Detonation Radio two: The exercise.
More laziness from me tonight1, as GiSoL forgoes any sort of thought whatsoever with the first in what I guess will be a long line of lazy-as-hell podcasts. The big theme for this one: my favorite songs of 20052. I'm sure nobody else is doing this sort of thing right now. What a coup.
Given how much trouble I had even thinking of records from this year that I like, maybe keeping the podcast current is not the best of ideas. Here's hoping that I will do a better job of keeping up with new music in 2006, and here's hoping that the music itself is worthy of the effort3. That said, this podcast is longer than they will normally be, both to accomodate the long songs and because I skipped last Sunday and will probably skip this Sunday because I have to buy Christmas gifts and see Sunn 0))).
Podcast can be direct-downloaded at http://totale.libsyn.com. You can also plug http://totale.libsyn.com/rss into your podcast catcher of choice and have each new episode of Detonation Radio sent right to you whenever I can be bothered to make and post them.
Below is the tracklisting for this week's episode, along with a little blurb on each track. I will probably continue to post the tracklistings here, but I doubt I'll be doing any more explanatory notes; writing about music is torture for me, and once I'd committed to writing those blurbs, the process delayed the posting of this episode by at least two days. So perhaps not.
On and on and on:
1. xbxrx - "Against the Odds": Off Sixth In Sixes, my favorite album of the year. The old, teenage, out-of-control xbxrx was a hell of a lot of fun, but the slightly older and much wiser Touchton brothers, with help from drummer/producer Weasel Walter and bassist Ed Rodriguez, fucking destroyed this whole sorry year and staked a claim to being the only remaining screamo/spazz/punk band worth listening to (i.e. fuck the Test Icicles). The live show is not to be missed.
2. Andrew Bird - "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left": I remember seeing a lot of message-board ire directed at Andrew Bird this year, and I'm not sure why exactly why. Maybe it's the ostentatiously clever lyrics, or the mellow, Starbucks-friendly sound. Maybe it's that he used to be in the Squirrel Nut Zippers. All I know is that I gave this record a chance when I learned that former Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison plays on one of the tracks, and was shocked to find a really great, sophisticated pop album with erudite lyrics and some impressive whistling. Fuck, as they say, the haters.
3. Silver Jews - "Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed": David Berman's comeback record is not his best, despite what you might be reading in clueless outlets like my blissfully unknowing nemesis, The L Magazine4. That said, a merely good Silver Jews record is way better than I thought we'd be getting, so perhaps lowered expectations have worked in this tracks favor, earning it a coveted spot on the Girls in Skirts on Ladders Best of 2005 podcast.
4. Lavender Diamond - "You Broke My Heart": Becky Stark's voice is a marvelous instrument, and while I don't know if this is my favorite track from Lavender Diamond's The Cavalry of Light, it's definitely my favorite vocal performance from her. Lavender Diamond features Jeff Rosenberg, formerly of Young People, and Fort Thunder alumnus Ron Rege, Jr., who contributes outstanding artwork to the EP, but the second the vocals start up, it's Stark's show, no question. More battle hymn than indie rock, I imagine this is great in a live setting.
5. The Harmonettes - "Can't Go Halfway": I'm cheating here, as this wasn't originally released this year, but fuck it, The Numero Group has been doing such an amazing job of unearthing incredible yet somehow unknown music that they deserve all the praise they can get, even from minor entities such as myself, and of course you should go buy all of their releases starting with Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up, which contains this track. And no, this isn't a song from 2005, but fuck you if you claim to have heard it any earlier.
6. The Mountain Goats - "Up the Wolves": Lord knows I hate admitting that I'm wrong, but I had to do an about face on The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree. When I first heard it, it was probably the most disappointing new record I'd heard by an artist I loved since The Fall's Are You Are Missing Winner, and I would've sold it except for a few tracks that I really liked ("Dance Music," "This Year," "Pale Green Things"). What ended up changing things was a download of the vinyl-only Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, and in large part this song right here. Maybe the songs just needed to be stripped of the glossy production for me to appreciate them, I dunno. "Lion's Teeth" is still a terrible song.
7. Mice Parade - "Passing and Galloping": Gotta love that fuzz guitar. Up until this year I'd never paid much attention to Mice Parade, despite having been given like five of their albums, and frankly I expect to go back to ignoring them in the new year. But for one brief, shining moment, when the twinkling went away, the drums started rolling, and the fuzz guitar started...didn't we almost have it all. Didn't we.
8. Brian McBride - "Silent Motels": I'm a Stars of the Lid fanatic. The Dead Texan album by Adam Wiltzie was among my favorite releases last year, and if the Lid's other half wants to put out a solo record while a new album from the duo proper continues its interminable march to completion, so be it. "Silent Motels" isn't as melodic as either most of this album or SOTL's recent work; it's barely there, then all of a sudden it's everywhere, and you didn't even realize. Perfect.
9. Electrelane - "Those Pockets Are People/The Partisan": Electrelane's third album, Axes, was such a willfully perverse move -- "Here's a complete live performance featurng lots of long, unwieldy songs! Thanks!" -- that I have to give them credit for, if nothing else, having the balls to follow the concise pop bursts of The Power Out with such a sprawling mess of an album. Here we have the two sides to Electrelane's coin in one handy bundle: a long, mostly instrumental jam that segues into a frantic punk cover of a Leonard Cohen song.
10. The Fall - "Trust In Me": The final track on Fall Heads Roll, and the one on which Mark E. Smith barely appears at all. He might be in there somewhere, but other vocalists carry the song while guitars buzz away, menacing and spectral. Not at all the sort of thing I expect from any iteration of The Fall, which is probably why I like it so much.
11. Eluvium - "Everything to Come": Matthew Cooper's first Eluvium album, Lambent Material, was one of my favorite records of 2003, so I was mightily disappointed when his last EP, the name of which I don't even remember, consisted of a bunch of Yann Tiersen-lite solo piano pieces5. He's back to the drones on Talk Amongst the Trees, and while this isn't my favorite track on the record, my favorite track (the gorgeous, ever-ascending monolith "Taken") is sixteen minutes long, and so sacrifices have been made. How can you harm what could have been, etc.
12. Animal Collective - "Grass": I think it's the sheer exuberance that wins me over to the side of this poppier iteration of the Animal Collective. Everything about this song is likeable in an extremely hyper way, and when they scream, it begs to be joined. Best tried in the privacy of your own home.
13. Tuxedo Killers - "Don't Rape the Okapi": Texas spazzout. Yeah, they're my friends. Well, except for their eminently-replaceacle douchebag of a bassist. But yeah. I love this song, and the M. Night Shyalaman's Tuxedo Killers EP from which it is taken. Do yourself a favor and pick up the vinyl version, which omits the CD-R's excruciating cover of Adam Green's "Baby's Gonna Die Tonight"6.
14. Hood - "The Lost You": It is so goddamned easy to forget about Hood given that nobody really seems to be interested in either post-rock or morose Brits anymore, and well where the hell does that leave the brothers Adams when it's year-end time? Outside Closer, purportedly the final Hood album, is about as close to a great album as this frustratingly inconsistent band will ever get, and "The Lost You" is a perfect summation of the electronic direction they've been moving in for the last few albums. Here they sound more than ever like their heroes in the defunct Disco Inferno, with a stuttering Robert Wyatt sample as the songs rhythmic guiding light, lending a fragile funkiness to the otherwise typically downcast material. Excellent stuff.
15. Coachwhips - "Did You Cum?": Weasel Walter shows up again here as the producer of this, a track from the only Coachwhips album to capture the glory of their berzerk live shows, Peanut Butter & Jelly Live at the Ginger Minge. I was lucky enough to catch the last Coachwhips show ever on a rooftop in Brooklyn this year, and it was about as spectacularly unhinged as a rock show can get without anything's head getting bitten off7. My sadness that the band is no more is tempered by the belief that there was nowhere to go from here but down.
And there you have it. I'm sure I forgot stuff, and you're welcome to call me out on that sort of thing, but keep in mind that I would rather talk utterly cruel shit about a band that I really like than admit to having made a mistake. For now, I'm done waiting to find out whether or not there's going to be a transit strike today. Frankly, I'll be a little disappointed if the trains are running tomorrow. I had all these plans for what I'd do with my day off. Some other time, perhaps.
1 Actually, I wish it was laziness. The fact of the matter is that I've been busy as hell for the last week or so, but not really doing anything I felt like writing about here, as my injuries have kept me from working the retail gig. Fret not, for the holiday season is well underway, and I expect to get approximately a week's worth of customer bad behavior every day from now on.
2 I feel less qualified than usual to do the whole year-end thing, as my lack of both money and interest in new music have kept me from hearing a huge chunk of this year's new releases. Off the top of my head, I've yet to hear the new Sunn 0))) or The Rebel's latest, both of which I'm sure would be contenders for my favorite album of the year. I have heard most of the big hype records this year: Wolf Parade, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Love Is All, Blood on the Wall, Broken Social Scene, Sufjan Stevens, Wilderness, Art Brut, M.I.A., Bloc Party, Antony and the Johnsons, The Go! Team, and of course my old friend Devendra all come to mind (after a quick browse of Pitchfork's "Best New Music" section, I admit). You couldn't pay me to listen to any of the aforementioned records even one more time, except for the Bloc Party which I find sort of charmingly clueless.
3 Have I mentioned how completely inescapable the new Cat Power is going to be next year? Now, I know what you're thinking: "Ooooh, bold fucking prediction. The new Cat Power, popular? No way." But you, Mr. Strawman, have failed to understand. I'm not saying, "The new Cat Power is going to rule college radio," although it surely will, and I'm not saying "Cat Power is going to get namedropped on Gilmore Girls next year," although I predict she will. What I am saying is that the next Cat Power album is going to be everywhere. The next Cat Power album is going to be an integral part of your trips to Borders or Starbucks or the multiplex or the couch to watch whatever the hell it is you watch. It could very easily be the biggest record in Matador's history, and on top of that, it's good. It's really, really good.
4 There will be a reckoning, L Magazine. Just you wait.
5 And let's be honest, Yann Tiersen is already pretty fluffy to begin with.
6 Yes, I wrote this knowing full well that the only people who might be reading this are either in the band or friends with the band and have thus probably already made up their minds about our friends the Tuxedo Killers.
7 Although John Dwyer did tell me I'm cute, which is pretty freaky in and of itself.
Given how much trouble I had even thinking of records from this year that I like, maybe keeping the podcast current is not the best of ideas. Here's hoping that I will do a better job of keeping up with new music in 2006, and here's hoping that the music itself is worthy of the effort3. That said, this podcast is longer than they will normally be, both to accomodate the long songs and because I skipped last Sunday and will probably skip this Sunday because I have to buy Christmas gifts and see Sunn 0))).
Podcast can be direct-downloaded at http://totale.libsyn.com. You can also plug http://totale.libsyn.com/rss into your podcast catcher of choice and have each new episode of Detonation Radio sent right to you whenever I can be bothered to make and post them.
Below is the tracklisting for this week's episode, along with a little blurb on each track. I will probably continue to post the tracklistings here, but I doubt I'll be doing any more explanatory notes; writing about music is torture for me, and once I'd committed to writing those blurbs, the process delayed the posting of this episode by at least two days. So perhaps not.
On and on and on:
1. xbxrx - "Against the Odds": Off Sixth In Sixes, my favorite album of the year. The old, teenage, out-of-control xbxrx was a hell of a lot of fun, but the slightly older and much wiser Touchton brothers, with help from drummer/producer Weasel Walter and bassist Ed Rodriguez, fucking destroyed this whole sorry year and staked a claim to being the only remaining screamo/spazz/punk band worth listening to (i.e. fuck the Test Icicles). The live show is not to be missed.
2. Andrew Bird - "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left": I remember seeing a lot of message-board ire directed at Andrew Bird this year, and I'm not sure why exactly why. Maybe it's the ostentatiously clever lyrics, or the mellow, Starbucks-friendly sound. Maybe it's that he used to be in the Squirrel Nut Zippers. All I know is that I gave this record a chance when I learned that former Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison plays on one of the tracks, and was shocked to find a really great, sophisticated pop album with erudite lyrics and some impressive whistling. Fuck, as they say, the haters.
3. Silver Jews - "Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed": David Berman's comeback record is not his best, despite what you might be reading in clueless outlets like my blissfully unknowing nemesis, The L Magazine4. That said, a merely good Silver Jews record is way better than I thought we'd be getting, so perhaps lowered expectations have worked in this tracks favor, earning it a coveted spot on the Girls in Skirts on Ladders Best of 2005 podcast.
4. Lavender Diamond - "You Broke My Heart": Becky Stark's voice is a marvelous instrument, and while I don't know if this is my favorite track from Lavender Diamond's The Cavalry of Light, it's definitely my favorite vocal performance from her. Lavender Diamond features Jeff Rosenberg, formerly of Young People, and Fort Thunder alumnus Ron Rege, Jr., who contributes outstanding artwork to the EP, but the second the vocals start up, it's Stark's show, no question. More battle hymn than indie rock, I imagine this is great in a live setting.
5. The Harmonettes - "Can't Go Halfway": I'm cheating here, as this wasn't originally released this year, but fuck it, The Numero Group has been doing such an amazing job of unearthing incredible yet somehow unknown music that they deserve all the praise they can get, even from minor entities such as myself, and of course you should go buy all of their releases starting with Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up, which contains this track. And no, this isn't a song from 2005, but fuck you if you claim to have heard it any earlier.
6. The Mountain Goats - "Up the Wolves": Lord knows I hate admitting that I'm wrong, but I had to do an about face on The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree. When I first heard it, it was probably the most disappointing new record I'd heard by an artist I loved since The Fall's Are You Are Missing Winner, and I would've sold it except for a few tracks that I really liked ("Dance Music," "This Year," "Pale Green Things"). What ended up changing things was a download of the vinyl-only Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, and in large part this song right here. Maybe the songs just needed to be stripped of the glossy production for me to appreciate them, I dunno. "Lion's Teeth" is still a terrible song.
7. Mice Parade - "Passing and Galloping": Gotta love that fuzz guitar. Up until this year I'd never paid much attention to Mice Parade, despite having been given like five of their albums, and frankly I expect to go back to ignoring them in the new year. But for one brief, shining moment, when the twinkling went away, the drums started rolling, and the fuzz guitar started...didn't we almost have it all. Didn't we.
8. Brian McBride - "Silent Motels": I'm a Stars of the Lid fanatic. The Dead Texan album by Adam Wiltzie was among my favorite releases last year, and if the Lid's other half wants to put out a solo record while a new album from the duo proper continues its interminable march to completion, so be it. "Silent Motels" isn't as melodic as either most of this album or SOTL's recent work; it's barely there, then all of a sudden it's everywhere, and you didn't even realize. Perfect.
9. Electrelane - "Those Pockets Are People/The Partisan": Electrelane's third album, Axes, was such a willfully perverse move -- "Here's a complete live performance featurng lots of long, unwieldy songs! Thanks!" -- that I have to give them credit for, if nothing else, having the balls to follow the concise pop bursts of The Power Out with such a sprawling mess of an album. Here we have the two sides to Electrelane's coin in one handy bundle: a long, mostly instrumental jam that segues into a frantic punk cover of a Leonard Cohen song.
10. The Fall - "Trust In Me": The final track on Fall Heads Roll, and the one on which Mark E. Smith barely appears at all. He might be in there somewhere, but other vocalists carry the song while guitars buzz away, menacing and spectral. Not at all the sort of thing I expect from any iteration of The Fall, which is probably why I like it so much.
11. Eluvium - "Everything to Come": Matthew Cooper's first Eluvium album, Lambent Material, was one of my favorite records of 2003, so I was mightily disappointed when his last EP, the name of which I don't even remember, consisted of a bunch of Yann Tiersen-lite solo piano pieces5. He's back to the drones on Talk Amongst the Trees, and while this isn't my favorite track on the record, my favorite track (the gorgeous, ever-ascending monolith "Taken") is sixteen minutes long, and so sacrifices have been made. How can you harm what could have been, etc.
12. Animal Collective - "Grass": I think it's the sheer exuberance that wins me over to the side of this poppier iteration of the Animal Collective. Everything about this song is likeable in an extremely hyper way, and when they scream, it begs to be joined. Best tried in the privacy of your own home.
13. Tuxedo Killers - "Don't Rape the Okapi": Texas spazzout. Yeah, they're my friends. Well, except for their eminently-replaceacle douchebag of a bassist. But yeah. I love this song, and the M. Night Shyalaman's Tuxedo Killers EP from which it is taken. Do yourself a favor and pick up the vinyl version, which omits the CD-R's excruciating cover of Adam Green's "Baby's Gonna Die Tonight"6.
14. Hood - "The Lost You": It is so goddamned easy to forget about Hood given that nobody really seems to be interested in either post-rock or morose Brits anymore, and well where the hell does that leave the brothers Adams when it's year-end time? Outside Closer, purportedly the final Hood album, is about as close to a great album as this frustratingly inconsistent band will ever get, and "The Lost You" is a perfect summation of the electronic direction they've been moving in for the last few albums. Here they sound more than ever like their heroes in the defunct Disco Inferno, with a stuttering Robert Wyatt sample as the songs rhythmic guiding light, lending a fragile funkiness to the otherwise typically downcast material. Excellent stuff.
15. Coachwhips - "Did You Cum?": Weasel Walter shows up again here as the producer of this, a track from the only Coachwhips album to capture the glory of their berzerk live shows, Peanut Butter & Jelly Live at the Ginger Minge. I was lucky enough to catch the last Coachwhips show ever on a rooftop in Brooklyn this year, and it was about as spectacularly unhinged as a rock show can get without anything's head getting bitten off7. My sadness that the band is no more is tempered by the belief that there was nowhere to go from here but down.
And there you have it. I'm sure I forgot stuff, and you're welcome to call me out on that sort of thing, but keep in mind that I would rather talk utterly cruel shit about a band that I really like than admit to having made a mistake. For now, I'm done waiting to find out whether or not there's going to be a transit strike today. Frankly, I'll be a little disappointed if the trains are running tomorrow. I had all these plans for what I'd do with my day off. Some other time, perhaps.
1 Actually, I wish it was laziness. The fact of the matter is that I've been busy as hell for the last week or so, but not really doing anything I felt like writing about here, as my injuries have kept me from working the retail gig. Fret not, for the holiday season is well underway, and I expect to get approximately a week's worth of customer bad behavior every day from now on.
2 I feel less qualified than usual to do the whole year-end thing, as my lack of both money and interest in new music have kept me from hearing a huge chunk of this year's new releases. Off the top of my head, I've yet to hear the new Sunn 0))) or The Rebel's latest, both of which I'm sure would be contenders for my favorite album of the year. I have heard most of the big hype records this year: Wolf Parade, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Love Is All, Blood on the Wall, Broken Social Scene, Sufjan Stevens, Wilderness, Art Brut, M.I.A., Bloc Party, Antony and the Johnsons, The Go! Team, and of course my old friend Devendra all come to mind (after a quick browse of Pitchfork's "Best New Music" section, I admit). You couldn't pay me to listen to any of the aforementioned records even one more time, except for the Bloc Party which I find sort of charmingly clueless.
3 Have I mentioned how completely inescapable the new Cat Power is going to be next year? Now, I know what you're thinking: "Ooooh, bold fucking prediction. The new Cat Power, popular? No way." But you, Mr. Strawman, have failed to understand. I'm not saying, "The new Cat Power is going to rule college radio," although it surely will, and I'm not saying "Cat Power is going to get namedropped on Gilmore Girls next year," although I predict she will. What I am saying is that the next Cat Power album is going to be everywhere. The next Cat Power album is going to be an integral part of your trips to Borders or Starbucks or the multiplex or the couch to watch whatever the hell it is you watch. It could very easily be the biggest record in Matador's history, and on top of that, it's good. It's really, really good.
4 There will be a reckoning, L Magazine. Just you wait.
5 And let's be honest, Yann Tiersen is already pretty fluffy to begin with.
6 Yes, I wrote this knowing full well that the only people who might be reading this are either in the band or friends with the band and have thus probably already made up their minds about our friends the Tuxedo Killers.
7 Although John Dwyer did tell me I'm cute, which is pretty freaky in and of itself.
posted by Dktr. Blasphemy at 1:45 AM
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