Blanched

Just when I think Vermont has little to offer the musical world but jam bands on skis, it turns out Brattleboro has a happening little freakout scene. I've been digging into the wild cartoon soundworld of Blanche Blanche Blanche, and I suspect my mind will be the weirder for it. With 10 or so albums blasted out in the last couple years, I truly admire their work ethic, nearly as much as I do the zigzag logic of the songs themselves. Ariel Pink is a natural touchstone for these guys, but the aforementioned rustic homeland lends them a friendly, non-menacing air. Here are a couple snapshots of the landscapes they inhabit.

Blanche Blanche Blanche - Mercantile Rugs

Blanche Blanche Blanche - She's Adopted

I'm a ghost

Spent a couple minutes catching up on those best-of lists of 2012, which make feel older and older each year. These guys appeared a bunch, and for good reason. Quite the catchy batch, and I'm glad the kids keep getting inspired by some extrapolated version of the synthpop of yore. This tune in particular perked my ears up while trying unsuccessfully to kick the jetlag via treadmill running. The experience was as close as I get to actual sleepwalking.

Chairlift - Ghost Tonight

4th annual Songblague mixtape!

Well, this was an eventful year. "Interesting times", as the Chinese curse has it. In many ways, the world seems a more unsettled place — economically, environmentally, and a creeping sense of hopeless national dysfunction in spite of Obama holding the line. And yet (and I hope I'm not tempting fate by saying), it was a pretty good one for me. Generally healthy, domestically happy, with all the gratitude that goes along with that, what fool could complain? Which is a weird place to be for someone in tune with the doom and dread in even the most benign situations.

So here's a year-end 'blague round-up that maybe hits some of the above notes, influenced also by a nagging case of jetleg (still getting my head around literally going back in time via crossing the international date line). At any rate, the flow feels right. Hope you enjoy whatever narrative comes across for you. Maybe even throw it on for a bit at your New Years party. See you on the other side.

Aside
Willie Hutch - I Choose You
Greg Hawkes - Block Party
The Toms - Other Boys Do
Joni Mitchell - Black Crow 
Cass McCombs - You Saved My Life
David Axelrod - The Warning Talk (Part II)
Tangerine Dream - The Dream Is Always The Same 

Beside
Zazou/Bikaye/CY1 - Mangungu
Violens - Der Microarc
Hiss Golden Messenger - Blue Country Mystic
Daniel Johnston - Sorry Entertainer
Andy Statman - My Hollywood Girls
Rodriguez - Street Boy
D Train - You're The One For Me

Seaside
Tone Dogs - Secret Crush
The Cut - Atmospheres
The Smiths with Sandie Shaw - I Don't Owe You Anything  
David Bowie - Velvet Goldmine
Guy Boulanger and Edgar Vercy - Cormoran Blesse   
Der Plan - Space Bob

Decide 
Beach House - Other People
The Move - Omnibus

El Coyote y Su Banda - Arboles de la Barranca 
Nite Jewel - In The Dark
Polmo Popto - Kiss Me Again And Again (Songblague edit)
Toshifumi Hinata - Pentimento
Marvin Gaye - My Love Is Waiting

Holding hands in the dark

Lady Nite Jewel sure is making a play for diva status. She's taken a big step out of the lo-fi basement. But who knows what's waiting in the rest of the house. I had this song on repeat while waiting in the long voting line. It was lovely enough to lift me out of that environment for a time. And wouldn't serendipity just compel to bring it as the answer to yesterday's lights.

Nite Jewel - In The Dark

Dinosaur days

"Synthesizers dictate the wonder, anticipation, and fear of exploring a 16-bit moon. It is a world half-remembered in neon synth beams, arpeggio craters, and washed in a liquid glass glaze." So goes a self-description of Philadelphia retro synth pilots Dinosaurs On Fire. Of course, the 'blague is not usually in the business of career hype or copy/pasting press promos. But I respect bands that bother to make visual what their aesthetic is going for. Also, I kinda couldn't have said it better myself. Here's a groovy tune from their debut album. Suitable for exploring inner and outer space alike.

Dinosaurs On Fire - Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes

Dreaming of yesterday in black and white

Nick Waterhouse has done his homework. From the smart suits to hot reverb-drenched production, his vintage presentation is impeccable. It helps that the songs are spot-on — retro R&B/soul/early rock/whatever reflecting a vinyl nerd's curatorial care. I'm pretty much sold, but however hip-shaking the music, it's hard to not hear Simon Reynolds whispering killjoy commentary into my ear about the modern music's need to marinade in the past at the expense of bold progress. I guess I go back forth on that one (heh heh, get it?).

Nick Waterhouse - Some Place

Grandpa's coughing in the kitchen, but the strings sounds good

Lambchop has always been a great example of the power of quiet. And of the ability for a big band to make the smallest sounds. Their latest continues the path of perplexing lyrics delivered in that pre-cancerous rasp, mingled with music of ever more refined beauty. All that was brought into powerful relief when I saw them a few months back, which made me want to live in that house of whispers for as long as they could keep the noisy world at bay.

Lambchop - If Not I'll Just Die

Number one in hell

Cheers to Ariel Pink for creeping everyone out again. For those who thought he'd gone hi-fi and cashed in on the perverse interest he'd accumulated, his new one reminds that he remains a truly demented guy. Also, a first-rate con-man. This tune feels like it belongs at a demonic beach party, pre-empting the sinister moonlight with some queasy afternoon sunshine.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Live It Up

Boys of summer

OK, I think I've had my Sparks fill for now. Just in time to celebrate the new album by perennial 'blague fave Windsurf, whose retro-futurist cosmic beach jams never fail to take me to a place of sonic bliss. This is the title track of their latest, and though the video has been around a while, I can't help but not share it, so deftly does it capture that jumbled, subjective '80s mutation that is at the heart of their aesthetic. I really can't get enough of this stuff.

Back in town

The reality of a drive back into the city involves undifferentiated stretches of highway monotony, clots of traffic, and several minutes of utterly unglamorous reststop time. While daydreaming yourself away from all that, you may find yourself cruising thru a digital wonderland, flanked by hallucinatory waves of a world that can never exist.

Squarepusher - Angel Integer

My way on the highway

If I'm not careful, I'm gonna exhaust all my summer signifiers before we even hit July. Ah well. I'm hitting the road for the year's first weekend upstate, and that means getting prepped for sundazed happiness. It also means driving music, and picking tunes for that never gets old.

Violens - Der Microarc

Little spaces and big spaces

I didn't think Beach House would've had staying power. Or if they had, I expected them to just replicate their candlelit, lo-fi bedroom slow pop for a few albums with a couple cosmetic tweaks. In a sense, they've done just that, but the ways they've chosen to evolve have resulted in music that now sounds equally brilliant booming out of giant outdoor speakers and little headphones in those candlelit bedrooms. Oh, and also as an accompaniment to my cold that won't go away.

Beach House - Other People

Night to day

Man, do those Chromatics keep whipping out the 'blagueworthy hooks. Everybody loves them, and that's a consensus I can get behind. Atmosphere + keeping it simple = winning nearly every time. This tune takes their night moves into broad daylight and the black eyeliner looks just as stunning.

Chromatics - Back From The Grave

Looking up at the gauzy sky

Drone-y type music comes in 2 general varieties. There's one kind that makes you keenly aware of the terror of forever, where the sense of endlessness actually creates an unbearable vertigo, and you just desperately want to to believe there's some kind of life outside that frame. And there's the kind that gently helps you disengage from your sense of time, opening your ears to a world of space and all the textural, unhurried pleasures that brings. This tune doesn't conjure either extreme, but it is a nice n' poppy easygoing approximation of the latter. Healthy, jaunty fare for well-functioning transit systems.

Lotus Plaza - Jet Out Of The Tundra

Exploring

If the only thing Gabo Gulbenkian had going for him was his charming name, I'd still probably want to learn more about him. The fact that he does a brand of electronic music that defies category makes him an easy choice for 'blague-ifying. This is the kind of stuff that reminds you to always give a hearty eye-roll when someone starts going on about how there's nothing new in music. His Explorers album is aptly titled. It's a big big world, and it's good to take time to explore more of the sound shapes it offers.

Gabo Gulbenkian - Arthur Rimbaud