I bought my first Yo La Tengo album some time in the late 90s, it’s hard to say when. It was their 1995 album Electro-O-Pura, which along with Modest Mouse’s This Is A Long Drive For Someone With No One To Think About, shifted my musical interests forever. Electr-O-Pura is extremely different from their other albums in my mind, mainly because it’s got a darker, more experimental sound to it. I’ve seen people comparing the album to the efforts of Sonic Youth, which isn’t too far off. But it’s the album’s ending that’s really the crown jewel of all the tracks, called Blue Line Swinger.
The song is a slow burn which ends in a huge raucous of drums and guitars. When I say it’s a slow burn, I mean reallllllly slow. The drums repeat themselves endlessly, slowly gathering more and more complexity as they go on. The guitar begins to expand, taking on new chords at the same pace as the drums. Finally around 3:40 something that sounds like a song finally emerges, almost like it’s being birthed from the sound. It’s a complex and driving song, the drums powering the track… and then at 4:25 Georgia’s stunning vocals break through it all, like a siren over the sound of the crashing waves.
I swear to you I get teary eyed when I hear this song. There’s something about this track that hits me in just the right spot. In my mind it has all the right elements, like the right ingredients for a perfect meal. It’s both straightforward, like in Georgia’s drums and vocals, but then you’ve got the ripping chaos of a guitar and the subtle bass line marrying it all together.
I don’t often wax poetic about songs, but I can undoubtedly say this is one of my very favorite songs. I would bring this song on a desert island with me, and I think it’d be a pretty fantastic song to die to in a film. I hope you take the time to listen to the song and appreciate it as I do.
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I’m a huge fan of ex-Smog frontman Bill Callahan’s music, so I was really excited to hear this cover he did of Leonard Cohen’s song, So Long, Marianne. I was listening to the song in bed last night after my buddy Justin from Aquarium Drunkard posted it. There’s something really special about Bill’s version, which I guess is a departure from the original. Justin says:
Slowing things down, Callahan and co. eschew the original’s violin and backing female vocals and in their stead add weeping pedal-steel and a dose of Texas heartache.
I couldn’t have said it better. I’m looking forward to listening to this on repeat this weekend.
I was and I wasn’t a fan of the last Sleigh Bells album, Treats. It had its high points with songs like “Tell ‘Em” and “Rill Rill,” but the noisy feedback ended up sounding the same after a while. I think Treats was the perfect name for the album; you don’t want to listen to it all the time, just when you’re in a certain mood. With their new album Reign of Terror, they’re back with more face punch rock, but with a bit more diversity.
The in-your-face guitars are still there and Alexis Krauss’ vocals are still as shout-y as ever, but there’s lots of great moments on this album that differ from their previous effort. The song “You Lost Me” sounds like a fire alarm going off on a Kate Bush track, which is honestly a compliment. I’ve only listened to the album one time through so far, but I’d say it’s certainly going to be a more solid album than Treats. You can listen to the three song preview above, or if you’re on Rdio you can click here to listen to the whole album.
Way back when the world was turning from one millenium to another, I wasn’t much of a hip hop listener. In high school, my friends gave me three “indie”/”undie” records to get me into the genre, mostly underground west coast legends. When I finally got my shot on the radio, another DJ dared me to try to use the Technics-1200s, sitting in the studio collecting dust. Soon after, I never used the CD players in the studio – all I wanted was to try the turntables and the mixer. I loved, and still love, the feel of a vinyl record under my fingers, the incredible power of manipulation one has with a song that you know inside and out. From that love of vinyl I found out I could mix anything by Jay Dilla with Jay Dilla. It’s the hip-hop DJ’s greatest trick. You think the DJ is effortlessly mixing the Pharcyde, Busta Rhymes, Slum Village, Janet Jackson, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and Erykah Badu together. But it’s all James Dewitt Yancey, a legend.
It’s those drums. Some songs have drums like a pistol shot, but Dilla’s drums cruise in from Alpha Centauri. The timing is inimitable. The sample, Gap Mangione’s “Diana in the Autumn Wind,” distorts, smoothing out into a seductive, intoxicating organ line. T-3 and Dilla’s verses are not about falling in love. They balance dreams against necessity. Dilla rhymes,
“I sit and wonder when I think about these written rhymes.
How’d I get to the point constantly taking all my time?
Time I could of been spending gettin’ cash, gettin’ mine.”
In 2000, maybe Dilla didn’t realize that this song was one step on his way to “getting mine.” This music is all about love. It has become one of my essential tracks, one that whoever I fell in love with would have to love as well. Thankfully she does and I have nothing to do with it. The flow of the organ on the drum is everything, something we can all fall in love with or to.
There’s a famous phrase by some famous architect saying that Los Angeles is the basin in which, if you tipped the world on its side, all the loose pieces would fall. While not 100% accurate, the music of the city has inevitably made that quote a reality. The independent labels that call the city home (Stones Throw, Now Again, Brain Feeder, Epitaph and Merge, to name a few) seem to coagulate all the loose ends of the music world. Henry Laufer, a.k.a. Shlomo, steeps himself in that cauldron of fuzzy hip-hop, spaced-out soul, woozy dub, hazy ambient and reverbed guitar in his debut record, Bad Vibes.
Places is the lead single for this 21 year old multi-instrumentalist and it is a cracker. With a Dilla-esque two-step and a light-tinkling melody, the track moves like the city in which it was made. The lo-fi, VHS-cut-and-paste video oscillates between the concepts of extreme humanity and the minuscule reality of human life. Landscapes cut between close-ups of children, men walking into the desert, spacemen dancing outside a city shimmering in all its impersonality. A tune for when you want to add a little bit more wonderment to your day.
The other day, I was driving home after a rough day of work and I needed to listen to something… passionate. So I went to one of my go-to songs that always gets me singing at the top of my lungs as I drive with all the windows down. The song is called If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next, and was released as a single way back in August of 1998 from the band’s album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. I’m guessing I probably heard the song first on 120 minutes, the Matt Pinfield hosted show which aired every Sunday night from midnight to 2 AM, and one of the places I discovered a bountiful amount of music.
The inspiration for the song is quite deep, so I’ll let the Wikipedia entry explain it better:
The song’s theme is taken from the Spanish Civil War, and the idealism of Welsh volunteers who joined the left-wing International Brigades, fighting Francisco Franco’s military rebels against the Spanish Republic. The song takes its name from a Republican poster of the time. A photograph of a young child killed by Nationalist bombs is shown under a sky of bombers with the stark warning “If you tolerate this, your children will be next” written at the bottom.
It’s been a long time favorite of mine, and I hope you enjoy it as well. On a final note, the song is in the Guinness World Records as the number one single with the longest title without brackets.
