Due to the overwhelmingly positive response to last Sunday’s Swedes, I’m From Barcelona (sample comment: “cancel this feature IMMEDIATELY”), I have no choice but to continue the feature. Now, understandably, I’m From Barcelona can be a bit over-the-top, so perhaps I should’ve started off with something a bit more…palatable.
Jose González is, in fact, a Swede. His hispanic name comes from his Argentinian heritage, but he was born and raised in Sweden. And, like so many Swedish artists I’ll be writing about, he sings in English. English: the international language of business and weird indie music.
González’s music is in some ways more of the same: it’s just a dude with a guitar, with some minimalist percussion. González updates the formula with a rich sound that sounds, for lack of a better word, analog. Nothing about this music sounds like it was run through GarageBand; his notes drip with a warmth and soulfulness that evokes a warm fire on a winter’s day.
Anyway, check out Jose González. And for those of you who have liked neither Swedish Sunday, I can at least promise that each week will feature an artist that varies greatly from the previous week’s. After all, we went from a 29-member group last week to just one man this week. Stay tuned.
To echo Dave’s sentiments on music, the internet, and having so many different artists to listen to, it only gets more complicated when you throw older artists into the mix.
The music industry is just that. An industry. And albums have been cranked out for decades and decades, leaving us with a very rich and diverse musical history. Still, it’s hard to sort through all of it, and going back and getting into artists or albums that were around before you were even born can be tricky. For all you know, you might be living your life missing out on some great music that really works for you.
That being said, music still gets passed down to us through numerous avenues. Our parents, friends, TV, radio, movies, the internet, and finding out which artists influenced our favorite artists. If it wasn’t for The Life Aquatic, or the fact that David Bowie is the most referenced musician in the Venture Bros., I may have never really gotten into him.
There are a few covers of Bowie songs that also played a big role along the way, particularly Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” and the Get Up Kids’ cover of “Suffragette City.” Recently all of these things clicked, and really got me into a lot Bowie’s stuff, particularly the album, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”
In summary, I say keep digging for music and sorting through stuff. It might also be good to learn how to pronounce artists’ names to avoid mishaps like Avril Lavigne’s mispronunciation of “Bowie.” Rhymes with “snowy” not “Maui.”
Let me begin by saying this is no easy task. I have obsessed over each and every song on this list at some point in my life (as well as songs not on this list), and narrowing this list down to ten songs was a real challenge. Not only that, I also have put them in order from my all time favorite, Number 1 on this list (duh), to number 10.
I was initially going to post these as a comment to Dave’s Top 10, but I had too much to say about each song. So here they are. From 10 to 1. It’s a countdown. It’s the final countdown.
10. The Bends (from the album The Bends) - Great song. Flat out. It starts off with some weird sounds that apparently Thom recorded outside a hotel. Then all of a sudden you get hit with that really bright and crunchy guitar riff. The lyrics are some of the best in the Radiohead catalogue in my opinion, including some personal favorites like “the planet is a gunboat in a sea of fear,” and “alone on an aeroplane, fall asleep on against the window pane, my blood will thicken,” among others.
9. Optimistic (from the album Kid A) - Yeah, it was a single. But nonetheless an amazing song. Great lyrically as well, painting some dark and twisted images on the human condition such as ”nervous messed up marionettes, floating around on a prison ship.” Plus that lead into In Limbo…
8. Let Down (from the album OK Computer) - A song of sheer desperation. Or maybe not. Maybe just a casual observation on every day life while being completely removed from it, just watching the people coming and going. Either way it’s incredible lyrically, and musically it’s beautiful.
7. Everything in Its Right Place (from the album Kid A) - One of the best album openers ever. Of any album I have ever listened to. I remember when I heard it for the first time, and I knew I was about to hear something that I had never heard anything even remotely close to before. And I was right.
6. Lucky (from the album OK Computer) - Starting out with the sounds of what is apparently Ed’s guitar being played on the strings above the nut, on the head stock through a delay pedal, this song transforms into a beautiful epic, with the guitars hinting at dark undertones, until the 3:12 mark where they surface completely, only to resolve beautifully into a guitar solo at 3:46. A masterpiece both lyrically and musically.
5. I Might Be Wrong (from the album Amnesiac) - A powerful guitar driven track on a very dark and electronic sound based album. It is an incredible combination of styles and sounds. The highlight for me is the buildup, and then when it completely breaks down around the 3:50 mark.
4. Kid A (from the album Kid A) - A song unlike any other. Thom’s voice is distorted and twisted (to distance himself from the heavy lyrical content according to some sources), which kind of reinvents vocals, and the role of a vocalist, and makes them into more of an instrument.
3. Knives Out (from the album Amnesiac) - Creating an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, this song is one of Radiohead’s best in my opinion, with the repetitive guitar riffs, Thom’s haunting vocals, and lyrics to match. “If you’d been a dog, they would have drowned you at birth.”
2. Motion Picture Soundtrack (from the album Kid A) - Everything in Its Right Place is a great opener. Motion Picture Soundtrack is an incredible closer. One of the best I can think of. It has always sounded like the end to me. It’s what I expect to hear at the end if that makes any sense. If there is a heaven, this is what it sounds like going in. Simply beautiful.
1. Street Spirit (Fade Out) (from the album The Bends) - This is the greatest closer of any album I have ever heard. It stands on its own. It is unlike every other song on The Bends, but doesn’t fit on any Radiohead album really. But it is “THE” Radiohead song to me. According to the band, they didn’t write the song. It wrote itself. They were simply its “biological catalysts.” A hopeless song about living in a world filled with identical mass produced homes, cold detached machines that we created and depend on to run our lives, and finally, about staring death straight in the face. Despite all the things described in the song, there is still a glimmer of hope at the end with the closing line “immerse your soul in love.”
We’re working our way (I’m working my way?) up to newer music on this blog, but as we’re just getting started I feel compelled to point out all of the great music I’ve accumulated over the last few months/years. Also, we currently have zero audience so it’s all relative I suppose.
Regardless, I feel like just as the internet has opened me up to a multitude of new music, it’s also made it that much harder to focus on any one particular new artist. Often times I’ll find two or three new albums in one day and I don’t always give them the attention that I should. That said, this is one album that sucked me in from the first track and quickly distinguished itself from the masses of my iTunes playlist.
I picked up Marry Me by St. Vincent sometime in 2007, and even as I skip through any number of great albums, there is not a song on this album that I cannot listen to all the way through. I had the fortune of seeing them a few months ago at the Rock and Roll Hotel in DC, and the even greater fortune of being able to snag a place right up in front of the stage.
Now, to be fair, I cannot safely say how much of that performance was great because of the music and how much was simply the fact that I could not look away from Annie Clark’s super-intense eyes (even in pictures, it’s impossible to look away, and if you don’t believe me, check out the video below). Either way, this former (and current?) member of the Polyphonic Spree has a solo album that is packed with inventive instrumentation and even more inventive lyrics (”Your lips are red / My face is red from reading your red lips”).
What strikes me most about the music is Annie’s guitar. I can’t quite articulate what makes it so special, but there’s a certain controlled yet absolutely free sound that surprises me every time. You’d think at some point that the electric guitar couldn’t surprise you, but then you hear a song like “Jesus Saves, I Spend” and it’s like hearing the instrument again for the first time.
Part of the reason I wanted to start this site is to streamline the way I go about telling my friends about cool music. Instead of say, pestering them in person and online everytime I think of a great song, it would be easier to just put them all in one place. Hence this site, and the first song/album/artist I want to point out is “No One Said It Would Be Easy,” by Cloud Cult.
I’ve only just recently discovered them, and I’m slowly making my way through their back catalogue. It’s some really inventive ensemble music that swings effortlessly between the absurd and the profound. I implore anyone to listen to this song just once.
Well, this is the latest blog from me. Usually these things last about 2 posts before I get bored and never touch them again, but I’m vaguely optimistic about this one, if for no other reason than I had to pay for the damn thing. Also, my friends Marcelo and Nick will be contributing, so if I go silent there will be someone else to pump blood into this thing.
The intention of this site is to be primarily a music blog, with other musings about pop-culture, life, and whatever strikes our fancy. With that in mind, I’m posting a song from the new Hold Steady album. Partly because I saw them perform it a couple weeks ago, partly because it’s awesome, and mostly because I’m really hoping that uploading this song will work.
09 14th, 2008| 
