The rundown of my favorite songs of 2006 continues…

“On The Radio” | Regina Spektor | Begin to Hope | Sire | 6/13/06 | 3:22 | buy disc/mp3s
As documented earlier, I got past some initial prejudice about Regina Spektor and came to really dig Begin to Hope. “On The Radio,” with its bouncy beat, plucked strings and amiable feel, was the first Spektor tune to work its way into my heart.

The “November Rain” reference might’ve really fallen flat–too much kitsch not enough Soviet?–but it’s sung so lovingly that it’s clearly more an homage than a slight to St. Axl, who’s had a hard enough time this decade without indie rock chanteuses piling on. I mean, we all love GNR a little, don’t we?

By the same token, a young woman trying to take on the totality of life and experience in song (”this is how it works…”) risks awful, awful pretension. “On The Radio” isn’t the even the only song on this record to swing big like this, proffering words of wisdom.

Maybe I’ve just been thinking too much about life and death this year, or maybe I’ve been brainwashed by Spektor’s pixie-ish charms, but I love her ambition, and I think it’s pulled off with the right amount of humor and humility.

“LoveStoned/I Think She Knows (Interlude)” | Justin Timberlake | Futuresex/Lovesounds | Jive/Zomba | 9/12/06 | 7:24 | buy disc/mp3s
Sometimes it’s a little tough for me loving Justin Timberlake’s music. I end up interrogating myself. Am I listening because he’s sort of the approved pop star of the undie intelligencia (except when he ain’t)? Is my fave-of-year nod to “LoveStoned/I Think She Knows” some sort of contrarian thing, when everyone else is bananas for “My Love”?

I plead guilty, give up, and submit to you that “LoveStoned,” if you can bring yrself to forgive a goofy lyric here or there, comes the closest in its loose-limbed feel and almost improvised spirit to rekindling the charms of Justified without simply rehashing old territory.

Let me further submit, that “I Think She Knows,” and seriously perk up those ears around 4:55(!), is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve heard this year. That vaguely indie-ish processed guitar, the borderline glitch-pop beat, something about the combination fucking floors me. It’s almost too much when the spacey keyboard comes in around 5:42.

It’s been said better elsewhere, but dude’s come a hell of a long way, and certainly far enough to pack away the cheese of his boy band past. I’ll be paying attention when his next joint hits.

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.

Elvis Costello & The Attractions “High Fidelity” (Live)

So this week PCR turned into High Fidelity (just in time for the Broadway musical!). I don’t know why, but you got a Spoon break-up song in between little remembrances of (the end of) summer love, an unrequited crush and recovery from the dissolution of my first really significant relationship.

Really, I’m gonna try to knock that shit off.

Anyway, I hope you’ll pardon yr cruise director, Capt. Obvious here, for posting today… well, you see it above. Elvis C. is a god of sorts to most of us music nerds and all of us geek rockers.

If you go back to the book that spawned the movie that spawned the musical that spawned a chorus of groans… It was, appropriately enough, basically a novelization of the Costello catalog, drawing out especially his “love is war” theme. (How did Pat Benatar get to sing the definitive song on the topic anyway?) And High Fidelity the book, for its flaws, nailed all the little details of music nerd life and worked its way into a sort of modern canon, as well as many of our hearts.

Which all, actually, is off-topic from what I wanted to discuss about this stripped-down live version of “High Fidelity,” taken from the 2003 reissue of 1980 E.C. masterwork Get Happy!! OK, I still like the studio version better. The concert take lacks the headlong drive and Motownisms of the fixed document–key charms of most of the tunes on that record–but vastly expands its moodiness.

So why post? What I’m finding fascinating about this take on the song is the interplay between Elvis’ vocal performance and Bruce Thomas’ bass playing. Maybe as a sometimes bassist m’self I tend to listen for this stuff, but really the bass fiddle is right there in yr face. This has been mixed like an early Attractions record so, in terms of prominence in the mix, it goes vocals, bass, drums, organ, guitar.

(A little funny that Elvis and Bruce T. have built up a lasting animosity, given the great musical service the bassman’s provided over the decades–but then again maybe not, since the Attractions started out as strangers, hired hands.)

Anyhow, before I ramble myself way way way past yr attention span, I want to point up the varied, almost improvised feel of Thomas’ playing on this song. I hear uptight funk, nods to classic pop bounce, dub cutouts, swooping, dramatic figures that suggest something epic and, starting around 2:12, call-and-response between Elvis’ chant and Thomas’ pluckings.

The drums set up a frame, the vocals communicate a text, the keys seep mood and peal out flourishes, the guitar growls a white noise wash… but here the bass is the meat and muscle tying it all together.

Get Happy!! at Newbury Comics.

Submarine “Pollen”

I’m reaching back to the dorm room days here. That was a time of Anglophilia for me, at least partially out of lingering sentiment for a big summer love I’d had with a British woman (Where are you now, Becky C?).

Picking up the Volume mini-mag/compilation series on import was one way I indulged this tendency. It was a pretty reliable source for rare tracks by U.S. alt-rockers and introductions to U.K. NME faves, G-d bless their poor, doomed hearts, as well as the breathless hyperbole and cheekiness we expect from the Brit music press.

Submarine¹ was possibly my favorite discovery from that time. This English outfit combined the languor and softness of the slowcore pioneered by Galaxie 500 with the wallpaper/earbleed guitar of shoegazers like My Bloody Valentine. Pardon the pin-the-comparison-on-the-rock-band, but the one thing about their Volume interview I remember is that these guys pretty much copped to their influences, with maybe a nod to Amerindie freaks like the Flaming Lips.

A decade-plus later, the music still holds up for me. For instance, we have “Pollen,” off 1994 singles comp Kiss Me Till Your Ears Burn Off. It was the Volume track, the first song I heard by these guys.

Why it was relevant to me in 199_: The “I’m tired of always feeling the same” line spoke to my youthful ennui. (Don’t worry, guys, somehow I survived.) And its “I really wanna see you again” refrain made it the soundtrack to a semester or two of pinings for the aforementioned summer love.

But bittersweet nostalgia held aside, the song is trippy and epic, repetitive to the point of being meditative. “Pollen” has all these wonderful elements, and each would be enough in and of itself to sort of make the song for me.

I love the layers of stompbox guitarmageddon and the shy, mushmouthed vocals. Then there’s the melodic bass part that actually holds the arrangement together, a legacy of New Order bass hero Peter Hook passed down through Naomi Y. of Galaxie 500. The chimes, the whistling feedback that pops in prettily, the vaguely Eastern drone–this could’ve been a fussy, disjointed mess, but the pieces came together organically and instead it’s a gorgeous mess.

I actually spent a little more than my usual five minutes of Google research in prepping this post, because these guys have disappeared so completely that if I didn’t have the discs to show for it I’d almost think I imagined ‘em.

Thank garsh for Wikipedia, ’cause now I know that Submarine split up, then reformed more or less as Jetboy DC–who in turn disappeared even more completely with even less evidence of ever existing.

Main Submariner Neil Haydock may now be a chef. Bass fiddler Rob Harron apparently traveled back in time and became a silent movie star. Drummer Rob Havis (a.k.a. “Ponk” and no, I’m not kidding) soldiers on with something call Suns of the Tundra.

Shine on, you crazy diamonds, and thanks for two platters worth of insane beauty and psych rock power.

Kiss Me Till Your Ears Burn Off at Gemm.
S/T at Amazon.

The Mountain Goats “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton” (Live)

OK, sorry that this week, maybe this month, has turned into PCR Featuring The Usual Suspects of Indie Rock. Maybe I lack imagination or maybe the holidays are making me return to my musical equivalent of comfort food. (A Sebadoh post can only be fast upon the heels…)

Anyway, archive.org says that back in 2002 my About page read, in part:

Please don’t blame the man, but PCR is more than partially inspired by John Darnielle’s zine, Last Plane to Jakarta, which really every one should read. I’m sure I’ll be talking soon about his most recent album under the Mountain Goats moniker, All Hail West Texas, probably the album that’s meant the most to me this year.

It occurred to me to follow up on this, since we’re almost at 2007. That’s about my typical turaround time on plans. So over the course of the next _____, from time to time I’ll come back to All Hail, a concept album made by one man, his acoustic guitar and an obsolete boombox, which nonetheless got me through and over my first real, major break-up. I’ll try to minimize the use of the phrases “tape hiss,” “yelp,” “frenetic strumming,” “genius,” but please don’t hold me to that.

The lead-off track, “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton,” is a heartbreaking wolf disguised in novelty-song sheepskin. I mean, death metal is no laughing matter for Darnielle, right, but there’s a jokiness here… if I have to explain it, it’s not funny, right?

The story of Jeff and Cyrus, the duo who make up the eponymous and ultimately untitled band, is about how the world can beat you down. Or at least about how the powers that be in West Texas doesn’t see the greater good of teens indulging naive ambition–really, are there any death metal bands who can afford to travel via Lear jet?–and a little good old fashioned Devil’s Music–ah, those damning pentagram stencils.

But it’s mostly setup for the bitter prospect of revenge, the Moment that so often gives me goosebumps, Darnielle crying, “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream/don’t expect him to thank or forgive you.” What’s better is that it’s followed by instant catharsis, albeit a promise that I often doubt: “The best ever death metal band out of Denton/will in time both outpace and outlive you.” I can’t be so sure that Jeff and Cyrus will triumph. But I’m a cynic.

The closing refrain is, then, no joke, but as anthemic as the Goats get, an invitation to pump fists along with these young men cast aside by society. “Hail Satan, tonight,” indeed.

And you have the birth of a little masterpiece and fan fave. A note on the attached mp3, a recording made by someone else of the recent secret Mountain Goats show in Claremont, Cali: I’m generally very anti singing along with performers at acoustic shows, at least until they invite that audience participation (which, OK, Darnielle does around 1:40), but for the reasons enumerated above, the singalong–and the devil’s horn salute–are very very necessary.

Can I get a “fuck yeah”? I think I can.

All Hail West Texas at Target.