Archive for 2005

Deeper Down to the Sleepy Glow

Gorillaz “Every Planet We Reach Is Dead” – On the first Gorillaz album, it was easy to see how the music could have been the work of a cartoon band. Though the record mostly sounded like a collection of Blur outtakes, the general tone corresponded well Jamie Hewlett’s design/animation aesthetic, enough so that it convinced a hell of a lot of people who wouldn’t ordinarily care about Damon Albarn’s regular band to buy the album and make it an unexpected hit. Demon Days is a strange follow-up to that record, mostly because it seems to be more of a continuation of the gloomy, groovy sound of Blur’s last record Think Tank than a proper sequel to a generally peppy party album. That is, unless they had intended for this to be like their version of The Empire Strikes Back, and intentionally went for a darker, bleaker tone. That may be their explanation in hindsight, but I would think that it is obvious that Albarn is just writing music for himself and getting it out on records however he can. This could just as well be a Blur record or a solo album that would be quickly dismissed by both critics and the public, but he’s clever enough to smuggle his most self-indulgent material on to a record that isn’t fully tied in with his identity, letting him off the hook in more ways than one. All that, and he gets to bring in Ike Turner for a keyboard solo on this song. Pretty sneaky, sis. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Sensational “Money Maker” – Sensational makes stoned lo-fi hip hop that straddles the line between oblivious amateurism and inspired artiness. His beats are generally canned and simplistic, but he’s fond of eerie keyboard textures that drone like cheap horror film soundtracks, mixing his vocals so loud that they seem like he’s broadcasting them into your skull telepathically, and distorting his vocal tracks to the point of rendering his lyrics incomprehensible. On this track, he runs two raps together simultaneously, derailing his flow and resulting in a disorienting abstraction. (Click here to buy it from Forced Exposure.)

Gifted, All Natural, and Splitting the Seams

Robyn “Konichiwa Bitches” – One does not reasonably expect much from token hip hop tracks on the albums of Scandinavian pop stars, but with this song, Robyn defies the odds and makes me wonder if she ought to be doing this sort of thing on a full-time basis. The beats and keyboards are minimal and perfectly composed, flowing smoothly and changing up consistently throughout the song without distracting attention from her vocals, which sound like an adorable anime version of Missy Elliott. There’s a very delicate balance being maintained here, keeping it from tipping too far into tweeness, and I suspect that it is kept mainly because it’s so clear that Robyn isn’t totally kidding around. The lyrics are certainly meant to be humorous, but the love for hip hop is very earnest, and it’s clear that she has a musical understanding of the genre that many cutesy hip hop dilettantes lack. (Click here to buy it from CDON.)

The Chap “Baby I’m Hurt’n'” – Ah ha, an energetic song about being tired! The Chap chug along for a few minutes on a simple groove, building up to a clangy climax before almost entirely dropping out the percussion and transposing the central guitar riff to a scratchy, out of tune cello for the outro. The vocals and lyrics are playful and silly, though not quite as clever and witty as other songs on their new record. It’s a bit hard for this to compete with lyrics like “I met you at the post-glitch laptop show / I was impressed, I was impressed / your take on the post-Parka look stood out / I told you about my studio setup.” (Click here to visit the official Chap site.)

Everybody Waits So Long

M83 “Teen Angst (Luciano Remix)” – This is nearly twelve minutes of delicate beauty, cutting in two lines of vocals from the M83 original with an expressive but minimal track that develops gradually, but is never at any point dull or unimaginative. If this sounds like anything, it’s almost as though Luciano has fused the sound of Arthur Russell’s ambient pop and disco tracks into one perfect song. (Click here to visit the official M83 site.)

The Concretes “Miss You” – Though they have changed the arrangement significantly, I wouldn’t quite say that The Concretes have made this Rolling Stones song their own so much as they have claimed it to the spirit of the Velvet Underground. In full-on Velvet Underground With Nico/Loaded drag, the essential NYC-in-the-late 60s/70s vibe of the song is intensified. The music fills my head with images from books, magazines, and films from that era of the city, and it somehow manages to make a place where I’ve spent a significant portion of my life seem like some exotic fictional locale. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Is Darth Vader Gonna Have To Choke A Bitch?

Fellini “Rock Europeu” – The liner notes to the new Soul Jazz compilation The Sexual Life of the Savages tells me that this song is an “ironic comment on European music,” but since I don’t understand a word of Portuguese, I’ll just have to take their word for it. The Sexual Life of the Savages is the second collection of Brazillian post-punk to be released this year, following the excellent Nao Wave compilation released by Man Recordings last month. Fellini’s music is a highlight of both records. Their bass and guitar sound is obviously heavily influenced by post-Joy Division/New Order Euro rock, but their integration of Latin rhythms and horns keep their music from sounding like a rote impression and more like a regional adaptation. (Click here to buy it from Soul Jazz.)

Teen Anthems “I Hate Oasis (And I Hate The Beatles)” – Teen Anthems is the most common alias of John Williams Davies, a DIY songwriter from Wales who specializes in bouncey pop tunes that critique the insular pop culture of the UK. His songs are packed full of references to obscure British television personalities, tabloid celebrities, and music that barely exists outside the context of the UK, but this song about the stifling influence of Beatles worship is lyrically accessable to most anyone on either side of the Atlantic. (For what it’s worth, I love The Beatles and I like a bunch of Oasis songs.) (Click here to buy it from the Teen Anthems website.)

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith – The Star Wars prequel trilogy did not have to be bad. On a basic level, the story of Anakin Skywalker’s descent has the potential to be a compelling cautionary tale, even if the drama is diminished somewhat by the fact that the audience is already aware of his ultimate fate. The problem with the prequels lies entirely in George Lucas’ extremely misguided execution. I place a lot of the blame for this on the fact that Lucas spent more than a decade after the release of Return of the Jedi on the merchandizing end of his enterprise, immersed in the iconography of his saga but entirely cut off from the mythic themes and recognizably human characters at the core of the Star Wars phenomenon. It’s easy to understand how he may have come to think that the audience responded more to the signifiers of his movies rather than the characterization or the allegory. To a certain extent, he may not be entirely wrong. Even if the new trilogy is unsatisfying in terms of content, most people can at least have some superficial fun with the lightsaber duels, droid armies, crazy aliens, and action setpieces.

For the prequel storyline to be entirely effective, it is crucial for the audience to be on Anakin Skywalker’s side. Lucas almost entirely fails to make the character even remotely sympathetic, even though you could make a bullet point list of things that are meant to make his seem that way – he was a slave; his mom died; his marriage must be kept a secret; he gets his hand chopped off; he is basically a superhero. Nevertheless, it’s hard to like Anakin. Though he’s more or less blameless as a little kid in The Phantom Menace, it’s difficult to really care about him in that film other than in a “aww, cute” sort of way. Hayden Christensen plays Anakin as a sullen charisma-free dick even when he ought to seem affectionate or valiant. Ideally, Anakin’s story in the prequels should have followed Luke Skywalker’s arc in the original series, but with Anakin succumbing to the dark side at the end of the second film rather than rejecting it, as Luke did at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

Emperor Palpatine is the best thing about Revenge of the Sith, full stop. Ian McDiarmid plays the character with a hammy glee that outdoes his performance in the same role in Return of the Jedi. He seems to be the only actor who had a good time working on the movie, but that could be because he’s the only one asked to cut loose or show any sign of complexity. Palpatine is the one character from the original films who is actually improved by the existence of the prequel trilogy. The character was very effective as a representation of ultimate evil in Return, but in Revenge, we actually get to see what makes him so terrible aside from being a creepy old dude in a black robe. I loved the character as a kid, and at least in terms of how he was represented in this film, I think I got what I had really wanted from the prequels when I was young. I am sure that if I saw this movie before puberty, it might have been my favorite Star Wars episode if just because there is so much Palpatine and the heroes get thoroughly trounced. This is a theme that I really responded to as a kid – half of the reason I loved (and still enjoy) Star Wars and the X-Men so much is because the heroes routinely lost their battles and always faced desperate odds.

Though Palpatine and Anakin’s scenes together are among the best reasons to see Revenge of the Sith, Lucas misses a great opportunity by not including a sequence of scenes in which the Emperor shows Vader the ways of the Sith, mirroring Luke’s Jedi training with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. That could have been wonderfully creepy, but it also could have shed more light on the differences between the two sides of the Force. In the new context of the prequel trilogy, the morality of Star Wars is maddeningly vague. Before, we could just assume that the Jedi were these really great people, but in these films they just seem like a bunch of beaurocratic self-righteous douchebags who are only interested in preserving a self-serving status quo. The original films hinted at a noble spirituality, but as it turns out, they are just cops with dogma. The only Jedi who seems at all heroic is Obi-Wan Kenobi, though I suspect that if a lesser actor than Ewan McGregor had been cast in the role, the character’s grace, humility, and selflessness would have never emerged from subtext.

Though I respect Lucas’ clumsy attempts to bring complexity to the morality of his story, it does the series as a whole few favors. Back when the Jedi/Sith conflict was black and white, the integrity of Luke Skywalker and the redemption of Darth Vader was far more powerful and resonant, enough so that I definitely feel that the end of Return of the Jedi had a pivotal influence on the deve

lopment of my own code of ethics as a child. Now it just seems like the moral of Star Wars is that it’s better to be a passive-aggressive smug turdodouche like Yoda than to be an aggressive, domineering asshole like Palpatine. Ech, you know? (For an elaboration on this concept, I refer you to The Face Knife)

In spite of its considerable flaws, I definitely enjoyed Revenge of the Sith more than I disliked it. It’s certainly more like the original trilogy in terms of tone and general aesthetics, and the majority of the mistakes in the first two prequels (poor pacing, Jar Jar Binks, space diners, nebulous political intrigue) are jetisonned in favor of a fairly streamlined storyline that remains focused on the central conflict of Anakin and his two mentors. The plot occasionally seems more like a history lesson than a movie, but the action sequences are mostly quite fun and engaging. My kid brain liked it, and since this is a series aimed at little boys, I can assume that this film at least met its objective goals even if it was held back by the baggage of its immediate predecessors.

You Saw Blue Sky When Sky Was Gray

A Frames “Eva Braun” – I have no idea how the A Frames’ Black Forest became my “default” record for 2005. I didn’t even like it the first two times that I heard it, but something about it keeps pulling me back in, compelling me put it on every time I can’t figure out what I want to hear. Every time I listen, I find more to love, and every week the songs burrow deeper into my unconcious mind, playing back in my head on loop at strangely random occasions. At this point, I’ve entirely let go of any of my initial qualms about the record. I thought that I could resist something so dour and nihilistic, but I surrender. I love the way that their harsh riffs sound like razors tearing holes in my speakers. Every time I hear the discordant guitar solo on “Eva Braun,” I feel like it is dissecting my heart with shards of glass. I didn’t realize that I needed something as intensely bleak as this record in my life right now, but obviously I do. Congratulations, A Frames – I am owned by your dark, menacing beauty. (Click here to buy it from Sub Pop.)

Chok Rock “Happy Man” – A day in the life of a happy man: Get up; strut around to a funky but low key groove; launch into a sudden and somewhat incongruous noisy indie-rock style guitar solo; take it to the bedroom for a slow jam; get some sleep. (Click here to buy it from Warp.)

You Can’t Get These Nutrients From A Blow-Pop

Bob Mould “(Shine Your) Light Love Hope” – It’s easy to understand why some artists go off in radical new directions after building up a body of work that practically defines who they are. Most any artist eventually has to come to terms with the question of whether their artistic identity and methods are a true expression of who they are, or simply the result of their technical limitations, habits, and fears. Bob Mould’s previous album Modulate was a very risky endeavor, but I think that this track is proof that his experimentation with electronic music was the right decision even if that record was not among his best work. “(Shine Your) Light Love Hope” splits the difference between the classic Mould alt-rock sound and his immersion in electronic dance music. Experimentation with unfamiliar sounds and styles is usually most successful when a musician plays to their strengths as writers and performers, and that’s exactly what Mould does on this track. Instead of going full-on electronic as he did on Modulate, he’s taken what he’s learned and applied his influences to his signature style so that the song seems less like a formal excercise and more like a compelling pop song that feels both new and familiar. Given that United State of Electronica‘s debut album was one of Mould’s favorite records from 2004 and this record was written and produced last year, it seems very likely that their synthesis of Daft Punk-style vocodered disco pop and live rock band aesthetics was a key inspiration for this song’s arrangement. (Click here to pre-order it from Yep Rock, and here to visit Bob Mould’s blog.)

Ed Shepp “Partydance” – This track starts off as an extremely cheerful and dorky pop tune encouraging good health and dance parties, but as the song progresses, the message becomes increasingly harsh and judgmental before finally devolving into absurd scare tactics. (Click here to visit the official Ed Shepp website.)

Spanish Panthers Gored By Antlers

Doleful Lions “Strange Vibrations” – Now that it’s easy and affordable for DIY and indie musicians to make their own studio quality recordings on mass market equipment, the old lo-fi production style of the late 80s and early 90s has become more of an aesthetic decision than an option predetermined by economic factors. The Doleful Lions are certainly using the lo-fi sound to their advantage, as they bring their odd folk songs about magic, D&D-style fantasy, and satanic rituals to life with evocative bits of noise and carefully manipulated distortions as though it was the musical equivalent of cgi special effects. It’s such a small detail, but the thing that puts this particular song over the top for me is their clever use of distorted breath sounds on the microphone as a percussive element in the arrangement. (Click here to buy it from Darla.)

The Planet The “Please Don’t Kill Myself” – Memo to System of a Down, The Mars Volta, Coheed & Cambria, et al: Now that your nu-prog style has undeniably achieved mainstream success in the United States, it has become increasingly difficult for me to avoid your awful, awful music. Would you please consider following The Planet The’s example so that I can at least tolerate your music when I have to, say, watch you play on tv chat shows or hear you on the stereo when I pick up my comic books at the local Dork Shack? Here are five things you all can learn from them:

1) Just because you are prog, it doesn’t mean you can’t have hooks and catchy bits. The Planet The can do it; it is not impossible that you can too. You don’t have to be this glam and flamboyant, but it wouldn’t hurt.
2) Hey, this song is less than three minutes long! What a great idea!
3) Heavy metal guitars: boring, cliched, the musical equivalent of flogging a dead horse. Heavy metal keyboards: interesting, rare, so much potential.
4) The constant shifts in rhythm in this song create a feeling of nervous tension and drama, as opposed to just sounding overblown or scattered.
5) The Planet The do not have embarassing facial hair or ridiculous haircuts. Seriously, System of a Down. You are not wizards, pirates, or from outer space; please cut your hair!

(Click here to buy it from Buy Olympia.)

Yoko Kanno / Seatbelts “Tank (TV Edit)”

Yoko Kanno / Seatbelts “What Planet Is This?!?”

Endnotes and Digressions:

1.The comparison of “The Imperial March” to “Spoonful of Sugar” was totally
stolen from The DVD Journal’s review of the “Star Wars Trilogy” DVD set.

2. Writer/cartoonist M.E. Russell has website, and so does colorist/poker geek Chris Hanel.

(Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

A Little Charm Can Only Get So Far

Funny Ha Ha – If you’ve ever listened to a recording of yourself having a conversation, you’ve more than likely noticed with some degree of horror all of the verbal tics and filler that stuff up the cracks in your speech. Funny Ha Ha is a character study about an underemployed postcollegiate young woman named Marnie, but there isn’t much in the way of plot or arc. Instead, writer/director Andrew Bujalski and his cast of amateur actors give us a window into the inner lives of Marnie and her constellation of similarly directionless friends and acquaintances via the subtext of their fragmented language and subtly passive-aggressive behavior.

Marnie is a person who is entirely at the mercy of her kindness and generosity, allowing people to walk all over her as she clumsily attempts to mask her emotions for the sake of others and mutters a perpetual stream of apologies. Her fear of confrontation and rejection runs so deep that she’s practically straitjacketed her id lest anything ever “get weird.” Meanwhile, her submerged desires are so transparent that everyone around her knows exactly what she’s thinking, but since they share most of the same social dysfunctions, they never say exactly what they mean either. Since she is beautiful, witty, cool and endlessly accomodating, she is surrounded by people who like her, and more than a few men who nurse futile crushes on her. Sometimes she seems to be in denial about this but more often she seems overwhelmed by possibility and retreats into self-sabotaging behavior such as pining for the most unavailable man that she knows and keeping her friendships superficial and emotionally distant.

Funny Ha Ha is particularly interesting to me in contrast with Todd Holland and Bryan Fuller’s shortlived television series Wonderfalls, which I recently viewed in its entirety on dvd. Wonderfalls is also about an underemployed recent college graduate who isn’t quite sure what to make of her life and just so happens to be a funny, pretty, willowy brunette. The similarities mostly end there, though. Whereas Marnie is only occasionally articulate, Wonderfalls‘ Jaye Tyler seems overly impressed by her own cleverness and talent for sarcasm to the degree that it often alienates those around her. (See also: Lorelai Gilmore.) She’s built up her own misanthropic self-mythology to the point that she’s come to view her most aggravating flaws – a tendency for condescension, rudeness, selfabsorbtion, laziness, and a dismissive attitude towards anyone who can function and thrive in the “real world” – as being strengths worthy of celebration. She’s from an upper middle class family and graduated from an Ivy League school, but she’s strangely content living in a trailer park and working in a tourist-trap gift shop. She’s smart and talented, but lacks ambition and fears effort. She’s rejecting her privilege, but not for any moral or intellectual reason. She’s just scared and immature and slumming it out until something comes along and happens to her.

Wonderfalls‘ central gimmick is that Jaye interacts with mass-produced representations of animals who offer her practical and challenging advice that forces her to step outside of herself and discover her potential for change and capacity for helping others. The nature of the talking animals is wisely kept vague, but I choose to interpret it as simply being a manifestation of the disassociated rational part of herself that she barely acknowledges as being within her. Each episode is built around a different animal trinket and set up so that the episodes can more or less write themselves around this conceit, but the story actually would have been a lot better if it had been a executed as selfcontained movie. After the first three episodes, the program becomes repetitive and increasingly contrived. If the series was allowed to continue, I’m not confident that it would have held up, mainly because as Jaye becomes less selfabsorbed and more generous, the basic tension in the narrative would dissipate. The beginning of Jaye’s transformation is very engaging, but I suspect that the closer the character could get to the end result, the show would become increasingly dull and selfrighteous.

Funny Ha Ha would actually make more sense as an ongoing story, since it is already a series of vingnettes that begin and end abruptly. Though the film says everything that it needed to, the lead and supporting characters have plenty of room for growth and the situations are kept open-ended enough for indefinite continuation. If I was in charge of original programming at HBO, I would be throwing bags of cash at Bujalski and his cast to convince them to turn the movie into a series that could take the place of the departing Six Feet Under.

Though I recognize more from my own lived experience in Funny Ha Ha, Wonderfalls is a far more devasting narrative for me, primarily because I see so much of the worst in myself in Jaye Tyler. The arrogance, the sense of entitlement, the selfdefeating laziness – I couldn’t help but cringe constantly from identification. In spite of the fact that show is light, goofy, and highly stylized in a post-Joss Whedon sort of way, making my way through the episodes was actually a very difficult task since I would get bummed out after viewing every episode and put off watching the next installment for a few days. Funny Ha Ha is technically more downbeat (though it never quite comes off as melancholy, thankfully), but since I’m mostly recognizing my friends and acquaintances in its story rather than myself (Marnie is like a composite of at least six female friends that I’ve had over the years), it brings out my affection and sympathy for those types of people rather than touch on any of my own insecurities.

Charlotte Hatherley “Rescue Plan” – In one of the most amusing and endearing scenes in Funny Ha Ha, Marnie writes out of list of things to do – go a month without drinking, make friends with a co-worker, spend more time outdoors, learn how to play chess, some loosely defined “fitness initiative!!” That is nicely echoed in the lyrics of this song, as Charlotte Hatherley (yet another clever, pretty, willowy brunette!) sings about her own list of list of resolutions, which she calls a “rescue plan” to “guarantee” a change in herself. To Marnie’s credit, she actually goes out and makes a solid attempt to do everything on her list. It seems like a more healthy and realistic ap

proach to life than the more dramatic gestures of Jaye Tyler. It’s possible that more longterm change can result from a confluence of minor alterations of lifestyle and daily routine than from more radical steps that require a lot more energy and commitment, thus allowing for a greater opportunity for frustration and failure.

“Rescue Plan” is taken from Hatherley’s debut album, which remains one of my favorite records of the past five months. (It was released in the UK sometime in 2004, but I never heard it until January.) It’s not one of the most immediate songs on the record – in terms of instant likeability, it is difficult to compete with the singles “Kim Wilde” and “Bastardo,” and the epic “Stop” sounds like all the best indie rock of the 90s melted into a puddle – but it has a casual, easygoing charm that suits its lyrics rather well. I hadn’t fully paid attention to the words until just recently, but I had already associated the track with a mixture of doubt and cautious optimism. The arrangement and guitar playing on this song is absolutely lovely, but easily overlooked and underrated since it isn’t particularly flashy or fashionable. This is true for most everything on Hatherley’s record, which often seems like a love letter to the indie and alt rock of the 90s from a person who clearly loved Veruca Salt without any “guilty pleasure” baggage and seems to be one of the rare musicians who is more influenced by the songs on The Bends that weren’t gentle power ballads. (Click here to buy Charlotte Hatherley’s album from Double Dragon. Click here to buy the Wonderfalls dvd set from Amazon. Funny Ha Ha is currently playing at the Cinema Village in NYC, and will be airing on the Sundance Channel on 5/20 at 2 PM, 5/25 at 6:30 PM, and 5/28 at 7:30 PM.)

Look Long Time In My Pretty Eyes

The Twin (featuring Avenue D) “Fire-Desire” – In a genre dominated by homophobes, one excellent queer ragga song can seem like a minor miracle. Believe it or not, this is Boy George sparring off with raunchy NYC hipster booty MCs Avenue D for the affections of some lucky Chi-Chi Man. A bit of advice: If taken literally, “Can I put fire in your rectum?” is a kinky request that ought to be declined. (Click here to buy it from More Protein.)

Jonathan Coulton “Skullcrusher Mountain” – If you have a high tolerance for smirky humor and mainstream country pop, this will probably seem like some kind of gift from above. Coulton nails the contemporary glossy American singer-songwriter aesthetic while subverting the genre with bizarro lyrics written from the perspective of a reclusive mad scientist/supervillain in love with his dim-witted but beautiful hostage. Though the song is awash in a sea of irony, he nevertheless manages to make lines like “even my henchmen think I’m crazy” and “isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?” seem genuinely poignant by delivering the vocals with a sincere tone and employing the classic tricks of sappy pop songwriting. (Click here to buy it from Jonathan Coulton.)

It’s All So Temporary

The Hospitals “Rich People” – My favorite kind of noise-punk is all about a contagious enthusiasm for weird sounds rather than some macho, puerile need to be obnoxious and difficult. There’s so much raw energy and excitement in this track, it’s pretty much everything that I want from a DIY art punk record. By the time the big guitar riff (which sounds just like this one song a lot of marching bands play at football games) kicks in , it sounds like singer is surfing on an enormous tidal wave of delay. It’s impossible to imagine that these guys didn’t have an incredible amount of fun recording this session. (Click here to buy it from Midheaven.)

Kidz Bop “Since U Been Gone” (VIDEO – Click/save, please do not stream or direct link from elsewhere!) (mirror) – Wormseye Films’ video for the Kidz Bop version of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” might be the most joycore thing that I’ve ever seen. I can barely contain my enthusiasm for this video. It’s beautiful, clever, cute, inspiring and joyous. It’s the most satisfying piece of cinematic art that I’ve seen this year aside from Arrested Development. Here is a list of twenty things that I love about the clip. (Thank you to Scott Stereogum!)

01 The way that the directors seem to have no shame about what they are doing. I think that a lot of people wouldn’t fully commit to making a good video for a recording like this, but they seem to genuinely appreciate the song, and this completely ridiculous version of it. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Kidz Bop, this is a very faithful cover version recorded by session players, but with a whole bunch of little kids belting out the chorus along with the lead singer. The directors foreground the subtext of the Kidz Bop enterprise and strike gold with a clip about little kids pretending to be pop stars.

02 It’s such an earnest celebration of the creativity and imagination of children, not to mention their ability to make their own fun out of whatever is around them.

03 The way that the “let’s make our own video” aesthetic is maintained throughout all of the non-fantasy framing sequences up until the end, when it cuts to some random home video of a school event that they were taping over.

04 The way the animated drawings of the kid brother are super cute, but not really flashy. They look like actual kid drawings come to life.

05 The design of the animal costumes, especially the ZZ Top walrus. They get the right combination of cuteness and radness.

06 The chemistry between the kids playing the brother and sister. The little bits of bickering seem very real to me.

07 The kids in the audience are about half the age of the tween singer on stage, which totally makes sense with kid logic. Little kids expect pop stars to be older than them.

08 Shark microphone!

09 The face the girl makes when she mimes along to “I even fell for that stupid love song.” It’s like she knows everything and nothing about adult relationships. I remember being that age and aspiring to pop drama and relating to lyrics about things I’ve never experienced. Lucky for her she didn’t grow up with whiny alt-rock.

10 If only I could see just one show in my life where the audience is as uniformly enthusiastic and passionate as this bunch of kindergarteners.

11 The little brother gives the nod of approval from the sidelines – he’s a big shot manager!

12 I stop noticing that it’s not the Kelly Clarkson version of the song by the time the first chorus hits. Every single time!

13 The way that one little girl with the white collar looks like she’s having some kind of religious experience after the tween singer kicks her hair back after the “again and again and again” part.

14 The walrus clicking his sticks in the air during the “Maps” riff.

15 The tiger jumping up and doing a split!

16 The way that crazy Asian kid in the yellow shirt looks like he’s about to turn into the Incredible Hulk.

17 The way the dancing tiger seems clumsy, triumphant, and vaguely menacing all at the same time.

18 That solemn look the tween singer gives the camera before the end of the song. This was a lot of fun, but she’s serious!

19 The way that the singing zebra seems to come out of nowhere.

20 The gator is the archetypal rock bass player – lanky, unassuming, slightly goofy, prone to hopping. He’s Krist Novoselic in green felt.

Feeling Sick, Falling Down

Colder “Downtown” – I find that songs built around loops are best when the repetition is central to the theme of the overall piece. That is certainly the case with this track, which feels like some kind of horrible rut in life made tolerable by excessive medication and cheap thrills. It seems so effortlessly desperate and emotionally barren that I kind of worry for the mental state of its author. If they ever make a sequel to Trainspotting, this really ought to be on the soundtrack. (Click here for the closest thing to an official Colder site that I can find anywhere online.)

Krome Angels (featuring Vula) “Missing You (Sticky Vocal Mix)” – The r+b vocals on this song are somewhat generic, but it’s hard for me to put it down when it meshes so well with Sticky’s bright and bouncy backing track. The vocal hooks are generally effective, but the song really hits it when the half-sung/half-rapped part kicks in on the bridge and it sounds like a broken beat version of Destiny’s Child. (Click here to buy it from Juno.)

Elsewhere: I am this week’s guest writer for Seattle Weekly’s CDR-Go! column. Basically, I was asked to put together a mix cd and comment on the songs. Most of the selections should be very familiar to people who have been reading this blog consistently since the beginning of the year.

You’re A Nice Guy And I Hate You For That

Brown Brothers “Platform Blues” – I’m sure that it says a lot about me that one of the records that I’ve been most eagerly anticipating this year is the Brown Brothers’ collection of jazz covers of Pavement songs. This is a selection from that record; a rather stunning interpretation of one of the more underrated songs from Pavement’s final record, Terror Twilight. “Platform Blues” is one of the most ambitious compositions in Stephen Malkmus’ catalog, and I think that it can be argued that this arrangement and performance comes closer to achieving the goals of the song than were possible given the limitations of Pavement as an ensemble. Whereas the original is a recording of a charming rock band navigating through an unconventional structure and approximating jazz skronk, the Brown Brothers bring the piece full circle with its influences and realize the song’s full potential. Don’t mistake this record for being a simple cash-in tribute. These are inspired performances that bring new light to the work of one of the finest songwriters of the 20th century. (Click here to visit the Brown Brothers Recordings site.)

Eddie Gale “Black Rhythm Happening” – This recording is taken from Soul Jazz’s New Thing! collection, which is a survey of the period of experimentation in the American jazz scene following the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Emboldened by radical politics, the musicians included in the set also radicalized their approach to music and spirituality, often resulting in music that integrated genres and concepts from around the world and broke new ground in jazz fusion. “Black Rhythm Happening” is one of the most subtle yet potent selections from the compilation. The guitar and percussion groove is foregrounded and the vocals of the street choir recede into the background as though they are meant to be interpreted as a field recording. The occasional blasts of horns nearly overwhelm the arrangement, as though they are being superimposed over the recording. The mix and arrangement is very unconventional, but it lends an uncommon sense of depth and panoramic scope to the composition. (Click here to buy it from Soul Jazz Records.)

There’s A Battle On The Dancefloor

Scenario Rock “Skitzo Dancer (Justice Remix)” – “Give me something to dance to, and please, no techno.” Well, at least he just comes out and says it. It’s not a crime to want to dance to music with pop hooks and vocals and lyrics that get you in the mood for fun. This isn’t about hating on techno, and it’s not some kind of rockist manifesto. Having preferences is not the same thing as aesthetic fascism unless you err on the side of narrow-minded bigotry. This is just a song about having fun, and almost every lyric in this song is like a joycore slogan scrawled out in sharpie ink. This is exactly the kind of song that I need right now, and I wish that I had this handy this past Thursday night at the Hammerstein. (Click here to buy it from Juno.)

Weezer “Perfect Situation” – Nevermind the reactionary slams of Pinkerton loyalists – Weezer’s new album is actually pretty good. I don’t think that anyone could ever mistake Make Believe for being their best work, but to write off this record and the two that came before it simply for being uneven would be to misunderstand the band’s greatest strength. Weezer is a singles band. It doesn’t really matter if they put filler on their albums (there’s about eight good songs on Make Believe, up from six on Maladroit and five on The Green Album) because it’s all about the songs that will end up on their greatest hits collection, and that will inevitably become the best record in their discography. Watching their career unfold is basically like getting the best power pop cd ever slowly doled out over an installment plan.

“Beverly Hills” does nothing to damage their string of perfect singles. If anything, it’s one of their very best to date, up there with “Say It Ain’t So,” “Keep Fishin’,” and “El Scorcho.” I can’t help but feel that people who hate on “Beverly Hills” are guzzling crazy pills. It’s easily the best mainstream rock single of the year so far aside from Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” The song is a shoo-in for the next The OC mix cd, in as much as it is the premise and aesthetic of that show in the form of a three minute pop tune. “Beverly Hills” is essentially the ballad of Ryan Atwood, though the rest of the record, especially “Perfect Situation” and “The Other Way,” is pure Seth Cohen – cheerful and fun in spite of being selfabsorbed to the point of total obliviousness. At its best, the album sounds like a fantasy about being an American teenager in the 00s written by a guy who relates to them a little too well for his age and spends a bit too much time with them because he’s still an undergrad in his mid-30s.

Rivers Cuomo has always come off a guy in a state of arrested adolescence (but hey, that goes for a lot of artists) but the lyrics on Make Believe seem as though he’s either emulating the poetry and emotional intelligence of teens or writing especially for them. The specificity of context and attention to detail that made his early lyrics so charming and relatable are almost entirely missing from this record, replaced by direct statements presented in cold, unpoetic languange that nearly cancels out the emotional impact of what could be the most personal writing of his career. The lyrical content often seems very cynical, especially when one of the best songs on the album sounds as though it was written primarily to fill an underserviced niche in the marketplace for songs about loving your best friend, but if you give Cuomo the benefit of the doubt, you can’t help but assume that he’s an aloof weirdo with cold dead eyes trying to sing sincere, emotional music in spite of himself. That’s pretty fascinating to me, especially since I suspect that the guy might have Asperger’s syndrome after reading that recent cover article about the band in Rolling Stone. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Please Don’t Let Me Hit The Ground

New Order @ Hammerstein Ballroom 5/5/2005
Love Vigilantes / Crystal / Regret / Hey Now What You Doing? / Krafty / Transmission / True Faith / Run Wild / Jetstream (w/ Ana Matronic) / Waiting For The Siren’s Call / Bizarre Love Triangle / Love Will Tear Us Apart / Temptation // She’s Lost Control / Atmosphere / Blue Monday

New Order “Temptation (Live @ Finsbury Park 2002)” – This was a great show, but it was more satisfying for me than fun. I had learned about half of these songs in the past two weeks, so my feeling after the show was roughly similar to being confident that I passed a test after cramming the night before. As a result of my crash course in New Order’s discography, I was most excited to hear the songs that were new to me – “Love Vigilantes,” “Regret,” “Krafty,” and especially “Run Wild,” which is a relatively obscure gem that I am fairly certain I would not have discovered unless they had been playing it in recent sets. The big hits were a thrill, but I think I got more out of the giddy reactions of other audience members than the performances themselves, particularly during the trio of showstoppers that closed out the main set. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

For those of you interested in my DJ set, this is what I played:

Set one: Agentss “Agentss” / Johnny Boy “You Are The Generation… (Remix)” / Captain Comatose “To My Song” / Klaus Nomi “After The Fall” / Kylie Minogue “Sweet Music” / Cristina “What’s A Girl To Do” / Futon “Gay Boy” / Maxi Geil & Playcolt “Strange Sensation” / David Wrench “World War IV” / Meloboy “Hot Love” / Out Hud “It’s For You” / Gene Serene & John Downfall “U Want Me” / Lady Sovereign “Random” / Annie “Chewing Gum” / Lo-Fi-FNK “Unighted” / United State of Electronica “La Discoteca” / Fox “S-s-single Bed” / The Meters “Cabbage Alley (Cosby Alley)” / Bollywood Freaks “Don’t Stop Til You Get To Bollywood” / Arabesque “City Cats” / X-Wife “Action Plan” / Scissor Sisters “Music Is The Victim” / Jamie Lidell “Multiply” / Fox & Wolf “Youth Alcoholic” / Set two: The Silures “21 Ghosts” / M.I.A. “Bingo” / Love Is All “Make Out Fall Out Make Up” / Prince Francis “Street Doctor” / The Clash “Koka Kola” / The Fall “Theme From Sparta FC” / ESG “My Love For You” / The Knife “Heartbeats” / The Celestial Choir “Stand On The Word” / Prince “U Got The Look”

Lo-Fi-FNK “Unighted” – DJing to a room full of people standing around waiting for the headliner is fairly easy. There’s not much pressure or expectation placed on the DJ in that situation, so I could just relax and play Fluxblog’s Greatest Hits and try to keep people awake and energetic. It was somewhat difficult to gauge the audience’s reaction – I caught a bit of dancing here and there, and I had a few people ask me what I was playing a few times, so I took that as a sign that some people were enjoying my selections. At least four people asked me about Lo-Fi-FNK, so I assume that went over pretty well. It’s such an immediately ingratiating song; lord knows that if I heard it out and didn’t know what it was, I’d try to find out. (Click here to visit the official Lo-Fi-FNK site.)

Scattered Across The Concrete

Crime Mob “Knuck If You Buck (Pistol Pete Remix)” – Fluxblog exclusive! The original mix of “Knuck If You Buck” seems rather lethargic and ponderous in comparison to this frenetic speed-crunk remix by Pistol Pete, which feels like a much better match for the wild, violent theme of the lyrics. Whereas the original mix gets by on a sense of vague menace, this version sounds as though it’s about to bust out into a full-on riot. (If you’d like to contact Pistol Pete, you can email him at petervaleri @ hotmail.com. Click here to buy his previous white label.)

Agentss “Agentss” – The liner notes of Man Recordings’ new Não Wave compilation posits that this is the track that kicked off the Brazilian post-punk movement in the early ’80s. I can only take their word for it, but either way, this certainly sounds like the beginning of something. The entire track is like one long intro, starting off with a heavily reverbed passage with clips of distorted speech and chanting leading up to a spacey rock section with a lead synth part that sounds like R2-D2 doing a scat solo. (Click here to buy it from Other Music.)

Also: If you happen to be going to the New Order show at the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC tonight, you may want to show up a little bit early – I’ll be DJing before and after the opening act. It should be fun.

Can’t Help The State I’m In

The Russian Futurists “Our Pen’s Out Of Ink” – Every week, I listen to at least thirty new albums and eps, mostly by artists that I’ve never heard before. The genres can be all over the map, but every week I am nearly guaranteed to screen at least two records that are obviously inspired by one trend or another from the 1980s and/or old video game soundtracks. In spite of what is being said in several lazy reviews of the new Russian Futurists album that you can easily find via Google, their new album is not one of them. I can’t possibly imagine what these reviewers are hearing in this record that is particularly ’80s aside from the presence of keyboards, and the keyboard textures being used aren’t particularly reminiscent of textures widely used in that decade! (Well, the guy’s voice is a little bit like Green Gartside. I’ll allow that.) If anything, Our Thickness is a record that could not possibly exist without the ’90s happening first. The big distorted beats are equal parts industrial and David Friddmann; the tendency to obscure the vocals behind a loud, overwhelming arrangement is straight out of lo-fi and shoegazing; the cut-up style is definitely post-Beck; and the general cheery sound of the album is right in line with the wave of joycore pop coming out of this current decade. But oh no, it’s a record with a lot of electronic keyboards on it and it’s not dance music – it must be 80s retro, right? I SWEAR TO GOD IT JUST MAKES ME WANT TO PERFORM AMATEUR SURGERY ON THESE PEOPLE WITH MY FACE KNIFE. (Click here to buy it from Upper Class.)

Juliet “On The Dance Floor” – Wow, this is like the best Garbage song ever. There’s a certain lightness and grace to this track that I think is missing from Garbage’s actual recordings, which usually seem overbearing and leaden to my ears. The song has a wonderful velocity to it, as though it’s a rollercoaster building up to an exhilirating peak and then dropping you off quickly after the grand finale. Excellent stuff. (Click here to visit the official Juliet site.)

We’ll Have Bizarre Celebrations

Of Montreal “Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games)” – Don’t let the odd title fool you – this is most definitely a love song. And it’s a very sweet one too, as it imagines romance as an invitation to strange adventures and surreal fantasy. Imagination is so urgent and key, but somehow vastly underrated in the context of relationships. Every love affair should be like a bizarre celebration! (Click here to buy it from Polyvinyl Records.)

Ethan Lipton “Whitney Houston” – Though this song is catchy and amusing, you’re really only getting half of Ethan Lipton’s act by listening to this track. Backed by an “orchestra” consisting soley of a ukulele player, Lipton croons sad little songs packed full of absurd nonsequitors about running off with toothless one-eyed Ren Faire women, magic tricks called “happy!,” enjoying the sight of “thighs in the fatty position,” and in this case, chastising Whitney Houston for seducing and corrupting that “sweet, sweet Bobby Brown,” with a straight face and an incredible level of commitment. (Click here to visit Ethan Lipton’s official site.)

We’re Only Blood On Light On Life

Sonic Youth “Wish Fulfillment (Rehearsal Tapes Version)” – In the context of the Sonic Youth catalog, “Wish Fulfillment” has always been a bit of an oddity in the sense that it’s actually a pretty straightforward love song with a dynamic verse-chorus-verse structure that would have made a lot more sense on alt-rock radio than the actual singles released in support of Dirty. It’s not much of a surprise that the song is a popular favorite among Sonic Youth fans, particularly the ones who got into the band as a teenager in the ’90s. Though the lyrics heavily imply that the song is sung from the perspective of someone stalking a celebrity, it works just as well as a more generalized song about unrequited love. After all, being obsessed with a celebrity isn’t all that different from having an intense teenage crush on someone that you barely know. In both cases, it’s all about creating an elaborate fantasy to justify a superficial interest. It’s just a matter of degree, really. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

String Quartet Tribute To Sonic Youth “Wish Fulfillment” – As with many many of the best string quartet recordings of contemporary pop songs released on the Vitamin label, this version of “Wish Fulfillment” shows the song in a new light rather than simply coming off as an intriguing but inessential adaptation. (This is more or less the case for the rest of the album, though it is mostly quite lovely.) All of the melancholy and hopeless yearning in the original is amped up to nearly unbearable levels, resulting in a grand, dramatic tearjerker just begging to be used as the love theme of some incredibly depressing movie. (Click here to buy it from Vitamin Records.)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Most of the lukewarm or negative reviews that I have read about this movie thus far seem to be from devoted fans who feel as though they’ve been wronged by the adaptation, but since my geekiness has never taken the form of Hitchhiker’s fandom, I believe that I benefited greatly from coming to this film with only a tentative grasp on the concept. Basically, it’s just a very fun movie. It’s about as twee as a post-Star Wars space adventure is likely to get, with or without the brief scene in which the lead characters are rendered in yarn animation. The core cast is adorable but never cloying, and the jokes mostly hit the mark. (I especially enjoyed Sam Rockwell as the vapid charmer Zaphod Beeblebrox.) I admire the brisk pacing of the plot, though I must admit that at a few points in the story I was vaguely confused. Hopefully this film will do well enough to warrant the production of its sequels, as this movie was more of a set up for a series than a fully contained narrative. For me, this is no different from how I relate to the Harry Potter franchise – I am fairly indifferent to the source material, but I’m willing to have a couple hours of noncommital fun with the film version every other year or so.

Special Guest Post By John Cei Douglas!

Spoon “The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine” – As we all know, pictures are at least 500 times better than words. John Cei Douglas, the felt tip hip kid of the Midlands, is here to boggle your mind.

(Click here to pre-order it from Merge Records. If you wish to contact John Cei Douglas, you can email him at johnceidouglas @ gmail.com)