Aeroplane, "Whispers"

Aeroplane, "Whispers" (feat. Kathy Diamond) - As a man who owns up to his own prejudices, I will freely admit that my contempt for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' song of the same name kept me from ever investigating Aeroplane before now. (Sadly, this is by no means the stupidest snap judgement to affect even my recent life; it has taken me until the middle of May 2008 to get past my internal talking point that There's A Riot Goin' On sounds "too washed out and hazy", no joke.) To be fair, given the vast preponderance of tedious nu-Balearica to spring up in the wake of Studio and Prins Thomas busting a nut all over last year, I was also looking for a reason to be prejudiced against Aeroplane in the first place; good as the best representatives of that genre may be, the bad stuff doesn't just gaze at its navel, it damn near falls in, and I am of course far far far too busy to ever be bothered with sorting out what's what. Besides, this way gives me yet another opportunity to hate on the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it is always good and proper to do the Lord's work.

Thankfully, however, Aeroplane have taken it upon themselves to come up with a song so intransigently awesome that not even my ridiculous ass can resist its charms; having discovered "Whispers" during a shuffle-assisted stroll through everything I've culled from other blogs recently, I see absolutely nothing wrong with putting it on the same level as "Happy House" or "No Matter What" or "Young Love" or "Drive My Car", which is a long way of saying that this song is one of the very best things I've heard this whole year. It hits literally exactly the same retro-disco vein Escort's been shirking ever since "A Bright New Life", riddled with sly little drum fills, glistening little synth flourishes, and one BIG MOTHERFUCKING ASS star turn for Kathy Diamond who does a better job of making me like her on this one track than anything from Miss Diamond To You ever managed. She plays so coy and sultry against the relentless gliterball assault of the track itself that I can't imagine anyone but the stuffiest of disco purists ever wanting a dub; the breathy archness of her voice just lends too much to Aeroplane's hired-gun session-musician precision (note: this is in no way a condemnation). In any event, Aeroplane certainly has my full attention now. The Red Hot Chili Peppers can, of course, continue to suck it. (Click here to buy the "Whispers" single from Juno)

But I Was There: The Long Blondes @ the Echo, 6/5/08

<3

The Long Blondes, "The Couples" - By all rights, this should have been the most soul-crushingly depressing show in history. Despite my years of unyieldingly vehement advocacy, the Long Blondes have yet to secure the kind of Stateside profile necessary to warrant a headlining gig at the Troubadour; Indie 103 couldn't even be bothered to show up and park their damn van outside, meaning the Long Blondes have less pull in Los Angeles than the motherfucking Ting Tings. Consequently, the Troubadour was dismally empty - I mean, %60-capacity empty, nobody-in-the-VIP-section empty, easily-find-a-new-spot-if-you-hate-your-neighbors empty. There might have even been more people present for show-opening douchebag-ensemble Castledoor, which is a real shame on account of fuck those guys.

The only thing keeping the show from being an outright disaster, as it turned out, was Kate Jackson's absolute and unchecked delight at playing the Troubadour, and it turned out to be way more than enough, too. It could have been an act, of course; Jackson's blindsiding sexiness (whoever had "158 words in" in the pool, go pick up your check) had the crowd making asses of themselves trying to get her attention from more or less the instant she took the stage, and for once in my bitter, hateful little life even I can't bring myself to make fun of them. (well, except for the guy who yelled out "SHEFFIELD!" - seriously, why do people do this? should Kate Jackson come to your place of employment and start blurting out "THOUSAND OAKS!"? actually, that would be pretty awesome. SHEFFIELD!) Never in my life have I seen a performer do such an effective job of making every girlfriend in the room get hell of uncomfortable simultaneously; I saw like five girls grabbing their guys for dear life within the first three songs, the unspoken message being I am going to cut your nuts off if you call me Kate tonight.

But to be honest, I'm inclined to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt, if only because of how often she kept breaking her own character as the most circuit-fryingly hot indie girl in the universe to completely and totally geek out over her surroundings. In addition to a half-dozen references to the venue during the show, when the band were dragged back out onstage for an encore (presumably the delay was due to Dorian Cox giving the sound guy several dozen strategically-placed cuts - the sound was all over the place during the show, particularly during "Century" where the climactic synth freakout was barely even audible), she shyly told the audience about how she'd been dreaming of playing the Troubadour since she was thirteen, which was awesome. It would certainly explain the stupefying effort she put into singing the everliving hell out of her band's songs, too. You can always tell when someone's really enjoying singing what they're singing - no flubbed notes, no overextensions, inability to keep still while doing it, etc. Well, Jackson was all that and more for an hour straight last night; her only miscue was accidentally going back into the chorus of "Guilt Has Nothing To Do With It" once too many times (a mistake for which she immediately apologized to every member in the band one-by-one - AWWWWWW), and you'll have to forgive me if I have a hard time seeing her fervor to keep singing as anything other than supportive of her enthusiasm.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that her performance of the songs off the new album were remarkable enough to insist upon another shot for the Long Blondes' second album, a record to which I've been despairingly indifferent until hearing Jackson sing some of its songs last night. I have no idea how my favorite band + the coolest producer on the planet + a track record of adjective-defyingly awesome b-sides =/= awesomeness, but that's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes; hell, I'm not crazy about Wilson Pickett In Philadelphia either. Besides, after last night's show I've got no problem placing the blame squarely on Erol Alkan's shoulders; the band absolutely demolished any complaints about the songs not sounding lively or rocking enough for my liking without the benefit of any complex double- or triple-tracking arrangements or manicured synth polish. Instead, what you got was Kate Jackson absolutely belting out everything, and even having seen them last year I still wasn't ready for just how completely Jackson throws herself into the new stuff. My favorite was, as you may have guessed, "The Couples", which sounds awesome live - it's just as wiry and slinky and upbeat as their old stuff, with plenty of opportunities for Jackson to sultrify things as she sees fit - but could have just as easily gone to their set-opening "Here Comes The Serious Bit" or big? single? "Guilt", all of which she just absolutely inhabited like she was afraid of the Sandman Hook.

I realize, of course, that I've fallen into the same trap as every other heterosexual music-show-review-writing-dude on the planet and blathered on about Jackson at the expense of everyone else in the band; I'd even avow that that's an even greater shame than usual given the show that they each put on - Cox snapping at the sound techs one moment and sullenly shaking a banana-shaped maraca on "Too Clever By Half" the next, Emma Chaplin trying to keep him from running up into the booth and choking a bitch, the comedic stylings of Screech Louder (ugh), Reenie Hollis playing the bass with Entwhistlian stoicism... these are all good things, the kind of things that make a good show great, and certainly not the kind of things which any critic worth his salt would bury under an avalanche of starstruck gushing for their more-famous bandmate. I have no defense apart from Jackson's singular ebullience. She was the one who couldn't shut up about the Troubadour, home of the $8.50 seven-and-sevens. She was the one who insisted on engaging the crowd at every turn, even going so far as to invite the audience to stick around for a drink. She was the one telling stories about wanting to sing at the Troubadour since the days when she wanted to fuck Duff McKagan. I mean, there's absolutely such a thing as fawning adulation in this world, but sometimes, fair's just fair. (Click here to buy "Couples" from Amazon.com)

(And an extra-special thanks to whoever's decision it was to play Evie Sands' "A Woman's Work Is Never Done" between the two bands' sets - you blew my fucking MIIIIIIIIIIIND.)

ELSEWHERE
- So in an effort to keep me posting more regularly, I've decided to abandon the old several-mp3s-in-one-post trope; this way (in theory) I don't have to sit around waiting for enough content to justify a post and can just throw shit up as it appears to me. Will this strategy prove successful? WHO KNOWS~

LET'S GET SOME INDIE-ROCK UP IN THIS BITCH

A great band to get drunk to

Air Traffic, "Charlotte" - So I suppose I should disclose this right up front: I accidentally got kinda drunk at the show. You know how sometimes you roll up to the club reasonably late and without any cash, and so you head to the bar and order something, and the bartender makes it right there in front of you and hands it to you and says "six bucks" and so you hand him your credit card and he says "Uh, we have a twenty-dollar minimum for cards here"? And so you think to yourself well fuck it, I can handle four drinks and start plugging away at your chosen task with an eye towards closing out your tab right before Air Traffic go on, and so you start making your way towards the bar when you see a bunch of ostensibly roadie-esque persons taking the stage, figuring that you've missed the opening act and that these people are setting up for the main event? Except then, right as the same goddamned bartender brings you your credit card slip, they introduce themselves as some other traitorous band entirely, and so you look up at the setlist posted over by where they keep the fancy beers and get that sinking feeling when you realize that it's going to be like an hour and fifteen minutes until the headliners go on? And so you think to yourself No! I'm going to be responsible this time and just nurse this last drink until the ice melts, except then the band in question turns out to be one of the most elegantly prototypical example of navel-gazing Silverlakery, the likes of which inspire the kind of howling banshees of ennui in yr boy which can only be effectively drowned by a monsoon of Seagram's 7, and so you're standing there, and you're standing there, and you're standing there, and you're standing there, and you're standing there, and you finished that last drink, and you look at your cell phone, and oh fucking hell there's still like an hour left how have they only played two songs OH FUCK IT.? Yeah, I got that drunk last Saturday night. Hoo boy. I don't even want to think about how much I must have tipped the cab driver; that's going to be a fun little present when my bank statement rolls in.

BUT! All was sort of not lost, because (and I swear this is true) it actually somehow occurred to me to take "notes"! I use quote-marks, of course, because to call the preposterous scribblings I somehow managed to drunkenly eke into a notebook "informative" would be a remarkable feat of liberal interpretation; apparently my shorthand trails off even more precipitously than my speech when I'm annihilated. Funnily enough, however, damn near all of those nigh-unto-illegible scrawlings confirmed my most fervent hopes about the show...sorta; apparently their drums were "relentles" and "banging the shit out of", two eminently reliable indicators that no matter how air-tight and Keane-y a band may threaten to sound on record, their live show proves conclusively that they fucking rock. Better yet, it appears that "lead singer sings REAL good!!!!!!", a fact I can actually remember well enough to corroborate; hearing someone absolutely belt out songs like "Never Even Told Me Her Name" exactly as well as you'd hoped tends to be the kind of thing that sticks in your memory. Besides, thinking back on it now, Chris Wall was more or less born with a voice made for Spaceland; the soundsystem is just deafeningly loud in there, the kind of setup that captures every little ounce of effort you throw into your performance - and make no doubt about it, Wall threw down on stage.

And in that same spirit, I remember "Charlotte", a word pregnant with so much importance that it demanded no less than four attempts to underline it. Can you blame me? The simple fact that "Charlotte" isn't married to a prohibitively-difficult-to-transport musical instrument almost guarantees that it's going to be a more potent weapon in their set, but YIKES was I ever not prepared for it; these kids know how to milk that song for all it's worth, and given the fact that "Charlotte" may be the hookiest confection since Blink 182 got tricked into thinking they meant something, the kids in attendance knew just how to eat it up. Needless to say I've had a hard time keeping "Charlotte" off my iPod lately. "Chasing the dragon", as the kids call it.

I should point out that, as a guest of the band enjoined into reviewing the show, it was probably pretty irresponsible of me to get as truly and completely obliterated as I did; hopefully everyone involved realizes that nobody in their right mind goes to a site called "Green Pea-Ness dot org" expecting anything even approaching responsible journalism (and if that doesn't work, seriously). And it wasn't a total loss; I did come away from the whole sordid affair with conclusive proof that there are at least two ways to enjoy Air Traffic's music: on record (feel free to scale the doses to your tolerance for piano-driven power-pop) and completely and utterly trashed at their concerts. And I unequivocally do not mean that as a pull-quote. (Click here to pre-order Fractured Life from Amazon)

Eagle*Seagull, "Photograph" - While I may have been completely and utterly incapacitated with drink by the time Air Traffic went on, I was most emphatically still among us for openers Eagle*Seagull - and thank God for that, because they ended up impressing the everliving hell out of me. Granted, it was touch and go for a minute there - as long as Conor Oberst continues to draw breath, I pledge to hold every band from Nebraska in the utmost of suspicion - but once they started playing it was over; their set was forty-five minutes of tense, nervy post-Clap Your Hands Say Yeah indie-pop of the finest caliber. Unfortunately, I doubt that it's going to come across too well in this studio recording of "Photograph" from their debut album (at the show, they were selling a new EP [cleverly titled We Hate EPs {BAW HAW HAW HAW GEDDIT}] but since I was cashless at the time and they're only selling it on DRM'd-assed iTunes, I have no way of comparing the two), but hopefully you can at least hear the elements that made their set such a rousing success. At the very least, take notice of that violin - live, the band wisely pushes it right to the front of the mix, putting it to work like New Wave bands used synthesizers. It is AWESOME; it makes the songs practically fling themselves out of the speakers and into your ears, and it really is a shame that the studio doesn't do them any favors - or at least hasn't done them any so far. Check back with in a few years and I doubt I'll be saying the same thing. (Click here to buy I Hate EPs from iTunes - personally, I'm waiting for it to show up on Amazon MP3, but if you can stomach DRM, they're worth checking out nowish.)

White Lies, "Death" (demo) - For a band who only released two singles in their all-too-short lifetime, Fear of Flying certainly managed to inspire a hell of a lot of loyalty in me; when I heard they split up it was all I could do to keep myself from getting a tribute mural spraypainted on the hood of my car (which should indicate just how long ago they apparently split up). Then along comes Derek with a demo of White Lies, the band that rose from Fear of Flying's ashes, and oh my god. This song is absolutely magical; it's like someone toned down every single characteristic of Bloc Party's "I Still Remember" (a song I am only begrudgingly willing to admit to liking, and even then only with the help of the amazing remixes it wrenched out of people) and the result is a modern indie-pop song comprised of seemingly every two-word virtue ever stuffed into an email blast - sweepingly cinematic, compulsively danceable, elegantly structured, all that stuff rolled into one wickedly tense little package. I keep having to remind myself that it's only a demo since all the ideas are so flawlessly realized; I'm honestly a little scared that they're going to fuck it up in the process of perfecting it in the studio. Needless to say, I'll keep you posted on that. (Click here to visit White Lies' MySpace, where you can sign up with the band's mailing list and receive another MP3)

Fyfe Dangerfield, "Well, Love Does Furnish A Life" - You probably don't need to be told that Fyfe Dangerfield's solo works tend to be rather hit-or-miss - I mean, I love the Guillemots more than I'll probably love any of my own children (a fact of which I plan to make my children painfully aware) but even I haven't been able to go all-in on them since the release of Through The Windowpane. Fortunately, Dangerfield's latest project includes this shimmering little slice of heaven, a cover of Larrikin Love's "Well, Love Does Furnish A Life". In the hands of the original band, the song is shall we say somewhat less than a moral imperative, but Dangerfield turns it into one of those records that's so slight and airy that you struggle to distinguish between intentional atmosphere and surface noise. And, like all of Dangerfield's best songs, it is spectacularly pretty, especially on a compositional level (I'm thinking of the melody to all those little flute flutters in particular). God only knows why Dangerfield's been celestially tapped to act as a conduit for overpoweringly beautiful music so frequently, but you sure can't argue with the results - I mean, this song's so pretty that I can't even make fun of how Grey's Anatomy-y it is, and that's not a strawman I pass by idly. (Click here to buy the A Day In The Life EP from Amazon)

ELSEWHERE
- Site feed's finally fixed

Quick Update - Air Traffic this weekend

1. No, I'm not dead; tax season was a b-word and then work subsequently started a big honking super-mega on-the-rag b-word for the next few weeks. And then of course Phil Collins retired; oh man I was a wreck. Rest assured that I've got two sets and a hilariously loaded backlog of stuff to bring you on...next weekish? That work for you? Well okay then.

2. Coachella in sixteen words: Prince ruled. Mark Ronson ruled. Sam Sparro ruled. Hot Chip ruled. Erol Alkan sucked. No, really.

3. So apparently GP favezzzzz Air Traffic are going to be releasing Fractured Life here in the US of States after all, and as such have made plans to tour this fair land far and wide (and possibly even in other directions too). As I'm'a be at their show at Spaceland this Saturday (barring my ride suffering some sort of tamale-related disaster beforehand), I figured I'd pass along the (poorly formatted - my bad) schedule for their upcoming tour:

5/8 -- San Francisco -- Bimbo's 365*
5/9 -- Los Angeles -- The Avalon*
5/10 -- Los Angeles -- Spaceland
5/11 -- San Diego -- Soma
5/12 -- Phoenix -- Brickhouse (it's mighty mighty)
5/14 -- Dallas -- House of Blues
5/15 -- Tulsa -- Bob at Cain's
5/17 -- Kansas City -- Record Bar
5/18 -- Chicago -- The Bottom Lounge
5/19 -- Columbus -- The Basement
5/20 -- Detroit -- Shelter
5/22 -- Cambridge -- TT The Bear's
5/23 -- Philadelphia -- Johnny Brenda's
5/24 -- New York -- Knitting Factory

* = with Elbow

I have complete and total confidence in this show, by the way - my main complaint about Fractured Life was that the songs tended to sound kinda MOR-ish on the record, but playing stuff live has always been the best antidote to a tepid recording. Here's a MP3 I was passed of the kids playing "No More Running Away" live - needless to say it leaves me stoked carat infinity at the prospect of "Never Even Told Me Her Name" played live.

C U NEXT TUESDAY

JUSTICE VAMPIRE WEEKEND LEONA LEWIS LIL WAYNE SOULWAX MSTRKRFT KENNY LOGGINS

WELCOME TO THE LOGGINSPHERE, FOOLISH HYPE MACHINERS

Dinosaur, "Kiss Me Again"
Dinosaur, "Kiss Me Again" (version)

WARNING: IN BIG-PERSON 320K

But seriously, folks: out of every word that I've ever written in the three-ish years I've been doing this stupid thing, the only ones I still consistently get specific mail about are the ones I used right cheer the first time I wrote up "Kiss Me Again". Naturally, most of the mail comes down to "d00d u should totaly send me that shit y0" in varying degrees of eloquence, but I kinda find it hard to fault them; this song is a stone-cold, unyielding, zero-shades-of-gray classic, and frankly it's more than a little ridiculous that some folks' enjoyment of it is entirely predicated on my mercurial ass taking action. Therefore, this time I'll be leaving it up until I get a takedown notice, at which point you can all look forward to my impending perpetration of a blisteringly self-congratulatory verbal wankfest at having ACCOMPLISHED~ something through my WORDS, MAN, WORDS~ and so on. Oh man, that's gonna be great. You're gonna be forwarding it to all your friends under the subject line "Check out this hipster douchebag". I'm gonna be the next this guy. Can't wait for that.

BUT I DIGRESS. As I scramble to regain the point, please enjoy this vastly superior rip of "Kiss Me Again", lovingly encoded with EAC and LAME (and actually cleaned up before exporting) instead of negligently entrusting this masterpiece to whatever stupid spyware-ridden junk I had on my old computer. I hate to belabor the point but it makes the rips I posted before sound like they were recorded through a kangaroo's pouch by comparison. I honestly feel like apologizing; here is a picture of a baby seal. Look at that while you listen to this single, both sides, all thirty-ish minutes of it, even if you got it last time; for reasons which are completely lost to me, the stylus gods decided to smile on me when I put the needle on the track this night, and this shit came out right this time. There's so much going on here that it's almost embarrassing to listen to it the whole way: you already feel like a burglar way before the running time hits double digits.

In particular, make sure you get the b-side; this time it's such a revelation that I'm going to subject you to an entire rambly, stoned paragraph of utterly pointless explication which you'll care about even less after you've read than you do right now (BELIEVE): the story of my mom seeing The Wizard of Oz. My mom, you see, (1) is from Louisiana and (2) was born after 1939, and was thus unable to see The Wizard of Oz on the bigscreen, and had thus only ever seen it on television (this being back when TV sets were black-and-white and had screens dwarfed by the iPhone's), and had thus always thought the whole thing was completely in black-and-white, which meant that, when my dad unknowingly took her to see it on one of their dates, she practically went apoplectic when Dorothy walked out into Oz in color. To hear my dad tell it, she was on the verge of causing a scene simply from sheer shock; she just had no idea what was coming.

YES YES GREAT STORY JAMES, right? Well I shit you not, that's exactly the experience you're in for with the flipside of this track. All of a sudden, what was once an incidental curiosity - I mean, I've called the original version of this the best song I've ever heard on prior occasion - is unequivocally the definitive version; I'm honestly at a loss for words to describe what you're in for if you're into sonic details and all that shit. The rough sound of the track alone takes on entire new dimensions; you can practically hear pieces of the track being taped together, especially during the stupefyingly "new" verse when the vocal tracks start doubling up. Hell, during the breakdowns, you can literally hear traces of vocal performances which bled onto the tracks chosen for the final piece; it's downright... I mean, "breathtaking" doesn't even begin to cover this song, people. You are in for a treat.

Anyway; as stated up top, to the best of my knowledge, the closest this song comes to "available" these days is at the conclusion of the Optimo Psyche Out mix from a few years back, so I suppose go buy that (n.b.: this is not the only reason to buy this mix). In the meantime, please to enjoy these rips and to suggest to your likeminded friends that they follow suit. This song is way too good to survive as literature. (Click here to buy Psyche Out from Amazon.com, or click here to browse used copies of "Kiss Me Again" on GEMM)

The Zombies, "I'll Call You Mine" - Look, you people know me by now; if I were to like a song by the Zombies - the "Tell Her No"/"She's Not There"/"Time of the Season"-ass Zombies - then obviously it would be off their "unreleased" album which nobody except the least lifeful of the lifeless (ha-cha-cha) have ever even heard of in the first place, I KNOW RIGHT? YEAH, TOTALLY BRO, except for the fact that as it turns out "I'll Call You Mine" really does crush everything else that's ever been presented to me as a Zombies song of consequence; it practically jumps out of the speakers and unfurls a bedroll in your head. It's also conspicuously undated in the way only truly great power-pop can ever be; it sounds distinctively not from the present, but never ties itself to any specific era (aside from those momentary flirtations with classicism, but since they never derail the song I figure hey). I mean, to my ears, it's a short hop from this to the Names' "Why Can't It Be" or one of like ten Big Star songs; this is really good company to keep.

Anyway my point - YES, MY POINT - is that I am not an obscurantist twat, or at the very least not one who engages in twattery which doesn't bear results. This song being one of them. (The Zombies' unreleased album can be found on their box set, which unlike most box sets really is the way to go - you'll probably end up passing over the rarities disc, but all three of the other sets are all completely compelling in their own right, PARTICULARLY the covers disc at the end; click here to buy it from Amazon)

The Mystery Jets, "Young Love" (feat. Laura Marling) - And now for a sentence which I never would have forseen myself writing: OH MY GOD THE NEW MYSTERY JETS ALBUM JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE. I mean, it's neck-and-neck between that and Portishead on top of my albums chart; I like it even more than the new Long Blondes album, and this is saying that. I honestly don't even know how to begin assigning credit for it - do you start by crediting Erol Alkan with somehow getting the Mystery Jets to settle down and stop cramming four songs into one? or do you start off with the band for writing an entire album's worth of reliably rewarding songs? I do stress that phrase "reliably rewarding"; 21 isn't a compelling album, or at least not the way Through The Windowpane or Funeral were. But "consistently rewarding" fits it like a glove: every time I go back to it, I'm discovering new inroads, new wrinkles - new reasons to listen.

Except, of course, for "Young Love", a song which needs absolutely no depth whatsoever to present itself as eminently deserving of your attention. And really, on this one, points have to go to the band; Alkan does a great job of keeping the rhythm section reined in (and that little shimmering flutter during the chorus is grin-crackingly awesome), but this is all about the song itself being catchy enough to signal the end of the world. Interestingly enough - and I am about to reveal myself to be hell of lame here, people - it's also eerily similar to some stupid song they came up with for that terrible Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore movie, a song written for the purpose of serving as an example of what audience-appealing pop music sounds like; the fact that the borrowed melody is used to such riotous success here feels almost strikingly appropriate. (Oh, I'm sorry - you're still wondering what could have led me to watch that stupid-ass Drew Barrymore movie? ME TOO.) (Click here to buy 21, the GREEN PEANESS DOT ORG ALBUM OF THE YEAR SO FAR, from Amazon.co.uk)

Isosceles, "Watertight" - Finally, I was passed this single early and encouraged to post it by the label on account of my rabid fandom of Isosceles' first single, and as it is quite the little nugget of Scottish indie-pop I am only too happy to oblige. I can't summon the same vehemence that I did for "Get Your Hands Off" if only because the song is so much more dialed-down; the band seems to have traded monolithic bleeping for streamlined Franz Ferdianism, and it's hard not to mourn the loss at least a little. Not too much, however; "Watertight" is deceptively good, at least as good as anything the aforementioned FFs have put out since "Darts of Pleasure", and yes I will go there thank you very much. It's one of those songs which always gives me the urge to fast-forward when it shows up on shuffle (SORRY ISOSCELES, TAKE ME BACK), but then out of sheer slothfulness I can't decide whether to fast-forward or not by the time the chorus hits, and by that time I'm more than on board enough to let it play to the end, bruising my back from patting it so relentlessly the whole time (see? practice makes perfect!). God, I don't even know if that's a compliment or not; fortunately I'm certain that the sheer volume of playtime this song gets unequivocally is. (Click here to visit Isosceles' MySpace and here for Art Goes Pop's MySpace. Also, AGP's supposedly putting out a new Findo Gask single in the near future, so keep an eye out for that, obviously.)

ELSEWHERE
- So I finally took the plunge and started up a MySpace; come and bask in the warming glow of what will surely go down as the least-attended-to corner of the whole socially networked internet. Ditto for Last.fm, too.

The Lord Works Through My Postman

Can't I do one simple GIS for "postman" without being bombarded with mail-on-mail action?

All things considered, I had a pretty good week last week. My boss gave me a raise out of the blue; it won't be enough to keep me working at that soul-killing death factory one second longer than I have to, but hey, free money. datA and the bafflingly-named MY!GAY!HUSBAND rocked shit at IHEARTCOMIX Saturday night, despite datA being hampered by some truly disheartening tech diffs (bass cutting out right when he's dropping into his remix of "Minuit Jacuzzi"? BOOOOOOOO). Above all else, however, the mailman handed me a package full of singles from Rough Trade that I'd been waiting on for months. This particular order was notable for being unusually chock-full of twelve-inches; I usually stay away from them since I have to save SOME money SOMEtime I guess, but over the last few months a few just proved too tempting to pass up. And thank god for that, because lord almighty did I turn up some gold. Let's recap.

Findo Gask, "Va-Va-Va" - There are few things on this world or off it which I treasure quite so much as a pop song which makes me say - out loud, in my empty apartment - "what in the FUCK?!", and it's been an awfully long time since a song's made me say it quite so loud as this one. I mean, it took me three test runs before I felt confident that I was playing it at the right speed, and even then it wasn't until the second track before I completely stopped worrying. Can you blame me? Songs don't usually come galloping out like this, throwing apparently tangential hooks around like that cat lady on the Simpsons; it could have been a 78 for all I knew.

And then KABLOW comes the chorus, and when I say KABLOW I say it after having spent five minutes carefully choosing the bluntest, most juvenile way to represent the rapturous stupidity this chorus is going to evoke in you. This is a heart-stopper, folks - when the backing melodies erupt and all those inexplicable little through-lines come together, the effect is flat-out transportative; you only wish all songs had a part like that. It's like Johnny Boy's "You Are The Generation" only turned on its head - same sense of the climactic moment, same supernatural ability to deliver, only instead of trafficking in the inarguably unobjectionable signifiers of Phil Spector, Findo Gask choose to go upside your head with searing little No Wave flourishes and jerky rhythms before plugging directly into your vein. The best part, I might add, is that in the process of getting through the meat in order to get to the pudding, you start to develop a real jones for the meat itself; there's some real intricate work being done here which takes some time to reveal itself, even after y0u've come to terms with the fact that a song with parts like that can actually come together like that and be that good. I mean, I guess; I've had this record for about three days and I'm still having trouble coping with the fact that it actually exists. (Click here to buy the "Va-Va-Va" 12" from Rough Trade. It should be noted that the other two songs really aren't anything like "Va-Va-Va" - they're good, but the A2 is some weird little lo-fi experimental thing while the B-side is an extremely pretty little song which stretches to like seven minutes thanks to a four-minute M83-ish outro. They're both good songs which recommend the band quite highly, but do be prepared to feel like you've bought "Trains To Brazil" all over again. Also, note that there's a really kickass "disco mix" available on the label's website - and that the label in question is an Optimo side project. God DAMN this turned out to be a long parenthetical.)

Filthy Dukes, "This Rhythm" - I'm honestly not sure quite where to shelve the Filthy Dukes in my mind; their body of work is both relatively small and all over the map in terms of methodology. Don't get me wrong - it's all pretty solid (particularly their mixes for Trabant and the Maccabees), but it's like trying to find a general classification for Soulwax' remixes before BOSH BOSH BOSH took over (note: in no way is this a dis on BOSH BOSH BOSH).

Sadly, "This Rhythm" does little to make things any clearer; it is simply so good as to force the issue, because if they're going to be turning out songs this amazing we need to know which pile to put them on top of (SORRY). "This Rhythm" is totally unlike anything they've ever done before - it wrecks your shit gracefully, elegantly, like a beefed-up Pet Shop Boys song, as effective an 80s 12-inch extended-dance-mix pastiche as we've seen since the rise of Richard X. I'd even go so far as to say that I like the vocoder on here alone more than I like any evocation of any stupid 80s touchstone on Sebastian Tellier's Sexuality - to my ears, it sounds like it completely and justifiably works even in a non "LOL, VOCODER" sense. (Also, let's give it up for the little run Samuel Dust's currently enjoying - in addition to providing vocals here, he's also better known as LA Priest and lead vocalist for Late Of The Pier. God, to think - I actually picked the Video Nasties to be the big band out of that scene. Why does anyone listen to me ever?) (Click here to buy the "This Rhythm" single from Rough Trade)

Martin Solveig, "C'est La Vie" (The Bloody Beetroots remix) - Technically this is a Beatport exclusive download-only EP rather than an actual 12", so you'll just have to allow me a little thematic leeway to discuss my new favorite thing from the Bloody Beetroots ever GOD PEOPLE WHY DON'T YOU GET OFF MY ASSSSSS. The Beetroots have been on my radar since that remix of "Miscommunication" last year, but I've never heard them release a song like this before; there's just something about the way that bassline seethes back and forth that almost seems to overcrowd the track - almost. And god, does it make the track move; it practically seesaws back and forth uncontrollably until, almost out of nowhere, these perfect little melodic footholds appear out of nowhere to allow you to regain your footing. The cool thing is how it all seems to work in negative space; it sounds like the Beetroots are pulling the sounds out of a vacuum, and that the track we get is just a recording of their struggles against the void. Compelling shit, just utterly and all-consumingly compelling; I cannot WAIT until they make it to LA next month. (Click here to buy the "C'est La Vie" EP - which has plenty of other kickass remixes, including a MURDERER from Goose - from Beatport)

The Real Ones, "Outlaw" (Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Re-Animation) - The Real Ones' original version of "Outlaw" is yet another one of my favorite songs of the year, and I was inordinately disappointed to discover that I'd have to keep hitting up their MySpace to hear it since it didn't make it onto the 12" - that is, of course, until the Beyond the Wizard's Sleeve version rendered it all but inconsequential. My favorite BtWS remixes are the ones where they simply pick up where the original artists left off - the prime example up to now being their epic take on Midlake's "Roscoe" where they fabricate three more minutes in which to soak up that song's overwhelming prettiness out of whole cloth - so, as you can imagine, I was TOTALLY STOKED BRAH to hear them doing exactly that to "Outlaw": giving all the Indian instrumentation free reign to run around justifying itself, adding layers of synth distortion just to momentarily throw the listener (although I say this as someone who counts "Platitudes" among his favorite Long Blondes songs), and above all else, teasing that piano with the same devastating efficacy as every girl I've ever dated. I mean wow do they bring that shit in well; now when I listen to the original I catch myself wishing they'd do it with Messrs. Alkan and Norris's seemingly reflexive grace. As far as I'm concerned, this is the official version of the song. (Click here to buy the "Outlaw" 12" - which also contains one of the most relentlessly hypnotic Prins Thomas mixes I've ever heard - from Rough Trade)

ELSEWHERE
- THIS

Five Old-Ass Songs

actual GIS result for "still not dead"

(Editor's Note: Look, I'm knee-deep in a motherfucking banger of a post, but it's nowhere near completion; consequently I figured I might want to look into just posting handfuls of relatively random songs which have had me by the ears lo these many months. Of course, the epic New Apartment Project has pretty much precluded me from finding anything new or undiscovered; consequently, you can expect to see a squillion songs you've seen on countless other blogs roundabout these parts until I get back on my grizzy. Basically, look, it's either this or more multi-month hiatuses [hiati?] for the time being; suck it up.)

Das Pop, "Fool For Love" (original mix) - The internets have been pushing all the remixes harder than the original - and not too surprisingly either, considering the insanely gifted lineup of remixers assembled for the single - but it's like my parents always told me: the internet should only be considered a trusted authority with regard to matters of grotesque pornography. As it turns out, the original absolutely annihilates any of the remixes, all of whom push the track to some downright compelling places by ditching the original's straightforward guitar-pop framework altogether. Unfortunately, in doing so, you fuck up a song which could easily be mistaken for one of those classic continental indie-pop jams; to my ears, "Fool For Love" stands shoulder to shoulder with "Young Folks" or "Too Young" or "Much Against Everyone's Advice" - that last one being a particularly significant match due to Soulwax manning the boards for "Fool For Love"'s original mix. I'm convinced that the only reason that fact isn't more widely known is because the Dewaeles modestly played down their contributions to give the remixers more of a chance to shine; SebastiAn and Yuksek et al. may have some cache at the moment, but their names would still be laughably overshadowed by Soulwax' on any label which happens to see them bumping elbows. As this track ably demonstrates, that's not an accident. (Click here to buy the "Fool For Love" single from Rough Trade)

Chromeo, "Bonafied Lovin'" (Yuksek remix) - Speaking of Yuksek, I honestly can't imagine anyone undergoing a more dramatic reevaluation in my eyes last year than he pulled off in going from One Of Those Dudes Whose Name I See Every So Often As I Make A Brave Attempt At Deciphering French MP3 Blogs (Note: I Don't Speak French) to a guy whose name whose name I could probably type into the Hype Machine simply thanks to my fingers' muscle memory. I am flat-out obsessed with Yuksek these days; it's like he's managed to figure out how to marry the ruthlessly cut-up approach of latter-day French house to the bafflingly all-encompassing pleasures of big-ass, stupid-ass, epic-ass handbag house music, and I'm just not left with a lot of options when confronted with a musical opportunity like that.

Still, I feel compelled to admit that, if forced, I wouldn't really have a problem throwing out every other track Yuksek's ever touched if it meant I could keep this one. I'm not kidding when I say that the first, like, two minutes of this song may well have been my favorite stretch of pop-music from all last year; the way he balances the vocals against all those giddily cheesy syncopated synths is just preposterous good fun, the kind of neofuturistic pop music we used to get out of Richard X back before he fell off the map and out of the solar system. (Yes, that's right, I'm calling someone out on their perceived lack of productivity. Don't get me wrong - I abhor hypocrisy, but it's a card I reserve the right to play when there's been new, beloved, as-yet-unheard by me Annie about since Moses played kick-the-can on the table.) It's also worth noting just how much better Yuksek's accompanying track is than Chromeo's original; I doubt if I made it two minutes into the original when I finally decided to give it a shot.

Of course, I rarely get much farther than that into Yuksek's remix, either; the track's peak comes in the form of a stupefyingly forceful banger, but ARGH if that first bit doesn't make it feel like dating a girl who only ever lets you see one boob. If he'd taken the time to do whatever he did to the first bit to the whole song, it might well have been my favorite thing I heard last year full-stop; as such, it was "just" enough to win my rapturous attention for the forseeable future. Sigh. Oh well. Maybe next time. (Click here to buy the "Bonafied Lovin'" remix from Rough Trade)

Ali Love, "Late Night Session" (Phones Filter Fromage Dub) - Speaking of dudes who fell off the edge of the earth, Paul Epworth certainly isn't one of them - he was arguably as consistent in 2007 as he's ever been, if not as mindblowingly productive as he's been in the past. Unfortunately for Mr. Epworth, he spent most of last year doing stuff other than what I like him doing best, namely finding ways to make indie rock sound way more provocative than it would otherwise; instead he spent a lot of time playing around with dance-music idioms, which would have probably gone over a lot better with my ears if the idiom of au courant French house hadn't been having a banner year in real time. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't justifiably more interesting than checking up on any of five thousand other things going on, and in dance music, that's just death. Frankly, I was getting a little worried.

And then out of nowhere comes this song, wherein he takes aim at the classic Alan Braxe/Fred Falke symbology and puts a hot one where it thinks. Formally, it's simply textbook French Touch; the only possible reason I can imagine some hoary old Homework-waving house-music Luddite rejecting it is simple prejudice towards anything contemporary. This is not a song that's about cutting a sample up; it's about teasing a sample, coaxing it, kneading it, lovingly warming it, and then beating your brains in with it once it reveals its raw bludgeoning force. Needless to say, I'm a pretty big fan; now please, for the love of God, let him go do something with Fury of the Headteachers. (Click here to buy the "Late Night Session" single from Rough Trade)

Hercules & Love Affair, "Blind" (Frankie Knuckles remix) - Speaking of...man, I'm out of practice at this shit. At any rate, speaking of this dumbfoundingly great remix: hey, this is some pretty great shit right here. It's not for everyone, of course, but then again I'm starting to get the impression that this whole Hercules & Love Affair project may well be the same kind of kickass "not for everyone"-y record at which the DFA excels at releasing - I mean, I'm starting to think their album's going to be a consolation prize since we apparently won't be getting that Black Leotard Front record anytime soon NOT THAT I PLAN ON SHUTTING UP ABOUT IT IN THIS LIFETIME OR ANY THAT MAY FOLLOW NO SIR. Of course, I'd have a better idea of that if I could actually pull off listening to the original track when Frankie Knuckles' mix is such a world-eraser; it doesn't sound particularly intricate, but there's just something inescapably pleasurable about how big and holistic and graceful the overall effect is in action. To say that this song bodes well for H&LA's forthcoming album is an understatement of Austenian restraint; I'm starting to nurture hopes that it'll be as much of a pastiche of 2004-era DFA - an era I adore without restraint. I never thought I'd hear myself say it, but I couldn't be more excited to put money in Antony's pockets. (Click here to visit Hercules and Love Affair's MySpace)

Those Dancing Days, "Those Dancing Days"
Looker, "Master's Gone Away"

And lest ye think I only listen to stupid dance music and stupid ambient music and stupid Steely Dan, allow me to say hey! fucker, you are... sadly pretty close to right these days. Let's be clear: a lot of it has to do with distribution (which goes hand in glove with dance music these days) and level of involvement (what, you think Gavin Bryars' The Sinking Of The Titanic picked itself out?) and the fact that Steely Dan is fucking awesome. But that doesn't mean stuff doesn't slip through the cracks, and lord knows I'll always keep a fissure in my heart wedged open for that odd immaculate gem which comes along every so often. Well, since I've been gone, there have been two.

The first one I regrettably have to present to you in hysterically po-faced fashion; I'm so far behind the curve on Those Dancing Days that I literally got beat by SPIN. SPIN. Nate Patrin is my boy and all, but SPIN. SPIN openly endorses the existence of My Chemical Romance and actively encourages the existence of The Cobrasnake. SPIN named "Your Hard Drive" as its album of the year back in 2000. SPIN still likes U2. And yet somehow, SPIN inexplicably manages to pluck Those Dancing Days out of the pure Swedish air (well, okay, eleven years after the blogs had already justifiably freaked out over them) while I sit around with my thumb up my ass howling at Time Warner; let us simply say that there are times when this world can suck it and move along to the fact that I'm idiotically glad I heard them in any event, because band, song, fuck it, after hearing this track I was preordering five copies of anything with the words "Those Dancing Days" printed anywhere on it (y'know, in case four get lost in the mail). This was one of those songs where I was, like, pumping my fist in the air with sheer exhilaration at the sound of hearing every chord change I hoped I'd hear come true, and for someone like myself who derives an almost spiritual peace from the familiarity of the verse-chorus-verse three-minute pop song, that's just not something you pass up. I am stupidly in love with this song, even two months after the fact, and have the wildest expectations for the album they're supposed to put out later this year. Maybe I should stay tuned to SPIN for the latest on that. Ugh. God. (Click here to buy the "These Dancing Days" EP from Amazon.co.uk)

Looker, on the other hand appears to be all mine for the moment; I cannot, however, expect that to stay the same if they've got other songs in 'em as good as "Master's Gone Away", the friggin' b-side to their debut single. Needless to say, it is a cataclysmically enjoyable little song, diminished only slightly by its cheeky 60s-quoting, and only then since the song's beyond strong enough to necessitate any fancying up (up-fancying?). Plus it may well be the first song technology ever picked out for me; it showed up on my random playlists so regularly I thought my mp3 player was taking money from someone. I actually had to pick the a-side out manually to play it, only to discover that nope, my Zune had the right idea all along. Thanks, technology! (Click here to buy the "After My Divorce/Master's Gone Away" 7" from Serious Business records)

2007: It Was A Year

Please do not use this

I'll be honest: even taking the Biblical annoyances which have plagued my music-consumption habits over the last few months - the move, two computers dying, Time Warner being Time Warner, certain harumph cough hack being shut down by the cough blagh hork snxxx, etc - the fact remains that my musical 2007 was spent decidedly elsewhere. 2007 was, for instance, the year I entered into My Steely Dan Phase, a project which certainly took priority over determining whether White Williams was worth being adorned with an 8.4 or damned to irrelevance with a 6.2 or whatever. The elegance and tidiness of Evie Sands and the Shivvers' bewilderingly compact discographies kept winning out time and time again over the history allegedly being rewritten with lightning by this year's alleged bumper crop of Britpop heroes. And Boz Scaggs...well, fuck you, Silk Degrees is just awesome.

Of course, the only reason I feel empowered to talk like that in the first place is because I did my absolute damnedest to keep up with every vector of musical subsistence 2007 had to offer. I practically hemorrhaged money on music in 2007. I approached Rough Trade's webshop the way an oil-rich sheik walks onto a Monte Carlo casino floor. I bothered the poor folks at Midheaven nonstop, to the point where I was one of the first people on the planet with a vinyl copy of 45:33 (more on this later). Time and time again, I ended up buying the randomest albums from the randomest bands on the randomest whims whipped up by the most predictably deceitful press releases. Fuck, if I'd saved up the money I spent on records this year, I'd probably have enough to put a price on Conor Oberest's head.

And that, as much as anything, is what makes 2007 feel like as much of a waste as it felt like: in a literal sense, it just didn't feel worth the price of admission. The "best" records of 2007 - even most of the ones I'd consider to be my favorites - felt like the musical equivalent of the kind of movies which get Oscars for Best Picture, and for someone who's spent every second since graduating from f*** s***** doing his best to repudiate any respectability he ever afforded the medium, that's pretty much the kiss of death right there. In a lot of ways, it felt like their primary value lay in proving that albums were, in fact, released this year.

In that spirit, then, I had the bright idea to do quick (or at least James-quick, anyway) writeups for every record of 2007 which I ended up keeping as a way of documenting just what, if anything, the albums of 2007 added to my own personal musical continuum. To do this, I tried to cast as wide a net as possible; this is literally everything on my CD shelf with a "2007" printed on it somewhere (and which I paid for - no promos). The implication by an album's inclusion is simply that it's proven at least to be good enough to keep, and in no way do I use the word "simply" to diminish that implication's practical value. After all, in days like these when the act of buying music is imbued with a nigh-unto political significance, simplicity of that kind can be downright virtuous, almost to the point where this can be considered a pretty comprehensive list of albums I would consider to have "won" 2007.

Well, either that or I found another excuse to talk about the Knife again.

(listed in alphabetical order)

Air Traffic, Fractured Life ("Never Even Told Me Her Name") - Yes, despite how much I really don't give a shit about this album apart from the obvious two songs, I ended up buying it; such is the intransigence of the inexplicable allure piano-driven power-pop holds over me. And besides, weren't we all saying that they'd never live up to those first two singles anyway? (Click here to buy Fractured Life from Amazon.co.uk)

The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible ("Black Mirror") - I'm as shocked as you are that this record's lived with me for nine months; I seriously doubt whether I've played it twice since the ride home from Best Buy, and I can't say I've got any plans to remedy that in the forseeable future. The packaging's still rad as hell, though - I do have to give them that. It is quite possibly the first album in history to both look and sound like a coffee table book, in both the best and worst ways possible. (Click here to buy Neon Bible from Amazon.com)

Bang Gang DJs, Light Sound Dance (Tepr, "Minuit Jacuzzi" (datA remix))- There's an argument to be made for the ethical necessity of this album - after all, given the amount of damages like %95 of the constituents of its tracklisting could claim from Hype Machinists, the price of one CD seems like a pretty fair bargain. One could also argue that it's a worthwhile artifact to own regardless of ethical precepts; as a document of the "blog house sound" Light Sound Dance is arguably comprehensive to the point of probably being a primary source on the subject in the future. Or, of course, one could simply point out that it's an awesome exploding shit-ton of fun to listen to. I would go with that last one myself. (Click here to buy Light Sound Dance from a GEMM merchant)

William Basinski, El Camino Real - Remember how, when you were a kid, in the process of fucking around doing kid stuff you'd stumble onto some previously-unknown aptitude for some meaningless activity like holding your breath or standing on one foot? Remember how excited you'd get about your prospects for destiny as you ran into the house in a frantic rush for the Guinness Book? And remember how that feeling of crushing finality would creep up as you struggled to do the computations which would reveal just how comically out of reach the actual record-holders' feats were?

I've come to accept that supremely pretentious, inexcusably snobby, resolutely unsharable ambient drones have some sort of unspoken power over me which dwarfs anything else, even the one previously ascribed to piano-pop. Every year since falling ass-backwards into Music for Airports and failing to get up, it feels like there's always one album of this stuff which proves to be so outrageously unintrusive as to prove intractably functionable, and ends up dwarfing everything else I accumulate during the year in terms of sheer volume just because it always could go on and god the day's been so long and do I really want to get up the energy to listen to that new Maximo Park album ergh no. El Camino Real is not that album this year; that album is Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, which (along with Aja and Gaucho, pretty much comprise the entire list of stuff I discovered this year I'd put in my all-time no-arguments-whatsoever canon), and El Camino Real only ended up in my collection as I was in the process of Hoovering up all of Basinski's works that I could find and heard about a chance to get an autographed copy, so I'm not %100 sure what to say about it. But really, I'm not sure too much has to be said; given its complete consistency with the rest of Basinski's catalogue, it's a worthy enough symbol of one of my most all-consuming addictions from last year. And, as all you normal people will no doubt appreciate, it's the album like this on this list. But don't forget - if we were talking about what I'm actually listening to here, for sheer volume, everything else on this list got lapped by Basinski the way you got lapped at holding your breath back in the day. Welcome to my 2007, y'all. (Click here to buy El Camino Real from Basinski's label)

Burial, Untrue ("Archangel") - To say that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Untrue would be a mild understatement; given how cold Burial's first album left me I would have been less shocked to catch myself raping a (figurative) horse than enjoying his sophomore album as much as I did. But oh well; I'm always happy to be wrong when it's over an album this good. Untrue manages to avoid the primary pitfall I associate with "evocative" albums, namely that it remembers to do things besides lay around evoking shit willy-nilly; songs like "Raver" and "Homeless" and "Archangel" ebb and crest with huge swells of bombed-out beauty. Hopefully this represents a moment of evolution for dubstep, by which I mean an evolution into something to which I enjoy listening. (Click here to buy Untrue from Amazon.com)

Caribou, Andorra ("Niobe") - Out of everything that I like about Andorra - and I like Andorra a lot - my favorite thing has to be the way the transition from jangly, Nuggets-y pop into, well, "Niobe", a song which not only as one of the most graceful pop songs I heard last year, but along with the Junior Boys' "FM" and the Knife's live rendition of "Heartbeats" forms a tidy little through-line of devastatingly powerful glacial-sounding electro-pop. Little continuities like that make me love songs like "Niobe", because they give me hope that there might be other songs like it that I just haven't heard yet. And, of course, sometimes they come attached to really good albums, too. (Click here to buy Andorra from Amazon.com)

Chromatics, Night Drive ("Mask") - I will admit that Night Drive really actually is pretty good in a way I wasn't expecting it to be, yes. And I am also not only happy enough with it to keep it for the moment but to also make seeking out a hard copy of After Dark a priority, yes. Having said that, I cannot for the life of me imagine listening to this album in any sort of organic manner; it is musically self-conscious in a way which demands that I set time aside for it rather than just throw it in for the fuck of it. Make of that what you will. (Click here to buy Night Drive from the band)

Culture, Two Sevens Clash (reissue) ("I'm Not Ashamed") - Anyone who reads this site and gives half a shit about reggae doesn't need to be told a damn thing about this, one of the most universally acclaimed albums the genre has ever produced. Anyone else couldn't possibly care less about any arguments to be raised in Two Sevens Clash's favor; I have no idea why reggae inspires such hatred in men's hearts, but I've given up trying to convince people too stupid to know what's good for them (especially when doing so lets me gloss over the fact that I somehow managed to avoid hearing this album until this year despite its status as kinda one of the most famously good albums in history. I will, however, say that this is, at best, the second-best unimpeachable column of the genre I picked up this year, with first place going to the even-more-inexplicably-absent-from-my-musical-consciousness Police & Thieves. Oh, hey, an end parenthesis). (Click here to buy the Two Sevens Clash remaster from Amazon)

Daft Punk, Alive 2007 ("Encore") - Because, shockingly, all of their t-shirts were stupid. (Click here to buy Alive 2007 from Amazon.com)

v/a, Body Language Vol. 4 Mixed By Dixon (Herbert, "Moving Like A Train" (Smith N Hack remix)) - Again, I can easily see how this could be construed as a cheat in service of something otherwise ineligible, namely the Smith N Hack remix of "Moving Like A Train" which came out in 2006 (although I wasn't aware of it until hearing about Erol Alkan bigging it up in like January so wtfEVRRRRRRRRR). The problem with this argument is that, again, the album is really fucking good - hell, between this CD and the Resident Advisor podcast alone Dixon can be said to have had an out-of-this-world year, to the point where if Tim Goldsworthy's show hadn't taken off as precipitously as it did around August (to levels I hadn't even considered possible) he'd pretty much have had everyone else trying to use the medium of house music outright lapped. It's an impressively fluid document, too - he even manages to have some fun with Thom Yorke's "The Eraser". Who'd'a thunk it? (Click here to buy Body Language Vol. 4 Mixed By Dixon from Amazon.com)

The Field, From Here We Go Sublime ("Over The Ice") - I am not going to lie: This album, which I have spent large chunks of this year defending as the best piece of music I heard which actually came 2007, is currently in mortal danger of winding up in a basket on a doorstep with a note reading "IM SORY" taped to its forehead. Part of this stems from seeing him live back during the summer, a fun outing at the time but one which, in retrospect, confirmed my darkest suspicions about the Field's music so completely as to scare me off the record itself almost entirely. I mean, he literally played nothing which he didn't produce; he might as well have just thrown up a white flag (lol Switzerland) and done a spoken word piece about how there's nowhere to go from his music. What's keeping me back, of course, is the fact that From Here We Go Sublime is still an impressively intricate work; I'm flat-out not done with it yet. But in no way am I made happy by the fact that (a) I know that there's an end point and (b) there's not really anywhere to go from there. (Click here to buy From Here We Go Sublime from Amazon.com)

House of Love, s/t (1988) (reissue) ("Christine") - Like many British guitar-pop albums from the mid/late 80s or later, the main problem with The House Of Love is everything that came after it - it is, in other words, distressingly easy to draw a line directly from this record to weak-sauce Snow Patrollery. Thankfully, The House Of Love itself is pretty unimpeachable (as compared to its sequel and its big single "Dale Gribble: The Song"), to the point where I may have had a harder time picking which song I'd be posting from it than anything else on this list. I mean, it's gotta be neck-and-neck with Forever Breathes The Lonely Word on the list for most economical C86 albums. Oh yeah. That's right. I am absolutely sticking to this controversial opinion and DON'T YOU TRY TO CHANGE MY MIND. (Click here to buy the reissue of House of Love from Rough Trade)

Justice, Option-T ("Genesis") - Has anyone actually dared to suggest that Justice might actually turn out to be a better group than Daft Punk? Granted, until they have both a live show as good as The Pyramid and a record as good as Discovery to their credit, you certainly won't catch me coming down on that side definitively...but give me a choice between Justice's debut and Homework and I'm going with Gaspard and Xavier every time. I don't even think it's a matter of technology rendering Homework obsolete or anything - I flat-out do not think Discovery can hold Justice's jock. If I want a banger which keeps dumping ever-larger piles of instruments on me, I'm going with "Stress" over "Da Funk". If I want to be hit in the chest with exsquisitely-manicured beats, I'm going with "Genesis" over "Rollin' and Scratchin". If I want to let stupid, empty phrases temporarily conquer the inside of my head, I'll admit that "Around the World" is pretty much king in the castle, but these days "DVNO" gets the job done even more quickly. You'll notice that I haven't even mentioned any of the album's big singles yet - I honestly don't think there's a song on Homework which comes close to either of the "Phantoms" or "Waters of Nazareth". (To be fair, you'll also notice that I haven't mentioned "The Party", a song I decidedly wish would disappear forever.) And don't even get me started on"D.A.N.C.E.", my choice for song of the year by every standard I value despite the fact that remixers have practically Gnarls Barklified it by this point. And this is their first album.

Look, I'm even willing to be That Guy over the issue: thanks to a lucky purchase of the Saint OST, I've been listening to Homework for a decade now. I've been a big enough fan of it in the past to be literally the only student at my high school with even the slightest inclination to recognize its existence, let alone own it and talk publicly about how it's awesome. I made most of my friends in college sending videos off of Homework back and forth over the T1 lines. This is not a fight where I'm without an iron in the fire. Meanwhile, Justice's new album is so widely and contemporaneously beloved that my enthusiasm for it probably doesn't even put me in the top fifteen percent of fans; I'm not even devoted enough to it to figure out how to type the fucking symbol on a PC.

But it's just better. I'm sorry but, well, yeah. (Click here to buy Cross from Amazon.com)

The Knife, Silent Shout (deluxe edition) ("Heartbeats" (live version)) - Toldja! (Click here to buy the Silent Shout deluxe edition from Amazon.com)

LCD Soundsystem, 45:33 ("Track 2")
LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver ("All My Friends")

Without hesitation, I would say that Sound of Silver is a better album in every measurable way; it is simply that, with the same freedom from hesitation, say that 45:33 is equally better as an musical artifact, and I honestly don't know which option I find to be more substantive. I can certainly say that I feel a more complete sense of ownership over 45:33, although it is kind of a shitty criterion to hold up when one record is, even as we speak, getting near-universal acclaim as one of the best albums of the year (it probably even showed up on Modern Oboe Enthusiast's list) and the other hogtied by its format, which limited its appeal to that minute slice of the popular audience with a hunger for forty-five minute disco suites to which they could take notes. It's doubly unfair when said forty-five etc kicks off with, but for "Losing My Edge", my hands-down absolute unequivocal runaway Steve-Hutchinson-clearing-a-fucking-path favorite LCD Soundsystem song ever, thereby condemning it to an obscurity so complete that it doesn't even have a title. Judging by the lack of coverage it's gotten on the Hype Machine, I can only assume that I'll be getting the same takedown notice as everyone else; I certainly can't argue with the premise that this here is a song worth protecting (and strenuously urge everyone to buy the shit out of the album which surrounds it). It is simply too amazing a track, one which knocked me far too thoroughly on my ass and one which has received a desperately disproportionate degree of praise relative to its quality, for me not to post.

This is not, of course, to imply that Sound of Silver is suddenly chopped liver 'round the stately halls of Cobo Manor, of course; not even a week ago I was taping another unfathomably rambly interview for Blog Fresh calling it my favorite album of the year, and you'll see the same reflected on my Idolator ballot at the end of the week. Sound of Silver is a fantastic album, both on its own terms and as a chapter in the band's ongoing evolution, and I categorically do not mean to inadvertantly demean it just because apparently a bunch of fratboys somewhere had a totally rad time dude DEVIL HORNS WHOO to "All My Friends". It's just that Sound of Silver feels to me like an album saved from its down patches (basically every song on there less than six minutes long) by its overall continuity, whereas by contrast "Track 2" stands out so far from the continuity of 45:33 - a record built from the ground up with continuity in mind - that I keep catching myself cutting the album slack out of sheer good fuckin' will. Whether this counts as fair use or not - well, uh, that's not up to me. If I were you, I'd get it quick. (AND THEN BUY THE FUCKING ALBUM ARGH HOW COULD YOU NOT HAVE 45:33 ALREADY WHAT ARE YOU TOO BUSY LURING CHILDREN BACK TO YOUR GINGERBREAD HOUSE TO THROW A COUPLE BUCKS INSOUND'S WAY SERIOUSLY GOD PEOPLE.)

Midnight Juggernauts, Dystopia ("Into The Galaxy") - I do like this album a fair bit, but facts are facts, and the best thing Dystopia really did for me in the end was free me up to sell my copy of Bright Like Neon Lights. (Click here to buy Dystopia from Amazon.co.uk)

Kate Nash, Made of Bricks ("We Get On" - yes, again)
St. Vincent, Marry Me ("All My Stars Aligned")

I'm not going to front like this is still the end-all be-all album it was for me when I discovered it, although it's so far above and beyond what anyone else in this whole London folkie thing has accomplished so far as to make me wince at the fact that I already wasted my Guinness Book thing. I will, however, attest to its quality by pointing out that I am a damn sight more likely to sell back St. Vincent's Marry Me (to the point of disrupting all this alphabetism to underscore it), a fine little album with a fine little stretch of tracks towards the middle which peaks with "All My Stars Aligned", a fine little song indeed. Quote me: Made of Bricks is neither fine nor little. It is a big-ass, awesome album with some big-ass, non-awesome parts over whose existence I am inexplicably unbutthurt. As it turns out, however, it just wasn't that good.

(Click here to buy Made of Bricks from Amazon.co.uk)
(Click here to buy Marry Me from Amazon.com)

Nico, The Frozen Borderline: 1968-1970 ("Nibelungen")- Up until I actually sat down and listened to it, I had always assumed that whatever experience I would have with The Marble Index would be pretty close to the one I had with The Exorcist back in high school (i.e. would largely consist of me focusing my attention on attempting to search out what other people had said about it instead of attempting to get into it myself, which in turn would be followed by much inelegantly-couched rhetoric about the pliancy of the masses on the internet). I had not, however, counted on The Marble Index being (1) quite possibly the most explicit album ever recorded when it comes to giving cues about how it is to be absorbed and discussed (seriously, there are Interpol songs less explicit about how their workings are to be interpreted. Interpol, people) and (2) way more engaging than I would have ever imagined. Forty minutes' worth of the intonations of some Teutonic tranny-sounding art-school girl set to music even more foreboding and dirgelike than "European Son" = automatic and irreversible DNW...except, apparently, for The Marble Index, which against all odds manages to be just as much fun to listen to as it is to describe the blight it inflicts on your outlook. It is to this remaster's great credit that it manages to improve on both of these aspects, much less to the outrageous degrees it actually manages to do so; songs like "Evening Light" practically acquire that eminently chaseable dragon record dorks refer to as "presence". Of course, it's still The Marble Index; regardless of how it matched up with my expectations I still bow before the simple truth that The Marble Index is er um uh not for everyone, arguably to a point which ought to make me think twice about gleefully bashing Ys. But it's certainly for me; this is a top-ten record of all time with a revelatory remaster, and I call that a win. And fuck Ys. (Click here to buy The Frozen Borderline from Amazon.com. It comes with a free coaster, which you can spot by the word Desertshore stamped on the cover. OHHHHHHH)

Paper Cranes, Halcyon Days ("Milkrun" (album version)) - This, however, was. I know I said "no promos", and in a way this is really