My Records of the Summer

Tomorrow I leave for my second year of college. I'm taking a two-day train across the country to Chicago, and most likely will be without internet access. In my final hours at home for the summer, I'm going to write a bit about the albums I spun the most this summer. As with most of the lists I do, they don't represent what I think are the "best" albums, just the ones I personally favored the most.


Ratatat - LP3

Ever since their first album (which I loved immediately), it's taken a while for their newest material to grow on me. There have been a lot of times where I just wanted some instrumental to fill in the silence, and that's given me a lot of time to absorb this album, and I've come to find a place for this album just as I have for their other two. "Mirando" always packs a twittering punch, and "Dura" got a lot of spins as well. From the sound of the album and the song titles, this somehow has tinges of Spanish and Eastern influences, which is experimentation enough on the great electronic formula Ratatat have for me. I remember a lot of critics wondering if the "gimmick" of their first album could spawn others, and I really admire their ability to keep finding new ways to make electronic instrumentals interesting.



Girl Talk - Feed the Animals

I was really not impressed when I saw Girl Talk perform at Northwestern in the winter, so this album really came out of left field for me. I didn't pay anything for it, as Gregg Gillis offered it up for free (you can kind of see why, considering all the songs he samples freely and with complete reckless abandon). For some reason this album rang differently to me. Where on other albums I'd feel frustrated by how fast the samples were burned up to move through a song, I felt that they lingered just long enough to capture our attention, and then moved onto something else at the right time. I danced many times to this entire record at parties and in the car over the course of the summer, and I was really taken aback at how much I like what he did on this record. I love being able to laugh at what he's sampling (the moment "Steal My Sunshine" comes on for 10 seconds is the best shout out on the entire CD to me, though "In A Big Country" is a close second). I had so much fun listening to this album in the past couple months; it'll always be linked to anything I remember from this summer, and that's the best praise I can give it.



The Hold Steady - Stay Positive

I remembering reading about The Hold Steady for the first time the summer before my senior year of high school when a RollingStone writer called them the best band of the decade. Since I'd never heard of them I picked up their debut and have been hooked ever since. Boys and Girls in America is a really hard album to top, but Stay Positive is another in a line of very consistent, very strong records for the band. They deserve all the critical praise they get, and while there's no song here to match my favorite from the last "Hot Soft Light" there are some great barn burners. "Constructive Summer" was an early song of the summer favorite for me, and "Sequestered in Memphis" was played many a time as I drove the highways with my windows down. I really dig the earthy feel of the album art and how it fits the Americana storytelling of the record. I just really like seeing a good band put out something deserving of their name.



Black Kids - Partie Traumatic

I never did get around to commenting on the ridiculousness surrounding the debut album of the much-buzzed about Jacksonville, FL band, so I guess now comes my compressed and delayed reaction. Pitchfork gave their debut EP an 8.4, and then inexplicably gave their full-length debut a non-review of 3.3 just nine short months later. I've seen a lot of internet reviewers trying to build and break down hype with their writing alone, but this case got out of hand quickly. The review smelled terribly of Pitchfork drumming up an audience for itself rather than making good on its intended purpose of reviewing and reacting to music in a helpful and informative fashion. It was more in tune with this Onion article than any well-written review they've ever posted.

Buzz and backlash aside, they did release four tracks from their debut EP re-recorded along with only six other tracks, but I still really like the album. I think the best four tracks close out the record, beginning with their awesome single "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You" and continuing through "Love Me Already", "I Want To Be Your Limosine", and "Look At Me (When I Rock Wichoo)." It's some nice dance-rock, and if people could focus on the music instead of the cloud of internet whining trying to grab at people's attention, everyone could see the strong record underneath it all.



Conor Oberst - Conor Oberst

A song that overstays its welcome and lasts too long for its own good is painfully bad. Conversely, a fantastic song that ends too soon is a masterful achievement. Clocking in at just 1:12, "NYC - Gone,Gone" was my favorite song of the summer, and ever since first hearing songs from the record I've been absolutely hooked on it. Aside from the fifty second interlude that is "Valley Mistico (Ruben's Song)", there is not a single weak song on this record. Somehow Oberst found himself using his own name and freeing himself of his longtime producer down in Mexico. From the opening notes of "Cape Canaveral" to the closing of "Milk Thistle" I was stunned. I've liked a lot from his past three records, but this album rang out a "return to form" vibe, and never gave it up. "Eagle On a Pole" is a standout, as are "Danny Callahan" and "Moab." Like I said, it's hard to pick a bad song from the bunch, and it's one of those rare albums that I can listen straight through without skipping a single track.



Bloc Party - Intimacy

It's taken a couple weeks, but just like I thought, the new Bloc Party album is already growing on me. I spin "Halo" a couple times a day, and "Trojan Horse", first single "Mercury" and "Biko" get frequent plays as well. I didn't like the places Bloc Party was growing towards, but now I've accepted the direction and enjoy the sounds. There's less angular, typical guitar work here and much more of Okereke's ideas at play here, but the other members do fill in the bits in fantastic ways. The bells in "Signs" shimmer nicely, and there are still a few walls to be broken down in "One Month Off." They do sound a bit like they didn't their ideas air out to a public reaction before settling on a final draft, but it's still a really enjoyable record, especially for a rabid Bloc Party fan like myself.


There you have it, my records of the summer. Hopefully some of the big profile fall releases will prove to be worth their salt, and maybe this year I'll actually get around to posting a list of my favorite records of the entire year.

Take Two: Radiohead

A while ago I was wondering what it would be like to boil down the albums of an entire career into just a few songs. Beyond that, what it would be like to only be able to choose a few songs off each album, making a different kind of "greatest hits" collection. Most of the time you like some albums in a discography more than others and would choose more tracks from there, but that's not the case with these posts.

I'm going to go back into some of my favorite artists who have released four or more albums, and pick two favorite tracks from each album to list. I'm not looking for "greatest" song or big hits, I'm just picking the songs I like the most off of each record. It's especially hard to do because you end up with songs that would be on the list if you weren't limiting yourself to only two songs per album.


Pablo Honey
"Creep" - Just because they hated the touring after their one mainstream hit doesn't mean it isn't a great song. Hell, it's an iconic guitar entrance at the chorus.

"Anyone Can Play Guitar" - Their debut is certainly their weakest album (there aren't too many worthwhile modern bands you can say that about...), but I still find myself coming back to this song when I'm in a Radiohead groove.


The Bends
"Fake Plastic Trees" - I'm a sucker for Thom Yorke beginning a song with just his voice and acoustic guitar.

"My Iron Lung" - One of my favorite opening riffs of any song, ever. People say that this album is what Radiohead would sound like if they didn't go down the creative rabbit hole of Ok Computer, but I'd disagree a little bit. This is a huge step forward from Pablo Honey and was probably just as much of a departure as any of their other albums. They hated the late recognition "Creep" got them and just completely turned away from that attitude.


Ok Computer
"Paranoid Android" - The epic, operatic centerpiece of the album to me. The legend goes that the band stayed up an entire night orchestrating all the instrumentation for the song, and then Thom Yorke heard it and laid down the vocals in one take. The lyrics in the breakdown (especially "kicking, screaming, Gucci little piggy") are some of the best I've ever heard.

"Exit Music (For A Film)" - Originally composed for the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack in the mid 90s (I can hear the play's influence a little bit in the verses), it shows off one of my favorite aspects of Radiohead in the shift from just acoustic guitar and airy noises to a bellowing bass shift that thunders through the track.


Kid A
"Kid A" - I keep picking some soft songs off these records, but damn if Radiohead doesn't do both extremes fantastically and blend them together too. This is probably my 2nd favorite record, and I love the masked vocals so much. Deciphering the words coming out of Yorke's mouth surrounded by the lush sonic landscape is simply beautiful.

"The National Anthem" - How can this cacophany immediately follow the title track on Kid A. What balls, Radiohead! My favorite softer song is followed immediately by their most destructive rocking, but then the horn section comes in. It's like rock mixed with experimental jazz, and then everything cuts out to let Yorke say his piece.


Amnesiac
"Like Spinning Plates" - There's no hiding that this is my least favorite Radiohead album after Pablo Honey, and there are songs off Ok Computer and Hail to the Thief that would bump these two songs off, but they're still great tracks. This track debuts the opening effect that went on to open another great track on Hail to The Thief ("The Gloaming"), and to my mind it kind of represents the sound of spinning plates pretty well. It's a hyper-realistic experience to listen to Radiohead, espeically in a dark setting and a contemplative mood. These are records that make me want to bring back the days of just putting on some music and sitting down with friends, or alone, to listen through it.

"I Might Be Wrong" - This is definitely one of the tracks that separates Amnesiac as something more than a b-sides album to the Kid A sessions. Its got a great backing beat and guitar riff, and the style just feels all its own. That's one thing that always amazes me about the band: their ability to write songs and keep them gestating over multiple sessions, but still have a stylistically cohesive album that sounds as though it was all written at the same time.


Hail to the Thief
"2+2=5" - This is still probably my favorite Radiohead song of all time. I love the guitar being plugged in at the start, the incidental dialogue, the opening riff, the frenetic, gasping-for-breath ending, the otherworldly post-apocalyptic 1984 feeling it instills right from the get-go. This song convinced me to buy into Radiohead as a band, and for that it remains my favorite.

"There There" - Again I choose contrasting songs, this with a much more mellow track, but there's still a feeling of claustraphobia, trapped anger, some emotion waiting just beneath the surface. This whole album feels very alive to me, like its a time capsule for that time in 2003. It's one of those records I can throw on and feel transported to the past.


In Rainbows
"All I Need" - The bass and piano make this song for me. This entire song feels effortless to me, but it's so well crafted and executed. It may have taken four years between albums for the band, but man was In Rainbows worth the wait.

"Reckoner" - I haven't really mentioned Johnny Greenwood a lot and have been mostly praising Thom Yorke, but good lord do I love the little guitar bits here. The things that impress me most about the guitars in Radiohead's work is how subtle it can be, and the many uses they've found for a guitar. They don't use the traditional rock instruments in the same way that all other bands do; they're able to use a guitar to fill gaps instead of set the tone.


So there you have it, my inagural Take Two post. I'll be putting up another one of these later in the week for another artist, I've just got to choose from among the four album plus contenders.

My Favorite Albums of 2007

Most of the time, I really don’t like top ten lists. I’d much rather make a list of 10 albums, movies, or whatever else I liked from the year regardless of rank. However, I do still think in my head about where I would rank albums over others. Since that’s going on in my head, despite my best efforts I make ranked lists at the end of each year. I make my lists based on what I liked from the year, and not on what hot, buzzed-about band every zine and blog goes crazy over that particular year. You're not going to find any Animal Collective, Panda Bear, or LCD Soundsystem on here, I just don't like any of that enough to even consider putting it on a list. I respect those releases, but when I do stuff like this, its about what I like.

I think this year has been a pretty good one for music. A lot of times you hear in the press that the year sucked for music, that ten or twenty years ago there was a much higher mean quality of music, but I tend to disagree. I can always find ten albums that I believe legitimately deserve to be remembered from the year, and 2007 is no exception. Here is my list of my top 10 favorite albums of the past twelve months:


10. Bright Eyes – Cassadaga

Conor Obherst finally dropped the boy wonder label with this release, recorded all over the country while he recovered from addictions he suffered from on the tours following his two releases in 2005. The album sounded mature, unwavering, soulful, and honest. I saw him play a concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, and with an orchestra behind him Obherst brings the house down on these tracks. It’s great to see him being experimental with his sound while his lyrics add much welcomed maturity to their originality and poetry.


9. Arcade Fire – Neon Bible

When I first heard the album, I didn’t really like it except the only previously released song “No Cars Go” because that song is to this day my favorite Arcade Fire track. Over the course of the year though, the album grew on me and deepened in the same way the band changed “No Cars Go” from its first incarnation into the thundering, string heavy, powerful barnburner it is on Bible. They transcended the sophomore slump, and I can’t wait to hear what they’ve got in store for their next, most likely even more ambitious disc.


8. Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare

One of my favorite songs from the year is “Fluorescent Adolescent,” and these English boys delivered another album full of great images of their travels. From the description of a friend in “Brianstorm” to a warning of hometown fans in “If You Were There, Beware” the whole album tells a great series of stories. It moves along at a masterful pace for the first six tracks, takes a break on “Only Ones Who Know” and then plunges into another race until the last track “505.” The last four songs are still the best ending to an album I’ve heard in a very long time.


7. Paramore – Riot!

Sometimes all you want to do when you listen to music is have fun, and no record I heard this year did that better than Riot!, the second album from Paramore. It’s loud, raucous, raging, pulsing, and just a huge good time of an album. It’s full of punchy guitars and loud, fast choruses, and I loved every one of them.


6. Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, & Interference – Once Soundtrack

I love the film for what it is, but it is undeniable that what gave Once its strength was the quality of the songs written for the film by Hansard and Irglova. Achingly powerful in their raw energy, Hansard belts his lungs out on songs like “Leave” and “Say It To Me Now,” but it is the chemistry between Hansard and Irglova (now an official couple off the set of the film) makes “Falling Slowly” and “When Your Mind’s Made Up” some of the best songs ever written for a film. I have no qualms about saying this is the best film soundtrack for popular music since Purple Rain.


5. Radiohead – In Rainbows

It’s on almost everyone else’s year end lists, and if I were to make a list of the most important releases of the year, this would without a doubt be at the top. I love Radiohead, I can’t stop following them down the creative rabbit hole they’ve made for themselves with every successive album. I marvel at the way they are able to go in almost any direction and make a great work of art. This time around they made their most cohesive, thematically tight album since OK Computer. No album Radiohead makes sounds like a previous work, so comparison to a different album’s sound is almost pointless, but taken as another fantastic album in a series, In Rainbows stands above a lot of the bands’ recent work.


4. Bloc Party – A Weekend in the City

A lot of people were turned off by the direction Bloc Party took with their sophomore disc. Kele Okereke chose to create a cohesive, story oriented album about life in a metropolis. Since their debut was such a party-oriented, fun-filled rock fest, this understandably turned a good amount of people off; but those that stuck around were rewarded with a fantastic concept album that plays through better with every subsequent listen. Okereke is clearly scared of London and the life that city fosters in people. The Xenophobia present in "The Prayer" and "Where is Home?" is palpable, with the fear and terror coming through in the music. The rest of the band kept the sound very tight, with Matt Tong's drumming still ranking with the best around. I heard this album develop from the early live debuts of some of the tracks, and the lyric changes only made the album better. If Silent Alarm was the sound of a late-night party, then A Weekend in the City is the sound of knowing you have to eventually leave hat party and walk home through the dark and unfriendly city. Bloc Party captured life in a big city better than any band since The Clash in London Calling, and it'll probably be another thirty years before anyone gets this close again.


3. Daphne Loves Derby – Good Night, Witness Light

They’re my favorite band for a reason, and every song on here resonates with me in a deeper way than anything I heard all year. These boys from the Seattle area possess some of my favorite indie rock ever made, and front man Kenny Choi really got poetic with his lyrics this time around. The title was named after a line from a Robert Frost poem, and the rest of the lyrics grapple with personal issues and finding a place in the world. I’ve loved this band ever since I first heard them as a wide eyed high school sophomore, and I haven’t stopped since.


2. Rilo Kiley – Under the Blacklight

Longtime fans of the band were up in arms over the sound of the first single off this record, “Moneymaker”, but in retrospect all the criticisms of the album and the new direction the band took seem insignificant in light of the masterful piece of pop music they created. It’s a portrait of Los Angeles, but also a perfectly crafted breakup album of Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett, the worst band mate breakup since Gwen Stefani and that bassist from No Doubt. Instead of just getting “Don’t Speak” out of it, Rilo Kiley got an entire album full of great tracks that fly by over Under the Blacklight’s short running time. Everything about the band over the past few years is examined in the lyrics and sound of these songs, and everything is fantastic.


1. Bloc Party – Another Weekend in the City

Some people might see this as cheating, but I don't give a damn. From the first time I read about the amount of b-sides Bloc Party was putting on different releases of A Weekend in the City I was ready to listen. The idea made fiscal sense because the actual album had been leaked in December of 2006, but it also was sonically different from what made it onto their sophomore album. Instead of being tight thematically in line with songs about a foreboding metropolis, these tracks were more akin to their debut, full of carefree, ballsy, danceable rock. When I first saw the band, it was the first time I had danced through the entire set of a rock band, and I loved that feeling. Listening to these tracks, in the order originally postulated on the Good, the Bad, & the Unknown the week of the emergence of the tracks, I can't believe that a band could release an amazing concept album, but have an equal amount of great rock-out tracks just waiting in the wings. Yes, the album is unofficial, as is the title, tracklisting, and album cover, but I didn't listen any album by any band, new, established, favorite or otherwise than this collection of 11 Bloc Party "b-sides." Considering the quality of all the tracks Bloc Party has released as so-called "b-sides," including "Two More Years" "Tulips" "Flux" and the entirety of these tracks, I have a hard time coming up with a single song they've created that isn't a great one.

Before the Weather Outside Gets Frightful...

Fall Quarter at Northwestern ends in a little under three weeks. I've pretty much finished everything up until I take my finals, so I haven't really had any real work to do and it's felt prematurely like the end of the year. The weather also hasn't gotten too horrific yet. It's been consistently in the 30s, but for the Chicago area in November that's pretty good. There hasn't been any big snowfall, though we've seen a bit of snow in the past two weeks. None of it is sticking, and no amount that is actually recordable.

I have officially begun my Christmas shopping for this year. I always end up making a list that I lose multiple times before getting all my gift shopping done, but who cares, I always have fun going and shopping during Christmas season. It's the one time of the year where I do not dread a long excursion to a mall or other shopping center. Being on a college campus means I've got a little bit of a weird distance to travel for buying stuff, but it's still very fun for me because I love this season and Christmas.

Going with those end of the year type mentalities, I decided to make a mix of songs with the months of the year in their title. I think it's a pretty diverse array of artists, and an enjoyable little playlist. Enjoy:

mewithoutYou - January 1979
Bright Eyes - Happy Birthday To Me (Feb. 15)
Rogue Wave - March
Gillian Welch - April the 14th(Part 1)
Elvis Perkins - May Day!
Bright Eyes - June on the West Coast
The Decemberists - July, July!
Rilo Kiley - August
Earth, Wind, & Fire - September
Be Your Own Pet - October, First Account
Guns N' Roses - November Rain
Weezer - December


I enjoy how this list will lead in to my Christmas music stuff for the month of December. Things to look for in the coming weeks:

1. Early review of Jason Reitman's new film Juno that I caught a preview screening of in downtown Chicago a little while ago.

2. Year end album and movie lists for 2007.

3. More alt-rock christmas covers than you can shake a stick at.

The Dying Summer: Best Albums

Summer officially ended on September first, so as Labor Day Weekend bids adieu to the warm season, I thought I'd put up a list of my top records released over the course of this summer, ranked in no particular order. Some may come as a surprise, and a few actually surprised me with how long they stayed stuck in my head and stereo these past few months. There are a few samples of the records, but they are all great, so go out and buy one for future enjoyment.


Under the Blacklight - Rilo Kiley

Okay, so I've now gone back and listened to Rilo Kiley's earlier albums, and I think I'm starting to understand why longtime fans are pretty upset over the departure this record is from their previous sound. That being said, I still think its a half hour masterwork of pop music. I can't skip a song, even the fan hated lead single "Moneymaker". The last couple songs are pitch perfect, as is my favorite track, "Breakin' Up"


Once Original Soundtrack

Every summer I used to attend a big music festival in the Bay Area and make a great personal discovery in the form of a band I'd never heard of before the concert. This year, for the first time in many years, I was unable to go, so I had to turn elsewhere to get my summer fix. Then Once came along, the indie film sensation, accompanied by its soundtrack, a collection of collaborations between the film's two stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. I love every single track, just like I pretty much adore every scene in the movie in some way. "When Your Mind's Made Up" and "Fallen From the Sky" come from the studio scene in the movie, which was far and away my favorite in the whole film.


Interpol - Our Love to Admire

When I was in 8th grade, I saw a festival the day before I graduated middle school. Interpol was on the bill, but I had never heard of them. After their half hour set, I was breathing heavily from having endured pounding sound waves to my chest because Carlos D's bass was turned up so loud and hammered out of the speakers at the crowd; in other words, I was hooked. While their debut Turn on the Bright Lights remains my favorite album, I still like this album, their 3rd release. I'll have another post up in the future about my exact gripes with the album, but they boil down to a lack of Carlos D and drummer Fogarino on the tracks. Even still, "No I in Threesome", "My Chemistry", and lead single "The Heinrich Maneuver" are standouts enough to keep this album on constant rotation for me.


Is Is EP - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

The first time I saw YYY's live was like a religious experience for me. Karen O was going nuts onstage, Zinner was freaking out on guitar, and the crowd was going wild. I just love the band, and especially their second album. I've been a fan since their EPs a couple years back, but Show Your Bones really got me listening heavily. This EP, much like reviewers have been saying since its release, sounds a bit like a combination of SYB and their debut Fever To Tell, which is more of a compliment than a criticism in my mind. It has the catchy melodies and riffs like SYB and a dash of the raw energy on FTT, and it was over much too quickly for my tastes. Yes, it's an EP instead of a full length record, but as far as summer releases go, this one is a winner.


Riot! - Paramore

Normally, I would only indulge in this kind of music as a guilty pleasure. I got started listening to Paramore after becoming a fan of Be Your Own Pet, sort of a raunchier, dirtier version of this band. They've got somewhat of the same dynamic, passionate, outgoing female lead singer, but something on this record struck a chord with me and I've been listening to it over and over throughout the summer. I don't know why, but it just works for me when it's pumping through my stero while driving through the heat or just chilling out around the house. By the time a year-end list rolls around, I doubt whether this record will make the cut in my mind in terms of "best quality music," but in terms of summer entertainment value, Riot! acts like a kick-ass summer blockbuster flick, and seriously rocks out.


Samples:

Rilo Kiley - Give a Little Love
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Rockers to Swallow
Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova - If You Want Me (Once Soundtrack)