This is a week for reflection about the year almost ended. Thus, my 2006 round-up, mightily constrained by my budget, listening patterns and mood… It’ll be a few songs a day, no particular order, other than starting today with music I discovered through other blogs. Thanks for reading, and enjoy…

“Trains To Brazil” | Guillemots | From the Cliffs EP | Verve/Fantastic Plastic | 3/14/06 | 4:03 | buy disc/mp3s
The backlash may’ve already overcome folks’ affection for this U.K.-based outfit, who swing from some fairly tiresome experimentation to total maximum pop bliss.

As you might’ve guessed, this one comes from the pop side of the Guillemots spectrum, wonderfully recalling that sweet spot where Dexy’s and the Cure overlap. As peppy a song of mourning as you’re likely to find, it’s buoyed by soaring vocals, insistent rhythm work and some red hot horn action.

“Trains To Brazil” served me regularly as a nice counterbalance to my morose existential dread issues. What I’m sayin’: “Can’t you live and be thankful yr here/see, it could be you tomorrow or next year.”

“On A Freezing Chicago Street” | Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s | The Dust of Retreat | Artemis | 3/28/06 | 3:02 | buy disc/mp3s
Boston’s Indy’s own Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s make a throwback style of indie pop that’s both wistful and gritty. Holding aside the egregiously long, Wes Anderson-referencing band name and occasional mean-spirited moment, their music feels pretty comforting to me. They sometimes bring to mind the best moments of Buffalo Tom’s fragile side–Buffalo Tom were awesome, watch this space for evidence later on–but with prettier arrangements.

To continue our theme of death (etc.), the part of this song that particularly connects for me is the borderline accusation, “And Sarah screams, ‘Yr every breath is a gift./If you weren’t so selfish then you might want to live.’ ”

It’s funny to find an affirmation in a lowlife character study, but I takes what I can where I gets it. That’s the way it shakes down sometimes.

“Oregon Girl” | Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin | Broom | Polyvinyl | 10/24/06 | 2:25 | buy disc/mp3s
So yeah, about egregiously long band names… All is forgiven, though, because “Oregon Girl” is a propulsive, sugary piece of pop/rock. Shy-guy vocals go anthemic and emotive (but not emo) in the service of a naive little song of devotion to a long-distance love.

Basically, this is the kind of thing Rivers Cuomo would’ve written before he was abducted by aliens around 1998, so I’m gonna guess it’d go over in a big way on Tralfamadore too.

“Corazon” | Bishop Allen | January EP | self-release | c. 1/31/06 | 4:43 | buy disc/mp3s
I repped for this one before, but “Corazon” stuck with me all year, standing up to obsessive “repeat button” play, so it belongs on this list.

Bishop Allen saved the best for first in their “EP of the month” 06 project, setting a love song to a piano against some strolling moderate rock that goes big in the right parts.

Anybody who can so intensely sympathize with objects facing obsolescence–and indeed, in various corners the music industry, the compact disc as a medium and even the rock band as a format have been eulogized lately; but hey, we all expire eventually, right?–well, they’re alright by me.

Spoon “The Book I Write”
Wreckless Eric “Whole Wide World”
Stranger Than Fiction soundtrack at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

This is a little different.

I want to talk about a movie, Stranger Than Fiction, I saw over the weekend, which is my favorite film this year. I think you should see it too, although maybe this post is more for people who’ve already seen the movie and can tell me how they felt about it.

I’m gonna start with the music and sorta ramble from there.

There will be very, very spoily spoilers that give everything away and will make you sad if yr the kind of person who doesn’t want to know that Vader is Luke’s father before going to see Empire or that the butler did it, etc.

On both counts consider yrselves forewarned.

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The Bee Gees “Craise Finton Kirk Royal Academy Of Arts”

I’m all false starts today, and finally settled on sharing a Bee Gees tune. These aren’t the Bros. Gibb of white suits and testicularly-constricted falsetto–although, for the record, the official Paper Covers Rock policy states that disco does not, in fact, suck.

In 1967 on the aptly titled 1st, it seems the boys’ highest ambition was to make a really good psych pop record mimicking their heroes the Beatles.

It worked.

Because “Craise Finton” seems to be riding a bouncy, old-timey vibe–call it dancehall/vaudeville–I’m guessing they had the Cute One in mind as a musical template. However, the lyrics artfully, if obliquely, connect the dots between “Nowhere Man” and T.S. Eliot.

All this and a chorus more or less guaranteed to rebound around your brain for the rest of the day. It’s not exactly a revolutionary technique, marrying sad lyrics to happy music–c.f. 60% of Motown–but there’s still something fun about that essential irony.

Although a label like “sad” is a tad bit simplistic. If I’m reading correctly what’s going on here, Mr. Life of Quiet Desperation has shuffled off this mortal coil. He’s travelling on as planned “with a mere step in the mountain to a light.” And why else can’t anyone find him?

The afterlife, it turns out, is a big upgrade for him.

Ah, my shaken faith; I wish I could be so hopeful in contemplating mortality.

The Studio Albums 1967-1968 on Amazon.

“And if a ten ton truck/ kills the both of us/ to die by your side/ the pleasure and the privilege is mine.”
– “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths

“Heartwarming” isn’t the right word, but there’s a certain triumphant feeling that comes from a really catchy pop tune about death. It takes that tension between happy music and sad text that made stuff like the Supremes not just great but also interesting, and turning it up to 11. We’re not just whistling past the graveyard here, folks. For a moment we’re figuratively staring down that great shadow of mortality that haunts all our days, grinning and flipping him the bird. And in more than a few cases, the songs also have something to say about life, why it’s essential to embrace it.

The morose/poppy thing resonates with me personally because I’ve been troubled by panic attack-level heebie jeebies ever since childhood whenever my mind strays to contemplations of the big nothing for too long. Despite a good Catholic upbringing, I just can’t get my head around the concept of an end to this life we know. And the prospect, revealing probably my lack of faith, that my soul and identity will just come to a screeching halt, oblivion… it’s horrible, and it opens up this awful chasm before me that is beyond my courage.

So I’d like to talk briefly about a few of my favorite pop songs about death of the past few years.

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