marathonpacks' 2008 Mid-Term Mix, Vol. II

(via)

Finally! I'm really happy with this one, you guys. It took a while to finish, owing to plenty of dawdling and taking a French translation class. (You'd be surprised at how much French you remember when it's been 10 years since you've thought about French. Also, how much French you forget). But I like this mix a lot. And I've taken the advice of a few whiners helpful emailers and am offering it in two ways: as a single-track monster jam and individual files in the .zip format. They should load into your iTunes in order and everything; if they don't, it'll sound weird because they have half-transitions and stuff on them. But I guess this way if there's a song you don't like, you can skip it (that last sentence was me with digital music technology. Yay!). Have fun everyone.

single track mp3 (62:17/192k/85.6 MB) || 18-mp3 .zip of the same thing

1. Portishead "The Rip" I'm not quite sure how quickly I learned to love "Sour Times" in 1994 when we played it at the radio station, but yeah, it was really really fast. Back then, I couldn't tell trip-hop from shinola, and my reference points for Dummy were like, um, hip-hop, and maybe I think I told someone they sounded like the Eurythmics or something. Dummy, for all of its coldness and distance, was, from an approachability standpoint, extremely accessible, and easy to fall in love with. 3, not so much. It's been a while since I've felt this totally alienated from a group I thought I had on lock, but well that's what 11 years and a refusal to do the same thing twice will do. "The Rip" has an underlying guitar motif with the paranoid, classical air of Love's Forever Changes, and Beth Gibbons is still the same Mata Hari she ever was: don't get drawn in for a minute by the sultry suffering. It's a trap.

2. My Brightest Diamond "Apples" I saw this little fucking dynamo live, and then started giving a shit about My Brightest Diamond, which I'd previously consigned to the milquetoast NPR bin of my promo pile. She's tiny, super-intense, and possessed of a wicked amazing conservatory-quality singing voice. "Apples" is one of the Bjorkier moments from the new one, which don't sleep on it, is just as good as its closest living relative (and it fits really well between numbers 1 and 3, too).

3. Dominique Leone "Goodbye" Off the first LP from the guy who wrote this review. The Runt and Wizard and 20/20 comparisons are being bandied about, and on this track at least, they're spot-on. Except none of those records had anything this good on it. What a wonderful little song!

4. Au "rr vs. d" Another year, another jam from Luke Wyland on my midterm mix. Seriously, music world: why is Au not doted upon with the fervor of those bullshit peddlers Animal Collective? We all know that Verbs, as well as this collective's self-titled first album, are far superior to some garbage like Strawberry Jam. Then what is it? Is it Portland? It's Portland, isn't it.

5. Sigur Ros "Gobbledigook" Personally, I'd like to see "Gobbledigook" soundtrack its own CSI scene, in which Grissom and Willows investigate blood spatter patterns at a commune murder site, where 4 naked hippies were sustainably slain. It'd have to be a fast-paced montage, in which the two gradually become accustomed to the locale as the investigation continues, it goes downhill really fast, and by the end they're wiping warpaint mud on each others' faces and making a pact to share the labor in food-foraging.

6. Cut Copy "Feel the Love" WE ARE DAFT PUNK AND WE ARE YOUR SAILING INSTRUCTORS. They're riding the goodwill wave of Daft Punk and the indie trend toward beach-party music, and I wish they'd just release an entire record of songs with this one's enormity and ease.

7. Sebastien Tellier "Divine" The dorkiest (and most Beck-like) song on a album full of incredibly dorky French sex-jams.

8. Santogold "L.E.S. Artistes" Santi White, songwriter for hire and former A&R exec, has a participant/observer perspective on the networked field of industry folks, critics, assholes and hangers-on surrounding pop music that few musicians enjoy. It gives her a distinct and clear set of hopes and fears, as well, all bound up and wonderfully presented in her first single. She's more concerned with losing face while pursuing her chosen hustle than her imagined critics could ever be, and the chorus to "Artistes" is a blast of self-affirming, skittish shock and awe that pre-empts any opponent's first punch.

9. R.E.M. "Living Well is the Best Revenge" The first second I put Accelerate on for the very first time, "Living Well" gave me such a rush of nostalgia and pride; I was happy again that I'd made R.E.M. my first all-time favorite band back freshman year in college. It's got the call -to-arms energy of "These Days" and the manic counsel of "Live and How to Live It," and while the target's a bit obvious, the sentiment is still delivered with the oblique poetry of Murmur or Reckoning. Michael Stipe is totally fucking pissed off, but he channels that anger into righteousness and good advices. Good for him and good for fucking R.E.M., too. I remember the exact moment in 1997 when I realized that New Adventures in Hi-Fi was one of the band's 2 or 3 best albums, and then realized that they'd put out one of their best works nearly 20 years into their career. I was only 20 then, and I suddenly felt like an adult for the first time I can recall. And Accelerate is just a frantic burst of well-crafted, radiant pop-rock, like the music's point is to color in the album cover by the time it's over. Every time I listen to Accelerate is the best 30 minutes of that day, it seems.

10. Deerhunter "Nothing Ever Happened" So guess what: Deerhunter's a pretty damn good band. Not quite great yet, but Microcastle is a solid step in that direction. The album, in terms of song structure and overall tone, is dream-pop where Cryptograms and the EP were nightmares, but approachable tunes doesn't mean Bradford Cox's macabre fever-dream aesthetic disappears. "Nothing Ever Happened" is just a mannered punk song, delivered with the worrisome air of a guy trying to come to terms with his own cloudy memory. Alan Moulder c. 1991 would have had a field day with the tourettic guitar freak-out that comprises the last couple minutes of this song.

11. No Age "Sleeper Hold" It took me a while (a couple months, I guess) to figure out the source after recognition the very first time I heard the song, but the opening guitar bit from "Sleeper Hold" is totally biting from "Alec Eiffel." And with how these guys go about making music, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a total happy accident, like how George Harrison was just strumming backstage before a show one time, found a melody he liked, and wrote it down. And that melody happened to be really similar to the Chiffons' "He's So Fine." And then he got sued. For the record, I don't think the Pixies will sue No Age. Side note about "Alec Eiffel": for the first like 8 months or so that I listened to Trompe le Monde, it was via a tape dub, without a tracklist or anything, and also way pre-Internet. So instead of asking anyone, lest I seem unknowledgeable, I just thought the song's chorus was "Little Lifeboat." Actually, now that I remember, I thought "Palace of the Brine" was "How to Say Goodbye," which I actually like better (think about it). On Nouns, No Age seems to quite purposefully aim toward multiple interpretations, buried as the vocals are in the soupy mix, and resonant of so many ambient and punk touchstones as the music is. In the lyrics, I hear "With passion, it's true," which reminds me of Rites of Spring or Fugazi. I'm good with that.

12. Sybris "Oh Man!" "Oh Man! Daydream Nation is Awesome!" is the full title of this song, but the band wisely chose to abbreviate it for the album. I love how Angela Mullenhour asserts herself vocally now more than before; she's doing the band a lot of favors.

13. Blood on the Wall "Rize" More 90s indie stuff WOOT
More of a Royal Trux/Mudhoney angle here, but they nail it to the wall. Hence: blood.

14. School of Language "Poor Boy" Because anything that this guy lays his hands on is gold to me. SoL isn't on par with any of Brewis' Field Music stuff, but now and again a song like this breaks free of those rigid-ass meters and dissonant tones he works his ideas through for this project, and, well, reminds me of Field Music.

15. Vampire Weekend "Walcott" NYC ska band, does Petty cover; RIYL miscegenation, cable-knit.

16. White Hinterland "Lindberghs and Metal Birds" "Your city's sinking, it was built on sand. You should have planned ahead. Or, leave it up to the Lindberghs and metal birds." Casey Dienel's song about war and responsibility, sung as if channeling a precocious little girl at a WWI-era military show.

17. Britta Persson "At 7" I really hope Britta Persson gets the same sort of shake given to Feist, with whom Persson's easily on par. The gospel undertones here and elsewhere on the wonderfully-titled Kill Hollywood Me, along with Persson's lazy, humid vocals actually push it a bit ahead of Feist's more precious, unitarded soft-pop.

18. Duffy "Rockferry" The best Welsh soul export since some A&R guy pulled Tom Jones out of a coal mine? Does that even mean anything? Duffy reminds me most of Lulu, that other single-named blue-eyed soul singer with her fair share of outsize sentimentality (god, that's a great song). I'm not made of stone here, people: "Rockferry" just pushes every single affective button I have right now.