The mixed tape is an age-old art! Well, at least since the 8-track... How better to demonstrate your love, if you are an awkard teenager, or your style and good taste, if you are a perhaps somewhat less awkward, but gruppy adult? There is no better way.SC had the marvelous idea of creating a mix-tape sharing group among some music-loving friends, with refined taste. Since I've been a bit itinerant this last year, I haven't received too many mix-tapes. Maybe we stopped. I don't know. But since I'm reveling in my unemployment, I made my mix, for April. Notes on the tracklist follow. Enjoy.
If you would like a copy of this on CD, I'd be happy to burn and send you one. Email me.
Since I’m not trying to romance you, this tape ain’t romantic. So don’t spend too many evenings with headphones on, lying on your bed, ankles crossed, poring over the liner notes or listening intently to the lyrics. There are no hidden messages of love and devotion. Just so that’s clear.
The mixtape is basically split into two stanzas. The first, running from “Hip Straights” to “Terrified,” should be played while you are cleaning your apartment, or driving; the second, starting with “Looking Down At The Great Wall of China” and ending with “If We Can Land A Man On The Moon…” is for when you need to take a break. The mixtape should be played loud, although it is, clearly, since it’s coming from me, pretty mellow fare throughout. I hope you enjoy it. Let’s get started.
I would not fuck around with Ted Leo. Chisel is Ted Leo’s band, from the early 90s D.C. scene. “Hip Straights,” with its angular guitar lines and signature yelps, is one of the standouts from 8 AM All Day. “Looking Down at the Great Wall Of China,” also from 8 AM All Day, opens up the second half of the mixtape.
The brown-eyed renaissance in Sweden is utterly charming. They apparently find love boring, funny, and joyous, all at once. Why more bands don’t use a great, simple beat as the foundation for their “pop” songs is beyond me. Peter, Bjorn & John sure can make you want to punch them in the face from time to time (“I laugh more often now / I cry more often now”), but “Young Folks” caught my attention the first time I heard it, and despite the whistling, I still enjoy it. The rest of Writer’s Block is pretty good, too. Jens Lekman is one of the funnier and more sloppily sentimental songwriters working these days. “You Are the Light’ is a buoyant song, and the video is equally charming.
Tucked between these two tracks is Portland, Oregon’s Viva Voce. The husband-wife band has released some up and down albums, but I enjoy the “sweet groove of “Alive With Pleasure” and “High Highs,” included later on the mixtape. Both songs are off of The Heat Can Melt Your Brain.
Honeycut, on DJ Shadow’s Quannum Projects, is a San Francisco-based, what, white boy soul group? I don’t really know. “Shadows” is catchy, though.
Dr. Dog has the worst band name of any band I’ve seen in the last two years. They also write lyrics that don’t mean anything at all. Not in the Stephen Malkmus, cryptically-don’t-mean- anything-but-fuck-you-whatever sort of way, but in the perfectly plain and simple these lyrics are stupid (“Ain’t it strange how everybody says I love you / Ain’t it a shame how a word can tell you more than words can say”) sort of way. Normally, two massive strikes against. But the band is endearing, like Animal from the Muppets, and “Ain’t It Strange” is a pretty little song.
I’m of two minds about Of Montreal, but “Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider” gives me triple happiness, with its fuzzed out introduction, it’s joyous pop bursts, and the lyrics “You’re just some faggy girl / And I need a lover with soul power/ And you ain’t got no soul power.” Winner!
Seriously, girls, what's up?
Au Revoir Simone and Fur Cups For Teeth provide a triple-punch of sassy hot Brooklyn nerd-girl synth and iMac action. Five years ago, you could have found them at Cokie’s. Now they are all probably married. Full disclosure, FCFT are good, old friends of mine, but they get props, as it were, for “Darling, Darling / Your love is like a mystery train,” which is surprisingly clear, given that there is no such thing as a mystery train, and choosing against the obvious rhyme with “Wherever it goes, it goes / It’s never coming back-ack-ack.” “The Disco Song” and “The Winter Song” are off the ponderously titled Verses of Comfort, Assurance, and Salvation while FCFT keep it real with Allergic 2 Fur, where you can find “Mystery Train.”
Beulah is a California band, and man, do I miss them. Beaming melancholy through the sunshine, they were a band after my own heart, and Miles Kurosky’s lyrics were more charming than most (“I heard he wrote you a song/ Well, so what?/ Some guy wrote sixty nine/ And one just isn’t enough”). I’m waving the flag, I guess, by including three Beulah tracks, just in case you forgot about the band. “Popular Mechanics for Lovers” and “A Good Man Is Easy to Kill” off of The Coast Is Never Clear and “If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart” from When Your Heartstrings Break. If he’s not doing anything else these days, Miles Kurosky should teach a course for the kids, on the difference between being clever and trying too hard.
The Walkmen and Lambchop are two fairly different bands that I like a lot, and everyone else is pretty ho-hum about. I guess it’s the New England talking, at the end of the day, that files the cashmere-sweater, prep-school assholism under charming. “Louisiana,” with horns, wanders just slightly off the cold-winter night tracks of previous Walkmen records. I like it. Lambchop are another story, the favorite of tortoise-shell frame wearing, library-card toting girls in stockings, their design school boyfriends, and me. “I Have Been Lonely For So Long” is a cover of a Frederick Knight song, showing off Kurt Wagner’s falsetto and good taste.
Norfolk & Western are massively under-appreciated. Fronted by one Adam Selzer, and comprised of members of the bands that back such folks as M. Ward and the Decembrists, and play beautiful and hushed little songs about love and wandering. “Terrified” from Dusk in Cold Parlours is one of my favorites.
Dump is the solo side-project of James McNew, from Yo La Tengo. The cover art A Grown-Ass Man, is a cute and funny drawing by Archer Prewitt, about a rabbit wearing a business suit, going to work. “Cowboy Song” is a Thin Lizzy cover, I believe.
Malkmus gets in with “Baby C’Mon.”
William DeVaughn’s “Be Thankful for What You Got” was supposedly a gospel track released in the service of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s what I heard on B101 the other day. Yo La Tengo cover it on the Little Honda EP.
Track listing, for April 2007 mixtape :
2 Young Folks Peter, Bjorn & John
3 Alive With Pleasure Viva Voce
4 You Are The Light Jens Lekman
5 Shadows Honeycut
6 Ain't It Strange Dr. Dog
7 Bunny Ain't No Kind Of Rider Of Montreal
8 The Disco Song Au Revoir Simone
9 Mystery Train Fur Cups For Teeth
10 The Winter Song Au Revoir Simone
11 Popular Mechanics For Lovers Beulah
12 Louisiana The Walkmen
13 I've Been Lonely For So Long Lambchop
14 Terrified Norfolk & Western
15 Looking Down At The Great Wall of China Chisel
16 A Good Man Is Easy To Kill Beulah
17 Cowboy Song Dump
18 High Highs Viva Voce
19 Baby C'Mon Stephen Malkmus
20 Be Thankful For What You've Got
21 If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart Beulah
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