Listening to Records & Doing Scrapbook: Sampler #1, Tracks 14-17

Yesterday I swung by the record store to pick up the new Sonic Youth, which sounds (so far) pretty damn good. Alas, the only SY represented was a weird Japanese import of "Goo" and I ended up going home with the new Vetiver album instead. If you have a porch, you need to get this album. Because I want to come over some night this summer and listen to this album on your porch. Not that it sounds like it was played on a porch, it's far from foot-stomping. But it's picture perfect cool summer night with a beer music. Porch owners, you've been warned.

I was going to post a couple tracks but my computer is currently cluttered with music for a wedding I'm djing tomorrw and I didn't want to risk a song like, say, Brooks and Dunn's "Boot Scootin Boogie" infecting Andy Cabic's efforts with its phenomenal craptacularness.

Anyway. Here's tracks 14 through 17 which are not craptacular in the least.


Make Out Fall Out Make Up
Some of you may ask, "What are these kids saying? Did they say 'living room' right there? What is this song about?" The answer is, these kids are Swedish and what they're saying is secondary to how they're saying it. And they're saying it by yelling through reverb, with plunking bass and crunchy saxophones (and yes, some handclaps). Love is All embraces the cyclic nature of relationships and throws it a little party. A Swedish makeout party.


LDN- Lily Allen
Lily Allen has more MySpace friends than Jesus. In fact, she has more MySpace friends than several versions of Jesus. So, logically, if the Beatles were bigger than one Jesus, and Lily Allen is bigger than several Jesuses, Lily Allen is bigger than several The Beatles. Follow that? Unfortunately, what the British songwriter/DJ/MySpace heartthrob doesn't have is a CD available in the US. Luckily for all of us, the internet spans the mighty Atlantic and brings Ms. Allen's songs to us here in the colonies. Words like "summer hit", "pop gem" and "first track on road trip mixes" come to mind when I think of this little back and forth tribute to Allen's home city. It's so hard to hate cities in the summer, isn't it? Unless you're the Lovin Spoonful.


Cowbell- Tapes n Tapes
Tapes n Tapes have been at the center of a weird war between bloggers and the print media of late. TnT have been labelled "the type of band bloggers love". WTF? Yes, the lead singer is a graduate of the Frank Black School of Singing All Twitchy Like (FBSoSATL, now accepting applications), but hey, everybody else is doing the David Byrne style neurosis, let's mix it up a bit. The downside is, the song includes no presence of its titular instrument. On the upside, it has a wonderfully hooky singalong chorus. It's all about balance.

Black Swan- Thom Yorke

(sorry folks, word on the street is that Thommy's lawyers are on the warpath, so this track is no longer postable. It is still on the CD, if you happen to have a copy. Please don't tell Thom Yorke's lawyers I gave it to you, okay?)

You may have heard of Thom Yorke. He belongs to an obscure British band called something like Stereoface. If you were to put a butterfly net up in the air, you would probably catch two or three tracks from Thom's forthcoming solo album, since they are bouncing around the internet (which, you probably know, is located up in the air) like the multiball bonus in Arkanoid. Young whippersnapper are claiming "The Eraser" is a bold step forward for Thommy, but those of us who were legitimately mopey when "Creep" first hit the airwaves (and totally miserable by the time "The Bends" was released), might hear it more as a step back to "Kid A/Amnesiac" territory, which was a nice stretch of land. Unlike those albums, here Yorke's misery-loves-melody vocals come through without frustrating effects, gliding smoothly over slick instrumentation. No Radiohead (see how I did that? Slipped the name of our record store into the review?) fan will be disappointed, even if Yorke is just preaching to the converted.

Tomorrow brings the last four tracks and the end of this particular mix cd. But we'll always have the memories. Remember that time I slipped the name of our record store into a Thom Yorke review? Man, those were good times. After that, who knows? For now, I must concentrate on my goal for tomorrow's wedding: make Aunt Sophia dance. Since she's not my Aunt Sophia, I don't know what might cause Aunt Sophia to dance, or if Aunt Sophia is even physically capable of dancing, because I imagine Aunt Sophia is an Italian woman who is roughly 102 years old. Hopefully she likes Outkast.

If you want to buy any of these CDs before August 19th, you can do so here:

...but after August 19th, sister...