Breaking radio silence to post “The Crunch” by Toy Love, primarily because it doesn’t appear to be online in any easy-to-digest format, and I want my bandmate Mark to hear it.

Although: I have covered Toy Love frontman Chris Knox in these pages before. I called him the best songwriter alive, primarily due to his incredible sense of pop economy crossed with what I guess you’d call sincerity or emotional heft. It’s still pretty probable that he is my favorite, but after watching this incredible video of a newly-comebacked D’Angelo literally burning the entire arena to the ground and making everyone on earth start crying with a song that consists of little more than four notes, four words, and and a bunch of awesome wailing, I think I have some thinking to do about economy v. emotional heft.

This was only put online a couple of days ago, but I wrote it about a month and a half ago; it’s grown on me a bunch since. Especially with the recent revelation that the vocals sound like a strange, modulated version of Jon Spencer. This review is not very good, because there are a lot of pretty irritating surface-level breakbeat-type things about the record that I hadn’t let myself get past before tossing off a pretty b-minus review.

Confidential to those who can read my thoughts: The 90’s Japanese group whose poppier material sounds exactly like Skoal Kodiak, the one whose name I couldn’t remember for hours while writing that review—and in the days that followed, for that matter—was Violent Onsen Geisha.

Where you’ll come up with an idea to play Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew on top of one another, calling it Kind of Brew, and it’ll have already been done. I had come up with a hilarious half-joke about how all jazz sounds exactly the same and everything.

I can’t sleep after that Warriors/Clippers game that I can’t believe I watched from beginning to end. So, I created a thing. It might be better described as a series of songs that flow into one another, effectively making one long song, or “medley”, except all of the songs-within-the-song are performed by different people. A “mixture” of musical styles and personnel, basically.

It is called Dog Wearing a Stegosaurus Costume, which also describes the art (above), because the notion of digital-only collections of music having “art” is ridiculous, and so is a dog wearing a stegosaurus costume¹. It can be downloaded here. I started in on it to have something to listen to on the train ride back to New York City tomorrow, so the emphasis is on driving kinds of songs that might sound all right while looking out the window of a train, or while trying to read a book² on a train.

The first piece in the thing is “It Was Up In the Mountains,” which is a short John Giorno thing about celebrating holidays. From there, it does this:

1. Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra - Beginning Of the Heartbreak
2. Lumerians - XuluX
3. Cave - Machines and Muscles
4. The Pastels - Baby Honey
5. The Meat Puppets - Look At the Rain
6. Reports - Dinamo Cambridge

Actually, it ends with “Love Performance” by Total Control, which doesn’t exactly fit with the rest of the things, but is my favorite song of 2011, so it seemed nice to include in a skippable place. Also, its refrain (“These are not the last days”) seems like a good 2011 thing for pretty much every conceivable reason³.

(I had meant to include “Those Pockets Are People” by Electrelane between the Pastels and the Meat Puppets, but accidentally forgot it when compiling them into one big thing. It’s a little intense for this thing, anyway, though it would have been kind of neat if I separated both “Beginning Of the Heartbreak” from “Don’t, Don’t” and “Those Pockets Are People” from “The Partisan” on the same thing.)

¹ That is also the name of the compilation because thematic continuity is important in a mix something something Rob Sheffield?

² The Right Stuff, currently, which is pretty good but I bet there’s a graduate thesis somewhere that supposes Tom Wolfe has Asperger’s because of how much he likes repeating himself.

³ I had a big thing written out about that song, actually, but it devolved into thoughts on “still having to get out of bed” or whatever, which was so stupid that I threw my computer out a window and killed myself and now I’m dead, which is why I’ve been using footnotes so much lately. Because I can’t do that twice.

I recently got into a messageboard argument about Skyrim¹ when I should have been working. It led, more or less directly, to an opportunity to do this. Let that be a lesson to you.

¹Skyrim isn’t a good game, per se. It’s just really, really good at having and displaying all the big obvious signposts people have for a “good game,” much the same way that strong Oscar contenders can always be seen from a mile away. That said, if you need me I’m going to stay in tonight and forge a million iron daggers in order to get my Smithing skill up to 100.

Pink Reason - Sixteen Years

Continuing on the subject of songs I listened to a lot during two thousand and eleven: Dang. It’s about time this record came out. I had leadoff track “Holding On” featured in the little sidebar playlist on my Myspace page circa 2008, back when that was a thing you did when you liked a song¹.

Thinking back to the strange self-obsession that caused everyone to create Myspace pages and usher in the era of social networking sets it in pretty clear relief: Nobody shoots the moon in the self-analysis department like Kevin Failure. For all the talk of “misremembered nostalgia” in music this year, Shitting in the Garden (and “Sixteen Years” in particular) seems like the sound of perfectly remembered nostalgia.

Being able to think backwards with that kind of accuracy can probably drive you crazy, which explains the near-constant comparisons Failure gets to the certifiably crazy (and great) self-analytics of Skip Spence and Jim Shepard. A lot of guys bandy about the term “confessional singer-songwriter” to get laid or work with Kanye or whatever, and that’s fine, but Pink Reason doesn’t appear to be going for either of those, and he does a pretty good job.

¹ For the record: Other songs in the playlist included “Boo Hoo Hoo” by the Strapping Fieldhands, “My Bartender” by Earthmen and Strangers, “Places West of Shawnapee” by Skygreen Leopards, and “I Can’t Wait” by the Sneaky Pinks, a song so perfect that when Nobunny was still semi-anonymous he more or less betrayed his identity by continuing to play it live.

I haven’t been working too much and I’ve hit a boring part in Skyrim, so I’ve ended up doing an extra little bit of thinking about my favorite songs of 2011. Diagnosis: Same delicate balance of 60’s pop and repetitive bummer-rock as ever. This brings me one step closer to creating a “songs I like” algorithm, though it’s becoming increasingly difficult to predict how into phasers I’ll be in a given year. (2011 was a good phaser year, primarily because of the excellent Sex Church LP and because hardcore bands are getting better at using them.)

(Above: “Dull Light” by Sex Church)

I bet some crazy percentage of blog posts mention something along the lines of “Hey, haven’t written here in awhile, ha ha! Been busy with the kids and shit, so.” Let’s say 5% of them. Apologizing, thinking out loud it’s time to start taking their blog more seriously, and so on.

Anyway, “Raincheck Vibrations” by Wounded Lion (above), that’s where I’ve been at, during that whole thing, even though I heard it for the first time about two hours ago.

(Unrelated: If any of you are internet hoarders who somehow have copies of any of my more recent posts, I accidentally deleted the ten or so most recent ones while running a Ruby script for something more or less unrelated. A couple of them caused me to receive compliments from people I liked receiving compliments from, and I’m [at least] as narcissistic as the next Tumblr user.)

Well, it certainly seems that developing a “beleaguered, defensive divorced man” artificial intelligence has become my day job. So be it.

irondavy:

After months of preparation, we were able to give Tag his birthday present today. It’s a book of drawings of the man himself, 365 in total, all drawn by people on Mechanical Turk. You can check out the online gallery of pictures, or if you’re mildly insane you can also purchase a copy off of Blurb (priced at cost, of course). Thanks to Joe, Nicole B., Jack, Ashleigh, Jen, Nicole H., Nicholas, Mike, Jason for help and contributions. And a double special thanks to Matt and Allan for mega help and contributions.

This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever had the privilege of being a part of.