this album is sex-ceptional

Just heard this on Girls and it made my night

Tracks to get you through a rainy day (of the heart and soul)

"No Surprises" - Radiohead

Essential lyrics: 
"Such a pretty house
And such a pretty garden

No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises please"

Category: Monotony and apathy couple in Yorke's exhausted voice.

"Carbon Monoxide" - Regina Spektor

Essential lyrics:
"Carbon monoxide, soon we'll go to sleep
No one will notice we're gone
'Cause we don't have a job to keep
They'll just say that we're being lazy
Sex crazed, sex crazed, hazy"

Category:  Darkly comic lullaby. Life, death, procreation, absurdity.

"Sad For The Weather" - Tom Dickins

Essential lyrics:
"Your mother, she called it a seasoned depression,
Your father can't cry from years of repression,
Your youngest of brothers thinks it should not matter,
Your friends are inclined to agree with the latter"

Category: Aussie, acoustic, amazing.

"Another Year" - Amanda Palmer

Essential lyrics:
"I have my new Bill Hicks CD
I have my friends and my career
I'm getting smaller by degrees
You said you'd help me disappear
But that could take forever
I think I'll wait another year"

Category: Dilapidated hearts and resuscitated self-respect. Caustic, heart-breaking, bleak. But one of the most beautiful songs I can imagine. 

T.S. Eliot and pop music

Great article from the Guardian that delights in drawing out just how influential T.S. Eliot's work has been on pop music: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/may/23/ts-eliot-poetry-pop-music

From Dylan to PJ Harvey to Radiohead and Arcade Fire:

Eliot once wrote: "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." True enough, many songwriters would say, especially if you can sing it.

British Accents and DJ tables

http://www.gorillavsbear.net/2012/05/19/nicolas-jaar-bbc-radio-1-essential-mix/

Thank you gorilla vs. bear for posting this mix! I just downloaded it, and I am listening as I write. Excellent.

Tortured and Twisted

I heard Jack White's tortured, almost Zeppelin-esque cover of U2's "Love is Blindness" for the first time today. It is epic. I also had to link you to the original. Both versions are amazing. Where U2's is subtly smoldering for a little over four minutes, finishing off the album Achtung Baby, the Jack White cover is truly twisted and tortured. It burns. It is exceptional.

Patti Smith reads her poetry

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/80_lovely_minutes_of_patti_smith_reading_her_poetry_at_the_strand_bookstore

NPR streaming What We Saw From The Cheap Seats

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/20/152939196/first-listen-regina-spektor-what-we-saw-from-the-cheap-seats

I am at the third song so far. (Also poaching an egg in ramen, so this blog post may be a bit fractured.)

Thoughts so far?

It's really upbeat (much more so than Far). She seems to do a bit of a back and forth with her albums. 11:11 was pretty low-key, bluesy/jazzy, but relatively positive. I've never listened to the album Songs, so I cannot tell you how that feels. Soviet Kitsch was a bit more upbeat musically, even as the themes were very dark. Then we had her pop breakthrough with Begin to Hope which was pretty light and upbeat (although truly mixed, especially with the bonus tracks). Far moved to darker themes and darker sounds. Now this album, as evidenced by the playful title, is bouncy and light. Even the songs that are a bit ominous ("All the Rowboats," "Open," "Ballad of a Politician") are whimsically so. After all, "All the Rowboats" is about paintings escaping from the museum and is almost an electronic thunderstorm. She also shouts out "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on the album and really makes it her own in the song "Oh Marcello!" (in fact I didn't even realize that she was pulling it into the song for awhile).

First listen is relatively positive, although I loved Far so I am not sure how well she will follow that in my own mind (at least right away). This album just seems a bit mismatched to well, the here and now. The thing about Regina is that her albums grow on me extensively over the course of about two years and I realize that I truly love every song on every album. Tricky, but isn't that the mark of something special? An album that grows with you and doesn't fade over time.

Racialicious article about Azealia Banks is excellent!

http://www.racialicious.com/2012/05/18/racialicious-crush-of-the-week-azealia-banks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Racialicious+%28Racialicious+-+the+intersection+of+race+and+pop+culture%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

"JUMANJI" - Azealia Banks (produced by Hudson Mohawke)

http://soundcloud.com/azealia-banks/jumanji-prod-by-hudson-mohawke

heard this track via Pitchfork. she's consistently throwing out tracks that i will be rocking to for the entire summer.

a random mix for graduation

I sent this one out into the universe, and I am not sure where it landed. But I am including it here for anyone who still reads this blog. 


I am hoping I will have a moment in the near future when I want to write about music as much as I want to listen to it. It hasn't happened yet. Maybe I got tired of my own writing (after all, I've been doing a lot of it in college). Maybe I got tired of writing about things I cannot quite condense into words. The point is, I am about to post this mix without a lot of interesting back story. I basically got a prompt from my graduating class to put a bunch of songs on a CD that reflect some of my time in college: that is both the easiest thing for me to do right now and an impossible task. How do I condense four years and many different iterations of me onto an 80MB disc? Tough, tough. But also pretty impossible to mess up. So here is what I pulled together:


"Blister in the Sun" - the Violent Femmes
"The Devil Never Sleeps" - Iron & Wine
"Galileo" - the Indigo Girls
"Angel From Montgomery" - Bonnie Raitt and John Prine
"Overkill" - Colin Hay
"Do You Swear to Tell the Truth the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth So Help Your Black Ass" - Amanda Palmer
"People Have The Power" - Patti Smith
"One Way Road" - John Butler Trio
"Folding Chair" - Regina Spektor
"Fake French" - Le Tigre
"Furr" - Blitzen Trapper
"The Long Way Home" - Norah Jones
"Cassidy" - Suzanne Vega
"Bertha" - the Grateful Dead

...so I'm graduating and I get a mixed CD? 

It is true. It is true. Below is a screenshot of my graduate gift CD from a fellow F08-er. I made a mix as well and I have posted the track list above (although I've got to say that the mix I received and the mix I made are epically distinct). MR did a fabulous job interweaving distinct tracks, while I sort of collaged something out of what has already been in my earbuds. My favorites tracks on this mix? "Sweet Soul Music" by Arthur Conley sounds like something that would pop up on my Kickin' Jams Pandora station, while "I Got Loaded" by Little Bob and the Lollipops reminds me of my sophomore year. But it is really all pretty great and also pretty distinct from what I have made the soundtrack to my thesis year. 

Thank you MR for the screenshot!