Music

Spotted: counter-culture meets counting money. A re-recording of The Moldy Peaches’ “Anyone Else But You” (made semi-famous in Juno), with new fun lyrics about vacation, in a commercial for Seaworld.

Kimya Dawson and Adam Green, have you no shame? It was kind of kitsch and meta and acceptably ironic when Of Montreal sold “Wraith Pinned to the Mist & Other Games” to be used as a jingle for Outback Steakhouse, but somehow this steps over the line for me. The Moldy Peaches don’t even exist anymore as a band, making this move seem more like a last chance money grab than the hipster pragmatism of past indie folks gone commercial (cf. The Go! Team, Of Montreal, The Magnetic Fields… etc.) 

This is a particularly busy finals period for me (is it even finals period yet? ugh), as evidenced by the fact that I’m typing this while literally surrounded by a little fortress of books. Therefore, for this week’s article I’ve turned the blog over to a far less frazzled Amherst alum, and incidentally one of the few people I know who might be more neurotic about music than I am, Jacob Thomas ‘07. Here goes:  

Firstly, I’d like to thank emoin09 for letting me have a crack at her weekly gig as music blogatorialist for Amherst’s new web publication. I don’t often write for fun anymore, and writing about music is a very happy opportunity for me indeed.

After leaving Amherst and (briefly) moving back to Iowa, I’ve landed in New York City – an arena of music broad enough to merit numerous web publications focused specifically on upcoming acts and NYC locals. Considering how brilliant this city’s live scene shines, you might be expecting a column on the desirability of different venues or a masturbatory run-down of shows I’ve seen to date. Instead, I’m coming clean with you to laud the virtues of a couple of electronic resources I’ve used both to track what I’ve been listening to and also to discover new music.

First an important philosophical question – why bother tracking what you’re listening to? My answer is one of sentimentality. As days of music listening turn into weeks and months and years and as my favorite band has shifted from Oasis to Air to LCD Soundsystem, a comprehensive way of aggregating listening patterns over time has provided an evocative snapshot in much the same way as a diary or photo journal does for feelings or images. For instance, two summers ago I listened to the song “Staring at the Sun” by TV on the Radio some 800 times in a month. Literally, I left that one song on repeat for days on end, coming into and out of my room, sometimes switching away but always returning and letting that one track permeate a summer spent doing neuroscience research and living in Tyler and playing Smash Brothers until my fingers bled. It just so happens that about that time, I’d started using Last.fm to record everything I played in iTunes.

Though I haven’t heard that track in months, anytime I browse through my listening history and stumble across it, it brings me back to a moment in time when I was thinking very specific thoughts, in a very different place emotionally. The fact that I lost my entire music collection when a hard drive died – and yet was able to retrace most of my steps from just that written record – is an exceptionally useful feature, as is the fact that I can share what I’m listening to with my friends on Facebook via a tightly written and altogether not-unsightly widget.

Most usefully though, it provides something in the way of statistics. It quantifies just what exactly I’m listening to, and when, and how often. The music to which a person listens means something to me, whether it means anything to them, and the insight provided on a Last.fm profile strikes a delicate balance between people who I would consider to have good taste and those I see as outright frauds, parading hipster bands without the good sense to enjoy Justin Timberlake’s sophomore effort (picture this for horrifying, cool kids: John Mayer rocking the bridge of Love/Stoned on YouTube. It’s my favorite video, eat that shit.)

Next up is something decidedly more hip than just rehashing how many times I’ve listened to “The Bleeding Heart Show,” and it comes in an infectiously cute package. Some of you by this point are undoubtedly savvy with the Hype Machine but if you’re not selling it to your friends by the shovel-full and making a personal compilation of loved tracks, you’re not using it properly.

Hype Machine, an MP3 aggregator in the grand tradition of Scour Media Agent (from way back, y’all) sniffs out .mp3 music files hosted on a number of well-known and well-regarded music blogs (two of my favorites are Brooklyn Vegan and The Music Slut). By compiling these files centrally, however, Hypem.com allows its users to compose massive streaming playlists of everything music blogs are writing about, which turns out to be most everything, from dirty Southern hip hop to electronica (and they do love their electronica) to stolen tracks from Axl Rose’s unreleased “Chinese Democracy.” Anyway, the point is that most of the music being written about is new which means that in a very short amount of time you can find lots of interesting things to delve into, whether by supporting the artist and buying the damn files already or by searching more specifically to listen at your leisure. It seems a little borderline sometimes, but since the files are hosted off-site and are removed at the drop of a subpoena, Hypem.com has managed to attain a position of quasi-legitimacy both with artists and with record companies. Every blog entry has links to buy the music from a number of different sources, and none of the files can be downloaded (without a goddamn headache). Additionally, within the last two months, the Hype Machine has also upgraded such that it will track my listening and report usage to Last.fm. Thus, even if I navigate away I can look back hours later to find out just who exactly remixed “Beautiful Girls” just the way I like.*

For starters, here are links to my Hype Machine and Last.fm profile. Your regular columnist, Emily, has profiles listed below, as well.

http://www.hypem.com/becauseiloveyou/

http://www.last.fm/user/jathomas

http://www.hypem.com/eemoin

http://www.last.fm/user/emoin 

* The answer is ABX as is usually the case when someone remixes something just the way I like.

The self-titled debut album of Santogold (née Santi White, and a Wesleyan alum) is coming out this week, and received a favorable nod from the Times, despite having one of the worst album covers I’ve ever seen. I will write a full fledged review once I’ve got it in my grubby little hands, but until then I highly recommend L.E.S. Artistes (XXXChange Remix). I can’t say I don’t appreciate someone who sounds a lot like M.I.A. but is also, how shall I say… sort of melodic.

Out this week is the fantastic, self-titled fourth album by Robyn, a Swedish singer who Wired recently dubbed the “anti-Britney” — insofar as they’re both blonde singers, but Robyn has made polar opposite career choices. What it all adds up to is that she hasn’t yet “sold out” or “gone fucking nuts,” and is therefore well suited to fill the void in our lives of sexy blondes making pop music (sorry, Madonna, I didn’t say “women who alternate between impressing and disgusting us”).

I heard most of the tracks on this album a few years ago (although it is just now being released in America, most of the material was released in Sweden in 2005) totally by accident. I was searching for songs with “robot” in the title, and ended up with the wonderfully bare future-ballad “Robotboy” (another very fantastic robot-titled song is Guided By Voices’ “Gold Star for Robot Boy,” but I digress). And while “Robotboy” was derided by critics at the time, it’s an apt representative of the rest of Robyn’s work. She is just as capable a singer as Britney or any other pop princess, the catchiness of her hooks and melodies is comparable to the best we’ve seen in the recent past. Where she diverges from the rest of the pack, besides the fact that she is still a) not a mom, and b) not insane, is in her actual, demonstrated penchant to do new things in pop music. “Doing something new” for young female pop singers has traditionally meant wearing less clothing, and while I don’t have a principled objection to that, it does seem to distract them from actually doing new things musically.

The second song that drew me in to Robyn, and one that most people actually like (I still stand by “Robotboy”), is “Be Mine.” A ballad with a driving beat and infectious string accompaniment, “Be Mine” has that delicious quality of making you dance when you really just want to sob — the chorus is “No you never were / and you never will be mine,” for chrissakes! In the bridge we hear a spoken word interlude in which Robyn sees the object of her affection with his new girlfriend, who is wearing the scarf Robyn bought for him… a more pathetic realization of unrequited love I have never heard in pop music.

The album may have fallen flat on its face if every song were as emotionally crushing as “Be Mine,” but most of the rest are pure ego pieces, full of the kind of swagger that is almost never seen among girl singers. “Konichiwa Bitches” contains some of the most wonderfully dirty lyrics you will hear today (”this week” would be pushing it, just in case you also listen to “Soulja Boy,” which you should) laid down over a beat that somehow still sounds very fresh, despite being 3+ years old by now. As an added bonus, this American release contains a few extra tracks, notably a cover of the Prince song “Jack U Off,” in which the singer offers a varieties of situations in which she will jack you off, while someone bangs out chords on a piano that is just a little out of tune. “If you really wanna be a star / we gotta do it in your mama’s car / naked in the Cadillac / I’ll jack you off.” This is seriously pure gold.

I could go on and on about Robyn, and if you know me “IRL,” I probably already have, so I will cut this short around now-ish. Robyn by Robyn is in stores now, and if you enjoy pop, indie, or any combination of the two (what exactly isn’t in the union of those sets? Broadway musicals?), you should check it out.

There’s nothing the indie rock blogosphere loves more than a “supergroup.” Supergroups are composed of prominent members of even more prominent bands (or occasionally solo artists), so not only are they generally pretty decent, but more importantly to dyed-in-the-wool hipsters, you can name drop like crazy:

Hipster: Hey baby, check out this new Wolf Legs record. It’s got vocals by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, the bassist is Kim Deal (Pixies, The Breeders), Stephen Malkmus plays guitar (Pavement, The Jicks), and I hear Jesus makes a cameo on the washboard.Hipsterette: Wow… wanna make out?

That said, this isn’t Hampshire/Mt. Holyoke/Brown (j/k!), most of us are proud not to be hipsters, and as a result, we tend to hope that a supergroup actually produces good music, rather than just opportunities for racking up hipster points.Enter She & Him.

As the blogosphere legend goes, Girl (Zooey Deschanel, former indie film “It” girl) met Boy (M. Ward, perpetual indie music “It” boy) on the set of a movie. Deschanel confessed that she had been writing songs in secret for years, Ward offered his musical expertise, and nine months later (… maybe), out came an unabashedly sweet and honest album-baby named Volume One.

The first two tracks, original songs by Deschanel (the album also features a few covers that are hit-or-miss), might as well be an album all by themselves (it would easily trounce most other releases thus far this year). “Sentimental Heart” and “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” are not groundbreaking. Their instrumentation is simple, their chord progressions are well worn, their lyrics are nothing new, but who cares? These songs evoke the image of Deschanel alone in her room writing these songs in her diary, and because she never intended to record or release them, they have an openness and lack of artifice that is rarely found in pop (or any) music anymore.

The album is not without its faults — for every time I’ve listened to the first two tracks on repeat, I’ve also skipped the weak “This Is Not a Test” and “I Thought I Saw Your Face Today.” There’s something appealing about the cover of “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me,” but moreso in the character Deschanel creates (the perfect girl, inexplicably sad) than the music itself.

And therein lies the true allure of She & Him. In a world where the best pop music is written by teams of Grammy winning middle aged men who are more likely to be suffering from erectile dysfunction than puppy love and belted out by American Idol winners*, She & Him’s debut carries refreshing authenticity and, even more importantly, strikes a lonely but much-welcomed blow for quality in actress to indie music crossovers (I’m looking at you, Scarlett Johannson).

* This does not imply that I do not love Kelly Clarkson.

Moving on. As I said above, the new releases this year so far have been so weak that an album composed of just two She & Him songs would beat them. As a result — perhaps to fill the void, or maybe just in a wonderful coincidence of money-grabbing on the parts of the record companies — pretty much every great indie album of the past ten years (slight overstatement) is being re-released, remastered, repackaged, and re-made-money-on. Normally I would turn my nose up at this, if not for the fact that I really do believe that several of these albums deserve the pomp of a re-release just so more people will listen to them.

Air’s 1998 album Moon Safari, remastered and re-released on April 15, is probably absolutely the best makeout album ever made. That’s right — just pop this baby in your stereo and you will probably absolutely get to first base. Best known for the single “Sexy Boy” (c.f. the party where Julia Stiles gets drunk in Ten Things I Hate About You), there is not much to say about this album besides its merits as a soundtrack to baby making. The best line of a music review I’ve ever read comes from the Pitchfork (www.pitchforkmedia.com) review of Safari, so I’ll quote it here:

Thanks to albums like Moon Safari, international stereotypes of Frenchmen as nothing more than muss-haired playboys stroking a woman with one hand and an analog synth with the other are forever reinforced.

If the last 10 years of the consistent awesomeness of Air have somehow passed you by, now would be a good time to start catching up.