Here are a couple of videos from two of my favorite albums this year:
I've just recently joined the board at CHIRP (that is, the Chicago Independent Radio Project. And when I have something to write about music, it generally ends up over on that site, instead of here.
And I've decided to participate in Hourly Comic Day this year. I will post that comic at the my webcomic site (Finn and Charlie are Hitched), and probably also at TenCentTicker.com message board along with all the other people who do it. I hope it ends up a reasonably interesting day.
So I DJed for an hour and a half at the Renegade Craft Fair this past Sunday, and it was fun, in spite of the constant rain. When I got there and started my set, I realized I should be playing the sort of music that would make people forget about the rain -- not a nonstop dance party, but not melancholy, either. Optimistic, perhaps... or "sunny". Well, I did play a beautiful melancholy Nina Simone song, but other than that, I tried to keep the sun shining (while still keeping the set eclectic). And the folks at the beer tent next door thanked me afterwards, saying I'd helped their day not suck. So that was nice.
You Belong to Me / Reverend Tom Frost La Vie L'Amour / Edith Piaf Savoir Faire / The London Suede The Way You Walk / Papas Fritas Headstart for happiness / The Style Council Diamonds Are Forever / Shirley Bassey Midnight / Yaz If I Can't Have You / Eve's Plumb Don't Wait / The Howard Fishman Quartet Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick / Ian Drury and the Blockheads Little Jazz Bird / Blossom Dearie Nobody / Nina Simone La vie en rose / Grace Jones River Deep Mountain High / Annie Lennox We Are the Sleepyheads. Belle and Sebastian Wings of a Dove (A Celebratory Song) / Madness Between Two Waves / Shelleyan Orphan A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left / Andrew Bird Feelin' / The La's Funkytown / Zen for Primates Blind / Hercules and Love affair Huayno / Yma Sumac O-o-h Child / The Posies Can't Go for That / PJ Pooterhoots
I feel the need to provide a little music for people, while in between shows, so here's a little MixWit mix for y'all.
I couldn't find everything I wanted to post in MixWit, and it's possible that some of these songs will suddenly become unavailable. But, you know, ENJOY!
Hellboy, Zerostars at Schuba's, CHIRPlogging, and gardening.
The week was pretty mellow for me. Without the CHIRP record fair approaching, and without my radio show, I had a kind of welcome respite. (Yesterday I slept in a bit.)
So I went to see Hellboy on Tuesday, which was great fun. Visually, magnificent, and very imaginative. The plot, on the other hand, was a bit predictable. Plot devices signaled their approach from miles away. The writing was also not always up to par. Generally, though, I enjoyed it anyway. There were only a couple of scenes that bothered me, and the rest, I enjoyed. The predictability of the plot is I think comparable to Calendar Girls: it didn't make it not a good movie.
Then on Wednesday I went to see a show at Schuba's: Zerostars, The Summer Salts, and Essex Chanel. My reason for going was to see Zerostars, and they sounded great; they really rocked up there and seemed to be enjoying themselves. The Summer Salts didn't impress me all that much, though they had a few good songs, while I really enjoyed Essex Chanel, especially the second half of the show, a non-stop back-to-back set of dance tunes. (The odd thing about these two bands is that they are some of the same people; The Summer Salts is a trio led by Travis Lee Wiggins, but all the members write the songs together, whereas Essex Chanel is purely a Travis Lee Wiggins project, but has a larger stage band. In spite of crossover, they were pretty different.)
And of course there's gardening to be done. Though there's a lot planted, and most of it doing well (on creeping juniper just went belly-up), there's still a lot of empty space. Oh well. (By "empty" I mean crawling with weeds. So I have my work cut out for me this afternoon.)
When I was a wee one, I remember Judy Collins was on Sesame Street. There were a lot of others, too, but I can't remember them. Anyhow, the tradition continues with Feist!
This morning on my show I played Scarlett Johansson. But let's back up.
Some time last year, I heard that Scarlett Johansson, the actress, was recording an album. She had recorded a song for something, and someone was impressed with her voice, and wanted her to record and album. She didn't want to be an actress-turned pop star, like Lindsey Lohan, and she said she would record an album, but it would be all standards. Then she changed her mind and said they would be all Tom Waits covers.
(I should say, this is how I remember the story; I haven't looked up any of this to verify my memory.)
Anyway, I was impressed with that. It's gutsy to take on Tom Waits. He's a unique artist with a distinctive voice and style. He's a great songwriter, but his performance of his songs is as important as the songs themselves. (Compare, to take an extreme example, ABBA: the songs are better written than they are performed, and are highly adaptable to other styles.) Announcing that you are going to do an album of Tom Waits covers says, I think, that you want to be an musician's musician.
So of course, you have to have the chops. Johansson is certainly a talented actress, but that's a different matter from singing. Still, the story was that she had a good voice.
An artist I like a great deal, Holly Cole, did her own album of Tom Waits covers some 13 years ago. Cole is primarily a jazz vocal interpreter, though she has also done pop. Her style is also distinctive, but more importantly, she has the chops. There are some tracks which are perhaps unimaginatively close to the original, but even those are very good. Her slow smoky groove in "Tango Til They're Sore", on the other hand, is quite a surprise, and a real change from the quirky original.
This past Monday I happened to see a link somewhere to watch the video for Johansson's cover of "Falling Down". And I thought, oh yeah, she was making that album, I'm interested to hear it! So I clicked on the link.
It was very meh. The style was a wash of feedback and guitar, like the Jesus and Mary Chain (which seems to be coming up a lot lately; aside from The Raveonettes, whose recent album, like all of their albums, sounds like JaMC, The Magnetic Fields this year did an album in that same style, called Distortion). It's the sort of style that's good for one or two bands, but you really don't want that much of it. It's also a style that you can hide behind, because of the distortion of the feedback. Her voice was fine, but unspecial. And I thought, OK, now I know what it's like. I was a little disappointed, and a little liberated, because I felt like I was done with the album.
Later that day, it showed up in new rotation at WLUW. I was surprised, because she's such a starlet; does she really need indie radio? On the other hand, the choice of Tom Waits indicates that she'd rather be on indie radio than on top 40. The label is Rhino, which is to me neither indie nor major; it's like another category somehow. Anyway, we'd recently been playing She and Him a lot, which is the pairing of the musician M Ward with the actress Zooey Deschanel. If I can play and like Zooey Deschanel, why not Scarlett Johansson?
There are some differences worth pointing out, actually. Zooey Deschanel is a successful, working actress, but she's not a starlet. She hasn't gotten the same level of attention as Johansson has. I know that should not make difference, but it does. Also, Deschanel teamed up with M Ward, which gives her a certain level of credibility — in fact, it was M Ward who convinced her to make the album. The two recorded together, in more or less equal billing, under the name of "She and Him", whereas Johansson is recording simply under her own name. Finally, Deschanel wrote her own songs, which she'd been doing for years (but hadn't apparently shown to anyone before Ward). Johansson wrote one song, and the rest are covers.
Also, I haven't seen any of the She and Him videos, but the video for "Falling Down" was pretty self-indulgent. It's just clips of Johansson wandering going from place to place and being famous (modeling, acting, driving off in a limo). Maybe "self-indulgent" isn't the right word, but the video is entirely wrapped up in her and who she is; it doesn't seem to be about the song at all, unless there's a parallel I'm missing. It was, to put it simply, the video of a famous actress.
So while my initial thought was to ignore the album altogether, I decided I'd play something this week, and then leave it, unless I was convinced that it was really great stuff.
Other DJs have been playing her, thought I only really heard it once. On Tuesday night, the Women on Women Music Show played her cover of "I Don't Want To Grow Up", which is ultimately pretty odd. The dense layers of feedback are accompanied by an 80's style synth-pop drum line. I could hear, around the edges, the possibility of a really good voice, but I couldn't be sure, under it all. The hosts, Jenny, Emily, and Elizabeth, concluded that is was very meh.
So here's what I did today: I played a Scarlett Johansson Tom Waits cover, followed by a Holly Cole Tom Waits cover, followed by a Tom Waits original. The listener response? One call, right after Johansson had ended and Cole had begun, saying "please play some real Tom Waits". I said absolutely — I'd been intending to.
Still, I think it was an interesting set, and I hope my audience thought so as well.
As for me, I think I'm done with Scarlett Johansson as a singer. She's fine, but not all that interesting.
Meanwhile, another CD that was added to rotation this week is by the Last Shadow Puppets, and that sounded really good. (I accidentally played two songs — after the break, I started the same CD again. Oops. Both songs were good.)
One of the new albums in the studio is by the New Zealand parodists Flight of the Conchords. Humor bands can get tiresome, but these guys seem pretty good. The song I played is a parody of a French 60's pop, and features the kind of French dialogue that you can understand if you've ever studied French, ever, even for just a year. It's a funny song (with a funny video).
Anyway, this inspired me to play a full set of French songs. In the 80's, the French pop music scene was a bit of a wasteland, but now they are producing a lot of good stuff. Everyone knows Air by now; they made the soundtrack to the movie The Virgin Suicides, and last year's Pocket Symphony was one of my favorite albums of the year. So, what else is there?
Camille came recommended to me by my friend Graziella. Her music is reminiscent of afropop, with overdubbed harmonies that sound like Zap Mama. I picked Le Fil up last spring (2007), but it's a couple of years older than that.
Les Négresses Vertes started in the late 80's mixing rock with bal musette; sometime in the 90's they shifted their sound to something much more electronic and dancey. I picked up Trabendo in 1999.
Stereo Total is band that's also gotten some international attention. The duo do not sing well, but it's good rock music, and good singing is not required.
I've been trying to think of other French bands I know, that I could have played — Louise Attaque, Les Innocents, Olivia Ruiz, Superbus, L'Affaire Louis Trio, Orwell, Justice, Paris Combo, Uztaglote. Am I missing anything?
(Not to mention Quebecois bands and artists like Ghislain Poirier and Les Sequelles. Really, that's a whole other scene.)
I finally got the Zerostars new album, Basement Stories — hot off the presses, I might add. I've been looking forward to it, and it does not disappoint. There are some great new tunes on it; I particularly like the moody, folky "Family Tree", which is something of a departure for them. The song I played today is more in their usual style, which is power-pop leaning toward chamber-pop. The song ("Uptown") also feature a great rock-out break toward the end.
Next week is my sister's birthday, so I played a song for her today — The Kinks' "Come Dancing". It's a song we both loved in the 80's. It's also a song written about an older sister, from the point of view of a younger brother, and it's probably partly for this reason that the song will forever be linked in my mind with my sister. She listened to my show on the internet today, so she could hear the song (she knew I was playing something, but she didn't know what). It was the perfect song.
It made me try to think about other songs about siblings. Yoko Ono's "Sisters" is more about metaphorical sisters — women in general. Juliana Hatfield's "My Sister" is a good example of a song about siblings, as is Kate Bush's "The Kick Inside" (though it's best not to think too hard about the meaning of that Kate Bush song). The Mortal Coil covered a song called "You and Your Sister", though it's more of a love song, incidentally mentioning a sister. Aside from "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" (covered excellently by Rufus Wainwright on the Zoolander soundtrack), I can't think of another song about a brother, though I'm sure there are some.
Any suggestions?
Meanwhile, my playlist:
*: new stuff (r): requests
artist
song
album
label
Rufus Wainwright
Foolish Love
Rufus Wainwright
Dream Works
The Aluminum Group
Post It
Little Happyness
Minty Fresh
*She & Him
I Was Made for You
Volume One
Merge
*DeVotchKa
Along the Way
A Mad and Faithful Telling
Anti-
*The Heavy
Brukpocket's Lament
Great Vengeance and Furious Fire
Counter
Chin Up Chin Up
The Architect Has a Gun
We Should Never Have Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers
No Time to Think about What She's Done - 4/18 show
There was an earthquake today! This is exciting news in Illinois, where this sort of thing never happens — especially since no one was hurt. It woke me up about 7 minutes before my alarm was to go off, though I didn't know what had happened. It wasn't till I heard the news later and found out the exact time it happened that I realized why I'd woken up to early.
One called made a request in honor of the event: "Of Pressure" by Mirah, which is a song about an earthquake. (Mirah's last album, last year, was a concept piece in which each song was about a different kind of insect.) During the song another caller called to ask if I was playing the song because of the earthquake. Yes. Yes I am.
Not that I would have had any better ideas without the call... "I Feel the Earth Move" by Carole King? Boy, I bet that got a lot of play on other stations today...
EMI did not apparently send a copy of the new B-52's album, Funplex, to the station, but they did send an album of remixes (which are still being reviewed). So I bought my own copy — of course, how could I not — and today I played my favorite song from the album, "Eyes Wide Open". Now, any time a DJ plays their favorite song from an album, they hope to get a good response (and to be fair, when I got to the office, Julio commented that he'd heard it and liked it). But this time a caller (actually the same caller who requested Mirah) said she though the song was too much like Madonna... or at least she found the lyrics too much like Madonna, though she liked the music. I dunno. I still like the song.
Meanwhile, DeVotchKa's A Mad & Faithful Telling is officially my favorite album of the year so far.
*: new stuff (r): requests
artist
song
album
label
Talking Heads
And She Was
Once in a Lifetime Boxed Set
Bobby Conn
Punch the Sky/Anybody
King for a Day
Thrill Jockey
*Goldfrapp
Happiness
Seventh Tree
Mute
*REM
Hollow Man
Accelerate
Warner Brothers
Jacques Brel
Les Bourgeois
Ne Me Quitte Pas
Kate Bush
All We Ever Look For
Never Forever
EMI-Manhattan
*Herman Dune
I Wish I Had Someone That I Loved Well
I Wish That I Could See You Soon EP
Everloving
Phillips & Driver
Oh Starsky
Togetherness
Bar None Records
*Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
We Can't Help You
Real Emotional Trash
Matador
Amy Winehouse
Some Unholy War
Back to Black
Island
Mavis Staples
99½
We'll Never Turn Back
Anti-
Grace Jones
I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango)
Private Life: The Compass Point Sessions
Island
*Crystal Castles
Alice Practice
Crystal Castles
Last Gang
Deee-Lite
What Is Love?
World Clique
Elektra
Happy Mondays
Dennis and Lois
Pills 'N' Thrills and Bellyaches
Elektra
*The B-52's
Eyes Wide Open
Funplex
EMI
Les Négresses Vertes
Les Mégots
Trabendo
Virgin France
(r)Hot Chip
Baby Said
Coming On Strong
Astralwerks
*Elf Power
Fried Out
In a Cave
Ryko
*DeVotchKa
Transliterator
A Mad & Faithful Telling
Anti-
Chin Up Chin Up
I Hope for Tumbleweeds
We Should Never Have Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers
Flameshovel
*Haale
Ay Dar Shekasteh
No Ceiling
Channel A
The Fiery Furnaces
My Egyptian Grammar
Widow City
Thrill Jockey
*The Heavy
Set Me Free
Great Vengeance and Furious Five
Counter
Frank Zappa
Uncle Remus
Apostrophe'
Rykodisc
(r)Mirah
Of Pressure
You Think It's Like This but It's Really Like This
Have I said this before? Is there a better song that so completely mangles Spanish as The Clash's "Spanish Bombs"? Honestly, I didn't even notice it was Spanish until the guys from Sound Opinions pointed it out. "Yo te quiero" ("yoh teh KYEH-roh") is sung as "yoh teh KEWH-ra". I sing along when this song is on, and I pronounce it right, and well, it makes it all easier to take. It is a great song, after all, and mostly in English.
I tell you I am no Oasis fan, and not even really a big Ryan Adams fan, but Ryan Adams's cover of Oasis' "Wonderwall" is excellent — spare and sort of spooky. "Wonderwall" is a great song. I've liked every cover of it I've heard, including the 60's pop parody by The Mike Flowers Pops (spot-on enough to make me think for a moment that Oasis had covered a song from 30 years earlier).
So this week's show as in anticipation of the CHIRP Record Fair, and I played a number of songs on vinyl, including some b-sides. I played Kate Bush's haunting cover of the traditional song "The Handsome Cabin Boy", as well as the spacy-funky "Monkey Monkey" by Eurythmics, the b-side to "Love is a Stranger." It was fun. There were other things I wanted to play but more or less couldn't — for example, ELP's "Baba Yaga's Revenge", a piece they composed for their version of Pictures at an Exhibition, but I found that the tracks on that album flow together and it would have been murder to cue up. But I listened to it at home the other night, so that was fun. I probably wouldn't have dragged it upstairs and played it without this impetus.
*: new stuff (r): requests
artist
song
album
label
The Clash
Spanish Bombs
London Calling
Epic
The Shangir-LA's
Out in the Streets
The Myrmidons of Melodrama
RPM
Laurie Anderson
O Superman
Talk Normal Anthology
Rhino
Kate Bush
The Handsome Cabin Boy
This Woman's Work (b-sides disc II)
EMI
*Haale
Off-Duty Fortune Teller
No Ceiling
Channel A
*DeVotchKa
A Blessing in Disguise
A Mad & Faithful Telling
Anti-
Ryan Adams
Wonderwall
Love is Hell pts 1&2
Lost Highway
Neko Case
Soulful Shade of Blue
The Tigers Have Spoken
Anti-
*Why?
Song of the Sad Assassin
Alopecia
Anticon
The Aluminum Group
The Mattachine Society
Plano
Minty Fresh
*Headlights
Market Girl
Some Racing, Some Stopping
Polyvinyl
Martha & the Muffins
Teddy the Dink
Trance and Dance
DinDisc/RTC
*The Apples in Stereo
On Your Own
Electronic Projects for Musicians
Tep Roc
Wilco
Pick Up the Change
A.M.
Sire/Reprise
The Folk Implosion
One Part Lullaby
One Part Lullaby
Interscope
(r)The Cure
The Edge of the Deep Green Sea
Wish
Elektra
*Faceless Werewolves
Couldn't Believe It Blues
Pardon Me, Are Those Your Claws on My Back?
Super Secret
*Crystal Castles
Courtship Dating
Crystal Castles
Last Gang
Toshinori Kondo
Shosuke-san
(Taihen/Shosuke-San single)
*The Mae Shi
Young Marks
HLLLYH
Team Shi
Luxury
Green Hearts
Yellow Pills Prefill
Numero Group
*The Breeders
Bang On
Mountain Battles
4AD
The Husbands
B.I.L.L.Y.
There's Nothing I'd Like More Than to See You Dead
I took some time this past weekend to compare vinyl and CD versions of “Oh What a World”, from Rufus Wainwright’s 2003 album Want One, and “Hello Earth”, from Kate Bush’s 1985 album The Hounds of Love.
Interestingly, a previous post (by someone else) provided a link to compare two MP3 files at different levels of quality. I confess I failed the test... the first time, I took it using cheap headphones at work; the second time, I fed my computer into my home stereo to test it. I couldn't tell the different — but I'll say this, both versions sounded tinny and weak to me, especially on my home stereo. It may be related to the way my computer does audio output.
A word about Frank Zappa: it always impresses me the extent to which he was both brilliant and weird. "Montana" is a good example: musically, a good song -- well constructed, good melody, etc -- about moving to Montana to grow dental floss. ("Raisin' it up / and waxin' it down / in a little white box that I can / sell uptown".) This is par for the course in the land of Zappa. And other people have written absurd music, but I don't think anyone has done it as well.
I'm afraid I don't have anything more to say about music this week... I spent a good chunk of my energy writing a blog entry for the Chicago Independent Radio Project, which should be up there soon.
*: new stuff (r): requests
artist
song
album
label
LCD Soundsystem
Time to Get Away
Sound of Silver
DFZ/Capitol
Nina Simone
Sinnerman (Felix Da Housecat's Heavenly Houxe Remix)
More thoughts about Kate Bush: some of her songs treat some pretty strange subjects. "The Wedding List" is a ballad telling the story (in first person) of a woman whose husband is shot dead at their wedding; she then hunts down the killer (still at the wedding, in her dress), kills him, and then herself. It's odd, but pretty well done, in that the motives behind the crime are alluded to but not explained. Another odd ballad by Bush is "There Goes a Tenner" about a failed bank heist, which was remade by a Chicago hip hop group as a rap song. Some day I will have to play those two songs back to back on the radio — they sound pretty different.
I feel the need to defend Swing Out Sister. Swing Out Sister had their biggest hits in the 80's, when they were playing jazz-influenced pop — somewhat akin to the Style Council, but which heavier orchestration. I enjoyed those songs, but they were tacky; always tacky. Lead sing Corinne Drewery did, however, have an excellent voice, in that smooth jazz-vocal style. In 1992 they came back with a more jazz- and soul- influenced album, Get in Touch with Yourself, followed in 1994 with The Living Return, which dispensed almost entirely with the pop sound, in favor of jazz, soul, and bossa nova. Each album was deeper and stronger than the previous one. Then, I just kind of stopped tracking them; apparently there have been five albums since then, including one that came out last month. So I guess I'll have to look into that. Anyway, "Mama Didn't Raise No Fool" is really my favorite track from The Living Return.
Zerostars are finally putting out there first full album. (Their previous effort was an EP.) The songs I've heard from it are strong, and I'm looking forward to hearing the whole thing. This will be self-released, as the EP was; who knows but it could be the record that gets them a contract. (Funny how that works these days — it's possible to self-release a good quality CD, rather than sending demos around in hope of getting a contract. You can generate some interest in your band, and this might get you a contract. Office did this; Q&A was self-released in 2006, and most of those songs made it onto their 2007 label debut, A Night at the Ritz.) Back to Zerostars: "Sleeping In" will be on this album. I'm a sucker for a song with time changes; the verses in "Sleeping In" are in 4/4 time, while the refrain is in 3/4. Anyway, you'll hear from me again once I've heard the album.
After two weeks of subbing and swapping, I was back in my usual slot today. That was kind of nice.
So, I admit it: when I first heard of Baby Dee, I didn't know what to make of her, and I passed on doing the CD review for the station. The information available on Baby Dee's website does not entirely elucidate; mostly you get the impression that Baby Dee is a little known phenomenon who's been performing for quite a while. Discovering her now feels like picking up a book in the middle. So: Baby Dee is described as a transgendered musician and performer; she sings with a voice that is in a male pitch range but with female intonation and speech patterns. The closest comparison would be Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons (with whom Baby Dee has performed), but whereas Antony uses his pure falsetto to gorgeous effect, Baby Dee's voice has more of a growl to it and works well with vaudeville. Some of the songs are very much vaudeville, and very funny; so far, I like these the most. Baby Dee is harpist, but also plays piano, and some songs also seem to feature accordion. I'm still exploring the album and figuring out how I feel about this artist, but the moment I heard the song "The Only Bones that Show," I wanted to hear more. (The title of the song sounds a bit like a riddle; what are the only bones that show? Teeth, of course.)
Baby Dee was not the only harpist in this week's show; I also played Toumani Diabaté, who plays the Malian harp. The songs on this album (those I've heard, at least) are instrumentals, and gorgeous. They run a little long, but you get lost in them, and don't notice the passing time. The way the notes weave around each other reminds me a bit of Zimbabwean mbira orchestra music, which is a bit of an obscure reference. It's probably better that it sounds like harp music, when a harp is used for more than simply arpeggios. On Monday night, listening to Catherine's show, she played Diabaté, and followed him up with Joanna Newsom, which was just about perfect; it didn't seem right for me to turn around and do the same thing.
On to other things... I regularly read a blog about comics (newspaper comics) called the Comics Curmudgeon (at joshreads.com). Josh's posts are very funny, but to get the full effect you must also read the comments. And, when people post comments, they often link their names to their own sites (I regularly link to my blog or my webcomic, and have picked up a couple of readers as a result). One of my fellow 'mudges had linked his name to djearworm.com, and I went to check it out toward the end of last year. DJ Earworm makes mashups, but not typical mashups. Typical mashups involve editing out the vocals of one song and the music of another, and putting the remainder together, giving you, for example, the vocals of "Get Your Freak On" with the music of "Love Will Tear Us Apart". DJ Earworm's mashups tend to more fully blend the songs, matching phrases on top of phrases. The effect is a little like that scene in Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas in which Emmet and his band discover that the song they sang for the contest and the song Emmet's mother sang for the contest sound better as a duet (OK: possibly the most obscure reference I could have made). Anyway, some of these mashups involve two or more songs mixed together; today, I played "Stairway to Bootleg Heaven", which involves 7. The whole thing is more or less centered on Dolly Parton's version of "Stairway to Heaven", but it starts mellow and moody, with bits of Eurythmics, Laurie Anderson, the Art of Noise, and the Beatles, and rocks out at the end with Pat Benetar and the Beastie Boys. It's pretty awesome, but don't take my word for it, go listen for yourself. And then check out some of the others.
And now: today's playlist.
*: new stuff (r): requests
artist
song
album
label
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Shake the Sheets
Shake the Sheets
Lookout
The Earlies
No Love in Your Heart
The Enemy Chorus
Secretly Canadian
Rainer Maria
Ears Ring
Ears Ring EP
Polyvinyl
*Nada Surf
From Now On
Lucky
Barsuk
*Toumani Diabaté
Ismael Drame
The Mandé Variations
Nonesuch
Dead Can Dance
Song of the Dispossessed
Spiritchaser
4AD
The Aluminum Group
If You've Got a Lover, You've Got a Life
Pelo
Hefty
Blossom Dearie
Bang Goes the Drum
Jazz Masters 51
Verve
*DeVotchKa
Comrade Z
A Mad and Faithful Telling
Anti-
*Baby Dee
The Only Bones that Show
Safe inside the Day
Drag City
*Atlas Sound
Cold as Ice
Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel
No Names Are Mentioned - 3/6 show (swapping with Matt this week)
This year I swapped shows with Matt, so he could sleep in the day after his birthday. ("Sleeping in" meaning sleeping past 4am; Matt lives all the way across town and it takes him a while to get up to Roger's Park.)
Kate Bush's album The Dreaming has always seemed to me to be her darkest, freakiest album, and possibly the pinnacle of her work with the Fairlight CMI. The Fairlight CMI was a state-of-the-art digital sampling synthesizer, used in most of the best 80's music — wide-ranging artists used it including Peter Gabriel (who introduce Bush to it), ABC, U2, Alan Parsons, Duran Duran, Stevie Wonder, Public Image Limited, Yes, and EBN-OZN. It was key to creating that dense, studio sound that Bush and Gabriel were known for. These days, artists like Björk and Sufjan Stevens can create that same sound in their homes using a laptop, for a lot less money.
I've mentioned The Free Design before, a few weeks ago when I played "Bubbles". Last week, I found a link on Copy, Right? to a cover of The Free Design's "I Found Love" that was featured on the hipster kids TV show Yo Gabba Gabba. I watched the video, and thought, 'I know this song, but I didn't know if was The Free Design.' Then, on Monday, Mary played the version I knew, which it turns out is also a cover, by Styrofoam with Sarah Shannon. So today I played the original version, just to hear it. Of the three, I think I have to go with the Styroform and Sarah Shannon version as my favorite; it's so lush, which I really think suits the song.
We recently got a new album in the studio by Destroyer. Our reviewer compared it to Hunk Dory-era David Bowie, and I just had to compare them side by side on my show. I brought in my copy of Hunk Dory, to play "Oh! You Pretty Things," right before Destroyer's "Plaza Trinidad". The comparison is apt, in terms of vocal styling and other aspects of sound, but I don't think the comparison does Destroyer any favors. Hunk Dory is a pretty strong album.
Spring is approaching! My official spring-is-approaching song this week is "Girl from Ipanema Goes to Greenland" by the B-52's.
Next week I'm doing Mary's show, and then she'll do mine; the week after I should be back in my regular spot.
*: new stuff (r): requests
artist
song
album
label
Kate Bush
Night of the Swallow
The Dreaming
EMI Manhattan
(r)Siouxsie
Loveless
Mantaray
Decca
Xiu Xiu
Boy Soprano
The Air Force
5RC
*Mahjongg
Teardrops
Kontpab
K
*Headlights
Catch Them All
Some Racing Some Stopping
Polyvinyl
The Free Design
I Found Love
Kites Are Fun (The Best of the Free Design)
Varese Sarabande
Elizabeth Conant
The Sky Fell Down
Why Shouldn't I?
Haven
*Vashti Bunyan
How Do I Know
Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind
Dicristina
Trash Can Sinatras
Only Tongue Can Tell
Cake
Go!
Troubled Hubble
Mrs. Whiskerson
Broken Airplanes
The Magic Spot
Final Fantasy
Song Song Song
Hee Poos Clouds
Tomlab
*Bon Iver
Skinny Love
For Emma, Forever Ago
Jagjaguwar
P:ano
T. Hatch Says 'Round Ev'ry Corner'
Ghost Pirates without Heads
Mint Records
*Thao with the Get Down Stay Down
Bag of Hammers
We Brave Bee Stings and All
Kill Rock Stars
Saint Etienne
Kiss and Make Up
Fox Base Alpha
Warner Brothers
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Peek-A Boo (Silver Dollar Mix)
The Best of Siouxsie and the Banshees
Polydor UK
Justice
DVNO
†
Ed Banger/Vice
Jamie Liddell
The City (Four Tet Mix)
Multiply Additions
WARP
*Hot Chip
Bendable Poseable
Made inthe Dark
Astralwerks/DFA
*Kelley Stoltz
The Birmingham Eccentric
Circular Sounds
Sub Pop
Konrad
Canyon Blue
First Disguised as Last
Radical Turf
David Bowie
Oh! You Pretty Things
Hunky Dory
Virgin
*Destroyer
Plaza Trinidad
Trouble in Dreams
Merge
(r)Cut Copy
Saturday
Bright Like Neon Love
Modular
The B-52's
Girl from Ipanema Goes to Greenland
Bouncing off the Satellites
Warner Brothers
*Vox Dei
Terroriste
Bippp: French Synthwave 1979/85
Everloving
*Baby Dee
The Only Bones that Show
Safe Inside the Day
Drag City
Mucca Pazza
Coat Czech
A Little Marching Band
Self-released
Elliot Smith
Baby Britain
XO
Dreamworks
Blossom Dearie
Rhode Island IS Famous for You
Jazz Masters 51
Verve
Ella Fitzgerald
Something's Gotta Give
Trav'lin' Light: The Johnny Mercer Songbook
Verve
*Cat Power
Song to Bobby
Jukebox
Matador
*Vampire Weekend
The Kids Don't Stand a Chance
Vampire Weekend
XL
XTC
Making Plans for Nigel
Drums and Wires
Geffen/Virgin
Chin Up Chin Up
We Should Never Have Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers (Stephen Snydaker Mix)
One of the fun things about having an iPod shuffle is that in presenting random music, you're attention is drawn to songs you might not have have noticed otherwise. I can't say that the first track from Bobby Conn's 2007 album King for a Day would have caught my ear. Listening to the album as a whole, you're much likelier to notice the more single-like songs, like "Anybody" or "Love Let Me Down". However, heard out of context (and with the intimacy of headphones), "Vanitas" is a thrilling, nearly operatic torrent of rock. The lyrics are in Latin and taken from Ecclesiastes; need I say more? "Nihil sub sole novum": "Nothing is new under the sun". I've been wanting to play this song for a while, but wasn't sure how to fit it into the show. My solution? Make it the opening tune. (It's also a long song, which is useful for a day in which I got to the station a little later than I like, since I had to shovel snow again.)
So how do you follow a song like "Vanitas"? Not an easy question. I don't want to inflict too much sturm und drang on my listeners at 6am. What I needed was to carry forward some of that drama, while at the same time dialing it down a bit and introducing just a little more pop sound. Solution? Morrissey... specifically, his most fabulously over-the-top piece of drama, "November Spawned a Monster".
Rounding out the set, something from the new Magnetic Fields album. The silliness of the lyrics, over the heaviness of the feedback-laden style of the new album (Distortion), combined with Stephin Merritt lugubrious baritone... I think it was the perfect ending to the set.
I played a couple of tracks off vinyl today, as well. Years ago, while shopping at a local records store (Reckless, most likely), I ran across a record from 1984 by a man named Robert Görl, with the amusingly tacky name of A Night Full of Tension. What caught my eye was the little hand-written sticker on the front: "featuring additional vocals by Annie Lennox". Sold! I haven't listened to the whole album in a while; I remember it as dark technopop and largely forgettable. (Now that I've written that I'll have to give it another listen; maybe I'm wrong?) In any event, I did remember one song that's particularly good: "Darling Don't Leave Me". Annie Lennox is well-featured in this one &151; sort of a featured-backing-vocal, like Helen Terry in Culture Club — and the song has that edgy, off-kilter quality that made early Eurythmics so great.
The other track played off vinyl is my favorite by The Flying Lizards. They are almost exclusively known for their cover of the song "Money" (a song that was used between news items during todays "Democracy Now", which followed my show), but there's much more to their work than that. Their self-title album begins with their aggressively shrill version of Kurt Weill's "Mandalay Song", almost daring you to turn off the stereo. Perseverance is rewarded with track two, the lovely "Herstory". The song has a slow sexy groove, with sardonic lyrics about sexism. The accented singspiel of Money and the nasal shrillness of "Mandalay Song" are replaced with earnest and soft female vocals intoning "You can still make money by singing sweet songs of love", complimented by spoken cockney men's voices repeating "I own you | You don't own me | You are my territory". This song made it onto many mix tapes I made in college.
I almost lost that record, actually. I found it in a record store in Montreal; it's not an easy album to find. I lent it to my friend Mark so that he could get a copy made for himself on CD (a trick that needed very specialized equipment at the time, which I could now do at home if I had the time). I left it with him in Providence for a while, and I think we both forgot about it. Then Mark moved, I think, and decided to unload most of his possessions before doing it. Before selling (or throwing out, I forget which) his records, he let a friend go through them and pull out anything he wanted. When I heard about this, I thought, oh hell, he still had my Flying Lizards album. Hell. So I met this friend of Mark's (someone I didn't yet know), probably at Fellini's Pizzeria on Wickenden in Providence where we all hung out that summer, and it turned out that yes, he had pulled The Flying Lizards. He saw it and knew it was something rare and worth having, and he kept it — and then, when he found out it was mine, he gave it back to me. It's been many years since then, and I still feel thankful (even if I rarely listen to the album). I think his name was Damian. Thanks, Damian.
We have been having miserable, miserable weather lately. We'll have a big snowstorm, then a little more snow, and then a little more snow, and then a rainstorm, and then snow again. This week we had sleet, which collected in the form of slush, which then turned into snow. All around the city there was an inch of ice adhering to sidewalks, streets and what-have-you. It is time for an escape!
One way I used to escape from winter, in college, was to listen to Haircut One Hundred. The sunny, Caribbean-influenced pop makes me feel like I'm in Florida, somehow. So I played them on today's show, and tried to pick a number of other sunny, summery-or-warm-climate tunes.
I wanted to start with "The Tide Is High", by Blondie, but it turned out we don't have that album at the station (though we have four others), so I played "Pretty Baby", from Parallel Lines — a very sunny song, though it lacks the Caribbean/Reggae influence of "The Tide Is High".
"Bubbles", by Free Design, is also not specifically a summer-or-warm-climate song, but it has a cheerful sunny sound. Free Design was a jazz-pop group from the late 60's and early 70's, made up of 5 brothers and sisters. "Bubbles", about the pleasures of bubble gum (seriously), shows strong jazz-vocal influences, while being, at the same time, almost saccharine sweet. It would be a bit much to listen to a whole album, but they are awfully fun mixed in with other music.
Sergent Garcia, on the other hand, is really warm-climate music. This Paris-based group (which I discovered in 1999) mixes Afro-Cuban sounds with Hip-Hop. The lyrics are mostly in Spanish, and the beat is infectious — you've just got to move your body when you listen. "Jumpi" is one of my favorite songs from the album, and it features raps in both French and Spanish.
Ojos de Brujo is a band I discovered more recently, while in Spain. They describe their music as "Nuevo Flamenco", and it combines Flamenco with various modern pop and dance sounds. "Color" is particularly wild, with funky, jerky beats.
Josephine Baker's "Don't Touch Me Tomatoes" is a song I found on a compilation I bought for Eric years ago, called Divas Exotica. The quality of the sound in this song is much better than on the Josephine Baker boxed set we also have, and her voice is deeper as well; I think it must have come from one of her later performance, in the 60's or 70's (when she was, herself in her 60's). It's got great Caribbean flair.
The The B-52s' 1989 album Cosmic Thing is, to me, very much a summer album. In an interview, one of them explained the album by saying something along the lines of, "some people stay in Athens, Georgia and write about living in New York; we were in New York and writing Athens, Georgia." Any number of songs on it have a real hot summer feel. "Junebug" is by no means the best song on the album, but it's fun, and a really good party tune. (Sample lyric: "go go go go go-go-go, whoah whoah whoah whoah whoah-whoah-whoah!")
And finally, I did choose Le Tigre's "Dyke March 2001" on the grounds that the Dyke March is in June. The version I played is perhaps a bit repetitive (I should check out the original, non-remixed version), but it's still pretty amusing. It's a techno-dance beat, with a sample of a woman saying, somewhat earnestly, "I like to come to the dyke march because I like to be surrounded by..."; the sentence is alternately finished with "women", "naked ladies", and occasionally "feminist fury". (I'm not sure if the original version's lines are mixed up the same way.)
*: new stuff (r): requests
artist
song
album
label
Blondie
Pretty Baby
Parallel Lines
Chrysalis
Free Design
Bubbles
Kites Are Fun (The Best of Free Design)
Varese Saraband
*Hello Blue Roses
St. Angela
The Portrait Is Finished and I Have Failed to Capture Your Beauty
This morning was a snowy one — the snow started yesterday in the afternoon and continued straight through my show, tapering off around noon. In the morning there were great piles of snow all over the place. I had shoveled my own walk last night at 6:30 and 10pm, and I did it again this morning at 5am; it will need to be done again.
So I thought I'd try to focus my show on playing songs that made people feel like getting up. You know, on a day like this you need an extra nudge. I invited listeners to all in with suggestions, and I got quite a lot of requests.
My first request was for "something by Tom Waits", and I chose one of my favorites, "Eggs and Sausage (in a Cadillac with Susan Michelson)" — it's technically a late-night song, but it works exceptionally well as a morning song (and I also got a call commending me on that choice, from a man who'd just spent half an hour digging his car out of the snow, and was getting in to drive to work).
The next request was for something that was recently in rotation here: Bonnie "Prince" Billy's mellow cover of "Am I Demon?" by Danzig. (The caller couldn't remember the song exactly, and I think he actually asked for a cover of Fugazi by Uncle Tupelo, but I'm pretty sure this is what he meant.) I haven't heard all of this Bonnie "Prince" Billy EP, but I liked this song the most.
Next I got a call for Sonic Youth... not a real wake-up-and-get-going song (like maybe "Kool Thing"), but rather the more experimental, spoken-word-over-instruental-drone "Tom Violence" from Evol. The story it tells is a bit disturbing, and it's not particularly melodic; I might not have chosen it myself for a day like today, though it's quite a good piece of music ultimately. It's sort of arresting.
Next request? Something completely different from the last: a band I'd not heard of called Death by Chocolate, which turns out to be very entertaining and silly spoken word over electronic melodies reminiscent of video games.
Rounding out the day's requests was the Groove Armada, requested by a listener who had just failed to win concert tickets from me. His voice was familiar; I think he may be a regular caller I have, from Brazil. This song also closed out my set.
Meanwhile, yesterday Julio gave me a couple of CDs he'd reviewed, and asked me to drop them off at the station. One of them didn't sound too appealing, but he convinced me to give it a listen on the way home. It surprised me completely: I loved it. Ungdomskulen comes out of Norway and plays very heavy, hard music. I'm not especially a fan of Metal, or even lots of guitar, and I expected something along those lines. And I think there is some Metal in this music, and certainly a lot of guitar; but there's also good bass and drum, and non-screaming vocals, and hooks, and musical complexities. There's a little bit of the Rapture's punk-disco, and a little of Frank Zappa's jazz-rock-guitar, and it's all happening at once. Relentless, but in a good way. So I played a song, and left the CD for the Music Department. They may chose to put it in rotation; I hope they do.
*: new stuff (r): requests
artist
song
album
label
Echo & the Bunnymen
Seven Seas
Ocean Rain
Sire/Rhino
Troubled Hubble
Nancy
Penturbia
Latest Flame
*Dengue Fever
Seeing Hands
Venus on Earth
M80
*Ween
Blue Balloon
La Cucaracha
Rounder
Os Mutantes
Panis et Circenses
Tropicália ou Panis et Circenses
Universal
Selda
Yaylalar
Selda
B-Music/Finders Keepers
*Bob Mould
Return to Dust
District Line
Anti-
*The Aluminum Group
Post It
Little Happyness
Minty Fresh
The Smiths
There is a Light That Never Goes Out
Singles
Reprise
(r)Tom Waits
Eggs and Sausage (in a Cadillac with Susan Michelson)
Nighthawks a the Diner
Asylum
Lady Sovereign
At Little Bit of Shhh
Publis Warning
Island/Def Jam
The Wolfgang Press
Louis XIV
Queer
4AD
(r)Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Am I Demon?
Ask Forgiveness
Drag City
*Hello, Blue Roses
Scarecrow
The Portrait is Finished and I Have Failed to Capture Your Beauty
Oh God of Progress, have you degraded or forgot us? - 1/25 show
It's no secret that one of my favorite artists is Sufjan Stevens, though I suppose I don't play him on the radio as much as I could. He got a name for himself by announcing plans to make an album for each state of the US, beginning with his home state of Michigan. So far, he's made two, and the second one was Come On Feel the Illinoise!. Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State was better, perhaps because it was more personal, but I do like Illinoise. The title track has an epic quality (it's written into two parts: "Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition" and "Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream"), but it's also fun and upbeat.
Incidentally, a year ago or so, one of the DJs at our station, Mary, got involved in a MasterCard "Priceless" YouTube campaign. She was asked to talk about Reckless Records, and in the course of her video (shot at odd, unflattering angles), she jokingly pronounced "Illinois" as "Illinoise", referring to Stevens' album. The YouTube comments were scathing and rude — people asserting that she probably wasn't a DJ (she is), and probably not even from Chicago if she couldn't pronounce "Illinois". While it is true that she didn't chose her subject, the vitriol in the comments was astounding to me. Honestly, who takes the time to leave a comment like "I hated your video so much I didn't watch it?" Rule of thumb: never read YouTube comments; they are almost uniformly asinine.
It's been cold and snowy in Chicago, and cold snowy days make me want to listen to Martha and the Muffins' This Is the Ice Age. It may be just that I got the album in the winter of my freshman year of college, and listened to it over and over again, so that it's indelibly associated with winter in my mind. In particular, though, it's the slick, icy title track (as opposed to the antic "You Sold the Cottage", which of course makes me think of summer).
Two new albums in recently, that I think bear a closer listen. Saint Bernadette's In the Ballroom is a bit jazzy, with gutsy vocal provided by Meredith DiMenna. (DiMenna is, as it happens, the vocalist behind Chunky Pam, though not the actress who protrays her; in any event Saint Bernadette is nothing like Chunky Pam.) Yeasayer's All Hour Symbols is dense, and complex, with a psych-rock edge.
*: new stuff (r): requests
artist
song
album
label
Sufjan Stevens
Come on feel the Illinoise!
Come on feel the Illinoise!
Asthmatic Kitty
Lilly Allen
LDN
Alright Still
EMI
Zerostars
Sleeping In
Self-released
*Bob Mould
Shelter Me
District Line
Anti-
*Kate Tucker & the Sons of Sweden
Saturday Night
Kate Tucker & the Sons of Sweden
Red Valise
Martha and the Muffins
This Is the Ice Age
This Is the Ice Age
EMI
Annie Lennox
River Deep, Mountain High
Walking on Broken Glass Single
*Mise en Abyme
Father Shore (Trilobites)
The Second Marriage Records Compilation
Marriage Records
*Saint Bernadette
Sidestep
In the Ballroom
Exotic
Amy Winehouse
Back to Black
Back to Black
Island
Dan Deacon
Okie Dokie
Spiderman of the Rings
Carpark
*Food for Animals
Bulk Gummies
Belly
Hoss
Laurie Anderson
The Day the Devil
Strange Angels
Warner Brothers
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Shake the Sheets
Shake the Sheets
Lookout
Fazzini
Dell
Sulphur, Glue the Star
Locust
(r)The Books
Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again
Thought for Food
Tomlab
*Hello, Blue Roses
Coming through Imposture
The Portrait Is Finished and I Have Failed to Capture Your Beauty...
Locust
*The Hidden Mitten
Marry Up
Roma! Roma! EP
Self-released
*The Mary Onettes
Still
The Mary Onettes
Labrador
The Futureheads
The Hounds of Love
The Futureheads
Sire
Lene Lovich
New Toy
Just Can't Get Enough: New Wave Hits of the 80's Vol. 3
I am officially no longer a DJ at WLUW. Long story.
However, the Chicago Independent Radio Project will have a webcast soon, and I'll be a part of that. And we can still talk about music... leave me a comment if there's something on your mind.
This blog is hosted by Blogger, but all the images, plus the rest of my personal and professional sites, is hosted by ULTRAsurge.com.
They have very cheap rates available for sites like this one, that
have low-bandwidth needs.
