Bob Dylan liked writing about his dreams. A lot. And there were a lot of them. Well, there were at least 115. “Isis” is the kind of dream normal people don’t have, but I’m sure Bob had all the time. It’s a very detailed account of a journey that begins with the mysterious Isis falling through the narrator’s fingertips (clearly she thought he was so reckless).
What follows is not adequately explicated by the word “epic”. Dylan and his shady cohort (“are you looking for something easy to catch?”) travel high and low to come to the grave they hope to rob. But the casket is empty “there were no jewels no nothing, I felt I’d been had”. So he lets his companion die, (you know, like you do) and journeys off to find the real prize, the woman that he “couldn’t hold onto” at the beginning of the song. This rollicking arc ends with a very simple exchange which, for whatever reason, is probably my favorite thing Dylan ever wrote (well, other than this).
“She said ‘where you been?’ I said ‘no place special.’ She said ‘you look different.’ I said ‘well, I guess.’ She said ‘you been gone.’ I said ‘that’s only natural.’ She said ‘you gonna stay?’ I said ‘if you want me to, yes.’”
I saw Passion Pit live a few weeks ago and was all about this song. I thought it was the strongest of the new tunes they played that night. When I saw this morning it had been released as the first single I was psyched.
But it doesn’t sound like I thought — or was hoping — it would sound. The live version had a similar bumpiness to Mannersfan favorite “Little Secrets”. The studio version isn’t so sonorous.
Doesn’t mean it’s bad. On Manners, Michael Angelakos sounded like an over-caffeinated ghost shouting in at the music from the periphery. His voice is very much at the center here and the lyrics are refreshingly decipherable, the story of the birth and death of the American dream in a busted economy.
Check out “Take a Walk” below. Gossamer, Passion Pit’s new album, comes out July 24th.
Beck‘s been judicious enough in his output over the years that two song releases in a week comes as a surprise (they’re each featured on a different compilation). That they’re both covers of songs written before he was born adds intrigue. That they’re quite different sonically bolsters the appeal all the more, and the fact that they’re two of the best things he’s recorded in years seals the deal.
“I Only Have Eyes for You”, written by Harry Warren all the way back in the the thirties and made famous by The Flamingos in 1959 was always a very spacey tune. Beck adds even more reverb and his voice sounds like it’s coming from across a giant wind tunnel filled with flowers. Truly beautiful and unconventional the melodic turns taken by this tune, and Beck is extremely faithful to the original in that respect.
“Corrine, Corrina” (this version is named “Corrina, Corrina”) is a classic blues song first recorded in the late twenties. It’s since become a standard in various versions in many musical styles. Beck’s take is quite bare-boned. But in this, and in “I Only Have Eyes for You”, it’s the emotive power of his voice that carries the song away. Sometime around the release of Sea Changean ironic distance Beck had with his listeners began to shrink, and on “Corrina, Corrina” it sounds like he’s right here in the room with you.
Consider Britney Spears’ left-field, apologist-indie-kid-creating classic single “Toxic”. It was a smash hit. It was unique but accessible, catchy but not simplistic, complex but uncluttered.
The same could be said for most of Miike Snow‘s work (besides that little smash hit part). They make very complex, disarmingly simple-sounding music. On their excellent 2009 debut (which Pitchfork managed to shit on, shocker), they tossed a number of influences — everything from Daft Punk to Steeley Dan — into a cauldron and came out with a dancey, melodic stew that managed to sound grandiose and economical.
“Devil’s Work”, the first single and still one of the finest songs on the new album, is jam-packed with ideas, but it never feels like they’re jockeying for space. Everything bristles with inspiration but never sounds stilted or over-ambitious.
It’s a lighter but denser album than its predecessor. Where the debut may have lacked in consistency and a unifying vibe, this record delivers in spades. That means the emotional peaks of the first album (“Sylvia” and “Black and Blue” in particular) are matched in intensity not by musical bombast, but by lyrical and thematic consistency. In fact if there’s any song on the first record that foreshadowed the vibe of the second it’s probably closer “Faker”.
While solid throughout, the middle section containing “God Help This Divorce”, “Bavarian #1 (Say You Will)”, and “Pretender” stands out. “God Help This Divorce” is a devastating update of Simon and Garfunkle‘s “The Only Living Boy in New York”, its wry matter-of-factness is as endearing as it is tragic. “Bavarian #1″ has so many musical strands it could launch several song-spin-offs, but somehow it works and works perfectly.
More than anything, this album accomplishes something similar to the first; it makes you want to hear more new music from Miike Snow as soon as possible. It also makes you wonder if they’re a band that could at some point crack the top-40. Maybe the world’s just not ready yet, though maybe the world wasn’t ready for “Toxic” either? Ask Miike Snow, two-thirds of the band wrote and produced it.
Nobody else sounds like Morphine. This is due partly, of course, to their instrumental lineup: drums, 2-string slide bass guitar, and baritone sax. But it’s also because they struck a weird balance between desperation and contentment, hunger and satiation, happy and sad.
Frontman Mark Sandman was as enigmatic as the music. Rumors of addiction thrust upon him simply for the name of his band, Sandman was never willing to divulge much about his personal life. But talk swirled about Boston/Cambridge that he was, in fact, a junky.
Morphine recorded two albums considered classics, but Cure for Painstands alone as their best work. It’s an album of incalculable pain, but a pain constantly tempered somehow, as though a fix comes through each time the sickness begins to creep in. The title track perfectly encapsulates the feeling of contented addiction, much the same way the The Velvet Underground‘s “Heroin” did many years before. Rarely, if ever, will you hear such an ebullient expression of enslavement.
So in this series we’ll explore the tendencies of contemporary pop (hint: catchy), evaluate the authenticity (or lack thereof) or an artist making a “hit”, and investigate exactly what makes a song popular.
Gotye, “Somebody that I Used to Know”
This is Wally de Backer. He’s a Belgian-born Australian who generally makes cut-and-paste electronic music under the stage name Gotye (gau-tee-yay). He’s been somewhat successful down under but has just scored his breakthrough hit with an undeniably catchy tune called “Somebody that I Used to Know” featuring a guest verse and backing vocal from Katy Perry some woman who sounds just like Katy Perry. Take a listen, then read on…
The track is undeniably catchy; the following elements all contribute to that:
-The xylophone line (I had pretty much forgotten this instrument exists)
-The sparseness of the instrumentation (at a time when the consensus in pop seems to be “bigger is better” the fact that this song is uncrowded is startling, in a good way)
-The chorus hook: “But you didn’t have to cutttttt me outtt, (blah blah blah) never happened and no, we weren’t nothing”
-He sounds like Peter Gabriel.
-The guest verse and backing harmonies from a different voice, bolstering the final chorus (though these may just be catchy because she sounds like Katy Perry, and Katy Perry is catchy like Eliot Smith is depressing)
Now, before we make a determination on whether the song is catchy and good, or just catchy, let’s look at the things about it that are decidedly not good:
-First and foremost, the lyrics, which are banal to the point of irony, but sung with too much conviction to be ironic:
“Now and then I think of when we were together
Like when you said you felt so happy you could die
Told myself that you were right for me
But felt so lonely in your company
But that was love and it’s an ache I still remember” barf.
-The guest verse: this is good and bad; good because it adds some sonic variety and the harmonies over the last chorus are excellent; bad because, come on, that’s seriously not Katy Perry? It makes me question the validity of the entire song that this woman is trying so hard to sound like someone she’s not. This is not to say Katy Perry is the gold-standard of female musicians, but be yourself Kimbra.
(She even kinda looks like Katy Perry)
If you’re keeping count, the catchy outweighs the bad, and here we come to heart of the question “Is this song good, or just catchy?”: every catchy song is good, unless it isn’t. Songs can beat you over the head with an infectious melody until it’s stuck in your head for days (apropos: my mom had Deep Blue Something‘s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” stuck in her head so badly she lost sleep, not exaggerating), but if what surrounds that melody is contrived or if that melody is annoying, it does not a good song make.
Stay tuned for further discussion of the “Catchy, Good, or Both?” issue and for now:
Whenever an artist whose last record was great releases their first thing since it’s an exciting, if nerve-wracking, prospect. Perfect example: Fleet Foxes make probably the best debut of the last decade then return from two years of silence to make something decidedly underwhelming.
Pressing play on “The Devil’s Work”, the first track from the forthcoming sophomore album from electro-pop geniuses Miike Snow, was terrifying for me. I worried that the band’s sound may have stagnated, or, conversely, that they’d get caught up in the self-conscious need to “innovate” that has dogged so many young bands (see: everything The Strokes ever made after, Is This It).
Gratifyingly, “The Devil’s Work” sounds like the perfect statement of intent for a new album. Less overtly “electro” than most of their earlier work, the song instead draws power from strings, horns, and an insistent, steady groove. Look for the new album Happy to Youon March 27th. And check out “The Devil’s Work” below, it sounds sooooooo good.
This part’s the most fun. In compiling the selections for this year’s best-of I came to the realization that this year was LONG on catchy, and somewhat short on pretty (James Blake and Bon Iver notwithstanding). Doesn’t mean there was any shortage of truly great songs. I sequenced the list but the order isn’t that important so you can either play it straight through or hit the shuffle and see what you get. It’s been a lovely first year of hMsM, and I’m psyched to share this with you.
Often the best songs of a given year say more about the cultural landscape than the best albums. These are songs that, for one reason or another, seemed to soundtrack 2011. They’re kind of all over the place, and you probably won’t find too, too many of them on anybody else’s top list, but all of them are great, and I’ll do my best to convince you why.
When she eviscerated our minds on Kanye‘s “Monster“, we were all pretty sure she was for real. When “Superbass” came around, there was no longer a doubt. Nicki Minaj, all youthful exuberance and oozing goofy sex, had quite a year in 2011. This song, like another one on this list, is sung from the perspective of a girl who’s ready to give you everything, and all you have to do is appreciate her. [of course in Nicki's case you also have to be a large, physically fit, well moneyed black man with a very loud sound system in your nice car]
9. Fleet Foxes, “Grown Ocean”
Helplessness Blueswas a hard pill for me to swallow. It’s not a bad album by any means, but it lacked something essential that made Fleet Foxesspecial. “Grown Ocean” is undoubtedly the defining moment. There’s something about this song that makes me happy to be a Mainer, maybe it’s the idea that “children grown on the edge of the ocean” are cut from a different cloth.
I’m tempted to just type the lyric sheet to this song. I did a complete one-eighty on Drake this year and this track was largely the reason. The beat (which is fully dope) becomes an afterthought because Drizzy flows with such ridiculous swag it’s hard to argue with the claims he makes. “I throw my dollas up hiiiiigh/ and they land on the stage you daaaance on / we got company comin ovvvaaaa / would it kill you to put some paaaants on.”
If there’s one thing you can say for Brooklyn’s The Antlers, they know how to sing about interactions. ”I Don’t Want Love” is the story of a tepid one-night stand between two friends. From the singer’s perspective, it sounded like a better idea at the time…
There was a point this year when this song hit a saturation level that totally baffled me. It’s a real success story; what happens when a single on a random Californian indie band’s album is just so ridiculously catchy it explodes into the public consciousness? The horrendously tactless lyrics notwithstanding, this is a GREAT pop song. It was inevitably overplayed, and has lost some of its luster, but let’s all remember where we were the second or third time we heard it and said “what IS this?”.
Lana del Rey is the product of collective nostalgia for a decade nobody remembers. The 50s are now far enough removed from the average music listener’s memory that the glamorization of the decade’s fashion and pop culture mores was inevitable. Enter Lizzy Grant, a starry-eyed and beautiful 20-something with a penchant for nonchalance. She decides she’ll change her name to Lana del Rey and pretend she’s a 50s starlet. Sounds dumb right? Well she hasn’t released a full-length LP yet, so the jury’s still out on the idea, but “Video Games” is pretty remarkable. The fact that it was her first single and the two she’s released since have been good-but-not-as-good doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence going forward, but we’ll remember that in 2011, if only for a moment, we all wanted to live in whatever year Lana chose.
4. James Blake, “A Case of You” (Joni Mitchell cover)
“Whaaaaat do you expect us to say after that… that was amaaazing”. That was the response from Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1 when James Blake finished an in-studio solo piano cover of Joni Mitchell‘s Blueclassic “A Case of You”. Where the original version had an almost calypso-y bump, Blake’s version is true to what he’s been making this year: quiet, emotionally wrought, and arrestingly gorgeous. That BBC version was so good, in fact, that Blake decided to feature that one-shot take on his late 2011 EP Enough Thunder. Blake’s self-titled solo album topped this year’s hMsMBest Albums of 2011, but this is the best recording he released all year, and as Lowe said in studio after the fateful performance “now you’ve given us a really good indication of where you can go”. Well he’s only 23, so that’s a pretty exciting prospect.
I feel a little silly ranking this song so high. Not only has it been totally unacknowledged by critics, but everybody seems to forget that Radiohead made an album this year. “Seperator” is the final track on The King of Limbs, a record that was probably better than it was given credit for; at this point anything less than perfection is a let down to Radiohead fans. When I initially reviewed The King of LimbsI noted that this was probably the happiest song Radiohead has ever made, and it’s at the end of their saddest album. The music evokes warmth, clear water, “flowering fruits”, paradise. The introduction of a seemingly trivial guitar riff at the 2:30 mark gives the song exactly the lift it needs and by the end it’s hard not to feel washed clean, blinking into brilliant sunlight, in whatever paradise comes to mind.
Purity Ring is Megan James and Corin Roddick, two young Canadians with a whole lot of ideas about what the future of pop music should sound like. In fact they describe their sound as, um, “future pop”. They’ve only released three tracks but a full length is on the way in the next few months. “Ungirthed” utilizes the Burial-style ghost voices that have been cropping up in a lot of electronic music over the last several years, but this is perhaps the first time those voices have sounded like they belong to blithe spirits. There’s SO MUCH happiness in this track it’s bubbling out like soap suds, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a debut LP.
Anthony Gonzalez’s magnum opus Hurry Up We’re Dreamingopens with the best 1-2 punch of the year. “Intro” sets the tenor exceptionally grand; it’s one of those moments where you imagine a performer saying “just try topping that”, to which Gonzalez clears his throat, takes a deep breath, and starts making bird noises. This vocal riff is not so much catchy as it is contagious; everybody I play this song for is taken by it. If the riff is the waves, “Midnight City” is the sea. Gonzalez’s lyrics occasionally float to the surface but more often the track is an exercise in atmosphere. In a year like 2011, where so much is uncertain (North Korea, the presidential election, the Middle East, the return of Community) we need heroes, and this year M83 rose to the occasion.
Well that does it for tracks, stay tuned for the Best of 2011 playlist, coming soon.
