kim & jessie
Skin of the Night
M83 is known for being maximalist. Everything comes at you in so many layers, just listen to “Teen Angst” off of their album, Before the Dawn Heals Us.
This year they released Saturdays = Youth. It’s Anthony Gonzalez’s, the band’s mastermind, tribute to his teenage years in the 1980s. It’s the band’s step from good/interesting to impressive.
The key element in what makes this album great is restraint. Trying to capture the 80s in an album required adding more “form,” “figure,” or “structure” to the songs and toning down the soaring synths. The synths, layered guitars, and vocals in Saturdays create an environment rather than a sonic assault. The album is playable front to back, a considerable feat in a market which focuses more on the single song more than ever.
The two that stand out are “kim & jessie” and “Skin of the Night.”
Anthony Gonzalez has stated that he tries to capture the feeling of John Hughes’s movies. “kim & jessie” does just that and takes off beautifully at about 2:20. “Skin of the Night” is chilling with beautifully interwoven vocals.
One a side note: Boards of Canada’s album Music Has the Right to Children effectively captures the 70s.
I’m pretty sure that this formula is correct:
people + glass of red wine + fireplace + coffee house = exaggerated gestures and dramatic laughing
Not saying it’s a bad thing 
, just holds true.
Filed under: Music 2008, music | Tags: 2008, gang gang dance, house jam, music
I feel that most of my favorite songs from this past year have an electronic twinge to them.
This one mixes an impressive range of samples, instrumental work, synths, and “eastern-influenced” sounding vocals. The entire album is rather diverse and I’m excited to hear more from them in the future.
Tour to Madison?
Probably not, they’re hanging out in Europe and at festivals like Primavera Sound in Barcelona.
I recently purchased Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf from a library book sale. The book seemed a bit older. As it turns out, it probably hasn’t been opened since the mid to late sixties.
As I was paging through it before packing the book for a trip, two pieces of paper fell out. One was a tag for “M. Lowenstein” fabrics. The other was a set of labels for attaching to bundles of letters. You would bundle the local mail and the out of town mail separately and then use these labels to distinguish the two. The date on these is 1965.
Do these have any real value? No, but it’s cool to hold random pieces of life from 40 years ago that probably haven’t been touched since then.
IMG00081 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
IMG00082 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
IMG00083 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
A couple years ago I ordered the english-language version of Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions used from the Amazon Marketplace. I found this when I got to the “Garden of Forking Paths” (which is one of my favorite Borges stories):
IMG00084 by Pat Jordan on Zooomr
It was cool to have that commentary that was more than just notes, but directed to the reader. It adds dimension to the book besides the text on the pages.
Filed under: Music 2008, Uncategorized | Tags: 2008, leviathan bound, rooks, shearwater
I wish that I had discovered these guys earlier. There is something serene and beautiful in their music … and it is rooted in both the power and softness of Jonathan Meiburg’s voice (originally the keyboard player in Okkervil River). I wouldn’t have guessed that the band was from Austin, TX -it feels like their songs were crafted for a snowy winter.
It’s not Weezer’s best, but it isn’t half bad. I haven’t put that many guitar songs in this “list” and those are usually my favorites. This year was more dance/electronic based it seems. Anyway, the song is still solid for blasting and singing along in the car. Apparently, people don’t do this as much as I do…
The video was the best that I’ve seen in awhile. It seems that most music videos (if you can even see them on TV anymore) are really all the same: the band performing, a loosely related plot-line, or an abstraction. It’s really hard to do much else. This is different. This is good awesome incorporation of contemporary life.
A good example of Ladytron’s poppy, but haunting songs. The new album, Velocifero was much darker than Witching Hour, but nothing managed to match the force of “Destroy Everything You Touch.” Still a solid, sonically rich, electropop album.
Key line:
Now I see you
From the corner
Clock strikes
And I know you will be drinking alone
Really worth checking out:
• Destroy Everything You Touch
• Destroy Everything You Touch (Hot Chip Remix)
• International Dateline
• Burning Up
• High Rise
• Last One standing
Part Atari, part disco, and (in some songs, but not this one) part indistinguishable or abrasive vocals. Their self-titled album is solid start to finish.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: lost in translation, my bloody valentine, sometimes
This scene is bliss:
(edit: Repost of the youtube video. This one doesn’t have the same quality, but the other one was deleted.)
It helps that “Sometimes” is one of my favorite songs…
Filed under: life, literature | Tags: gabriel garcia marquez, journals, one hundred years of solitude
A while ago, my brother gave me this small journal. It’s very simple with a nice recycled paper cover of sorts. I really didn’t appreciate it at first, but I started using it when I got to college. It’s been about two years since I wrote in it and, for whatever reason, I decided to pick it up and read through the other night. I wouldn’t mind sharing this one from a day in November, 2006.
This is why Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a genius:
One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything that he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
From: One Hundred Years of Solitude
That has to be one of my favorite passages in a book, ever. It’s those paragraphs of insight strewn throughout the book in the most beautiful language that also make it one of my favorites.
