K-the-I??? featuring NoCanDo “Trading Places”

One of the more fascinating things about this song is the way K-the-I??? and NoCanDo are both venting frustrations and speaking their mind, but in a way that seems like they’re holding back slightly, not out of weakness, but out of tact. It’s not passive aggression, but rather words carefully designed to hit precise targets, and call into question “frenemies” who have given them reason to feel suspicious, bitter, or confused. The track feels tightly wound from the start, but by the time the sample loop kicks in, there’s a distinct hazy, dizzy, slightly nauseous feeling that emphasizes the rappers’ emotional discomfort and lyrical bile.

Buy it from Mush Records.

The Sound of Arrows “M.A.G.I.C.”

If you need a warning, here you go: “M.A.G.I.C.” is an extremely Pollyanna-ish pop song, and really, the sort of thing you should never hear on a bad day. The arrangement twinkles like a sequin suit in a room full of mirror balls, its groove is so shamelessly Swedish that it may as well be Ace of Base, and the chorus is sung by a choir of children. It’s a bit too much, but somehow, there’s some sense of restraint. It’s not all giddiness and rainbows — the lead vocalist sounds measured and calm, and upon closer inspection, it’s clear that he’s singing about trying to be open to the wonders of the world, which implies the understanding that those things can easily be drowned out by the horrors. It’s a tremendously optimistic song, but its outsize perkiness feels lived-in, earned, and surprisingly pragmatic.

Buy it from Labrador.

Animal Collective “Summertime Clothes”

1) I’ll be honest with you: I had pretty much given up on these guys. After the initial thrill of discovering Spirit They’re Gone Spirit They’ve Vanished and Danse Manatee circa 2001, Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s path mostly diverged from what I wanted, and what I imagined to be their full potential. There were good songs along the way — “Who Could Win A Rabbit?,” “Grass,” about half of Person Pitch, and “Chores,” but for the most part, their music had come to seem overly indulgent, lazy, or horribly uninspiring. I can’t hear Strawberry Jam as anything other than a failed compromise; a misfire that moved toward more accessible songwriting while leaning hard on the most grating aspects of their distinct aesthetic. I just get this allergic reaction hearing that album — I wish I could isolate exactly what it is that bothers me so much, but I can hardly stand to listen to most of the tracks.

2) I didn’t expect much from Merriweather Post Pavilion, but my immediate response was positive. Very positive, in fact, to the point that I had to wonder how much of my reaction came out of the fact that I was enjoying new music by a band I had almost entirely written off. One or two good songs wouldn’t have such a huge surprise — even their worst records have at least one worthwhile track — but Merriweather was the thing I’d been hoping for since the start of the decade: A record by Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and the Geologist that was tuneful and enjoyable from beginning to end without sacrificing their particular tone and style. The album is not perfect — it’s a bit too long and lags in the middle — but it is by far the best work of their career to date. Simply put, Merriweather Post Pavilion is everything good about the Animal Collective, with barely a trace of their worst impulses. It’s a balancing act, really — disciplined pop and avant chaos, hippie and hipster, electronic textures and quasi-primitive rhythms — there is nothing on the album that wasn’t there all along, but suddenly they’ve got it all figured out.

3) “Summertime Clothes” is essentially a synth pop song with a folk pop melody, done up in Animal Collective drag. It’s about as conventional and straightforward as the band has ever been, but it still feels light-headed, delirious, and disconnected. Avey Tare sings about feeling uncomfortable in oppressive heat, and sneaking out with a someone for a walk as a way of making the most of a sleepless night. His words focus on physical sensation, and the music follows suit, simulating waves of stifling heat, thick humid breeze, and the slightly unreal feeling of empty city streets in the wee hours of the morning. Even when it feels most sticky and wet, the song overflows with pleasure and an overwhelming, utterly joyous sense of both physical and mental freedom, as if all the singer’s neuroses have temporarily disappeared, and he’s just acting on instinct. He seems amazed by himself, by his partner, by the beauty of everything around him. More than that, he seems genuinely grateful.

Buy it from Insound.

Hilotrons “Lovesuit”

Aside from vaguely resembling the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody),” the most immediately striking thing about “Lovesuit” is its immaculate tone. Every element in the track seems almost freakishly crisp and clean, but somehow the song doesn’t feel uptight. It’s like a state of alert, clear-headed relaxation. The lead singer does seem a bit high-strung at points, but even still, any anxiety in his voice or rigidity in the beat is diluted by the composition’s overall cool, easy-going vibe.

Buy it from Kelp Records.

Women “Shaking Hands”

Taken on its own, Women’s breakthrough song “Black Rice” gives the impression that the band is in the same general post-Zombies/Beach Boys aesthetic zone as the Shins, but the rest of their work comes closer to emulating Sonic Youth’s balance of freaky punk experimentation and gorgeous, winding arpeggiated melodies. “Shaking Hands” is a fine example, cycling through several parts that recall Sonic Youth at various stages in their career, from the grim urban tangles of Sister and Daydream Nation on through the more placid landscapes of A Thousand Leaves and Murray Street. This is not to say that Women lack character — their tones are colder, their beats have more stutter, and their compositions go on more frequent digressions, generally avoiding Sonic Youth’s penchant for neatly symmetrical forms.

Buy it from Jagjaguwar.

Hank “Threw Me”

Song one, side one for 2009. We start things off feeling rather tentative, but optimistic. We’ve still got a touch of bitterness, but we’re slowly letting it go — we know it’s not helpful, that it’s not productive. We harmonize, we come together to make something beautiful. Our confidence builds, but we’re still skeptical and questioning, even of ourselves and our collective strength, careful not to over- or underestimate our capabilities. We hit our stride, we cool out. We already feel better, so we all smile. We’ve taken our lumps, but it’s time to move on, to try to find the silver linings, and the opportunities hidden within all sorts of adversity. It’s time to build, it’s time to create, it’s time to move into the next decade, and get our heads out of 2008. Let’s go.

Buy it from Weeping Truckers.

Beck “Profanity Prayers”

The older Beck gets, the more his music begins to sound like the equivalent of a thousand yard stare. Or really, in the case of Modern Guilt, a billion lightyear stare out into the expanse of the universe. He’s always been aloof and unknowable, but in recent years, his work has felt aesthetically sterile and emotionally blank, even as he deals with increasingly dark subject matter. His songs are still catchy and he’s still got a sense of humor, but it has all become very cerebral and disconnected, like there’s just no real dude there anymore, only this intellect that has thoroughly devoured a personality. I think this all worked to his benefit on The Information, a record that navigated the void and emoted in this odd, muted sort of way. Modern Guilt, on the other hand, mostly just sounds like a hollow shell, even when the songs have a nice hook or express, in the faintest way perceivable, serious existential dread.

I reckon a lot of this failure comes down to the fact that the album is a collaboration with Danger Mouse, and his weak production values hobble many of the songs from the get-go. From begin to end, the drums on Modern Guilt sound limp, ineffectual, and overly compressed, leaving even the best songs feeling tentative and anemic. Whereas Nigel Godrich’s production work on The Information balanced out the distant vibe of the material with crisp, urgent percussion and vivid tones, Danger Mouse’s oomph-less tracks make entire compositions come across as non-committal, or worse, devoid of humanity. In other contexts, some of these songs could click, but for the most part, Modern Guilt is pleasant but not at all engaging, and it gets to feel draining when heard as a whole. This is unfortunate given that “Profanity Prayers,” the record’s most successful number, arrives at the end. The song, which sounds rather like an emotionally neutral version of Radiohead’s “Bodysnatchers,” is the most spirited thing on the album by far, and the only track with a drum sound that has any sort of spark.

Buy it from Amazon.

Hauschka “Rode Null”

Should song reviews come with spoiler warnings? I feel as though describing exactly what happens in the second half of this song may ruin the experience somewhat, but at the same time, I feel like there’s no way I could adequately describe its movement, and the specific blend of emotions it evokes. I probably don’t have the skill necessary to do it, but more than that, I don’t have the desire. This is an astonishing, gorgeous piece of music, and I don’t want my useless, futile words to get in the way of your pleasure.

Buy it from Amazon.

Black Milk featuring Colin Munroe “Without U”

When people bitch about “haters” holding them back, it’s easy to be suspicious and wonder if they’re just egomaniacs who cannot handle any form of criticism, or if they are actually dealing with toxic, negative people who are genuinely undermining their happiness and creativity. In the case of “Without U,” I’m inclined to feel that Black Milk was actually dealing with the latter. This could easily be an excessively bitter and angry song, but mostly, he just sounds relieved and eager to move on. Even if this were an instrumental, the light, airy bounce of the track would still express that feeling of a weight lifted off of one’s chest.

Buy it from Amazon.

Flying Lotus featuring Dolly “RobertaFlack”

The critical success of this Flying Lotus record comes as something of a surprise, at least in the sense that I didn’t realize so many of my peers were eager for new iterations on trip-hop. As an album, Los Angeles is comforting and functional background music — it maintains a steady groove, and its sound feels classy yet slightly perverse. Upon closer inspection, many of its tracks reveal subtle charms, mainly in the form of intriguing textural clashes, rhythmic shifts, and samples that temporarily stray from its primary palette of tones. The most effective tracks include vocals, or some other emotive element — too much of the album floats along in a stoned haze, but its gradual drift toward more expressive and communicative tracks is a nice trick in and of itself.

Buy it from Amazon.

Andrew Daly “Sing-along With Skip McCabe”

Andrew Daly’s character monologues do not break any formal ground, but somehow his best bits have an unusual charge that leaves the work feeling rather bold, new, and distinct. Daly’s performances are exceptionally controlled, and often benefit greatly from a presentation that removes the visual component and focuses the audience’s attention entirely on his vocal mannerisms. He truly sounds like a different person from track to track on his debut album Nine Sweaters, whether he’s portraying an unusually horny old man, a philandering futurist, an abrasive party-starter, or broad caricatures of French, Irish, and Southern Californian stereotypes. The bits mostly start with a familiar archetype or scenario, but the structure of Daly’s routines inevitably follow down some horribly dark path, and the most hilarious moments come when his characters are forced to reckon with the twists of the narrative on their own skewed terms. Even when you’re anticipating the turns, Daly’s verbal prowess and impeccable timing allow for genuine surprises, particularly when he shows himself willing to go much further with his premise than originally expected without compromising the integrity of his character’s reality. This is certainly the case for “Sing-along With Skip McCabe,” a sketch in which a seemingly wholesome singer tells an unfortunate story that inadvertently highlights his warped, ruthless ambition.

Buy a physical copy from A Special Thing, or a digital copy from Amazon.

Rev. Edward W. Clayborn (The Guitar Evengelist) “The Wrong Way To Celebrate Christmas”

Not being a religious person, I don’t really have any issue with secularizing Christmas. Make it open, abstract, and inclusive — as long as there’s some peace and love in there, it can’t be a bad thing. Reverend Clayborn — obviously, a man of God — doesn’t get very specific about the wrong ways to celebrate Christmas day in this song, but it certainly seems that he’s more concerned about people suffering through the holidays rather than going a little overboard with Christmas lights. (Of course, this was recorded ninety years ago, so maybe if he were around today, he would’ve thrown in a jab at that sort of material excess, or something disapproving about people trampling a guy to death at Walmart on Black Friday.) Anyway, whatever your views may be, I hope that one way or another you celebrate this Christmas in a way that is right for you.

Buy it from Dust To Digital.

Fall Out Boy “20 Dollar Nose Bleed”

Fall Out Boy are about as weird as a band can possibly get while still, somehow, sounding more or less normal. Despite, and in some ways because of, their incredible success, they’ve become oddball pop maximalists hell-bent on appropriating the often embarrassing trappings of the 80s/90s blockbuster aesthetic at a time when the blockbuster album is dead or dying. The band is still technically “emo,” at least in the sense that they pin smirky-clever lyrics to music that mostly conforms to some variation on pop-punk, but at this point, Patrick Stump is singing virtually everything with an R&B affectation, songs are packed with unnecessary, ostentatious cameos (Elvis Costello!), and at least half of their new record is a mutant strain of some other genre. I really appreciate what Fall Out Boy are going for, but I wish that I enjoyed more of the songs. Though the group is capable of knocking out some gems, too many of the songs fall flat with huge ambitions and slight, unremarkable melodies. “20 Dollar Nose Bleed” is one of the numbers that works, in part because its fanfare and dynamics flatter Stump’s voice, but mostly because its hooks are pleasurable enough to make Pete Wentz’s vainly verbose lyrics seem relatively natural. (Well, except for the sorta rappy bit at the very end, that’s not so hot.)

Buy it from Amazon.

Archers of Loaf “Assassination On X-Mas Eve”

Christmas music is normally concerned with things that are appropriate to the season, but the Archers of Loaf’s song opts for the opposite, and presents a scenario in which an act of violence ruins Christmas for everyone. It’s hard to tell what’s the actual tragedy in the song — the murder, the fact that the perpetrator is running free, or that all these hapless people are forced to work on a miserable case through the holidays. There’s no escape to ritualized artifice, just blood and paperwork.

Buy it from Alias Records.