¿donde viven los bangers?

breaking from normal practice to post a couple of reviews ahead of schedule – these were slated to run in city paper (and online) today, but got bumped back due to space constraints... but i wanted to share b/c for once it seems i am (semi-inadvertently) in lockstep with the daily pitchforkgeist, in the sense that these albums both got Best New Music, today and yesterday respectively.  (and now it will maybe look like i was trailing hype trends by a week behind...oh well whatevs.)  sweet tunes, lame covers, check it:

Disclosure - Settle

Daft Punk can keep their randomly accessed analog memories; British brother duo Disclosure are using much more precise, calibrated means – pinprick-crisp digital beats, icy smart-missile synth hooks – to summon a very specific place (London – the predominant home turf of their myriad guest vocalists: Jessie Ware, Jamie Woon, AlunaGeorge...) and time (the turn-of-the-century heyday of sleek, syncopated UK Garage.)  No slight on our beloved Parisian disco-bots, but Settle (PMR/Island) – a crossover-ready club thumper that plays like Basement Jaxx's Remedy as reimagined by two-step maven MJ Cole – is looking like the dance party album to beat this summer.

Jon Hopkins - Immunity

Jon Hopkins is no stranger to warmly inviting, ambient-leaning soundscapes, as his collaborations with Brian Eno, Coldplay and Scottish folkie King Creosete all attest, but the producer's fourth solo album finds him aiming for something a bit rougher.  Just a little bit.  Six of Immunity (Domino)'s eight cuts are solidly beat-based; most of them appreciably danceable, many of them more expansive takes on The Field's lush, feathery minimal trance, commingled with Dntel's warmed-over glitch techno.  It all sounds pretty glorious, but it's the glacially-paced, nearly beatless, title track – the most luxuriantly billowing bliss-out Four Tet never made – that's perhaps most heartmeltingly resonant.

No big surprise that Disclosure got the BNM status (though impressive that they leap-frogged Daft Punk on the score – more on that later); seems like a third of the tracks on the album were already being heavily hyped, and anyway it's just an obviously great album.  Though I haven't completely decided if I really think they're the second coming of early-period Basement Jaxx, which seems to be everyone else's go-to comparison (and mine) – if only because it's a lack we've been feeling for so long (if their next album gets as wild and wide-ranging as Rooty I'll be truly impressed; so far they seem to be mostly fitting their guest vocalists to their specific mold/choosing from within a narrow range, rather than letting collaborations broaden their approach – which is a totally reasonable approach, at least for now...anyway...)  But the Hopkins review was a bit of a surprise; as much as I'd been enjoying the record it seemed like the kind of thing that p4k might sniff at.  I guess you never know.  Anyway (as I wrote), it's the closing title track that really does it for me – precisely because it sounds almost exactly like one of the slow/gentle cuts on There Is Love In You.  It's the kind of perfect that could be stretched to an hour long and be all the better for it.

so anyway, yeah – as nate asked me recently (in english) – where do bangers live?  if you'll notice my unusually up-to-date "2013 scene" sidebar, i'm developing a pretty sturdy canon of 2013 hits.  i'll probably fashion these into a summer jams mixtape before too long (probably with that as a title) but in the mean time i thought i'd share a few of the most notable.  oh hey soundcloud (apparently that's the answer.)

  
most recently, i've been crushing super hard on this song by CHVRCHES (are we allowed to call them Chrvches in polite company?) – actually overplaying it to the point where I feel like I'm in danger of wearing it out.  not so far, though.  still sounds like crystal clear summertime sprinkles.  i guess i still need to fully parse the lyrics, but in the mean time it hits a whole bunch of tried-and-true electro-pop marks just so meticulously, and often with a little twinge of something extra... one of my favorites is the slightly martial (definitely live-sounding) re-entry of the drums after the breakdown (around 2:40)   dance with me?


not sure i can fully explain why this song has stuck with me so strongly – the rest of caitlin rose's album is good but this is a head-and-shoulders stand-out – but it just feels like utterly perfect pop.  i connected with it immediately when i saw her play live (before hearing the record), so that probably helped.  lyrics are great too, even the loose tennessee williams references which could so easily feel forced.  also great for such a sweet sounding song to be about such a dark destructive impulse.

 
so this is a "minimix" of all the different remixes on the 12", which is especially fun b/c it's exactly the kind of goofiness i would get up to. (qv my treatment of "mixed bizness" on superstar djs and "dancing on my own" on the 2010 mix.)  been banging this all year but it's clearly built for summer.


so i'm just hearing this remix for the first time now... nice stuff! reminds me a lot of the avalanches treatment of "i'm a cuckoo" (one of the all-time greats.)  i'm not gonna say it's better than the original, but it does a good job of translating the song's gooey saccharine sweetness into something very different.  hard to beat those super-chimey chirrupy mandolins, but hyperactive multi-tracked slap bass is a pretty good approach if you're gonna try.  what do you think?


I'm sure this song will get its due time to shine (VW don't like to go about things orderly, which is just fine), but as far as i'm concerned this is far and away the banger from MVOTC.  (It obviously doesn't come close to "Giving Up The Gun," which is one way, at least, in which the new album is a let-down – but it's a solid shot.)  I always want the blazing pianos to kick ("I know I love you...") when the bottom drops out instead ("I'm not excited...").  Why they gotta hold back like that?  (I do like the handclaps in this live version.)  Meanwhile "Obvious Bicycle" is so utterly beautiful, and "Hannah Hunt" works so well that it's really tough to pick a favorite track from the album as a whole...



feels so cheap (not to mention clunky! - i know it's supposed to feel casual but omg those dubbed-out curse words are just sloppy – even if actually including the curse words would be 10x worse) but dammit it works.  #on repeat.

as for Daft Punk...i didn't mean to pick on them in my Disclosure review, it was just an easy target.  I'm taking my time with Random Access Memories, have only given it three or maybe four listens thru so far.  So I don't feel ready to make a definitive statement.  there's a lot of fun stuff there, for sure, but it is clear that sequencing is a major issue – "Giorgio by Moroder" would make so much more sense later in the album rather than killing momentum on track three.  and what's up with putting a slow-jam second (in the "Aerodynamic" slot, if you will.)  a lot of the best stuff is in the middle of the album - esp. "Instant Crush" (Julian!!) and "Lose Yourself To Dance" although that song is just begging to be sped up a good ten clicks.  I guess I'm a little undecided on "Giorgio" but some of the other epics do work pretty well, especially "Touch."  (also "Get Lucky" is much improved at this length and with proper song structure.)  anyhow, i'll keep on living with it, gettin comfy.

i keep dancing on my own

this was an awesome summer for dance-pop. really, the whole year has probably been the best, quantity+quality-wise, since 2006, which might have been the last year i was excited about dance-pop on a large scale (the year of paris, etc.) even if there was sort of a dearth of bona-fide massive summer jams – which i define as massive enough to penetrate the consciousness of my relatively pop-averse friends (katy perry came close, i guess. rihanna, the erstwhile queen of summer, got her smash on in the springtime, rudely enough.)

sadly, though, there didn't seem to be all that much actual dancing, at least in my world. save for a couple-few transcendent daytime dining-room get-down sessions to Lazerproof. there was a pretty promising start to the summer with the /\/\ /\ Y /\ release party (once we made it through the album, that is.) and I did see LCD in NYC, and The Rapture at Making Time. but then La Roux had to go and cancel their tour... at least Robyn and Kelis came through – and how! though, again, i went by myself. i think i only dj'd that one real party all summer, too (heat activated.)

but, at least i made this mix, pretty casually, and it is, i think, pretty close to phenomenal – little credit to me, but to our faithful friends the pop pros, who cranking out jams on all fronts. still, what's a summer jam without a pool-party posse to share it with?

sort of a fabricated document, then, of a summer of fun that never exactly was. maybe the problem is that i made the mix on cd. and who listened to cds in the summer of 2010?

title: Froth of July
date: July 2010
format: cd-r; daydream

1. The Spell – Alphabeat
2. Shampain – Marina and the Diamonds
3. Nothing on You – B.o.B ft. Bruno Mars [Villains Remix]
4. You've Changed – Sia
5. XXXO – M.I.A. ft. Jay-Z [Fulton Yard/Waltboogie Remix]
6. In Ruins - Fol Chen
7. All The Lovers – Kylie Minogue
8. Seasun – Delorean
9. Swoon – Chemical Brothers [Don Diablo Remix]
10. One – Sky Ferreira
11. Drunk Girls – LCD Soundsystem [Holy Ghost! Remix]
12. Come With Me – ceo
13. 4th of July (Fireworks) – Kelis
14. Take That – Wiley & Chew Fu
15. Push It Fembot – Robyn vs. Salt 'n' Pepa [A Rokk Pie N Mashup]
16. Daydreaming – Kid Sister [Telephoned Dreams Version]
17. Wile Out – DJ Zinc Ft. Ms Dynamite
18. Tenderoni – Kele [Ryan Hervé Re-Fix]
19. Dan – Grovesnor
20. Independent Kill – La Roux & Major Lazer ft. Candi Redd
21. Dancing On My Own – Robyn [Jakwob Remix]

quasi-mixed – that is, sequenced and edited for reasonably beat-smooth transitions in most places, but no actual dj tweaking. this ranges pretty far over the map, geographically, stylistically, all across the indie-mainstream divide and back. (what divide you say?)

notable omissions (cut out for space reasons only): Ke$ha, Katy Perry, Big Boi, Goldfrapp (i still haven't really gotten into Head First, though i feel like it should really be up my alley...still, the first two tracks are lovely in that frothy way), Hot Chip (was still rocking One Life Stand hard at this point, though it had been out for a pretty long time.) and the Scissor Sisters album hadn't even come out yet.

the Alphabeat feels a bit like a throwaway intro (though i do love that song in the context of its album...which for whatever reason hasn't quite stuck with me the way i thought it would.) Kid Sister probably wouldn't have made it (that's a 2010 remix, i think, of a 2009 track) except i had just written her up for CP and had belatedly realized that it's a pretty darn sweet album (though that remix may not be too representative.) likewise, the Delorean, which i love, is a belatedly-discovered favorite from their 2009 ep which is sadly better than anything on their (generally quite good) 2010 album. otherwise, the vast majority of these are still solid favorites, some surprisingly so (Marina; Fol Chen.)

the real question is whether i'm going to reuse/recycle many of these for year-end mix, so that this will end up feeling like scrap fodder for that, or whether i'll try to keep this as a strong separate entity. time will tell...

summertime (concl.)

got it: i just need to think of this not as a "music blog" (something i don't really like or get, er anyway something i don't really read) but as an artist journal/news update website. course, still backed up on "artist"-life news (hey, i'm deejaying! tonight even! and look up!), but -

wanted to write in a little bit about that mix that's been hanging at the top of this page for close to two months now...even if it's not "summer" anymore, tho it still basically feels like it, and i feel funny about continuing to give it out.

Title: Summertime, Cont. (Popsical Bonus Disc) [a.k.a. Popsequel]
Format: CD-R (23 track continuous mix, + 2)
Date: July 2007
Packaging: it fits inside the same paper printer-printed sleeve alongside Popsical

1. Summertime, Summertime/Smile Around the Face - the Jamies/Four Tet
2. Happy Summertime - R. Kelly ft. Snoop Dogg
3. Summertime - Beyonce ft. Ghostface
4. Summertime - DJ Jazzy Jeff ft. the Fresh Will Smith
5. SummerLove - Justin Timbalake ft. Stat Quo
6. Dear Summer - Jay-Z ft. Lil Wayne, Young Jeezy, etc. plus Weldon Irvine
[Morning Sunrise - Weldon Irvine]
7. Summertime - Sublime ft. the Pharcyde
8. Umbrella (the Summerbrella ThatzmyJAM "Lolly Brolly" Remix) - Rihanna ft. Jay-Z, Keak da Sneak, Mims, Usher, Lil Jon, Ludacris, Clipse, Birdman, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, T-Pain, Cassie, Lil Mama, T.I., DJ Webstar, Young B, DJ Unk, Fat Joe, Lil Wayne
9. Oh My God - Mark Ronson ft. Lily Allen
[Heat Wave - Martha Reeves + the Vandellas]
10. Summer Night on Hammer Hill - Jens Lekman
11. Her Breasts Were Still Small - Tribeca
12. Vacation/Summertime Blues - Vitamin C/Eddie Cochran
13. The Rockafeller Skank/Surfin' U.S.A. - Fatboy Slim/The Beach Boys
14. Summer Samba - Walter Wenderly
15. Nice Day - Persephone's Bees
16. Sun - The Toms
17. Computer Camp Love - Datarock
18. Real Summer - Future Bible Heroes
19. Don't Falter - Mint Royale ft. Lauren Laverne
20. Heavy Metal Drummer - Wilco
21. Do It Again - Steely Dan
22. Do It Again - The Beach Boys
23. Do It Again/Summertime - The Chemical Brothers/The Zombies

bonus tracks:
24. Sketch for Summer - The Durutti Column
25. Black Like Me - Spoon

it's a strange little hodgepodge, i think, the cobbling-together of several different strains of ideas, but i tend to think it works. rather than a repository for ideas left off of popsical proper, it's the realization of mostly post-facto vision of what i'd like to have played at laurel's summer solstice barbeque. didn't worry too much about making it overtly dancy, though it ends with up roughly the same danceability quotient as Popsical [~80%] i sort of reverse-engineered the concept-heavy flow of the mix starting from that smattered list of songs, ending up with something like this:

1-7) every song i could think of [or acquisit] titled "summertime," which it turns out are all more or less hiphop/r&b, and all ft. "ft." the most overdetermined tracklist joke i've done in a while, but it works.
8) the official song of the summer, mashed with all the other jamz, past and present, that sometimes flitted into my headspace while i listened to it.
9) my new favorite performance by lily allen, who became something of an embodiment of summer-pop last year, but that's a stretch i don't particularly care to make, because in fact this is the only song here ['cept steely dan] that's not decidedly summery in theme. it does work well as a transition from the r&b to the indie/pop portion, tho.
10-12; 15, 17) scandinavians! now allowed. singing about nostalgia and love, because that's what summer songs are about. [erm. vitamin c isn't scandinavian, but her music owes at least as much to swede-pop as it does to hawaiian slack-key folk. persephone's bees are russian...ish?] i still can't get over how strange and amazing "her breasts were still small" is - sweetly, earnestly nostalgic but also very extremely creepy; resultingly, both funny and somber, also a little sexy, albeit uneasily so; and somehow the music manages to fit that duality perfectly.
12-14) mash-ups of classic good-time summer songs. ["vacation" is an acknowledged classic right?] i'd done the fatboy/beach boy one live once or twice; the other just sort of happened. fun!
16) a stray cut from the original original popsical (last year), previously a stray cut from yellow pills, previously a stray cut from the nth era of lost power-pop whatever. sun=summer.
18-20) some of my personal classic good-time summer songs. about nostalgia and love.
21-23) do it again and again and again. self-explanatory? inexplicable? also, "summertime," for real, finally. nice lil version too. (though i never loved that song.)
24-25) cd-only bonus tracks. the first a recent and fortuitous discovery - "sketch for summer," the beautifully languid (instrumental) opening track from the durutti column's cheekily named debut, the return of the durutti column. the second pretty much my personal song of the summer, spoon's "black like me" - achingly gorgeous and clearly a summer song in disguise (there's really no reason for it not to be titled "street tar and summer" - wtf britt.) somebody called it "a day in the life" in miniature, and that is almost uncannily apt. maybe i'll write about that some other time.

get ice.

this right here is my last summer mix. of the summer. i promise.

it's parts three and beyond of what you've already heard so far. it's a bonus disc for Popsical (there's room for two in that sleeve - it's a twin-pop!) it's extremely straightforwardly summery. it...s compulsively continuous-mixed, but it may not be a dance mix, exactly. it's all over the place.

i'll have more to say later. and i'll make a track-separated version for the cd. here's what you get:

1. Summertime, Summertime (Time to Smile Re:face) - the Jamies ft. Four Tet
2. Happy Summertime - R. Kelly ft. Snoop Dogg
3. Summertime - Beyonce ft. Ghostface
4. Summertime - DJ Jazzy Jeff ft. the Fresh Will Smith
5. SummerLove - Justin Timbalake ft. Stat Quo
6. Dear Summer - Jay-Z ft. Lil Wayne, Young Jeezy, etc.
[+ Morning Sunrise - Weldon Irvine]
7. Summertime - Sublime ft. the Pharcyde
8. Umbrella (the Summerbrella ThatzmyJAM Lolly Brolly Remix) - Rihanna ft. Jay-Z, Keak da Sneak, Mims, Usher, Lil Jon, Ludacris, Clipse, Birdman, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, T-Pain, Cassie, Lil Mama, T.I., DJ Webstar, Young B, DJ Unk, Fat Joe, Lil Wayne
9. Oh My God - Mark Ronson ft. Lily Allen
10. Summer Night on Hammer Hill ["This Song is Like, uh, 'Heat Wave'?"] - Jens "The Vandel" Lekman ft. Martha Reeves + the Vandellas
11. Her Breasts Were Still Small - Tribeca
12. Vacation (The "Vitamin C is the Cure for the Summertime Blues" Remash) - Vitamin C ft. Eddie Cochran
13. The Funk Soul Surfer - H.R. Lovemuffin vs. BeachBoy Slim
14. Summer Samba - Walter Wenderly
15. Nice Day - Persephone's Bees
16. Computer Camp Love - Datarock
17. Real Summer - Future Bible Heroes
18. Don't Falter - Mint Royale ft. Lauren Laverne
19. Heavy Metal Drummer - Wilco
20. Do It Again - Steely Dan/The Beach Boys/The Chemical Brothers
21. Summertime - The Zombies

now usually i don't do this, but, uh...

Rihanna: "Umbrella (Remix ft. Jay-Z, Keak da Sneak, Mims, Usher, Lil Jon, Ludacris, Clipse, Birdman, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, T-Pain, Cassie, Lil Mama, T.I., DJ Webstar, Young B, DJ Unk, Fat Joe, Lil Wayne)"

a.k.a. Still Summer Still Now, section II

um, enjoy!

happy summertime, knickers!

still summer, still now [part one, or sumthing]

better put this up before it's not anymore. just take a listen. not sure why it looks like the german flag...

It's Summertime - the Jamies
[vs. Smile Around the Face - Four Tet]
Happy Summertime - R. Kelly ft. Snoop Dogg
Summertime - Beyonce ft. Ghostface
Summertime - DJ Jazzy Jeff ft. the Fresh Will Smith
SummerLove - Justin Timbalake ft. Stat Quo
Dear Summer - Jay-Z ft. Lil Wayne, Young Jeezy, etc.
[Weldon Irvine - Morning Sunrise]
Summertime - Sublime ft. the Pharcyde

...to be continued




p.s. i'm a premium snapdrive member now, so the old mp3 links should work again. including the springles mincepod, which i should prob. replace with this about now. also means you can download this, here.

it's summertime, boy!

so the spring of springles, the shortest of the seasons, is over, and the summer jamz be jamming. i'm listening to the new matthew dear cd now - it's poppin, it's cool. (possibly really really cool. don't like the title much though.) i've been writing a number of song blurbs over in the styjuke, which you can see if you scroll back through the last several pages. no major revelations yet. i'm inching forward (but having new thoughts faster than i can record them) on my disco stuff...hopefully post that very soon. also been thinkin' bout the beatles - sgt. peppers
less so than, actually, meet [not with] - which upon consideration turns out to be easily the best early beatles album, since it relegates all the dross of with to the filler-ful 2nd album. also "in my life" and how perfectly pitched its sentimentality is.

otherwise, my bloggish enerjies for the last week and a half have been going to the MIXX. which is done! at least, the musixal part of it - i want to work on some artwork and packaging and all that. maybe it will be a 2cd set with the Love is the Dancer mix (also about an hour long) but i will want to nice that up a bit first.

anyway, the latest and final version of PoPSICAL, which is now posted below, is slightly different from the one i posted a few days ago, so go listen to it now, as you read along. here it is again:

LISTEN / DOWNLOAD

sort of annoying that snapdrive (whom i like for file storage even though it can be rather slow, because it's generally generous) is not allowing direct URL linkage to mp3s anymore, which may mean there isn't a good way for you to download them - i'll look into that later, and at the very least make a sidebar player for my mixes. but for now...

Title: Popsical(!)
Format: mp3 (single file 1:02:)/CD-R (with track separation! - 24 track continuous mix)
Date: 28 May - 5 June, 2007
Packaging: tbd. perhaps: [eta: found a way to make a neat sleeve package using my printer (for once), with this image on the front; this on the back. there's even a little divot in the envelope to create spaces for two discs.]

Jan and Dean: "Popsicle"The Buffalo Bunch: "Music Box [Waves]"
Tom Tom Club: "Under the Boardwalk"
The Fiery Furnaces: "Here Comes the Summer"
Four Tet: "Sun Drums and Soil (Sa Ra Creative Partners Remix)"
Bonde do Role: "Office Boy"
Rihanna: "S.O.S."
Millie Small: "My Boy Lollipop"
Leslie Gore: "Maybe I Know"
Spank Rock: "Sweet Talk"
Phoenix: "Funky Squaredance"
Blackbyrds: "Rock Creek Park"
Shuggie Otis: "Ice Cold Daydream"
DJ /Rupture: "Mosquito"
Ce'Cile: "Hot Like We"
Mistah F.A.B.: "Ghost Ride It"
Stevie Wonder: "All Day Sucker"
Fantasia: "Baby Making Hips"
XTC: "It's Nearly Africa"
Natasha Bedingfield: "I Want To Have Your Babies"
Munk and James Murphy: "Kick out the Chairs!"
The Pharcyde: "Soul Flower"
Cassie: "Just 1 Nite"
Lil Mama: "Lip Gloss"
Rjd2: "Bus Stop Bitties"
Clinton: "Mr. President"
Talking Heads: "Popsicle"

notes:
• it's a summertime dance/DJ mix - first draft hastily assembled for a memorial day (monday) barbeque, after several days of futzing i started completely from scratch on friday, recording it again (but with most of the same music); editing and some minor re-recording over the next few evenings, a few more days of fiddling with levels and such, and now it is ready for the world. and it's barely even summer yet! which means i'm in good shape.

• it doesn't have a whole to do with this summer mix i made this winter (although i still love it though), but it has a lot in common with this, not quite a year old, summer mix from last summer. in fact, it might be the same mix. same title (cause i couldn't think of a good way to call it as a stand-alone sequel/revision), 5/21 of the same tracks, plus at least two i had wanted to put on the original popsical - "sun drums and soil" and the tom tom club cover - instead of "under the boardwalk" i used its standalone sequel/revision "sand in my shoes." other amendments due to underdanceability, timelinesslessness, and whatever.

• the second half of this mix (blackbyrds on) was originally going to be the latter half/third of what is now "Love is the Dancer" (still not sure about that title), as evidenced by the presence of "rock creek park" on both. i don't mind.

• stretched but basically obeyed the four tet rule (you can think of the first three tracks as preamble, "sun drums" as introduction, and "office boy" as start of the mix proper, because that's where the dancing really gets going anyway.)

• final resting place for the "s.o.s.">"my boy lollipop" and "maybe i know">"sweet talk" transitions that i've been playing with for like a year now - love 'em both but good riddance b/c they were getting dated and played, at least in my living room, but it felt like an obligation to air them properly. see how you like 'em now.

• what makes the songs "summer" is obvious in some cases, subtler/indirect/questionable in others, nonexistent in others, but it all sounds pretty summery to me. two popsicle songs; two lollipop songs (could have done more but that'd seem like overkill - why are there so many more of the latter when the former are so much better?) no ice cream or pinkberry songs. i was mostly unaware of the two popsicle songs until i started conceiving this. amazingly, talking heads, my favorite band, turned out to have a song called "popsicle" that i had never (consciously) heard before! and it was in my collection - and it's really good! thanks to amg for the tip. ending the mix with that makes me feel like a reel kool dj. actually allows me the rare chance to experience the thrill of discovery, on my own mix, that i'm always hoping my mixes will provide to others.

• no scandinavians.

• the idea at one point was to represent a dj style for the defunct club night whose flyer design i modified to make the above cover. the mix as it exists doesn't quite reflect the styles described there - novelties and summer jams, check, but not as much with the disco, electro, and dance-pop, strangely enough. all of those are amply represented on love is the dancer (hence my wanting to present it as a complement), but here we have more hip-hop, r&b (old & nu), and indie/post-punk(!) than i would have predicted. not to mention baile funk, ragga, electro-salsa, faux-reggae, bajun pop, and what-have-you (file under "novelties," perhaps.) but, y'know, whatever. mixmaking is such a strange balance of wholes, units, and sections - i like the way this works out even if the architecture is more slippery than you might expect.

i make summer mixtapes for no reason

Title: Gold Star for Robot Boy
Format: iTunes playlist (~80 min) CD-R!
Date: early-teens, December 2006
Packaging: optional...but the CD's got a purple star on! [r = 1/2 k csc 36º, thanks lys.]

1 ★ Gold Star for Robot Boy - Guided by Voices
2 ★ Come Closer - Marit Larsen
3 ★ Something I Must Tell You - Aberfeldy
4 ★ Kate - Sambassadeur
5 ★ Let's Get Out of This Country - Camera Obscura
6 ★ I Write Summer Songs for No Reason - Acid House Kings
7 ★ Paris 2004 - Peter Bjorn and John
8 ★ Suffer for Fashion - Of Montreal
9 ★ Robot Rock - Daft Punk [excerpt]
10 ★ Robot Song - Margaret Berger
11 ★ Robotboy - Robyn
12 ★ Heartbeat - Paris
13 ★ Beat of my Heart - Hilary
14 ★ I Built This City (original maxi mix) - Baxendale
15 ★ Promise (Kyaal Remix) - Ciara
16 15 ★ All This Love - The Similou
17 16 ★ Yours to Keep - Teddybears ft. Neneh Cherry
18 17 ★ Month in the Summer - Sway
[eta:] 18 ★ Summer Love - Justin Timberlake
19 ★ Ditto - Cassie
20 ★ No End - The Ark
21 ★ Evening Sun - The Strokes
22 ★ Build Me Up - Rhymefest ft. ODB
23 ★ I Love You - The Pipettes
24 ★ Gold Star for Robot Boy - Jon Auer

still not supersatisfied with this mix, which i've been working on for week or so now, but i think it's time to give up and post it here. i don't have any particular plans for it; i may not even burn a physical copy, though let me know if you especially want one (there are some fun transition edits and such.) i may keep tinkering with it, but it may just end up being an exercise. (hence i will feel free to cannibalize from it in the future.)

it's trying to do a lot of different things simultaneously (maybe too many):

• just wanted to make a straight-up mixtape (as opposed to a dj mix) since it's been a long time since i've done that. (but it's just not the same with mp3s...)

• an opportunity to salvage and capitalize on a title ("gold star for robotboy") that i was playing around with a while back. along with that, naturally, it's a robot mix. except not overly so, because there just aren't that many suitable robot songs, and i didn't want to overplay my hand there (didn't include peggy lee's "robot man," or folk implosion's "mechanical man," or the futureheads "robot," etc.) wasn't sure if i should include the title track, but then ended up doing it twice. (sort of think of them as 'bonus' or would-be hidden tracks, the bookends/frames for the mix rather than part of the mix proper.)

• it's a love mix, and specifically a rosy, optimistic, beginning-of-relationship love mix. which is sort of wish fulfillment on my part, since at the moment i'm not in love with anybody, not even (much less?) a robot. hum de dum de dum. (i wasn't necessarily trying to tell a story with the song sequence, but you might be able to find one in the track titles. the final segment of blends solemnity, playfulness, hope, resignation, and certainty in ways that might be important to pay attention to.)

• it turned out to be a summer mix too, which sort of goes hand-in-hand with those kind of happy love songs, though not so much robot love songs. [see trx 4-7, 16-18, 21] so it's a summer love mix - but of course on the other side of blissful and carefree there's the awareness of how fragile it is, just as summer fades and the days grow older and colder. so many summer love songs are really about the end of summer, looking back at it fondly. ["summer's gone," probably the best tune on the aberfeldy album, would almost have fit, except it's no longer sentimental, it's already resigned to moving on; also it's on the ghost of valentine's past mixtape that i should get around to publishing here sometime.] the end of summer is about the end of youth too, and innocence ("i love you more than being seventeen"), but on balance this mix is still in that beautiful, idealistic, sunny moment ("i'm all about you, you're all about me, we're all about each other.") anyway, in this and a couple senses this it's a bit of a belated successor to popsical.

• also, likewise, it's a pop mix - in this case encompassing/trying to reconcile indie pop with chart/dance pop (or maybe just b/c that's what i'm mostly into these days.) no vintage pop in this case, though i played with that a little bit. sometimes it gets to feel arbitrary picking and choosing from among recent music, especially when there's so much of it. but old stuff doesn't necessarily help. in this case there's not a lot of musical reconciliation - indie and charty remain almost entirely segregated in a fairly predictable fashion [even more so than popsical actually, though the general template is similar, with a false peak in the early middle, then backing off a bit before a bigger peak, then a more experimental concluding taper.] production-wise and generally sonically (which is indeed the issue), contemporary indie-pop feels about as far from big-budge dance-pop as '60s-era stuff is.

act one [2-7] alternates scandinavian and scottish cutesy-rootsy sing-a-longs almost evenly 'til my favorite swedish sandwich tips the scales; then glam-pop exploders of montreal simultaneously create and detonate a bridge to the amped-up mid-section of top-down dancey-synthy heart/fist-pumpers, which comes fully equipped with its own amped-down mid-mid-section [10-11] of robo-tripping emo-power ballad slow jams. [but n.b.! this is not a "heartbeat" mix - that would be way too easy and obvious - i'd have had to go consciously out of my way to avoid heartbeat songs. i did have to include hils though cuz i feel like i've been giving her short shrift in general.]

things get more complex in the final chapter, maybe more sober and more whimsical at the same time (and if MB's "robot song" is the centerpiece of the mix, then sober whimsicality, or whimsical sobriety, is probably the appropriate mood.) this section [?18-23, i guess] reads like odd ends but may be a painstakingly re-re-sequenced melting-pot of sentimentalist album-closing moves from a remarkable range of genres; each one either building on and/or second-guessing the pathos of the one before. for me, even as the irony-potential warning indicator increases from sway>cassie>ark>strokes>odb>pipettes, the level of sincere emotion actually attained grows all the more touching. but them i'm a sap.

as for my own closer, turns out jon auer's spare acoustic balladization of pollard's pseudo-surrealist title nugget, which bursts in gently here like reality after waking from a dream, emphasizes it as a kinda tender little self-empowerment anthem ("if i waited for you to signify the moves that i should make...") that fits in quite nicely.

well anyway. that's that. if nothing else, nice to spotlight some overlooked gems - i like all of these songs a good deal. ("all this love" and "let's get out of this country" verging on overplayed rather than overlooked, but still good.)

i'm sort of working on a (companion? probably not) mix of, erm, sadder music (which will probably make me feel better.) or maybe something else. then there's a big question of how my year-end mix tradition will manifest this year. been playing around with live and working towards a maximalistmashymash, but unclear whether i'll have the whatever to go through with it. (?)

[revised 2/07, swapping in justim's "summer love" for the promise remix, which is already on oh-six, and is not really on topic anyway.]