As I said a few weeks ago, I’m helpless without Pitchfork Media’s Top 50 list. It has totally dictated my January listening habits for three years running. Well, the 2008 list is finally available, and as usual they’ve spread it across five web pages, which is a minor annoyance to me and a few other people I know. So, I’ve done you all a little favor, and summarized the list without reviews. I’ve also gone one step further and provided product and torrent search links for most of the list. I tend to torrent, review, then buy if I like it or delete if I don’t. Try to be cool and support the artists if you do the same. By the way, the The Pitchfork 500 book (pictured) is a treasure trove too, if you haven’t checked it out. It chronologically covers indy music from ‘77 Punk to the present, and is written in the same clever style as their site content. So free up some hard drive space, ’cause here it is, our condensed list —> (more…)

It would be impressive enough that percussionist Evelyn Glennie has worked with notable artists like Philip Glass, Bela Fleck, Ray Davies, Bjork, Fred Frith, Kodo, Bobby McFerrin, and Sting, but this is made a bit more impressive by the fact that she is “profoundly deaf”. Which is, by the way, a misleading term that she does her best to clarify here. In spite of her insistence that you disregard her “impairment” and instead focus on her musicianship, she does a great deal to help people reframe their rigid perceptions of what it means to hear and to listen in the first place. As part of her early musical training she learned to “hear” with her fingers, hands, and in fact, her entire body. And having turned a perceived adversity into an asset, she devotes considerable energy to motivational speaking, on top of performing 100+ times a year. The TED.com clip at left (view full size here) is a bit long for web viewing at over 30 minutes, but well worth a watch. Especially the piece she performs at the end, which powerfully shows the importance of dynamics in a piece of music. Although the piece is very harmonically simple, the dynamics of her playing nearly made me cry. But check her out for yourself, you can listen to a bunch of preview clips here.

Grace Jones Gets Her Head Examined

When Grace Jones first broke onto the scene over twenty years ago, my genderblending friends and I welcomed her to the club, but always thought of her more as a Jean Paul Goude media creation and personality than a true talent. Well, after 19 years of silence, she’s back to prove us wrong. Her new CD Hurricane ranges from the obligatory dub-derived club grooves to the unexpectedly sensitive and soulful , with masterful production (thanks to Sly and Robbie, Brian Eno and Tricky) that makes you feel like you’re opening a new present over and over each time you listen. The release cleverly manages to capture the essence of her early sound while somehow sounding timeless in spite of the extensive use of electronics, kind of like Seal’s secret dark sister. Although the cover art is suggestive of Goude’s other media creations (check out this classic Citroen ad featuring Grace Jones on YouTube) it was actually conceived by artist Tom Hingston. And yes, that’s an actual mold of Jones’ head in the photo here, rendered in chocolate.

[UPDATED: The list is out!]

What ever will I do with myself until the Pitchfork Media Top 50 list comes out? Although I only agree with their reviews about half the time, I must confess that a lot of my listening of the last couple of years was heavily influenced by their last two lists. I might have encountered, but not slowed down and listen to, any of the following this year without the Pitchfork top 50 list (these are all Amazon links): Okkervil River - The Stage Names; Panda Bear - Person Pitch;  Arcade Fire - Neon Bible; Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga; Feist - Reminder; Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam; Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer; Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline; The Field - From Here We Go Sublime…and others, actually. Anyone have ideas on how I can ease my dependency on Pitchfork without having to “put on the waders” and trudge through the crap that they call music distribution these days? By “crap that they call music distribution” I mean the commercial sites with the unbearably slow, ad-infested page loads, and glitchy audio players. Bring it on people, my ears are hungry, and the best recommendations always come from other listeners.

Something that’s driven me crazy for a while is pop music artists that use that effect you’ve probably heard where they sound just a little like a robot on certain notes. Kid Rock probably used it first, trying to copy the effect on Cher’s “Believe”, and now everyone from Britney Spears to Akon uses it. People who sort of know what they’re talking about think it’s a Vocoder or a talk box, but it is in fact an abuse of the settings on Autotune, which is meant to correct a vocalist’s bad pitch. If you’ve ever seen this clip of Billy Joel singing the national anthem, you’ll know why I say “abuse” (I’ve always wondered if that sound guy still has a job). In any case, long before Peter Frampton or Stevie Wonder used the talk box effect, there was Peter Drake. In the clip here (from 1964!), he performs the spooky country tune “Forever”. The clip is probably better viewed full size, to capture the creepy, David Lynchian surreality of the zombie-like backing band.

After my recent dissing of eighties music, I was talking with my walking musicological pop media reference library and friend Eric about whether or not there were any eighties bands that didn’t suck. We agreed on Wire, one of the least-acknowledged but most influential pop bands of the last 25 years. The clip at left is of their club hit “Ahead”. Early on (1977-79), Wire was kind of punk, but even then had more melodic tunes like The 15th. Whatever popularity they enjoyed peaked in the late eighties, and by the mid-nineties, they were being thoroughly plagiarized by bands like Elastica. Of all their releases, my personal fave is probably the rather accessible A Bell Is a Cup…Until It Is Struck, which includes one of the most brilliant pop songs of all time: Kidney Bingos. Really bad video, beautiful song, and proof that lyrics don’t always matter.

It’s weird for me to hear so many bands that do music that sounds exactly like awful music I did in the 80’s. Music that I think even we knew was awful back then, while we were doing it (sometimes I think we did all the drugs we did just so we could stand to listen it). Anyway, it’s even weirder when I find myself kind of liking the stuff. In the case of the White Corolla video at left by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone , I’m sure the video helps. The animation was apparently provided by Julia Pott of London (web site, blog). Drowned In Sound  has an interview with Owen Ashworth (who essentially is Casiotone for the Painfully Alone) which highlights why I’d never be able to get a job with the British pop press: whereas I would describe the music as “that plinky Casio stuff our manager wouldn’t let us include in the set list and IRS Records laughed at us for sending them“, DIS’s interviewer James Gracey describes it as “…simple yet incredibly addictive: a barrage of reverberated beats, shuddering with a raw, almost dirty intensity; melodic yet often lifting, blown-out chords wrapped around Ashworth’s baritone, guttural observations that form articulate, Raymond Carver-esque character studies…” I guess it’s not hyperbole if you’re British…

Years ago I had a dream in which I was playing an amazing instrument that responded to my hand gestures and thoughts, creating sublime, transcendent music that moved the soul. Then I woke up. The best that I had at my disposal at the time was still my electric guitar, because a velocity sensitive keyboard, although it’s pretty cool, had been around for awhile. The evolution of the musical instrument interface has amazing possibilities these days, as evident in the reactable project created by students at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. As is so often the case though, the same technology seems to be more immediately applicable to practical needs, like selling cocktails. The clip at left is the brick, a “Tangible & Multi Touch Sonification Instrument”. Which is one of the more creative and purposeful interfaces I’ve seen. Many of these concepts are clever, but end up being rather non-musical or like the reacTogon, just a a clever redesign of existing ideas. Coming at things from the other direction, Japanese artist Daito Manabe lets the music play him (YouTube clip). If you watch that video, you’ll get a feel for what it means to “surrender to your art”. That can’t feel good. Daito Manabe’s YouTube page is here; he also seems to do interesting public performance art projects like whitebase + Daito Manabe and disturbing video experiments like Milk. Yucky.

If you care about me, stop introducing me to music I like. I’m rapidly running out of time and hard drive space. The other day, a friend sent me a link to some British band’s web site, asking me what I thought. I think my remark at the time was something like “it’s a good thing their web site’s so pretty, ’cause they’re a fugly bunch of fellows”. After giving their music obsessively repeated listens, I now officially retract anything unkind I’ve ever said about Elbow. Their newest release, The Seldom Seen Kid, is one of the solidest recordings I’ve heard in a while. Elbow somehow manages to maintain a fairly consistent “downtempo” vibe without actually sounding gloomy. Singer Guy Garvey’s voice is often compared (legitimately) to Peter Gabriel, but their style on this recording meanders from prog-rockish to jazzy to almost Brechtian, and the lyrics are simply brilliant. The video at left, for the song One Day Like This, captures one of my favorite feelings - staying alive and enthused in the face of the mindnumbingly mundane - with brilliant simplicity.

If you’re in a funk today, check out the Peter Fox clip at left. If you’re not feeling a bit chippier by the end of the tune, call your doctor for an emergency dose of Zoloft. Your case may be terminal. I had heard of Seeed, the German reggae-ish hip-hoppish band before, but never given them a good listen until recently, when I discovered singer Peter Fox’s solo material. This is the freshest sound I’ve heard in a long time, somehow fusing string sections, the beatboxy-ness of M.I.A., and a kind of laid-back über-sunshine. By the way, if the idea of German reggae sounds a bit at odds with itself, get in touch with the fact that German music even had an influence on Mexican music. Coincidentally, the Peter Fox material is slated for U.S. release on election day. Order a copy now. You may need something to cheer you up that day. For another cool clip check out Alles Neu, also from the release Stadtaffe, which BabelFish tells me means “city ape”.