100 DIRECTIONS / BUD'S 2008 PLAYLIST

Fleet Foxes, “White Winter Hymnal” (from Fleet Foxes, Sub Pop): This sort of rustic, open-throated harmonizing could only be made by guys with unmanicured beards. I could’ve picked practically anything off the young Seattle group’s self-titled album or Sun Giant EP, both out this year, but this one adds a lovely seasonal angle.

Vampire Weekend, “A-Punk” (from Vampire Weekend, XL): A short, sharp blast of bratty exuberance from the Ivy League upstarts, part Talking Heads, part Ramones, part Paul Simon.

Pictures and Sound, “100 Directions” (from Pictures and Sound, Vanguard): My fave track of 2008—from my fave album of 2008—mounts a wonderfully big-hearted lyric opening into a captivating hook atop a groove that jumps with the visceral momentum of Spoon. A totally inspired take on a perfectly written song.

Kings of Leon, “Use Somebody” (from Only by the Night, RCA): I still don’t understand why 2007’s fully awesome, wildly inventive Because of the Times wasn’t the commercial breakthrough the Followills were destined to pull off as the most exciting young rock & roll band on the planet. Not only that, but it’s ironic that KOL’s first U.S. hit track was the pumping but thematically knuckleheaded “Sex on Fire,” which Caleb had to be talked into finishing by his bandmates. This one, the follow-up single, is far more satisfying, applying the muscular backing vocals of the previous album’s thrilling “Knocked Up” to an Arcade Fire-style anthem. Only by the Night also boasts a ferocious Stones-meet-Zeppelin rocker “Crawl” and the sleeper “I Want You,” a classic summertime lazy groover.

TV on the Radio, “Halfway Home” (from Dear Science, Interscope): With its Beach Boys-derived Bah-bah-bahs and thrilling payoff in which Tunde Adibimpe slides upward into falsetto, the rousing opener from Dear Science, the New York band’s artistic triumph and mega-hookfest, churns through genre distinctions as if they were dead-set on obliterating them. The first time I heard it was on the iPod of Scott Cresto, my friend from Chrysalis, the band’s publisher, just before Radiohead took the stage at the Hollywood Bowl, providing me with the perfect lead-in for the show of the year.

Coldplay, “Strawberry Swing” (from Viva La Vida, Capitol): For me, Viva La Vida is missing something. It doesn’t pack the punch of X&Y or roll out the parade of hooks that made A Rushj of Blood to the Head so endlessly playable. But this Beatlesque beauty stands with the band’s grabbiest, most tuneful cuts; the secret weapon is the squad of cellos that thickens the chords in the chorus.

Lindsey Buckingham, “The Right Place to Fade” (From Gift of Screws, Reprise): Think of this cut as “Son of Secondhand News,” topped off with a “Take that, Jack White” rawk solo from the great eccentric. Yup, that’s Mick Fleetwood hammering away on the drums; Mick and John McVie reunite with Lindsey on the shredding title track and the crunchy rocker Wait for You”; neither plays on the sparkly “Love Runs Deeper,” according to the credits, but it sure sounds like they do. Actually, as I listen to these tracks again, I’m leaning toward “Love Runs Deeper” on my year-end compilation.

The Raconteurs, “Old Enough” (from Consolers of the Lonely, Third Man/WB): Jack and Brendan find the perfect balance between Gram Parsons, Blind Faith and Crosby, Stills & Nash on this delightful roots romp.

My Morning Jacket, “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 1” (from Evil Urges, ATO): The Louisville band’s second terrific album in a row, Evil Urges was produced by the veteran Joe Chiccarelli, who did a similarly killer job engineering the Raconteurs’ Consoler of the Lonely. With its elegant groove and dusky atmosphere, this one is as close as MMJ gets to Radiohead.

TV on the Radio, “Golden Age” (from Dear Science, Interscope): Inspirational lines from Kip Malone: “The age of miracles. The age of sound. Well there’s a Golden Age. Comin’ round, comin’ round, comin’ round!” And what a groove they’ve cooked up to go with it.

Beck, “Youthless” (from Modern Guilt, Geffen): Here, Beck and Danger Mouse seem to take TVOTR’s groove and strip it down to the bone, so that it’s as dry as the desert. But there’s real power in the austerity they’ve created, and that goes for the album as a whole.

Elbow, “Grounds for Divorce” (from The Seldom Seen Kid, Fiction/Geffen): Utterly spot-on classic-rock-throwback track reinvents the power ballad for the ’00s.

Aimee Mann, “Freeway” (from @#%&*! Smilers, SuperEgo): I sold this album a bit short in my three-star review, resisting the synth-focused, guitar-less musical premise, but man, this track grooves, setting up a classic Aimee pop hook. The song I singled out in the review, sounds even more epic now than it did at the time.

Matthew Sweet, “Byrdgirl” (from Sunshine Lies, Shout! Factory): Delivers on the promise of the title with maximum jangle and the implied poignancy that’s a Matthew trademark.

Lucinda Williams, “Real Love” (from Little Honey, Lost Highway): I had the honor of hooking up Lucinda Williams with Matthew, who did the vocal arrangement on this track as well as “Little Rock Star,” and sang the harmonies with Susanna Hoffs, the other half of Sid and Susie.

Bob Dylan, “Everything Is Broken” (from The Bootleg Series Vol. 8, Tell Tale Signs, Columbia Legacy): This finger-snapping alternate take from 1989’s Oh Mercy anticipates the more recent chuggers “Things Have Changed” and “Someday Baby” (both of which appear on this collection in radically altered form). It also anticipates the mess the world is in two decades later, but that prescience is what we’ve come to expect from Bob.

John Mellencamp, “Troubled Land” (from Life Death Love and Freedom, Hear Music): T Bone Burnett has yet to produce his old pal Dylan, but on this Mellencamp LP, he hints at what such a collaboration might sound like. In feel as well as theme, this is very much a companion piece to “Everything Is Broken.”

Mudcrutch, “Scare Easy” (from Mudcrutch, Reprise): Here’s one of Tom Petty’s signature credo anthems, right up there with “I Won’t Back Down” and “Refugee.” How interesting that it took the odd notion of cutting the album Petty’s pre-Heartbreakers band didn’t last long enough to make to re-inspire him to do his best work since Wildflowers in 1994.

Teddy Thompson, “In My Arms” (from A Piece of What You Need, Verve): In which Richard Thompson’s talented kid locates his inner Roy Orbison. Think of the rollicking electric keyboard solo as a bonus hit.

Explorers Club, “Safe Distance” (from Freedom Wind, Dead Oceans): Lil Wayne and Kanye West weren’t the only artists to mess around with zeroed-out Auto-Tune. You wouldn’t expect to find the tonal trickery in a Beach Boys-style ballad, but Jason Brewer pulls it off, turning incongruity into intrigue. From one of the year’s most fully realized albums—who knew a bunch of obsessed kids from Charleston, South Carolina, would possess the arcane skills to pick up where Holland left off?

Robin Danar w/Jesca Hoop, “Yell” (from Altered States, Shanachie): Here’s my 2008 pick for an absolute smash in a perfect world. Producer Danar mixed and matched familiar songs with a variety of vocalists, who do their thing over beats he’s created. This one departs from the concept in that writer/singer Hoop came up with the lyric and melody on the spot, and the resulting piece is as seductive as anything I heard this year. Also worth checking out from the same album: the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan putting his romantic stamp on Chrissie Hynde’s “Message of Love.”

Death Cab for Cutie, “I Will Possess Your Heart” (from Narrow Stairs, Atlantic): The five-minute instrumental buildup to the meat of the song is somewhere between dancing about architecture and wordless poetry; it’s the sort of thing the Beatles might’ve done.

Randy Newman, “Losing You” (from Harps and Angels, Nonesuch): A string-drenched ballad from the old master as gorgeous as it is sad, this song is right up there with “Marie” from Good Ol’ Boys—meaning as good as it gets.

Ray LaMontagne, “I Still Care for You” (from Gossip in the Grain, RCA): The bearded one carries along the existential emptiness of “Losing You” as if Newman had handed off to him during a pickup football game. The track’s dark beauty is deepened by the arrangement and drumming of producer/collaborator Ethan Johns that culminates in a synth wash as hopeless as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Radiohead, “House of Cards” (from the live-in-studio DVD From the Basement, TBD/ATO): Practically a singer/songwriter-ish solo perf by Thom Yorke, who coaxes a ton of mood out of his acoustic. The very definition of haunting.

Pictures and Sound, “It’s You” (from Pictures and Sound, Vanguard): I first heard this in the car as I was turning onto my street on the way back from buying my wife’s birthday present, and its clear-eyed tenderness captivated me. When Luke Reynolds sings the hook, “It’s you I love, not just the thought of you,” I can’t help but sing along every time while pondering the implications of the notion at the same time. This is something rare—a truly original love song.

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: TWEEDY ON OBAMA, 9/05

I first posted the following in February, but the occasion demands that I pull it out of the archives and put it up again. What an amazing moment this is.

This is shaping up to be one of those memorable years—and I’m not just referring to how brilliantly the Lakers have been playing since the trade for Pau Gasol. What I’m referring to is the Barack Obama phenomenon, which is unlike anything in my experience since the decade of the Kennedys, Beatles, Dylan and Muhammad Ali; it’s enough to restore hope to a nation of hardened cynics.

That got me to thinking about the first individual I came across who was aglow with the Barack effect—Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. The following is an unpublished exchange from a phone conversation that took place in September of 2005:

We’re living in an age where it’s hard not to be cynical. It’s insane not to be cynical, actually.
I kind of disagree with that. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and it certainly does feel like it’s hard not to be cynical. But I think what we’re experiencing is the worst kind of fucking cynicism that there is. You could not have a more cynical philosophy than the people that are running this country. And what’s so cynical about it is they’re asking everybody to give up completely on the notion that the future could be better. And because of that, everybody is scared to death, trying to do everything they possibly can to hang on to the way things were. I just don’t think you can motivate people to do anything other than destroy when they’re terrified of the future. If there was a lack of cynicism; if you could combat that cynicism with something like… At one point, we were all kind of working towards helping feed the poor, for example. I know I’m sounding totally naïve, but this is a mass movement that we’re witnessing, and it’s a mass movement of people that are fucking scared to death about the future being worse than it is now. Other movements in our time have been based on thinking that the future could be fucking great, and generally those movements have done a lot more good, even though they could definitely use some perspective as well.

I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to start lecturing. But if people could find something that could give them some kind of hope that you could make it better, if you really ask people to start thinking in a really concerted way about conservation and [the idea] that the children’s future could actually be really bright, I think you’d have a lot more people willing to vote for people like…you know, Obama. I got to meet him not too long ago; he introduced us at Farm Aid. It’s pretty hard not to wanna hang on desperately to someone like that as a life raft. Please save us [laughs].

He definitely has a lot of character, and it comes across as impeccable.
He was great. He was really kind of normal and fun to hang out with, and at the same time very, very sharp.

We need somebody very sharp at this point.
Like a razor.

IT'S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR

Uncut magazine put out the call to contributors for our top 10s of 2008. Here's what my lists of best (or favorite) albums, singles and reissues look like as of early October. I fudged on certain really good albums I haven't yet spent enough time with (like Lindsey Buckingham's latest) by putting key tracks in my singles list. Below those lists are a pair of top 10 LP lists from 1972, which I just discovered in a trunk in my garage.

ALBUMS
1. Pictures and Sound, Pictures and Sound (Vanguard)
2. Kings of Leon, Only by the Night (RCA)
3. Teddy Thompson, A Piece of What You Need (Decca)
4. Mudcrutch, Mudcrutch (Reprise)
5. My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges (ATO)
6. Randy Newman, Harps and Angels (Nonesuch)
7. Explorers Club, Freedom Wind (Dead Oceans)
8. Beck, Modern Guilt (DGC)
9. Ray LaMontagne, Gossip in the Grain (RCA)
10. TV on the Radio, Dear Science (Interscope)

TRACKS (listed alphabetically)
Lindsey Buckingham, “The Right Place to Fade” (Reprise)
Robin Danar w/Jesca Hoop, “Yell” (Shanachie)
Death Cab for Cutie, “I Will Possess Your Heart” (Atlantic)
Elbow, “Grounds for Divorce” (Fiction/Geffen)
Fleet Foxes, “Ragged Wood” (Sub Pop)
Aimee Mann, “Freeway” (SuperEgo)
Pictures and Sound, “100 Directions” (Vanguard)
The Raconteurs, “Old Enough” (Third Man/WB)
Matthew Sweet, “Byrdgirl” (Shout! Factory)
Lucinda Williams, “Real Love” (Lost Highway)

REISSUES (listed alphabetically)
Blue Ash, No More, No Less (Collectors Choice/UMe)
Creedence Clearwater Revival, 40th Anniversary reissues (Fantasy/Concord)
The Doors, Live in Pittsburgh 1970 (DMC/Bright Midnight/Rhino)
Elton John, Tumbleweed Connection (UMe)
Little Richard, The Very Best Of… (Specialty/Concord)
Nick Lowe, Jesus of Cool (Yep Roc)
Old Records Never Die: The Mott the Hoople/Ian Hunter Anthology (Shout! Factory)
Otis Redding, Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul (ATCO/Rhino)
Ike & Tina Turner, Sing the Blues (Acrobat Music)
Dennis Wilson, Pacific Ocean Blue (Columbia/Legacy)


The 1972 Top 10 I submitted to Fusion mag:
Jackson Browne, Jackson Browne

Rod Stewart, Never a Dull Moment

Mott The Hoople, All theYoung Dudes

Little Feat, Sailin’ Shoes
Jesse Winchester, Jesse Winchester
The Eagles, The Eagles
David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street

Flying Burrito Brothers, The Last of the Red Hot Burritos
Brinsley Schwarz, Silver Pistol/Nervous on the Road

The 1972 top 10 of the late, great Paul Nelson:
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
Jackson Browne, Jackson Browne
Rod Stewart, Never a Dull Moment
Mott The Hoople, All theYoung Dudes
Randy Newman, Sail Away
Steve Young, Seven Bridges Road
John Fahey, Of Rivers and Religion
David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
The Kinks, Everybody’s in Showbiz
Wilderness Road, Wilderness Road

BECK STOPS KIDDING AROUND

Beck
Modern Guilt
DGC

Modern Guilt is Beck Hansen’s fourth album of this decade, following his exquisite 2002 breakup album Sea Change, 2005’s scintillating, hook- and groove-packed Guero—my nominee for the quintessential modern-day SoCal album—and the spotty The Information in 2006. Although the most recent LP yielded a pair of grabbers in “I Think I’m in Love” and “Cellphone’s Dead,” even hard-core fans were forced to acknowledge that it just wasn’t “sticky,” like Beck’s best work, which has always hit above the neck and below the waist with equal force.

If The Information failed to stick, the new album is even more resistant to an easy embrace—but the fact that it plays hard to get doesn’t mean it isn’t beguiling in its rhythmic, textural and time-traveling adventurousness. Modern Guilt is Beck’s first collaboration with Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Burton), a restless, iconoclastic sonic architect who somehow managed to sculpt two of the stickiest smashes of the ’00s in the Gorillaz’ “Feel Good Inc.” and Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” While you’ll find nothing that accessible here, there’s a universe of intriguing detail—though grasping it at any given moment proves to be as tricky as catching a hummingbird with your bare hands.

One way of looking at the album is as a postmillennial, postmodern refraction of ’60s acid rock, in which the sounds have been so radically treated that there’s no longer more than a fleeting hint of discernible instrumentation. The psychedelic flavor extends to the elliptically metaphysical lyrics, buried deep in Danger Mouse’s mixes so that Beck’s vocals are part of the wash rather than central features (this is one album for which the printed lyrics are essential). This record is a sort of Zen riddle in that the harder you try to absorb it, the more it resists. Better to follow the lead of the original acid-rock crowd—get your consciousness into a more receptive space and let it seep in through the pores.

These 10 tracks are sci-fi soundscapes disguised as retro pop songs…or the other way around…or both at the same time. It’s like Bowie’s Major Tom took them into space with him 40 years ago and has just transmitted them back to earth, now barely recognizable artifacts after being warped by the space-time continuum.

From the first line of the opening “Orphans”—“I think I’m stranded but I don’t know where”—punctuated by a mutation of the Phil Spector Wall-of-Sound drum beat, it’s apparent that Beck has something weighing heavily on him, as a Byrds-y guitar and Beach Boys-style oohs shimmer in the distance, like memories of better times. “Gamma Ray” harnesses a vintage go-go beat and surf guitar to a futuristic fable in which icecaps are melting, “the heatwave’s calling your name” and the Chevrolet terraplane is the preferred form of conveyance. The eerie “Chemtrails” sets off teeming post-apocalyptic imagery against symphonic-rock pomp on the order of the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed, exploding at midpoint into hallucinatory grandeur a la Revolver’s “Tomorrow Never Knows,” complete with a burbling, McCartney-esque bass pattern from Jason Falkner and Ringo-style drum fills from Joey Waronker, as Beck envisions climbing “in a hole in the sky.” “Modern Guilt,” in which he confesses hopelessly, “I don’t know what I’ve done but I feel ashamed,” appropriates and soups up the shuffle beat of the Turtles’ “Happy Together” and the descending bass pattern of the Doors’ “People Are Strange,” before giving way to the punchy “Youthless,” with Larry Corbett’s cello doubling Matt Mahaffey’s bass line while Danger Mouse’s synth bleeps like C3-PO.

This is an elusive, rigorously avant-garde piece of work that seems to exist in constant flux, like an aural kaleidoscope, its rhythmic, melodic and harmonic elements seeming to move independently of each other—so much so that when a conventional rock backbeat and overdriven guitar riff finally appear on the next-to-last track “Profanity Prayers,” it’s a relief—even more so when a strummed acoustic and a George Harrison-style slide guitar make a brief appearance near the song’s end.

The closing “Volcano” returns to the panoramic balladry of Sea Change, offering what passes for a coherent summing up of the album’s accumulated unease, as Beck, whose vocal for the first time is placed front and center, muses: “I don’t know if it’s my illusions that keep me alive… I’m tired of evil and all that it feeds, but I don’t know / I’ve been drifting on this wave so long / I don’t know if it’s already crashed on the shore…” In all, he utters the words “I don’t know” seven times, along with an “I can’t tell,” before turning his questioning mind to “the Japanese girl who jumped into the volcano / Was she trying to make it back to the womb of the world?” For him, the volcano beckons only because he wants “to warm my bones on that fire a while,” as the album cycles from capturing the zeitgeist with unsettling vividness to pondering the universal imponderables.

A master of Dylanesque free association, Beck has never been more purposeful or theme-serving in his expression, as if the verbal playfulness of his past writing is no longer enough. On Modern Guilt, he’s getting at the grinding sense of uncertainty that we all carry with us in these freaky times—frequently through the prism of freaky times past—as what we believed to be the most permanent of edifices crumble around us, one after another, along with the protections and reassurances they offered. Modern Guilt is the sound of life being lived as things fall apart.

(This review originally appeared on http://www.sonicboomers.com/.)

SHE WENT THATAWAY

Two weeks ago, our fave spinning instructor Essie Shure (see posts from 9/28/07 and 5/26/08 below) made the move to Blacksburg, Va. While we wish her the best, it's a major drag for us regular spinners at the Sports Center in Toluca Lake, because no other trainer played better music or maintained a more infectious sense of groove. Because I'd been putting together spin compilations for her to use since 2003, it seemed fitting to make one for her crosscountry drive. Here's what I came up with...


AUTUMN SWEATER
For Essie, August 31, 2008
1. "Free Fallin'," John Mayer (4:24)
2. "Big Screen," Pictures And Sound (4:10)
3. "Strange Overtones," David Byrne & Brian Eno (4:18)
4. "Chicago," Sufjan Stevens (6:05)
5. "House of Cards," Radiohead (5:28)
6. "All I Got Is Me," Spoon (3:26)
7. "Message to My Girl," Split Enz (4:02)
8. "Real Love," Lucinda Williams (3:45)
9. "You Are the Best Thing," Ray Lamontagne (3:55)
10. "Two Ways Out," Darker My Love (3:23)
11. "The Youth," Pictures And Sound (4:12)
12. "Via Chicago," Wilco (5:34)
13. "Float On," Ben Lee (4:08)
14. "Safe Distance," The Explorers Club (2:07)
15. "Everything in Its Right Place," Radiohead (4:11)
16. "We Can Work It Out," The Beatles (2:16)
17. "A Falling Through," Ray LaMontagne (4:28)
18. "Autumn Sweater," Yo La Tengo (5:18)
19. "Surf's Up," The Beach Boys (4:12)

Just got this Facebook Wall to Wall note, which is precisely the sort of response that has made the day of mixtape compilers since the invention of the audiocassette basck in the previous century:

BUUUUD!!
Firstly, I really can't thank you enough for the travel cd you made for me. I'm kinda embarrassed to admit this, but I got teary-eyed on a couple of them ("Free Fallin'" got me good)... & that little inconspicuous "we'll keep a seat warm for you, Ess" note on the cover was quite nice. Pictures And Sound, awesome!...
thank you, thank you :D
I really do miss you guys. I'm gonna miss showing up to teach, greeted w/a fresh new set of tunes placed on my handlebars... (sigh) <: \ Please tell Peg "hello" from me."

Recommended reading: Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape (Three Rivers Press, 2007)

KINGS OF LEON/PICTURES AND SOUND

Hey kids, you've gotta grab this: http://www.kingsofleon.com/spin_crawlfreedownload/

...and watch this two-part, artist-made EPK on imeem (http://www.imeem.com/picturesandsound/video/) or YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/PicsAndSound).

Interestingly, both Pictures And Sound (8/19, Vanguard) and the Followill boys' new Only by the Night (9/23, RCA) were co-produced, engineered and mixed by Jacquire King. These two records are gonna look real good on his discography.