Daydream your way around the room

Any album that sounds the way its cover looks is bound to get a thumbs-up around here. And I hope you will find today's selection as dorko charming/looks ridiculous with snorkel gear/but in a funkyish way as I do. Arto Lindsay's career has effectively straddled the noisy/smooth divide, and his samba-with-a-twist records are easy pleasers. Let this tune take your mind off the prospect of slushy foot journeys and further sidewalk shoveling this weekend.

(FYI, I'll be cooling out for a bit. Back Wednesday.)

Arto Lindsay - Simply Are

Junior boys

I admit I didn't really care too much when Dinosaur Jr reunited a few years back. Still don't. Liked 'em, but never loved 'em. Which I realize diminishes my indie rock bona fides in the eyes of some. That's OK. Mostly, I just want J Mascis to take some Dimetapp already and get rid of that nasal congestion he's had for 30 years. Anyway, here's a rocker that just rocks rockingly all the way from where you been to wherever you're going.

Dinosaur Jr - On The Way

More songs about buildings and snow

Yesterday, I found myself looking out my 9th floor work window, completely lost in the patterns of falling snow against the suddenly beautiful Lego-like building across the street. My mind discreetly checked into a room soundtracked by today's song, which belongs in the "sorta-but-not-quite-classical/swear-you-heard-it-in-a-film" files. Or in a planetarium. Or in a celestial waiting room.

Max Richter - Iconography

Smile with such good grace

I suppose this one would've made a better segue from Friday's track, but it's a pretty one on any day. It takes me back to those years in the '00s where doing a half decent Morrissey impression was enough to get you a gig at a respectable venue and maybe even a little East Coast tour. But these guys are better than that, even on this number that seems to wistfully recall Belle & Sebastian's now-classic chamber pop records. I'm inclined to nod approvingly at the whole arrangement, but I find myself oddly focused on the bass, which motors along dashingly without ever preening too much for your ears.

Butcher Boy - Keep Your Powder Dry

Watching the snow fall

These last few weeks, the snow has become such a natural part of the city landscape that I'm hardly noticing it anymore. Which may be why I've been living inside this excellent mix the last few days. It contains this semi-classic track, which I'm just now re-appreciating. Partly because of that charmingly dated synth percussion, and also because it manages to be icily funky without sounding being all post-punk ominous. Maybe also something to do with those flocks of birds falling from the sky of late. And the presence Peter Gabriel in guest star mode makes me smile.

Laurie Anderson - Excellent Birds

And here's Gabriel's own version, a nice reshuffling of the elements. It's not as much of a curiosity as our last double-dose Gabriel collaboration, but it is a pretty cool and weird choice for a big blockbuster album closer.

Peter Gabriel - This Is The Picture

Not gonna do a thing that they say

I've always meant to like Felt more than I do. So many of the parts are in place — inscrutably peevish English dude, chiming guitars, ambitious lyrics + breathy vox (if you try really hard, maybe you can be Tom Verlaine!). But it just doesn't hang together enough to turn my polite admiration into full-on fandom. Except songs like this, which is great because of its incongruousness. Especially the drums, which sound like they were imported from another song that happened to be at the same tempo. It hits me just right.

Felt - Trails Of Colour Dissolve

Unsalted peanuts

You think you've got enough music from awesome blind piano players, do you? Well, friend, you do not. Valerie Capers was a sidewoman for several bebop and Afro-Cuban notables, but seemed to have had little of a headlining career for herself. Which is a shame, as today's tune should amply demonstrate. It makes me want to invent a new Peanuts gang character and go sledding in some cartoon snow. Who's with me?

Valerie Capers - Kenne's Soul

Afterlife entrance music

If yesterday's song seemed fitting for a funeral procession, this one leaps into the imaginary next step — a passage into the crystal kingdom of infinite whatever. And who doesn't want to be there? It's a little cartoonish, but that kind of agreeable over-the-topness is what Library music does best. The real question is why has no rapper sampled this yet?

Bruce Mitchell & Rick Miller - Space City

None of us have anything

Happy belated MLK Day. Sorry, forgot to mention I'd be observing it. In the spirit of honoring lives, here's a song for the sadly just-departed Trish Keenan, singer of the excellent band Broadcast. They never quite got all the acclaim they deserved, what with simplistic comparisons to Stereolab and the like. But they were brilliant all the same, with both a well-considered aesthetic and a drive to keep evolving it. They only made a few albums, but they're all worth your attention. This track feels appropriate for the occasion — funereal and otherworldly, with Keenan's beautifully blank voice set hauntingly in the foreground.

Broadcast - Until Then

86ed

I sure love me a good compilation, which is no big news if you're a regular around here. There are a couple ways at it — some lovingly dig deep and serve up forgotten music in particular styles (like anything by the Numero Group); others go broader and synthesize many different aspects of a place or time (i.e. any of the sprawling Nuggets editions). One that does both and is rarely far from my mind is the C86 cassette (now available as the CD86 disc; I don't think they're calling it mp386 yet). If you're already familiar, I'll spare all the talk about "jangly," "shambling" pop and just say it's an embarrassment of Anglo pop riches, one after another.

The title is kinda apt. It comes from its release year of 1986. And while many of the bands clearly took inspiration from early to mid '60s guitar pop, it's all filtered through a very mid '80s Smiths-esque sensibility, deftly eliding the '70s. See. 80s. 60s. Fun. But I digress.

Most of these bands had little career to speak of, so each tune feels like an especially noteworthy moment in the sun. You could throw a dart at a board and pick a winner. But I'm especially fond of this one, with its strummy, rainy day dreaminess. A rainy moment in the sun? Hmm...

The Raw Herbs - He Blows In

The nightmare before soundtracks

Sticking with early '80s pop, let me address a pet peeve and note a distinction between its New Wave and New Romantic strands, which often get conflated. It may sound like splitting hairs, but I think it's important to appreciate the richness of that era, especially the stuff that's fallen through the cracks. The music that makes it onto VH1 quasi-histories (ie Duran Duran type glam, the least interesting of the synth pop practitioners, and novelty numbers) mostly sidesteps the desperate, breathless sense of outsiderness that has more in common with punk and postpunk than the music would at first suggest. And with catchier hooks to boot.

This is all very reductionist, but worth considering in light of today's song. You may remember Oingo Boingo from this, and you may also know that the band's mastermind was a young Danny Elfman, who has since carved out a cottage industry of well-known soundtrack work (like The Simpsons and nearly every Tim Burton movie). You can hear that tongue-in-cheek cartoon-spooky carnival aesthetic in its infancy on this track. It's almost showtune-esque in scope, but it's pure New Wave dorkery stoking the furnace.

Oingo Boingo - Nasty Habits

Take it or leave it

Here's a funny one. As in goofy and interesting also. I'm sure the members of Yes had to pinch themselves when they thought about the career arc that brought them from Close To The Edge to this. This being such a nakedly commercial play that they actually named the 90125 album after its record label catalog number! But the fact that it's such a snazzy slice of commercial pop is pretty impressive for a bunch of washed-up prog dudes, even if this version of the band saw Steve Howe gone in favor of the much more '80s looking Trevor Rabin (who was equally dweeby at heart).

In the end, this one's all about producer Trevor Horn, who got some SB love a while back, and who deserves credit for slyly adding lots of artiness to the early '80s pop vernacular. And this brings us to the lyrics, the silliness of which may be the only cue that these are the same guys who once took us to the heart of the sunrise.

Yes - Leave It

Your stereo is perverted

Of course, it is. Otherwise, you wouldn't be listening to this twisted little nightmare. Aphex Twin can be hit or miss, but when he hits, he hits hard. Or very soft, which often makes the impact deeper. But here he goes for more fleshy grotesquerie. Those seizure-inducing beats and warm synths are still in effect, but it's the vocal samples that top the marquee. I'm guessing it's altered porn moans (severely disfigured), but even if it's not, that's the effect. And it's a nauseating one, as if you were caught in a hallucinatory whirlwind of nasty sex and the wrong drugs. It's hitting the sensory buttons alright, but you can't escape the sense that it's also a little taste of hell. If you think I'm misreading Richard D. James's dark motives, consider the album cover. He's smiling because he knows he's damaging you.

Aphex Twin - Windowlicker

Mercy me

Songblague of course always has love for the unheralded. Even more for bands that had the bum luck to share song titles with superior contemporaries. And in the same year, no less. That aside, these guys were pretty good at Jesus and Mary Chain-esque pop. And as far as songs with loaded biblical imagery go, this one's got some good character. Mostly courtesy of that stinging guitar. Vocally, the dude is nowhere near Nick Cave, but then, who is?

Ultra Vivid Scene - Mercy Seat

Sleazy listening

Has the first week of 2011 harshed your mellow yet? Well, let's get back in the mental bathtub for the weekend. And when you get out of it, you'll find yourself a lot less clean than before. No really, this is some classy shit. Now let's get you out of those clothes...

I haven't seen Camille 2000, but judging from the poster/album cover, it's clearly a film about the Eiffel Tower. You can grab the full soundtrack here.

Piero Piccioni - Ballade

By indolence and insolence

Keeping it in an early '80s New York headspace, here's a cool rocker from a somewhat forgotten album. This song finds the Blank Generation doing its best to more fully debase itself in the unforgiving last hours of long, ungraceful nights. But not without a sense of desperate community. Maybe they're all held together by the wires of Robert Quine's brilliant guitar.

Richard Hell & The Voidoids - Downtown At Dawn

Breakdown

So, how about that totally inept municipal response to last week's blizzard. I feel no need to pile on Mayor 3-term Whine-o-tone. I'm more interested in how it may foretell a future of collapsed infrastructure and a starved government's inability to get anything together. I doubt we're anywhere near that, but it wasn't too long ago that this city did seem on the verge of [insert favorite urban apocalyptic metaphor]. Which takes me to visions of Ed Koch and songs like this. Lest you think 2011 will be all about silver mornings and leotard jams, SB intends to keep the ominousness at an acceptably audible level.

Implog - She Creatures

Love is no disguise

Your Honor, let me just say that I'm not now and never have been a fan of Footloose. I mean, I do love many '80s movies about teen pseudo-rebellion. But a town where dancing is illegal? And under the thumb of John Lithgow. C'mon. Always struck as a little too Broadway. I guess it's no surprise that the movie made its way to schmaltzy B'way staging.

Then there's the soundtrack. Somehow, I also never got around to making it mine, though I'm pretty sure it held court on my sister's tape deck for a while. So you can forgive that this deep cut only recently floated onto my radar. Total winner. Yacht-y early '80s sneaky verses and a screwy-face-makin' chorus (read: triumphant)! Who cares if it is a little too close to "Private Eyes" (the title can't help but take me there). And maybe it's my attraction to schlock of this era, but there's something a bit poignant about the singer's paranoia and ultimate fatalism about stolen romance. Maybe I'm not such a Broadway hater, after all.

Karla Bonoff - Somebody's Eyes

New morning

Hello new year. It feels like a light slowing emerging from fog. The little that can be said for sure is wrapped in shapes that can't yet be named. But I'm feeling that 2011 has a tender melody in it somewhere and I think it might sound a little like this.

Brian Eno & Daniel Lanois - Silver Morning

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