How about we try an experiment? If you’ve heard the new Franz Ferdinand album, this won’t work as well, but you can still play along.
Here’s step one (step two is below the jump):
Listen to the original, pre-album version of “Lucid Dreams” by Franz Ferdinand, which originally streamed on their website a few months in advance of the album:
Franz Ferdinand – Lucid Dreams (Pre-Album Version) (Download)
Listen to it 3-4 times over a couple of days. Get used to it, like you might have over the few months between the release of the pre-album version and the release of the album. Sing along, get familiar with the way the song is put together. Come back and continue reading below the jump when you’re ready.
Even more charming than the song I posted earlier, Mary Pearson’s childlike mixture of curiosity and agnosticism towards matters outside her immediate experience makes “Cosmonaut” the quintessential High Places track
This year’s hiddenest gem, Ivana’s delicate voice yields, into the spaces between her arpeggiated guitar chords, just enough sweetness that there’s something to fear for as she threatens to vanish into white light.
Johan Agebjörn – Spacer Woman From Mars (Feat. Sally Shapiro) (Download) (Buy It)
“I’m a spacer woman from Mars / and I came right here with my brainiac / and I caught my view from the stars / and I play for all the disco maniacs”
This is an absolutely enthralling piece of work, layering the incantations of children’s voices from Christian Vander’s Baba Yaga La Sorcière on top of a 4 note piano pattern from the same piece; Villalobos has slightly accelerated the source material and stretched the approximately one minute long fragment out into a 17 minute work of minimal techno, adding a snare and a few other effects that change so slowly and subtlety as to disguise the fact that the piece is changing at all, as if to dissimulate the spell it casts.
The Roots – 75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction) (Download) (Buy It)
Great sousaphone bass line plus tight flow from Black Thought.
I woke up this morning to a notice on my WordPress Dashboard that my ability to post had been temporarily frozen, and that I should contact support immediately. Apparently my posting of Sam la More’s remix of Empire of the Sun’s “Walking on a Dream” triggered a DMCA takedown notice to WordPress. The result was a relatively benign move by WordPress – the track was simply removed from the website – but it was accompanied by a vague and ominous warning that future DMCA notices could result in the blog being “permanently suspended.”
Now, this is not going to stop me from continuing to write music that I care about, and it isn’t going to stop me from sharing that music as context to my writing so that you, my readers, can evaluate it and support the artists you discover here. Being “permanently suspended” would be unfortunate, but it’s not a reason to permanently suspend the site on my own. It does, however, mean a couple of small changes in the way I do business.
1) I’m making backup plans: in the event that I’m suspended by WordPress, the blog will be moved to www.songsaboutradios.com. I’ve just purchased the domain name, though as long as things are ok here at WordPress, I’m not paying to host anything there. I can also be reached at songaboutradios@gmail.com in the event that this site disappears and you’re curious where to find it.
2) I’ll be regularly backing up the site now so that my content isn’t lost in the event that I get deleted
3) I’ll no longer be posting music from the British label EMI.
Why EMI? Some scratching around on the internet dug up several sites which agreed that they are responsible for the latest round of takedown notices on Blogger and WordPress. This seems to be corroborated by the fact that the only piece of music I’ve had to take down to date turns out to be the only piece of music I’ve ever posted from EMI. Okkervil River is also on EMI, but the track I posted comes from an early album released on Joust.
I’d love to let the Sex Pistols tell you how much they love EMI, but posting the song they dedicated to their first label that would violate my no-music-from-EMI policy, so you’ll have to follow this link to find it on Hype Machine.
And you thought 2008 was over! It’s February already…
Well, for the past couple of years, ever since I started blogging about my top 20 albums of the year, I’ve also included an additional 30 songs, in no particular order, from 30 artists not already represented by my top albums. Sure, I’ve been a little slow this year, but that’s no reason to deprive my readers of some of the best songs of 2008.
Here are the first 10:
Air France – Collapsing At Your Doorstep (Download) (Buy It)
Swedish pop adrift in dreamy strings and electronic currents, like something remembered from an old movie you loved as a child.
Antony & The Johnsons – Shake That Devil (Download) (Buy It)
While the title track of Antony’s Another World EP, along with his work with Hercules & Love Affair, got most of the critical attention this year, “Shake That Devil” is the best vehicle for Antony’s otherworldly voice that I’ve heard yet, abandoning the precious, operatic quality of “Another World” for a bluesy structure which is just at odds enough with his voice to release all the vengeful pathos of his victimized lyrics.
Blue Sky Black Death & Jean Grae – Shadows Forever (Download) (Buy It)
Blue Sky Black Death’s “unauthorized” production lays down a ferocious sample from the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” which Jean Grae absolutely murders.
Vocal harmony and counterpoint usually bring a certain degree of gravitas, but for the Born Ruffians, bouncing their voices off of overlapping layers of hyperactive melody and jittery percussion is just a spazzy good time.
Empire of the Sun – Walking on a Dream (Sam La More 12″ Remix) (Download Link Removed) (Buy It)
The dance-the-night-away ethos of “Walking on a Dream” is already implicit in the original, but Sam La More adds the thumping house beat to bring it out on the floor where it belongs.
Estelle – American Boy (Feat. Kanye West) (Download) (Buy It)
I tried to fight it, but this is clearly the pop song of the year.
frYars – The Ides (Download) (Available on iTunes)
Charming interaction between a toy piano and Ben Garrett’s melodramatic tongue-in-cheek croon, all wrapped in a variety of equally endearing sound effects
Sorry Hold Steady, but on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the end of the 50’s, The Gaslight Anthem’s “The ‘59 Sound” takes the prize for best nostalgic reinvention of good old American rock ‘n roll, asking, “Do you hear your favorite song one more time when you die?”, a powerful wish image of the ways in which our participation in public culture gets burnt into our ownmost experiences.
Grouper – Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping (Download) (Buy It)
The nautical metaphors that make up this song’s lyrics are a fitting self-description of a song that comes over you like dense but gentle wave after wave of ambient noise.
For the second post in this series of translations, I switch languages to French and dig up a gem from Serge Gainsbourg’s perverse 1971 masterpiece, Histoire de Melody Nelson. Gainsbourg is the Humbert Humbert of French pop, and Histoire de Melody Nelson is his Lolita, the story of an affair with an underaged nymphette who Gainsbourg’s character meets when he nearly runs her over in his Rolls Royce. Melody Nelson is voiced by Gainsbourg’s wife, Jane Birkin, whose squeaks and squeals of delight provide an unnervingly erotic accompaniment to Gainsbourg’s lurid bass lines and luscious psychedelic arrangements.
“Cargo Culte,” the album’s finale, is staged as Gainsbourg’s response to Melody’s tragic death in a plane crash. The song attempts to summon her lost body from the sky like the wreckage of an airliner downed in the Pacific. The comparison to a New Guinean shaman completes the singer’s transfiguration by Melody’s bewitching power. Like Nabokov’s invocation of the musicality of the name “Lo-li-ta,” Gainsbourg’s choice of the name Melody here is no coincidence, leaving entirely unresolved the question of whether the erotic appeal of this music lies in Melody’s giggle or Gainsbourg’s melody.
Je sais moi des sorciers qui invoquent les jets
Dans la jungle de Nouvelle-Guinée
Ils scrutent le zénith convoitant les guinées
Que leur rapporterait le pillage du fret
I know of sorcerers who summon jets
In the jungle of New Guinea
They scan the heights, coveting the wealth
That pillaging the freight will bring them
Sur la mer de corail au passage de cet
Appareil ces créatures non dénuées
De raison ces papous attendent des nuées
L’avarie du Viscount et celle du Comet
On the sea of coral, upon the passage of that
Aircraft, these creatures, not bereft of
Reason, these citizens of Papua await in swarms
The breakdown of a Viscount and of a Comet [*Two aircraft models]
Et comme leur totem n’a jamais pu abattre
A leurs pieds ni Bœing ni même D.C. quatre
Ils rêvent de hijacks et d’accidents d’oiseaux
And since their totem has never been able to pull down
To their feet a Boeing or even a D.C. 4
They dream of hijax and crashes with birds
Ces naufrageurs naïfs armés de sarbacanes
Qui sacrifient ainsi au culte du cargo
En soufflant vers l’azur et les aéroplanes.
These naive shipwreckers armed with blowguns
Who sacrifice thus to the cult of cargo
Blowing their weapons towards the blue and the airplanes
Où es-tu Melody et ton corps disloqué
Hante-t-il l’archipel que peuplent les sirènes
Ou bien accrochés au cargo dont la sirène
D’alarme s’est tue, es-tu restée
Where are you, Melody, and your broken body?
Does it haunt the archipelago peopled by sirens?
Or do you remain hanging from that cargo
About which the alarm siren is silent?
Au hasard des courants as-tu déjà touché
Ces lumineux coraux des côtes guinéennes
Où s’agitent en vain ces sorciers indigènes
Qui espèrent encore des avions brisés
Adrift in the currents, have you already touched
Those luminous corals of the Guinean coast
Where the indigenous sorcerer, still awaiting
Shattered airplanes, fidget in vain?
N’ayant plus rien à perdre ni Dieu en qui croire
Afin qu’ils me rendent mes amours dérisoires
Moi, comme eux, j’ai prié les cargos de la nuit
No longer having anything more to lose, nor God in whom to believe
So that they’ll give me back my pathetic passions
I, like them, have prayed for the cargos of the night
Et je garde cette espérance d’un désastre
Aérien qui me ramènerait Melody
Mineure détournée de l’attraction des astres.
And I keep that hope for a aerial
Disaster that will return to me Melody
Minor diverted from the pull of the stars
Look carefully under the title of Songs About Radios and you’ll notice that the site’s tagline is this quote from the mostly forgotten (and, otherwise, probably forgettable) 1999 sophomore EP by now well-established indie folk-rockers, Okkervil River. I’ve had trouble in the past communicating my love for this song, since the first aspect which my friends can’t help but notice is the truly grating quality of the vocals. So I’m going to use this second post in the “Songs About Radios” series to explain why I love this song, not just in spite of the vocals, but in large part because of them, and not just because Will Sheff’s occasional deviations from pitch are fairly forgiving of my own tone-deaf attempts to sing along.
The radio makes an appearance in “For the Captain” at a crucial moment in a chain of metaphors about the way an earworm, one of those maddeningly catchy pop melodies that you can’t get out of your head, is born. “Relax,” Sheff begins, “no song is written” – that is to say, you’re doing it all wrong: you can’t write a song, it can only unfold itself inside you, without your permission, like a ghost that “came unbidden.” It enters, abides as if in a home, unfolds (“the way an unborn baby’s ear unfolds in your belly”), grows stronger like an infection, leaks out like a tear when the fever breaks, and then makes a new home in your radio. The songwriter is not the agent of this growth, but merely the site where it takes place, with or without consent. The repetition of the metaphor of the home suggests a cyclical process: this thing that is making its home in your radio has a way of taking you over and transforming you into a host for the incubation of yet another thing.
The brilliance of this song, in other words, is that it makes all of us, even tone-deaf literary critics like myself, everyone who’s ever loved a piece of music and carried it around in his or her head on an endless loop of an invisible little gramophone, into would-be songwriters. That itching of the earworm inside your brain is the kicking of a new song yearning to be born. That joy and frustration are the awareness of an unrealized creative capacity which Sheff expresses through the literally pedestrian image of an organic beauty imprisoned under the impenetrable barrier of the pathways that make up our everyday life:
All your tiny flowers
They have sat under the sidewalk
They have waited for the pieces
Of the summer sun to show us
All that is your beauty
All and all that is your treasure
Sheff’s delivery is perfect for conveying the emergence of these tiny flowers through the concrete. It strains and cracks as if inadequate to the task at hand, but propelled forward by an inner necessity. As the refrain about “the thing this is making its home in your radio” echos compulsively in the background, Sheff’s increasingly hoarse voice, like the house on fire at the end of the song, is gradually consumed by its attempts to exorcise the ghost.
Head on over to Zombie Public Speaking for a couple of quality Heaps recordings featuring yours truly on the keyboard/virtual Farfisa organ!
Meanwhile, Songs About Radios is happy to announce that my good friend, colleague, poker rival, and fellow blogger, Joseph Kugelmass, has recently started writing for the cultural criticism website Pop Matters, which, as far as I understand, is a pretty big deal. And how nice of him to use his second post there to promote Songs About Radios!
So, I thought I’d return the favor and point you all back to Joe’s excellent first post, entitled “Tha Giggle: On Lil Wayne,” which attempts to answer the question “Why was Lil’ Wayne the single biggest musical phenomenon of 2008?” Here’s an excerpt:
Obviously, Wayne isn’t naïve; he just sounds that way. The centerpiece of his whole persona is his giggle, which he lets loose on most of his songs, and which fits in perfectly last summer alongside of Heath Ledger’s near-hero Joker. It’s another piece of anarchic, disruptive noise, and another instance of disbelief: how funny is it, really, that Wayne’s on top of the world? Eminem had the same reaction to his fame, but he took it seriously and it blew out his creative fuses. Eminem made didactic points about the schizophrenic existence of public figures, yearning to be authentic or at least smart enough to hold the strings, whereas Wayne glorifies the moment of looking in the mirror and wondering who he’ll be today
If you suspected that my own brief write up of Tha Carter III was in dialogue with Joe’s, you wouldn’t be wrong. Both of us see the giggle as a symptom of Wayne’s more or less schizophrenic reaction to his own performance. For Joe, the key image is Weezy watching himself in the mirror while playfully trying on identities, taking pleasure in the freedom that his art gives him to fashion himself differently every day. The giggle is anarchic and disruptive, but, like Heath Ledger’s Joker, Wayne is still in command of when he lets it loose. For me, the key image is Weezy catching his breath. As I see it, speech isn’t a tool of self-fashioning, but a sort of out of control compulsion built into the words themselves. The giggle isn’t something Wayne does, but something that happens to him, a sort of nervous tick that interrupts his attempt to pretend that he’s in command, that he has any idea how or why he’s so good. In both cases, the idea of “authentic identity” gets disrupted, but in different ways: for Joe, because language gives us the power to endlessly reinvent ourselves; for me, because language, despite being our most personal possession, is the part of ourselves that least belongs to us.
You can check up on the latest Pop Matters posts of Joseph Kugelmass here.
Shit, get on my level, you can’t get on my level, you would need a space shuttle or a ladder that’s forever
Forget the club tracks like “Got Money” and “Lollipop,” what makes this album great is the way that Wayne spits, boasts, and recycles his way through disarticulated syllables, double-entendres and localisms (“Su-Woop and Da Da Doe”) like his voice has taken on a disembodied life of its own. On Phone Home, Weezy declares, “We are not the same, I am a Martian,” but really it’s his voice that’s alien, even to Wayne. Every so often, he seems genuinely surprised by whatever’s just come out of his mouth, like it doesn’t belong to him, like it emerged spontaneously from the words themselves. Sure, he boasts like it was his all along, on “Dr. Carter” even laying his style down as a set of artistic principles, but on “A Milli” he tells us that he “don’t write shit,” ’cause he “ain’t got time,” – his flow isn’t the deliberate labor of a craftsman, but literally a flow (“like a menstrual bleed through the pencil”), something you can’t stop and you can’t catch. Weezy’s always wheezing trying to catch his breath, to catch up with himself so he can look back and claim his exhalations as his own.
Don’t sing that old sad hymn no more / It resonates inside my soul /It haunts me in my waking dream / I cannot bear to hear it
April is a secondary work of mourning. It deals not with the loss of love, but with the traces that love and loss leave on the soul several years later. From its slightly out of focus cover art, to its austere acoustic arpeggios, to its lyrics about ghosts and rolling fogs, April is haunted by a past that it cannot bear to hear, but cannot erase. Mark Kozelek’s voice is somber, but its steadiness, through thoughts that should make his throat swell, betrays a deep inner calm. That calm has been there for me on many nights, reaching its tendrils into my soul and twisting restless racing thoughts into peaceful self-reflection.
Highlight: “Paranoid (Feat. Mr. Hudson)” (Download)
808s & Heartbreaks casts Kanye’s ego in a whole new light. On Graduation, singing about the good life, Kanye looked larger than life, invulnerable to the world, almost inhumanly so. Now, through the lens of the loss of the two women closest to him, we see him at his weakest, and the ego looks like a contrived spectacle. Using 808s to bare the sutures of his production and the faintest trace of auto-tune to emphasize the artifice of his voice, Kanye seems to be confessing the ruse of his ego, admitting that’s it’s just another impressive result of his talents as a producer.
But the more robotic Kanye makes himself sound, the more human he appears. In the repeated, sometimes hard to swallow, assertions of glory with which he attempts to hold together his shattered head, we hear a man rediscovering his inner life. The more Kanye stutters and stammers to produce the illusion of invulnerability, the more vulnerable he sounds. So if the ego on his earlier albums now seems fake, it doesn’t make those albums seem shallow: if anything, it deepens them, since we can now hear in them the real Kanye: not the ego being projected, but the man nervously at work at the projector.
…unless the gesture of vulnerability is just another ruse.
Angry young mannequin, american, apparently / still to the rhythm, better get to the back of me / Can’t stand the vision, better tongue the anatomy / Gold plated overhead, blank transparency…
Dear Science is that kind of album that tells the world a band is going to be around for a while: a captivating third LP that pulls off a change in style without abandoning the defining characteristics of its predecessors. On this latest album, TV on the Radio are making a statement about the versatility of their original vision, the full potential of which remains inexhausted, still to be explored for years to come. One can’t help but hear traces of Bowie (who lended vocals to “Province” on an earlier album and picked TV on the Radio to cover “Heroes” on the the War Child charity comp), not only in the aesthetic, but in the particular spirit of innovation and exploration evidenced by this release.
On their debut EP, Young Liars and the follow-up LP, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, TV on the Radio offered a strikingly unique sound made out of elements of doo-wop and post-punk, a mixture of Tumbe Adebimpe and Kyp Malone’s rich, frightening vocal harmonies with David Sitek’s noisy, atmospheric production. On their sophomore LP, Return to Cookie Mountain, they ramped up some of the rock elements, but generally remained in the same idiom. What makes Dear Science, so impressive as an album is the way that TV on the Radio are able to explore new directions while preserving a sense of identity that links the album to their earlier work. While songs like “DLZ” would be at home on Desperate Youth, the majority of the album moves in a funkier direction. Prince is an apparent influence, though some of the album’s sexuality seems exaggerated to the point of parody (“I’m gonna take you, I’m gonna shake you, I’m gonna make you cum. Swear to god it will get so hot, it’ll melt our faces off.”) There are also shades of gospel on tracks like “Golden Age.” But the doo-wop harmonies are still there, with, for example, the introductory scat of album opener “Halfway Home” not so far off from the vocal bass line of Desperate Youth’s standout “Ambulance.” And the production, though generally cleaner, still reveals fascinatingly complex uses of electronic tonalities, reverbed percussion, and occasionally menacing distortion. The production has been absorbed into the work with a new subtlety that speaks to the growth TV on the Radio as artists. Watching their continued development in the years to come is certain to be exciting.
I’m worn, tired of my mind / I’m worn out, thinking of why / I’m always so unsure…
From the first words of the cryptic Portuguese aphorism with which “Silence” begins, to the final moment when Beth Gibbons’s wavering voice is swallowed by lumbering fog horns at the end of “Threads,” I am spellbound, terrified. At times I literally have to catch my breath. Third works on the nerves from all angles, bass textures rumbling portentously under strings stroked slowly and vibrating unsteadily as jarring machine gun style bursts of percussion fragment any illusion of continuity. I am left scattered but transfixed, unable to turn away and unable to turn towards. How Beth Gibbons can acclimate her voice to this abyss which saps my strength just as a spectator, I cannot fathom. Her voice appears as if in a constant battle with the uncertainty surrounding her: at times, it seems like a feat just to sustain a single note; at times, she allows herself to recede, tenderly, just barely. Snatched out from under the jaws of death, always on the verge of crumbling back to dust, she sustains a sublime fragility with an inhuman fortitude.
All songs are posted for evaluation purposes only. If you hear something you like, please follow the links provided and support the artist. Files are provided for only a week or two at a time, and will be removed upon request from the artist's representative.
Watch videos at Vodpod and other videos from this collection.
Listen to the original, pre-album version of “Lucid Dreams” by Franz Ferdinand, which originally streamed on their website a few months in advance of the album:
For the second post in this series of translations, I switch languages to French and dig up a gem from Serge Gainsbourg’s perverse 1971 masterpiece, Histoire de Melody Nelson. Gainsbourg is the Humbert Humbert of French pop, and Histoire de Melody Nelson is his Lolita, the story of an affair with an underaged nymphette who Gainsbourg’s character meets when he nearly runs her over in his Rolls Royce. Melody Nelson is voiced by Gainsbourg’s wife, Jane Birkin, whose squeaks and squeals of delight provide an unnervingly erotic accompaniment to Gainsbourg’s lurid bass lines and luscious psychedelic arrangements.
Look carefully under the title of Songs About Radios and you’ll notice that the site’s tagline is this quote from the mostly forgotten (and, otherwise, probably forgettable) 1999 sophomore EP by now well-established indie folk-rockers, Okkervil River. I’ve had trouble in the past communicating my love for this song, since the first aspect which my friends can’t help but notice is the truly grating quality of the vocals. So I’m going to use this second post in the “Songs About Radios” series to explain why I love this song, not just in spite of the vocals, but in large part because of them, and not just because Will Sheff’s occasional deviations from pitch are fairly forgiving of my own tone-deaf attempts to sing along.
Sheff’s delivery is perfect for conveying the emergence of these tiny flowers through the concrete. It strains and cracks as if inadequate to the task at hand, but propelled forward by an inner necessity. As the refrain about “the thing this is making its home in your radio” echos compulsively in the background, Sheff’s increasingly hoarse voice, like the house on fire at the end of the song, is gradually consumed by its attempts to exorcise the ghost.
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