Play To Z: Shut Up, You F*cking Baby to The Stage Names

Random Observations

"Signs" by Justin Timberlake, Snoop Dogg and Charlie Wilson is one of those perfect party songs. The opening is just spot on, Timberlake's falsetto sliding in before the playful drum beat begins and the horns start to bubble underneath. Plus listening to Snoop Dogg rhyme "Venus and Serena" with "Wimbledon arena" is just a juicy pop pleasure.

  Bloc Party's Silent Alarm and The Knife's Silent Shout make wonderful neighbours,with Bloc Party's spiky, angular, pulsing rock giving way effortlessly to The Knife's vocal-driven, otherworldly electronica. Listening to these two albums back-to-back was a dream.

  If you ever want a group of people of our generation (mid-Eighties to early-Nineties) to drunkenly sing along to something, you could do a lot worse than "Don't Speak" by No Doubt.

  People don't give The Buzzcocks enough love. They were huge influences on the British punk scene (and therefore the British indie scene) from the very beginning of the movement (if you haven't already, go watch 24 Hour Party People) and they produced iconic, masterful, insightful songs, most of which came in under the magic 4 minute mark.

  It's a shame I didn't manage to tackle both of Das Racist's mixtapes, Shut Up, Man and Sit Down, Dude, in one blogging session. I still haven't gotten around to their album, Relax, but frankly the two mixtapes are 37 tracks between them, longer than most full albums. The fact that they won't be making music together anymore is such a shame - there was so much truth and humour in their rhymes, and we need more of that, in music and in life.

  The Social Network soundtrack is a great, atmospheric piece. It matches the tone of the film so perfectly without resorting to any of the cliches of film scoring. There are no sweeping overtures, no hushed variations for emotional scenes. Instead, there are a series of intricate, well-constructed pieces that fit together like elaborate clockwork, a machine designed to build dread and tension.

  Someone To Drive You Home by The Long Blondes is one of those albums that can take over your life. I discovered it at a point in my life when I was particularly open to that kind of infectious worldview and for two or three months, that album owned me. Like a sermon, like a manifesto, it constructs a perspective on life and romance that you can't help but pour yourself into. The characters in the songs are so well drawn, so true to life that you connect with them as well as you might with any protagonist from a novel or hero in a film. Kate Jackson's voice is a siren song, pulling you into the cynical, wearied waters of her world. From that place, all romance is a power game, a maneuvering of players where the men are selfish predators and the women are cruel and tragic. It's a dangerous world, filled with the allure of old films and danger of illicit liaisons. If you let it, it will take you over, and never let you go.

  Eels' Souljacker, like Shootenanny after it, bridges the gap between Daisies of the Galaxy's optimism and Blinking Lights and Other Revelations' ambitious melancholy with a harder, rougher sound. Where earlier records were like an open wound, this is the scab - toughened skin that tells a tale of an earlier injury. Mark Everett steps outside his own head a little, with tales of circus freaks and ghosts, but the evidence of his heartbreak is still there, in the anger of "Bus Stop Boxer" and the bruised vulnerability of "That's Not Really Funny". The ramshackle production matches the tone of the songs perfectly, and like all Eels albums it creates a wonderfully complete package.

  I know I'm meant to be sticking to the whole "each song gets one listen" rule, but I may have cheated a little when it comes to "All My Friends" by LCD Soundsystem. You know why? Because it's the best song this millennium has produced so far. Because it's a perfect cocktail of triumph and loss. Because it makes me want to run from door to door, pulling people out on to the street to scream into the sky. Because it makes me want to see all my friends tonight.

  The Stage Names was one of those albums I mentioned rediscovering in my last post. If you'd have asked me before this listen through what I could remember from it, I would have been able to talk about the spot on homage/sampling of The Beach Boys "Sloop John B" in "John Allyn Smith Sails" and nothing much beyond that. Now, I could talk about the building wail of "Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe", the pulsing thrum of the guitar hook on "Unless It's Kicks" and the oh-so-clever workplay of "Plus Ones" that manages to add, rather than detract, from the song.

  It was about this time in proceedings that I was gifted a selection of music by my friend Georgie, mostly new stuff that I hadn't got my hands on yet. Chief among the pleasures were Haim's Forever EP and Holy Fire, the new album from Foals. Forever is like a delicious slice of cake; sweet, tantalizing and leaves you aching for more. Holy Fire is filled with leap-out-of-speakers energy and brings together so much of Foals' earlier sounds into one cohesive whole.

Rediscovered Gem

"In The Mouth A Desert" by Pavement

Play To Z: Cross to Doolittle

Some Observations

Holy Playlist Interruptions, Batman! This chunk of albums saw my first shift off the alphabetical order due to a new addition to the discography. I downloaded Talib Kweli's fantastic mixtape Attack The Block (inspired by the movie of the same name) and, having listened to Stereogum's Cruel Summer 2011 Mixtape, realised I didn't have their 2012 one, so downloaded that to.

I also finally borrowed a copy of Camp by Childish Gambino off a friend - I've got all his mixtapes but hadn't got round to buying the album, and having finally given it a good listen, I think I'm going to be one of those awful people saying "I preferred his earlier stuff". Camp seems weighed down with his preoccupation with how he is viewed by the rest of rap culture, but doesn't offer any huge insights or truly unique perspectives. A couple of tracks dealing with this topic would have been interesting, but giving over so much of the album to it dilutes the potency of the message.

Listening to just under two hours of Crystal Castles non-stop does strange things to your brain. I felt like I'd slipped into some weird 16-bit nightmare inside a vast haunted cathedral. It made doing photocopying at work a lot more interesting.

Daisies of the Galaxy was the first Eels album I owned, and remains one of my favourites. It's arguably the most positive, radio-friendly of his albums, but still run through with a deep vein of melancholy and despair that serves to heighten the happy moments. I have a very vivid memory from about 7 years ago of walking down St Benedict's Street in Norwich on a warm, sunny St Patrick's Day, bag full of comics and headed to the pub to celebrate my now-housemate Bret's birthday, with "Packing Blankets" on my iPod (or possibly Discman at the time). It was a transcendentally happy moment, one of those perfect instants when music helps crystalise an experience in your mind.

TV On The Radio's Dear Science is a pretty much flawless album. To my mind, it's their strongest record, a fantastic blend of danceable beats, triumphant horns and lyrical mastery. It feels very much "of it's time" (end of the Bush administration, beginning of Obama) but it doesn't let that weigh it down the way other records sometimes do when aiming to comment on modern society. There's enough about it that's timeless to not feel like a time capsule.

Definitely Maybe, Oasis' debut record, is filled with mostly decent tunes that are, without exception, about a minute too long.

In the ultimate karaoke bar, where you have access to every song imaginable, my pick will always be the live version of "Brian Wilson" by the Barenaked Ladies that is included on Disc One: All Their Greatest Hits. The energy of the performance really adds a whole other layer of urgency to the song, and the big bellowing chorus is a classic power ballad wrapped around a portrait of depression.

"Debaser" by the Pixies is one of my all-time favourite songs. I could, and have, listened to it a dozen times on repeat and not got bored. It's a flawless song, beautiful in it's power and economy. It's a little piece of magic.

The Subtle And Mysterious Art of the Mixtape

Among the albums I listened to in this batch were two mixtapes by the music website Stereogum, as well as two film soundtracks (as opposed to scores), Dazed and Confused and Deathproof. Soundtracks and mixtapes have a lot in common, although obviously soundtracks are also beholden to the events of the film they support. They are about creating a mood, and conveying some kind of meaning, sometimes a story, sometimes a sentiment, all of it using someone else's music.

Among my various skills with little real-world application, I consider myself a proficient maker of mixtapes (or whatever you want to call the CD equivalent). For a while, I posted a bunch of friends a new mix every 3 months, sometimes simply a collection of songs I enjoyed, sometimes built around a theme (one was the soundtrack to a film that didn't exist, a nice little link back to my earlier point). I've made soundtracks for role-playing games I've been involved with, created mixes for friends, lovers and acquaintances.

I learned my skills from some of the basic rules delivered in High Fidelity and found I had a good ear for transitions. I often wish I could go back to my teenaged self and tell him not to spend so much money on plastic Space Marines and instead invest in a pair of decks and some speakers - I think I would have made an alright DJ. Instead, I'm limited to mixes and the occasional party playlist (the mixtape's grown-up, meaner brother).

A good mixtape takes you on a journey, like any good album, but it also uses the mix of artists to create a dialogue, a conversation between the changing sound of the album and the listener. Audience is important to bear in mind, as is what effect. Lyrical themes can be carried from song to song, and if your lucky, images can recur and evolve. Put in enough work, and it's like constructing a sonnet from a dozen broken-up haiku.

Rediscovered Gem

"Destroy Rock And Roll" by Mylo