My Morning Jam

8:00 a.m.: “Lazy”, Deep Purple 

Personally I like to be woken up slowly. The start of “Lazy” is all about progression– an instrumental build up: the organ echoes creating a spiritual-like trance before ushering you to consciousness, the little jazzy break-down a jolt to your listless limbs, the ticking percussion a friendly reminder that the time has come to get out of bed before the song swings into full throttle. And when it does, you get Gillian’s voice confirming your current state. “You’re Lazy,” he says, and it’s nice to hear. But if there’s a song that’ll make you want to get up and go, this is the one to do it. It’s a dose io irony in your morning coffee.

8:07 a.m.: “Veni, Vidi, Vici”, The Back Lips

Let the mellower beat of this Black Lips song remind you that the day ahead holds nothing that the right kind of attitude can’t control. Splash cold water on your face, look into the mirror and repeat the (slightly altered) words of Julius Caesar: Cause I came, I saw, I conquered all… Repeat, repeat, repeat, and by the time you’re done brushing your teeth you’ll be ready to take over the world! (Or at least the smelly subway.)

8:10 a.m: “The Bare Necessities”, The Jungle Book Soundtrack

Didn’t see that one coming, huh? I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. More than the motto, a little throwback into childhood is always a great way to keep your head on your shoulders and a smile on your face.

A Sound for September

The Tree Swings Diagonally

Fables and Fornication

The correct word would actually be parable ­– there are no talking animals in The Rolling Stones’ song “Spider and the Fly,” so you’ll have to excuse my lack of precision for the sake of alliteration. Released in 1965, “Spider and the Fly” has become my favorite song from the Stones’ fourth album Out of Our Heads (also home to the seminal “Satisfaction”) for its structural simplicity, it’s infantile simile, and its omission of repercussion to the idyllic debauchery of a rock star on the road. Despite the docile harmonica, the mellow guitar solo*, the “would have run away but I was on my own,” creating the illusion of premeditated acquiescence to his little girl’s wishes, they are just other pieces to Mick Jagger’s intricately woven web.

*replaced by the harmonica in this live version

13 minutes of live music

Attic Addict session w/ We Are Enfant Terrible

We Are Enfant Terrible from Attic Addict on Vimeo.

M. Ward @ La Gaité Lyrique

Experience Portland in Paris, is how la Blogothèque advertised M. Ward’s concert at La Gaité Lyrique this past Friday. It isn’t hard to see why when the venue is a converted theater built in 1862, the bar an opulent Haussmmanian reception hall, and the concert a man on stage with his acoustic guitar singing the epitome of music proper to America: country. There’s more to it, of course. M. Ward at times uses a harmonica or switches to the keyboard; his songs are also colored with the weight of blues and the edge to rock.

Still, M. Ward is above all guy-on-guitar music that evokes a very different, simpler setting ­­– one of campfires and cowboy boots, lawn chairs and hand-rolled tobacco. What isn’t so simple, however, is the way this Oregonian manipulates his instrument. Opening his show with a medley of “One Hundred Million Years,” Ward saved his distinctive scruffy singing for the songs to follow. But under the dance of Ward’s fingers, voice was given to his guitar as it alternatively whispered and choked, became feverish or impatient with emotion.

Country is distinctive of the South, not the West Coast where M. Ward is from. But to those music fanatic foreigners who have only a romanticized conception of Portland ­– a granola-eating, peace & love place that breeds a surprising number of talented, alternative musicians ­– the purity and timeless quality of M. Ward’s music embodies just that.

Gummy Skulls, The Flaming Lips

Watch how The Flaming Lips delivered four new tracks. Some less sophisticated procedures include biting straight into the yummy flavored gummy.

"Soft Shock", Yeah Yeah Yeahs

The acoustic version of this song came up in the episode of Bones I watched this morning. It was very emotional - Bones was tracking down the parents of a child who had been kidnapped at age three and abused since; not really a "soft" shock. Anyways, here's there more lively original to start off your Saturday night.

Red and Yellow

"The Look", Metronomy

"Wicked Wisdom", Of Montreal

On Of Montreal’s most insularly eclectic album Skeletal Lamping appears “Wicked Wisdom” ­– a rhapsody with a two-minute interlude of sultry smoothness; a back and forth between what parades as bridge and chorus. Reminiscent of Queen (when such a structure appears in the world of rock, how can it not) but very different in tone to the epic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Kevin Barnes asserts the cheerful nature of his music here with his opening line, “I’m a motherfucking headliner, bitch, you don’t even know it,” and solidifies the song to our times with a borrowed interjection: “Process it”. Next? Drum roll, please, before Of Montreal lead you into their wild playground including an exercise in falsetto, a minimalist background to the address of Georgie Fruit (Barnes’ “black she-male” alter-ego) and a claustrophobic tunnel of reverb and electronic machination. Now add to this the insane costumes Of Montreal perform in… 

"Houseboat Babies", Reptar

If you want a little something to dance to now that summer is sneak-attacking the weather, Reptar is a refreshing dose. Of what exactly? Euphoria put in a blender on medium with some ice, recorded into a microphone and sampled backwards over a array of unwieldy instruments and electronics – verbatim from their Myspace. If Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks" was the song that should have been THE song of the of summer 2010, but wasn't, "Houseboat Babies" is that song for 2011. Also recommended for intake: "Cannabis Canyon." Of course. 

P.S. For those of you in NYC, Reptar, rprztn' Georgia (like a special someone else I know) is playing this Thursday @ Music Hall of Williamsburg.

"How Dare You", Thao & Mirah

"this one wants something from you and you cannot do it. But you're going to do your version of it which actually doesn't cut it."

Thao & Mirah "How Dare You" from Yours Truly on Vimeo.

A La Paris vs New York

France:

US:

"The Rake's Song", The Decemberists

This past January, The Decemberists came out with their 6th album, The King Is Dead. But it’s really hard to want to write about their latest album when you haven’t written about their previous one – their hyperbolic genre–relishing humorously disturbing concept album – The Hazards of Love: a rock-opera, and a brilliant feat in story telling. 

Although probably the most commercial sounding song from Hazards, “The Rake’s Song,” is also where the self-proclaimed “writer of fictions” (remember “The Engine Driver”) showcases his mastery of irony. With the well-timed blazing guitar, the punctuating drums, and the chorus of voices backing up Colin Meloy’s ardent “alrights,” The Decemberists gives the “The Rake’s Song” all the qualities of an anthem. The song, about a man who ties the knot at twenty-one but realizes he’s fucked the second his wife starts popping out kids, will therefore have you rooting along with its narrator for the virtues of – as the title suggests – the single life.

So you root with the narrator for the bachelors, for the rakes, for the careless and unbound! You root for freedom! And you keep on rooting, until you're rooting for the twisted means that justify the end. 

 

Stoned Popes, in the Metro

A Very Pretty Video

Plastic Flowers - Upperground Stories from Panaframe ▲ on Vimeo.

"Whale", Yellow Ostrich

Maybe it's the way Alex Schaaf's voice is softly synthesized to sound like he's talking through glass or water or in some secret aquatic animal signals. Maybe it's the majestic percussion that drive the song in homage to the massive mammal. Or the way the percussion stop, giving way to the amplified guitar strings, signaling a possible change in point of view. Maybe its simply the way the song culminates with the splendor of the tumbling crash of a wave.

Maybe its just a damn beautiful love song.

Cloud Control @ La Maroquinerie

The band yielding from the Blue Mountains of Australia was pleasantly surprised by the turn out of their only gig in Paris. “We weren’t sure anyone would show up,” said front man Alister Wright, with a somewhat nervous chuckle. Formed in 2007, Cloud Control has been collecting a lot of attention in their native country. And while the band has opened in the past for Vampire Weekend, Local Natives and Supergrass, the fact that their debut album Bliss Release came out only last year (2010) has kept their exposure localized – that and the fact that no one bothers to pay attention to anything going on in Australia.

Having recently moved back to Paris, my attendance at Cloud Control’s concert was the result of random venue browsing and minimal Myspace sampling. I had dragged a friend and wondered just how many others had come on a hunch like myself. There didn’t seem to be a general sense of anticipation in the crowd that filled but didn’t pack the small space; they seemed idle and content. As we made our way to the doors at the end of the concert however, it may as well have been with a completely new set of people.

With only four instruments (plus the occasional use of a transfixing tambourine) Cloud Control manages to create a sound that is powerfully enveloping. “Make my head a pool of water,” Wright and Heidi Lenffer (keyboard/vocals) sang in their opener “Meditation Song #2,” displaying the kind of harmonic abilities that distinguishes their sound. “Let out my emotions and my pain,” they continued once the guitars started blazing, pulsing hands began clapping, the tambourine trembling, and the audience was left feeling like we were following these four folks in front of us on some kind of pilgrimage through the rainforest. With lyrics like “soul is what I got/ I know it’s not much/ whatever it is its mine” (“This Is What I Said”) and “there’s nothing in the water we can’t fight” (“There’s Nothing in the Water”) Cloud Control delivered a whole-hearted dose of blissful idealism. But if Cloud Control’s lyrics verge on the light-hearted, the ecstatic vocal explosions (“Into the Line”), psychedelic synth solo (“Gold Canary”), and the tribal chant texture ("Ghost Story") in their music gives them the weight of revelation.

Generous with their time, Cloud Control played songs from their album, their EP, as well as a cover of “Pursuit of Happiness,” which, of course, everyone in the audience knew and were happy to sing along to. By the end of it, the crowd that walked out was a group of invigorated, loud, and lively people. Although Cloud Control is sticking to Europe for their first tour – most shows being in the UK – I doubt it will be long before these Aussies starts to resonate extensively in the indie rock world.

"Problem", Young Man

Problem - Young Man (TWHP Concert Footage) from The Wild Honey Pie on Vimeo.

Local Natives Unplugged in Paris

“Fuckable”, Hot Sugar

Hot Sugar will have you getting down to the disco sound of his track “Fuckable,” part his new EP Muscle Milk. If the downtempo beat and the coy squeals of his electronic slips – as if he didn’t know exactly what he was doing, and doing it with wild imagination (watch his process documented below) – doesn’t get your blood rushing, Baghdaddy’s breathy vocals will, all the more for its minimal appearance. Lasting just over two minutes, “Fuckable” is one big tease that will not be fulfilled by listening to his other songs, although they are sure to satisfy you in other ways. While “Color Wars” dabbles with R&B, “The Seagull” sounds like a psychedelic music box; Hot Sugar’s songs are as eclectic and fascinating as his means of production.

Radiohead Remixed

I thought it would be relevant post on Radiohead in honor of the release of their new album this past Saturday. Maybe if I grow a pair (and the vocabulary) to review it, you'll see another post sometime soon, on the band adored by all those alienated kids out there. 

Bad puns aside, below are two different types of remixes. The first is my favorite Radiohead song remixed so that you can add it to your party playlist without sucking out all the energy in the room. And the second.. let's just say I stopped hating Beyonce's "Single Ladies" for all of three minutes and thirteen seconds.

"Two Blobs Fucking", The Flaming Lips

If the title isn't romantic, the concept surely is. "Two Blogs Fucking" is the first of Flaming Lips' tracks to be released monthly in 2011. What it actually is, is twelve individual tracks/clips meant for i-phone type devices that played simultaneously, ultimately create one song. So you can mix and match with your fellow i-phone, i-pad users and orchestrate your own variant of "Two Blogs Fucking". Cool huh?

You'll find all the tracks below, as well as the kind of superfluous instructional video. If you're all on your lonesome, however, and feel dejected because you don't have twelve mice (mouses?) to click play at the same time, you can listen to the full mixdown here.

Sneaky Sneaky Scissor Sisters

Here's to a little derision of V-day. Boys, try offering Scissor Sisters' proposal from their song "Whole New Way" (in their words of course) to your loved one today. I bet Prince wished he had come up with this one first.

Blame the Boredom, Blame the Basement, The Nico Blues

The Nico Blues wear their ethos on their sleeve; its in the title of their album, in their choice of its distribution (it’s free), in the theme of their video clip, and in the name of their “record label” on their myspace: Tiny Giant Artist Collective. They’re just guys, hoping their music can do for others what it does for them, honoring their inspirations while their at it (“Nico” is a reference to a Blind Melon’s album). While their music is more aggressive than the kind I typically enjoy, they are doing some pretty cool things with it. And after listening to the first minute of “An Hour in a Half”, I was really glad I came across them.

"First Snow In Grand Rapids", La Dispute

My mother (ya I know, I started my post by talking about my Mom) tells me I that I listen to depressing music. This song would be a perfect example… except that it gets so jovial after the initial minute, it even sounds like people are clapping along! As for some of the other of La Dispute’s songs, I wouldn’t characterize them as “happy” or “sad”… more like “angry” and I definitely would NOT play them for my mother. If you’re into “depressing” tunes like me though, check out “Nine” and “Ten”.

Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom

If there is a person who could single-handedly change what it means for someone to be “easy”, that person is Joanna Newsom, with her opening song “Easy” of her album Have One On Me. “Easy, easy/My man and me,” Newsom sings in her beautiful song about dedicating yourself completely to the service of loving an other. And to convey the strength of the emotions evoked, Newsom solicits the symbolic power of nature: we hear the frog who courts until the day he croaks, the life of the river  in the tickle of flutes.

It is rare now a day to find a recourse to Nature so prominent in music – a theme that was inspiration to so many classical composers (Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony,” Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”). It would make sense that Joanna Newsom, who has been playing the harp since she was five years old, be influenced by classical music. But Newsom is anything but classic. Everything, down to her voice (reminiscent of a more sober Kate Bush in “Wuthering Heights”) is unconventional.

While Nature, often embodied in animals, runs through Newsom's imagery, it does so in the form of, “a brace of jackrabbits with their necks all broke,” “[doling] out hurt like a puking bird,” and “swans and lisps down on the gossiping lawn saying, ‘tsk’,’tsk’,’tsk’.” Just as powerful as her lyrics is Newsom’s use of instruments. In “Easy,” the violin sweeps us into romantic fantasies while the minimal touches of the piano reveal the simple message of a love song one dedicates to their beloved. There are trumpets that take the place of vocals and hum along to the ending of “Good Intentions Paving Company”, and reproachful piano chords in “In California”. The result is that Have One On Me feels like the confessions of a modern-day nymph – one that gets drunk and barges through her ex’s door (“Jackrabbits”).

“Not informed of the natural law,” Newsom sings in “No Provenance,” and it’s almost impossible to believe her. For Newsom’s songs so lyrically and musically poignant, speak of emotions around love and loss in such a universal way, they seemed to be offered to us as a cautionary tales. Joanna Newsom not only has intuitive insight into the human condition, but also a distinctive way of communicating it.

Metric & The Pretty Reckless

One is with the indies, the other with the majors. One makes alternative, pop-rock while the other’s is heavy, post-grunge. The former band’s (Metric, in case you were still guessing) front-woman Emily Haines secluded herself in Buenos Aires to compose and write her latest, and lovely album Fantasies, while the latter’s, Taylor Momsen, met with high-end producers and songwriters somewhere like LA or NY to churn out the group’s debut, Light Me Up. So why am I comparing the two? Besides both bandleaders’ electric blond hair, they seem to have nothing in common. Well, maybe that’s exactly the point: female rockers need to have blond hair. Why not? Since no other hair color embodies the adjective “electric” so rightly, it makes sense that these gals can stand in front of powerful rock instruments and “man” the stage.

This is in fact, my point (not the hair color thing but the gender thing): both Metric and The Pretty Reckless are two rock bands today that are lead by strong, assertive women. And like the female figure itself, when rock is molded with a feminine touch, it is left with the quality of sounding particularly sexy. While there’s no contesting that Metric – whose album embodies at once the sound of the glamorous at the peak of their career and of those abandoned in the downward spiral of their cause – is much more musically complex than The Pretty Reckless, I think that there is something to be said for what Momsen (better known for her role as “Little J” in Gossip Girl) does. If her raccoon eyes seemed incongruous in the tailored world of the Upper East Side, it makes a lot more sense in the context of her music. It’s dark (ish), has heavy, accentuated drumbeats, and melodious vocals turned edgy by Momsens’ surprisingly deep singing which she chokes, contorts, and rasps at will. Now, there are also a lot of things I dislike about Taylor Momsen the singer. Like how she tells her audience that one of her songs is about the time she fucked a priest (??) and her blaze countenance in interviews (what drug exactly is she pretending to be on, I’m not sure). But on the scale of positive to negative influence Momsen and The Pretty Reckless have on impressionable youths, I would say positive. While The Pretty Reckless is typical enough to be mainstream, its spirit (and riffs) is deeply tied with the heavier side of rock – a sub-genre of music whose masters (AC/DC, Aerosmith, Nirvana) will inevitably find its way into the hearts of those who hear and like The Pretty Reckless.

This Year and That - A List of Songs Played on Repeat in 2010

Now that the haze of a good New Year’s celebration has passed and resolutions officially underway (because all serious things must begin on a Monday) let us flashback into the not-so-distant past of 2010. Before we do though, I’d like to go even further and talk a bit about 2009, because in my opinion, last year didn’t have quite the same splash as did the rounding up of the first decade of the new millennium. Whether you’re more apt to believe in the alignment of the stars or the dictating forces of the economy, it’s difficult to deny that something happened musically in 2009. It saw Lilly Allen – the bubbly, British, pop singer – who basically dedicated an entire album to the moral edification of the general public. It welcomed Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, whose debut album Up From Below made even the most urbanized individuals want to trade in their coffees to-go, quit thinking about the future and relish instead in the stability of the past over a home-cooked meal. It also inaugurated the innovative, introverted XX, whose mesmerizing music is as subtle and layered as its band’s name suggests.

But if the past year didn’t have the over all bang that the previous one did, there still came out of it great, powerful albums. There was, after all, the great Kanye West who recently discovered what – when applied to music and music videos – an oxymoron can do for your career. Not that his techniques aren’t genius: while flirting with sophistication in “Runaway”, Kanye launches into a list of insults only Urban Dictionary would be able to distinguish. This way, Kanye attracts the attention of everyone including those who think ballet is the highest form of physical expression to those who think it's for sissies. There was also Vampire Weekend’s second album, Contra, surpassing its genre-shaking eponymous album of 2008, as well as many other bands and artists reminding you why you liked them in the first place (The Morning Benders and the Black Keys’ albums were personal favorites). So instead of giving you a list of the best albums of the year (there are much more qualified people to do so ­– many of whom voted My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy number one) the following is a list of songs that had only one criteria to fill: I played them on repeat at some point last year.

1. "Crave You" - Flight Facilities

2. "Pumped Up Kicks" - Foster The People

3.Psychic City (Clasixx Remix) - Yacht

4.Something Good Can Work - Two Door Cinema Club

5. "Psychotic Girl" - Black Keys

6."Excuses" - Morning Benders

7. "For Your Love" - The Yardbirds

8. "Colours" - Calvin Harris

9. "Something Is Not Right With Me" - Cold War Kids

10. "On My Balcony" - Flunk