35 Years

DIfferent Drum

Here in Southern California, it's cooler than usual tonight. My mother isn't well, and I miss her very much. Here is one of her favorite songs, "Different Drum," by released in the fall of 1967 by a band called the Stone Poneys whose lead singer was a young woman named Linda Ronstadt. (I should clarify that even though the song was credited to the Stone Poneys, only other session musicians played on it). Anyway, my mother was very fond of Linda Ronstadt, and growing up we had her greatest hits on the record player a lot. She had a great run of country-tinged Top 40 singles. This particular song, written by Mike Nesmith (of the Monkees) is a perfect pop song, a wonderful example of a catchy, beautiful, but clever pop song, less than 3 minutes long. (And it has a bit of an edge too, lyrically).

Harmony Rockets - I've Got A Golden TIcket

A reader request. I'll only have the link active for a short period of time.

Harmony Rockets - I've Got A Golden Ticket
[link removed]

Beach House - Depression Cherry

So one of my favorite albums of this year has been Depression Cherry by Beach House. (This is mostly due to a reader of this blog who made me revisit their catalog -- thanks!). A duo from Baltimore, they produce dreamy shoegaze-y music, a bit like My Bloody Valentine but without all the drama and crazy experiments. Their sound isn't original and would probably fit in quite well in, say, in 1992 as a band on Creation Records, but what sets them apart is that they have an incredible talent for writing beautiful tunes, the kind you think you've heard before because they sound so obvious but you really haven't. Like MBV, their sound is also defined by a male/female vocal dynamic and songs can often blur into another, but I really admire their aesthetic of just crawling inwards into the music instead of outwards (if that makes any sense). Their music is minimalist, without too many frills, and songs often fade out instead of coming to a discrete ending. Imagine driving, and you drive by someone playing music, the music comes into focus, it's a small slice of bliss, then as you drive way, the Doppler shift takes it away, and the song fades into nothingness.

They've been mining the dreamy pop vein of music for about ten years now. Depression Cherry, which came out at the end of August, was their fifth album. Remarkably, less than two months later, they have released a completely brand new album, Thank Your Lucky Stars, which must be a world record for the shortest time between two new albums.

For a band that's kind of under the radar, I was surprised to see that Depression Cherry reached number 8 (number 8!) on the national Billboard charts! Amazing. And the remarkable thing is that any of their recent albums are just as good as Depression Cherry. Go search out Bloom (2012) or Teen Dream (2010), for example.

Here are a couple of awesome songs, the first one from Depression Cherry:



The second one is "Better Times" from their album Teen Dream:

Deerhunter - Snakeskin

Grizzly Bear

Belatedly (very belatedly) I have finally gotten into the band, Grizzly Bear. I've known their music for a while now, years in fact, and kinda liked some of their stuff, but suddenly something totally clicked early this year and I have been listening to their most recent two albums Veckatimest (2009) and Shields (2012) nonstop. Both are beautifully constructed pop albums and listening to them, you can tell the care that went into creating them. As far as I can tell, the band began as a four-piece based in New York but are now split between LA and NYC. Most of the heavy-duty music work is done by Daniel Rossen (guitars, etc.) and Chris Taylor (bass, overall producer), both multi-instrumentalists extraordinaires, but the public face of the band is, more or less, singer Edward Droste (left in the picture) who has a bit of an angelic voice.

What to say of their music? They are a bit like the Beatles in spirit in that they work firmly in the three-minute-pop-song idiom but their ambition is far bigger than pop. They draw in all manner of different genres (folk, rock, psychedelia, and the modern avant garde) into the mix. What comes out are odd but familiar pop tunes crafted lovingly in the studio. I can see why some people would find them a bit twee (in the mold of say, mediocre bands like the Decemberists or Death Cab for Cutie) and yes, they don't rock out or anything. Their commitment is instead to produce the perfect song, the perfect melody, with a strong sense of the history of pop music, with one eye firmly planted into the future. The future part is in the way songs are both familiar and yet sound like nothing you've heard before. I think there is a movement here to push the boundaries of conventional pop into marginally new areas. The production values are excellent. They really take this stuff seriously. I like that. (And so does apparently, of all people, Trent Reznor).

One thing worth mentioning: I know that they have been critical darlings for many years, particularly from the Pitchfork-type set. I missed all that (fortunately) so my recent devotion to them is something that has happened entirely organically, a rare feat in these over-saturated social-media-crazed days. They just grew on me!

Both the albums I mention above are lovely, and I could name any number of songs to check out. But I'll mention one from each, both just literally the best pop tunes I've heard in years, maybe in a decade. The first is a song from Vekatimest called "Ready, Able." I am posting a live version but the studio version is also just as good if not better.



The second is a fantastic song from Shields called "Yet Again." Can this be the best single pop song from the past five years? Anyone? We're talking (nearly) as beautiful as Neil Young singing "Expecting to Fly."



And because you should also see the studio version of "Yet Again":



Finally, apparently, the band is now recording a new album, due in 2016.

Dead Flowers

"Well, I won't forget to put roses on your grave...." I've been jamming to the Sticky Fingers reissue the last few weeks. This was the stuff of my teenage years. I'd honestly forgotten how great of a band the Rolling Stones were at their peak (roughly '68 to '73). It doesn't hurt to have a stellar blues guitarist on board (Mick Taylor) and everybody generally writing and recording one awesome album after another: Beggars' Banquet (1968), Let it Bleed (1969), Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out (1970), Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile on Main Street (1972), and yes, even Goats Head Soup (1973). And let us not forget the two stellar non-album singles from that period, "Jumping Jack Flash," and "Honky Tonk Women."

They are also a great live band, needless to say and this clip, showing them in a small club in London in late 1971, just before the release of Sticky Fingers shows that, once, even the Rolling Stones could play to a small crowd and be totally plugged in. Also noteworthy: Charlie Watts is a phenomenal drummer; Mick Taylor is a superb guitar player; Keith Richards looks like a corpse; and Mick Jagger looks like Adonis.

Quatuor pour la fin du temps

Here is a performance of "Quartet for the End of Time" by Oliver Messiaen (1908-1992), the French composer. Apparently, Karlheinz Stockhausen was one of his students! Who knew?! The piece was first premiered in 1941 and is about 50 minutes long. He apparently wrote it while a prisoner-of-war under the Nazis and the music was first premiered in an actual POW camp.

This particular performance is by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Part 2 begins automatically after Part 1.

Spiritualized - Run

Is this sublime or what? Spiritualized's cover of J.J. Cale's "Run." This is the single version. There is also an equally great version on Spiritualized's first (and very brilliant) album Lazer Guided Melodies (1992). I was listening to this album nonstop back in the old Pittsburgh days. I remember regularly driving from Oakland (where I lived) to the Southside. You had to cross over the Birmingham Bridge, then take a right onto Carson, leading you towards Dee's -- that infamous bar where I stumbled out many a night a bit more intoxicated than necessary, having decided that writing a dissertation was not a life conducive to improving one's self-respect. Spiritualized's "Run" was a perfect soundtrack to those nights.

Last Month

A bit of a random post here, by which I mean that this post is not necessarily centered around a single song or a band or anything like that, but more a general commentary about things.

I was just looking at my iTunes and thought I'd write about the last few things I've added to it -- things acquired in the past month. (It's easy to verify this since iTunes has a "Recently Added" feature). Some of the stuff I added is positively embarrassing, but some not so. For some reason, I downloaded the entire catalog--all three albums--of Buffalo Springfield. Every so often, I go off on a Neil Young tangent and I seem to have gone in one recently, sparked by two recent vinyl purchases, of Time Fades Away (1973) and On The Beach (1974). Those who are somewhat familiar with the Neil Young songbook will recognize those two albums as part of the so-called "ditch trilogy" (the third one being Tonight's The Night from 1975), because apparently he left the "middle of the road" pop industry and headed for the ditch. Either way, these two are spectacular albums, although very different in tone. Time Fades Away is unpolished, scraggly, barely put together, just completely falling apart, while On The Beach is moderated, controlled, and weary in tone. But both are incredibly morose albums, the kind of stuff you don't want to hear often. They contain some of Neil Young's greatest songs that no one's ever heard of. I'm thinking of fantastic songs like "On The Beach," "Revolution Blues," and "Ambulance Blues" from On The Beach, amazing meditations on the malaise of the nineteen seventies and the death of the 1960s dream. Here is "Revolution Blues" a kind of "fuck you" to Southern California's star culture. The music is propulsive, amazing, David Crosby's rhythm guitar and Levon Helm's drums creating aural imagery of people out to do something wrong. Of course, a fabulously bizarre lead solo from Neil Young himself. Key lines:

"Well I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars
But I hate them worse than lepers
And I'll kill them in their cars"



Anyway, so Buffalo Springfield, yeah what a great '60s band, very quintessentially hippie but with an inventive spirit that burnt out too soon. Neil was, of course, firing on all cylinders producing one masterpiece after another on those early Springfield albums, including the epic "Expecting To Fly."

Other recent additions? Well, I got me some obscure David Bowie, actually some of his maligned 1980s stuff, particularly the rather unremarkable singles "Never Let Me Down" and "Absolute Beginners" but also the utterly strange Baal E.P. (1982), a bunch of songs written for Bertolt Brecht's play of the same name. One of the songs ("The Drowned Girl") actually has a video for it. It's very dirge-y, not something you want to hear first thing in the morning. One of Bowie's odd excursions outside the pop world. Other recent Bowie acquisitions included the soundtrack for the movie The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) which features the utterly great song named after the movie, a collaboration between fusion jazz guitarist Pat Metheny and Bowie. A lovely and evocative song from a surprisingly great movie:



I also coincidentally acquired another movie song:"Real Cool World"off the Cool World (1992) soundtrack. Bowie had firmly moved into the electronic dance pop phase of the 1990s by this time. I remember when this came out, I totally loved it, but this was also a time when I was madly going to clubs and doing what club people do. It sounds a bit dated now but has the spirit of good disposable pop.

Other acquisitions in the last month include Thom Yorke's recent solo album Tomorrow's Modern Boxes. I quite liked his last one but at the same time I am in danger of getting fatigued a bit on his whole blippity-bloppity unobtrusive electronic music experiments. And I wish he would just belt out sometimes, and actually sing about something different than the computer distance between us all, or whatever. This isn't bad actually, especially the second half of the album which is a bit more ambient and Aphex Twin-y than your usual Radiohead glitchy pop. The last song on the album, "Nose Grows Some," is like many last songs on Radiohead albums, a bit dreamy and very pretty:

unofficial nose grows some from spilleR ltd on Vimeo.

OK, I also got the recent Sleater-Kinney album, No Cities To Love (2015) which I've been listening to quite a bit recently. I resisted the hype--there was this absolutely ridiculously hagiographic essay on Pitchfork about the band that was really grotesque--so I almost didn't want to like it. I like it a lot actually. They put together some good songs! It's not as monumentally heavy and kickass as The Woods (2006) which almost rivals Led Zeppelin IV in heaviness, but the new one is a great upbeat rock album for those into that kind of thing. Here is "Price Tag" performed live:

A final addition to my iTunes, the lovely EP2 by FKA Twigs. Who could possibly not like "Water Me"? Gorgeous: