I spent most of last night watching Fiona Apple performance videos on YouTube. She’s so remarkable live, so intelligent and brave, that the performances shine on despite the long-lost layers of video quality that the clips may have had upon their original airings. Nevertheless, it should be a crime for her Vevo page to carry the official video for “Paper Bag” — directed by P.T. Anderson during their late ’90s romance, and featuring adorable choreography, kids in Dick Tracy suits and Fiona Apple smiling — in anything less than 1080p. I’d never seen it; until last night, I didn’t know it existed. A few more Apple hits from my video surfing after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

In the interests of sharing what I was listening to in between clicking “x” on Soundcloud pages and taking cranky notes, here are the pre-2011 albums I gave the most spins to (or discovered!) this year. All tremendous stuff and almost all of them are better than any 2011 albums.

Standard Fare – The Noyelle Beat (2010)
An album so great and life-affirming that I felt compelled to tweet about it nearly every time I put it on. (I suppose that’s damning with faint praise.) Turns out we’ve been doing emo wrong all these years — it took the Brits to nail it. If you’ve heard better guitar tones than the opening chords of “Love Doesn’t Just Stop,” I don’t want to know about it.
>> Listen on Spotify

The Softies - Winter Pageant (1997)
Decided after all these years that this is my favorite album ever, narrowly topping Elliott Smith’s Roman Candle. Unstoppably gorgeous and more rewarding than ever after literally hundreds of plays.
>> Listen on Spotify

Steely Dan – Aja (1977)
I’m not sure when all my friends decided it’d be a great idea to get into Aja by Steely Dan. But I couldn’t be happier that we did. The unironic Dan revival never quite peaked like the Hall and Oates one did, but that’s fine — Aja is for the discerning. Full disclosure: I sang “Peg” at vacation karaoke at the silliest bar on Catalina island and it was a top five moment of my year.
>> Listen on Spotify

Todd Rundgren – Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren (1971)
Why didn’t my dad tell me about this?
>> Listen on Spotify

Andrew Bird – Noble Beast (2009)
You can’t approach Noble Beast looking for hooks. It’s a feast of aesthetics, a record you have to absorb on a good stereo with a warm cat in your lap. I shrugged it off when it came out (thought the songwriting was too loose), but that was a mistake.
>> Buy from Fat Possum

Harvey Williams – Rebellion (1994) and California (1999)
I went through a period of genuine obsession for two or three weeks with these records. Sentimental, funny and occasionally quietly mean-spirited, a weirdly refreshing twee rarity. Rebellion is the slightly better of the two.
>> Listen on Spotify

Mighty Clouds – Mighty Clouds (2010)
Mighty Clouds is one of those records you put on when you don’t know what to put on and then you realize you’ve played it 20 times. Fred Thomas is a straight-up pop genius on par with Kevin Barnes, Miles Kurosky and whoever you’d like to pit him against. If you are the owner of a Girls record, you should probably buy 10 copies of this.
>> Listen on Spotify

Always – Thames Valley Leather Club and Other Stories (1988)
A straight-up lost classic from the New Wave era. Doesn’t really sound like anything else. Unhinged yet wonderfully tuneful. Thanks to the remarkable blog Bigger Splashes for pointing the way.
>> Listen on Spotify

Buddy – Alterations and Repairs (2007)
Lovely proto-Death Cab sadcore. Came out five years too late for anyone to notice. I found the band in someone’s SXSW 2011 write-up, despite the fact that no one else seemed to know they’d been there.
>> Listen on Spotify

Curren$y – Pilot Talk I and II (2010)
Nobody put out better rap albums than this in 2011. Why did we not spend the entire year talking about “Breakfast”?
>> Listen on Spotify

The Long Winters – Discography
I renewed my appreciation of the brilliantly lyric’d power-pop band this year in anticipation of their new album, which is currently hiding out in the indie witness protection program. Even their apparent filler songs are tiny slices of genius.
>> Listen on Spotify

(Photo: Andrew Bird by David Greenwald)

For all the chatter over the state of music discovery lately (Jim, preach!), some things never change: your favorite bands have favorite bands. I looked up ‘80s underdogs Felt entirely on the recommendation of The Clientele, hoping to find an antecedent to the London band’s spectral folk-rock. In Forever Breathes The Lonely Word, I got something else – a missing link between New Wave and the birth of the twee movement.

The 1986 album, the Birmingham band’s sixth in as many years, was released just a year before the launch of Sarah Records and within months of The Smith’s The Queen Is Dead, both touchstones in Felt’s sound. Like their colleagues in The Smiths and, to a lesser extent, The Church, Felt’s music is founded on layered guitar melodies of varying bombast backed by glimmering chords, a template later further simplified and embraced by a generation or two of indie-pop acts. While the synth tones should ring a bell for Belle & Sebastian fans, singer Lawrence Hayward’s voice is another story, a dorky, romantic warble that’s equal parts Buddy Holly and Lou Reed. Song for song, the album’s remarkably consistent — and remarkably great. How do records like this one become lost in the mists of time so easily? Friends: get Lonely.

Felt – “Down But Not Out Yet”: stream

(Forever Breathes The Lonely Word was released by Creation in 1986; stream it on Spotify)

In acknowledgement of the tragedy’s 10-year anniversary, I’ll share my memory of the day, if only because it’s music-related. I was in high school; my dad was driving me to first period and I was, of course, running late. (In the last decade, the rest of my life has changed entirely. But not that.) During the previous few days, the local classic rock station had been playing Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” in the minutes before 8 a.m. and I turned on the radio, anxious to hear it. Instead, we were interrupted by a broadcaster talking about planes and Twin Towers and confusion. My dad, uncertain, let me out of the car and I went to class. I did not listen to Led Zeppelin that day. But when I do, that’s the moment I go back to, far from the darkest depths of Mordor and somewhere much more sad and strange.

Photo by PaulTCowan

You could call “In This Home on Ice” a forerunner of the current edition of 1980s revivalism. Its guitar chords melt into the sides of headphones like microwaved gummy bears, the occasional lead bits emerge just long enough to proclaim their love for Johnny Marr and fade back into the mix; the only sign the ’90s happened at all is Alec Ounsworth’s gloriously ragged vocal. But it’s all enough to separate Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and their abandoned potential from pretty much all of a half-decade of ensuing synth-pop. Joke’s on the band, though: the Strokes got to the chord progression first with “Someday.” So maybe this is ’70s revival? It’ll sound great forever. (And probably better on vinyl on June 14, when it gets remastered and reissued. The band’s latest, Hysterical, is due in September.)

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – “In This Home On Ice”: mp3

(Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was released in 2005)

The thing I love best about Todd Rundgren, chosen from a long and competitive list, is his heart. In “Hello It’s Me,” his best and most popular song, he offers a fresh start to a wronged lover: “It’s important to me that you know you are free,” he bird-croons on the chorus. “I never want to make you change for me.” But the song’s best moment comes when he adds, almost as an afterthought, “I’ll come around every once in a while / or if I ever need a reason to smile / and spend the night if you think I should,” as horns bleat suggestively. In the soft-rock ’70s, plenty of masculine sincerity could be considered an easy cover for stoned skinny dudes trying to get laid, but Rundgren presents his feelings, amorous and otherwise, with credibility. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1999 and 2000, the years I began devouring indie rock as ravenously as my part-time job’s paycheck and a 56k modem would allow, I spent a lot of time listening to “The Chris Carter Mess,” a weekly three-hour block on the now-defunct Southern California radio station Y107. Unlike the Shins, it changed my life. It turned me on to everything from David Bowie to Fiona Apple, and a lot of really incredible sad bastard ballads in between: Hefner’s “Hymn for the Alcohol,” Luna’s “Dear Diary,” and a number of songs that are still my all-time favorites.

I found this song later, probably on an Audiogalaxy user group — I don’t remember the exact details, but essentially you’d download like-minded people’s recommended songs via P2P. (I found another gem, Bright Eyes’ “No Lies, Just Love,” there as well. Also a pre-fame coffeehouse Jason Mraz jam, but that’s neither here nor there. If you think there’s no serendipity on the Internet, you’re probably a real fun guy at parties.) At any rate, it occurred to me to track it down last night. I hadn’t listened to it in 8 years, but it still splits my heart right in two. Bands don’t really make music like this any more — fragile and pretty without having to dive into Olympic pools of reverb or even acknowledge that pop music continued after the Zombies and the Left Banke. If this song’s any indication, it could’ve quit while it was ahead.

In the late ’90s, I was listening heavily to Owsley’s self-titled debut, Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn, Ben Folds Five’s The Autobiography of Reinhold Messner and whatever sad, weird pop I could get my hands on. Harvey Williams’ California would’ve blown my mind back then, but over a decade later (I’m old! Fuuuuuck!), it sounds no less revelatory. Everything about California is pretty much wonderful: Williams’ sensitive, British Ben Folds vocals; the Burt Bacharach-influenced songwriting; the songs’ spare, piano-driven arrangements; the weirdly ’80s room sound; the happy music paired with pained melodies. It seems simple enough, but it’s nearly impossible to find music that nails this sort of thing. I feel lucky every time I do. (It should be noted that Williams was/is an incredibly prolific twee journeyman – read up on him here.)

Harvey Williams – “Cindy’s Been and Gone”: mp3

(California is out of print)