Free MP3 download: Woven Bones "I've Gotta Get"

Hey! I like the Black Lips! Do you guys like the Black Lips?! If so, you'll like Woven Bones! enthusiasm! garage rock!
But in all seriousnous I do like this single, from their new 7-inch EP:

Woven Bones "I've Gotta Get"
(Right click to download, left click to stream)

Free MP3 downloads: Avi Buffalo "Remember Last Time" and "What's In It For?"

I haven't heard the rest of this highly-buzzed self-titled debut, but I was instantly sold by the second-half guitar spaz-out that would have felt at home on Wilco's "A Ghost is Born." These kids are like 18. I lose.

Avi Buffalo "Remember Last Time"
(Right click to download, left click to stream)

Avi Buffalo "What's In It For?"
(Right click to download, left click to stream)

Last year is always better

I've been going back to some of 2009's freshest music, and man, does last year make this year look weak as hell.

2010 = Weak (by their standards) followups by established acts (Spoon, the Hold Steady, Band of Horses), and very few complete, fully-realized debuts (the exception being Surfer Blood, and maybe Tame Impala), and some disappointing to mildly good sophomore efforts [Vampire Weekend, (second half of) Yeasayer's album], with the exception being Titus Andronicus's "The Monitor." Some good, but not career-highlight albums by LCD Soundsystem and Black Keys, fill out my best-of the year list only because of lack of competition.

Beach House's superb "Teen Dream" doesn't fit in any of these categories. It's still really good, though. And my initial distaste and resistance for Ariel Pink is wearing off.

2009 = Several breakout sophomore (or later) albums (St. Vincent, Phoenix, Animal Collective, YACHT, White Rabbits, etc), several incredible debuts by bands with terrible names (Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Girls, Japandroids, The XX, Neon Indian) and plenty of good workman-like records from M. Ward, Dinosaur Jr., Yo La Tengo, The Thermals, Black Lips, The Decemberists and The Flaming Lips, among others.
In retrospect, Wilco's self titled record still stands as a disappointment, outside of a few tracks.

2010 may yet be redeemed by Deerhunter. The first single and B-side from "Halcyon Digest," available in an older posting, point towards great things.

MP3 download: Male Bonding "Year's Not Long"

"Nothing Hurts" was out several months ago, and if you haven't checked it out, it's worth it: Shoegaze-punk that powers through on 2-3 minute songs, with correspondingly fast rhythms and guitar.

Male Bonding "Year's Not Long"
(left click to stream, right click to save)

New Deerhunter song: Free Mp3 download

Deerhunter created a game: if you go here http://halcyondigest.com/revival/ and enter a password, you get to download the new single "Revival" (and the B-side!) from their upcoming "Halcyon Digest." I did some googling and found the password, it's "tapereel." Enjoy. Once the page loads, click on the tape recorder.

 "Revival" has a fairly clean (outside of the shoegaze-y vocals and a fuzz guitar lurking in the background) and poppy '60s vibe, not unlike Atlas Sound's standout 2009 track "Walkabout."

Summer reading (some beach books, some not)

Philip K. Dick "A Scanner Darkly"
Everyone should read this book. Funny, scary, compassionate, depressing and mind-bending, it's easily the best depiction of users and their circuitous conversations, paranoia and earnest foolishness I've ever seen/read. Having been friends with some real-life versions of characters in this book, the shit hit close to home. And, the plot, my god, the plot: Bob Archer is a Substance D addict. Bob Archer is also Fred, a undercover narcotics officer. When Fred reports to his superiors, he wears a holographic suit that disguises his appearance. Fred is assigned to report on Bob Archer's "suspicious" activities. As Archer/Fred becomes more dependent on Substance D, a drug the splits the brain's left and right hemisphere, he begins to compartmentalize his two identities until they are separate people. Is Fred, Bob, or is Bob, Fred? — all kinds of themes of identity are at play here, and "A Scanner Darkly" is easily some of PKD's best work. [My favorite PKD book is likely "Ubik," but I would also highly recommend "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (the basis for "Blade Runner") as well as "The Man in the High Castle."] A

Stieg Larsson "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"
This one falls more into the beach reading category, despite the occasionally dense paragraph detailing some financial scandal. Apparently everyone in America is reading this Swede's book, so why should I be any different? I couldn't put it down, and it definitely had its hooks in me — and why wouldn't it, with a journo as the main character, an the other being a hacker-punk chick who rides a motorcycle? I loved it, despite some questionable journalistic ethics in the final 100 pages, and an uneven writing style that occasionally jeers into an editorial voice. But, the book weaves a tale of corporate corruption, journalism, a family murder plot and buried secrets into a thriller that, you know, thrills. (Larsson was a magazine editor who wrote three books in this series before dieing in 2004. I have not yet read the other two, but this one could have used a bit more editing, me thinks. They were posthumously published.) B+

Dave Eggers "What is the What"

"What is the What" is tagged as fiction only because it tells the odyssey of Valentino Achak Deng who fled genocide in Sudan in the '80s for the United States, and Eggers had to recreate dialogue and some details to fill in Deng's memory. The story at large is purely non-fiction. Eggers frames the story from the present, as Deng is taken hostage during a sloppy robbery in his Atlanta apartment, and tells his story of escape from Sudan in the first person to his new, American captors, oddly addressing them directly. I didn't finish this, because I was reading it on vacation and then lost momentum when I got home and had shit to do. But it was engrossing for several hundred pages before becoming a bit repetitive. Deng went through several levels of hell — machetes, machine guns, fire, starvation, dehydration, disease, lions and then American robbery. Former 7' 7" NBA center Manute Bol hailed from the same tribe as Deng and fled the same atrocities. The book added new meaning and gravity to the memory of Bol, for me, who is often regarded as not much more than a circus act. Bol gave away most his NBA millions to Sudan relief efforts and died this summer 47. B+

Pitchfork Music Festival 2010

Seeing Titus Andronicus live on Saturday just cemented "The Monitor" as my album of the year thus far.

They win.

Oh and Pavement was good (sloppy), too.