Happy New Year

I hope you enjoyed the mammoth christmas posting as much I enjoyed compiling it. The footnote is this collecion of new year music which, mercifully, is much smaller:

The predictable one: Death Cab For Cutie - The New Year

The old one that you've probably forgotten how good it is: Breeders - New Year

The one that applies to both Christmas and new year: O' Jays - Christmas Ain't Christmas, New Years Ain't New Years Without The One You Love

The one by a band that I don't know anything about but may have seen live at some point: The New Year - Reconstruction

The one for the day after: Goldenboy - Second Day Of The Year

The factually incorrect one: Clipse - Chinese New Year

More Christmas Music? Seriously It's Getting A Bit Much Now

Christmas mix part three (download half here and half here)

Christmas mix part four (download half here and half here)

Have a great christmas.


Like dogs wearing clothes? Then go here

Christmas Present

Over the last couple of weeks I been compiling the ultimate Christmas album, and now I am going to share the first two parts with you. Now there's going to be a lot of music here, in fact there's far too much. But that's the idea, you can go through and cherry pick out the ones you don't like. Look forward to such delights as Arcade Fire not being very good for once, Fats Domino sounding uncannily like Wesley Willis, the connection between Belle & Sebastian, Snoop Dogg and James Brown, some dubious cover versions, and some even more dubious Christmas themed song title puns. And some actually quite good music. Feliz natal!

Christmas Part One (Download from here and here)

Christmas Part Two (Download from here and here)

Forró

In my final lesson before my Portuguese tests, my teacher decided to offer us an unusual form of revision. Instead of going over those conjugations one more time, she decided to show us how to dance to forró. This is one of the many types of traditional Brazilian popular music that exist independently from the pop mainstream, but manage to maintain equal levels of popularity. Personally, all the forró I have heard up to now has been just as mediocre as the stuff in the pop charts. Apart from this one:

Forró In The Dark feat. David Byrne - Asa Branca (download from here)

See the hat in action:

Forró In The Dark are based in New York, and have decided to take classic forró tunes and update them, with mixed results from what I have heard. The track with Bebel Gilberto is as dull as you would expect from a track with Bebel Gilberto. But the above track with David Byrne is, unsurprisingly, ace (read about it on his fantastic blog). This track with Miho Hatori (once of Cibo Matto) is also pretty cool:

Forró In The Dark feat Miho Hatori - Paraiba (download from here)

So now I know how to do the most basic forró dance (despite my my English embarrassment) and I passed my course. Result!

This Is Why YouTube Was Invented

Prince debuts the Purple Rain album in 1983:

Keep It Simple

At the moment I am finding that the music I most enjoy is the simplest. Crunk, baile funk, reggaeton, rap, straightforward indie rock and old favourites are doing it for me right now. Generally, these all tend to create two reactions: the desire to dance or to sing along, the two primary jobs of pop music. I'm just not in the mood for the more challenging end of my taste spectrum. The noisy, the experimental, the avant-garde, the post-rocking, the miserable, the droning, the jazzy, I'm just not going there. I think this is because I am learning Portuguese, and trying to get my head around the language (especially the blinking verbs) is tiring and is making my brain work harder than it has since, errr, ever. I am using music as my comfort blanket, giving my brain a breather after a busy lesson of conjugating. And if that's not the best reason ever for listening to these songs, than I don't know what is:


Diplo - Shhake It Up! (download from a seperate window)

Matt & Kim - Yea Yeah (download from a seperate window)

New LCD

Yes yes yes.

LCD Soundsystem - Someone Great (removed - see comments for the full story)

The new album is out March 20th and if it sounds this good, then we are fortunate people indeed. Lots have other blogs have posted tracks, and then had to remove them. I managed to grab this one before DFA's swat team of lawyers swept down on them. Let's see how good they are, because if they find my blog here in the deepest darkest recesses of the internet, then they are very impressive indeed (clue: they are impressive).


The photo is from here

Zaireeka

In 1997, the Flaming Lips released the album Zaireeka. Released on four cd's, the concept of the album was that you played all four cds simultaneously on different cd players. Apart from the count in, which enables you to line them up, you were free to play them however you wanted, in four different rooms, in four cars, whatever. The one thing they didn't want was for people to turn them into one track, they had to be played seperately. Well, sorry chaps, but I have done just that. It's a lovely theory, and while I don't want to mess with your artistic vision, I do want to experience it, something that is currently impossible to arrange without combining the tracks.

Zaireeka is the album that they released before the breakthrough Soft Bulletin, and while it retains some of the acid-fried nature of their previous albums, you can hear the beginnngs of a move towards the pop direction that would enable them to hit the big time. It reminds me of In The Morning Of The Magicians from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, that kind of sound.

Flaming Lips - Zaireeka (download the whole album by opening a new window)