City wandering

Found myself on a little business jaunt to Philadelphia yesterday. And with a beautiful day on my hands, I felt obliged to walk around aimlessly with all the free time I could steal. In my mind, this is what such a walk sounds like, irrespective of season or weather. And no amount of grim faces and neck tattoos can take the soul out of that fantasy.

Bibio - Jealous Of Roses

Cool fever

Leave it to Knife/Fever Ray vocalist Karin Dreijer Andersson to find the dark side in a cool, almost marimba-like electronic groove. Or to look at it in reverse, I guess this is a pop song in her world. Music for walking in circles and waiting for what comes next.

Fever Ray - Triangle Walks

Ladies and pheasants

When Dungen burst onto the scene (in the US at least), frontman Gustav Ejstes seemed a man out of time. Or at least one so devoted to the range of vintage psychedelic practices that one would think he had spent his whole life in a very particular academy. Since we pretty much live an environment of neighboring nostalgia bubbles, there's no point anymore in picking at people for lack of originality. Given that, I was totally sold on the songwriting and presentation, which was as faithful to Ejstes's notion of the ideal late '60s as it is a reminder that the music was never as tight as he imagines it. I'm glad his imagination keeps going, album after album. The work is a real comfort to me, especially now as I struggle with what seems like trench warfare against this cold that is brutalizing my nose and throat.

Dungen - Mina Damer Och Fasaner

You can't deny

It's Monday, so why not a song about shedding the past and bounding toward inevitable mortality. All the better when driven by a such bouncy beat and an angelic vocals. Viva la workweek!

Sweet Trip - Pretending

And you know it's alright

Well, I would never have foreseen the Bats having three songs up here on the 'blague. But then, serendipity has always been a big part of the project. This is a driving, feedbacky one from the excellent benefit album for Chris Knox, released in the wake of his tragic stroke. As much as I never believe it when songs tell me "it's alright," I kinda gotta go with them here.

The Bats - Just Do It

Humming along

Evening train rides have an incredible tranquilizing effect on me. Somewhere between drug daze and fetal pre-consciousness. A few minutes into it, and I'm at one with the hum. A work trip has given me the chance to indulge the pleasure, made all the better having synced up with this sympathetic tune.

Al Usher - Lullaby For Robert (Bogdan Irkük Remix)

Alive unto you

Moving along from guitar propulsion to gentle, spare sounds. The less beats per minute, the more they count. This is how I like my ballads. A slow build to a soar. A voice that's so unaffected it can't help but affect you. And steel guitar. Let it carry you through the weekend.

Cass McCombs - You Saved My Life

Real humans

So it seems everyone's all hot for neon-noir, Michael Mann-indebted sounds these days. And why shouldn't they be? I'm glad folks like the Chromatics are getting their well-deserved cinema time. Drive was exquisitely flawed — with a strange fetish for demolished heads — but it succeeded at least for bringing this fabulous track to light.

As much as the hook, I'm drawn to it for the tenderly delivered lyrical notion that to be 'a real human being' is itself a thing worth rallying around, as much as being 'a real hero'. Which is to say I'm at least halfway appalled that we expect a world of inhumanity, if we even know what that is anymore.

College (featuring Electric Youth) - A Real Hero

Meanwhile, I hate to waste anyone's time with a tune they're probably hearing a lot these days (though I do love me that M83 sonic overload), but this somehow feels like the flip side to the heroics above. The former was smartly used in a smiling, dreamy daylight sequence, while this one seems more the province of the stone-faced night driver that is the go-to mental image for this aesthetic.

Having said that, Anthony Gonzales gets a big high-five for his courageous saxophone deployment in the outro. A real human being indeed.

M83 - Midnight City

It will end again in bullets

I just love songs that carry you on a breeze and then make you realize it's violence pushing them along. Neko Case has never been particularly gunshy with her subjects, and this is a pretty nasty picture of humans in nature she's conjuring here. but the lyrical thoughtfulness is all gravy. She could sing spreadsheet content and it would sound soaring.

Neko Case - People Got A Lotta Nerve

I got a bad desire

Another one near and dear to me. Everyone likes the Springsteen fist-pumpers, but this one has a quiet intensity that can burn holes through iron. Talk about anguish. And a bit creepy — exactly how little is this little girl? Are we talking "daddy" as in actual father? The warm keys can't soften these questions. But I'm gonna have to drop a curveball version, approaching dance mix territory, which works better than you'd think.

Bruce Springsteen - I'm On Fire (Cousin Cole's Bad Desire Mix)

And for a screwball, the Chromatics version, working the "Every Breath You Take" style guitar. It's blank and ghostly, almost dubby. Points for not changing gender in the lyrics.

The Chromatics - I'm On Fire

Music from a world where high school theater people are tolerable

Spencer Krug should be just too precious for me. Too theatrical, fantastical, lily-white. And yet... he continues to rock me right. Maybe it's our shared citizenship (joint) of Canada. Or the organ and guitars he's got swirling rhapsodically here. I'd sit through a musical that featured this tune.

Sunset Rubdown - Paper Lace

Painted ladies

Some bands just perplex with their monikers. Say you're a bunch of dreamy-voiced ladies from LA who write sparkly, music that billows out in soft shapes around the room. The word "paint" may be applicable to your sound, but not when preceded by "war." Whatever. Guess you have your reasons. Which I might try to suss out if I weren't lulled into a reverie by this song right here.

Warpaint - Stars

Art official

More DIY sounds. I've heard Nite Jewel referred to as the soundtrack to the blurry moments at the end of a night out. But this song feels more like early morning to me. Like a nature film on fast forward—all the animals stirring and shaking off sleep as little rays of light peak through the sky. There's nothing artificial about that intelligence.

Nite Jewel - Artificial Intelligence

Quiet is still the new loud

I never understood why such deliberate and sensitive-minded folks like these would give themselves such a terrible band name. Kings of Convenience? It sounds like a discount furniture store in Bay Ridge. Matters aren't helped by having a song title that awkwardly calls this to mind. Well, any clutch hitter will tell you that a two-strike count is the best launching pad for magic. Not that this tune is exactly magic. More like a quiet home run under a microscope.

Kings of Convenience - Me In You

Drone strike

Sorry. There's nothing amusing about death from above by remote controlled aircraft. And there's nothing attack-like about today's song. In fact, if it has the same effect on you that it does on me, you might even forget how to muster up an aggressive impulse. But it will help you focus on breathing and keeping it mindful...all the way om. Uh, sorry for that one too.

Mountains - Choral

A dream that life forgot

I've kept one eye on New Zealand's indie rock scene for a few years now, and I've long been privy to the twee delicacies that one so easily finds in bands like the Ruby Suns and the Brunettes. Still, it's quite easy to be out of touch with what's considered popular in other countries; even as I warm to the trashy inevitabilities of Ke$ha, I couldn't tell you whether she's had an impact on the international charts.

So when my best friend - who happens to reside in New Zealand - sent me a link to the following song, I got instantly nostalgic for a time when music sounded like this. I thought first about the Outfield, and then I thought about Too Much Joy, and it made my heart feel pretty good that this seemed to reside chronologically and thematically between the two. Then I realized she was sending it to me because it's one of the top 2009 singles in her country. While I've been obsessing over the latest pop jam from Kelly Clarkson and discovering a deep-seated affinity for Kid Cudi, she's been rocking out to this brazen pop-rock anthem.

Not too shabby, other side of the world.

Midnight Youth - All On Our Own

Wild visions at first light

OK, I admit I'm much more jetlagged than I thought yesterday. Or maybe actually getting some sleep was the worst thing for me. My brain isn't so much taking in sensory information as getting bits of data smeared all across it. Here's a song for such a state. I'm not usually the biggest Karen O fan, but, like the movie it soundtracks, this little tune captures the feral dreamlife of the mind when it goes away for a while.

Karen O and The Kids - Rumpus

Øye vay

Autumn sounds remain the order of the day. Maybe it's because I've gotten to see so little of the autumn daylight lately that I've got to feel it by proxy. This one's funky and minimal. Up close and personal. Feels like it should soundtrack slow dancing in the living room. Or a slow evening walk in someone else's city. Too bad the song's all about possessiveness and jealousy. Hit me, Erlend!

The Whitest Boy Alive - Gravity

I am older than ever before

Songblague quietly hit the 6-month mark last month. Cool, cool. But my birthday is tomorrow, and I'll ask you to indulge me a moment to make this space a little self-serving on that occasion.

It's not much of a milestone...cough...32, and I've been too busy to plan anything social. Instead, I'd like to celebrate it with a track from my band's forthcoming album, which I am very very very excited about. We're looking at a Halloween time release, so look out for it. This track is one of my favorites. It's about the textile workers' strike at the Lowell Mill way back in the American day, and it features the excellent voice of our friend Ali Hammer. Enjoy the sweet harmony and my attempt at appropriating the Purdie Shuffle. Cheers!

The Deedle Deedle Dees - Do The Turn Out

Another VU

So you may have heard Beck recently recorded a full-album interpretation of The Velvet Underground and Nico. It has a nice homespun quality; having your own home studio facilitates that. The covers are a pleasing, playful homage to that big, intimidating work. Nothing revolutionary, nothing embarrassing.

But this track stands out, mainly because the Germanic elements are flipped. Instead of Nico's teutonic harshness, we get warm-throated Thorunn Magnusdottir. And rather than John Cale's avant piano poundings, we get throwback krautpop of the best kind—with its one-chord background insistence, ghostly synth, and a graceful sparseness that hints at some kind of ceremony. It rolls ahead but feels almost suspended in air, pulling off the trick that bands like Harmonia had down pat in their '70s halcyon days. Or maybe I like it because it feels like Autumn, and so does the weather.

Beck - All Tomorrow's Parties