It's been a long long while, but did you really think i would stop making mixtapes? No no no no no... never. So, what's the story?
Since the last mixtape i posted here, i had my first proper DJ gig ever. The search for good dance songs from the seventies until now resulted in the following mixtape. And the mix as you can hear here is almost the same as the set i mixed three weeks ago. Since a new DJ night is coming up first weekend of April, expect a new mixtape not too long after that. In the mean time, enjoy this one.
Tracklist:
Poni Hoax - Antibodies
Sparks - Beat the Clock
Boy Crisis - Dressed to Digress
Goldfrapp - Rocket
She Wants Revenge - I Don't Wanna Fall In Love
New Order - Chosen Time
Valerie Dore - Get Closer
FM Belfast - Lotus (Killing In The Name Of)
Tiga - Sex O'Clock (Matthias Aguayo Remix)
Shamen - Make It Mine (Progress 1 Vox)
Annie - Anthonio (Designer Drugs Remix)
And this is part 2 in my December mixtape farewell disco roadshow extravaganza: Spirits. The first mix concentrated on the forgotten songs of the years 2000-2009, this one is just all the hit songs from 2009... well, the hits from my small, deformed world. Put it on, throw a party and dance 'til your dead as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would say.
1 Junior Boys - Parallel Lines
2 Animal Collective - My Girls
3 Florence And The Machine - Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)
4 Golden Filter - Solid Gold
5 The Horrors - Primary Colours
6 Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Heads Will Roll
7 Duchess Says - Black Flag
8 Rainbow Arabia - Kabukimono
9 Fischerspooner - Fascinating
10 Patrick Wolf - Hard Times
11 Little Boots - Stuck On Repeat
12 YACHT - Summer Song
13 Miike Snow - Cult Logic
14 La Roux - Reflections Are Protection
15 Health - Nice Girls (Tommie Sunshine Pandemic Pandemonium Re-Touch)
16 The Detachments - Fear No Fear
Presenting this month's mixtape in two parts, the first one is up for download right here. It's a best of the years 2000-2009, or to be more precise, not exactly a best of. There's no Radiohead, Interpol or Antony & The Johnsons here, no names that end up on Top Of The Year lists... but the songs and bands that kind of fell through. That meant i had to dig a little deeper into my memory to actually come up with those songs, and i'll probably remember more of them the next few days... but for now, this is it. Tracklist is as follows:
1 Kent - Music Non Stop
2 Rogue Wave - Publish My Love
3 She Wants Revenge - Out Of Control
4 A Perfect Circle - Magdalena
5 On! Air! Library! - Bread
6 Tilly and the Wall - Beat Control
7 Radio 4 - Absolute Affirmation
8 Georgie James - Hard Feelings
9 The Airfields - Leaps And Bounds
10 Architecture In Helsinki - Do The Whirlwind
11 Of Montreal - Gallery Piece
12 Neon Neon - I Lust U
13 Mobius Band - City vs. Country
14 Band Of Horses - Wicked Gil
15 The Notwist - Pick Up The Phone
16 Glasvegas - It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry
17 I-am-X - Your Joy Is My Low
18 Spektrum - Kinda New (Tiefschwarz Vocal)
Here's this month's mix... it's an imaginary soundtrack to an imaginary relationship that's a bit abusive... somehow that's how it all fell together. The Billie Holiday song is there because it's referenced in the Magnetic Fields song, and it mixes surprisingly well with the Coco Rosie track. The Philip Glass piece and Underworld song gel together in the same, awkward way. Well, i'm quite happy with it. Hear for yourself!
tracklist is like this:
01:00 The Magnetic Fields - How Fucking Romantic
02:00 Florence And The Machine - Kiss With A Fist
03:00 Billie Holiday - You Took Advantage of Me
04:00 Coco Rosie - Tekno Love Song
05:00 The Dears - You And I Are A Gang Of Losers
06:00 Philip Glass - Floe
07:00 Underworld - Mo Move
08:00 M83 - Couleurs
09:00 Sonic Youth - Washing Machine
10:00 Morrissey - Southpaw
This month just begged for a Halloween theme... and ofcourse i gladly obeyed. I created a 13 track monster guaranteed to make your ears bleed...
1. Girls - Ghost Mouth
2. Siouxsie And The Banshees - Carcass
3. The Horrors - Jack The Ripper
4. Girls Against Boys - Disco Six Six Six
5. The Mae Shi - Leech And Locust
6. Jimmy Scott - Sycamore Trees
7. Rainbow Arabia - Haunted Hall
8. Byron Lee - Frankenstein
9. Daft Punk - The Brainwasher (Erol Alkan's Horrorhouse Dub)
10. Wavves - California Goth
11. Helium - I'm A Witch
12. Diamanda Galas - Gloomy Sunday
13. Type O Negative - Love You to Death
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i’ll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
One thing that separated the Zeroes from the Nineties, like i mentioned in the Bloc Party piece, was the creation of the niche. Debutants like Interpol or The Strokes or indeed Bloc Party seemed to have carved out their own corner in popmusic before they even first set foot in a studio. Every album that follows after the first confirms the route, but never strays from it.
How different the path of Goldfrapp. Felt Mountain was their unworldly debut in 2000, the soundtrack to Snow White would it have been a soft porn film-noir. It took three years to complete the follow-up Black Cherry, and what a shock it was to hear Train, the first single, for the first time... like a long lost collaboration between Gary Glitter and Marlene Dietrich.
If the term "difficult" second album means an album that scares off most of the fans you gained with your first, then Black Cherry was a very very difficult one. It doesn't deliver on Felt Mountain's promise, which in my opinion was a dead-end anyway, a beautiful one, but a cul-de-sac nonetheless. What is so great about Black Cherry, knowing that Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory deliberately chose to make this kind of record after such a stellar one like Felt Mountain, is that it sends a message: Expect change, and expect challenges. With Black Cherry, it became apparent that Goldfrapp had a creative agenda more complex and less accessible than most people expected, and in the long run that proved to be a good thing.
Perhaps at first it seemed a little arrogant - as if Alison assumed that the thing listeners loved most about her debut was her voice, and we can do without the rest. Personally, i think that's the sort of stylistic leap more artists should’ve made the past few years. Opener Crystalline Green shuts the door good and proper on Felt Mountain from the start, with its dry beats, throbbing synths and Vanity 6-style harmonies, and Alison singing “Try to forget who you are now”. Sexual, almost to the point of caricature, which was probably the point all along.
Black Cherry doesn’t entirely abandon Felt Mountain’s aesthetic, proof for that is in the mid-section of the album with the wonderfully lush and erotic Deep Honey and Hairy Trees. After those two songs, the build up from the first part of the record continues with Twist and comes to a glittering sonic climax on Stric Machine - in more than one way a modern day answer to Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. Where the classic disco track was clearly about two people enjoying each other, Strict Machine sings of the wonders of accessorized masturbation. After that, the album gently slips away with Forever and Slippage - basically Strict Machine but a bit slower and lower.
In hindsight, Black Cherry was a transitional record, as they say. You could summarize the record with the word Erotic, on the next record Supernature, the word was Sex. Train got a proper hit single reworking in the shape of Ooh La La, and where Strict Machine was the glittering peak on Black Cherry, on Supernature the glitter was in every corner, wrinkle and hole. It proved the notion that every Goldfrapp album is an adventure on it’s own, and there’s no way of telling which way they’re going. Wonderful electric!
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i’ll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
Dance-punk. Perhaps that word sums up best what happened in alternative music in the past ten years. Dance, because there wasn’t much room for subtleties. Whatever music you made, it had to appeal to the body instead of the mind, it had to make you move before it made you think. And punk, well, file-sharing and the immediacy of internet prompted any musician to a more do-it-yourself approach of making and distributing songs.
The genre that was called dance-punk was at its height around 2005, with LCD Soundsystem as the centre of gravity. But by the time James Murphy’s band released their debut album that year, dance-punk had already crystallized, all the ingredients of the concoction were in the right balance. The hard work had been done a few years earlier, by The Rapture, who made danceable music and sounded like punks on some occasions... and Radio 4, who did both full-time.
Radio 4 formed in Brooklyn, 1999, and claimed that their sound is "made in New York, is about New York, and sounds like New York". With a little help from James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy they recorded their second album Gotham, and set a sonic template that bands like Bloc Party and The Dead 60s would happily adopt .
Even though Gotham was released in 2002, hitting the spot with its militant, call-to-arms message and sound in a post 9/11 world, in fact it was recorded in July 2001. The record is a commentary on New York and its people before the Twin Towers fell down, to make them dance, and then think. Songs about the need to discuss AIDS more constructively ("Who'd have thought disease could turn out passe?” from Start A Fire), the neglect of the arts (the self-explanatory Save Your City) and ubiquitously, about the injustice of former Mayor Giuliani's banning of dancing in many of the city's clubs.
The album is a full-speed subway ride, with stops only slowing down slightly in Speaking In Codes and Pipe Bombs. The funk comes from the rhythm section, the bass always at the front, and the drums sounds like Radio 4 nicked every dustbin lid in Brooklyn to bang on, to underline the statements they’re making. The punk is provided by the jagged guitars, most impressively on Our Town, and the impassioned vocals. You won’t find soppy love songs here, The Movies is the one that comes to something that resembles a traditional popsong at all.
After Gotham, Radio 4 returned in 2004 with Stealing Of A Nation, and while it showed some progression to a more electronic sound and traditional song structures, it rubbed me the wrong way completely with the overtly political message. On Gotham, their saving grace is that the lyrics are drowned out by the music. When the bass is turned up and the feet are dancing, the mind is open for anything.
WIth a website that looks like a 3-year old designed it with a Microsoft product, you could say The Detachments are a beginning band. Barely any listeners on last.fm, only a few tour-dates on MySpace and a debut album to be released as far as somewhere well into 2010. Well, you and i can say we were here first. The following track is mesmerizing, but if it's very representative of their sound, God knows. They're a beginning band, right?
The summer breeze is still blowing in the Netherlands, that helped a lot whilst creating this mix. And yes, while testing it driving the car on a sunny Saturday afternoon, it was qualified '100% summer proof'! My favourite new band, YACHT, is on it twice, because i like 'em that much, and nothing spells M.I.X.T.A.P.E. more than including two songs by the same band, right?
No more stories, this is the tracklist:
1 YACHT - Psychic City (Classixx Remix)
2 Taken By Trees - Greyest Love of All
3 Junior Boys - Hazel
4 The Chemical Brothers - Asleep from Day
5 Neon Neon - Steel Your Girl
6 Imperial Teen - Captain
7 Martha and the Muffins - Echo Beach
8 The Virgins - Rich Girls
9 Ladyhawke - Dusk Till Dawn
10 R.E .M. - Parakeet
11 The Soundtrack of Our Lives - Legend In His Own Mind
12 YACHT - The Afterlife
From Portland, Oregon comes YACHT, just as much art project as pop group. On their own website teamyacht.com you can find an instrumental version of their current album See Mystery Lights. The real thing is just out, and available in your local record store.
New Jersey duo Glass Candy are not new, but i just stumbled upon this great track accompanied by a great video. The song is called Digital Versicolor, it's from 2007, and apparently they're on a label called Italians Do It Better. Hotdamn, that's something a shirt Tony Danza wears could say. Timeless discolectro!
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i’ll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
The further i proceed on this list of lists of lists, the more frantic i get whenever i have to write a bit about the next album on it. I start doubting my common sense while skipping through the tracks of aforementioned album, realizing how bloody good it is, and deciding it should be higher up. So as i’ve rearranged the entire order of the list, i start skipping through the tracks of the album that became number 9 instead of Maxïmo Park’s A Certain Trigger. And then i realize how bloody useless it is. From now on, all you’re going to see here are modern day classics, and perhaps, apart from the top two, they’re all equal to sit at number 9 just as well as number 3.
Maxïmo Park is in this list, and as i’m researching and re-listening their debut album, i see a lot of similarities between them and the previous entry on the Zeroes Heroes’ list, Bloc Party. Part of the post-punk/new wave revival of the mid Zeroes, a debut album produced by Paul Epworth and nominated for the Mercury Prize, to name a few. However, wether you had read about them, saw them or heard them even around that time, it would have been impossible from the start to dismiss them as ‘just a band’.
Beneath only that most superficial surface, there are a lot of oddities going on with Maxïmo Park. They were the first ‘conventional’ pop band to sign to Warp Records - known for their progressive electronic music like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. Lead singer Paul Smith looked like an extra from A Clockwork Orange who easily could have had his own spin-off movie. His lyrics stay far away from the usual angst of bands like Bloc Party, but instead center around the intense frustation that comes from boredom, echoing The Smiths instead of Joy Division, quoting Albert Einstein instead of Kurt Cobain. And where Bloc Party was a band that stuffed a great idea in every track on Silent Alarm, Maxïmo Park start their songs with a great idea, have another one during the first chorus, and discard that one too by the time they get to the bridge.
The best thing about all that, and A Certain Trigger to be specific, is that it left a weak first impression. The music was unfathomable at first glance, the only songs that hit home almost straight away were Apply Some Pressure and Once, A Glimpse. Serving as a catalyst for the rest of the album, those tracks softened my ears for the next step, where for instance Postcard Of A Painting, Going Missing and The Coast Is Always Changing revealed their true identity. By the time i had listened to the album quite a few times and agreed it was OK despite Graffiti, Limassol and Acrobat, BANG!, it hit me right in the face that those were actually among the best of the whole album.
The twitch comes partly from their deceptively complicated song structures. Their songs seem to slide from verse to chorus to bridge and it’s over, but in the mean time you get 16 bars of pure genius like the ecstatic, whirling bridge on Graffiti. Their melodies can be lightheartedly catchy, but get obscured oft and again by rhythmical curiosities, like the drum-roll that doesn’t fit in Apply Some Pressure.
When i’d peeled off all those layers of A Certain Trigger, its heart lays bare, and it was bittersweet, smart, sexual, frustated, angry, bored, romantic, stupid, spiteful, yearning and witty. The time it took me to learn to know and appreciate it made it feel like a old friend. Music that achieves that, never fails to touch you everytime you listen to it, adding to the friendship. Well, more of that for every album coming up next.
Whilst preparing for tonight's VJ show at Cruise Control, i stumbled upon this: Antony & The Johnsons cover Beyoncé's Crazy In Love. I've heard of the cover before, he performed it at the Carré show in Amsterdam a few months ago, but i didn't know an official video was made for it. Besides the beautiful rendition of the song, the video shows what a mystery Antony still is.
I have instantly become a fan of Grizzly Bear after watching these two videos for their song Two Weeks. The first is the official one directed by Patrick Daughters (remember that name people), and the second one is done by animator Gabe Askew, purely because he is a fan of the band and the song. I can't decide yet which one i like better, but making a video just because you want to, and creating something so gorgeous is a huge plus.
Go on, watch them both... the song is so nice you won't stop listening to it after hearing it just two times.
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i'll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
If i could give out an award for Most Promising Debut Of The Decade, without a doubt i'd give it to Bloc Party's Silent Alarm. Their mix of Joy Division-style drum & bass combined with Radiohead-like soundscapes and lyrics made them the most likely ones of their generation to gain the status of Rock Gods like R.E.M. and U2. But something went wrong after that.
A better title for this piece would be Me Trying To Unravel The Mystery Of Bloc Party. How could any band debut with a sound so distinctively their own, balanced but still with all the youthfull head-over-heals-enthusiasm you'd expect on a first album? And more important, a collection of songs most bands can only hope to compile on a Best Of.
The Mystery sort of unravelled itself every time Bloc Party released a new album, because a strange phenomenon seemed to connect all those bands with fabulous debuts in the 00s, like The Strokes, Interpol, Vampire Weekend etc. As soon as a follow-up appeared on the horizon, you realized that what made these bands stand out was more a carefully constructed function and form, instead of the romantic notion that it only takes a stroke of pure genius and a bit of luck to hit upon a unique sound. What that means to all music that comes after the initial introduction, is that there's not a lot of diversion to be discovered, just a continuation of the course set.
Bloc Party are really the prime example of that trend to me. Their following albums A Weekend In The City and Intimacy didn't add much to their sound, which downsized their remarkability in a way - if they can't come up with anything different from what they've done before, what's the difference between them and their copycats?
Now, about the album. Because i'm not here writing about what Bloc Party meant, but more about what they did ofcourse. The reason this album is not in the upper regions of my list, is The Curse Of Silent Alarm. Apart from all the good stuff i mentioned two paragraphs before, there are some things that can be held against it.
Most important, the album has always felt and still feels oversized to me. Thirteen tracks in a bit more than 50 minutes time doesn't seem much oversized on paper, but in the case of Silent Alarm it really is. That probably has a lot to do with the dense production and too similar sounding songs - after four years i still can't remember which title goes with which song.
The time that passed since its release has also helped picking out the weak songs on the album, although i can only choose two - Blue Light, Luno - that could've been left off the album to bring it down to more comprehensable proportions.
Enough bitchforking though... After seeing them live just a few weeks ago, finally something clicked between me and Bloc Party. Perhaps it was perfect timing, dancing in the light of a setting sun to This Modern Love - if only one song of them should be passed over to next generations, it should be that one - but no matter what, i saw a band that had a great bunch of songs to play, and played them well and with the same vigour with which they were recorded. A band that was one of the trendsetters during these past ten years.
This month was Crash Course month at the Monthly Mixtape group. You're supposed to make an introduction to an artist your mixpartner doesn't know much about, but is interested in. The theme was on repeat from August 2008, when i made a Nine Inch Nails mix. Since my mixbuddy didn't really respond to any of my suggestions, i went with my own infatuation, and made an old-school Simple Minds compilation. That means i picked my favourite songs from the studio albums they recorded between 1979 and 1984, when they released Sparkle In The Rain.
The Simple Minds are one of those rare bands that made a drastic change in their sound, and thus have a 'good' and 'bad' period in their career, no matter which period one would deem bad. They emerged in the late Seventies post-punk slipstream, and evolved from Sparks sound-a-likes to a band who explored repetitive patterns and trance-like rhythms before house music was even invented, and then moved on to a bigger than life rock-sound... which for me is the point where they went bad. Sparkle In The Rain is the album that devides those two periods. It hugely differs from their previous album New Gold Dream from 1982, it's the first with the Simple Minds signature 'big' rock sound, but still echoes the esoteric nuances that marked their previous albums.
Like i said, the songs i picked are personal favourites, and a bunch of them have been singles, so perhaps you'll recognize some of them. In any way, this collection clearly showcases the progress Simple Minds made from an underground band to the mainstream which made them rock superstars in the late Eighties. Tracklist is as follows:
1 Life In A Day
2 Factory
3 Premonition
4 Changeling
5 Travel
6 Thirty Frames a Second
7 Sweat In Bullet
8 Love Song
9 Theme For Great Cities
10 The American
11 Promised You a Miracle
12 Someone Somewhere in Summertime
13 New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)
14 Up On the Catwalk
15 Speed Your Love to Me
This must be the most creative and elaborate video i've seen in a very long time. It's hard to tell where animation, live projection and actual footage meet, but that's the whole beauty of it. Very impressive!
