07 is sleeping 08 is burning!

(burning copies of the mix, naturally.)

picking up where we left off: dancing the night away to the toasts and jams of 2007.

oh-eight's just a baby... i wanna make it stay up all night!
Title: [...] New Years Dance Mix 2007 [....oh wait...]
Format: continuous DJ mix, 74 minutes. currently available on mp3 or CD-R
Date: 28 December 2007

my first attempt at making a mix using traktor, specifically using the "native mix recording" process - an almost entirely foreign working method to me - after a week or so of trying to figure out how or whether it was even going to be possible. i made almost the whole thing (at least 80% of it) on the 27th and 28th (i stayed up all night finishing it, and ended up not sleeping for over 40 hours) progressing very slowly as the program kept crashing and i gradually learned how to make it crash somewhat left.

turned out pretty good i think. it's remarkably similar to ¡OhSix! in overall shape and flow (and in many specific moments too) - unintentionally but largely just an artifact of my working process, which basically consists of making a big list of songs and sequencing them in order of ascending BPM. this time i didn't loop around from the top of the tempo range (160~180) to the bottom (80~90) [as i did towards the end of last years mix, and exactly in the middle of SupaStarDeeJays], i just let it get faster and increasingly unhinged towards the end to the point that it's almost (deliberately) comical. (and somehow we managed to keep dancing through the whole thing.)

in some ways it's not as complex and nuanced as last year's was (i made it much more quickly and with a less precise tool that allowed less flexibility with editing), but on the whole i think it actually came out better - smoother, more consistently danceable, less fussy - though it took me a couple of listens through to accept that.

anyhoo, i hope you dig. here's whatcha get [numbers correspond to the break points on the CD version]:

[1]
it's Ross of Love bitch !!

[standard obligatory wtf pile-on intro, featuring, as it happens, the two songs of year, as well as my two favorite songs of the year. also jojo/toto's "anything," which wasn't anything in particular of the year, but fit well with the journey and the groove and kicks off an overt sample-friendly meme that continues throughout. and also "house of cards," which i didn't actually pick for its lyrics, but its infamous opening line turned out to be almost identical to that of what i think is the actual opening song of the mix;]

Y cassie: "is it you?"
didn't know where to start, but i'm glad i landed on this. it has become very possibly my favorite single of the last few months, or else my first favorite single of '08, depending on what counts. nice to hear some guitars in r&b that actually growl and snarl and rawk, as opposed to the kinda turgid ones in "party like a rock star" and r. kelly's "rock star." relistened to cassie recently (my #15 album of last year) and it is truly wonderful - getting super-psyched for connecticut fever or whatever her next album's gonna be called.

fantasia: "hood boy"
amerie: "gotta work"
the fantasia technically came out in '06 (though it's the first song i remember hearing on the radio all the time in january '07), and who knows how to reckon where amerie falls anymore (what a fucky and a wtf her recent career handling has been), but these are two fantastic songs that don't deserve to fall through the cracks (yknow, the cracks between the years that are full of songs.) both proudly harness their '60s soul sample chassis (one motown, one stax) - '60s soul sounded bigger in '07 than it has in almost thirty years, i'd wager - to 2007 horsepower rhythm engines, rev up their best diva-style vocal passion, and leave us to wallow in their glorious dust. (um, how's that for an inane metaphor?)

amy winehouse: "you know that i'm no good" it didn't sound like a single to me the first fifty times i heard it, and i still maintain that it doesn't actually have a hook, but i heard enough people talking about "that tanqueray song" this year for it to worm its way into my head too. anyway, i'd already used "tears dry" (on my folks' mix) and "rehab" (on last year's model), and like it or not you can't properly evoke the soul of '07 without a splash of ms. wetwetwet.

sharon jones: "tell me" gotta be honest, i was a little underwhelmed by sharjo's offering this year - maybe just 'cause i knew what to expect. i saw her do her schtick for the fourth and fifth times in '07, to diminishing returns; my paper on her got rejected from emp; mark and amy went and got rich off her horn section; and she turned 51. still sounds pretty good though.

the budos band: "ride or die"
same goes for those lovable second-fiddles the budos. the good-sounding part that is. (no judgment yet on whether the songs still pass muster.) i had wanted to keep the funk going with their half-siblings antibalas, their semi-cousins tinariwen, and/or a cut from the impressively pedigreed superbad ost - prob. my movie of the year, btw - but this will have to suffice.

[2]
Y katharine mcphee: "love story"
it seems like it should be too dumb to work, but it just keeps sounding better. cops the exuberance and the basic template of "crazy in love"/"1 thing," without being as complex or interesting musically, which actually makes it more purely soulful (that ain't a sample yo.) still didn't chart why?

dizzee rascal: "pussyole (oldskool)" veering off from the soul/retro-soul/simulacra-soul train, here's...yet another song based on a very familiar sample. didn't hear this (or the rest of maths + english) until very late in the game, but it takes no time to warm to; only slightly more to recognize as reasonably righteous in its own right (not just for the deathless e-z rock/lyn collins crib.) based on not enough listens (to any of the three), m+e may be my favorite dizzee album, just because it doesn't sound like it's trying to be anything other than fun.

dj khaled, ft. pretty much ehrrrbody: "we taking over"
weird song. sort of epic, but pretty silly at the same time. i guess that's what happens when akon tries to be epic. what a weird dude to be dominating music the way he has - no wonder this year was so weird. i have yet to feel any inkling of akon being interesting as a person (or t-pain, or lil wayne for that matter though admittedly i haven't been trying. i do enjoy rick ross, and t.i. sort of although the most charismatic i've heard him was back on "rubber band man") my main association with this song is hearing it blasting from car windows at my fairmount apartment this spring. also this: memo to rappers.

>ashley tisdale: "he said she said"
this seemed like such a nothing, insignificant album when it came out. i still pretty much feel that way about it, so i've been surprised by all the attention/love it (or at least certain songs) it continued to get from the teenpop thread (or at least frank) throughout the year. it seemed like a much slower year for teenpop than 06 - which is my only expanation - but maybe that was just me.

justice: "d.a.n.c.e."
britney spears: "piece of me"
of course. two quintessential crossovers of 07. whatever that means. from pop to popular, or vice versa. they play pretty nice together too. and i've wanted to do that feist interpolation forever since i thought their "five" sounded more like "feist" (actually it's "fight.") what would be the correct cheeky mash-up title for this? "dance, britney"? "piece of justice"?

low: "hatchet"
ha! suckas. does this sound okay to you, cuz i've convinced myself it works. the synthpop reharmonization makes it creepier, inadvertently more in line with the rest of the album. btw the album version is actually dancier than the optimimi remix, though it's less groovy and less optimimi.

aesop rock: "none shall pass"
last time i really cared about an ace-rock song was when i put "no jumper cables" on 03 in pop; i actually liked this one before mixing it (and the rest of the album shows potential too, so i may attempt to digest it further), but its inclusion here still substantially boosts the chances that i'll remember it in a year's time.

nelly furtado: "say it right"
i got around to owning loose in 07; perhaps in 08 i'll get around to caring about it. in the meantime this daringly minimal, deceptively simple ditty did manage to conquer my headspace more effectively than either of its more hamfisted, loudmouthed predecessors. those i noticed long before i liked; this one took forever to notice, but by that time like/dislike didn't seem to be a relevant question anymore.

[3]
gwen stefani: "the sweet escape"
there's something obnoxious about this (maybe something to do with how oversaturated it became - but it somehow sounded oversaturated even when it wasn't) but i've got a pretty generous soft spot for it all the same, mostly because it is so sweet. no matter strident and cloying gwen and akon may sound, or how preposterous the lyrics are, it's got some real, messy, overexaggerated life to it.

Y tracey thorn: "it's all true"
okay, here's finally one about which i have nothing conflicted or negative to say. unless its, as i've said before, that it's almost too perfect. it just glides. i love how the metallic kaleidascopy bits work in the context of this mix.

hilary duff: "dreamer"
i've written about this before. still cracks me up. had to let it play out long enough to get to the great deadpan second verse.

lcd soundsystem: "get innocuous"
plays "we share our mother's health" to "dreamer"'s "play with fire" (q.v. last year's mix.) fittingly enough since lcd was more or less to 07 as the knife were to 06, albeit with a bit more avuncularity, a bit less shock & awe. by the way, none of sound of silver's dance jams (which, after all, were much more than just dance jams) could touch last year's "kick out the chairs," the james murphy collab w/ whomadewho (as heard on popsical.)

Y matthew dear: "pom pom"
the clear standout from a very confusing, conflicting album that i really wanted to love, but couldn't quite hack. though it does have probably the sexiest opening moments of any 07 album. to be honest i guess i've never really understood matthew dear in album form. part of the problem here is that (like lcd) he's no longer really trying to make dance jams, though (unlike lcd), i can't really tell what he is trying to do. but a couple slipped out anyway. the nicely if typically inscrutably titled "pom pom" (it's more sound than sense) is poppier but less anthemic than, say, "dog days." and sometimes i dunno wtf is going on with his vocal sounds. still, it's hard to come by a lyrical hook as simple but arrestingly honest as this one: "i've got to figure out love!"

nôze: "love affair"
and i love how (and this wasn't really planned), immediately after dear utters that declaration for the second time, along come nôze, leading the way out of this pile-up of innocuous befuddlement with their goofy, cocksure, way-frenchy absolutely certainty about love. or at least about the necessary preparatory steps for a love affair. i also love how they pronounce the names of their body parts (i brush my teez? i clean my nôze?) and how perfectly the screwy, jaunty music suits the absurd lyrics. this tune is from a couple years ago, not actually 07, (was on an 06 singles comp and, coincidentally, hot chip's 07 dj-kicks) but i just found it and wanted to share.

will.iam: "heartbreaker"
hopefully i'll get around to writing up my list of reasons why will.i.am's songs about girls is superior to kanye west's graduation (west's absence here is quite deliberate, as was gnarls barkley last year - i thought about teasing the sample again, but it's just warmed-over daft punk anyway, and who needs that)...in the meantime just feel the groove. so smoove. so fly. so-so-so-so-sorry.

roisin murphy: "let me know"
disco is alive and well. "overpowered" may have caught more ears with its edgy acid teeter, but this one is a thing of beauty, pure and simple.

[4]
escort: "all through the night"
('fake') "authentic" disco. hey who's counting? sounds great - sounds a lot more happening that sharon jones right at the moment. my cousin plays drums on this. at the club last night the dj played a mash-up of it with a twista/pharell song. whoa, muppety video!

Y aly+aj: "like whoa"
it feels good, it feels good! teenrock confessional dance; slow-burn verses, pyrotechnic chorus. it didn't really occur to me before but this section of the mix is pretty enraptured - the michalkas sound about as hot and bothered here as the hyperverbal escort divas, after their fashion. good girls gone bad?

rihanna: "please don't stop the music"
07's fave bajan babe sounds practically relaxed by contrast. another potent sample here - takes some temerity (or utter shamelessness) to nab michael jackson's most overt, bluntest floor-filler. could have been obnoxiously overpowering, save for how it savvily only sneaks in about a minute into the track's masterful slow build, taking enough time for the full reveal that the handclap stomp and big stupid stadium synths have ample time to burrow into your brain before you realize what's happening. it sounds obvious, but it's deceptively impressive how gracefully this track deploys all the heavy artillery at its disposal. "umbrella" seemed like an unlikely smash at first; this one sounded like a no-brainer from the get-go, and it's only now starting its chart ascension (#26 this week after 7 weeks on the chart) - we'll have to keep an eye and see how prophetic the titular request becomes.

the chemical brothers: "a modern midnight conversation"
did you hear the lily allen is having ed chemical's baby. damn dawg. i listened to we are the night, the chem's 07 album (and their first i haven't owned...yet...i guess) a few times, and nothing really stuck except this one, an appropriately modern-sounding groover which seems to take some cues from so-called minimalism. not that it's especially minimal (or minimalist), but there's a healthy modicum of restraint within its typically expansive galactic funk. it actually sounds sleek, which they haven't managed in a minute or so. good looking out. more like this, and better luck next time.

gui boratto: "beautiful life"
certainly the hook of the year, house/trance/electro-disco-wise. euphoric but understated; pop-kissed but elegant. hearing it throb from the window of a passing rittenhouse square car on the way to unsilent night this year was as magically transformative as unsilent night itself - it made me feel like the whole block had suddenly entered one of those slinky, futuristic car commercial, in a good way. the problem is that the track itself, though it contains several excellent builds, is constructed somewhat poorly for actual dancefloor use, making it more useful as a headphones bliss-out than a bona-fide club anthem, or more properly perhaps, a necessary subject for remixes. unfortunately, i didn't hear any (there must have been some, right?) but i think i did a decent job of incorporating the most quintessential portion, even if i had to leave out the secondary hook ("i can feel life..."), which doesn't come in until the third round of waning and waxing. even the most pounding, propulsive part of the track comes off as a bit of a floaty respite in the context of the poptacular disco inferno that precedes it here, so it serves as something of a breather and a palate-cleanser.

von südenfed: "fledermaus can't get it"
and then we are rudely plunged down from that cosmic euphoria into what i think of as the 'hooligans' portion of the mix. who knows what mark e smith is on about here, but he certainly isn't being very polite about telling us whatever it is. meanwhile mouse on mars concoct what sounds like a fartier version of "losing my edge."

[5]
bonde do role: "solta o frango"
not quite as over-the-top as "office boy," but i guess a dab of subtlety can't hurt amidst all this loony chaos. not that there's ever anything truly subtle about the bonde. i like how the chorus mostly consists of them shouting "o-le!"

calvin harris: "the girls"
still digging on calvin, perhaps because i never got around to overplaying him, and this may be even better than "acceptable." i'm not too keen on the bit where he list of types of girls that he likes (which i tastefully left mostly obscured by bonde do role's yammering - which for all i know might be just as tasteless), but i like the rest of it; i like the phrase "oversubscribed with relationships," i like his bluntness that he'll play around "for sure, for sure!" (reminds me of jonah hill in superbad), i love that main synth hook, and i loved the way the girls at the new years eve party took to the refrain "i get all the girls" right way.

Y muscles: "sweaty"
but really now, that unwashed chauvinism gets pretty stinky pretty fast, and that's why i got muscles here (all the way from oz) to undercut it with a little of that old-fashioned peace love ecstasy unity respect. simply put, this song is awesome! and it is special! hooray for hooligans!

dan le sac vs. scroobious pip: "thou shalt always kill"
love. yeah, there are a couple of dumb lines, but even those become more endearing as you get to know it, rather than discoloring the whole thing. had to include a good long chunk of it here b/c it seems unlikely to get much of an airing anywhere else. on the other hand i also had to loop it and fade it after the "repetitive generic music" part. you're not missing too much good stuff after that anyway, it's just pop-song allusions and things that don't make any sense to us clueless americans (pheonix wtf?) incidentally, i'd like to point out how awesome the beat of this song is; it'd be a pretty sweet weirdo electro-funk workout on its own, without the slam-poetry punchlines.

armand van helden, "nyc beat"
just a basic booming beat and a killer bassline. hard to argue with that. i've even grown to like the admittedly totally vapid chant. i'll also admit that i watched the video more times than is healthy.

[6]
sophie ellis-bextor: "me and my imagination"
yay sophie. still don't really know what makes her special, of the assorted british pop diva ladies, except that she's probably the most posh i guess (i will likely delve into her albums soon for amg purposes), but this is one massively, stomping tchune. rather unsubtle electro-disco extolling the virtues of subtlety. "magic stays where myth remains."

stanton warriors ft. sway: "get 'em high"
this was a bonus track on this year's sway ep (which i probably wouldn't have noticed except that i reviewed it for amg) - not sure if it appeared on an earlier stanton warriors release or what. anyway it's neither of their best work, but it ain't too shabby.

m.i.a.: "xr2"
massive. pretty much definitely my favorite track to dance to this year. (the album version that is - better than the "turbo" version - single? remix? leak? - which turned up early in the year.) made both of my critpoll top ten ballots. freaked out to it on dancefloors more than once. still can't hear it without jiggling involuntarily. listening to it again, that's almost all due to the beat, or more specifically the beat plus that incredible dirty synth hook. i've got no problem with m.i.a.'s lyrics/vocals, it's just that they have relatively little to do with why this track is so great. i continue to struggle with the rest of kala - i do enjoy a lot of it, but for some reason it still doesn't do what i want from it as an album. dunno.

cornelius: "wataridori"
(what? i didn't hear anything, did you?)

Y simian mobile disco: "love"
another fortuitous lyrical dovetail (with "xr2"): some say "love is all you need to know." not quite sure what to make of the verses (s-p-e-ls fiasco?) except that they're very silly still pretty catchy, but the chorus is one of the year's more touching and beautiful. of course i take it at face value, what do you think? so i had to give it a bit of breathing room and let love rule for a little minute before moving on. except, i guess, for "i believe," i didn't like the singles from attack sustain decay release as much as most of the album tracks - go figure.

modest mouse: dashboard
barely listened to this after i initially heard it and thought it was pretty good. but then i remembered it, which will have paid off if anybody else remembers it too. was the album any good? i pretty much wrote them off after good news, but then i didn't even really care for the singles from that one.

fujiya and miyagi: ankle injuries
from last year (ish) and not too dancey (ish), but i have a soft spot for this one mostly because of the title. (also because of the way they repeat their own bandname incessantly.)

r. kelly ft. t.i. and t-pain: "i'm a flirt (remix)"
how the hell r. kelly manages to keep on making singles that seem like goofy novelties at first, but turn out to be compulsively, endlessly listenable, i think i'll never understand. if i had to guess, it's very possibly the song i listened to most this year; certainly its up there. i kind of regret how much i obscured its simplicity and laid-back bounce here by mashing it against assorted obscurantist british hipster-hypesters - but then, you've heard it before. also, the reharmonization is pretty nice, particularly the turnaround on the fujiya tune.

burial: archangel
still not convinced by burial in general, but this one at least has a nice skeletal two-step/d&b thing going on. very well suited to my purposes. (though my favorite thing to mash up with "i'm a flirt" is squarepusher's "my red hot car" - this gets at the same kind of groove juxtaposition, but it's not quite as much fun.) anyway, more of this sort of beat is a good idea.

[7]
Y miley cyrus: "see you again"
and now for the rock/indie/non-"dance music" detour. took this one on faith for a while, but no, it's true, this is an absolute stormer of a teenpop/rock/country/dance should-be/could-be/would-be smash. (bedbugs here on the phenomenology of its success.) so far i've still mostly warmed to miley/hannah on a per-song basis (only about three songs have managed to win me over to date, including the also-great "east northumberland high") but maybe i'll go see the concert movie or something, and figure out what all the fuss is.

candie payne: "one more chance (mark ronson mix)"
ronson, you dog. i find him vaguely repugnant for the same reasons as kanye, something about the obvious and formulaic nature of his working methods, but he is often damnably effective. been listening to candie's album a fair bit, and this one still stands out as by far the biggest pop nugget. indeed, possibly the best (and least overachieving) neo-girl group single we've had in this recent spate - beats the pipettes for both songwriting and sound (though it lacks the unfettered exuberance of "pull shapes"), and amy winehouse for credibility and non-obnoxiousness, while lucky soul haven't quite pulled out a truly smashing single (though "lips are unhappy" comes close.) it's no "he's a rebel," but considering this is 2007 it'll serve.

spoon: "you got yr cherry bomb"
yeah, this too. can you believe there are two separate segments of (neo-) soul music on this mix? and that's not even counting disco. black sixties pop is alive and well. and living in austin, tx. what the hell is this song about? "octopus for good"? oh right it's britt daniel. nevermind then.

the ark: "absolutely no decorum"
not really sure why i included this. nobody else is possibly going to recognize it or care that it's on here (except maybe dave); i didn't particularly like the album it came from; and i don't particularly love the song either, though it's not bad (the best thing about might be the title phrase.) mostly i just really like the ark, and wanted to give them another chance to shine. comes off ok.

tegan and sara: "back in your head"
this on the other hand - i didn't especially care for the song or the album (though i'll listen more), but i knew there'd be an appreciative audience (as there was, at least on new years.) and it just seemed like such an unlikely and idiosyncratic thing for there to be a hit like this (well, a semi-hit - at least among certain demographics it definitely was) - an odd conflation of folky, indie rock, teenpop, and ABM/NPR music, earning supporters from all of those camps and probably others. particularly since it's not really that remarkable of a song. but yeah, i like it okay too.

sally shapiro: "he keeps me alive"
this, on the other hand, i love. it's singular in a way that makes it feel kind of indelicate to just slot it in here, roughly juxtaposed against whatever happened to be in its BPM cohort. but by the same token it works its fragile magic regardless of the context, and is just as devastating and heartbreaking - maybe more so, with this additional injustice added to co-dependent self-injury.

[8]
lethal bizzle: "police on my back"
i think i almost like it more over sally's frosty disco synths than the fun but slightly grating clash sample. have you noticed that i've been giving at least as much space and attention to british rap (dizzee, sway) as the homegrown variety? i never even considered myself a particular fan of u.k. rap, but with bizzle added to the ranks i'm coming around to the idea that it feels a lot more witty, inventive, and just plain fun these days. this one's great - classic doofy scofflaw storytelling (had to let it play out so as not to leave you/him hanging in that shed) and his vocal tics and funny sound effects are ridiculously endearing. (though my favorite is on his other 07 single, "bizzle bizzle," where he lets out a snortled yelp of glee about being on somebody's "top 8 hitlist" on myspace.) t-t-totally dude.

shop boys: "party like a rockstar"
omg wtf. i can't quite comprehend how actually popular this was. the actual song neither rocks nor parties - it's just yr standard-issue dirty south drawl, with a couple more guitars - but the concept was too apropos not to include it just here.

dude 'n nem: "watch my feet"
björk: "declare independence"
party like a demented icelandic artstar. "declare my feet"? "watch my independence"? ("feet independence" is probably better, though it lacks the imperative intensity that is crucial to both of these tunes.) an unholy alliance of two wholly different impish rapscallions, united in their not wholly dissimilar assertions of blunt, bone-headed impudence. makes for one of my favorite, most gleefully unhinged moments on the mix (i want to spin it into a stand-alone mash-up; it practically is already, but it doesn't line up quite perfectly.) i've always been pretty much floored by "declare independence" - definitely my most lasting impression of volta, though recent return listens have reminded me there's plenty more to enjoy - and i'm glad i finally got away with sneaking it into a dance party. it also lends considerable urgency and darkness to the stupid-awesome "watch my feet," although i'm not sure how "dark" it's technically possible to be whilst eating egg-a-rolls in your hat hat and your shirt shirt.

aberfeldy: "do whatever turns you on"
pop levi: "pick me up - uppercut"
skye sweetnam: "ghosts" (with tim armstrong)
i'm considering rejiggering the whole mix from this point on, starting with the revised björk'n'nem remash. actually, when i was making it, it was about 6:00am when i got that point, and i was gonna stop and call it a night (morning), but something inspired to keep going and i cranked out this last fifteen-odd minutes in almost a single burst of sloppy rock'n'roll energy. which is why the songs play out longer than usual and the transitions are somewhat approximate. i could probably trim some of the excess and make it a little sleeker and more dancefloor-palatable. on the other hand i do like all of these songs. even if i should probably stop pretending that aberfeldy count for this year. even if pop levi is a total weirdball that i don't understand at all. even if skye sweetnam disappointed even her biggest cheerleader this year. actually, this is maybe the best and most infectious of these three - channels mid-'90s so-cal so perfectly, effortlessly. (n.b. skye's "music is my boyfriend" is easily one of my favorite singles of the year - and my favorite video as well, not that i'd ever make that list - but it was a little too intense and unhinged even for this mix, which is kind of inconceivable. er maybe it's just not dancy enough.)

[9]
avril lavigne: "girlfriend (remix ft. lil mama)"
actually nevermind, it gets back on track here. i really like how tim armstrong's guitar solo leads into this. and does anything more need to be said about the song itself? you remember right? [like how it was the first rock #1 single since 2001 (but nobody noticed because they didn't think it was rock for some reason?) but then lil mama came around and demonstrated that it's actually a hip-hop song?] right.

Y sugababes: "about you now"
doesn't sound quite as massive coming out of "girlfriend" as i'd like - verse restraint be damned - but nevermind, it's still crushing. kinda strange that this is the sugababes, but who ever knows what to expect from them anyway. so sweet.

paramore: "misery business"
holy cow. cowabunga. now we're talking. and we're off to the races. hail hail rock and roll!

the veronicas: "untouched"
how does this possibly come off as an actual slight lessening of energy? must be a volume issue. should have extended the paramore ghost verse a little further into it i think, until the v's own guitars take over. (will get it on the rejigger.) actually, this is definitely not one of the better songs on "hook me up," but whatever. (it's the most intense, for sure.)

maxïmo park: "our velocity" [dj velociropter's "per second per second" retempo]
kind of a random place to end - and there's still a few minutes grace left for fully-stuffed CD-R maximization - but it was past 8:00 by this point and i still had editing and transferring (traktor>garageband>itunes>toast, probably not the most direct system but hey it works) not to mention packing left to do. plus there wasn't anywhere obvious to go from here - the most pragmatic step would be to loop back around for some low-key, low-tempo hip-hop/r&b (devin the dude? MIMS? was vaguely planning on UGK's "int'l playas anthem") but that would seem like an unnecessary comedown, and hardly a better way to end. (maybe i'll end up tacking on "stay my baby," just so amy can finally get her due - though i'd particularly wanted to emphasize that song's unexpected, "grindin'"-esque boom-bap.) so we close with the maxïmos, with, to be fair, probably the most urgent and blistering single of the year after all (and one of my favorite djing moments too, closing the night at the M room back in august), even if it retains the distinct whiff of XTCian prissiness. that just makes it cuter, right? and just to wring every ounce of patent dancefloor ridiculosity from it, i made it blast into the tempo stratosphear. could have done so even earlier and harder; sometimes too much is just enough...

to bed with '07 (counting down to midnight...)

just like last year - i guess i'm falling back on old forms for lack of new inspirations - the way i really capped off my musical year was with a big honkin' round-em-up mash-em-up dance mix. available for your downloading pleasure in two handily-sized portions, by clicking on those words; also from the sidebar.

the tracklisting will serve in lieu of a favorite singles list - the majority of my favorite tracks and artists of the year made it on here - well at least those that fit into any vaguely dance-related genres. for those that don't (and others that do), please see the musician plugs 2 mix, which i'll probably never get around annotating. but just to make this a more complete repository for my favorite 07 singles, consider:

these songs were disqualified due to inclusion on earlier mixes (popsical, summertime, cont., or the soon-to-be-revamped love is the dancer):
lil mama: "lip gloss"
natasha bedingfield: "i want to have your babies"
mistah f.a.b: "ghost ride it"
bonde do role: "office boy"
rihanna: "umbrella"
mark ronson ft. lily allen: "oh my god"
mims: "this is why i'm hot"; fat joe: "make it rain (rmx)"; birdman/lil wayne :" i know what i'm doing" (sorta)
calvin harris: "acceptable in the '80s"
dragonette: "i get around"
justin timberlake: "lovestoned" and "summer love" (also generally disqualified for being from 2006)
fujiya and miyagi: "collarbone"

victims of temporary amnesia:
rich boy: "throw some d's"
frankie valli (and the four seasons): "beggin' (pilooski edit)"

casualties of war (er i mean editing/whittling):
amy diamond: "stay my baby"
el-p: "up all night"
les savy fav: "patty lee"
digitalism: "zdarlight"
mims: "this is why i'm hot" ['cause it deserved a spot anyway]
devin the dude ft. andre 3000 and snoop dogg: "what a job"
alice smith: "woodstock"
tiniwaren: "matadjem yinmixan" [notice how that title contains both "dj" and "mix"?]
lyle workman/superbad OST: "flashback party weekend"
kylie minogue: "2 hearts"
arctic monkeys: "flourescent adolescent"
linda sundblad: "back in time"
fall out boy: "this ain't a scene..."
joss stone: "girl they won't believe you"
ashlee simpson: "outta my head"
apples in stereo: "same old drag"

meanwhile, here's what we danced to leading up to midnight on new years eve:

"Lips Are Unhappy" by Lucky Soul
definitely my favorite song from an album that i still can't quite wrap my mind around. my capsule nugget is 'halfway between camera obscura and the pipettes' (which isn't much of a span to traverse), and everything about that description hits me exactly right, but though there are definitely a number of stunners i'm not sure the songs are quite all there. either way, this one's pure pop bliss. and dig the groovy video!

"Parentheses" by The Blow
by special request. technically '06 but most people (including me) heard it this year. total jam. also a totally weird song.

"Lose You" by Linda Sundblad
in the top 4-5 of both my critic poll ballots (which only had three or four songs in common.) i feel i have not done well enough by this song, as linda still has yet to grace a mix of mine - save the ladies love series of girlpop comps for my sister - but i'll keep swooning right along. at least i gave it it a good profuse gush on amg.

"I Want To Have Your Babies" by Natasha Bedingfield
i've gotten over it a bit, but it still does the trick. some excellent possibilities for demonstrative acting-out dances here.

"Stay My Baby" by Amy Diamond
feel particularly bad for amy as she got cut out of last year's mash-mix too, just because i ran out of time to squeeze her in right at the end, back at the low end of the tempo-wheel. jury's out on album #3 (not me, not now) but this one's a keeper.

"Lip Gloss" by Lil Mama
"Umbrella [remix ft. Lil Mama]" by Rihanna
"Take Control" by Amerie
"Gimme More" by Britney Spears
"1 2 3 4" by Feist
a.k.a. dancepop inevitables, 2007 edition
"Paper Planes" by M.I.A.
"Bunny Ain't No Kind Of Rider" by of Montreal

then we took it down a notch and played an abortive game of celebrity password to this soundtrack:

"Hatchet (Optimimi Version)" by Low
"Bookshop Casanova" by The Clientele
"Someone Like You" by Aberfeldy
"Again & Again" by The Bird And The Bee
"Baby I'm Broke" by Lucky Soul
my other possible favorite by them. so fragile, so sweet. calls to mind "crown of love," which i'd nearly forgotten i once loved.
"Solid Ground" by Marit Larsen
"Blush" by Aly & AJ
"Boy With A Coin" by Iron and Wine
haven't really given the album a fair shakedown yet, but this single bodes well
"Fake Empire" by The National
i go back and forth on whether i actively like the rest of the record or just passively enjoy it, but this song is undeniably something special.
"Behind The Sun" by The Good, The Bad & The Queen
"Shirin" by Jens Lekman
"Falling Off A Log " by Tracey Thorn

and then it was midnight...or, not quite, it was slightly past, or by the oven clock maybe a little before, but we decided to pretend that it would be midnight at precisely the end of the song, which was:

"The Underdog" by Spoon
a fitting enough fanfare/farewell, musically at least, pumping us right up into 2008 and the beginning of my mix, which carried the dance party through the first 70 minutes of the new year, at which point we switched over to "like a prayer," phoenix, and beyond. new year, new entry for the mix proper. stay tuned...

p.s. party pix: dance dance dance dance!!!

puttin' 07 to bed (first yawn)

been in minor brow-wrinkling panic mode here for the last little bit, trying to sort out how best to cap off a year when i very possibly heard more music than any other year - according to my running tally i bought/got/acquired 344 physical records this year (most of them CD albums, though that figure includes LPs and EPs and whatnot too) - over a third of them (117) within the last three months, october-december (versus 65 over the same period last year, though there wasn't quite so dramatic an uptick for the year as a whole.) of which i'm going to guess somewhere between a quarter and a third were 2007 releases. and then there were the digital records - i started downloading torrents for the first time in '07, and heard enough albums that way to utterly clog up my laptop (not a few of which i later purchased on CD, thank you very much.)

so i can't tell if my apathy to conclusive listmaking this time around is reflective of there not being as many albums i felt truly passionate about, or just the result of having had way too much intake to process in a meaningful way, or simply an indication that my 2007 music experience doesn't neatly in list format - specifically, i have no obvious #1. i'm willing to accept any and all of these explanations - and there are plenty of other ways to sum up our year of the double agent, some of which i have already executed (see the top of the side bar for new years round-up mixness...more on that soon)

but i still feel like i owe the world (or, more honestly, my future self) a list. and if any given album stood out from that mass enough for me to consider it here, it must be pretty good or at least interesting. so here's a list. i didn't make this order up but it actually seems to work out about right:

the Top Ten (+ 1) Albums of 2007
1. (tie) Aly + AJ - Insomniatic
Britney Spears - Blackout
Devon Sproule - Keep Your Silver Shined
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Low - Drums and Guns
6. (tie) Radiohead - In Rainbows
Sally Shapiro - Disco Romance
8. (tie) Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Tracey Thorn - Out of the Woods
10. (tie) The Good The Bad and the Queen
They Might Be Giants - The Else/Cast Your Pod to the Wind

ties cheap? maybe you say, but forced comparison of different beasts does little to help anyone either. let's just say this covers my #1 rock album of the year, my #1 pop album of the year, my #1 songwriter album of the year, my #1 dance album of the year, and my #1 art album of the year. and then a couple confused close seconds (art/rock? dance/pop?) and then two evenly-matched though divergent pairs of steadfast old friends who delivered yet again.

and again...with cover art reviews!

nice one, actually. the photo doesn't do much for the girls themselves (though, um, it's way better than this), and i'm not sure about that silly gothic font they're using for their names, but the overall concept and composition works surprisingly well - i like how huge the moon is. and it's cute that they're crouching on top of road cases (hadn't noticed that before.) the general vibe i get is of the michalkas as were-people or, maybe more likely, cat-burglars, but given the cases and their no-nonsense black outfits they could be stagehands/roadies.

i must say something too about the title. it took me a while to warm up to this album (and i'm still gonna hold off on buying it until the deluxe edition gets used, which might mean a year off - unless of course i happen to stumble across a copy with "blush" - bah, most of the best tracks from their last album were only on the deluxe ed, and i won't get fooled again.) one problem was that the first mp3 i got of "potential break-up song" strangely omitted include the del shannon sample, so it took me a while to realize that it featured a very smartly lifted lick from one of my absolute all-time favorite songs (on the other hand, a similar realization didn't entirely do wonders for my opinion of "beautiful girls," though i like that song okay.) i think the moment that it finally fully clicked for me, though, was when i read their definition of "insomniatic" (which has made it into urban dictionary if not into the parlance) and realized that it was not (just) an annoyingly over-clever and apparently meaningless album title, but (also) an apt and actually-clever neologism for a phenomenom that i in fact experience quite frequently.

[the title track is still one of my least favorite songs, however. best track, hands down - or at least the one that's been ruling my headspace for several solid weeks - is "if i could have you back."]
★★★

so much and not enough has been written and thought about this album... but the cover is sadly one of the least inspiring things about it. it's not awful - i quite like the color scheme, actually, and the font is nifty if not entirely appropriate. and, i guess, it's somewhat suitably garish and disorienting (what's with that zebra-print image in the background?) but they could have pushed it even more in that direction. mostly it's the photo of brit that doesn't do it for me - that silly hat (which she is wearing in every single photo in the booklet) and the blank expression that captures none of the intensity of her presence on the album (even its intense blankness!)

the musical brilliance of this chef d'œuvre and the recent tumultuous complexification of britney's public presence aside, i can't help but wondering what things would have been like if this had come closer to the beginning of the year, just post her divorce from k-fed, when everybody was rooting for her and she seemed poised to reign supreme in 2007 (that is, in a different way from how she eventually actually did.) given the generally positive attention this record has received (from non 'net-pervs, even) as is, i can only imagine how tremendously it might have been received with more fully open arms.

[best track: "heaven on earth." but i like 'em all.]
★★1/2

haven't seen this on any lists but mine, which of course is not much a surprise (her last one did sneak onto some rolling stone writer's top then, though, and she got a glowing writeup in AMG, so somebody must have heard it.) that's ok - well, i mean it's a crying shame, but i don't mind getting to have her to myself for the time being, and sharing her with my lucky lucky friends.

this cover is funny - i don't really understand why she used this picture - it's nice enough, but doesn't exactly scream album cover (which is probably the point - it just looks like any old snapshot.) i guess it does a decent job of capturing how gawjess and elfin devon is in person. i don't know who her friends are. one of them's pregnant. i always think it's a dressing room but it's actually a bedroom. the retro nods (sepia tone photo, song titles on the cover) are effectively understated, not (deliberately) campy like this. nice fontwork too. oh-kay devon.

[best track? well the title song is the obvious pick, but "let's go out" is ruling me more at the moment.]
<3<3<3>★★★1/2

keep your silver shined indeed. sounded like the album of the year the moment i put it on. rightly so - because it obviously is. at least, of somebody's year. maybe not mine (not sure.) i still wish it was better - not that it's bad, at all at all, but simply because these days lcd soundsystem seem capable of just about anything, which means they'd have been capable of making this even even better. a couple more standouts in the back half. a little less tossed-off sounding of a lead single. something to really pull it into focus. does that make any sense? maybe if i'd managed to see them live (i did find out about their free myspace show in philly in the nick o time, but it was the day my mom was in town....)

oh yeah, the cover. if that's the best we can do for iconic these days i guess it'll have to do. the writing's on the floor. i like that it's the floor. i like that it's (maybe?) a studio shot. hmm.

[best track: "someone great," first last and forever. my single of the year, unless it's "lipgloss".]
★★★1/2

okay, now, see? this was supposed to be my number one, no problem, no ?s askd. (well, yknow, when i got over being gaga for gagaga it was supposed to, which was obviously gonna happen.) i did place it at #1 in both my pazz'n'jop and idolator ballots, but i didn't feel quite great about it. what went wrong?

that cover sure ain't helping. frankly low have managed exactly one great album cover in their career (for things we lost in the fire, and they're not getting any better at it.) yeah, i know, minimalism is cool (just ask the field, whose cover i actually did like, perhaps hypocritically, possibly more than i actually loved the album), and the book packaging format is a good in theory (the package design is fairly nice, actually, though it feels a little paltry in your hands.) and yes i have to admit that this particular shade of whitish off-grey, with the smudges and the faux-fabric texture and the grainy type does fit the bleakness and sparsity of this album. but it just doesn't make a statement.

which is really poor planning because the music contained on the cd does absolutely have something to say, but it's threatened to be drowned out by the devastated monochromy of the cover art and the flat detachment of the title and the inexplicably offputting vocal panning. the whole thing just resonates barren desolation to the extent that it's no wonder it was (at first genially commended and then) generally overlooked.

and yes, there is some serious barren desolation here - it's all over the opening track, "pretty people," which is probably the most frightening and uncomfortable thing i heard all year - a bracing and perhaps necessary tone-setter, but hardly the way i'd expect my album of the year to begin. it sure ain't the unapologetic sirens'n'boom-bap'n'moaning that kickstarted "turn it up" and paris last year, or the a cappella lead-in (redolent of the first three elvis costello albums!) to "you and your memory" (amusingly literal video re-enactment here) and the sunset tree before that. nor, even, is it the glorious "poopy bass" and grunge-friendly menace of "monkey" or the glacial, crushing, ethereal "(that's how you sing) amazing grace."

but but but - get beyond that (easy enough - just skip past track 1 to the gorgeous "belarus" - blasphemy whatever) and this is far from a monochromatic album, even though the basic palette (drum loops, atmospheric scufflings, "treatments," and high hardpanned lonely lovely low-vox) is fairly relentless and minimal. still, there's sweetness here, and hope and anger and sympathy and soul-searching - truly, there's just so much emotion, it aches and it breathes and it wears you out, which is another reason this is not an easy album to get through - and serious beauty and beautiful serious and, huh-yup, there's humor too.

[mostly that's "hatchet," which is in the running for my favorite song (qua song, whatever that means) of 07, in either album or remixed "optimimi" form, though as a favorite track on this album i might have to side with "dragonflies." there's also the tremendous closing one-two of "murderer" and "violent past" (this is one of those albums that builds up to a finale, rather than trickling out after an initial bang), the first so potently, pointedly conflicted, the latter so ultimately, utterly resigned. oh man, i do really love this band (adjective reuse alert), after all.]
★★

sort of like the opposite of blackout. here's an artist who can do no wrong, in the eyes of practically everyone who cares, releasing a small-scale, unassuming, nonmonumental (as the new museum would have it) little record in what might in other instances have been the most discreet way possible. and of course it was a bombshell. or something. (no, not a bomb!) forget it, i'm not going to talk about in rainbows here. except just enough to get my job done: lame title. lousy artwork. fricking radiohead have only had one great cover (ok computer), which is really not reasonable. (thom yorke's cover was nice though.) i mean, who cares what the cover looks like, right? except that some people are, supposedly, going to actually buy the thing in stores. like i would (and surely will) - i bought every one of the last three rh albums on their release dates, largely by coincidence - might have done it this time too except i was in the great north woods... listening to the album.

[best track? tough choice - really anything except the first two, for which i don't particularly care and which just feel tacked on, and which i often skip. couldn't they just have kept it strictly on the mellow tip? would make for a stronger album, i think. might have actually succeeded in attracting less attention though (nobody hailing their 'return to rock' - why do i like this so much less than when they rocked the first time?) okay i think i have to say "videotape." this album's "scatterbrained" (which didn't occur to me until just now.) but, possibly, better. with a hint of "wolf at the door," lyrically.]
★

i love this album and i love this singer/band/project/person and i love this cover (finally!) i even kind of love the preposterous original cover (from last year's european edition), though this is at least as marked as an improvement as this version of the album itself is (three new songs, no tacked-on remixes; feels much more like a real album.) i used a discussion of the cover art as a lead-in to my just-finished amg review, so i don't want to dive back into it again, but essentially it's both a lovely cover in its own right and an unusually apt image to represent the album. i know you can't see it here, but look close and notice that the "snowflakes" are actually computer generated (though they look hand-drawn) pentagrams. one interesting thing about sally shapiro is how perfectly she/they/it bridge the still largely uncharted divide between two of my very favorite kinds of music in the 2000s: female-fronted scandinavian pop and dance-based electronica. the knife are the obvious parallel here, though they take a very different approach to the combination, and sound almost nothing alike. annie and robyn do something like this too, but their music is unique and personality-driven in a way that shapiro's is grand and sweepingly general in the manner of great disco and house.

[my two favorite songs would have to be the two covers, "anorak christmas" and the new "he keeps me alive," which are polar opposites in their emotional subject matter, but convey it equally immaculately. but i want to stress how well the album works as a continuous whole.]
★★★★★

there's a reason that i have such a hard time remembering why i love this album, even though i always know that i do. it's because what truly makes it great is the way it sounds, and that's a hard thing to hold in mind when it's not actually playing. spoon have been honing their craft for a long time now, and they've become so proficient - at making records of startling depth and immediacy, at embodying the deathless cool of the rock'n'roll ethos, at simultaneously refining and expanding their own inimitable style - that it's sometimes hard to appreciate how insanely good they still are.

they have had a slight difficulty in recent years coming up with the goods (okay, the greats) songwriting-wise, and if this isn't fully a return to the consistently popcraft of girls can kill (mind, it's not necessarily trying to be) there are at least a pair of effortless pop corkers (the pure-pop "underdog" and the "nothing but heartaches"/"king horse"-riffing "cherry bomb") and a few other forays toward tune-over-texture (...almost. if only britt bothered to enunciate a little better.) and if this band's achilles' heel (or lack thereof) is their tendency toward inscrutable dispassion, they finally, unexpectedly, manage to warm up and even, gasp, emote in the simply stunning last two songs, either of which could contend for spoon's sweetest punch since "anything you want." (and, needless to say, they both sound fantastic.)

as for the cover - well spoon have their style honed in that dept too, though although i dig the vibe i've gotta say this is my least favorite spoon cover since telephono: i don't like the font, i really don't like the title (though i liked how fast britt spit it out in concert), and the image, though interesting in theory, doesn't do much for me. always dig the white border though. (a la girls.) it's not bad, but i expect more from merge and these guys.

[best track: the 1 uptown, gush-flirting with some girl about how hot they are, on the ride home from the nearly-rained-out rockefeller park show this july, the day after the record came out.]
★★1/2

oh la la. nice one. this would work a lot better LP size, so you could really see the detail of the image - there's a lot in there. free-standing abacus, star-shaped rug, not sure what that is on the wall, is that an omnichord leaning against her chair? wonder whose flat that is? and where the tree-things are now. as it is (especially cd-booklet size) tracey almost gets lost in her own livingroom. (playroom?) the font is fun, though i kind of wish they'd written it out across the bottom. anyway.

this album has the nicest opening moments of this whole list, those sweet twinkly synths sound like waking up. i like how it's a electro/dance album that takes a couple songs to warm up to full-on dance, intersperses its bangers with its ballads and ends on an anthem rather than comedown. great to hear her working with some hip minimal/micro-house names, but honestly, tracey could sing anything and i'll be happy. love her lyrics too.

["it's all true" is almost too perfect to adore; "grand canyon" and "raise the roof" tie for beautiful dance-world-love come-together mini-epics; "falling off a log" mixes modes and metaphors, might be the best microcosm of all.]
★★★★

such a bizarre combination of big-deal concept and unassuming end result, no wonder people were underwhelmed or confused or worse. although the attention-grabbing star power of the legend-worthy allen/simonon rhythm section did help to make their mid-afternoon sxsw set one of the most transcendent musical experiences of my year, i can't pretend that it constitutes much more than a side helping of wtf to my appreciation for what is ultimately a quiet and quirky little damon albarn album, one i connected with a lot more than either gorillaz record, and certainly at least as much as mali music, if not as much as think tank, my still-reigning (i guess?) album-of-the-decade. it's an idiosyncratic record, but its the idiosyncrasies that do it for me. what can i say, i'm just a fanboy.

cover's pretty fabulous and fitting too, in concept and execution, though i don't love the typeface.

[best song: "green fields." ...above all things i've learned it's the honesty that secures the bond in the heart]
★★★★

are they referencing the knife? i can't tell. this is a seriously weird and disturbing cover. (even more so cuz my copy doesn't have the name/title text, just an abrupt black stripe.) it doesn't look like anything i'm familiar with in terms of album covers, certainly not tmbg covers. in fact it's their first non-illustrated cover since john henry (1994) - (the only other one with a photograph is flood.) the interior images are just as scary. i don't know what to say.

and, coincidentally(?) it's their best album since john henry. hands down. a bit of careful pruning and interspersing a couple of tracks from the awesome if overgenerous bonus disc cast your pod... might have made it even stronger.

["climbing the walls." also, "the shadow government." and too many to choose from on the bonus disc.]
★★★★

[ETA: just one more thing: my favorite mix of the year (just one): Dirty South Dance by A-Trak

like dave said i said i said, this year's night ripper. in some ways seemingly less original than girl talk's ballyhooed breakout (i mean, it's just a bunch of 1:1 mash-ups, isn't that so 2003?) but in another sense much more impressively conceived; just as compulsively listenable and if anything more flawlessly executed. nate patrin's knowledgeable and witty pitchfork review gives the low-down more eloquently and concisely than i should bother to paraphrase, but what a-trak has achieved here, with apparent effortlessness, is effectively what i strive for in my own most ambitious mixes: not only is it an absolutely killer dance mix, it's also a rigorous intellectual exposition and exploration of a specific musicological premise; in this case, the underexamined connections and countercurrents (and latent potential links) between two distinct genres, dirty south hip-hop and various strains of electronic dance music.

yeah, it's gimmicky and jokey enough to possibly give you the wrong idea about the ideological intentions of this mix (think what you want, but the amount of care a-trak clearly took in assembling it readily belies any hint of hipster irony or pandering), but it's still a startling and refreshingly different cover image. plus it's just fun.
★★★★]

listlessnesslessnesslessness

(albums edition)

[but first, a metacritic update: and their refinement of the decline dropped from #2 to #4 thanks to the addition of this justifiably incredulous but still horribly written 1.5/5 review (presumably underweighted.) i still haven't heard it (though i want to) so not sure why i'm so keen on reporting about it, except that i want to make up for my initial skepticism of tired sounds of. (i have now heard untrue, or at least most of it, and am not entirely convinced.)]

i don't really believe in compiling finalized year-end lists until at least the end of the year. but it is certainly time to start getting my thoughts together, for mix-envisioning purposes (really not sure about that, but i do have an ostensibly working optical drive now), or if nothing else for the twin critics polls, which both have next friday as their deadline (a relief, as i'd thought one was this friday.) don't want to end up with another 2005 on my hands.

still, stuff's tough. years are just too long, for one thing, and this year feels especially poorly defined, both personally and musically. it's hard to even know what counts as '07 sometimes.

technically '06 albums i'll probably count anyway:
sally shapiro, disco romance (released dec '06 in europe; oct '07 in canada - dunno about u.s.)
joan as police woman, real life (released in uk/feted online '06; released us '07)
long blondes, someone to drive you home (similarly)
keith urban, love pain and the whole crazy thing (released november '06, so it's fairly questionable, but i didn't hear it until early '07 and loved it.)

albums that i considered for '06 (and mostly didn't like at the time) and therefore don't seem like they should count (even though i like several of them a lot more now) although they were released here in '07 (in what felt like a total onslaught):
the pipettes, we are the pipettes
peter bjorn and john, writer's block
lily allen, alright, still
amy winehouse, back to black
i'm from barcelona, let me introduce my friends
fujiya and miyagi, transparent things
cornelius, sensuous (the only one i'd consider possibly including, since i may have given it an unfair shake last year.)

some of my favorite albums of the decade (that have never been on my year-end lists) which i could probably fudge as '07 if i wanted to, even though it would be totally unfair:
robyn, robyn (sweden release '05. uk release april '07. uk re-issue august '07. us release december 4th, allegedly???)
rachel stevens, come and get it (uk release '05. american itunes-only release june '07 wtf.)
marit larsen, under the surface (norway release '06. but for some reason i didn't fall head-over-heels for it/her until this year. and it is maybe possibly maybe going to get a u.s. release sometime maybe soonish? probably not in '07 though i guess. maybe '08?)

other '06 albums that i only heard/got in '07 and would otherwise have listed:
aberfeldy, do whatever turns you on (but nobody heard it. amg review forthcoming)
extra golden, ok-oyot soundystem
sid and susie, under the covers, vol. 1
hot chip, the warning (i know, i blew it.)
regina spektor, begin to hope (ditto)
justin timberlake, futuresex/lovesounds (heard '06; loved '07 - by dint of the singles one could theoretically decide to count it, but actually i refuse to even count the '07 singles.)
nôze, how to dance (pretty left-field - but i'm diggin' it.)

additional confusion:
radiohead, in rainbows (okay, it was "released" in '07. and is indisputably an '07 album, perhaps the zeitgeistest of them all. but it's also an '08 album, since the u.s. physical release date is january 1.)

as for albums which i can't actually invent qualms about voting for, well, i can at least wring my hands about comparing apples with oranges whose appeal stems from totally different places. (and don't tell me oranges don't have stems and apples don't have peels.) roughly in order of preference in each category:

indie (rock?) about which i give at least a damn:
low, drums and guns (a strong #1 contender - it's old and lived-in now, but that shouldn't count against it too much.)
okkervil river, the stage names (i tend to give them too short a shrift, but they still haven't managed make anything as immediate and pleasurable as the wonderful don't fall in love with everyone you see again - i get the sense they haven't really been trying.)
the national, boxer
the clientele, god save the clientele
lucky soul, the great unwanted

(indie?) rock, about which likewise:
spoon, ga ga ga ga ga
pop levi, the return to form black magick party
the new pornographers, challengers
maxïmo park, our earthly pleasures
the ark, prayer for the weekend
arctic monkeys, favourite worst album title

some sweet-ass hipster dance albums:
lcd soundsystem, sound of silver
justice, †
m.i.a., kala
simian mobile disco, attack decay sustain release
a-trak, dirty south dance
bonde do role, with lasers

electronica or something like it (mostly listeny, not dancy)
caribou, andorra
pantha du prince, this bliss
gui boratto, chromophobia
strategy, future rock (just got it, but really liking it so far)
the field, from here we go sublime

rootsy/folky/country/soul/ABM ladysingers:
devon sproule, keep your silver shined
alice smith, for the lovers, dreamers and me
miranda lambert, crazy ex-girlfriend
patty griffin, children running through
feist, the reminder
bettye lavette, scene of the crime
mirah and spectratone international, share this place
sharon jones and the dap-kings, 100 days, 100 nights (eh...to be honest i'm kinda getting over the whole dap-thing. hopefully seeing sharon on friday will re-excite me.)
taylor swift, taylor swift (haven't actually really listened to the album, but i think i know i'll like it)

[why no menfolks? you tell me. mostly my listening prejudice - haven't given much of a fair shake to iron and wine, donnie, nick lowe, or other possible contenders here. though these categories fudge and bleed anyway.]

sentimental favorites from back in the day (an auspicious category):
tracey thorn, out of the woods
the good the bad and the queen, the good the bad and the queen
they might be giants, the else/cast your pod to the wind
the apples in stereo, new magnetic wonder (it feels like a guilty pleasure just when i thought i was immune to them. i think they planned it that way.)
jarvis cocker, jarvis

[elliott smith's new moon probably ought to be on here, but for some reason i didn't listen to it all that much.]

jazz?
the bad plus, prog (?)
jason moran, artist in residence (?)
floratone? nels cline singers?
(oh, what the hell: )
battles, mirrored
the budos band, ii

rap?
hmm. not sure. lethal bizzle (the new sway for '07)? devin the dude? aesop rock/el-p? yeah, ok whatever. should listen to dizzee and weezy and jayzee s'more.

so far that's all well and good, but it really gets confusing when i try to rank those against pop, which is getting to feel like a fundamentally separate interest, with separate tendencies and listening habits from the kind of music that other people who think they like music think they like. hm hm.

pop albums that are better than their singles
aly & aj, insomniatic
the veronicas, hook me up
hilary duff, dignity
will.i.am, songs about girls

pop albums that may well be at least as good as their singles
britney spears, blackout
linda sundblad, oh my god
roisin murphy, overpowered
sophie ellis-bextor, trip the light fantastic
kylie, x

pop albums that aren't as good as their singles, but are still pretty great (and/or the singles are so good it doesn't matter):
r. kelly, double up
rihanna, good girl gone bad
amerie, because i love it
skye sweetnam, sound soldier
amy diamond, music in motion
sugababes, change
avril lavigne, the best damn album title
katharine mcphee, katharine mcphee


fairly disappointing but still somewhat interesting albums that i wish i liked more, and should probably listen to again, just to make sure:
tunng, good arrows [=not as good as their first two albums]
patrick wolf, magic position [=not as good as its singles]
shins, wincing [=really not as good as their first two albums]
of montreal, hissing fauna [eta: actually, this is a lot better than i gave it credit for.]
sondre lerche, phantom punch
colleen, les ondes silencieuses [really wanted to like this but no dice]
bjork, volta [really wanted to like this...it works better when i'm not trying so hard]
jens lekman, night falls on kortedala [omg what was he thinking?]
von südenfeld, tromatic reflexxxions [omg what was i thinking?]
chemical brothers, we are the night [...yawn...]

sparks & spears & sophie & so on (cont.)

a couple more things, still riffing on jordin sparks.

first, to correct an oversight (you might want to read the last post first if you haven't...if you care...if you dare): even though it was mentioned on the teenpop thread, i neglected to note/recognize that "see my side," which i mentioned as by far the sweetest (almost wrote sweedest, ha) of the recent bloodshy/avant crop, was written not just by karlsson/winnberg and åhlund, but also by r. carlsson. which is of course (not me, though i am also r, carl's son!) but robyn, of robyn fame. (of whom discogs has more images than it has credits - well, under that version of her name.) (sorry tapestore - is that someone i know? - but i'm pretty sure the connection probably came via bloodshy and windbag, er, i mean, since apparently they'd already submitted the track to britney. nice thought though - let's keep working on that.)

which, come to think of it, makes perfect sense, because it has an extremely similar sensibility to robyn's heartbreaking closing trilogy, particularly "eclipse" and "anytime you like" - it's not quite as achingly gorgeous as those two, but it's close, and i can imagine robyn doing a pretty stunning rendition of it. (actually, as long as we're getting particular, robyn didn't write "eclipse" - she didn't write "robotboy" or "handle me" either; åhlund did. she does have the third co-credit on "anything you like" with two people i don't know - how significant do we think order of credits is? but the point holds.)

meanwhile, "young and in love" is (in addition to b&a and their frequent crony h. jonback) by cathy dennis, who is a bona fide legend in this game - behind hits from basically everyone in uk chartpop starting with spice girls and s club 7, peaking with kylie, and recently sugababes ("about you now" - with dr. luke!), sophie ellis-bextor ("catch you") and roisin m. (non-album tracks only) and a legit artist in her own right. her previous co-writes with b&a include rach stevens' "sweet dreams (my lax)" and, oh yeah, "toxic."

besides jordin's album, i've been following the links and connecting the dots for sophie la-bex's trip the light fantastic and for kylie's x, both of which i've only started to listen to recently, and about which i feel much greater capacity to care. which is partly because they're almost certainly better albums; partly because i have a much better sense of who sophie and kylie are, as artists and people - tho you can blame that on the no tv if you like i guess. how much those two factors are linked is a crucial question i want to get into a little bit later. anyway, trip has cathy dennis/greg kurstin (who till has no wiki entry, amazingly), pascal gabriel and hannah robinson, xenomania, the guys from sneaker pimps, the feeling, and the b-52s...though, imporantly, sophie has a co-credit on every song except the dennis/kurstin "catch you." x, with minogue credits on just over half the tracks, has dennis, hansen/jeberg, calvin harris, freemasons, karlsson/winnberg with karen poole (of alisha's attic), kurstin/minogue/poole, and, if wikipedia is to be believed, which i doubt, kurstin producing a bloodshy/avant/poole/minogue/quant co-write.

also kat mcphee's album, which in stark contrast to sparks' has no scandinavian names - and the difference is quite audible - but does have six kara dioguardi credits and six nate hills credits (five overlap.) and "open toes" is written/produced by the clutch (along with those two and kat herself), who also did "ice box," "like a boy," dave's two favorite keke palmer songs, and blackout's "radar" and "freakshow" (the latter, interestingly, britney's only writing credit on the album)... both of which are bloodshy/avant tracks, not danja tracks.

which is interesting, because it means the scandinavians electro-pop crew were working together with the american r&b crew (the clutch, which seems to be a slightly loose collective, are timbaland proteges or something; at least they include keri hilson.) though knows how directly they were working together - actually, the liners reveal that all of the bloodshy tracks were recorded partly in the states as well as in stockholm. well whatever.

it's really hard to say what any of this means. how do these songs get written? how much of the way credits are presented is based on legal/contractual considerations that don't necessarily accurately reflect the creative process? in the vast majority of the cases i've been looking at, the producer or producers are credited as among the writers of a given song. which in plenty of cases probably makes sense, especially for sonically inventive/electronic-based music where so much of the song's essence comes from the production rather than the writing per se. but to what extent are songs usually finished before they go into the studio; or to what extent do "'songs" sometimes get fleshed out after the creation of the beats and backing arrangements (which counts as "production.")

i've been fairly focused on songwriting credits lately, in my amg pieces as well as these posts here - calling attention to it, for various reasons, in my reviews of albums by the veronicas, rachel stevens, skye sweetnam, and marit larsen - and while it makes sense as an interpretive key of sorts, it also feels strange to be so fixated on. i do feel in some ways that my interest in pop has been taking a turn for the academic ... that at least a lot of the recent stuff i've been listening to hasn't managed to excite me quite as much on a musical level as some things in the past - or, certainly, to engage me on an emotional level.

indeed, as much as i enjoyed listening to and familiarizing myself with the skye and 'ronnies albums for review - and i stand by my (respectively) generally positive and enthusiastic assessments of them - neither has shown exceptional sticking power. certainly neither has compelled me (so far anyway) to keep listening and re-examining the way rachel and marit's albums have (in both cases i came to fundamentally new shades of understanding in these most recent revisitations.) meanwhile there's been this whole series of teen-pop and dance-pop albums - most of which, admittedly, i only have as itunes playlists - that i've been enjoying, to a greater or lesser extent, but that have so far largely failed to stand out as especially distinctive. that'd include the new ones by sugababes, roisin murphy, keke palmer, ashley tisdale, amy diamond, vanessa hudgens, and the aforementioned sparks, mcphee, kylie and sophie e-b, and aly + aj (though that one is making major strides - probably shouldn't be on this list anymore.)

admittedly many of these will require more listening, though some are simply not going to be worth the effort - my overwhelming impression of a lot of this is that it's, well, overwhelming - just too much, too fast, that's all impressively good but not quite great. and though of course there are some stylistic distinctions among these various albums, i'm struggling to distinguish them more fully. so i guess i may be delving into the minutiae of credit information, in part, as a shortcut to understanding them.

but i'm also on some level trying to link these lackluster impressions to the effect of having too many cooks, as it were. as fascinating as it is to realize how incestuous and intertangled the world of mainstream pop/r&b/dance/etc. can be - especially when the behind-the-scenes players intermingle internationally (well, across scandinavia, the u.k. and the u.s.) even though the public personas often don't - it grows increasingly harder to know what to make of all this prodigious cross-collaborative output, let alone to keep the endless but recurring array of practitioners straight.

many of the albums i listed above have quite a hodge-podge of writers and producers working on various tracks, as i've sort of demonstrated in exhaustive detailed. insomniatic is a clear exception, and is decidedly stronger for it - as are the veronicas and skye album's (though the latter is pretty scattershot even with the same producers/writers on 9/12 tracks) - though it should be noted that all of these are much more pop/rock than anything else on the list, despite their dancy frills. (same goes for ashlee's two albums, primarily the work of the sorely missed simpson/dioguardi/shanks trifecta.)

some other (slightly less recent) albums that are primarily written and produced by the same people: linda sundblad's oh my god [all songs sundblad/karlsson - a different one - with a couple adding others - max martin on one, klas åhlund on "lose you"], sally shapiro's disco romance [the possibly fictional sally herself doesn't write anything, but mr. johan agebjörn wrote all but two songs and produced everything], and the work of bertine zetlitz, especially her last two albums, which were produced entirely by fred ball [aka pleasure] and written entirely by zetlitz/ball. (two people...made the whole album? is that even possible?) the shapiro album and zetlitz's rollerskating are two of my absolute favorite albums at them moment - and the sundblad's pretty great too - i'll hopefully have reviews for all three up on amg shortly.

so those are some scandinavians (there's also annie and robyn, both of whom are starting to get seriously overdue for new albums - but though they do co-write most of their material, neither of them write all of it, and both of their celebrated albums had a fair range of different producers involved, which is interesting to note in light of how auteurist their public personae tend to be.) then there's madonna's confessions on a dancefloor [all madge co-writes; all with stuart price and/or mirwais except for two bloodshy/avant tracks] and hilary duff's dignity [a handful of producers, including, hilariously, richard "humpty" vission, but 12 out of 14 cuts are by dioguardi/duff, often with the producer as a third co-credit] - both solid if not amazing, but certainly stylistically cohesive.

and then there's blackout. it's telling that this album has, by far, fewer producers (or, maybe more relevantly, fewer production teams) than any of spears' albums since her debut - either five or six, depending on how you count the clutch, but basically only two for 3/4 of the album. to recap: four tracks are produced by bloodshy and avant (two with the clutch co-producing) and five are produced by danja. that leaves one by the neptunes, one - "heaven on earth," very possibly my favorite track - with music by onetime (?) ambient electronica duo freescha and vocal production by kara dioguardi, and one - consensus weakest-link "ooh ooh baby" (though i kinda like it; possibly too bad they didn't actually sample the turtles) by dioguardi and "fredwreck" nasser, who also did something on the mcphee album. anyway, as i think i've established, it's quite cohesive sonically and consistent song-wise, and, well, it just keeps growing on me, even though my interest in it has relatively little to do with britney herself.

i'm happy to continue absenting myself from the controversy over the extent of her actual involvement, as fascinating as it is. as far as i'm concerned, as long as the job is done and done well, i'm not going to complain - and whoever it is that's behind blackout has accomplished something pretty remarkable, just by virtue of creating an album that stands out from this season's teeming pack. i will point out, however, that there is only one person listed as executive producer for this album. and that's britney, bitch.

one disclaimer, and one final question. just to be clear, i certainly wouldn't want to contend that a record needs to have a reasonably consolidated writing/production crew to work well as an album. my review of rachel stevens' come and get it - which just might be my personal yardstick for the entire genre - should make that evident enough (even though it's definitely not the album-iest album.) similarly, kylie's fever - an obvious touchstone of an '00s pop album if there ever was one - is cobbled together from a surprising array of talent (truly, surprising - i'd always assumed it wasn't so much, because the sound is so consistent, but nope.) and then, of course, i'll always have paris ... the presence of many sets of writers and producers did little to stop me from erecting a grand glittering interpretive edifice to its conceptual perfection. and i don't think i need to say any more about that.

but as a general rule - and as one would imagine - albums with fewer writers and producers do tend to hold together better as albums. the exceptions generally have some other overarching unifying element - a clear shared stylistic approach, or a front-person with enough individuality, vocal/lyrical distinctness, or sheer force of personality to make everything hold together.

so my question is this: what is the historical context for albums with songs by many different writers and producers? i know it's a longstanding pop tradition in some ways (tin-pan-alley, brill building, motown, what-have-you), but it seems like there's been a resurgence and an intensification, probably just within the last 15-20 years, and possibly increasingly over that span. it seems at least partly related to the rise of hip-hop and r&b (and even in those genres it has gotten far more pronounced - even when the black album came out it was a big deal that each track was by a different producer, which i guess would still be noteworthy today, but i think less so.) if there are discernable trends along these lines, can we link them to other trends in the nature of pop albums?

and, more broadly, what else can be said about the historical development of the pop album? admittedly, it's a somewhat academic, limited question - in pop, albums will always be secondary to singles and songs - but as both a confirmed poptimist and albumist, it speaks to a very present tension in my musical exploration, and as year-end album list time grows ever nearer, it's also timely one - and i'm gonna keep on teasing it out.

it's poppin'

okay, liveblogging as i listen to jordin sparks' self-titled first album for the first time. and browse wikipedia musing on the tangled connections in the pop universe. 'cuz, why not.

first track/first single "tattoo" - written/produced by stargate, the same norwegian team behind "so sick" and "irreplaceable" and "hate that i love you" (and three more songs from good girl gone bad) and it sounds exactly like those songs, which makes me realize how much they sound like each other. (stargate also did mis-teeq's "scandalous" which sounds most different from these of anything i recognize in their discography.) it's not bad - the title metaphor (he's written on her heart like a tattoo) sort of continues the trend somebody pointed out of everyday objects (lip gloss, open-toed shoes, vans i guess) taking prominence lately over namechecking big brand names.

doesn't feel like it should be the first song on the album - it's probably not good enough for one (though, i haven't heard the rest of it yet), but it has that kinda epic vibe that comes on too strong off the bat. irreplaceable (from which the drum groove is lifted verbatim, with added open hat or two) was track 9 on b-day (b'day, get the punxuation right) until the bollixed deluxedition when it was moved to track two (after new track beautiful liar, which is also by stargate. think they're hot right now or something?

scanning the writing credits, every song except for maybe three has at least one writer with a conspicuously scandinavian name.

track two - "one step at a time" - really love the footsteps sound for the beat - surprised that hasn't been done more often. especially before the rest of the beat kicks in, but i like how it's still audible throughout. lovely lilting harp riff very reminiscent of ryan leslie's production for cassie. (i guess i'm thinking of "just 1 night" in particular.)

ok, good, production credits here. (should discogs and wiki merge?) (they're my top two resources for amg bio research.) so the producers/writers are jonas jeberg, who also has credits on vanessa hudgens' V (under the name Jay Jay) and mitch hansen, aka cutfather, who hasn't done much since the new jack era, apparently, when he used to work with soulshock (aka carsten schack), the dane best known as half of the duo behind, well, all kinds of things, including more recently-ish, leave (get out) and some jamelia stuff. [eta: and skye's "kiss a girl"] and also robbie nevil, an american who's apparently been around forever (had a song on the cocktail soundtrack) but doesn't seem to have much connection to current stuff. jeberg and hansen also worked together on a track for kylie's X (working their way from the end of the alphabet i guess?)

"no air," duet with chris brown, about whom i have managed to remember nothing so far, though i guess he's supposed to be important somehow. his name sure sucks. producers/writers are eric "bluetooth" griggs, who has no other credits that i can find, but does have a good name, and the underdogs (whoa, harvey mason's son!) who have been around and worked with lots of r&b names, and pink, britney, and kat mcphee in case they don't count.) ok whatever. not norwegians.

"freeze" is by stargate again. not too impressed.

"shy boy" on the other hand, is neat-o, with snaky synths snaking all over the place (sometimes into midi-ringtone arpeggiator territory, but that's cool) and bleeps and vocals and whatnot. and a minimal (hyphy-ish, i guess) boom-bap and processed vocals. it's by bloodshy and avant.
produced by them; written by them (aka christian karlsson and pontus winberg, whose name sounds like pompous windbag) and the bassist (?) j honback, and klas åhlund of teddybears.

bloodshy and avant are half of the reason i decided to write this in the first place. they are responsible, of course for ("toxic" as well as) four of the key tracks on blackout, the album that's been fascinating me more than most these days. (åhlund also has a co-credit on "piece of me," which means another coup for the robyn/teddybears camp, although i haven't yet been able to notice robyn's b. vox on that song.) according to their very interesting wiki article, B&A wrote more songs intended for blackout that were rejected and subsequently given to sparks (three songs including "shy boy") and to jennifer lopez (the title track of her new album brave)
and to kylie (two of them appear on X - a-ha, another connexion - the very ones tom ewing complained about in pitchfork as sounding like nu-britney. er, also the one he said sounded like ol'-daft punk.)

yeah, bloodshy & avant (what names, right?) have a knack for smashing productions that almost totally obscure the artist "fronting" the track in the process. "toxic" never really sounded like britney to me one whit, i can barely even recall what she sounds like on it. actually of this recent crop j-lo may fare the best - she sounds reasonably like herself on "brave," which makes sense since she possibly has the strongest (in character, not quality) voice of the four. also there's enough harmony in the song that it doesn't feel as frosty as many of the others.

of the jordin tracks - actually of all ten in this crop - "see my side" stands out as the most sweetly touching - music-box harp lines, simple melody, gently pleading "see my side and i'll see yours better." the chorus has funny big boom-bap beats that don't quite fit but don't quite disrupt it either. "young and in love" is more in line with the other tunes - it frankly sounds like a blackout reject. need to hear it more to know if there's anything worthwhile in it; doubtful.

i've jumped ahead and gotten off my album-sequence reportage schedule. which is okay, because i never really cared about the album in the first place. the other half of the reason i'm writing this, in case you were curious, is that two of the tracks were co-written by espen lind, a one-time tourmate of one-time norwegian idol finalist alejandro fuentes (chilean-born, unlike josé gonzález who's only argentinian by parentage), who i don't care about really but i was gonna write a bio on him for amg. but i didn't because i wrote this instead. oh yeah - lind co-wrote "irreplaceable" too (and a ne-yo song, and an elliott yamin song), and stargate produced one of these two songs; the other one was produced by 'espionage' which i'm guessing is lind's producer-hat moniker.

okay, just for the sake of completeness: two of the other tracks, "next to you" and "permanent monday" were produced by one emanuel kirakou (what kind of name is that?) who did two songs i don't remember for kat mcphee and one ("love me for me") for ashleey tisdale, and were co-written with an l. robbins who's connected to people whose names are vaguely familiar (melissa o'neill, anastacia.) and the last song is by a friend of hers, which might be worth paying attention to, but i don't have time now.

i guess the thing to get to, eventually, is the question of what all of this does to the identities of pop artists and pop albums. it's no shocker and no news that albums are (often) cobbled together from the work of multiple songwriters, producers, etc. and hence often don't have a lot of personality - that's where the weakness of a sparks or a mcphee comes through; not having enough force of personality to make a record cohere when there's nothing otherwise coherent about it. i guess having a good executive producer or whatever has to be important, but you never hear anything about that.

but when the individual producers and writings have such strong styles - and especially when those styles are as dramatic iconoclastic as bloodshy & avant's recent work - that you recognize them as they crop up again in lesser and lesser variations across the albums of second- and third-tier artists, we end up with a handful of interchangeable albums that are familiarly, systematically piecemeal.

"toxic" sounded fairly out of place on in the zone; the producers of blackout were savvy enough to run with b+a for much of the album, so that the style ("sliced up" vocals, among other things) is now, already and probably inevitably, shorthanded as "nu britney," since we heard it there first and best and most. and, better, they aligned those tracks with the sympathetic style of danja + co (who do essentially the r&b take on the same basic premise), and a few other producers who seem to be on board with the general concept. i don't know how it came about, exactly, but clearly there was a concerted effort to put together something stylistically cohesive and fresh-sounding. the fact that the style they came up with for it is also has this curious and unsettling effect of distorting the singer (to the extent that she becomes enmeshed within the production rather than riding on top of it) is either convenient or consciously confundatory or both. it's tremendously provocative either way, and blackout is almost certainly the most innovative pop albums of the year, as well as one of the most enjoyable.

jordin sparks on the other hand, frequently sounds fantastic...but leaves me with next to nothing. scandinavians are magic, as is well known. but even magic can only do so much.

plug tuning, pt. 2

i'm not enitrely ready yet to commence the year-end listing, and all the soul-searching, self-imposed self-conscious listening that entails - to say nothing of the year-end mixmaking - though bedbugs' fairly comprehensive '07 teen-pop round-up makes a good inspiration/starting point. but here goes i guess the last mix-tape i made in regular season play this year, which will stands as a sort of informal beginning to that process, since it rounds up many of my favorites from the first two-thirds of '07 (and the last half or so of '06); and i'll use it as a way to begin commenting on those artists/albums/tracks, as seems appropriate.

it's possibly the most 'conventional' mix i've made in ages, which is to say that, even more than its mood-based predecessor (which drew from a wider array, temporally speaking) it has no especial theme or organizing principle other than to survey recent highlights in a way that makes an enjoyable, relatively cohesive listen.

Title: Musician Plugs II (subtitle: paren(t)heses)
Format: 2 CDs
Date: September 2007
Packaging: similar to the design of the original, with inserts made from that same calendar, but in a long, DVD-size jewel case (the fancy kind that allows two discs to fit on the spindle.) this time it's ingrid bergman on the front/inside cover, and humphrey bogart on the back cover, and for some reason i decided the track listing on the calendar squares should be upside down with respect to the numbers. so it's pretty hard. i won't even bother showing you a picture of the track list for the first disc (which is in the tray, underneath the cd) - look down to see the list for the second disc (which is inside the 'booklet'.)

incidentally, the critics have been raving:

"Your musician plugs covers are works of genius."

- my dad

DISC ONE

1. LCD Soundsystem, "Someone Great"
2. Caribou, "Sandy"
3. Patrick Wolf, "Overture"
4. The New Pornographers, "My Rights Versus Yours"
5. Battles, "Leyendecker"
6. Keith Urban, "I Told You So"
7. Miranda Lambert, "Guilty in Here"
8. The Blow, "Parentheses"
9. Spoon, "Finer Feelings"
10. Pop Levi, "Flirting"
11. The Long Blondes, "Weekend Without Makeup"
12. Okkervil River, "Black"
13. Hot Chip, "No Fit State"
14. The Ark, "Let Me Down Gently"
15. Gui Boratto, "Xilo"
16. Aberfeldy, "Hypnotized"
17. M.I.A., "Paper Planes"
18. Oakley Hall, "Living in Sin in the USA"
19. Patty Griffin, "I Don't Ever Give Up"
20. Feist, "1 2 3 4"

DISC TWO

1. Low, "Hatchet (Optimimi Version)"
2. Margaret Berger, "Naive (16)"
3. Lauryn Hill, "Lose Myself"
4. Junior Boys, "Count Souvenirs"
5. Regina Spektor, "Better"
6. The Good, The Bad and the Queen, "Behind the Sun"
7. Maxïmo Park, "Books From Boxes"
8. The National, "Fake Empire"
9. They Might Be Giants, "Climbing The Walls"
10. Arctic Monkeys, "Flourescent Adolescent"
11. Andrew Bird, "Heretics"
[alternate selection: Joan as Police Woman, "Eternal Flame"]
12. Joanna Newsom, "Cosmia"
13. Ellen Allien + Apparat, "Way Out"
14. Tracey Thorn, "Falling Off a Log"
15. Amy Winehouse, "Tears Dry On Their Own"
16. The Hold Steady, "You Can Make Him Like You"
17. The Gothic Archies, "The World Is A Very Scary Place"
18. Beirut, "Scenic World"
19. Barbara Morgenstern, "The Operator (Single Edit)"
20. The Bird and the Bee, "Again and Again"
21. John Vanderslice, "New Zealand Pines"
22. Jarvis Cocker, "Black Magic"
23. Marit Larsen, "Solid Ground"

[stay tuned for commentary on the tracklists]

metastatic

or, stars of the burial field, and their untrue refinement of the sublime

i've got a question, it's serious as cancer. ok, it's not, but it's mildly interesting: why are the top three slots on metacritic's best-reviewed albums of 2007 list occupied by three obscure electronica albums? one german, one american, one british. all decidedly obscure to the general public, as compared to for instance current top-five runners-up robert plant and radiohead. and all relatively unheralded, at least until recently, even in online music circles; only one of the three even has an amg review yet. (whoa - it was a billboard #2 new age album.) (and, admittedly, i've only heard one, though i know essentially what the others sound like.) so what's going on here?

is 2007 a banner year for techno? has last year's impressive showing of support for the knife's silent shout blossomed into a full-on resurgence of interest in electronic music. possibly so - did i actually get around to trumpeting the return of big beat? (more vulgarly known as electro-house or blog house or, i guess, new rave - yknow, justice and simian and dgtlsm and that?) cuz i'm pretty sure nobody else did.

but this is something else anyway - atmospheric, minimalist, not really dancey at all. nobody uses the term IDM anymore (almost nobody?) - which is a good thing - but it used to be synonymous with "ambient." "minimal'"s become meaningless (and is something else again.) john schenk and the kölnizers call it pop ambient, bedbugs calls it naptime, and i've been taking a cue from lullatone and thinking of it as pajama pop. pajambient? [i really enjoy the notion that this kind of music could be "pop" despite not foregrounding melody, harmony, or even rhythm.]

apart from the motley reigning trio - and if you want to get specific, burial's technically dubstep; stars of the lid are truly minimalist drone artists; and the field could reasonably be called trance or some hipper modifier thereof - eluvium's copia (#21 on the metacritic list with a metascore of [84]), pole's steingarten ([82] - it recently fell off the top 30), and pantha du prince's this bliss all occupy this general genrescape. (copia's probably the least similar - it's essentially non-electronic music made by an electronic artist. on that note, susumu yokota and colleen also released records this year.) the boundaries are blurry, but then so is the music.

but i'd contend that these kinds of electronic or electro-acoustic mood music, ambient/drone/what-have-you, are always around, as it were, in the background - or have been for decades, anyway - albeit only occasionally attracting attention. they were never likely to find mass appeal - a trend of widespread popular interest in them would just be illogical, although i suppose "new age" had its heyday. and it's such personal, intimate music (almost always made by individuals), and so subjective anyway in terms of quality, that it's difficult to construe in the context of a movement or a socially significant scene. if there is a phenomenon afoot - which i'm definitely skeptical about, even though i have personally been taking more notice of this stuff recently myself - it's hard to imagine it as anything more than an incidental waxing of critical interest.

which is of course all that metacritic intends to represent anyway. after all music guide and wikipedia, meta (as my bookmark shortens it) is probably my third most frequently visited site in my insatiable quest for music-related knowledge, even if the actual information it contains is relatively limited. if the other two take their authority from self-declared expertise and the democratic process, respectively, metacritic's is founded on something close to science (with a side helping of the other two.) unlike that other mathematically-calibrated barometer of critical consensus, the more credible but less idiosyncratic pazz'n'jop poll (and its new doppelganger, the idolator critic's poll, nee jackin' pop), metacritic bases its aggregate rankings on actual reviews as they come out, rather than critics' pre-meditated, self-mediated year-end lists.

which makes it a lot more unpredictable, and generally less beholden to tastemaker consensus - it sometimes reads as less relevant, but who's defining that anyway? and it fluctuates constantly. my austinite erstwhile roommate and i will occasionally track and discuss the shifting rankings as if they were sports statistics - for a long time we were debating whether anything would manage to upset from here we go sublime, which a firm lock on the #1 spot for over six months, peaking at [95] if i remember correctly. gradually, additionally overwhelmingly positive reviews (in the 90 range) diluted that down a few points, and then and the refinement of their decline was added to the list, months after its april release, holding the top spot until untrue's unearthing a couple weeks ago. (incidentally, the only overtly dance-based electronica album i can remember even touching the top 30 is justice's opposite-of-ambient † [81] - unless you count lcd soundsystem.)

my inkling at the time was that the metacritic method skews towards niche albums - records in genres with a supportive core audience but that are unlikely even to be reviewed by critics without a specific interest in the genre. it's a reasonable bias, and even a desirable one (vs. p'n'j's tendency to favor least common denominator), which helps to highlight forms with limited audiences, like underground electronica (is there any other kind left?) and world music (such as last year's #1, ali farka touré's savane.) but it also, maybe counterintuitively, favors more broadly palatable, "adult"-leaning selections of the sort i sometimes call ABM or dad-rock, which the hipper blogs and 'zines will often ignore - hence strong showings this year from patty griffin, richard thompson, suzanne vega, and nick lowe, among others. it's a narrow line - albums must be reviewed in a sufficient number of publications even to appear in the database, but once included, they're all on roughly equal footing regardless of the number of reviews - and fewer reviews can often be an advantage.

burial [92] and stars [91] have 11 reviews each, as did farka toure [94] last year; the field [90] still only has 14. radiohead [88] have 40 - obviously it's not always a disadvantage. there were no electronic albums on last year's top thirty - has the entrance policy consciously diversified to allow this crop in? - although '05 had isolée's wearemonster at #3 [89] with 12 reviews, and also kraftwerk, the books and konono no. 1, if any of them count.

based on the admittedly rough indicator of percentage overlap in their top tens, metacritic has become an increasingly accurate predictor for pazz'n'jop over the past seven years, possibly because the burgeoning blogosphere has helped to consolidate critical consensus - there were five overlapping picks last year and six in '05, but only four the two years before that, and three from '00-'02.

at this point, i'd say it's unlikely that more than three - maybe four - of the top ten overlap with pazz'n'jop, or jackin' pop (though those two will surely overlap substantially, especially since they're both calling for ballots early this year.) frankly, the metacritic top ten is a bit of a mess right now - the top three are causing a collective freakout in the user comments, les savy fav feels bizarrely fluky, and the upstart physical release of lcd soundsystem's 45:33 upstaging its own artist's actual '07 album by six places is simply poor form. it was much neater up until a month or so ago; more plausible when radiohead, the arcade fire, and sound of silver were among the top 3, and at least more interesting when patty griffin, miranda lambert, battles, and panda bear were.

but hey, a weird year for critical consensus could well indicate a great year for the critical community, and for music in general. i certainly have no complaints; even as i find myself looking farther and farther afield for contenders for my own list, i'm already sitting on a pile that it will be somewhat torturous to choose among. and i better get on it... it's getting to be that time. meanwhile though, i've been painstakingly polishing off reviews of many of my favorites c. 2005-06, for amg - hopefully i'll make it through that batch soon too and can start tossing things off with somewhat less excruciating care. see you soon.