2nd annual Songblague mixtape!

Yeesh, this took a while. No matter how I try to prevent it, I always get overwhelmed by choice. I love all my babies, and we're talking over 250 songs this year to boil down into a single, digestible "story." In the end, I decided not worry about equitable representation. No 2010 in miniature, just one view out of a million possibilities. If you're looking for a little bit of everything, you should just take a listen to the year in full. Backwards, of course. Or just stock up on Bill Nelson records — Songblague's obsession of the year (anything up to 1986; after that, it gets pretty spotty).

So here's your 2010 mix, featuring all of two songs that actually came out this year. (The past is always present!) Picture it double album style. Five tracks a side, which is one week in Songblague time. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it would make a pretty OK soundtrack for your New Year's party. Most of it anyway. Enjoy!

Side A
Susumu Yokota - Tobiume
Bill Nelson - White Sound
Japan - My New Career
Ambrosia - If Heaven Could Find Me
Roger Miller - My Uncle Used To Love Me But She Died

Side B
Marcos Valle - Tira a Mão
Simple Minds - Glittering Prize
Nora Guthrie - Home Before Dark
Need New Body - Show Me Your Heart
Superchunk - My Gap Feels Weird

Side C
Hatchback - Midnight Jogger
Shalamar - Don't Try To Change Me
Haniwa-Chan - Sumidagawa Daisanji
The Pretenders - I Go To Sleep
Pete Townshend - Face Dances Part Two

Side D
The Fall - Rowche Rumble
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Let It Sway
Serge Bulot - Fumee
Arthur Russell - The Letter
John Stewart - Gold

Not-so-secret track (If a record could do a tastefully-chosen encore)
Cube - Concert Boy

Another not-so-secret track (If a record could point out to the last guy at the party and the sun is now coming up and it's time for sleep)
Nite Jewel - Artificial Intelligence

Snow falls slow

After the last few days of shoehorning Christmas into songs that really don't care, here's one that seems to fit naturally. Silent night style, you know? All the late-'90s post-rockers gathered in the snowy night, ruddy-faced with their tongues out to collect the falling flakes. Pretty pretty. And it's aged well too.

Last year's thoughts about Christmas sort of apply now as well, so I'll just direct you there if you're looking for some reflections, though this time it looks like the day will be filled more with busyness than quiet drift.

Meanwhile, let this track gently close out the year in Songblague. Hope you've enjoyed! I'll be taking off next week, but plan to drop a year-end mix before jumping back on the decks in January. If you're feeling nostalgic, give last year's a metaphorical spin. I think it holds up. Like a seasoned bank robber. Peace, friends! 'Til soon.

Ariel M - Roadrunner

Shining violence

Whether via music writers or press release, descriptors for the Chromatics' sound are all pretty much in a line — dark night of the soul (or the disco), driving through uneasy, late-night city quietude after the drugs have worn off but the menace remains, trouble either in the rearview or up ahead. I'm gonna add a little Christmas dimension to it, because I also see lots of cruising through suburban towns looking at the holiday lights and wondering if anything terrible is maybe going inside. Nothing only really happens once a year.

Chromatics - Lady

White denim Christmas

So it's late December, and with no snow on the ground, I resort to audio snowball fights. These kids from Austin have an awfully good time with their proggy garage palette, augmented by some mild noise and held together by a wide-eyed enthusiasm. It all adds up to fun. And what's Christmastime without that? Here's one of their more straight-ahead tunes. Reminds me of kids jumping around in a parked station wagon, waiting for the family road trip to get going already.

White Denim - WDA

Chestnuts

Yesterday's post reminded me that most bands that have been pillars of my musical history have not made their way onto the 'blague (click the tag below for some special exceptions). It probably has something to do with an old, useless desire to not misrepresent an entire oeuvre with a single song, a wish for objective encapsulation. Which is contrary to the whole idea of this blog. Plus, in a very real sense, representation is always misrepresentation. Why worry about what you think you're leaving out?

So in the holiday spirit, here's a classic chestnut from a band that defies the idea of a summary that doesn't diminish. This one reminds me of a goofy crush from long ago. And it's got a cool theremin.

Pixies - Velouria

O Captain my captain

Well, what more needs to be said about our dearly departed Captain that hasn't already been mentioned throughout the weekend? I'm happy that so many people have been giving him his due and acknowledging his singular genius. Here's my small contribution.

Picking a tribute-paying track is no easy matter. You could choose from over a dozen gold nuggets from all phases of his career (except maybe this one). Or any random one from Trout Mask Replica. I've decided to offer up a tune that's a little harder to find, from the criminally still-only-available-on-vinyl (or the Internet) Lick My Decals Off Baby, which is a slightly less inspired kid sister to that towering masterpiece. Which is to say, it's still avant-blues-cubist amazing.

What Decals lacks in original brilliance, it more than makes up for in advertising. Check out this excellent commercial that Beefheart made for its release. If would win a Clio if it had been made today.

Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - Woe-Is-Uh-Me-Bop

All we ever had was now

Who doesn't think a little about mortality as the year approaches its end? And if you're gonna go there, it never hurts to bring Wayne Coyne with you. I admire the Lips' freakout prowess as much as anyone, but I've got a real soft spot for the band's kindhearted/childlike handling of weighty matters like addiction, alienation, and death. And of course, the giant balloons at their shows.

I recently listened to the Yoshimi album for the first time in years, and was fully taken by its warmth. This tracks pulls a neat trick — flipping apocalyptic despair into a realization that having an ongoing flow of now that simply persists until it stops persisting isn't really such a bad deal. And the texture of the music is a total winner — a soft drugginess that somehow sheds a very clear light. (You can hear an instrumental version here.)

The Flaming Lips - All We Have Is Now

Alternate office party soundtrack

The approach of a work holiday party is always cause to imagine my own soundtrack. If you're gonna blast the music at a volume that renders conversation near-impossible, you can't expect me to not have strong feelings about it. Last year, I wanted to go all cosmic groovy. This year, it's vintage hip-hop robots, with lots of pitch bending. Which really should happen more than once a year.

Beem - Manka

Cosmic lovesick

Bands that live out in the cosmos tend to sound weird when they come down to earth. Here's a band of Italian psych/prog/space rockers who apparently also liked to try their hand at emotional concerns. The singer is at the wrong end of the vocal gracefulness spectrum, but there's a certain desperation that's sort of appealing. As for the music, I guess garages in space are similar to the ones down here. It's strange how much this sounds like '90s indie rock.

Sensations' Fix - Do You Love Me

Clouds before Christmas

I think we need a little tilt after yesterday's goodhearted jam. How about some lo-fi, analog synth murkiness that seems inspired by bad dreams and worse drugs. This is pop music in the kingdom of Ariel Pink. Thanks to Team Songblague member Ali Hammer for hipping me to it. I think it adds a nice spice to the holiday season.

Bubonic Plague - The Greek Ambassador

That's us, before we got there

With rare exceptions, Songblague usually chooses not to hang with love songs. It's not out of coldness. They just tend to bore me. Well, here is one of those rare exceptions, and yet again, it comes courtesy of Arthur Russell. Beyond the avant-disco innovations, he's just got a knack for expressing genuine tenderness with a childlike guilenessness that disarms you of cynicism. Here, it's a warm keyboard against brisk percussion that rushes ahead but still seems unhurried. And of course, that Kermit the Frog voice gently cooing the sweetest obliqueness you might ever hear.

Arthur Russell - Wild Combination

Secondhand sweet pop

Japanese pop bands have magical powers of refraction, taking original sources and bending them into sounds that range from a little disconcerting to very perverse. And they have a weird way of twisting memories of my adolescence. This tune sounds eerily like my first attempt at forming a band, from the excessive guitar effects to the drums that barely keep up. It's a game of telephone, weirdly imitating American teenagers weirdly imitating British '80s alt-rockers. I like how the guitar break is so perfect, dude plays twice exactly the same.

D-Day - So That Night

Dirty sea

Last weekend, I saw a stage performance of The Metamorphosis. The production was brilliant in itself (no insect costume but plenty of pathos!), but I was equally struck by how good a pair of soundtrackers Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have become. Which reminded me how long it's been since I listened to my Dirty Three albums (Ellis is their violinist).

A couple of this week's themes come into play here — nostalgia for un-muddied musical influence and an evocation of overwhelming sadness. Regarding the latter, no one does it quite like these guys. This music breathes like a body you want to stay close to.

Dirty Three - Sea Above, Sky Below

Your heart is surrounded in rust

Licking cracked lips on cold days like these, my mind often drifts back to wide-eyed undergrad times. Or at least as wide-eyed as my cranky temperament allowed. I remember hanging out with my bandmates listening to the likes of Beekeeper and instinctively trying to incorporate their best ideas into whatever stew we were trying to cook up. At some distance, I can now appreciate that lack of focus, the utopian sense that just about anything can work together. (That'd be the wide-eyed part, I guess.) And now, this song — with a steely austerity that finds room for harmony in its furrow-browed groove — seems just about right as you watch your breath form and vanish in front of your eyes.

Beekeeper - Dead And Drugged

Big dumb awesome

From the subtle contours of emotional anguish to...big, bong-rippin' blooze proggery. With lyrics to match. I think this is one of those cases where "love" actually means "filthy sex." Watch out, those guitars may give you a nosebleed.

Arc - Let Your Love Run Through

Ghost notes

Songs named after emotional states can be pretty dicey, and it's a rare track that can shoulder the weight. It's especially tough when the emotion is actually a knotted set of feelings. According to some quick research, saudade is a Portugese word referring to a longing for something that was loved and is now lost, not only a deep desire to have it back, but also a belief that one day it will actually happen. Refusing to let the thing or person go means that the ghost is always present. And the constant failure of the past to return creates something that's both a huge emptiness and a crushing sadness. Interestingly, in Brazil, they have a holiday for it (January 30, if you want to mark your calendar).

Apparently, saudade has no true analogue in English, and I'm probably missing a lot in the translation. Thankfully, music can do it a lot better. So...does old Vini Reilly nail it with this one? Songblague says yes. Agree?

Durutti Column - Saudade

Theme Week - À la bibliothèque, bébé! (5/5)

Let's close out Library week like the champs we are. I love that there's a whole species of music meant to soundtrack Olympic-scale victory. But again, for me, it's the mundane moments that most deserve to be accompanied by such heroic sounds. So in that spirit, let your weekend laundry or grocery shopping chores be magnified by this track.

Simon Haseley - World Power

Theme Week - À la bibliothèque, bébé! (4/5)

Maybe it's weird, but I like my ambient sounds to be a little troubled, with a peacefulness that suggests some disturbance under the surface. The steady bass flange and mysterious fluttering synth on this one make me feel like I'm backstroking over soft ripples that are not nearly as placid as they appear. And the shore is very far away.

Serge Bulot - Fumee

Theme Week - À la bibliothèque, bébé! (3/5)

One summer during college, I had a habit of getting baked in the morning and then proceeding on my mellow way to the supermarket to buy a whole lot of things that made no sense. Most of the groceries would eventually go bad in the fridge, the concept of the ingredients having passed into the ether by early afternoon. Everything about those little excursions — my mismatched clothes, the gentle swerve of my driving, and the very absent expression on my face — comes back to me as this track plays.

Geoff Bastow - Bubble And Squeak