Music I Love: Nite Jewel September 24, 2009

I’ve been making my top ten list of records for 2009 since about January when the Animal Collective album came out. I’m that kind of a nerd and I don’t want rehabilitation for it, thank you. There are several things that will make the list that everyone who knows much about music outside of Lady Gaga have chatted your ear off about this year, but there is one I love who haven’t been given a ton of consideration.

I’m obsessed with Nite Jewel.

There are very few people who present their music as actual art – let alone accompanied by any sort of 3D visual art, outside of pop artists with lofty ideals and a lighting director and DJ culture. You’ve got The Knife, sometimes Of Montreal and after that I want to say Daft Punk but please refer to the previously mentioned DJ culture. There are certainly precious few lo-fi artists dipping their toes in that pond. That’s why I’m so glad when an artist like Ramona Gonzalez comes along.She’s inspired by weird stuff I’ve never even heard of but you bet your ass I’ll be Googling, like Tom Reccion, UK group Woo and Sensations Fix.

I want to know all about her world after listening to her Good Evening CD.What I most want to know is how someone has the balls to cover a Roxy Music song and actually do it better than Roxy Music. I mean, you don’t one up Bryan Ferry. Not that she meant to, like all covers it’s an homage to something she loves but my damn. It’s so good. Watch this lo-fi even further stripped down version of the song from ZDB and just try to tell me you aren’t mesmerized.

You totally want to go see her live now, don’t you? Me too. I can’t believe I’ve been in love with this album and haven’t gone to see this live show yet. I hereby resolve to stop being a hermit briefly enough to go to a Nite Jewel song.Thank you for reading about my obsession. In exchange for your time I offer you this free and legal download to take with you when you go on your way.

Download: Nite Jewel “Weak For Me”

Twilight Conference Recap August 4, 2009

I went to TwiCon in Dallas this past weekend. I spoke on a panel about the music of Twilight. Marah of Bloodshot Records organized our panel and, along with Angela at Wired and Genevive at The Onion, we planned for months what to talk about. Some of us were very nervous, which only increased when we saw the ballroom they put our panel in (photo at left), but luckily only about 3 dozen people actually showed up and all panic attacks abated. Canadian web channel Reelz taped it, but let me elaborate on my comparison of “Twilight,” “Valley Girl,” and Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” with you.

I touched on other topics, but one of the most interesting was comparing these three teen movies. I selected “Valley Girl” and “Romeo + Juliet” specifically to compare musically to “Twilight” because all three are, at their core, in debt to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for their plot. Additionally all three have had wildly successful soundtracks that accompanied the very successful movies. So how does the “Twilight” soundtrack stack up to these other teen movie soundtracks? Personally, I think it is the weakest of the bunch.  “Valley Girl” shoved Modern English’s “I Melt With You” into the collective consciousness of the world. “Romeo + Juliet” made a hit of The Cardigans “Lovefool.” “Twilight” has yet to break a new artist like the other two movies. I do hold out hope it will move in that direction with the second Twilight movie “New Moon.” I’d like to see a song (or several) become inextricably associated with the Twilight series in the minds of the general public and not just TwiHards. To me that is the sign of a very powerful soundtrack that has been wisely chosen and marketed.

Also, in my own personal opinion, the songs on the “Twilight” soundtrack as a whole are not as compelling as the other two movies I compared it to. “Valley Girl” is very focused musically, enlisting L.A. bands and a few cool British bands of the time into a very specific music soundtrack. You get the sense that the people putting it together and selecting music for that film were consciously attempting to be cool and credible. “Romeo + Juliet” is less concerned with credibility, but also operates in a narrow parameter where pop music scores specific moments in the movie and everything is very, very current. “Twilight” seems to have a broader focus musically. The music in the film is largely hidden in the background and unrecognizable, even at pivotal moments. There is nothing wrong with that at all, but it lends itself to a soundtrack with somewhat improbable artists like Collective Soul (who we haven’t really heard from since the late ’90s), Perry Farrell (a panel favorite to pick on as the out of place track on this soundtrack) and Linkin Park (who especially strike me as an odd choice for such a female driven movie – why is there not an aggressive female voice here instead?).

At any rate, those are just my impressions and musings. If you’d like you can listen to the alternative TwiVerse soundtracks Marah, Angela and I created for “Twilight” on imeem.

Also, I have to talk a little about the Masquerade Ball that closed the conference. It got me thinking about a “Twilight and the Media” panel we’d attended the day before when someone brought up how mainstream media marginalizes things women fetishize, like Twilight, but will embrace boy fetishes like “Star Wars.” It is true, to a degree, that womens’ interest items like Twilight are treated as second class, but it’s also difficult not to laugh at the sort of cult behavior it inspires, like this masquerade ball. I mean, it was thousands of women dressed in ballgowns and masks with nary a man in sight. Ok, I saw 4 men. I found it amusing in the same way I’d find dudes dressed up like Star Wars characters and hanging out together funny. It is in no way a lesser funny.

If you think you are unable to appreciate the movie “Twilight” please allow me to point you to the Riff Tracks version. It is an additional commentary track in MP3 form written and performed by the people who brought you Mystery Science Theater 3000 and it makes the movie SO SO SO much more hilarious. I cannot recommend this enough, especially if you think you’d hate “Twilight” or if you watched it and thought it was an unintentionally hilarious B-movie.

Invisible (a band, not a feeling) August 3, 2009

It seems one of my favorite albums from 2009 still shows no movement towards being released in the U.S. (or such is the word from inside the UK label who initially signed them). If you haven’t yet listened to the Invisible then please sit down a moment and let me tell you about how great they are.

Their debut album, The Invisible, is like a jazz/electro/political mixture of  dance floor awesome. It was produced by the venerable electronic artist Matthew Herbert and released on his, hmmm I guess you could call it a label collective, Accidental Records in the UK this past March. Now, Accidental have some sort of relationship to Rough Trade as they’ve released Micachu & the Shapes also. So I was trying to convince Rough Trade/Beggars/4AD to release this album in the U.S. months ago, but alas they still have no plans to do so. Even though The Invisible was nominated for the 2009 Mercury Prize!

There’s a bit of critical controversy because everyone and their mother insists on comparing the Invisible to TV on the Radio. This has quickly turned into a question of if the comparison has to do more with their singer being black than the band actually sounding like TVOTR. Personally, I think it sounds more like they were influenced by Radiohead with a dash of Prince (and when someone pointed out that singer Dave Okumu had a sort of Seal-esque voice I couldn’t argue). Certain songs have a tinge of TVOTR’s instrumentalism but the album overall doesn’t have that certain Dave Sitek production touch that would make it definitively alike – it’s actually more polished and further out there with the musical flourishes than Sitek typically goes. Thematically, I can see the TVOTR comparisons. Both bands sing about political, obtuse things inside pretty, compelling song structures.

Don’t just take my word for it, watch their excellent video for the single “London Girl” below and visit their excellent blog.

The Jonas Brothers Are Not the New Beatles March 10, 2009

Alan McGee, in his never ending wisdom that seems to get less wise as he gets older, recently posted a blog on the Guardian about The Monkees, the Jonas Brothers and Britney Spears that I assume had some sort of point about credibility in music which he never got around to actually making. It reminded me, in a round about way, of a chance meeting I had a few months back with the Jonas Brothers lawyer, who happens to also be Vampire Weekend’s lawyer. We got to talking about how certain older people in the music industry keep trying to make the Jonas Brothers into the new Beatles and he challenged me to explain why they couldn’t be the Beatles.

Before we start, let me say for the record that I think the Jonas Brothers are fine. I don’t hate them but I don’t love them. They are not, however, credible artists.

If you look only at the early careers of Jonas and the Beatles, on paper the two groups have a lot in common: both teeny-bopper bands who get dismissed by music snobs as a fad; both write or co-write their own songs which are largely simplistic pop affairs about puppy love; both rejected by record labels (Beatles – every single label in England, Jonas – Columbia Records signed and then dropped before the found their Disney home at Hollywood), both saw a great surge in popularity via appearances in movies and TV shows. The primary difference between early Beatles and the Jonas Brothers so far, as far as I can tell, is the desire to change the world.

The Beatles, even in their earliest and seemingly least offensive songs, were being subversive. John Lennon told journalists early in their career that they were singing about sex and that all their fans knew it. The Jonas Brothers, in comparison, wear promise rings to symbolize their intention to wait until marriage to have sex and have never indicated that their puppy love songs have any sort of raunchy subtext implied. Early in their career The Beatles were taking speed, out partying every night, getting girlfriends preggers (John’s early marriage, Paul’s girlfriend’s early miscarriage which he was reportedly relieved by) and meeting Bob Dylan who introduced them to pot and helped them move beyond writing teeny bopper songs.

While the Jonas Brothers have had their share of PG-rated, US Weekly-endorsed scandals (Miley’s shower photos that may have involved Nick! Joe’s text message break-up with Taylor Swift!), they have yet to express any desire to actually stand for anything except perhaps diabetes awareness and that is mainly because songwriter/lead Jonas brother Nick was diagnosed with the disease. The early Beatles were selling themselves with a winking irony and a desire to start a cultural revolution, but the Jonas Brothers seem to want to distance themselves from any sort of scandal and would never tell a reporter anything that wasn’t sanctioned by their manager/dad, record company publicist and probably Jesus Christ himself. That is nothing like The Beatles, who would once cause mass burnings of their records when noted smart ass John Lennon proclaimed them to be bigger than Jesus. Those Jonases write fine pop songs but until someone either whips out a sitar, expresses an agenda that deviates from societal norms or starts inspiring other bands to imitate them it is nothing more than pop music as usual. Until people of all ages consider the Jonas Brothers songwriting part of the cultural cannon they’ll never be the sort of landmark, beloved band who could start Beatlemania.

The Beatles had sex and drugs going for them and that made their songs rock ‘n roll. I’d really like Nick Jonas to take a cue from Elvis Costello, one of his favorite songwriters, and get subversive already.

Song Obsession: Dri “You Know I Tried” February 19, 2009

I’m having a total song obsession right now with Dri’s “I Know You Tried.” I want to listen to it over and over. So here’s what I’m trying to figure out:

1) How did this album come out in 2007 and the first I heard of it wasn’t until the end of 2008, and then it took me until 2009 to fully obsess?

2) How is her label, Range Life Records, affiliated with Saddle Creek?

3) How in the world did the girl from The Anniversary (who I also had a song obsession problem with at one time, btw) go from emo-esque to blue eyed soul? Fascinating.

P.J. Harvey Scores Mary-Louise Parker’s Broadway “Hedda Gabler” January 23, 2009

Cross posted on The Playlist.

Broadway is bringing us the perfect storm of three crazy women in one play: P.J. Harvey, Mary-Louise Parker and Hedda Gabler. Jim Farber reports that P.J. Harvey has written the score to director Ian Rick-son’s new production of “Hedda Gabler,” opening in New York this Sunday.

The score is reportedly based on the idea of a hiss – created with mashed up guitar feedback. Amazingly enough Harvey tells Faber, “I’ve wanted to do theater or film music since I first began writing music. I’ve just never been approached before.” Granted, Harvey does have a reputation for being a difficult and temperamental artist (or, if she were a man we’d probably say “particular and unpredictable”) but she seems from the interview to grasp the basic idea of bending her musical vision to work with that of the director and/or with the material. With the way Harvey’s musical output has been evolving in this particular decade alone we’d say she’s moving more and more towards the kind of ideal artist to score films, specifically those on the darker end of the spectrum.

Until such time as Christopher Nolan finds a nice, dark non-superhero film for Harvey to score you can catch “Hedda Gabler” and wait it out for her next album, which is to be released this spring.

Ryan Gosling Gets Cool Band, New Movies, Kind of Rules Right Now January 23, 2009

Cross posted on The Playlist.

Generally speaking, when actors decide to have music side projects there are no amount of snide remarks that adequately capture the stunning self-indulgent, needless stupidity and absolute terribleness of their musical results. In the case of Dead Man’s Bones, a new band featuring Ryan Gosling (“Half-Nelson” and “Lars and the Real Girl”) and his best friend/normal person Zach Shields the opposite seems to be true.

The music is, against almost all logical expectations of a music snob like myself, really good. In an interview with Pitchfork the guys explain that over the several years they’ve been working on this collaboration they worked with several different producers who tried to make them more contemporary (which we will take the liberty of assuming means “sucky”) and after hearing the results of these sessions opted to go for a more lo-fi and less professional sound themselves, with Tim Anderson of semi-credible L.A. band ImARobot producing. The project also enlists help from a choir of precocious kids from the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, a music education project founded by Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers – amazing live performance video below with the choir dressed in all manner of Halloween costumes that gives the whole affair a very creepy, dark Nick Cave visual by way of a much less polished Arcade Fire musical feel.

Kudos to Gosling for his integrity in his acting choices for the last few years and now his music career. In other good new for acting integrity, IMDB indicates that we’ll be seeing Gosling in two interesting looking features at some point in the near future: “Blue Valentine,” with Michelle Williams attached to co-star, which seems to be about time-traveling lovers and “The Dallas Buyer’s Club” about a man in the 1980s who is diagnosed with HIV and starts toying around with underground drugs not approved for use in the U.S. at the time (the latter sounds completely amazing and we cannot wait to hear more). Until then we can and will continue to pretend Ryan Gosling is our boyfriend on the Fuck Yeah! blog.

Day Five – Palm Springs, CA to Los Angeles, CA Via Joshua Tree January 10, 2009

Apologies for the delay in posting this! I’d like to blame Internet troubles but really I’m just lazy.

On my fifth day I took the very round about way from Palm Springs to L.A. with a circular detour through Joshua Tree National Park. However, before leaving Palm Springs I lounged around my hotel…and lounged…and lounged. There were some water problems the night before and in the morning their credit card machine wasn’t working so, in exchange for paying cash I got a nice discount and a robe. Yay! Seriously, if you go to Palm Springs do stay at the Del Marcos. It’s adorable.

My GPS took me an entirely differnt route off of I-10 to Joshua Tree – some back road way to the Twentynine Palms Highway. It was pretty and I got a good look at the windmill farms. Have a photo. During this drive I was listening to Alex’s playlist which injected a much needed soulful touch. Two notes: I have been entirely unable to account for the Alicia Keys song and I cannot believe you gave me a ten minute version of “Mustang Sally” (I made it through 8 minutes).

Everything was beautiful and strange and instead of trying to explain it to you I will just post a photo. Not one person recommended I listen to U2’s Joshua Tree album for this drive but two (Anne! Alex!) suggested Gram Parsons and one (Josh L!) left me a Fbook comment about it after the fact. As such I put together a little Gram Parsons playlist from those recommendations and it was perfect.

When I left the park and headed back towards L.A., I put on a mix I’d made myself to pshych me up for all the ch-ch-changes. I’d stopped feeling nervous and started feeling just plain excited/elated circa the Coachella Valley so happiness abounded. I was especially stoked on Highway 60, which were some of the most scenic drives I’ve ever seen – really, could have been straight out of New Zealand.

Finally, years later, I actually reached L.A. and put on Jay B’s playlist to help me not be lost. Very ecclectic, very pefect for driving in L.A.

So, as a footnote, you’ll all be glad to know I reached my friend Russ’s house with only a few minor fuck ups and I found an apartment on Saturday morning! I did not come here to play around – I move in on Wednesday and it’s lovely.

Thanks for all the mixes! Read the list for this trip after the jump.

Day Four – Tucson, AZ to Palm Springs, CA January 9, 2009

Parting Tucson was such sweet sorrow – I actually liked it a lot. Granted, I only saw a bit of it because that 7 1/2 hour drive made me very sleepy and cranky but the parts I did see and the people I met were lovely. I like how the mountains surrounding the city are just part of the cityscape, as shown in this photo.

I drove out on the 10 listening to a mix I made myself with The Magnetic Fields as the jumping off point. City traffic makes me tense.

When I was about clear of Tucson I put on Roger’s driving mix. Very witty. And in regard to the Art Brut song I’d like to request that no one from England move here to find Morrissey.

Then it was all drive, drive, drive – flat, flat, flat – dull, dull, dull until Phoenix. I stopped at a place I found randomly on my GPS called Claim Jumper because it was such a ridic name. I had the glazed walnut & asian pear salad and it was ever so yummy. This also may have been the first vegetables I’ve eaten on this trip. Mmm lettuce.

Then it was drive, drive, drive – la, la, la for another million miles or so. There were hills. I listened to another one of my own mixes that was Motown/Soul/Girl Groups/Bacharach and then Sam P’s excellent mix with songs I haven’t even thought about in five years. It was lovely.

When I got to the border of Cali they were pulling everyone over to ask if we were bringing produce into the state. That was an interesting question.

More amazing revelations after the jump, including the days playlists and…oh yeah the earthquake.

Road Trip – Day Three – Marfa, TX to Tucson, AZ January 8, 2009

I sat on my butt too long today and now I think I’m crippled. Well, I’m at least emotionally crippled.

Follow my route today.

So I peaced out of Marfa really early today. And by really early I mean 9AM. It was COLD! 34 degrees – but the weather report on TV predicted El Paso would hit 60 today so I didn’t wear total winter clothes. So there’s a tiny, tiny town of just over 200 people west of Marfa called Valentine, TX. I drove through it on my way to El Paso and it creeped me out. It looked like a deserted place – weird houses built of stone and adobe, the only gas station was closed down and there was a cafe that looked like no one had ever dusted it so you couldn’t see in the windows – oh and I saw exactly ZERO people and passed ZERO cars driving by it. The place reminded me of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” If anyone ever asks me about a rural setting for a creepy horror movie I am recommending Valentine.

Shortly after that I passed the famous Prada Marfa. That cheered me back up. During all of this I was listening to PP’s playlist, detailed below. Many good remixes to be had and I feel we should pause a moment to discuss her Soulwax Dub remix of Hot Chip. This goes back to a fight James Montgomery and I keep having about Girl Talk. I am a Soulwax fan, but I think Girl Talk can suck it – not to say that Girl Talk’s remixes aren’t ingenius in themselves, because they are, but the lifestyle that surrounds his live shows are so crass and annoying. Soulwax, in their heyday, were never crass and didn’t attract a bunch of loafer college students. Go Team Soulwax.

Here’s a left/right shot of a mountain on one side and some pecan trees (I think) on the left. The scenery was kind of weird around here. To follow when PPPlist was done, I put on part of an ’80s mix I had in my iPod.

Then blah blah blah nothing nothing boring landscape, man is El Paso ugly. However, at this point I put on Josh Rosey’s playlist and it was perfect! FYI, you’ve always been Josh Rosey in my cell phone since we met. I found the whole playlist to be thoughtful, subtle and tres Southwestern without overkill. The Death Cab song also made me tear up a little. Stop tugging on my heartstrings.

More after the jump, including hot burrito #1 and the day’s playlist.