In the meantime, I’ll be periodically posting mp3 mix tapes.  This one is basically for stoners, and it’s best enjoyed outside on randomized order.  A soul one is coming soon and you can probably expect more after that (depending on how long the redesign takes).

Tracklist and a mediafire link are after the jump.

DOWNLOAD ZIP FILE HERE (7zip is a free and user-friendly unzipping software, if you don’t already have something)

Song......................Artist..........................Album
You and I.................Washed Out......................Adult Swim Singles
Take Shelter..............Active Child....................Curtis Lane 
Strangers In The Wind.....Cut Copy........................In Ghost Colours
Sometimes.................Beach Fossils...................S/T LP  
Round And Round...........Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti...Before Today 
Just Wait Til Next Year...John Maus.......................Songs  
Friend of the Night.......Teen Inc........................Fountains 7"
Fly Like an Eagle.........Steve Miller Band...............Fly Like an Eagle
Feel It All Around........Washed Out......................Life of Leisure 
Do Your Best..............John Maus.......................Love Is Real 
Darlin'...................Dead Meadow.....................Three Kings  
Cortez the Killer.........Neil Young......................Zuma 
Chinatown.................Wild Nothing....................Gemini  
Can't Hear My Eyes........Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti...Before Today
Air Supply................Sweet Trip......................You Will Never Know Why

If you like this, allow me to also plug Rachel and my DJ night (every 2nd Thursday of the month at Enid’s) as well as DJ Overgold’s (wayyyyy to many to mention, but he’s highly google-able).  See you all again when we land,

Guten Morgan

And most exciting of all, two of my most anticipated 2010 releases have leaked, and they are just as dreamy and summery as you would both hope and expect!  Ariel Pink’s 4AD debut and Beach Fossils official full-length.  Former one-man bands, both artists have benefited from the permanent involvement of their touring musicians and from cleaned-up (but not antiseptic) production choices.  My favorite MP3s from both releases are streaming below.

Everyone knows this reasonably unimportant fact:  Ariel Pink was a one-man ”shit-gaze” phenomenom back when Psychedelic Horseshit was a gleam in the Siltbreeze eye.  He made his own homemade sound effects, buried melodies under tape hiss, cut off those melodies at awkward moments, jumped radically between time signatures, and was generally perceived of as an “outsider artist,” despite growing up in a predominantly Jewish enclave adjacent to Beverly Hills. 

This story hasn’t rung true for a while, though.  A little over a year ago Ariel Pink broke with the narrative by releasing Can’t Hear My Eyes, a single on Mexican Summer that signaled his intention to move more towards at least mid-fi recording.  The hazy 70s vibe of the Paw Tracks reissue releases remains but is no longer obscured by idiosyncratic production.  Before Today includes a re-recording of Can’t Hear My Eyes, with minimal changes from last year, but it’s the new tracks that really shine.  Round and Round has already been released (and is amazing) as a single but Beverly Kills and Bright Lit Blue Skies are my personal standouts.  Give these a listen–in terms of atmosphere, they most remind me of Under The Bushes, Under The Stars-era Guided By Voices, filtered through instrumentation choices that leave it sounding like something you’d encounter in a dentist’s waiting room, sitting with the late afternoon sun streaming in through the vertical blinds.

• Ariel Pink: Beverly Kills Ariel Pink: Beverly Kills
• Ariel Pink: Bright Lit Blue Skies Ariel Pink: Bright Lit Blue Skies

Beach Fossils, by contrast, are a more straightforward pleasure: if Ariel Pink makes music to get high to and play D&D on the front porch, Beach Fossils makes music for the moments spent chasing down that spare towel before catching your ride to the beach.  While Beach Fossils have  never been notably lo-fi, they’ve toned down their perhaps-excessive use of vocal reverb (another tiresome detail noted by every reviewer) while retaining the killer pop hooks of their singles, all of which are also included on this LP.  Two previously unreleased standouts are below.

• Beach Fossils: Twelve Roses Beach Fossils: Twelve Roses
• Beach Fossils: Sometimes Beach Fossils: Sometimes

This week, in no particular order: tracks from Splash by Jeremy Jay, Make You Mine by Best Coast, Looking for Some Action by Bare Wires, Travellers in Space and Time by Apples in Stereo, and Hologram Jams by Jaguar Love.

Jeremy Jay:  Jeremy Jay is incredibly prolific these days–his latest album (the first of two set for release this year) is called Splash and comes out in March on K.  To be honest, Slow Dance set an unbelievably high bar that Splash mostly fails to surpass.  All the same, it’s a wonderful and increasingly consistent effort from Jeremy Jay, in which he again lays claim to a hyper-specific pop territory, uniquely anglophile and Godard-modern in execution, sprinkled with trademark synthesizers and a cold, wistful feel.  The two tracks below are prime material: Dial features baroquely-stylized vocals atop a busy, hi-hat drum and a delicate piano beat, while in Our Time, those same vocals adorn a glam rock guitar hook that’s reminisent of T. Rex at its finest. 

• Out On The HighwayOut On The Highway
• This Is Our TimeThis is Our Time

Best Coast:  Cutting to the chase, this band represents an incremental yet clear improvement upon the formula previously explored by the Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, Frankie And The Outs, et al.  Best Coast’s vocals are slightly superior to those of their compatriots, their melodies are stronger and clearer, the rhythm section is more sophisticated, and, if your eyes were closed, you might opine that the Vivian Girls haven’t crafted songs so good since Where Do You Run To.  The use of a hazy production aesthetic on these tracks, together with their mundane lyrical concerns and stoned tempo,  tweaks the Runaways obsession of Best Coast’s peers sufficently that the band can engage with their audience’s actual memories of adolescent, suburban heartache, rather than the obsessions of an imaginary teenage Joan Jett.

• Make You MineMake You Mine
• Feeling of LoveFeeling of Love

Bare Wires:  Apparently this band’s already released a full-length, which I went back and listened to after checking out their new 7″.  Looking For Some Action is definitely an improvement upon what came before, though I now know that Bare Wires has been solid for some time now.  Actually, the band has a legitimately amazing pedigree, founded by Alicia Trout from Lost Sounds (my favorite Jay Reatard side project); in case of any doubt, know that they more than deliver on any expectations that this backstory promises.  Without rambling on, Looking sounds like a superior In The Red genre album, maybe like a less stupid version of The Hunches or a less schticky King Khan.

• Looking For Some ActionLooking For Some Action

Apples In Stereo:  It isn’t as though Apples In Stereo are afraid of funk/dance music (see The Bird That You Can’t See off 2000’s The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone).  But with Travellers in Space and Time, they take things to a fantastic new level: danceable fuzz that isn’t cartoon disco or Sgt. Pepper psychedelics.  To my ears, Travellers‘ breezy, pitch-perfect charm may have its closest cousin in Ariel Pink’s Can’t Hear My Eyes 7″ on Mexican Summer: the burned-out late-70s feel of these tracks is palpable, yet doesn’t feel like a calculated effort or a nostalgia act.  In a just world, this album should portend a Flaming Lips-level future for the band, assuming they can avoid a future scoring Brady Bunch sequal soundtracks.

• Told You OnceTold You Once
• Dance FloorDance Floor
• Hey ElevatorHey Elevator

Jaguar Love:  Pitchfork’s assessment of Hologram Jams better deserves a 2.0 than the album it reviews.  This isn’t genius (were the Blood Brothers ever ”geniuses?”) but it’s tons of spastic fun, like shotgunning a Sparks Black before those spoilsports took away all the taurine.  I was going to add more details about this LP but the Sparks Black description actually summarizes things pretty nicely.  Does the now-a-duo band’s hyperative, gleefully plasticine concept get a little old over the course of however many tracks and/or albums?  Sure, and these lyrics aren’t exactly Mark E. Smith caliber.  But if you don’t care, I won’t pretend to either.  Besides the song below, please, by all that’s holy, check out the ridiculous video for the album’s best single: Started A Fire.

• A Prostitute, An AngelA Prostitute, An Angel

As a thank you, here are a couple of obscure (to me) soul tracks that I played on Saturday.  Thanks again for your support!

• They Won’t Let MeThe Unemployed (from New Orleans): They Won’t Let Me
• Cut Your Motor OffBlack Nasty (from Detroit): Cut Your Motor Off (Quit Pussyfootin’ Around)

But you know, if Mission of Burma, Polvo, and all the rest have taught us anything, it’s that there ARE second acts in showbiz, and YellowFever (one word, apparently) fully deserve theirs.

Mostly the tunes here are carried by their bassline, loping slowly through harmonized vocals that remind me of early Helium sans Tolkein imagery.  The vocals are a pleasure, beautifully enunciated, precise, and crystalline, and the musical parts are arranged to similar effect.  Despite the Vivian Girls’ imprimatur, there is none of the washed out sound so much in vogue with bands like Dum Dum Girls, Frankie and the Outs, et al.  In a world where bands are polarized between hardcore Fucked Up rants and Real Estate beach-core, YellowFever provides a welcome antidote–not a middle ground so much as a completely different musical vision.

Indeed, there’s every reason to celebrate this quasi-re-release; besides the merits of YellowFever’s individual songs, there’s a self-assurance and subtlety to the band that comes across best in large doses, and they make more of an impact on this EP than they could in their earlier, bitesized releases.  Stream a few of the best tracks here.

• HellfireHellfire
• Culver CityCulver City
• RatcatcherRatcatcher

Night Control

In case you were waiting with baited breath: Life Control defies any assumption that newfound acclaim and revised recording methods have led Smith towards anything approaching a rapprochement with the Other Music “in” section.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Night Control Sound,™ it isn’t unlike early Ariel Pink, with flashes of Women.  There’s occasional dreamy pop, lots of heroin-addict nodding and drifting, and a sea of muddy, homemade production values.  Life Control frustrates in the same way that Women (the band) frustrates, giving you a taste for perfect melody and then drifting into experimental clatter.  There’s a little less “drifting” here than on last year’s LP, and there’s always the possibility that, like Ariel Pink, a hi-fi future is in Night Control’s future.  But considering that the 21st century Rumpelstiltskin released about 5 full-lengths and received major Paw Tracks endorsement before he made the jump to 4AD, I wouldn’t expect a sugary-pop Night Control anytime in the near future. 

In any event, I have 3 songs from Life Control streaming below.  They are, by necessity, the poppiest and the punchiest: longer, more experimental tracks clock in at 6 minutes or longer and comprise untold megabytes of file size.  If you’d like to hear more, just get in touch.

• CSCS
• Take ApartTake Apart
• The WordThe Word

But thumbs down to me.  Harlem has done interviews where they claim Nirvana as their only influence, they do a mean cover of Goodbye Horses, and their album art (two seemingly homeless dudes killing it in a practice room) rocks.  Yet somehow, despite these unquestionable indicators of awesomeness, I was unprepared for the genius of this LP. 

The key to Harlem is that they’re a straight-ahead rock band:  they don’t traffic in difficult production values, math-rock time signatures, or vocals that “need to grow on you.”  They aren’t a pop band, an art-rock band, a post-rock band, or a shoegaze band.  Instead, Harlem tosses off what would be the very best hooks for bands like The Strange Boys or Ty Segall (or various other In The Red neo-garage groups), leaving behind the southern-fried, neo-hilbilly backwash that’s so popular these days as a symbol of authenticity.  Considering that Harlem is from Austin, it really makes the collard greens and black-eyed-peas schtick even harder for those other rock-and-rollers to justify. 

But, to paraphrase Reading Rainbow, the hell with what I have to say.  There are 3 great tracks for you below, listed roughly in order of my preference. Gay Human Bones in particular is an absolute monster of a track; there’s a solid crunch at the base of every guitar jangle, and the vocal harmonies (dare I say this in a post-incest world?) have shades of the Mamas and the Poppas.  

New Yorkers, I’ll see you next Wednesday at Mercury Lounge. 

• Gay Human BonesGay Human Bones
• Tila And ITila and I
• Friendly GhostFriendly Ghost

Though it’s true that Mark Ronson loves them, despite their atrocious name, maybe I went too far with the cockney joke.  If I wasn’t trying to provide you with an entertaining music column, I’d probably simply have said that the band reminds me of a Slumberland-era Sic Alps as covered by Love of Diagrams.

Like Sic Alps, Wetdog have a new release out on a major U.S. indie (Captured Tracks) that slightly tames their earlier, more distinctive sound.  Also like Sic Alps, they seem to be playing a sort of angular, shitgaze motown these days, with traces in there of riot grrl and Mika Miko.  As awesome as this sounds, I’m ambivalent towards them for the same reasons that I go back and forth on Love of Diagrams, an apparently-not-defunct band that I like(d) more for its attitude, aggressive coldness, and live show than for its memorable individual songs.  I’m all for music built on a solid, rumbling drive and a no-wave aesthetic, but it’s a little jarring in a band with as many pop tendencies as Wetdog.

I’ve attached a bunch of mp3s below (actually m4a’s, which I suppose means something slightly different) so that you can form your own opinion.  Happy 2010!

• Napolean’s PlanNapolean’s Plan
• Steal a CarSteal a Car
• Nancy RileyNancy Riley
• Stumpy TorsoStumpy Torso
• Long Long Time to GoLong Long Time to Go
• Lower LegLower Leg

p.s. No quibbling about the release date of Frauhaus!  I know it came out in November in the UK and see some mentions that it came out earlier here as well, but Itunes and Emusic claim it was released last week digitally, so the hell with you all.

2010 is finally starting to crank into high gear: January brings with it yet another release from my favorite band in high school, a second full-length from Vampire Weekend (whose music leaves me cold but whose fashion sense I cannot help but applaud), and god knows what else.   Beach House and Love Is All, I think?

Since I’m swearing off negativity for the new year, let’s skip over these new releases and devote one last post to “guten times 2009.”  Specifically, a couple of bands whose work I slept on last year:  Screaming Females‘ Power Move and Christmas Island’s 7″ on Captured Tracks and full length, Blackout Summer, on In The Red.

There’s not much to say about Christmas Island in terms of stunning originality, but there’s certainly lots to enjoy.  To use a Disneyworld metaphor (as a child, Christmas and Disneyworld were pretty much my big things, along with dinosaurs, astronauts, and firefighters), Christmas Island forms the perfect frozen Dole Whip, swirling Fergus and Geronimo and early Dodos in a lo-fi, Siltbreeze waffle cone.  I’ve uploaded a couple of their songs below and, like any good pusher, can promise more to those who “ask nicely.”

Screaming Females, to go in a totally opposite direction, combine classic stoner-rock chug (think a more sophisticated version of tourmates JEFF the Brotherhood) with a tremendous, Gracie-Slick-gone-Chainsaw-Records-riot-girl vocalist.  This sounds pedestrian on paper but, I SWEAR, it manages to raise them beyond the usual 70s-shag-carpet cliches.  As a side note, this band isn’t exactly slept-on in the wider world, having been tapped to open for Arctic Monkeys last year.  Anyway, I’ve also got Screaming Females mp3s for you here, same deal as above.

So please enjoy.  Next time we’ll do something more topical.  I promise.

–guten MORGAN

Christmas Island:

• NineteenNineteen
• Bed IslandBed Island

Screaming Females:

• Halfway DownHalfway Down
• I Believe in EvilI Believe in Evil
• Starving DogStarving Dog
• Sour GrapesSour Grapes

But you know what?  I don’t have much more to write about their sound than I did over this last summer.  The vocal sounds are a little cleaner now and the distortion is falling away, though not as dramatically as on Ariel Pink’s magnificent Can’t Hear My Eyes single last winter.  Check out Youth and Wide Awake, streaming on the Beach Fossils myspace page, and Time, available for download right here: right here  The band (no longer a one-man show) plays a number of NYC-area shows over the next month or two, performing most of them with The Beets and Christmas Island, and a couple of lucky gigs with German Measles (see you on the 10th, 13th, or 20th, kiddoes).

Sorry for the short post, but that’s all you’ll get from me until a good, proper full-length is released this year.

EXCEPT! By popular demand, I also include below the chili recipe that I went with on New Years day.  It’s roughly adapted from a Tyler Florence recipe that I thought was too smoky and modified accordingly.  It makes a huge quantity of chili, so you may want to halve it or something.  I think it was a success.  I’m calling it Morgan’s Meaty Treat 5-Alarm Chili™ .

Ingredients:

• 3 pounds beef shoulder (cubed by butcher)
• 1 box whole foods beef broth
• 3 medium onions (diced)
• 6 garlic cloves (halved)
• 2 jalapenos (chopped)
• 1 red pepper (chopped)
• 3 tablespoons chili powder
• 2 tablespoons ground coriander
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1 tablespoon dried oregano
• 1 teaspoon mustard powder
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon cayenne
• 1 teaspoon adobo powder
• Dash of cinnamon
• 1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 1 (12-oz) can or bottle pilsener
• 2 (15 ounce) cans kidney beans
• 1 (15 ounce) can pinto beans
• 1/4 cup cornmeal

Directions:

• Salt and pepper meat and place in stock pot.
• Add broth and enough additional water to cover meat with an inch to spare.
• Bring to a boil at medium heat and skim any foam from surface.
• Mix in all remaining ingredients except cornmeal and beans.
• Simmer approx. 2 hours until meat is tender.
• Remove meat and shred (discarding excess fat) while simultaneously adding beans and cornmeal to sauce and reducing.
• When ready, return meat to pot and simmer chili approx. 1-2 hours, stirring regularly and seasoning as desired with dried red chili flakes.