Everything I am Listening To 1

Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

I haven't listened to a Mogwai album since Happy Songs for Happy People--which was listening to significantly less than Mogwai Young Team (but more as a result of MYT's strengths than HPFHP's weaknesses)--but an album carrying this name and this album art (look at it) is a lot tougher to ignore than something with a silly looking eagle on it.

And maybe it's not as good as Young Team. And maybe it's not as loud and brutal as the title might imply (still bring earplugs to the show), but it is a solid album. More the most part, Mogwai make music that sounds like Mogwai; it's a fine thing, that. Here and there little memorable bits emerge (it was the 'Death Rays' synth noise that make me call it the best song I've heard in 2011. Only two days into the year, but still). Overall, then, Mogwai remains a post-rock-ish band who makes post-rock-ish albums.

Lil B - Angels Exodus

It's a mystery why this things ends up being nearly as listenable as it actually is. There's more to appreciate here than the astonishing horribleness of 2010's "ambient based freestyles" collection "Rain in England". But the tracks where B might just show evidence of becoming a competent MC are probably not the ones to show your friends. It's the "Life Zombies" (some sort of Resident Evil ode) you'll play for friends in the car. "1 Time" sounds like he's getting there, and "Vampires" might be one of B's best tracks to date, until he closes by doing his best Andy Samberg-"boiled-guuse" voice while exclaiming "don't let the vompires getchoo!" a few times. Choices are


Lil B - Free Music: The Complete Myspace Collection

This is a mixtape that collects all of the tracks Lil B uploaded to his various (uh, 120+) MySpace throughout 2009/2010. So, here's a 676 track, 40 hour long, 2.5 gigabyte collection that I spent more time cleaning out hard drive space than I've so far been able to stand sitting through a fraction of the thing. It's completely triumphant. It's a 0.0 and it's a 10.0. It's a testament to B's mission to be "based for life", but a totally indigestible one. The best we can hope for is to listen to a track here and there, understand and be glad this insane, unfiltered level of proliferation is over with.

Lil B - Red Flame (Devil Music Edition)

And finally, Lil B's first mixtape of 2011. Though the distinction seems a little silly, since both feature stolen beats and original McCarthy GarageBand creations. Either way, positivity seems to be the theme of this newest "rare music" collection, picking up where "Motivation" left off. Again, this trends away from the truly bizarre, but manages to end up something Lil B really never was before: sort of forgetful. His background track skipping and his claims at Red Flame (Devil Music Edition) being the most influential and prolific mixtape of all time are what gets remembered. With some three "albums" and who knows how many mixtapes on deck for the rest of the year, there's probably not much reason to worry.\

Tennis - Cape Dory

A band that sounds like another band making music for a different season. Tennis, Headlights, summer. But the reason I like Headlights, despite them probably being, objectively, sort of kind of dull, is because they sound like fall. It's not hard to hear the sounds of summer's exit in their little pop medleys. "So Much for the Afternoon" sounded like slipping into sleep as the sun began setting earlier even before Casiotone for the Painfully Alone made it undeniable on his remix.

Maybe Cape Dory will be a really nice album to play while sleepy once this snow melts for good. it's just a matter of remembering it until then.


Beans - End It All

More weirdo rap. But in the most opposite of ways compared to, say, oh, the Based God. While the Pretty Bitch sometimes seems like he doesn't always have enough (and not only content-wise; he sometimes just sort of stops), Beans' flow is unrelenting. He talk/raps through every inch of his fourth album (his first in the good company of anticon.), over beats sent in from all over (Four Tet, Tobacco, some dude from Interpol), sounding different but sounding pretty far from B's GarageBand compositions.

Listening to the 30 odd minutes of End It All, it's not hard to draw (MF)/DOOM comparisons. Music that is so obviously rap, but so far stylistically distanced from 99% of what is going on in the rest of the genre. And not always in an accessible, easy, or likable way. The allure is difficult to explain, but the album's length makes it easy enough to sit through a few times, even if you don't end up any closer to explaining the compulsion.

Braids - Native Speaker

"Feels-era Animal Collective with a girl singer". That description works, but kind of dodges a better one: that Braids also sounds a lot like the Brooklyn-based duo High Places. It's, again, a vocal thing. Mary Pearson sounds a lot like Braids' Katie Lee. And it's a watery loop thing. And it's "not a totally outstanding yet" thing. Native Speaker's standouts are almost always surrounded by fun-limiting droney nothingness sequences that work against the outstanding momentum tracks like "Lemonade" so effortlessly build.

soon:

Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972
Bright Eyes - The People's Key
Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs. Evil
Destroyer - Kaputt
Radiohead - The King of Limbs
Sam Mickens - Sinistra Secco
James Blake - s/t
The Decemberists - The King is Dead
Buck 65 - 20 Odd Years
Akron/Family - S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT

Natural Light Will Need Nice Weather Soon

sNOw MORE SNOW

please

Daytrotter Notes, Jan 6-Jan 10

January 6 - Lone Wolf

Piano on the first track sounds really cool. I don't know if it's how it was recorded (hot and peaking all over the place), or if it's some sort of synth sounding like a piano and a harpsichord sounding at once. Whatever it is, the effect is really neat and is definitely a compliment to rest of the sad-but-still-jaunty-and-catchy song. That fake, long, hyphenated word describes the session pretty well. The other three songs in the session are all played on guitar, where pretty, driving, fingerpicked melodies compliment the strong, soulful (?) vocal really well. This was nice.

Notable track(s): 15 Letters

January 6 - Active Child

Legitimately pretty songs, maybe even ones that accomplish something beyond sounding pretty. It is pretty obviously the striking voices, somewhere between Andrew Bird and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg, are responsible for a vast majority of it, but the sparse, airy strings don't hurt.

Notable track(s): Wilderness

RIYL: Shearwater

January 7 - Happy Birthday

The first song, 'Evergreen', was a pretty, slow, pleasant sounding song that probably reminds you over a dozen others, but in an ok way. I liked the little bass line that is mostly tucked away beneath the guitar. The other three songs really took a turn, devolving into a messy sounding, raucous distorted, still twee-ish thing. The sort of music that might be fun live but doesn't really interest me on record too much.

January 8 - We Are Country Mice

Words thought of: southern rock, classic rock, psych-rock, the 60s, the 70s. We Are Country Mice sound like all of those things, for better or worse. I am probably not well-versed enough in any of those topics to name names, but the band definitely spends a lot of time sounding like something you've probably heard before. The final track, "Close Behind", caught my attention more than the others, staying fairly minimal and spacey (and staying sounding a lot like Pink Floyd (ooops, a name), until the thing explodes in its 90 seconds. Crunchy, echoey guitars.

January 9 - Wartime Blues

The riff-driven "California Winter" draws heavily from the same sonic palate Modest Mouse (which I'll be careful to not call "theirs" (see: a few sentences down)) has drawn from on several slower songs, while the rollicking "Grain Belt" would, musically, easily fit in somewhere on Bright Eyes' LIFTED. I hate that I can't do more than say "sort of sounds like Modest Mouse!" or "sort of makes me think of Bright Eyes!" when it comes to things that can be described at a high level as some combination of indie/folk/rock. But it is those comparisons are the ones that are easiest and most apparent for me.

I can talk about things that beep and boop a lot better than ones that twang.

January 10 - OK Go

Inoffensive, if not genetic indie rock/power pop stuff. All of the reverb on "White Knuckles" surprised me (I really like reverb, guys), but really all it does is drag out each sound of what is, more or less, to me anyway, completely ineffectual music.

It is a weird feeling. To feel like you are just not ready to go ahead and create something specific, not yet. Like having a novel you want to write, but somehow knowing you are just not ready to do that.

I feel a little bit like that and can't really explain it to much better.

I've had the words "______ Fight Song" written down on a post-it for a while.

I don't know what it is. But that is what it is called.

Caltrain blog 2

This train isn't nearly as nice.

But with how good the rest of absolutely everything is, i barely noticed.

I am going to say 'I love you' in every volume of voice I have.

Daytrotter Notes, Jan 1-Jan 5

Every year, for the past two or three [years], I've resolved to listen to every session daytrotter.com posts (which these days is 365+ a year). In 2010 I made in three months or so before falling a few weeks behind and went back to picking and choosing, mostly bands I already liked. Which isn't really a good way to find out about new things at all.

So I am trying something new! It is called "write a little blurb about each session this year". Mostly for my own reference down the road, but maybe having a place to put it will keep me on top of it a little more. Maybe something will sound nice, or I will make a comparison to a band someone really likes/hate and they will check it out and find new things along with me.

January 1 - Korean is Asian

The year started with what might be the hardest type of music for me to write about. Not because I don't like it, or really like it, or have trouble understand how anyone could like it; just, there are so many things that sounds like this. Even a few days later I can't really recall what this band really was about outside of 'acoustic folky music' even though I listened to the session three times. And it's nothing against them. I just don't know if I have the vocabulary for it anymore. Sorry, guys.

January 2 - Eagle Seagull

I liked this a little more. A lot of the songs they played had some neat things going on aesthetically once in a while. Between lots of sparse jangling guitar (think early Modest Mouse) and some really constant fiddling, it's a fun listen. I guess the vocal (and what is going on lyrically, really) isn't the most original sounding thing if you've heard Franz Ferdinand or the Killers any of the copy-catish bands that popped up around the same time in 2006, but it's nothing that bothered me too much.

Apparently this band released their second album last year and then broke up. That is kind of sad.

January 3 - MGMT

I am sort of weird about MGMT. I am pretty aware of them, and they have their place, I guess, but their place is sort of removed from anything I care about musically. But this was all a lot less irritating than I was expecting. Maybe it was that the set the played here was a lot less electronically-based/reliant (which is usually what I am all into, so I do not know what is up), but these tracks were nice. When they are using synths it's not overpowering. The drone-y pitches in 'I Found a Whistle' work really well. I don't know if they are going to win anyone over, totally, or anything, but it's inoffensive. I sort of would have liked to hear 'Kids' arranged like this.

Notable track(s): "I Found a Whistle"

January 4 - DJ Spooky

The most interesting part of the single track "Daytrotter Mix" is probably the short, found sound collage that serves as the mix's intro. Not that the rest is bad, or not well done, but I am probably not alone in finding it more and more difficult to be impressed by straightforward DJ stuff in a post-Girl Talk world. It ends a bit stronger though. Programmed drums over post-rock violins. Kind of neat, I guess.

January 5 - Twin Shadow

This is a band who put out one of my favorite albums of 2010 so it was exciting to see him here, but even more exciting were the live in studio arrangements. I missed out on seeing him live back in October or November and knowing this was what I missed--that it probably wasn't the low-key intimate performance I expected--makes it even harder.

Notable track(s): Slow

MMXI.1

Year started.



And so far I've spent every second of it in love. And it is great.

There are some other things to probably talk about. Some resolutions, what I am going to be doing/want to do, a bunch of music stuff.

But I am not really thinking about any of that right now.

I am thinking about how good I think this year might be.