Day three of my 2006 faves rundown…

“Kick, Push” | Lupe Fiasco | Food & Liquor | Atlantic | 9/19/06 | 4:13 | buy disc/mp3s
Yes, this is the token hip hop inclusion. To review: yr humble editor is an old fart when it comes to the boom bap. Sorry, Mom. Sorry, G-d.

And I’m less concerned with “Kick, Push” as a document of the skater boi life than I am with its larger subjects: otherness, coming of age and those beautifully tentative moments of new love.

If I’m wrong on this please leave examples in the comment section, but it’s kind of a minor miracle to find a rapper talking about love in a way that’s neither sappy nor pornographic, and even, y’know, seems to recognize that a chica might be on equal footing with a dude, a person rather than the embodiment of one side or the other of the chickenhead/golddigger dialectic.

In other words, in a way that’s real.

With the not-so-controversial generalizations out of the way, let me sing the praises of the effortlessness of “Kick, Push.” It’s in no way tossed off or half-ass, but still cruises (yeah) along on a catchy horn hook and a breakbeat that feels straight outta my beloved Golden Age.

What’s more, Lupe F. doesn’t sound like he’s pushing any agenda other than repping for a life that means something to him. He’s certainly not frontin’ like he’s hard or overdoing it with wordplay, etc., etc. He’s just flowin’.

And that, my friend, is the definition of cool around these parts.

“There Goes My Outfit” (Acoustic) | The Dears | Gang of Losers | Arts & Crafts | 10/3/06 | 3:57 | buy disc/mp3s
This burner by Canada’s top Britpop band turned out to be my heartbreak beat of the year. It nailed me on listen one, and hasn’t really let go. I prefer the acoustic take that’s a “bonus” to U.S. listeners ahead of the full-band version on the proper record. (Really, what did you expect from me?)

I can’t say I’m clear on what exactly Murray Lightburn, the main Dear, is getting at line-by-line, but the feelings coalesce in the grainy widescreen. It’s in the words, in the forlorn riff that opens each verse, in the forcefulness of his vocal delivery. We’re talking breakup, betrayal and new lows by the second.

“Outfit” is more than a weeper though. There’s a push-pull between woe (”clearly this isn’t my life”) and a palpable, almost nasty defiance (”just admit/I’ve got you by the lapels”–a great line).

But weeper wins in the end, and this was the ace for tears in beers in this dying year.

“The Moon” | Cat Power | The Greatest | Matador | 1/24/06 & 9/12/06 | 3:45 | buy disc/mp3s
Chan Marshall, she who is Cat Power, made a record so good Matador had to release it twice this year!

(OK, in short, it was a revolutionary kind of damage control after a drink/drug/depression breakdown scrapped the initial tour to promote The Greatest. Once Marshall cleaned up–for a tour that wowed even naysayers–the label’s all, “Wait folks! It’s a new release again!”)

The parenthetical is extremely germane to my reaction to the record, to this song. Even though Marshall was probably in a rough place when it was written and recorded, it evokes for me her turnaround, something that really gives me hope. (I hope the newfound health and happiness stays with her.)

But, hey, the music stands up on its own. Backed by Al Green’s supporting players, Marshall pumped out a parcel of songs that pack rhythm and blues, coming on cool like summer music, but aching like autumn. “The Moon”–an appreciation of the satellite’s permanence and indifference overlooking man’s hustle, bustle and demise–stuck with me the hardest, but the whole disc simply kicks ass.

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.

(more…)

The Secret Stars “Your Life To Live”

In the hope of sending you off to yr weekend in a mood full of both hope and wist(?), here’s some bedroom-recording whispers from the Secret Stars, the now-defunct Boston boy-girl duo interlinked with more rocking concerns like Karate and Ted Leo/Pharmacists.

“Your Life To Live,” off their 1996 self-titled tape, floats along on a sweet love vibe, intimating the dazed infatuation of what sounds to me like the early days of a relationship. Geoff Farina breathes out velvety but emotive lead vocals over smudged acoustic strums and subtle bass accompaniment from Jodi Buonanno.

Even for all the wonder, there’s an edge of anxiety, a sense of capturing a feeling that could fade or a good thing that could slip from yr grasp. The chorus projects the object of affection later possibly on the movie screen rather than in the next seat in the theater, mediated in the future where she’s immediate now. I’m also not sure what to make of a song title that’s more at home as part of a kiss-off rather than a lovestruck paean.

But of course everywhere else, the song overflows with her presence.

This might fall somewhere into the region that’s oft-derided as “twee”–and OK, this tune is totally cute. I was gonna argue that there’s something ballsy in the heart-on-sleeve quality, the torn-valentine earnestness, the subcult hat-tips. But when I think it over the claim feels kinda anachronistic.

I’m fumbling around here, but the sunny yet autumnal feel, and all of the above signifiers, sort of mark this as a document of something we’ve lost in the Interweb age, just dawning at that time. I’m in love with the modern world, but, hey, y’all know I’m also prone to nostalgia.

I could never figure out the handshake–I was more of a spectator and solitary fan–but there was still a sense of inclusiveness for the excluded. Enlisting, through dedication to one or another aesthetic, in a community of outsiders. Shrimper cassettes as membership badge to a secret club. Believe it or not, there was a time when some folks could still say “alternative” without snickering or “indie” without pausing to pick apart that shorthand for all its emptiness and inconsistencies. (The death of that naivete isn’t all bad.)

(There’s a whole other critique we could dive into–way off-track–about buying into an identity, etc., but it’s totally unfair to throw the weight of an entire era, or really of an evergreen pop culture conundrum, on the unassuming heads of TSS and their small-scope song of crushed-out joy.)

Maybe what I’m saying is that the Secret Stars were letting you into their world with these songs about their lives and their friends. There’s some presumption that it would resonate, that yr concerns were in some ways like theirs, yr group of friends like theirs. On second thought that sounds like, I dunno, blogging or vlogging or YouTubing or…

So maybe let’s just talk about a young man, singing in amazement at the gift he’s been given, the perfect girl.

TSS at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

Jon Brion “CITGO Sign” (Demo)

Today, off of a widely-traveled set of bootlegs from the early 90s, we have a demo of “CITGO Sign,” my favorite composition by L.A. pop producer, film-score composer and musical polyglot Jon Brion. I’ve heard this one live probably half a dozen times in the old days, when I used to hit his Friday night gig at Largo–OK, I was the one shouting out the request–and I hope you can hear the magic of this tune beneath the iffy sound quality.

The word “favorite” above is really a way of shoehorning this into the subjective and staying under control. Thing is, I’m convinced that this is objectively the best song the guy’s written, and maybe the best he ever will write.

Given that this is pop music, so totally ephemeral and even maybe insignificant, I’ve always winced at the phrase “criminally overlooked” used to describe some band or cute little ditty. But! I think it’s criminal that this song has never seen it to official release.

The opening 12-string lick shows up and sets the mood, but the song doesn’t fuck around too long before kicking in with some vocals. The verse melody is just the right kind of sing-song catchy. The chorus implies Rock before kicking into something swirling and dramatic. The bridge ups the ante and the outro gets epic for exactly 40 seconds, fadeout inclusive, not a second too short or too long for perfect pop.

Aside from its many formal/structural virtues, “CITGO Sign” nails me every goddamn time because it’s concerned with new love, and hits its mark in describing or suggesting every piece of it: hesitation, relief, awkwardness, comfort, especially open-hearted wonder, the whole gamut. There’s the right mixture of light and dark even–the despondence of the lonely at the start, the tinge of doubt in the final mini-verse…

Maybe the coup de grace is the Brilliant Use of the Mundane. How do you make a gas station romantic? Well, this is how the human brain, and heart, works. Cues, symbols and tokens without any inherent value of their own are imbued with an entire universe of emotion–just because That’s Where It Happened. Brion would cover this theme on the title track to 2001’s Meaningless, his only(!) proper solo album to date. But whereas that tune, not shabby I’d say, was an essay on the topic, “CITGO Sign” is a work of genius with the message wrapped inside, not painted across the face of it, and thus superior.

And with my orientation toward nostalgia, fake and otherwise, this touches my olde East Coasting heart. Yeah, I’ve never held hands with anyone by a CITGO sign. But there was a CITGO station not 15 minutes from my childhood home in Western Mass, and you don’t see many of those in my adopted L.A. home. Knowing that Brion grew up in Connecticut, within an hour of my old haunts, and cut his teeth in the Boston music scene, well, the affinity’s there.

Jon Brion music at iTunes.