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Tears for Fears“Head Over Heels” (Live circa the...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:45:30 -0400

Tears for Fears
“Head Over Heels” (Live circa the mid-80s)

I heard this song in a store the other day and was reminded how brilliant it is – the structure, the sound, that main hook, and the climax. It’s kinda unfair that this band’s place in culture seems to be mainly 80s nostalgia radio; they deserve a lot better.

I wrote a big piece about Daft Punk’s new album and their...

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:08:00 -0400

I wrote a big piece about Daft Punk’s new album and their genius for marketing. I’m sorta ambivalent about the record – I appreciate what they were trying to do and like a few of the songs, but generally feel like it’s a lavishly produced set of mediocre songs. It’s good for artists to step outside their comfort zone and challenge themselves, but in this case it just ends up revealing their weaknesses as songwriters.

"More than half of the songs on Modern Vampires of the City are about young people who hyperbolically..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 16:02:00 -0400

“More than half of the songs on Modern Vampires of the City are about young people who hyperbolically conflate adulthood with death, or at least with permanently surrendering a sense of possibility and license for recklessness. Koenig’s characters sense doors closing behind them at every turn, and feel the weight of decisions they might have not considered to be particularly important even just a few years ago. For his protagonists, YOLO isn’t a declaration of freedom; it’s a nagging pressure to make the most of their finite youth.”

- Vampire Weekend Vs. YOLO

I wrote an essay about Vampire Weekend’s new album, which is so far my favorite record of 2013. I’ve been dying to talk about it for weeks now; I’m pretty happy with how this came out.

Ever wonder why some artists get signed to labels, and then they...

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:56:00 -0400

Ever wonder why some artists get signed to labels, and then they never get to release any music, or their record gets delayed forever? Aylin Zafar explains why this happens in this excellent, very well reported feature story.

I had a long conversation with Stuart Murdoch about his first...

Tue, 07 May 2013 12:08:55 -0400

I had a long conversation with Stuart Murdoch about his first movie – eight years in the making! – and the past and future of Belle & Sebastian, and now it’s up as a feature length Q&A. Stuart was very high up on my wish list of people I’ve been wanting to interview, so this was quite a thrill for me. I hope you like it too - we get pretty deep into some stuff.

I wrote an essay about Phoenix and the increasingly prominent...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:40:04 -0400

I wrote an essay about Phoenix and the increasingly prominent place for French musicians in American pop culture.

Thee Oh Sees“Toe Cutter - Thumb Buster”Man, this...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:39:59 -0400

Thee Oh Sees
“Toe Cutter - Thumb Buster”

Man, this song. This like someone ringing a thousand Pavlov bells for me at once. This song makes me wish I played guitar because it sounds so fun to play. I can very clearly imagine being in a basement or shed and running through this over and over in an afternoon with a few people, just kinda getting lost in the ebb and flow of the groove. It feels vicariously cathartic just listening to it, so what must it be like to actually play it?

"The 90s were better than the 80s, and one key reason was that there was less originality...."

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:37:43 -0400

“The 90s were better than the 80s, and one key reason was that there was less originality. Originality is unmusical. The urge to do music is an admiring emulation of music one loves; the urge toward originality happens under threat that the music that sounds good to you somehow isn’t good enough.”

- The late Scott Miller in his excellent and thought-provoking book of music criticism, Music: What Happened? You can buy the digital version of the book for less than $4 through Amazon, FYI.

Bat For Lashes“Oh Yeah”Live at Coachella, April 13,...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:05:21 -0400

Bat For Lashes
“Oh Yeah”
Live at Coachella, April 13, 2013

It is an awful thing to feel stuck and uninspired, as if your inner life has all gone blank. You feel the absence in your mind, but you don’t know how to fill it. “Oh Yeah” is sung from the perspective of a woman who feels this lack, and she’s desperately hoping for a quick fix. “I’m looking for a lover to climb inside,” Natasha Khan sings, her voice rising up with an optimistic yearning. “Waiting like a flower to open wide, I’m in bloom!” From the first verse, she sings about feeling alive, echoing the climax of “Lilies,” a song with more or less the same narrative at the start of the record. But “Oh Yeah!” is more sexual and less ambiguous. She’s unlocked something in her mind and body, and the song communicates her desire to act on this personal breakthrough.

(Originally posted 10/30/2012)

Scott Miller, the singer and songwriter of Loud Family and Game...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:45:40 -0400

Scott Miller, the singer and songwriter of Loud Family and Game Theory, as well as the author of an excellent book of music criticism called Music: What Happened?, has died. He was a huge talent, and incredibly intelligent and kind. You can get a sense of who he was and what he accomplished in this interview I conducted with him about his book back in 2011. There’s a bunch of songs embedded, give them a listen too. The Game Theory catalog is being given away for free on the official site, and you can find the Loud Family catalog on Spotify et al. My favorite albums are Interbabe Concern, Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things, Days for Days, and Lolita Nation.

This is what the last two Coachellas look like with only the...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:17:00 -0400

This is what the last two Coachellas look like with only the female fronted acts. We did this for every year of the festival going back to 1999, and analyzed the gender breakdown by year. Data by Maria Sherman and Jane Kelly, graphics by Chris Ritter, and article by Amy Rose Spiegel.

Basement Jaxx featuring Dizzee Rascal“Lucky Star”Can...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 22:08:15 -0400

Basement Jaxx featuring Dizzee Rascal
“Lucky Star”

Can you even fathom how much I wish there was more music like Rooty/Cish Cish-era Basement Jaxx?

Vampire Weekend“White Sky”Live on KCRW 2010 “White...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:00:41 -0400

Vampire Weekend
“White Sky”
Live on KCRW 2010

“White Sky” is a stroll through uptown Manhattan, taking in the art and architecture that is available to everyone while quietly pondering the barriers between the public domain and the private property of the powerful and wealthy. The tension is faint, but it’s there: You walk through this area, always dimly aware of the immense luxury just out of view, and all the places where you don’t belong that share a border with the common culture. The boundaries are at once glaringly obvious and weirdly invisible; security guards and doormen are merely a second line of defense after the sheer banality of class stratification.

Resentment is usually mitigated by aspiration — you can get a contact high off the big money and high culture; you can dream of ways of insinuating yourself into this world. In the final verse of the song, Ezra Koenig’s protagonist pictures herself in this context:

look up at the buildings

imagine who might live there

imagining your Wolfords in a ball upon the sink there

I love that last line; it’s so specific and loaded with implication. You can read this a few ways, but it makes the most sense to me if she’s only just a visitor, her access granted by personal connection and sexual availability. It sounds cynical, but it doesn’t have to be. There are certainly worse ways of attaining social mobility.

Originally posted 6/3/2010

This was Fleetwood Mac’s setlist tonight, at the opening...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 22:33:53 -0400

This was Fleetwood Mac’s setlist tonight, at the opening show of their tour in Ohio. I’m going to see them on Monday and they’ll probably play pretty much this exactly and I’m pretty excited. (“Sad Angel” and “Without You” are unreleased new songs, FYI.)

I interviewed Bradford Cox and the rest of Deerhunter yesterday...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:34:26 -0400

I interviewed Bradford Cox and the rest of Deerhunter yesterday and we mainly talked about how much Bradford hates Morrissey and The Smiths. It’s a really funny interview, and you should read it knowing that Bradford was having fun, not being angry or anything.

I wrote a piece about The Knife’s amazing new album...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:26:17 -0400

I wrote a piece about The Knife’s amazing new album Shaking the Habitual, and its connection to goth and social justice, and how its packaging/marketing will keep a lot of people from noticing that it’s waaaay more emotional/physical than cerebral.

I made a guide to Stereolab’s body of work on BuzzFeed...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:55:00 -0400

I made a guide to Stereolab’s body of work on BuzzFeed last week. Going on the reception, it seems almost futile to get anyone under the age of 28 to even listen to this band. If you are in your teens or 20s, please give them a chance because you will probably find something to love, or possibly one of your new favorite bands.

"The early rounds of American Idol feature inappropriate contestants with little or no talent who are..."

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:38:34 -0400

“The early rounds of American Idol feature inappropriate contestants with little or no talent who are intentionally let through the cattle call weeding process. This represents an ugly and compelling entertainment spectacle that allows viewers to enjoy the drama of a few elite upper class celebrities verbally torturing some unfortunate neurotic caught in their web. These early scenes are job interviews designed to go horribly wrong. The hopeless contestants seem to deserve this fate because their grotesquely delusional overestimation of their talents and complete lack of understanding of what is expected of them by their prospective employers violates some primal sentiment of self-preservation in us. What they are really being punished for is not a lack of talent. They are being punished for being socially maladapted. Sadistic spectators at a ritual enforcement of conformity, we enjoy watching these sickly deer being culled from the herd. In the later rounds, when we root for the talented underdogs who have made it through the culling process, our sentiment shifts: now we’re thrilled at someone else’s success. But we’re also connecting with our own desire to sell out. Can this person hold on to a vestige of their humanity and individuality while achieving the extreme-sports version of selling out? American Idol openly and engagingly celebrates the triumph of commercialism over art. As viewers, we are rooting for the corporate machine that manufactures these celebrities as much as for the contestants themselves.”

- KILLER KARAOKE: Reality Television and the Death of the American Middle Class | Press Play

Please go and read this extremely intelligent take on how reality tv contest shows reflect the conditions of our awful economy.

"Impeccably tasteful, impeccably bored, impeccably attired, [The Strokes’] Is This It shirks..."

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 21:03:00 -0400

“Impeccably tasteful, impeccably bored, impeccably attired, [The Strokes’] Is This It shirks meaning and responsibility (“Oh dear can’t you see? It’s them it’s not me”), wants nothing more than to get into your apartment and drink your booze and take off your clothes and fuck you, half-heartedly, and leave before morning. It’s the moment when I started to feel old, started to feel that the generation coming up weren’t going to take advantage of what had gone before and use it as a springboard to achieve greater things, but were just going to repeat the easiest, most shot-term, short-sighted bits of instant gratification that everyone else had been guilty of. … Sometimes I listen to this record and I enjoy the fact that it’s just 11 great scuzzy pop songs. And sometimes I listen to this record and think it’s an ideological black hole, a vacuum, a vortex, an evil, dark, empty, hollow, selfish, greedy, solipsistic thing, the death of culture, and that it shouldn’t be allowed.”

- The Strokes – Is This It (2001) | Sick Mouthy

Nick Southall has some really interesting things to say about The Strokes. I don’t 100% share this point of view on this band in particular, but….I see some of this in other things I observe in culture now, particularly this bit: “repeat the easiest, most shot-term, short-sighted bits of instant gratification.”

"[Midnite Vultures is] an album about sex — sex in the kitchen, sex in the champagne room, sex like..."

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 07:23:00 -0400

“[Midnite Vultures is] an album about sex — sex in the kitchen, sex in the champagne room, sex like the sex in that Mark Leyner novel where the protagonist huffs from a vial of Abe Lincoln’s morning breath and ejaculates apricot gel. But it’s also about passion, and how our experience of pleasure and desire is inevitably bigger and stranger than the language we have to describe it with, most of which is clinical or childish or silly, and about slow jams and lube-dribble synthesizers and songs about money written for cars that go boom. Mixing business with leather, cold lamping with Man-Thing, and turning “Do you wanna ride on the Baltic Sea?” (on the “Good Ship Ménage-à-Trois,” probably) into a pickup line, Beck manages to celebrate funk and R&B as founts of authentic idiosyncrasy, satirizing their excesses while coveting their capacity for carnal expression. Beck squealing “You look good in that sweater / And that aluminum crutch” in a surprisingly supple falsetto felt revolutionary in 1999, when most white rock singers who bothered to address sexuality at all tended to work within parameters laid down by “Closer” and “Nookie”; today it sounds prophetic, anticipating not just the Lonely Island’s R&B parodies but Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds, too.”

- The 20th Anniversary of Beck’s “Loser” - Grantland

I’ve been meaning to share this amazing article by Alex Pappademas about Beck’s career to date, in which he writes very accurately about his masterpiece, Midnite Vultures, and addresses his most overrated work, Sea Change, with an appropriate level of skepticism. “Overwhelmingly, [Sea Change is] the favorite Beck record of people who distrust sampling, jokes, disruptive bursts of noise, the postmodern impulse, etc.; I distrust these people.”