iPod rundown - 10/11/07

1. Van Dyke Parks - "All Golden": It was inevitable that I would have Van Dyke Parks represented somewhere in my collection, given my musical interests (gushing praise from Davids Thomas and Grubbs being my specific point of entry, not so much the Brian Wilson connection). I have Song Cycle, which I believe is the best known record. Dunno. I probably have yet to give it the time it deserves, but it doesn't mean a whole lot to me. Strikes me as carnivalesque, corny.

2. (Smog) - "Natural Decline": A good, slow one from the underrated Rain on Lens. The lines that I caught from the end:

The mind is always working
Out ways to see
The things I shouldn't see
And have the things I shouldn't have
I see the night sky as a jewelry store window
And my mind is half a brick

3. Blaine L. Reininger - "Crash": Instrumental, from an album called Night Air. I must've downloaded it, though I have no idea where from. . . it's not bad, sounding perfectly ok in the middle of everything else. Don't know anything about the artist.

4. Pere Ubu - "Rhapsody in Pink": From Art of Walking. Possibly the least good Pere Ubu album, but still not without interest (actually, the later Worlds In Collision and Story of My Life are probably more likely candidates for least good Ubu albums--I honestly routinely forget that those two even exist, which is not a good sign for such a consistently compelling band). This track is a little demented: David Thomas warbling about being "a big pink ball at the bottom of the sea" where "all the fish came and looked at me" over repeated piano figure, slowly strummed guitar (Mayo Thompson) buried in the mix, gurgling and swirling sound effects. . .

5. Kristin Hersh - "San Francisco": Sky Motel, 1999, right in the middle of my full-blown obsession with all things Hersh. But have I gone off Hersh? I don't know. Probably not, but I haven't wanted to listen to her solo music in a while; haven't even bought the new one yet. The album seemed to fade from my memory pretty quickly. Hersh's voice is processed on this song, which you don't usually hear. The song is pleasant, short, drifts by…. Difficult to nail down.

6. Lou Reed - "The Blue Mask": I love the Velvet Underground, but oddly, I haven't paid much attention to Reed's solo albums. I think I bought The Blue Mask a few years ago, primarily because I'd been reading about guitarist Robert Quine. The song is harder-edged than most of the solo Reed I've heard, which again is surprisingly little (and I've not ever listened to Metal Machine Music).

7. Les Savy Fav - "Obsessed with the Excess": This is one of the singles from the Inches collection. I'm always reading that Les Savy Fav are one of those bands that you simply must catch live, that their live show is so amazing, so energetic, so insane, that their records don't do them any justice. Maybe. As it is, some of their albums have seemed sort of stiff (such as Go Forth), but then the songs collected here never did. Even so, I'm not likely to see them live at this point (are they even still around?). This song is representive enough of their raucous post-Fugazi sound (which is really the best you're going to get from me, sorry).

8. The Beta Band - "Inner Meet Me": The Three EPs was one of the first cds that Pitchfork clued me onto, back when the site was more attitude and enthusiasm than actual good music writing (with exceptions), but took itself less seriously. It's a good cd, though it's faded in my estimation over the years. Sort of Beatley classic rock stuff mixed with electronica and dance. This song achieves that incantation-like effect that a lot of their best songs do, where midway through it feels as if the song has been going on for hours and could continue for hours more, but you don't mind.

9. Basehead - "Shouldna Dunnit": Another mellow, loping, and extremely short track from Not In Kansas Anymore, but this one at least has rapping on it.

10. Califone - "Bottles and Bones (Shades and Sympathy)": I rather like Califone. Steeped in the blues (pleasing the classic rock fan in me), and with an experimental bent that gets them labeled "post-rock". Sort of a kitchen-sink, Captain Beefheart aesthetic (without the good Captain's Howlin' Wolf kind of voice). This track is fairly typical and appears on Roomsound.

11. Charalambides - "Magnolia": Unknown Spin. Damn, the shuffle loves this band. . . their early stuff (heard by me on the Our Bed Is Green reissue) was more compressed--bluesy stabs of guitar and organ. Here the guitar lines are longer, more angular, as they wind around each other (it sounds like two guitars). Just shy of the four minute mark, Christina Carter's (Wikipedia tells me she is now known as Christina Madonia) wordless vocals come in, snaking along, in and around the guitars, for the rest of the track's 9+ minutes. . . Quite nice.

12. McLusky - "She Will Only Bring You Happiness": Mclusky was a somewhat short-lived, deeply silly, kick-ass no-frills rock band from Cardiff. The song is from The Difference Between You and Me Is That I'm Not on Fire, is very catchy, features lyrics like "Note to invading aliens, avoid this town, like this town avoided us", and is notable for its closing "Our old singer is a sex criminal" round. Classy.

13. Latin Playboys - "New Zandu": I like Los Lobos just fine, but I don't think I enjoy any one of their albums as much as I do the first Latin Playboys cd. A side project with producers Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake. I recently read a complaint that the album sounds more like song fragments than fully fleshed-out songs. I don't mind.

14. David Thomas & the Pedestrians - "Confuse Did": The Sound of Sand and Other Songs of the Pedestrians. Wow. I know I have a lot of David Thomas on this thing, but this is ridiculous. Richard Thompson played guitar on this album.

15. Paul Bley - "Seven": Homage to Carla. I've talked about Bley before and his amazing ability to create spontaneous melodies on the fly. Of course, here he's interpreting a Carla Bley song, so it's not quite on evidence; I am otherwise unfamiliar with it. All I can say is that Bley's performance is beautiful.

iPod rundown - 09/27/07

I haven't done one of these in a while, in part because I'd sort of painted myself into a corner with the length of my writeups and didn't have the time for that. So I expect these to be shorter, but, hey, maybe that means they'll happen more often. The self-imposed rules: note the first fifteen songs that come up when I listen to my iPod on shuffle at work in the morning; write about them. I've settled on Thursdays as the day of the week to do this.

1. Mr. Lif - "Collapse": So-called underground, "indie" rapper (or, groan, "undie"). Def Jux. Given my former tendency to assume that the mainstream--in any genre--was not worth paying any attention to at all, I had had high hopes for the Def Jux crew, but I've been generally disappointed. Mr. Lif is no exception. Some of his songs are pretty cool, but I tend to be put off by the timbre of his voice. This one gets better as it goes along.

2. DJ Spooky - "Variation Cybernetique: Rhythmic Pataphysic": How's that for a song title? I first heard of Spooky around the time DJ Shadow was getting big. I bought a random cd of his expecting it to be something like the noisy, hip-hop-ish Riddim Warfare, but it ended up being more of a musique concrète urban soundscape sort of thing. It wasn't what I was looking for at the time, and I eventually got rid of it (I don't remember the title). Later, he did Optometry as part of the Matthew Shipp-curated Blue Series on Thirsty Ear, with contributions from Shipp, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Joe McPhee, and numerous others. I've been up and down about this album (it was on the chopping block last year), but it has enough on it of interest for me to keep. This short track features Daniel Bernard Roumain on violin and is nice and shimmery.

3. The Unicorns - "Ghost Mountain": I loved Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? Loved the ramshackle, half-formed pop songs, the crunchy guitar sound and largely non-sensical lyrics, the sense the songs gave that they were barely holding together. Listened to it incessantly for about a year, not much in the last couple. They seem to be obsessed with ghosts.

4. Scott Walker - "Cockfighter": Very dramatic. I still need to spend some quality time with the two Walker cds I have, and work is oddly not the best place for that kind of thing. This song is interesting--begins with some metallic percussion before settling into its groove--but drifts by without my really being able to get a handle on it. From Tilt.

5. The Flatlanders - "The Stars in my life": More a Legend Than a Band is one of my favorite albums of all time. Great country music.

6. Liz Phair - "Help Me Mary": Exile in Guyville is really the only Liz Phair album I like, and even it I don't like that much. I've always thought it was good, not great, but with a few fantastic songs (like "Divorce Song"). This one's ok. I've always thought it was sort of creepy how obsessed certain male listeners were with Phair, given the sexually explicit lyrics, and I'd tended to think that her popularity was mainly with that crowd (boy wannabe critics). But that was before I met Aimée and saw how much she and her girlfriends (who are all six or seven years younger than I am) love Phair and especially Exile in Guyville. (Incidentally, I have no opinion on the controversial self-titled cd; since I'd already lost interest by the time it came out, I never bothered to listen to it, though I was a little curious when I became aware that it had serious defenders in the "poptimist" crowd.)

7. Mandy Barnett - "Funny, Familiar, Forgotten Feelings": I bought Barnett's I've Got a Right to Cry cd several years ago, partly because she has a pretty voice and sounds like Patsy Cline. The album is not bad, but not thrilling. Not really in line with mainstream country, which is usually fine by me. Never got a lot of play. I've given it to my father as part of the purge.

8. The Mountain Goats - "You or Your Memory": The first track on The Sunset Tree. I love the Mountain Goats, of course, but I did not immediately like this song. It's grown on me.

9. Pixies - "Rock Music": I never feel like listening to a Pixies album anymore, but damn their songs sound good when they come up like this, like the great pop songs they are. From Bossanova.

10. Neutral Milk Hotel - "Untitled": This is an instrumental version of one of the main themes, I think, from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I've never been able to hear what it is that makes everyone go apeshit over them. Can anyone explain to me why I should care?

11. Wayne Shorter - "Chief Crazy Horse": I've been enjoying listening to a lot of Shorter's music lately--I have a clutch of the Blue Notes. This is from Adam's Apple; I think my favorites are Etc. and The All Seeing Eye.

12. Sly & the Family Stone - "Dance to the Music": There's no doubting the historical importance of this group, but I've never been able to love them. All I have is the single-disc Anthology. It's interesting: when it comes to rock or pop from the 1960s or 1970s, I tend to have full albums and discographies from white artists, and compilations from black artists. I should probably explore the reasons for that. It makes me more than a little uncomfortable. No doubt there are several complex socio-cultural underlying reasons.

13. Basehead - "Hoes on Tour Deal Drie": Not in Kansas Anymore. One of those super-short (36 seconds) between song bridges. I inherited this rap album from a friend who was getting rid of a lot of stuff before leaving the country. It's pretty good; has a loping, drugged out feel.

14. David Thomas & Two Pale Boys - "Planet of Fools": I think David Thomas' albums with Two Pale Boys have been a lot more interesting than the recent Pere Ubu releases. This is from Erehwon and features the group's standard accordian/guitar/trumpet instrumentation.

15. Pet Shop Boys - "It's Alright": There are, what?, eighteen songs on Discography, and I have more than 11,000 songs on my iPod, and yet the Pet Shop Boys keep coming up on these things. Typically chilly disco, not bad, not great.


Bonus rundown from last week (so much for shorter, eh?):

1. Jackie-O Motherfucker - "777 (Tombstone Massive)": I'd like to be able to describe this song, probably the best track on Change, but I don't think I can, not without spending a lot of time listening to it over and over (which I'm not against, but it won't happen just for this post). JOMF seem to be able to organically combine most of my musical interests in one place: blues, Appalachian folk, skronky free jazz, electronics, drone, and post-rock come together in a glorious clamor. Change is not as good as Fig. 5 or Liberation, but it's still pretty damn good. Slightly more conventional, heavier on the blues.

2. Mission of Burma - "That's When I Reach for my Revolver": Perhaps the best known Mission of Burma song. I love the group, but this song does not excite me. Is it wrong that I heard the Moby version first?

3. James Brown - "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag": What, I'm supposed to have something original to say about this song? It's always been one of my favorites of Brown's singles from the 1960s.

4. Jack Rose - "Black Pearls": Rose is in the group Pelt, which draws heavily from folk and raga, often in the service of the drone. This is virtuosic solo acoustic guitar from Two Originals...

5. Nick Drake - "From the Morning": Pleasant. Pink Moon.

6. Pixies - "All over the World": Another one from Bossanova.

7. Michaela Melian "Brautlied [edit]": A song from one of those Wire magazine comps. Bells, chugging strings; don't know much about it, but I like it.

8. Gastr del Sol - "Thos. Dudley Ah! Old Must Dye": Crookt, Crackt, or Fly. Prickly acoustic guitar fragment with David Grubb's customary crisp, clear, if not mannered vocals, and sound effects. One of my favorite groups.

9. Chris Bell - "You and Your Sister": Bell was in Big Star. I have this song from one of those Oxford American samplers. A nice enough pop ballad.

10. David Thomas & Two Pale Boys - "Numbers Man": More Thomas and Two Pale Boys, this time from 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man's Chest; harder rocking than most of this group's music.

11. Pixies - "Where is my Mind?": Again with the Pixies. Surfer Rosa.

12. Supersilent - "5.2": Glacial. Lovely.

13. Smog - "Everything You Touch Becomes a Crutch": From the great, early album, The Doctor Came at Dawn. The song is short, with acoustic guitar and piano backing. That can be said about many Smog songs, so it basically tells you nothing; sorry about that.

14. Dntel - "Last Songs": Electronic pop. I bought Life is Full of Possibilities because I'd been listening to Death Cab For Cutie a lot and front-band Ben Gibbard's appearance on the album was hyped. By now, a few years on, I have very little interest in the increasingly boring Death Cab (I've discarded most of what I had), didn't even really like that Postal Service record that everyone loved (I've grown to hate Gibbard's voice), but this album gets better and better.

15. Spontaneous Music Ensemble - "Oliv 1": I bought the classic Karyobin while on a trip in London (actually at a Derek Bailey gig in Stoke Newington). I like this (1969) incarnation of the group better. This track is long (19 minutes), with a folky vibe that I find appealing. I downloaded the song from Destination: OUT. Of all the records they've showcased on their site, this is among the handful of albums I'd most like to track down.

iPod rundown - 05/24/07

1. Poni Hoax - "Budapest": What the hell? Where did this come from? I must have downloaded it from somewhere, eh? It's all keyboards and drums, basically disco; repetitive, as might be expected, with occasional guitar, what sounds like a violin solo in the middle, synth stabs. I rather like it. Wikipedia tells me they're from France. The singer's voice reminds me of Martina Topley-Bird, who used to sing with Tricky (among other things). I'm thinking of her vocal on their version of Public Enemy's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos".

2. Fushitsusha - "Don’t be afraid. Even if your nerves snap, you can tie them to a fragment of the universe": Somehow, I've managed to acquire three Fushitsusha cds, and they sit in my collection gathering dust. I'd've thought Keiji Haino's brand of space rock/guitar squall would have been just my thing, but so far I haven't been able to find my way in. I keep thinking I should spend a little time with them, to see what's what, but I never seem to be able to find it (time). This particular track is fairly typical, I think, and is actually from the fifth various artist Wire Tapper cd, which I received upon subscribing to The Wire.

3. Six Organs of Admittance - "Close to the sky": Ben Chasny is among a group of great acoustic guitar players who have emerged in recent years (including Jack Rose of Pelt). In his Six Organs of Admittance he makes often beautiful music, combining his John Fahey-like guitar virtuosity with what sounds to me like influences from Indian music, such as raga, and electric guitar noise. The first Six Organs cd I bought was Dark Noontide, and I immediately took to its folk-drone sound; it fit in perfectly with much of what I was listening to at the time. I never thought of that record as especially "low-fi", though it was released on a very tiny label. But his last two excellent albums (and probably his two best), School of the Flower and The Sun Awakens, came out on Drag City, which is not exactly Columbia, and they sound fantastic by comparison. This song? Oh, right. This song is from Compathia, which immediately followed Dark Noontide, in 2003. I think it's his weakest album. Chasny's vocals are much more front-and-center, and the songs are less interesting. This one is pleasant enough; repetitive acoustic strumming, vocals; closes with a minute or so of acoustic noodling, before giving way, I think, to an electric guitar, or some kind of feedback, to finish.

4. The Walkmen - "We've Been Had": The Walkmen are ok. I never seem to want to listen to a whole album anymore. The vocalist reminds me, on record, of some exaggeration of Bono, which can be irritating, whereas when I caught them live (at the 9:30 Club in DC) he reminded me more of the Afghan Whigs' Greg Dulli. "We've Been Had" was the big song from their first album, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone. On that album they used an upright piano, which for the most part was replaced by synths or organ or something (I can't remember) on the second, harder rocking album. On this song, the piano meanders along in the background, and the effect of it is sort of haunting, like it's a toy piano. Incidentally, the Walkmen were formed out of two earlier bands, Jonathan Fire*Eater and the Recoys. My only experience with Jonathan Fire*Eater was as a largely forgettable (in that I have no memory of it, other than that it happened) opening act for the Breeders, when they also played the 9:30 Club in like 1997. This was years before the Breeders finally released their follow-up to Last Splash, when it seemed like every year it was rumored that they had a record coming out, and Kim Deal was passing the Amps off as the Breeders, because no one went to see the Amps (who I liked just fine). (Deal, looking out at the packed 9:30 Club: "Which twelve of you were at the Amps show at the Black Cat?")

5. Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom - "El Monte": From the 2nd DFA compilation. Fairly short, dance music. Doesn't leave much of an impression.

6. The Mountain Goats - "Distant Stations". All Hail West Texas is probably my favorite Mountain Goats album. If I'm not mistaken, it was the last one recorded on a boombox, before John Darnielle signed with 4AD. I think the 4AD records are uniformly excellent, so I'm not one of those old-school fans who felt betrayed or something when he started to record in a studio and made albums that sound better--although I used to think that his stuff did just sound better as recorded through the boombox. It suited John Darnielle's nasal whine, and the acoustic guitar was more immediate. Maybe it's just that those earlier albums were perfectly suited to be how they were, or maybe it's just because I'm used to them that way (ok, that's probably why), but I think All Hail West Texas sounds great. As ever, it's the songs. Literate, precise, delivered with uncommon conviction: "I sang old songs from nowhere/Los Angeles, Albuquerque/Said a small prayer for the poor and the naked and the hungry, and I prayed real hard for you/I waited . . . for you, but I never told you where I was/It was you who taught me how to write this kind of equation [. . .]/You taught me how to listen to these distant stations..." All Hail West Texas is as good a place as any to start, if you've never listened to the Mountain Goats before (and, hey, he quotes The Notorious B.I.G. on "Fall Of The Star High School Running Back", which is pretty cool).

7. Primal Scream - "Blood Money". Xtrnntr. I really liked this album when I first heard it (which was a while after it had come out), but hardly listen to it at all anymore. I'd previously always felt quite safe ignoring Primal Scream, particularly when they were in their exceedingly boring Black Crowes-style, blooze rawk phase, and I'm more or less happy to be ignoring them again. They are a band that flits from style to style in a way that I tend, no doubt unfairly, to find suspicious. Here they are covering the same sort of ground, only more aggressively, that Radiohead covered in their two best albums, Kid A and Amnesiac. Kevin Shields was involved, so of course it was a big deal. This, I think, is one of the more successful songs, perhaps because it's almost entirely devoid of vocals. I could attempt to actually describe it, but I can't be bothered.

8. Vashti Bunyan - "Glow Worms". Another very nice song from the decades out-of-print and recently reissued Just Another Diamond Day. Lovely folk music, acoustic guitar, of course, and Bunyan's soft vocals. The songs on this album often sound like lullabies to me, as I may have mentioned, but "Glow Worms" doesn't really.

9. The Vandermark 5 - "Stranger Blues". See my description of them from last time. This track is mid-tempo, less "free" than they often are. It comes from Acoustic Machine, my favorite Vandermark 5 album, or at least the one I know the best.

10. Built to Spill - "Untrustable Part 2 (About Someone Else)". I love this song. From probably Built to Spill's finest album, Perfect From Now On. Nearly nine minutes of guitar-rock glory. A classic rock anthem, but without the cock-rock lyrical nonsense. Some samples: "You can't trust anyone, 'cause you're untrustable/How can you trust someone you know can't trust you?" -"And God is whoever you perform for" - "I know you wouldn't be the way you feel if you could choose". But, oh the guitars! If only I could describe the gorgeous guitars! I've seen Built to Spill live twice, and the first time was one of the most transcendently awesome musical experiences of my life. This song in particular was spectacular and lifted me into ecstasy.

11. Sonic Youth - "Disconnection Notice". The first time I did one of these, a song from Murray Street, on which "Disconnection Notice" appears, came up. I said, "Murray Street is a great record, but it wasn't a comeback. They never went away." Which, while true, was kind of an annoying record-store clerk sort of thing for me to say. I was annoyed that their previous major release, NYC Ghosts & Flowers, had been so rudely treated. Well, it did get some good press, but mainly I'm thinking of Pitchfork's infamous (and stupid and ignorant) 0.0 dismissal (which was introduced with the tagline: "pretty much the worst thing ever"). But it wasn't just the review, it was the manner in which all of Pitchfork's writers, whenever that album came up, insisted on attacking it in passing or dismissing it out of hand, seemingly as part of some irritating groupthink, and that they still do, if the occasion arises. I recall one reference to the record as "an abortion" (!). But then Murray Street came out, jettisoned was the Beat poetry and overt avant-gardisms and angular guitar noise, more or less, in favor of more basic songforms, and it was all love and smiles and "return to form" and "blah blah Daydream Nation blah blah" and so on. And then with last year's even more direct Rather Ripped, it was more of the same kind of praise (and I loved the album, don't misunderstand), some still ripping on the earlier record, but also on the more experimental aspect of Sonic Youth in general, including the relatively tame but more meandering (and wonderful!) Sonic Nurse which came in between the two. . . . Ok. I'm rambling. My point is, to dump on NYC Ghosts & Flowers in the way it was dumped on, and then to jump all over the more poppy stuff, is to not get Sonic Youth. For one thing, I think that NYC Ghosts & Flowers is quite good, and it certainly repays multiple listens (which I doubt it got from many). But let's assume it is that bad. In my mind, to gratuitously dismiss a major artist's minor work, or even bad work, to claim that, now, here, finally they are doing what they should have been doing, is presumptuous and contributes further to the tendency to treat art as mere product intended to entertain, to divert. It seems to not occur to such fans that maybe NYC Ghosts & Flowers was necessary for Sonic Youth (again, this assumes the album's not good! But it is!), maybe the later, arguably better work would not have happened without it. Alright. Rant over. (Incidentally, I was trying to make a similar point, somewhere, in the post in which I argued that David Foster Wallace is not washed up.) The best piece on Sonic Youth I've read in recent memory was Michaelangelo Matos' review of Sonic Nurse, in which he demonstrates that he totally gets the ongoing Sonic Youthiness of Sonic Youth.

12. Joni Mitchell - "Little Green". This is from Blue. As is so often the case, I'd had this cd for a while without giving it proper time, until I met Aimée. She loves the album, and I'm glad, because I'm rather fond of it now, too. So far none of her others have appealed to me in the same way, but I'm still interested in finding the right ones.

13. Ghostface Killah feat. Megan Rochell - "Momma": This is excellent, heartfelt, personal rap. Very nice piano underscoring the loping bass and drums. Ghostface raps to begin: "It's not your momma's fault/it's your father's fault/it's your father's fault your mother is a alcoholic/Confusing the brain from the booze and the pain/And plus he cheated on her, beated on her, smacked her down in the rain/She lost her first child in '74 . . . " From last year's excellent Fishscale.

14. Latin Playboys - "Mira!": The first, self-titled Latin Playboys album is great--one of the best albums of the 90s, say I. It was a side project of Los Lobos' David Hidalgo and Louie Pérez, and producers Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake, with whom the band had been working. The album has a very pleasant, casual feel. This short track sounds like noises overheard on a busy street.

15. The Raincoats - "Fairytale in the Supermarket". I first heard of the Raincoats via Kurt Cobain's rambling liner notes to Nirvana's Incesticide compilation, managed to score a promo of the reissue of their first album, The Raincoats. I've only recently listened to it much (this appears to be a common theme). I like their ramshackle, ragged, barely competent sound. But it's getting late, and I've gone on long enough, so I'm not going to say any more right now. . .

iPod rundown - 05/10/07

1. Animal Collective - "Tell it to the Mountain": From the reissued live Hollindagain. Animal Collective are great live, but this track barely captures their chaotic glory. An electronic tone throughout much of it, alongside a sustained more or less wordless vocal is overtaken by some ecstatic, messy, sort of tribal drumming. That's about it.

2. Billy Holiday - "You Turned the Tables on Me": I listen to very little jazz vocal. I tend to prefer Holiday to a singer like Ella Fitzgerald, though many of her songs seem to end on the same note, as she dramatically delivers the final words, which I do find a little off-putting. This lovely song is on Solitude. At our wedding, our first dance was to Holiday's version of "Love is Here to Stay".

3. Arthur Russell - "Let's Go Swimming (Walter Gibbons mix): Like a lot of people, I suspect, I only heard of Russell in the last few years; curious (and unduly obsessed with filling in the gaps of post-punk), I bought the Soul Jazz comp The World of Arthur Russell, which focuses on his disco-related music. I do like his take on disco, but that has not translated into great reverence. Russell's thin and distant vocal was initially off-putting for me, but not too much so. The percussion is great.

4. Feist - "Lonely Lonely": People are raving about Feist's new album, The Reminder (though I have seen rumblings that it represents the adult-contemporification of indie rock). I haven't heard it. This is off her last album, Let it Die, which I bought because we love her cover of the Bee Gees song, "Inside and Out", that appears on it. The album itself is pleasant enough, though I haven't listened to it closely. "Lonely Lonely" is a good one, sounds like a fresh take on a singer-singwriter sound.

5. Wire - "Marooned": Chairs Missing is great of course.

6. Bardo Pond - "Ganges": I often forget about Bardo Pond, but I always enjoy when one of their songs comes on. This 11-minute instrumental begins with alternating channels of psychedelic electric guitar, which fades after less than a minute. The track settles into a slow, mellow fuzz groove; about seven minutes in, drums and guitar get progressively busier above it, before settling down toward the end of the track. Great music to work to. Dilate is the album.

7. Smog - "Cold Blooded Old Times": One of the best songs on Knock Knock. An insistent rock guitar and nice piano, which ends in a great squall of guitar and piano noise. Some lyrics: "the type of memories that turn your bones to glass" and "in this way they gave you clarity, a cold-blooded clarity". I still haven't been able to pick up the new Bill Callahan record.

8. The Jayhawks - "I'd Run Away": For a while, I thought I was interested in keeping up with various stripes of alt-country bands (this didn't last very long; most of them are pretty boring--cf. The Old 97s). One of my favorite such records is Tomorrow the Green Grass, which includes this song. A lot of what I loved about the record was Mark Olson's vocals, and he left the band after this album. So I lost interest, though I know people who swear by the follow-up, Sound of Lies.

9. Outkast - "Liberation": Damn this is a beautiful song. Why do I feel like I've never heard it before? I've had Aquemini for years (since it came out in 1998, I'm sure). At more than 8 minutes, this is one of the longer rap songs I'm aware of. Just drums, piano, bass. I should probably listen to this cd more often.

10. The Vandermark 5 - "Cruz Campo (For Gerhard Richter)": Airports for Light was produced by Bob Weston of Shellac and, of late, Mission of Burma, and it sounds great. This is solid, workmanlike modern jazz, in the traditions of free bop and free jazz. I saw the group play in Chicago at the Empty Bottle (also in the audience: Peter Brotzmann! Joe McPhee!).

11. The Notorious B.I.G. - "Respect": There's a reason Ready to Die is considered a classic. I still don't have much intelligent to say about rap.
12. Miles Davis Quintet - "You're My Everything": The first great quintet, with Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Jo Jones. This stuff is pretty much the dictionary definition of jazz for me, so it's hard to imagine that there were those who reacted negatively to it at the time. This comes from Relaxin' with Miles.

13. Pixies - "Planet of Sound": I've been sort of bored by the Pixies lately. Or, bored by the idea of them, bored by their position as indie rock gods. But a song like "Planet of Sound" comes on, and well. I've tended to favor the raw, bare-bones, Albini-recorded Surfer Rosa and not given enough attention to the last Pixies album, Trompe le Monde, which gives us this song. It's hard to say why; I'm always surprised by how great it is. There's a lot going on in these songs.

14. Mia Doi Todd - "88 Ways": I'd never heard of Mia Doi Todd before John Darnielle raved about her most recent cd, Manzanita, when it was released a couple of years ago. I bought that album and the earlier, major-label album The Golden State, which includes "88 Ways". I love Todd's voice. Manzanita is beautiful, and its spare production is much more to my liking than is Mitchell Froom's overly busy production on The Golden State. Still, the latter is a good album nonetheless.

15. Belly - "Super-Connected": This is a pretty basic, engaging rock song from the second Belly cd, King. Tanya Donelly's Belly had some good songs, but they were nothing like as good as her previous band, the great Throwing Muses.

iPod rundown - 04/05/07

1. Matmos - "For the Trees (Return)": This pretty, sort of country-ish song is from The Civil War. In the first episode of Woebot.tv, in which Woebot talked about his favorite albums from 2006, he praised Matmos' fantastic The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast as their best album (I agree), but then referred to The Civil War as embarrassing. Hey! Anyway, I like the album. It's not nearly as good as the later one, but it has a lot of great music on it, I think.

2. Throwing Muses - "Epiphany": In 2003, Throwing Muses unexpectedly released a new album after having had to break up several years earlier for financial reasons (no one bought their consistently excellent records, no one went to see them play; I went by myself to see them at the 9:30 Club in DC in 1996, just before the end, in support of the great Limbo cd, and the place was only 1/3 filled; they were amazing...). This "reunion" album is self-titled (they claim their first full-length album, from 1986, was actually "untitled"), and it's hard-charging, raw stuff, of which "Epiphany" is a representative example.

3. Cat Power - "Salty Dog": This nice version of the traditional folk song appears on The Covers Record.

4. The Ex - "Fistful of Feed": More excellent rock music from the Dutch anarchists; awesome. Dizzy Spells is the album, and was actually my introduction to this essential band (recorded by Steve Albini; it sounds great).

5. Fridge - "Ark": I was briefly really into Kieran Hebden's solo project, Four Tet, and his band Fridge (AllMusic describes them as a post-rock trio, which sounds about right). I played Fridge's Happiness cd incessantly for months. And yet now it's been several years since I've listened to it at all. This track is the opening song from the earlier Eph. I still like it quite a bit. It always feels to me like it's on the way somewhere, but never quite gets there.

6. Beanie Sigel (feat. Bub B) - "Purple Rain": This was the most-talked about song on Sigel's The B. Coming, one of the most praised rap albums of the last couple of years. I like the album, though I admit that I've had a hard time seeing why this song in particular excites everybody. A little too much of the izzle-speak, frankly.

7. Fleetwood Mac - "Little Lies": Another Fleetwood Mac song for one of these things? Well, at least it's again from a different album. Funny, in 1987, as I've mentioned more than once before, I was still listening almost exclusively to classic rock. So, when news came that Fleetwood Mac had a new album coming out, it was a big deal to me. A little embarrassing. In the event, Tango in the Night is only half good. There are some interesting Lindsey Buckingham songs (like "Big Love" and "Caroline"), weird and really kind of bad Steve Nicks tragedies ("Seven Wonders"?), and the typically boring fare from Christine McVie. "Little Lies" is a McVie song, and it became a pretty big hit. I have some affection for it, but it's rather cheesy. I've gotten rid of the cd.

8. Hendrix - "Stone Free": From Are You Experienced?, obviously. Maybe I just missed it, even with all my classic rock listening, but I don't really notice Hendrix's influence on any other rock. Unless it's so pervasive I just can't hear it.

9. The Black Heart Procession - "A Heart Like Mine": This comes from my favorite Black Heart Procession album, Three, also the first one I ever got. I like them; they remind me of Tom Waits in some respects, of Souled American in others. First encountered them opening for Modest Mouse.

10. The Rapture - "Sister Saviour": Another song from the second DFA label compilation, a dub mix of one of the better songs from The Rapture's Echoes. I like it.

11. Palace Music - "Tonight's Decision (And Hereafter)": Is Will Oldham our most death-haunted songwriter? This song appears on Viva Lost Blues. Some choice lyrics: "the rest suffer death in its own black blur"; "where are the days I used to be friendly?"

12. The Game-"Don't Worry": Pleasant, boring rap from The Documentary. This may be axed from the iPod.

13. Kid606 - "Longer": From Wire magazine Tigerbeat label-comp. I'm not really into Kid606's brand of electronic mash-up, though this track is not too annoying, and at 38 seconds doesn't wear out its welcome.

14. Polmo Polpo - "Like Hearts Swelling": Title track from a simply gorgeous record. I have Polmo Polpo categorized as "electronic", but this 9+ minute track doesn't sound like much electronic music; it sounds more like music from a strange, distorted string quartet, with some other instrumentation I had a hard time picking out of the mix (it does sound as if the performance has been processed with electronics to a certain extent, so like Matmos' music in that respect, I suppose). A peek at the liner notes tells me that this track was, in fact, built around a live, improvised performance of double bass, accordian (the instrument I couldn't identify, I'm sure), electronics (by Sandro Perri, who basically is Polmo Polpo), and viola. Plaintive. Mournful.

15. Richard & Linda Thompson - "Streets of Paradise": I've talked about them before. This is a lovely Richard-sung song from Pour Down Like Silver, an album I looked for and coveted for years before it finally was reissued on cd a couple years back; it's now pretty easy to find.

iPod rundown - 03/08/07

1. Paul Robeson - "Blue Prelude": I downloaded a bunch of Robeson at Aimée's request last year. I'd not listened to him previously. Of course, that voice is amazing. I admit, though, that my first reaction to his versions of those old folk songs and spirituals is to think that the voice is too much for the songs. That they sound better with a rawer, untrained singer. The authenticity trope again.

2. Built to Spill - "Stop the Show": This is on Perfect From Now On, probably Built to Spill's finest album. One day I'll write a long-winded post about how it was a major-label Built to Spill cd (Keep It Like a Secret) that led me to the rock underground and ultimately farther afield, into noise music, free jazz, and all around Wire-covered stuff. The first two-plus minutes of this track are slow and lovely, with one of the finest cello appearances in rock history. From about 2:45 till 3:15 there is a phenomenal, noisy build-up, then it rocks generically for a little, before getting interesting again, with some molten feedback. Six minutes of guitar bliss.

3. Fleetwood Mac - "Gold Dust Woman": Again with Fleetwood Mac. I have two good friends who are unaccountably huge Stevie Nicks fans (one routinely flies out to Denver to see her perform, the other thinks nothing of catching her in Philly, Baltimore, and Virginia, in the same week). Anyway, this song is great. Compare with her stiff post-coke 80s and 90s schlock. When asked why she didn't have more songs as well-developed as those on the first couple of Mac albums she appeared on, she frankly said something to the effect (watch me not look it up) that that was when Lindsey Buckingham was talking to her. Yeah.

4. African Brothers - "Self Reliance": I've only very recently started listening to Fela Kuti and other African funk workouts. What I've heard so far, I've liked. This song clocks in at 8:34, is very enjoyable, and comes from the Ghana Soundz compilation.

5. Randy Newman - "Underneath the Harlem Moon": another good song from 12 Songs, the only Newman album I have.

6. Tarnation - "You'll Understand": One of my favorite albums from 1997 was Cornershop's When I Was Born For the 7th Time. I don't like it quite as much anymore, but I still love the song "It's Good to Be on the Way Back Home Again", which is a duet with Paula Frazer. I fell in love with her voice. I was excited to learn that she was in a group of her own called Tarnation, so I snapped up their album called Mirador. As happens so often, I listened to it once, and promptly filed it away to gather dust. I only recently loaded it onto the iPod, and this is the first song to come up from it. It's very nice, country-ish. I should have been listening to it all this time.

7. Vashti Bunyan - "Timothy Grub": Much has been written about Bunyan's return to music and affiliation with the annoyingly labeled "freak-folk" groups, more than 30 years after the release of her only album, Just Another Diamond Day. Whatever, this is very pleasant English folk. Most of the songs sound like lullabies to me. Incidentally, better that she hang out with Animal Collective than Devenda Banhart.

8. Luna - "Hey Sister": Someone left the Lunapark cd at my house years ago. I kept meaning to listen to it. One of the many borderline albums to make the cut when I culled the collection recently. Perfectly decent VU-inspired rock.

9. The Ex & Tom Cora - "Batium": An instrumental from 1991's Scrabbling at the Lock, which, as coincidence would have it, I've been listening to constantly over the last month (Aimée is thrilled, rest assured). The Ex are completely great in every way, and this album, one of two they did with the late avant garde cellist Tom Cora, is fantastic. Another great instance of the cello in rock.

10. Charlie Feathers - "Someday You Will Pay": I've talked about Feathers some before. This track is a lot of fun (of the "you broke my heart, and one day you'll pay" genre). Jaunty female vocals provided by the Miller Sisters. Feathers himself doesn't sing, but he does play the spoons, which is pretty awesome. Wouldn't be complete with out the fiddle.

11. Belle & Sebastian - "My Wandering Days are Over": typically pleasant Belle & Sebastian song off of Tigermilk.

12. Evan Parker - "Line 3": This is a circular breathing solo from David Toop's excellent Haunted Weather compilation. I haven't spent a lot of time with Parker, but I like what I've heard. This sort of solo can easily descend into a show-offy display of technique, but with Parker it doesn't. As the track started, I noted the repeating screeching quality of it--easy to imagine that as a turn-off. But as the track continued, and my mind drifted elsewhere, I felt a sense of calm emanating from the music. Hard to explain. I'd become aware that he was still playing, and the sounds were similar as at the beginning, but what had been mildly irritating was now not at all. There is a certain purity to this music. The word that flashed across my mind as it played was "monastic". Beautiful.

13. Double Leopards - "Stutter": Ah, glorious noise. I guess it's the Brian Eno aesthetic: this music works great as white noise droning in my head as I'm trying to work, but if I zero in at any given moment there's something interesting going on. My favorite noise artist.

14. Lotion - "She Is Weird City": I've had a promotional copy of the Full Isaac cd since 1994, when it came out (I was working at a record store). I had literally never listened to it until a couple of months ago. I'm not sure why I took home it in the first place, or how it's made so many culling cuts in the past. Catchy, guitar rock. Yeah, more or less a dime a dozen, these bands. But: They're good! I do not have the album--the follow up to this, I think--for which Thomas Pynchon famously provided the liner notes.

15. Flamin' Groovies - "32-20": Not bad, raucous cover of a Robert Johnson song, from Teenage Head.

iPod rundown - 03/01/07

1. Paul Bley - "Ida Lupino": I've talked about Bley before. This track is gorgeous, one of my favorite jazz recordings of all time, from the classic Open, To Love. I have two other Bley cds that also feature versions of this Carla Bley composition: Closer, released on ESP, and Ramblin', on BYG Actuel. Both of those versions are shorter and faster than this one. Here, you can almost hear Bley thinking as he improvises.

2. Pere Ubu - "A Day Such as This": Song of the Bailing Man was Pere Ubu's fifth album, the last of the original run (the "historical" era, as David Thomas puts it). Gone are the Chuck Berry riffs of guitarist Tom Herman, replaced by the more angular work of the Red Krayola's Mayo Thompson. And for this album only, Anton Fier appears on drums and other percussion. At more than 7 minutes, this song is unusually long for Ubu. It's a mid-tempo track, with a repeating percussion cycle for most of the song, and marimba. Halfway through, it speeds up, almost rocks, but not quite, before returning to the pattern set by the beginning.

3. Matmos - "Rag for William Burroughs": The longest track (13+ minutes) from my favorite album of last year and Matmos' best. It opens with some pleasant, melodic piano (backed by interesting electronics), interrupted at 1:55 by the sound of a gunshot, followed by keys opening a door, and the sound of a typewriter (backed by an insistent buzzing), then two typewriters. The typewriters devolve into a clicking rhythm. Then at the 4:15 (or so) mark begins 7 minutes of a very entertaining electronic rag. Very cool.

4. Charalambides - "I Don't Know What To Sing": This track is just over a minute long, and there's not much I can say about it. Some fuzzy guitar, voice. In general, I like Charalambides' brand of Texas psychedelic music, but this song wouldn't tell you much about what they do. It's more of sketch, really. From the reissue of Our Bed Is Green.

5. Pere Ubu - "Big Ed's Used Farms": Oddly, this is also from Song of the Bailing Man. It's a faster song, and half as long. David Thomas' frenetic vocals are more in evidence here.

6. Van Der Graaf Generator - "My Room (Waiting for Wonderland)": It was Simon Reynolds' book, Rip It Up and Start Again, that led me to Van Der Graaf Generator (John Lydon was apparently a big fan), a group that had previously only been on the periphery of my awareness. I have so far picked up one album, Still Life. Peter Hammill's dramatic vocals take a little getting used to, and I'm still getting used to them (sort of like Scott Walker, for me, in this respect). This particular song is lovely and mellow (and also more than 7 minutes long). Mostly keyboards, with a beautiful sax throughout.

7. Bob Dylan - "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts": Blood on the Tracks is one of my favorite Dylan albums (we're always going out on a limb here at The Existence Machine), but for years I took little notice of this song. Lately I've come to like it, too, even if I couldn't say with confidence what it's about. Some nice local images though.

8. The Go-Betweens - "The House That Jack Kerouac Built": Years ago I bought two Go-Betweens albums (Spring Hill Fair and Tallulah) after reading about them in one of those music guide books, but I didn't give them fair listens until recently, partly inspired by this Parlando post. I'm still absorbing the albums, but I like them. Catchy, literate, guitar pop.

9. Uncle Dave Macon - "Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train": Perhaps like a lot of people, I bought the cd reissue of the famous Anthology of American Folk Music, assembled by Harry Smith, expecting it to be interesting more for historical purposes than for listening pleasure. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I like a lot of the music for its own sake. The original set contained three volumes, but Smith had apparently intended for there to be a fourth, and even had a songlist ready for one. John Fahey's Revenant label finally released it a few years ago as Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 4. It includes this Uncle Dave Macon song. Macon is one of my favorite artists on these anthologies (along with the Carter Family and Dock Boggs, among others). A lot of the songs featured touched on topics of the day (the Titanic, the Mississippi flood of 1927, definitely life in the Great Depression, etc.) but some, such as Macon's, are more explicitly political. A sample lyric: "some lay it all on parties, some lay it on others you see, but now that you can plainly see what happened to Tennessee/for the engineer pulled the throttle, conductor rang the bell, the brakeman hollered 'all aboard' and the banks all went to hell". I wouldn't mind finding a collection of Macon's music.

10. Fiona Apple - "Please Please Please": A fine song from Extraordinary Machine, an excellent pop album.

11. June of 44 - "Take it with a Grain of Salt": June of 44 was already more or less dead by the time I found them (one day I'll write about how I ended up sifting through the wreckage of various kinds of already-happened music), and I guess the indie kids have moved on from this kind of thing, but I like it. Ascetically recorded post-Slint math-rock (wheeee!), complete with dramatic yet barely decipherable spoken vocals. I described them earlier as a "music of possibility". I think I meant that they seemed transitional, like they and their ilk were on their way to some future kind of rock, but which never quite happened. Which sounds semi-dismissive, like I don't get actual pleasure from listening to them. But I do. This song is on their first album, Engine Takes to Water.

12. Pavement - "Summer Babe (Winter Version)": Now that I've finally listened to the Fall, I can hear why Pavement got compared to them, especially circa Slanted & Enchanted. This is the first song from that album, an album that continues to get better every time I hear it. Malkmus has always reminded me of Lou Reed on this song.

13. Radiohead - "Motion Picture Soundtrack": This is the quiet closing track on Kid A. By now, after some of the dust has settled, it seems clear to me that Kid A and especially Amnesiac are far and away the best of Radiohead's albums. OK Computer, which I played constantly for years, and loved, now sounds quaint to my ears, and I never got into The Bends. The debut Pablo Honey was always sort of crap, "Creep" aside, and I've had the hardest time giving a fig about their more recent Hail to the Thief.

14. Fleetwood Mac - "Not That Funny": A Lindsey Buckingham song from Tusk. Tusk was famously underrated at the time, but it has since become more recognized for what it is, an excellent and diverse collection of pop songs. Fleetwood Mac's White Album. Inspired, I guess, by the energy of punk, Lindsey's songs are all short and seemingly more minimal than his contributions to either Fleetwood Mac or Rumours.

15. Einsturzende Neubauten - "Schwindel": Haus der Lüge is the only Neubauten record I have; I like it, but haven't made the effort to track down any of their other numerous albums. This track is fairly typical of the album: lots of clanging metal, occasional German vocals.

iPod rundown - 02/22/07

1. Ghost - "God Took a Picture of His Illness on This Ground": I have two cds from the Japanese band Ghost. This is a gorgeous song from the excellent Hypnotic Underworld. Thirteen minutes of abstractness, with a lonely bass plucked throughout, a lovely, plaintive reed of some kind (recorder?) cutting through the din, occasional crashing of cymbals, somewhat tribal-sounding percussion off in the distance…

2. Kool & the Gang - "Jungle Jazz": And a nice transition into this enjoyable funk, from Kool & the Gang, before they went supernova with songs like the cheesy wedding staple "Celebration". I have this on the Funky Stuff various artists collection. I like the flute solo in the last minute.

3. Smog - "Russian Winter" - Bill Callahan/Smog is one of my favorite musicians. "Russian Winter" is from his first album, 1990's Sewn to the Sky, which I haven't spent much time with as compared to his other music. It's much noisier than later Smog albums, with less emphasis on Callahan's distinctive songwriting, more on tape manipulations and guitar experiments. This particular track is an instrumental: guitar accompanied by a fluttery machine chug; yet not as abrasive as much of the rest of the cd.

4. Tommy Boy Megamix "Tommy Boy Megamix": Eh. I didn't hear much rap for several years, then I started to listen to more of it in the last two, realized I'd missed a lot of interesting music, decided I wanted to go back and check out a lot of it and do the historical survey thing. I'd read an interesting review of the label sampler, The Tommy Boy Story Vol. 1. Then I saw it used, listened to a couple of tracks, and bought it. I'm sort of wishing now that I hadn't. It's not terrible, but it wasn't quite what I'd had in mind. It has a couple of nice rap songs from the label's early days, but it's largely filled with dated, quaint dj mixes like this, not entirely without charm or interest, but not what I was hoping for.

5. Three 6 Mafia - "Got it 4 Sale": I enjoy Three 6 Mafia, even if most of their songs sound alike to me. This is from Most Known Unknown.

6. Bedhead - "To the Ground": Bedhead was already defunct by the time I'd ever heard of them. All three Bedhead albums are equally good; this song comes from their first one, WhatFunLifeWas. They seemed to take the Velvet Underground's third album as their basic template, which is fine by me. (What I said here about American Analog Set applies to Bedhead, too, except that Bedhead was much better, and I think they also potentially could have pointed me out of that particular dilemma, had it happened.)

7. Muhal Richard Abrams - "Duet for One World" - I'd never heard any Abrams before I downloaded this track from Destination: OUT! Pretty good! (This is the permalink, but the mp3s have been taken down.)

8. Modest Mouse - "A Different City": Modest Mouse is a great rock band. I've been able to catch them live on three occasions. The first was a few months before The Moon & Antarctica (from which comes this song) came out, at The Black Cat in DC. It was a solid show, not overwhelming; by the end my legs were killing me (I was already too old for this kind of thing), and possibly a bit cranky as a result, so perhaps more critical than I otherwise might have been. The second time was at an old fire hall in Dundalk, MD, and they were phenomenal. One song ("Tundra/Desert", I think) was so transcendently awesome that I'd swear that I nearly levitated. Third was at DAR Constitution Hall in DC, which I can tell you is a terrible place to see a rock show. I saw the Pixies there, too, and both shows should have been incredible--it was clear that both bands were on--but it was hard to get involved; they seemed so far away.

9. Nick Drake - "Harvest Breed": Short (1:40) track from Pink Moon, which I guess is pretty much all short tracks, isn't it? Anyway, it went by pretty quickly, and I don't have much to say about it or Nick Drake (who I like well enough, though not quite as much as I thought I did when I first got into him, by coincidence just around the same time "Pink Moon" was in that VW ad).

10. Pet Shop Boys - "West End Girls": This really is a great pop song. I'm always sort of astonished by how good it is. I don't like anything else by the Pet Shop Boys (who keep showing up on these rundowns, I can't help but notice) nearly as much.

11. Aretha Franklin - "The House That Jack Built": For years the only Aretha Franklin songs I knew were "Respect", "Think" (largely thanks to The Blues Brothers; is that wrong? I suspect that it is); and "(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman". A few years ago I finally did the right thing and bought The Very Best. Of course, it's pretty much all great (though I could do without her cover of "Eleanor Rigby").

12. Volcano the Bear - "Dawn and My Hips are Fuel": Wow. How can I describe Volcano the Bear? Improv rock, maybe? Except it doesn't really rock. If you like Henry Cow you might like them? Gastr del Sol? This track is from the wonderful album, The Idea of Wood. It's music like this that makes it worth scouring the bins and magazines for new music.

13. John Duncan - "Helix": This comes from another Wire-sampler, Atlantic Waves 2006 in this case. Three minutes of a barely changing wall of noise. Not sure I care, but I'll give it another shot.

14. Silver Jews - "Room Games & Diamond Rain": I always put off buying another Silver Jews album. The music is always fairly mellow, deceptively simple country-ish rock. And then there are poet David Berman's laconic vocals and interesting lyrics. This comes from Bright Flight.

15. Joanna Newsom - "Cosmia": I'm still absorbing Ys, but I do enjoy it so far. If occasionally Van Dyke Parks's strings threaten to overwhelm the songs, I still find much local pleasure in Newsom's harp playing and wordplay.

If you guessed from this list that I have a lot of music released by the Drag City label, you guessed right.

iPod rundowns - 02/15/07 & 02/16/07

In an effort to write more about what I'm reading and listening to, I'm going to make the iPod shuffle rundown a semi-regular feature. I was going to do this yesterday but, other than noting the songs as they came up yesterday morning, didn't have time to. So today you get a bonus: I'm going to give you the first 15 songs I heard both yesterday and today. I'm sure you're all very excited.

Yesterday's first 15:
I have more than 10,000 songs on my iPod. With such a number, I always find it interesting where the shuffle appears to fixate on any given day. One day last week, eight of the first 50 songs I heard were by Sonic Youth. Yesterday, it started out heavy on the country.

1. Merle Haggard - "California Blues (Blue Yodel #4)": I have the great Down Every Road 4-cd box, though I find it hard to listen to any given disc straight through. Love it when one of the songs comes up on shuffle though. . .

2. Palace - "Give Me Children": Arise Therefore may be my favorite Will Oldham record, if it's not I See a Darkness.

3. Signal - "Index Area": 14 minutes of electronic music from the lone Mort aux Vaches comp I have. It would probably make for better reading if I could remember a thing about it right now. I'm sure it must have been repetitious.

4. Annie - "Chewing Gum": Appropriately titled sugary pop song; I like "Heartbeat" better.

5. Randy Newman - "Have You Seen My Baby?": I don't have nearly enough Randy Newman. This is a great one from 1970's 12 Songs. I also have the Flamin' Groovies version, which is pretty cool, too.

6. Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson - "Good Hearted Woman"
7. Dolly Parton - "Do I Ever Cross Your Mind":

Two albums that I got to know very well when I was like 13 or 14 were Waylon Jennings' and Dolly Parton's Greatest Hits. My Dad liked country. He had these on tape, and we listened to them constantly when we were with him (as well as, um, the Eagles). I've always liked Waylon Jennings' voice, and his duets with Willie Nelson were great. This one addresses the old problem of the "good hearted woman lovin' a good-timin' man". Of course, all of his songs seemed to be about being, or having been, an outlaw or roughneck or cowboy or some such trouble. Seems pretty silly these days, but, notwithstanding that period of time in which I pretended that I was too cool to admit I liked country music, I've always loved those songs. I liked when we listened to Dolly Parton, too, but it took me longer to come back to an appreciation of her. "Islands in the Stream" is hard to forgive. Aimée is the big Dolly fan in the house; I think the last song played at our wedding reception was, by her request, "9 to 5".

8. Beck - "The New Pollution": Don't really care about Beck anymore, but I still like Odelay.

9. Syd Barrett - "Long Gone": I mentioned liking post-Barrett Pink Floyd better, but I do like the earlier Barrett-led stuff. This is, of course, from the solo album, The Madcap Laughs, which I've had for a while, but haven't spent much time with. People swear by it.

10. The J. Geils Band - "Freeze Frame": Ha! I have this on here because I was making a mix-cd of 80s pop hits; it may be sort of terrible, but fuck it, I've always liked this song. Somehow, I can still remember the first time I ever heard it (I was eleven).

11. Herbert - "Harmonize": A lovely song from one of my favorite albums from last year.

12. Ghostface Killah - "Run": Yes! Evidence that I do indeed listen to rap! This song features Jadakiss, and is from The Pretty Toney Album.

13. Midnight Oil - "Forgotten Years": I don't care much for Midnight Oil. I have the 20,000 Watts R.S.L. greatest hits collection, which is actually more than I need. But it so happens that this is one of my favorite songs of theirs.

14. The Rapture - "Alabama Sunshine": I was looking the other direction when all the indie kids realized it was ok to dance again and went batshit crazy for the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers" and Echoes. That said, it's a decent album. This song is from the second DFA compilation, and I like it just fine.

15. The Velvet Underground - "Sunday Morning": The first song on The Velvet Underground & Nico. Given all the noise and dissonance on this record, it's occasionally a surprise to notice the quieter moments of sheer beauty.


Today's first 15:
Contra Dial "M" for Musicology, I have a fair amount of music on my iPod that I can't quite say I like, at least not yet. My first instinct was to load it up with albums that had lain dormant in my collection. Plus, there are all of the cds that come with various issues of The Wire. I loaded them all, and have been grading the tracks and removing the ones that I can't stand. And then there are exploratory downloads. Etc.

1. Dizzee Rascal - "Vexed": I have both Dizzee cds and the first Run the Road comp, but I guess grime is dead, innit? That's ok; if so, it left some cool music behind. This is from Dizzee's Boy In Da Corner. At times Dizzee's distinctive (and attractive) flow is a distraction from the music, which seems to be made up of shards of electronic keyboards (whatever that means--I'd no doubt do better writing these while listening to the songs).

2. Voxtrot - "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives": Downloaded this song from some blog at the end of last year, I think. Not sure about it. Generic indie rock.

3. Scarface - "In Between Us": Scarface's The Fix is a monster of a rap album, one of my favorites ever, I think. Like much of the album, this song has a bluesy menace to it. I will not dig myself a hole with an attempt to define it any further. Nas guests.

4. David Thomas & the Pedestrians - "Semaphore": A delightfully odd song from the second David Thomas "solo" album, Variations on a Theme (featuring, among others, Richard Thompson, Lindsay Cooper, and Chris Cutler).

5. Billy Bragg - "Upfield": Blah. I love Bragg's collaborations with Wilco, the Mermaid Avenue albums of previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics, but I'd never listened to Bragg's solo stuff. Last year I borrowed his 2-cd Must I Paint You a Picture compilation from a friend. I didn't listen to it straight through, instead just dumping the whole lot onto the iPod, letting them come up randomly. I haven't been impressed. I'm usually annoyed when his songs come up. This one is no different.

6. The Constantines - "Goodbye Baby & Amen": This band got tagged with the odd "Fugazi meets Springsteen" label. Ignore that. They're just a damn solid rock band. This song is one of the quieter ones from the excellent Shine a Light.

7. Maria Castro - "Postglacial Rebound": Some of my favorite Wire-sampler cds are in the Exploratory Music from Portugal series. This particular track was on the 2004 sampler. All electronic blips and static, and somehow soothing.

8. BR5-49 - "Even if it's Wrong": Entertaining trad country; here and there sounding a little like Waylon Jennings, then a little like Hank Williams.

9. Bob Dylan - "Seven Curses": If you're a Dylan fan at all, the 3-cd first Bootleg Series release is absolutely essential. This is one of my favorite songs from the set; it tells the same basic story as Zep's "Gallows Pole". In this version, a woman comes to town to pay off the hanging judge in order to save her father; neither gold nor silver will do, and he demands her as payment; she pays the price, but he hangs her father anyway. Curses ensue.

10. US Maple - "Babe": Guttural, indecipherable vocals; two guitarists who sound like they've walked into different songs; the drummer laying down an off-kilter groove. . . U.S. Maple has a wonderful lurching quality that I find tremendously appealing. Their deconstruction of rock is different than, say, Deerhoof's. Deerhoof seem to play the basic hooks in their songs from every possible angle until they're done. U.S. Maple plays rock music like it's falling apart and they can't be bothered to make it right. If any of this sounds interesting, I recommend experiencing them live. "Babe" is from what I think is their best album, Acre Thrills.

11. Ghostface Killah - "Big Girl": From last year's excellent Fishscale. I don't know that I have anything intelligent to say about Ghostface, or rap in general. I don't listen to enough of it to know what I'm talking about. I'm not good at differentiating voices (Ghostface's is one of the few I think I could recognize right off). But I like plenty of it. And I like Ghostface. Most of what I've heard of his is musically based on old soul samples, and he seems to just barrel ahead, rapping at full-speed, in his own world, at times seeming oblivious to the music behind him.

12. Mission of Burma - "Man In Decline": Huge, punishing, awesome. Forever an argument in favor of rock-band reunions, in the face of the many more arguments against. Obliterati rocks.

13. Spontaneous Music Ensemble - "Karyobin, Pt. 1": I bought Karyobin at a Derek Bailey show (w/American Milo Fine) at Stoke Newington in 2003. Recordings of free improv seem counter-intuitive in some respects. I often have a hard time with them, because I can't help but to reflexively want them to resolve into jazz or some other kind of structure. I do much better when I allow the music to just happen. This stuff often sounds to me like it's music falling down a hill.

14. Low + the Dirty Three - "Cody": A lovely instrumental track from Low's collaboration with the Dirty Three, as part of the In the Fishtank series. The record also has a gorgeous cover of Neil Young's "Down By the River".

15. Fleetwood Mac - "Monday Morning": I love this song. My mom had very few albums that I had much interest in, but Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, the first Fleetwood Mac albums with Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, were two that I gave her credit for. Commercially huge, of course, and also critically praised at the time, they still seem sort of out of step with the whole punk-taking-over narrative. I'd rather listen to Rumours than Never Mind the Bollocks.

iPod rundown - 02/07/07

Dial "M" for Musicology has issued an iPod random challenge, which has been picked up by Parlando, among others. I've done this twice before, in my first month of blogolalia. A fairly common practice, it seems. I wasn't sure at the time whether I wanted to make it a regular feature. In the event, I did not. Anyway, even before this challenge, I'd been thinking it would be fun to do it again. So, here goes. These are, then, the last 15 songs that I heard yesterday on my iPod:

1. Sun Ra - "Outer Nothingness": I don't have a lot of Sun Ra, and The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 1, is the only one I have on the iPod. This is the more abstract Sun Ra, from the mid-sixties--no typical jazz groove or beat to speak of, but an insistent pulse of sorts, with ever-shifting horn fanfare. . .

2. Charlie Feathers - "Everybody's Lovin' My Baby": I'd never heard of Charlie Feathers before a few years ago, when I bought the 2-cd collection, Get With It, solely because it was on John Fahey's great Revenant label. I figured, if Fahey dug him, he must be worth checking out. I figured right. One of those early Sun Records guys, Feathers played some mean rockabilly.

3. Broadcast - "Tender Buttons": I'm new to Broadcast. I'd been hearing about them for a couple years now, got 2005's Tender Buttons cd last year. Excellent electro-pop; this track has very nice strummy guitar, pleasantly obliterated by electronic noise.

4. Liars - "Grown Men Don't Fall in the River, Just Like That": Which actually leads in pretty well to this high-energy neo-post-punk song from Liars' first album. I like Liars. I saw them play at the Black Cat in DC, in the wake of their widely reviled second cd. The show consisted entirely of songs from that cd, and was incredible.

5. The Pop Group - "She is Beyond Good and Evil": And here we have "real" post-punk. I bought the Pop Group's 1979 album Y as part of my effort to fill in some of the gaps with the less well-known (in the States) punk and post-punk and otherwise left-field artists. This is probably the best song on the cd.

6. M is the 13th Letter - "Napoleon": One of David Pajo's many solo projects. This is an easy-going, yet very Slint-like instrumental, found on his Hole of Burning Alms compilation.

7. Brian Eno & David Byrne - "A Secret Life": A short track from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, just reissued on cd last year. I still haven't quite absorbed this album, but I definitely like huge portions of it. This track features guitar stabs, swirling sound effects, and vocal chant samples (like, um, most of the rest of the album).

8. Pet Shop Boys - "Was it Worth It?": When I got the iPod, I loaded a lot of cds onto it that had languished in obscurity in my collection. Discography was one of them; I'd bought it for one or two songs (basically "West End Girls" and a couple of others), but never really listened to it in full. As it happens, the Pet Shop Boys' chilly disco is perfect for the shuffle feature. This song is just fine.

9. Love - "Laughing Stock": I finally bought Forever Changes last year, and everyone is right: it's a fantastic album. Yet another album from 1967 that I like better than Sgt. Pepper. But "Laughing Stock" is a b-side bonus track on the cd, and it's nothing like as good as the regular album songs. I may have to remove it from the iPod.

10. Broken Social Scene - "Bandwitch": Broken Social Scene was one indie band du jour that I did appreciate. From my first listen, I liked the hell out of You Forgot It In People, which I found endlessly re-playable. Each song seemed to stand out. But the self-titled second cd, from which "Bandwitch" comes, is a much murkier deal, a kind of muddy soup of a record, with nothing grabbing my attention. I've found, however, that many of the individual songs work much better when they come up randomly, than the album did as a whole. This song is a good example. It's got a steady mid-tempo rhythm, like most of the album, and suggests a sort of communal groove, somehow, with voices bubbling up from the haze. . .

11. Mouse On Mars - "The Illking": I've cooled on Mouse On Mars in the last couple of years, but I was into them pretty heavily there for a while. This song is from Idiology, the last album I had much interest in. It's all electronic squeaks and orchestral string swells and sounds good coming up on my own personal radio like this.

12. The Rolling Stones - "Imagination": I love The Rolling Stones, and I like Some Girls just fine. This cover of The Temptations' "Just My Imagination" is good, but not exactly upper-tier Stones music. Incidentally, the Stones' Steel Wheels show at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia was only the third show I ever attended (Living Colour opened).

13. William Parker Clarinet Trio - "Fence in the Snow": Over the course of 28 minutes, bassist William Parker and drummer Walter Perkins keep the music moving, with Perry Robinson on clarinet. This is beautiful free jazz from a wonderful album (the 2-cd Bob's Pink Cadillac set on Eremite), which I bought in the middle of my heavy out-jazz period, when I was buying pretty much everything by William Parker. You can go broke very quickly trying to buy everything by William Parker.

14. The Mavericks - "What a Crying Shame": See the Pet Shop Boys comment, above. Have had this cd for years, for no apparent reason. It's perfectly decent country, I guess, but not really something I care all that much about. Dude's voice reminds me of Roy Orbison's, when it doesn't remind me too much of Chris Isaak's. Anyway, this song is kind of lost here, trapped between the 28-minute William Parker free jazz and 12-plus minutes of 1970s Miles Davis coming next.

15. Miles Davis - "Moja (Part 1)": Ah, yes. Electric Miles, from Dark Magus. This stuff can be exhausting, these huge slabs of music that Miles was churning out in the early seventies, but I like it. I often find that I get to know music like this much better when it can flow over me, which is what happens when I listen to music with the iPod (I use it primarily at work or, if I'm too tired to read, on the train during my commute).

In many ways this list is not representative at all of my main musical interests. From this list, only Broadcast, with Tender Buttons, and Love, with Forever Changes, have albums that I listened to with any sort of regularity last year. Oh, and the perennial Rolling Stones. But in some sense, that very non-representativeness does represent my collection quite well. I have dabbled. I have been profligate. I've been afflicted with musical ADD. I have way too many cds.

iPod rundown - 03/12/06

Do I post these just so I can show off how cool I think I am, how eclectic my taste in music is? Perhaps I just want to knock the Barry Bonds post off the top spot. It's not like anyone's looking at this yet anyway.

I do have some other posts in the works, but until I get around to doing them...

I was at the gym in the evening and listened to the following (still working the indefinite shuffle):

1279. Ghost - "Feed"
1280. June of 44 - "Mindel"
1281. Latin Playboys - "Pink Steps"
1282. Missy Elliott - "Dog In Heat"
1283. Dälek - "Voices of the Ether"
1284. Wilco - "War on War"
1285. Kwanjai Kalasin Yuk - "Auk Pee Deh Bun Mai Terng"
1286. Six Organs of Admittance - "School of the Flower"
1287. The Red Krayola - "Green of My Pants"
1288. Low - "Closer"
1289. Basement Jaxx - "Being With U"
1290. Herbie Hancock - "Rain Dance"
1291. Beyoncé - "Naughty Girl"
1292. Pet Shop Boys - "It's Alright"
1293. Amerie - "1 Thing"

1279: Hypnotic Underworld is an excellent album. I'd ended my commute home halfway through this song. Didn't bother beginning it again--it's just as well, the second half of it is much better for working the stairmaster than is the quiet first half.

1280: I got into Slint and their followers several years late and spent a lot of time picking through the back catalogs of several related bands. Much of it sort of runs together, but I have a soft spot for it, in general, as a music of possibility. June of 44 rocks, and this is one of the better early tracks, from Engine Takes to the Water.

1281: I love the Latin Playboys record, but this short, quiet song is not good workout music. Skipped.

1282: Missy Elliott is great, of course. I inherited …So Addictive from a friend who bought it upon release but who somehow didn't like it. Very well suited for working out, perhaps not surprisingly.

1283: I may post in the future about my former, mistaken assumption that, as is true for many other genres of music, hip hop is more interesting/inventive in the underground than in the mainstream. In the event, Dälek is one of the few underground hip hop artists that I get any enjoyment out of. This noisy track off of From Filthy Tongue Of Gods And Griots is, in fact, perfect workout music.

1284: Yeah, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is great. Not much else to add.

1285: Molam: Thai Country Groove from Isan, one of the Sublime Frequencies releases, of which I have a few. These songs are always a pleasant shock when they come on.

1286: I think School of the Flower is the most satisfying Six Organs of Admittance record so far. This 13 minute, drone-y title track is gorgeous.

1287: I got into The Red Krayola in part because of David Grubbs' involvement in their more recent stuff and because of David Thomas' enthusiasm--plus, Mayo Thompson was in Pere Ubu for a while. Also, I have a perverse need to look into leftfield or lesser known music from the past. This song is one of my favorites from God Bless The Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It, the second album.

1288: Things We Lost In The Fire is my favorite Low album. One of the many great sounding records recorded by Steve Albini. I wonder if this lovely song is too slow to have as a slow song at the wedding. At this point I was stretching, so there was no need to skip it.

1289: I actually bought Remedy soon after it came out, even though I wasn't listening to much electronic or any dance music at the time (1999), and, as it turned out, was soon going to be spending a lot of time listening to post-rock and free jazz. But, Spin (!) was so enthusiastic about it, I had to hear it. I thought it was ok, but, in retrospect, it wasn't the right time for me. I then completely avoided pop music for years, but I started to read more and more about Basement Jaxx. Thankfully, I'd kept Remedy. Many listens later, it's not only better than "ok", it's great. As are Rooty and Kish Kash.

1290: For a while there, it seemed like every month there was an article or interview in The Wire namechecking Sextant. One of my few non-Miles "fusion" records. It's pretty cool--sort of akin to, I think, To Rococo Rot, and those sorts of more recent German electronic bands.

1291: By the end of 2004, after years of ignoring chart pop, and having started reading several music bloggers who wrote admiringly (and convincingly) about pop, I decided to take the plunge and download several singles from that year. I'm glad I did. "Naughty Girl", for one, is fantastic; I never seem to get enough of it.

1292: Bought Discography years ago but, other than "West End Girls" and that U2 cover, never really listened to it. Loaded it onto the iPod to correct this oversight. This song has a swell beat, plenty good for a workout, but lyrically it's kind of dumb--the old "things may suck, but music makes it alright" thing...

1293: "1 Thing" was part of 2005's end-of-year pop download. I like it ok, but it doesn't have that extra little bit that elevates a pop song for me.

It would appear that, if nothing else, these types of posts are demonstrating that writing about music, about the music itself, beyond just my personal history surrounding the music, is not my strong suit.

Oh well.

iPod rundown - 03/08/06

I was too tired to read on the way home from work this evening. This usually frustrates me, since the train rides are the few extended reading sessions I get these days. It's been happening a lot this week; I haven't been getting enough sleep.

But, luckily, I had my iPod to hand. I use it primarily at work, but also at the gym and during such times as these. I have 4568 songs on the thing at the moment, and recently I've been listening to it on shuffle, trying not to re-set it, to listen to as many of the songs as possible. I'm 1162 songs in. Only 12 weeks to go!

1149. Neu! - "Sonderangebot"
1150. The Flatlanders - "Stars in my Life"
1151. Beck - "Devil's Haircut"
1152. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - "Madeleine-Mary"
1153. Out Hud - "Dear Mr. Bush, There Are Over 100 Words for Shit and Only 1 for Music. Fuck You, Out Hud"
1154. Captain Beafheart - "Sue Egypt"
1155. Tower Recordings - "I Didn't Know That Hajji Smoked/ID Can Hear The Magic Spring"
1156. James Brown - "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Just Open the Door I'll Get It Myself)"
1157. Sonic Youth - "Sympathy for the Strawberry"
1158. Nas - "Represent"
1159. Nina Simone - "Old Jim Crow"
1160. The Kinks - "Uncle Son"
1161. The Rolling Stones - "Prodigal Son"
1162. The American Analog Set - "Two Way Diamond II"

Some notes:
1149: Neu! had been one of those shadowy groups I kept reading about, whose stuff was long out of print, but key inspirations for bands like Stereolab, who I was listening to a lot at one time. I ran out and got the cd reissues as soon as they were available. This track is from the first one, Neu1, which never really grew on me. I prefer the second and third records.

1150: The Flatlanders were another mystery band for me to track down. In the mid-90s I was listening to a lot of non-mainstream country such as Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, and I'd loved the Jimmie Dale Gilmore record Spinning Around the Sun. When I heard about the existence of the Flatlanders cd More a Legend Than a Band, I had to have it. It remains one of my favorite cds. For a while thereafter I was keen on digging up hard-to-find country and folk-tinged stuff, like Butch Hancock and Joe Ely and Guy Clark.

1151: I still more or less like Odelay; haven't listened to anything since Midnite Vultures, which I found mostly tedious at the time.

1152: Not much to say about Will Oldham. I liked him in Matewan.

1153: I liked STREET DAD but was wary of Let Us Never Speak Of It Again when I heard it was going to be more dance-oriented. Turns out it's fucking awesome, and I should just shut up and dance. Who knew?

1154: I like Captain Beefheart, love Safe as Milk, among others, but I've not been able to get into the last couple of records he did, like Doc at the Radar Station. I don't like this song much.

1155: I liked listening to the Tower Recordings cds, like that kind of noisy/folky shit, but their songs don't work well on the iPod, particularly on shuffle--lots of short "songs" bleeding into each other--in general I've been deleting them, though this one is a little longer and is cool enough.

1156: No one needs me to tell them about James Brown. I got the Star Time box for Christmas the year it came out (1991?), and listened to it a lot for a year or two, occasionally dragging a disc out after that. But it languished for years. Until I got the iPod, when I decided to load it up with a lot of stuff I hadn't heard in a while. I'm glad I did. It's always nice when James Brown comes on.

1157: I fucking love Sonic Youth. Murray Street is a great record, but it wasn't a comeback. They never went away.

1158: Would you believe I've had Illmatic since it came out and never listened to it until a couple of months ago? This is because I am an idiot. After college, I didn't listen to much hip hop until last year, but still. I'd always heard it was supposed to be great and that Nas had never matched it. It's true: Great album.

1159: I'm new to Nina Simone; my fiancée loves her. This nice track is from the 1960s Philips Recordings box.

1160: Bought Muswell Hillbillies based on a rave from Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan. I don't love it, but this song is pretty good.

1161: Perhaps my favorite song from Beggars Banquet.

1162: Interesting. I always forget about American Analog Set. If my tastes had ossified at a certain point, I could have settled in with them, and other VU-lite bands, and listened to plenty of safe, comfortable, perfectly decent music until the end of time. From Our Living Room To Yours is the only cd of theirs I have, and that's probably enough.

A longer post than I thought it would be. Dunno how often I'll do this, but it was fun this time.