60 Favorite Albums of 2011: #40-21

And on we go. Be forewarned that the artwork for album #29 is less than SFW.
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40 :: The Field | Looping State of Mind

Almost exactly four years ago I listened to From Here We Go Sublime for the first time and felt my idea of what music could do expand a not insignificant amount. Yesterday and Today is an underrated album but attempted no conceptual feat so ambitious as the ascension toward sublimity. So it was with great delight that I discovered that this third LP marks Axel Willner’s return to conceptual brilliance. These seven expansive offerings are more sonically diverse than Sublime, but they all focus on loops and the mighty, hypnosis-inducing power of repetition.
>>>Key track: “Looping State of Mind”
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39 :: Megafaun | Megafaun

In which some very nice men with beards and broken-in voices let many of their more experimental tendencies slide away, write some new songs but sing them like they’re hundreds of years old, record them in a wooden room, and please a whole lot of people like me who secretly have very simplistic taste in music.
>>>Key track: “Everything”
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38 :: Frank Ocean | Nostalgia, Ultra

So, the most acclaimed and successful work released under the OFWGKTA guise is the album that’s the least representative of their aesthetic as a whole? Funny how that works. Rising star Ocean packed his free debut with highly replayable silky jams and, against all odds, convinced legions of hipsters that there is plenty to enjoy about “Hotel California.”
>>>Key track: “Novacane”
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37 :: Paul Simon | So Beautiful or So What

Ways To Remain Relevant: Possess a voice that sounds as young as ever while being 70 years old. (!!!) Remind people that you’re one of the only people alive that can sing about beauty, death, faith and doubt without being ham-fisted. Write melodies that would make The Grinch’s heart grow three sizes. And keep experimenting with new styles and textures, no matter what.
>>>Key track: “So Beautiful or So What”
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36 :: Jamie Woon | Mirrorwriting

It’s been well over 5 years since FutureSex/LoveSounds, and it’s time to start looking for Timberlake replacements. Other than those deathly smooth vocals, JT and JW don’t actually sound much alike, but Mirrorwriting is the best cutting-edge, progressively-minded R&B we’ve gotten lately. Call it a FS/LS for the dubstep era.
>>>Key track: “Lady Luck”
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35 :: Iron & Wine | Kiss Each Other Clean

Sam Beam spent three albums and a handful of EPs building the Iron & Wine sound up from a 4-track basement whisper into The Shepherd’s Dog’s pan-global sound party. So where to turn next? Into forgotten (like, really forgotten) 70s-radio sounds and used record bins. But no matter the sonic decorations, his delicate songwriting touch and near-perfect voice will always shine through.
>>>Key track: “Half Moon”
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34 :: Nicolas Jaar | Space Is Only Noise

If you only glance at the cover of Nicolas Jaar’s debut quickly, it looks like that baby stroller is sitting on the surface of the moon. It’s a great analogy for his unclassifiable music, which takes snippets of blues and funk and maroons them in a desolate lunar landscape of downtempo minimal electronica.
>>>Key track: “Keep Me There”
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33 :: Saigon | The Greatest Story Never Told

Overly elaborate backstories can be a burden on a musician, but ones as powerful as this one just can’t be ignored. Visit Wikipedia and read up on it. What’s more, origin myth hype will never overshadow a release as strong as Saigon’s debut, which plays like an epic autobiography composed of his endless, dexterous rhymes over a prime selection of Just Blaze beats.
>>>Key track: “Come On Baby (ft. Jay-Z)”
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32 :: Junior Boys | It’s All True

Geeky-sexy. That’s the contradiction at the heart of this deeply engrossing album by two scruffy Canadian dudes. It’s slinky, warm “dance music” that sounds buttoned-up and seductive at the same time.
>>>Key track: “Itchy Fingers”
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31 :: Radiohead | The King of Limbs

It may be Radiohead’s smallest, least friendly, knottiest, most elusive album ever, but it’s still a goddamn Radiohead album. These guys pretty much figured out music on In Rainbows, so it was time to shake things up a bit. If its slightness is your only complaint, bundle it up with the great singles they released this year, like “Supercollider” and “The Daily Mail” and you’re golden. Read my review here.
>>>Key track: “Lotus Flower”
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30 :: DJ Quik | The Book of David

Quik doesn’t sound like most rappers from this year, or even this decade. There’s something almost nerdy about his off-kilter taunts and straightforward delivery. It’s wonderful how he sells it, though — with the help of his beats, in which that same nerdiness manifests in timeless funk- and soul-infused joints that sound like they’re from no era of hip-hop in particular.
>>>Key track: “Hydromatic”
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29 :: Handsome Furs | Sound Kapital

On their third and best LP (by leaps and bounds), husband-and-wife duo Alexei Perry and Dan Boeckner craft raw, gloriously garish keyboard-core that bursts at the seams with human compassion. Springsteen with synthesizers.
>>>Key track: “Repatriated”
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28 :: Bill Callahan | Apocalypse

In which our protagonist with the somber baritone twists and turns in the clutches of personal demons, musical tradition, and forces larger than himself, and, on the masterful “One Fine Morning,” comes out the other side with some kind of peace.
>>>Key track: “Riding for the Feeling”
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27 :: Holy Ghost! | Holy Ghost!

May I present to you the heir apparent to the DFA throne and our best bet to carry the live-band-dance-party torch in the wake of LCD Soundsystem. (Sorry, Juan MacLean.) “Jam For Jerry” is no “Someone Great,” but give them a couple more LPs and they could be doing that emotional-resonance thing as well as The God Murphy Himself.
>>>Key track: “Some Children (ft. Michael McDonald)”
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26 :: Julianna Barwick | The Magic Place

On 2011’s best and most original ambient release, the heavenly-voiced Barwick seemingly went to the world’s most resonant cathedral, cloned herself 100 times, and tried to replicate the sound of rays of sunlight breaking momentarily through a cloud bank. Remember the wonderful “Boy 1904” from Riceboy Sleeps, that song that used the recording of the last known castrato? Well, it turns out that the next-best person to deliver to us the music of angels is still alive, and she’s just getting started.
>>>Key track: “White Flag”
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25 :: Fucked Up | David Comes to Life

Trying to sort through the insanely convoluted mythology surrounding this album would give anyone a headache. Sitting down, shutting the fuck up, and listening to this 79-minute tribute to the eternal power of guitar and drums will also give you a headache, but a headache of the best kind. The kind Damien “Pink Eyes” Abraham gets from smashing bottles against his head on stage. Mr. Abraham casually discusses leaving the group, but Fucked Up just wouldn’t be the same without him muscling his way through their triple-pronged guitar assault like a bull in a china shop.
>>>Key track: “Queen of Hearts”
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24 :: Kate Bush | 50 Words For Snow

If you’ve been trying to track down the year’s best song about having sex with a snowman, look no further. As bold as it is to pen a (relatively) straight-faced song on such a subject, the real triumph is that this song and all of its potentially-ridiculous fellows (characters include a yeti, a snowflake, and a ghost girl looking for her lost dog) sound lush, empathetic and elemental, not stupid. For chrissakes, the title track does nothing but count down said 50 words (many of them made-up), and I still get goosebumps when the male guest vocalist exhales #50: “Snow.”
>>>Key track: “Snowflake”
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23 :: Action Bronson | Dr. Lecter

Pure cartoon villainy, just like the cover. It was hard to read about NYC newcomer Action Bronson this year without seeing Ghostface Killah mentioned in the same breath, but other than the timbre of their voices, the similarity doesn’t run deep. Where Ghost leans forward with bug-eyed intensity, Bronsolino steps back and smirks, delivering the best verses about food, weed, and good living to be found in 2011, over an impeccable collection of beats from virtual unknown Tommy Mas.
>>>Key track: “Larry Csonka”
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22 :: Kurt Vile | Smoke Ring For My Halo

The perennially road-weary Vile took things down a notch here from previous LP Childish Prodigy and discovered that, guess what, everything’s just as fucked up whether you’re howling or mumbling. Almost no one sounded as beaten-down as this guy in 2011, and yet almost no one else on this list experienced the same surge of popularity.
>>>Key track: “Runner Ups”
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21 :: tUnE-YaRdS | w h o k i l l

The typographically-challenged Merrill Garbus experienced one of 2011’s biggest success stories. BiRd-BrAiNs, her very good but too-weird-to-crossover debut, turned out to be the perfect lead-in to the ambitious and widely beloved w h o k i l l, which has catapulted her to the position of one of indie’s biggest rising stars. Like Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca, it is a worldly album that seems to exist at that magical, elusive, perfect crossroads between experimentation and pop.
>>>Key track: “Bizness”
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Back to #60-41 | Best of 2011 home | Onward to #20-1

60 Favorite Albums of 2011: #60-41

Sorry for the delay on this post! I messed up on the publish dates for all of these Best Of posts when I scheduled them. (Shouts to Ian for noticing my mistake and notifying me.) Accordingly, I’ll shift everything by a day, with the whole shebang running Tuesday through Sunday.

On this list: I tried to trim it down to 50 albums, I really did. But I just couldn’t bear to leave off a number of releases that I legitimately love. I listened to more music than ever this year (tired of hearing that yet?) because, like every year, a musical universe that already seemed to be infinite in 2010 continued to expand in 2011. (Hey, just like the actual universe!) There seemed to be shockingly little critical consensus on year-end lists, which is a good thing but it can feel very overwhelming if you’re someone who attempts to maintain an “edge” on what’s going on in music.

So, because of that, I think I have a satisfyingly diverse list here, but I still find myself wishing the same things I have the past two years: I wish there were more women on this list. I wish there was more hip-hop on this list. I wish there was more ambient and experimental music on this list. I wish there was more cutting-edge dance music on this list. (Though dance music historically thrives on singles more than on albums.) As my musical journey continues in 2012, I’ll keep trying to branch out, not only across current genre pools, but into the past as well — which almost definitely means sacrificing some of the new-music-listening I did this year.

Until then, here are my 60 favorite albums of the year. More so than ever, these are “favorite” and not “best” or “top” — I thought a great deal about the deep subjectivity of music evaluation this year, in part because of the album that lands at my #1 spot, so this list is anything but objective. Just a list of splendid music to check out if it sounds up your alley from my descriptions. The “key tracks” are my guess at a good starting place. Sometimes they’re my favorite on the album, sometimes they’re the most representative of the album as a whole, and sometimes they’re what you could call the album’s “signature” song. All of them are keepers. No Youtube links because you can do that shit yourself.
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60 :: Akron/Family | Akron/Family II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT

If it weren’t for the pre-release stunts – the album’s nonsensical title, muddled origin story (something about recording in a shack on an active volcano), and the fake noise leak with gibberish track names – I might not have detected the permeating weirdness lurking beneath Akron/Family II‘s three-part harmonies and other flat-out beautiful folk-stuff. But it’s that marriage of the pretty and the weird that makes Akron/Family’s releases worth returning to.
>>>Key track: “Silly Bears”
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59 :: Future Islands | On The Water

I never tire of hearing Sam Herring growl his way around Will Cashion’s bass and Gerrit Welmers’ keyboard arrangements with that singular, gremlin-like voice, especially as On the Water finds the group constructing the most nuanced, mature, and unforcedly tuneful songs of their career.
>>>Key track: “Balance”
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58 :: A Winged Victory For The Sullen | A Winged Victory For The Sullen

Adam Wiltzie (a.k.a. one half of ambient drone godheads Stars of the Lid) teamed up with pianist and composer Dustin O’Halloran to deliver this fine album of sweeping, stately, classical-infused ambient.
>>>Key track: “Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears”
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57 :: Youth Lagoon | The Year of Hibernation

On first listen, I could practically hear the detractors lining up to shit on Trevor Powers’ debut – on the castrato vocals, the overpowering bedroom intimacy and the little-kid simplicity of the arrangements. But open up to it and it’s those same qualities that make The Year of Hibernation great.
>>>Key track: “July”
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56 :: Ryan Adams | Ashes & Fire

Just in time, Mr. Adams shook off the blistering Cardinals release pace, the pizza-adorned EPs, the fake metal nonsense, and the inevitable career fatigue to deliver his most consistent album of straight-up songwriter material in years. Expertly recorded with Glyn Johns’ vintage-sounding touch, Ashes & Fire is some of the year’s best musical comfort food.
>>>Key track: “Dirty Rain”
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55 :: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah | Hysterical

In which one of 2005’s coolest bands makes a defiantly traditional, markedly uncool record filled with the sort of meat-and-potatoes indie rock no one is making right now and gets roundly dismissed by pretty much everyone that matters. I gave Hysterical some patience and another spin or two and Alec Ounsworth’s drunken nursery rhymes (as well as CYHSY’s focus on songcraft rather than atmosphere) got under my skin in a big way.
>>>Key track: “Same Mistake”
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54 :: Oneohtrix Point Never | Replica

Sound-worlds build and unfold themselves with engrossing musical complexity on Replica, which scans like a digital update of Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land for the Age of the Sample.
>>>Key track: “Replica”
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53 :: The Pains of Being Pure At Heart | Belong

Hard to turn down a fresh pot of 90s Blend (grunge guitars, new wave rhythms, roller-rink synths, radio-ready choruses) when POBPAH whip it up with this level of ambition and clarity.
>>>Key track: “Heart In Your Heartbreak”
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52 :: Tiger & Woods | Through the Green

The ultra-taut, sample-based disco jams on Through the Green are so irresistible that I’ll have to forgive Tiger & Woods their stupid name and the fact that they picked the wrong giant cat for their album cover. Try not to dance, I quintuple-leopard dare you.
>>>Key track: “Gin Nation”

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51 :: Active Child | You Are All I See

Slotting Pat Grossi in with other “PBR&B” white boys trying and failing to get their groove on (cough, How To Dress Well) is missing the point. (It doesn’t help that he invited HTDW’s Tom Krell onto the single.) Such a classification belies this album’s real magic: that otherworldly atmosphere that arises from looped harp, huge synths, and Grossi’s theatrical falsetto.
>>>Key track: “Hanging On”
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50 :: Peter Bjorn and John | Gimme Some

The haters are right, those bongos on “Dig A Little Deeper” do reek of a Carnival cruise conga line. But there’s some wonderfully classic pop quality (a Swedish specialty) to those melodies that Peter Morén sings, and that jolt of garage-y energy they injected into this LP shuffled things up just enough. Read my review here.
>>>Key track: “May Seem Macabre”
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49 :: Mogwai | Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

Goodbye Mogwai Young Team, hello…Mogwai Middle-Aged Team? Gone are the “Fear Satan” days where a cloud of deafening distortion could be lurking a few bars up ahead. They aimed to recapture that danger on The Hawk Is Howling and it wasn’t a good look, like an older dude trying to rock young dude clothes. So they risked being cheesy and ended up with a crazy-listenable album of soaring, melodic post-rock.
>>>Key track: “How To Be A Werewolf”
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48 :: Abigail Washburn | City of Refuge

To create these dusty, windswept tunes, banjo queen Washburn surrounded her dexterous plucking and gorgeous, breathy vocals with male harmonies and lush arrangements. What resulted is arguably the best straight-up folk release of the year.
>>>Key track: “Bring Me My Queen”
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47 :: Nicholas Szczepanik | Please Stop Loving Me

Over the course of a single, 48-minute track, this ambient newcomer bends and twists his drone into all kinds of beautiful and engrossing shapes before locking into a single chord (lasting the final 10 or 15 minutes) that’ll leave you breathless.
>>>Key track: The only one.
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46 :: Africa Hitech | 93 Million Miles

What the hell is this album? Most of these tracks would leave dancefloors with raised eyebrows, and they refuse to be slotted into any of the extremely narrow categories for electronic music that are currently in circulation. Let’s just call it something like the lovechild of bass music and math rock and let our ears do the rest.
>>>Key track: “Light the Way”
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45 :: White Denim | D

It takes some special sauce to get the hipster blogosphere to embrace a release this unabashedly classic-rockin. The rapidly ascending career arc of this Austin four-piece peaks with D. And the ingredients of that special sauce are catchy songwriting, razor-sharp arrangements, and some of the most insane chops you’ll hear outside of a jam band festival.
>>>Key track: “Anvil Everything”
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44 :: G-Side | iSLAND

The third release by this prolific and delightfully unusual Huntsville, Alabama duo sounds like the work of a group with quite a well-formed identity. They embrace many of the best qualities of Southern rap while following their idiosyncratic vision into uncharted territory.
>>>Key track: “Cinematic”
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43 :: The Middle East | I Want That You Are Always Happy

Who would’ve thought an Australian band named The Middle East would make one of the finest Americana albums of the year? These up-and-comers wind their way through a sprawling and largely desolate collection of tunes and almost never hit a bum note.
>>>Key track: “Dan’s Silverleaf”
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42 :: Beyoncé | 4

The fourth (and best) LP by Queen B does, as some have pointed out, feel more like a collection of singles than an album proper. But lo what a collection of singles it is. My favorite keeps changing (“Let’s Start Over” right now), but taken together it’s the most thrilling pure pop made in 2011.
>>>Key track: “Countdown”
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41 :: Beirut | The Rip Tide

The Rip Tide, or, How Zach Condon Saved Beirut From Becoming Tiresome. Stripping his craft down to its essence, shedding some of its frillier European affects, and releasing his most concise album yet, Condon reminds us why we love him: because dude’s got a golden voice and he can write a damn solid pop tune. I’d argue this is his best LP to date.
>>>Key track: “Santa Fe”
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Best of 2011 home | Onward to #40-21

Hurry Up, I’m Dreaming

All seven of you regular Ashtray Says readers will be excited to hear that I’m gearing up to do a Best of 2011 Extravaganza, which will consist of a Top 50 Albums list, a Top 50 Songs list, and probably some other miscellaneous stuff, and will go up over the course of the first week of January, starting Jan 2. More info on that to come. To tide you over until then, here’s something I’ve been working on the past few days: my re-sequenced version of M83′s blockbuster album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, which was released in October and has been tearing shit up netwide on Best of 2011 lists.

Why do this? Well, I’m a huge M83 fan, and I love most of the songs on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, but I think the album is slightly bloated and terribly sequenced. As Tom Breihan put it in his premature but astute evaluation for Stereogum, the track order doesn’t seem intently thought-out, and you can listen to the album on shuffle without really noticing a change. I’d take that a step further, and say that the positioning of some of the tracks actively detracted from my enjoyment of them; there’s a lot of different sounds on this album, and sometimes they butt up against each other at odd angles. So I decided to indulge my nerdiest instincts and create a version that cut some of the tracks and put the remaining ones in a more coherent order.

Basically, I don’t think the original double-album format works. The two discs have the same general structure, in terms of how the mood changes throughout the disc, and the relatively brief length of each half made it feel, to me, like the tracks were moving from one mood to another too quickly. Obviously I’m in the minority on this, as many many people have been enjoying the hell out of this album for the past few months, but I couldn’t help but feel I would enjoy Hurry Up more if I put the tracks in an order that better allowed their incredible quality to shine.

So what I ended up doing after a couple of “drafts” was (without realizing it) preserving the original foundation of Disc 1, plugging in the key tracks from Disc 2 where they seemed to fit. “This Bright Flash” and “My Tears Are Becoming A Sea,” both fine songs on their own, got cut because they are essentially less-developed retreads of “New Map” and “Outro,” respectively. The instrumental interludes from Disc 2 — “Another Wave From You,” “Fountains,” and “Klaus I Love You” — are also perfectly pleasant but felt inessential to the whole. (The similar interludes from Disc 1 got to stay because of the way they bleed together with their adjacent tracks.) Finally, Disc 2′s “Splendor,” which I consider the weakest song on the album and sort of a pace-killer, got chucked.

If you want to make a playlist and listen to my resequenced version of the album for yourself, the tracklist is below. I got super duper nerdy and spliced a fragment of “Klaus I Love You” into the end of “Soon, My Friend” so that it would flow more naturally into “Outro,” so if you’re REALLY into this thing, you can right-click download my edited version from the link below. Otherwise, just putting the tracks into a playlist will give you pretty much the same experience.

1:: Intro (ft. Zola Jesus)
2:: Midnight City
3:: New Map
4:: Reunion
5:: Where The Boats Go
6:: Steve McQueen
7:: Year One, One UFO
8:: Echoes of Mine
9:: Wait
10:: Raconte-Moi Une Histoire
11:: Train To Pluton
12:: Claudia Lewis
13:: OK Pal
14:: When Will You Come Home?
15:: Soon, My Friend
16:: Outro

Young Jeezy ft. Jay-Z & André 3000 – “I Do”

As you may have noticed, things have been quiet here for the past month. My previous post notes that I was in Ireland for two weeks (maybe I’ll post a couple of my favorite pics from that trip on here once I finally get them online), and I’ve also taken over as music editor for the Donnybrook Writing Academy, the wonderful blog for which, as you’ll know if you follow The Ashtray Says, I started writing album reviews at the beginning of the year. So I’ve kept busy learning the ins and outs of Donnybrook, and as that will probably be the primary outlet of my music-blogging energies in the future, I’m not really sure what The Ashtray Says is going to be/how often it will be updated from now on. I’m sure you’re all heartbroken. Not that it’s ever been a very consistent blog, and I guess it’ll remain what it’s been — an outlet for my writing about things, music primarily, that doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Without a doubt, I’ll continue my tradition of doing some completely excessive year-end lists, so check back about a month from now for all that.

My real reason for writing this post: to encourage you to listen to a song that, one day after its release, has become one of my favorite (if not my flat-out favorite) hip-hop tracks of the year. It’s off Young Jeezy’s endlessly delayed fourth studio album Thug Motivation 103: Hustlerz Ambition, due out December 20 on Def Jam, whose superpower as a label seems to be delaying things, endlessly.

Well, “I Do” is a song too strong to be detained by the villainous Dr. Def Jam and his insidious Song Dungeon. A version of the song consisting of 3K’s verse leaked sometime in 2010, and I came across it when it was posted on Kanye’s blog in the midst of Summer 2010′s G.O.O.D. Fridays onslaught. (It was the best of times…) I was smitten, and unaware of the song’s origins, mostly wondering why it was only two minutes long, for god’s sake! Later, a snippet with Jeezy’s hook also leaked, but not until yesterday did the full version surface — complete with Jeezy’s verse and, BONUS, a killer verse from Hov (in which he displays more charisma than anywhere on Watch the Throne!) — when it was played on Funkmaster Flex’s excellent but obnoxiously-tagged Hot 97 radio show. Soon after, a high-quality, non-tagged version appeared, and I now feel I can die a happy man.

I’d go so far as to call the track the second coming of UGK & Outkast’s untouchable “Int’l Players Anthem.” Over a soulful and exuberantly joyous beat (this one by unknown producer M16), the emcees continue the grand tradition of appearing to rap earnestly about fidelity and commitment (“I choose you,” “I do,” etc.) while remaining their usual incorrigible selves. YJ mostly describes the things he’s gonna do to ya when he gets you out this club and into his bed, just barely squeaking in some stuff about loyalty at the end. Jay-Z continues his epic troll of the entire human race by extending the narrative that kicked off with the parallel success “99 Problems” and “Crazy In Love” — you know, the one where Beyoncé floods the charts with devastatingly awesome pop songs about love and Jay-Z slyly places “A Bitch” at #100 on his List of Problems. Or, as here, appears to be talking about marrying the Queen of Earth but is actually cryptically rapping about being “married to the game,” be that the rap game or, you know, the crack one.

Of course, 3 Stacks is different: here as on “Int’l Players Anthem,” his verse eschews rappers-refusing-to-be-sentimental territory and delivers a verse to make your heart melt. Only rather than kicking things off, he’s the anchor leg. As if you needed another reason to stick around — despite my aforementioned cynicism about Jeezy’s and Hov’s true intentions, the song’s bursting warmth and effervescence makes it easy to pretend they really are rapping about true love and marital fidelity, making this both a multi-layered piece of hip-hop deftness and one of the feel-good anthems of the year. Just some grown ass men rapping about a grown ass subject.

Young Jeezy, Jay-Z & André 3000 – “I Do”

The Emerald Isle

I’m off to Ireland for two weeks! Probably won’t be posting (though I haven’t been doing that much lately, anyway). Make sure nothing too exciting happens on the Internet while I’m gone!

Real Estate – “Days”

Check out my review of the splendid new Real Estate album over at Donnybrook.

If you picked Days, the sophomore album by New Jersey vibe-rockers Real Estate, off the rack at a record store, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were the most boring band on the face of the earth. Superficially assessing their flat, affectless, Google-search-foiling name, even lessevocative album title, and drabber-than-drab cover art depicting a row of tasteless, grey prefab houses in a dusty lot underneath a matte grey sky, you might think to yourself “now here’s a band that runs in the opposite direction of any signs of brightness, life, or color.”

Ooh, cliffhanger! Click on for the “BUT!”

New Old Mixtape – “Hot Fuzz”

In cleaning some old crap out of my room, I discovered a CD-R wrapped in notebook paper containing an old mix I made a few years ago, which I remember liking but which had somehow disappeared from my computer. It was inspired when I first heard Deerhunter’s “Nothing Ever Happened”, so it must have been some time in 2008. As with the last mix I posted here, I can’t exactly say what ties these songs together, but there is some connective tissue that may only make sense inside of my head. They’re all fairly long — you could even say “jammy” (oh dear I’ve offended the indie gods with that blasphemous word) — and have a sort of ragged or “fuzzy” quality which led me to think of that stupid title in five seconds. Most importantly, some of my all-time favorites are on here (namely, “Nothing Ever Happened”, “The Light”, and “Yellow Country Teeth”). Each and every one is a phenomenal song, all-time favorite or no.

I didn’t feel like going through the trouble of packaging them together, tagging them as an “album”, and uploading them like I did last time, but do please download the mp3s (by right clicking the track titles and doing the old “Save Target As”) and turn them into a playlist on yr compy because, as always, the order is intentional. And feel free to use that “album art” above that I whipped up in 10 minutes, IF THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE INTO.

01 :: Deerhunter :: “Nothing Ever Happened”
02 :: Peter, Bjorn & John :: “Up Against The Wall”
03 :: Sun Kil Moon :: “Salvador Sanchez”
04 :: Mogwai :: “You Don’t Know Jesus”
05 :: Wolf Parade :: “I’ll Believe In Anything”
06 :: Hayden :: “Dynamite Walls”
07 :: Silversun Pickups :: “Lazy Eye”
08 :: Sun Kil Moon :: “The Light”
09 :: Built To Spill :: “Carry the Zero”
10 :: Grizzly Bear :: “Colorado”
11 :: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah :: “The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth”
12 :: Yo La Tengo :: “Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind”