Fornication Forever with Five
1. The Books at Café Dunord, Wednesday – I love that one song, “Be Good To Them Always,” in which the vocalist sings the same lyrics as the various vocal samples (“a culture is not better than its woods” is a highlight). Neato! Actually, The Books sounded great, better than i expected. Too bad i couldn’t SEE anything. Tall people with giant heads really suck. All giants should be forced to stand in the back. You know who you are, giant pricks.
2. Caribou The Milk Of Human Kindness – just as weird and, dare i say, psychedelic as ever. Fuck Manitoba, Caribou is king.
3. Sufjan Stevens “Chicago” from upcoming LP Illinois – Jon Brion wishes he could have recorded this. It’s nice to hear a song that clearly has a shit-ton of work and creativity poured into it. This heart-swelling track makes me want to find a ginormous meadow somewhere that i can run fast with my hands in the air, with a kick-ass sound system mowing me down with sufjan. No really.
4. Boot of Kraftwerk’s Coachella ’04 performance, http://www.hushreality.com/kraftwerk/ – German electro-pop for life. This brings me right back to the show. If you listen carefully enough, you can hear a girl ask a tall guy with a giant hat to take it off because she couldn’t see the robots standing in front of their terminals (see The Books, above). And if you listen close, you can also hear me screaming.
5. Hating on Kings Of Leon – Goddamn they are bothersome. Go the fuck away, Followills (what kind of name is that anyway?). But it's fun to hate a band too. Hating on Train is so played (and too easy).
.....
Bonus +1 – Seeing Autechre tonight - I can’t wait to see people attempt to dance to their herky jerky pachinko machine rhythms.
-1. Having to work on what is clearly a day in which i should be running through a ginormous meadow somewhere with my arms flailing.
fornication forever,
tP
Back From The Brink (Vol. 2, #1)
1. LCD Soundsystem LCD Soundsystem (2005)
i love music snobbery. fucking rocks!!
it's totally all over the place.
'daft punk is playing at my house' fucking kills.
no question.
arrogant.
carefully and beautifully recorded.
admittedly, almost flawless.
as hard as that is to say.
but it's just goddamn good.
2. Ulrich Schnauss "Blumenwiese Neben Autobahn" from Far Away Trains Passing By (2001)
this song makes me want to cry.
but in a totally hip cool way your dad would be down with.
holy shit, this track is just...amazing.
jaw already in a big heap on the floor.
joyously dreamy this is. the chirpy keyboards.
the pin-sharp beats.
heaven Ulrich is from.
(sidenote to DJs: mixes well with Telefon Tel Aviv)
3. Tricky "Excess" from Blowback (2001)
for some strange reason, i've rediscovered this song lately, the scratchy-throated Tricky Kid whose arrogance often exceeds his actual talent. Yet, sometimes he can still throw down a great track and this is one of them.
a real builder of a song that opens the album (unfortunately most of the rest of the album is utter shite) with a great piano line, sinister beat and, like most great Tricky tracks, a sizzling female vocalist or two to pump up the vibe.
though i still miss Martina Topley-Bird from back in the early Tricky days.
4. New Order Waiting For The Sirens' Call (released 04.26.05)
run right out and order yourself a copy of the New Order album. It's surprisingly solid, one of the better New Order albums in many years, i'd say. the keyboards are less chintzy, the guitars bolder, the songwriting better. that simple. I just scored this advance so i need to listen to it more but what i've heard thus far, i'm digging on. It's encouraging to know a band this old, formed after the demise of Joy Division in the early 1980s, can still come up with new, innovative and vital music.
5. The Books Lost And Safe (released 04.05.05)
The third album from this environmental and found sound electroacoustic outfit finds them better than ever. It's a weird, tripped-out clattery audio experience from start to finish, with off-kilter vocals supported by equally on-kilter banjo playing and odd audio incorporated into the music.
this takes a few listens but it's hard to knock an album that harkens back to when you were in elementary school, putting your heads down on your desk to escape the world for a few minutes while the teacher softly reads a story to the class.
It's That kind of fun.
