Memorial Day

I'm sure you will indulge if I skip the salute to people in uniform and instead honor a musician. Tom Cora was an avant garde improvising cellist who played with just about every experimental musician in New York and beyond throughout the '80s and '90s. The music is all over the map, and a lot of it is excellent and exploratory work. He died of cancer in 1998, and shortly afterward John Zorn released a retrospective of his music. You should own it. I put it on recently for the first time in years and was totally stunned, track after track.

Here's a piece from that comp recorded just after Cora's death. I find it genuinely poignant. Probably not so great for barbecue listening though. See you back Tuesday.

Thierry Azam - The Week Tom Died

How not to cure migraines

Yesterday I found myself in the grip of a brutal migraine/nausea tag-team. It lasted most of the day, and there was little I could do but ride it out. But vertigo can be awfully stubborn, especially when you've got this tune on the stereo. What an amazingly skewed mind Monk had. Even more amazing that he made this number swing.

Thelonious Monk - Brilliant Corners

Insistent winds

I love it when I hear an unfamiliar group doing stuff that sounds like home. The more branches, the better the musical family tree. This one's got it going on. Primitive mechanical rhythm track? Overlapping circular melodies? Steady layering? Yes, yes, yes! I'm not sure those are real flutes, but they're giving me real smiles. Part of me wants a version that strips away everything but the breathing.

Soft Verdict - Mildly Skeeming

Like a coked-up Lindsey Buckingham

Let's be honest with ourselves here: it's barbeque season.  This necessitates that we put aside all of the dark, sleepy lyrics we've been cuddled up with for months and we get really, really, unintelligibly silly.

Let's listen to Fang Island and ride bikes!

Fang Island - Daisy

Triumphantly fleeing old selves

Ruts are hell—suffocating, torturously self-reinforcing. A room without windows. That's why it's so inspiring to see people busting out of them. If any band was headed toward dangerous self-parody, it was Belle & Sebastian at the beginning of the '00s. It turned out all they needed was Trevor Horn to knock them out of their comfort zone.

I laughed out loud when this track came on the stereo the other day. The good kind of out loud. Enjoying its jaunty catchiness, I couldn't help but imagine how they would've done it years before—precious, maudlin, the usual accusations. Instead, it's almost Broadway in its garish orchestration, complete with cartoonish bwah bwah trumpet. They seem to be having a sly kind of fun all the way through and breathing a whole lot easier for it. Sorta like the album cover - people with portentous facial expressions now accompanied by other people with spaghetti on their heads. Bravo.

Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress

Float in space, drift in time

Another chunk of bigness. Or maybe it's wideness. But epicness undeniably. This one feels a lot like an aftermath and pulling yourself together enough to recite the simplest declarations as though they held all the meaning in the world. By the time all the pieces are in place, I'm ready to get swallowed by the sky.

Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

Heroic sounds

Surely you have soundtracks for your great undertakings. Whether it's your triumphant scaling of Mount Kilimanjaro or your deadline-nailing all-nighter, you need a sonic engine. Here's one of mine, even if it's more often used to soundtrack toweling off and getting dressed. Grandiosity starts in your head.

Popol Vuh - Hüter der Schwelle

Sounds of my imaginary English youth

It doesn't happen enough, but whenever some gruff jangle from the C86 era crosses my earspace, I'm reminded how much I love the stuff, as though some version of myself might've grown up on it. If you're interested, an updated/expanded version of that comp is available and near-essential. Here's a track from a band whose name I love or hate depending on my mood.

14 Iced Bears - Like A Dolphin

Automatic person operation

Another find from Lights in the Night. This one made me do a double-take. A lot less menacing, a lot more...sexy? Well, maybe. When it sounds like you're reading off of phonetic cue cards, the dread just melts away. I guess once Ms. Anderson had her accidental chart hit, she thought "dance mix next!" I'm still trying to figure out exactly what dance this calls for. Any suggestions?

A.P.O. - O Superman

Busted up on love

Yesterday I took a dig through the backposts of the excellent blog Lights in the Night and found this sparkling gem. I know nothing about Fiona Franklyn, but I know that almost anything engineered by Don Was is worth hearing. Good fortune provided a beautiful day, and I had this in my head as I went cycling around the park, feeling grateful for all my senses. How is it that the title phrase hasn't made it into popular vernacular?! Can we not all relate?

Fiona Franklyn - Busted Up On Love

Days

More music for reflection. This one always seemed to make more sense in the summer haze, but it's also appropriate for stepping back and taking a good look at yourself. How your days are filled or not filled or should be filled. They pile up, and getting older, you're faced with the tyranny of habit. Watching your accumulated patterns play out, the days in front threaten to run their course without even rocking the boat.

Television - Days

Pieces of a dream that I've been building

Another rainy day on the train. It would've been romantic if there was anything romantic about the Amtrak local. Looking out the window at the broken parts of Newark, Rahway, Baltimore, etc., I couldn't help but summon audio soul reflections like these.

Gil Scott-Heron - Willing

Fleet fingers and magic lips

Having the great privilege of rocking out with Roy Nathanson reminded me that I really should put on music from the erstwhile downtown scene more often. There's really no substitute for top shelf improvisers busting out, even when they've got it written out. Here's trumpeter Dave Douglas and accordionist Guy Klucevsek yukkin' it up.

Dave Douglas - Mugshots: Decafinata

La la la songs

One part of me likes to think of Thee Oh Sees as the band that sounds like what the garage rock revival could have sounded like if the garage rock revival hadn't sounded so much like, well, The Strokes.

Another part of me thinks that it's simply about anticipation: this is what summer sounds like when it gets the outdoor festival / plastic cups of beer / sunburn ratio just right.  Simple enough, that!


The Oh Sees - I Was Denied

Strangers

Cold, windy Sunday put me in a bit of a spin. Allergies, cracked skin, a weird sense of unease. The kind of day where doing anything seems like the wrong thing and doing nothing feels the same way. Sometimes you don't feel like yourself, and sometimes you think it's possible for the brain to glitch enough that you become a different person for a little while until it resets itself. Here's a song from a band I don't remember hearing about and whose music is tied to no memory and yet feels totally familiar to me. Maybe I'm just channeling my German doppelganger.

1. Futurologischer Congress - Rote Autos

Rock a Fela

A little self-promotion today. The Dees are playing some Fela tunes for a protest-themed show at the Knitting Factory on Saturday. Getting to learn them has been a lesson in the subtle intricacies of his music. So much to love about it—every thing doing its unselfish part to form a colossal whole, the undeniable groove, the righteous voice. I always say I love the stuff. And then sometimes I feel it profoundly and want to live inside it for several weeks. Here's a fine one to get lost in.

Fela Kuti - Colonial Mentality

Static dynamic

Following Def Leppard is gonna require a pretty hard correction. Musically and geographically. All the way to Japan, in this case. I heard this track in the middle of an excellent mix from Noncollective, and I perked right up. It's very much a product of its home country, which is to say a fairly incoherent brew—steady marimbas à la Steve Reich, some guitar Frippery, a little new age saxophone, a dash of Japanese ladies wordlessly vocalizing. But it's all laid down smooth enough to make the strict time feel nice and fluid. Good for kicking back and watching the sun do its magic descent.

Kazumi Watanabe - Tsuru-Kame Hinatango

Better rock n' roll through science

Some bands work the literary aspirations of rock n' roll, as evidenced by Flynn's Hold Steady track yesterday. Others just plug in and go for the big dumb glory. And some bands do the latter and then spend months in a studio applying mysterious audio chemicals to polish and shine the stuff into something slick enough to enter young listeners' ears and permanently affix itself to the pleasure center of their brains. Such was Def Leppard's method in their prime. And this was before the drummer even got his bionic implants. Here's an album cut that could've easily ruled the world in 1983.

Def Leppard - Stagefright

If you've still got a fair bit of clairvoyance.

I'll be very honest here. I have a love / hate relationship with the Hold Steady - to the point where two years ago I started a blog that revolved around the very subject. Love them or hate them, this band is polarizing.

One thing they do almost inarguably well is create narrative; in their songs, characters spring to life and recur.  The narrator is almost always a good guy and there's almost always a messed-up girl involved, but within these themes the same two people might guest star. Such is the case with "The Weekenders", a sequel to an earlier track called "Chips Ahoy" that I realized I hated because it's essentially about characters that hit too close to home for comfort.

Once I got comfortable with *that*, I fell in love. Maybe you will too!

The Hold Steady - The Weekenders

Hurt like kryptonite

I found my sister's cassette copy of XTC's Skylarking in the spring when I was 13. I remember really liking the way the album breathed, but being a little uneasy about it. It was one of those gateway albums that segued me from pop radio to artier, more idiosyncratic stuff. I waded in gingerly, the lack of a listening community making early listens feel like I'd stumbled onto strange territory. But the record's self-assured breeziness won out, and I was happy to start having bands that I could spread the news about.

Over the years, Skylarking's luster has dimmed. The band's post-punk early albums are still compellingly cockeyed, and their Dukes of Stratosphear incarnation did '60s psychedelia note-perfectly. On the other hand, this record at least has Todd Rundgren going for it. And this track—with its dorky take on failed romance via the language of superpowers—has springtime running all through it, including the key element of melancholy riding the breeze.

XTC - That's Really Super, Supergirl