10 SONGS & WHAT I LIKE ABOUT THEM
One of my favorite things in the world is when a friend shows me new music and I fall in love with it. This is a list of some songs I'm loving right now - it's not meant to be some "hey check out how cool I am because the music I listen to is totally obscure and you're not cool enough to know about it and once more people find out about it I'm not gonna like it anymore" - it's just stuff I'm into, some of it is pretty mainstream or older or whatever and some of it is new and you maybe haven't heard it - I want to start posting more about this kind of stuff because music is so important in my daily life and to give someone the gift of a new favorite artist or a beautiful song is better than (almost any other possible gift) these ten songs are my current playlist - listen to them while you read this and hopefully I can turn you on to some new favorites! (eventually this list will be replaced with different songs and I'll write about those too.)
I'm not a music critic either, so I won't write well about these songs - I'm gonna treat it like we're sitting down next to the stereo and I'm just playing some songs and telling you what's up. if you want expert, intelligent critique and discussion, go to PITCHFORK
MGMT "Weekend Wars"
making music as a non-world famous person, playing shows on the weekends, that what i think of when i listen to this song, i think lyrics are super important when i'm writing songs, but for some reason as a listener - sometimes i dont give a shit what a song is about. This whole album makes me love the guitar a little bit (which I mostly hate right now) - - - If you haven't heard the rest of the MGMT album, check it out, go to the beach, smoke something and have sex with a stranger while this is blasting from your car.
Crystal Castles "Untrust Us"
another obvious sign that I'm so not paying attention to lyrics much right now. Sarah and I have decided Alice Glass is singing to me. (Oh, oh eeeeeeee- oh oh oh eeeeee - I'm flattered) CC is all about blippy beats and screams and dancing and cheap fun. I hope there's not too much of a backlash against them later, because they could be the white stripes of glitchrock. (I've since been informed by my friend Kayvon that the vocals on Untrust Us are actually a manipulated sample taken from a Death From Above 1979 song.)
Bright Eyes "Haligh Haligh A Lie..."
There are just a couple of men I would make out with. Conor is one. The Ancient Greeks thought you could absorb a man's power by buttfucking him... I know this is so crude, but I would shove my tongue down his throat in hopes of sucking away even the tiniest little bit of his talent to use for my own evil purposes. Here's an example of a song that will make me feel both inspired and completely useless. Could anything better be written? Hasn't he said it all in this song? I almost cry EVERY time i hear this song and sometimes I listen to it on repeat. When he gets to the "I KNOW NOT WHO I AM!" line I just clam up. --- I don't think I could ever write a list of favorite songs and not include a Bright Eyes track.
Naomi Elizabeth "I Wanna Be Bad"
Oh man. You know when you watch too much porn and start just uncontrollably perving all day? I have these little breakdowns where I almost feel like I should go to church or something and confess to a priest about the disgusting things happening in my head. I'm just afraid I might catch on fire if I walk into a church. Naomi sings about taking a comfortable life and going on a sex rampage just for the sake of adventure. I believe her when she says she wants to be bad, she seems like a nutjob (in a good way). Maybe being bad is hiding someone's car keys, I dunno - but she makes it sounds sexy.
TOBACCO "Hairy Candy"
I'm pretty sure this is what old crime-dramas would sound like squeezed through a coke whore's asshole. Best part is everybody's too busy being cool to care how shitty of a dancer I am. I think about rubber masks and years of recession. huge boom boxes, holes in your dancing shoes. This is my favorite instrumental album since Jonny Greenwood's BODYSONG... which I love almost as much as I love the FIGHT CLUB soundtrack by the Dust Brothers.
Jonny Greenwood "Moon Trills"
The first time I heard this album I was sitting on a chair in a hotel room really high up and I was looking down at the street and the ants marching and it all looked like a nasty bunch of veins and arteries and tumors... I wanted to die. Not because anything in my life was so bad, to be honest I don't even know exactly why - never do - but I was in a low place. I was on my second bottle of cheap red wine and second pack of cigarettes. I hadn't spoken to a single person in three days... Something about this song made me start to snap out of it - it has these lulls, and then they lift up. I won't say the song saved my life but it made it a little bit longer...
The Fashion "Dead Boys"
One of the only guitar bands I am in love with right now. They're from Denmark and they've got so much more New York City in them than most of the real NYC groups out there. Shake it, Stab it, Fuck it up and run... I missed them when they played SF and I'm still kicking myself for it.
The Good Life "Your Birthday Present"
Tim Kasher is one of the best writers alive. I (may know him from Cursive) hate being the type to say "oh I liked their old shit better..." but The Good Life is one of those projects. The first album is one of my all time favorites. It sounds like a sad drunk locked in his room with a shitty drum machine, some whiskey, a phone that hasn't rang in weeks - and a heart that's been beaten to shit. The music sounds like it doesn't want to be made, it sounds like it's not meant for you to hear it. It sounds like it's uncomfortable because it knows you're listening. It's the most genuine and gorgeous thing... I wanted to get the artwork from the album "Novena On A Nocturn" tattooed somewhere on me until I saw that the guy from The Ataris had it - then I thought, hmmm, I've got a lot of cheesy tattoos that other people have, why not... I put this track in my playlist on my birthday in hopes that someone would click on my wishlist and decide to buy me a new MacBook Pro.
The Limousines "New Year's Resolution"
I know what you're thinking. What kind of retard puts one of his own songs in his little blog list song thingie? me. I'm that kind of retard. And this song is dope, especially when it's New Year's Eve for real.
Bjork "Unravel"
What's a Bjork? Aside from the cutest, most amazing pixie monster in the world, I like to say a Bjork is the feeling of sinking into the quicksand of musical bliss... wow. that was tacky and cheesy as hell. but I stand by it. I will close my eyes and sink into my Bjork. Unravel is not my favorite Bjork song (All Is Full Of Love and Pagan Poetry are tied for that honor) but this one tells a story I know really well. - I have heard a lot of my "friends" say they can't get into Bjork, they can't get past her voice - that's so strange to me... Except when I first heard Glassjaw I made fun of Daryl Palumbo - his voice was like nothing I had heard before, so it caught me off guard... But now he's one of the bosses at the end of a level. Like if the music world were a video game... Bjork and Thom York are who you gotta take down to beat the game. (Sonny, you know what I mean!)
