Wow, has it really taken 694 posts to get to one of my all-time faves?! The pre-1983 Costello catalogue is pretty intimidating, and you could pick just about any track out of a hat and have a great day of it. Here's one that probably wouldn't have made it onto a personal best-of mix, but has been rattling around my head lately. Also, it's the leap-year bonus day, which offers a tenuous segue by way of title. Cheers!
I don't know much about this Alan Shearer, but he has now impressed me twice, so he goes on my good list. Listening to this one, I think back to my imaginary boyhood in mid-'80s Tokyo, stepping out of the arcade into the neon dusk and all its perfumed confusion.
Having wasted a few hours half-watching the Oscars, I can't think of a better corrective to the movie industry's desperate self-promotional ploys than the sweet intonations of Daniel Johnston. I'll take his sad madness over the sorry entertainers of the red carpet almost any day.
Gonna keep it going with French dudes and their audio bong hits. This tune comes from a more hip/less fantastical source — Jean-Benoit Dunckel, taking a little solo break from Air. All Music Guide characterizes this one as a "cybernetically enhanced George Harrison song," and I'd say that's about right. Except that George's voice never sounded so noncommittal about its gender.
Ever wonder what you should be listening to when you're lying on the grass watching the clouds drift and suddenly the nature of infinity becomes as clear and real to you as the sight of your own hands? Here it is.
First there was twinkling and flickering that seemed to exist without beginning. Which gave way to a mighty gallop of crunching guitars and rolling drums that stampeded across the landscape. From the one house left undestroyed, there came a naive, unsure voice pitched a bit plaintive and a lot blank. Which then stopped as a new flickering began. That happened in a recent dream. And it sounded like this.
Love or hate, you can't deny the basic sweet-spot appeal of dreamy synth pop. I've spied curmudgeons who breathlessly grasp for pejoratives absently tapping their feet when they think no one's looking. I embraced the candy full-on a while back, and I've never found it hard to equally love "serious" music at the same time. 
I often think Presidents' Day is a holiday cooked up by auto dealers and electronics shops. I'm not sure why Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays are an occasion to go buy stuff on sale, and I also think it's pretty awkward to try linking these anniversaries to some non-specific honoring of US presidents. Regardless, I have the day off, and hopefully, so do you, and let's be happy about that. Meanwhile, here's a tune that's about as far from American pseudo-holidays as I can think of. Let's raise a flagon of mead to these troubadour faeries of olde English woodplaces!
Still kinda digging this tendency toward wordlessness. You may be familiar with Jean Michel Jarre from his flamboyant and atmospheric work, but it's good to know that he had a fair bit of musique concrète in his genes too. Talk about industrial music! This should be playing in a power plant breakroom on Venus.
Intense workdays call for palate cleansers that don't kid around. I'd take floaty, skyward-looking synth dreams like this almost any day. But today, it's a special helping of audio peace. It also sounds like the soundtrack for curing diseases.
Well, I was right. My current Tangerine Dream immersion has pulled me into the outer reaches. And I have no choice but to take you with me. You'd be surprised how good this stuff sounds when you wake up and stretch in the morning. Something to do with greeting day in all its giant formlessness. And I'm sure it sounds better the further you get out into the solar system.
It doesn't take much to get me into an Arthur Russell state of mind. Sometimes, it's just the winter air chilling my bones that makes me want to float in the warm ocean that is his voice. Add in the invigorating bristles of that cello and you've got pure audio therapy. Let's go swimming!
Having recently come across this Television-esque band from Norway, I'm reminded why groups aped this sound so thoroughly throughout the 'aughts. But these sadly unheralded guys got everything right about this aesthetic back in their day — zippy, angular, nice Gary Numan-like synth warbles, and in no hurry to get through it. Somehow, I continue to be a sucker for oh-so-serious voices like this. 
Been catching up on movies I should've watched in film class. Melville's Le Samourai is justly legendary for smooth n' icy French gangster chicness as personified by Alain Delon. There's nothing more I can really add to that piece of iconography, except to note how much I really do appreciate the minimal amount of speaking not just in the movie, but also in many parts of life. Which may mean that I'm putting myself in the wrong situations. Or that I'm getting crankier with time. But with 4 of 5 songs this week being instrumentals, I think it's that I'd just rather hear music most of the time. Including awesome soundtracks like this one.
More instrumental evocativeness. Conrad Schnitzler had his hand in a bunch of krautrock cookie jars, though was never a luminary in his own right. (In a just world, he'd be a tycoon of a pretzel company.)
If you dig The Cars (debut album, at least) as much I do, today's song will be quite a treat. Aside from looking awesome in their videos, keyboardist Greg Hawkes clearly had some ideas of his own. They seem to involve a kid running from both FBI and KGB agents in a downward spiral of plot twists in my made-up film. They also involve some sweet pitchbending (perk your ears up at 2:32). The fact that some of my own synth adventures seem at home in this soundworld only make me fonder. Thanks to Jason for hipping me to this one.
Uh-oh, it seems I've entered into a Tangerine Dream vortex. Which means there's a real chance I may disappear into the depths of space or melt into the floor. Before I meet either of these fates, allow me to give you a solo tune from frontdude Edgar Froese. While it's tempting to embark on a 20-minute epic drift from TD's far-out heyday, I'll go with an anomaly instead — a linear groove with flesh n' drums and some baked guitar action.
In previous years, a twee-ish piece of curatorial, '60-reconstructing pop might have been all wrong for a post-Super Bowl morning. But since the ritual watching of the game is pretty much all we have left to unify us a nation and with pro football marketers savvy enough to bring the ladies into the jersey-wearing, wing-chomping fold, we find ourselves in a different world. Which is to say, at least some pallid indie rock boys and girls will enjoy the transition from gridiron heroics to these precious 3 minutes.
The thing about being "ahead of your time" is that you never get full credit for your innovations if time never actually catches up to you. So it went with the Silver Apples, who used a fairly limited sound palette to produce some of the coolest, most distinct music of the '60s (also some of the least '60s sounding). There are so many ways the space age could've gone. These guys charted a course we still haven't even embarked on.
I love that ELO have been thoroughly rescued from the dustbin of AOR history, and that Jeff Lynne's insistent fusion of Beatles and bombast seems to have the respect it always deserved. Still, I suspect their '80s output will remain stashed in the attic. Which is a pity. Secret Messages has some killer moments. This is my favorite, with its preposterous rainy day verses (synth sax!) and equally preposterous chorus (TR-808 handclaps!). Totally mismatched and totally worth blasting out loud. I'll stand this one next to "Evil Woman" any day. Dig this one too from the same album.
Moving from grainy Euro/African fusions to a more wide-screen form of exotica. Via a pair of drummers doing it all with electronic percussion and sampling. I give a big thumbs-up to my fellow stickmen getting their melody on. Strangely, I love those new agey '80s synth drums more and more. Maybe it's something about the charm of limitation.
