’s frustrating because I don’t know where it’s going and I don’t always have the patience for it–”iieee” just came up and it’s like “oh, shut up.” I don’t feel as strongly about this as I do Pele, but that’s what makes it more dangerous–it’s like that subtle drug that you don’t notice until well after it’s kicked in. Part of me wants to say it’s my second favorite behind Scarlet, but I don’t know if I can do that, for that reason. I’m not really sure how to feel about it.

I got To Venus & Back a bit after it came out (thinking about it, I don’t actually remember when…) and I still think it’s generally underrated in her canon. The live disc is this or that… “Cornflake Girl” and “Little Earthquakes” have great versions, but “Waitress” doesn’t need to go on for nearly 11 minutes on a disc. The album itself has some throwaways (”Datura”) that I’m fairly indifferent to. But this song, on the other hand (particularly this version) IS sex:
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=5YNCS9DLsZg]
That restrained yell at the end (3:30 or so)… oh god. So there’s that. “Glory of the ’80s” is my sophomore year of high school summed up in a soundtrack–it’s got that weird confidence/insecurity thing (”then when it all seemed clear, just then you go and disappear”) when all the weird things in my life started to happen all at once. “Riot Proof” has that kind of confident swagger I tried (and failed) to adopt around this point, “Concertina” is quite pretty, etc. Yet all that said, the album feels like a high schooler in that it’s overproduced–you can tell there’s something good in there, but it’s trying to figure out what it is. When it’s over, you feel like a lot happened, but you don’t really remember most of it, things that are significant at the time don’t necessarily have a lasting impact (thank God).

Strange Little Girls is… well, strange. Speaking of not knowing what you want to be, it’s really weird hearing somebody as distinctive as Tori is playing the material of others and, in many cases, completely turning it inside out. It’s the only album of hers that has a song on it I really, consistently hate. You can’t do that to “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” I get what she’s going for, but you can’t do that. No. “Time,” “Enjoy the Silence,” and “I’m Not in Love” aren’t terrible, but they lose the character of the originals. “Raining Blood” and “‘97 Bonnie & Clyde” are interesting interpretations (and the latter is extremely unsettling) but I can’t actually say I really like them, etc. The one really sublime moment on this album is “Rattlesnakes.” This doesn’t quite capture it, but it’s close:
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=9UazvXSLFNc]
The original (Lloyd Cole, in case you were unaware) is a great song, but she does something to it–pulls it back and makes it a more complex character by making it first person, despite the language. It’s getting difficult to articulate (partially because I’m getting tired), but that stuck with me. Again a lot of the lyrics hit close to home, but there’s a sense of understanding that Lloyd couldn’t quite communicate even if he had it.

Scarlet’s Walk came at an interesting time for me. It’s an album that is, in part, about traveling across America, which came out a couple months (5) before I *did* travel across America. It has songs about being friends with those in the adult industry (”Amber Waves”), and I *was* friends with some of those ladies. That sort of thing. Maybe that’s why I find this as interesting as I do, but it’s her most fascinating album narratively. There’s also the sense, for the first time really, that she’s stepping outside herself on this and I like that–it’s exploring the world beyond. That’s what I was doing too. “Another Girl’s Paradise” is an amazing track (listen to that chorus melody), “Wednesday” has a kind of blustery business to it, and so on. Characters have names like “Carbon” and “Crazy” (with a song dedicated to each), events don’t mean any one thing, but work on levels. This is my favorite of her albums. The music flirts dangerously with being flat, but it never is–it’s subtle, but actually quite varied.

Incidentally, the lead single for this also produced a video that should’ve been in my “WTF Videos” post:
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=3uho2NQw1GY]

The Beekeeper, however, is flat. Maybe I’ll figure it out someday, but it’s been 3 years and it’s still fairly impenetrable and overlong (just shy of 80 minutes). I don’t have a lot to say about it. This came out as my taste was branching outwards and was the moment I felt I’d outgrown her, where endless self-examination (which is what this album feels like) was kid stuff. I wanted to erase that past. I didn’t listen to her for some time. I wrote her off.

And then she came out with a perfect pop single.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=hSGMjB3HbGM]

So I bought American Doll Posse. It’s also somewhat overlong, but definitely more interesting–I’m still sorting through most of it. I don’t know if I’ve listened to the whole record in one sitting beyond the first time. In that sense it’s a nice distillation of how I feel about her now. There are some moments of incredible impact (”Girl Disappearing” on this album), but she requires a lot of patience to deal with, which I don’t always have. She can be overly obvious (”Yo George”), annoyingly inscrutable (”Programmable Soda”), pleasantly sassy (”You Can Bring Your Dog”), etc.

I think what’s most interesting, and the closest thing this long-ass post has to a point, is the realization that, ten or even five years ago, I would’ve sat down with this record and plucked every word apart until I was woven all through it and each song had something attached to it. And now I don’t do that. There was a time when she was my #1 artist, now she’d probably make the top 20, but not the top 10, necessarily. It’s a similar feeling to what I was talking about in the “Ten Years Gone” post, but even more crystallized with one particular artist–to watch her change as I’ve changed (even though the time was a little skewed at the start there). And because her music is so inherently personal, that comparison gets accentuated even more. Tori refers to her songs as though they were living people and I can understand why–people have a strange dialog with music, you share memories and feelings, you come together with it and grow apart from it like you would a friend. That’s not a novel observation, but it’s a strange thing to actually think about, especially with someone as distinctive as she is, because that distinction makes perspective all the more important (scroll down to the bottom), where more general music is exactly that.

Thinking about it, I know I’ll keep buying her records as long as she keeps making them, in the same way I keep in touch with a few old friends from high school. Even if she’s never going to mean to me what she once did and I get pissy with her a lot, there’s enough history there to appreciate growing up together.