Best of 2012: Music from January

This song showed up as a free iTunes single the last week of December. The six piece Icelandic folk band sneaked onto my playlist on New Year's Eve and hasn't budged. Just try being grumpy after all that trumpet blaring and chorus of "Hey!"s. The single version has a lot of ambient noise that's missing from the live versions, including the eerie creaking of ropes, presumably the rigging of the ship that caries our bodies safe to shore.



This song is a few years old now, from Gregory Alan Isakov's 2009 album The Empty Northern Hemisphere.  It's just a mellow, acoustic love song that begs to be on a dozen soundtracks, yet it isn't.



Last week when I wrote about Ingrid Michaelson's new album Human Again, I barely mentioned "How We Love" in passing, but since then this quiet little song, tucked into a record full of big sounds, has won me over, heart and soul.  Listen closely or you'll miss gems like, "felt the sharpness deep inside, the kind of ache that can't be satisfied" and "she smelled like cinnamon and winter clove, and sparked like firewood inside a stove."



I've also become (re)obsessed with Australian rocker Butterfly Boucher. Yes, that's her real name. Moving on.  "I'm Not Fooling Around" is a song about denying that you're trying to win someone back.  That's not my analysis. It's right there in the song. Go ahead, listen. This song is one-third techno, one-third disco, one-third Bach. You have to listen now.  The album isn't out until April, but you can get a free download from Butterfly's official site.



And for a completely different sound, "5,6,7,8" is part tango, part girl power rock, especially in this live version where Butterfly is on stage with fellow-Aussie Missy Higgins and Nashville alt-country, and Butterfly's Ten Out of Tennessee bandmate Katie Herzig.  There's so much pretty on stage, the eye hardly knows where to look. That is, until around 1:50, where, if you're more, shall we say, inclined towards the female form, it'll blow your mind.  Butterfly Boucher is the hottest thing since Joan Jett.

See.


(from Kirk Stauffer's Flickr page.)

On Human Again

There are no discernible ukuleles.  If that's what you're looking for from Ingrid Michaelson's new record Human Again, you'll have to go back to 2008's Be OK.  For this album, they've been largely replaced by the more mature-sounding strings. That's not to say there's not plenty here for the more traditional (read: crazy internet) fans. Tracks like "Ribbons," "Palm of Your Hand," and "How We Love" have that trademark quirkiness and tight ladies-sounding-like-angels harmonies.

The thing Ingrid fans love, though, is that her sound tends to fluctuate, from experimental techno-beats to ukuleles to fake trumpet mouth sounds (3:09). Her personality is always audible, but maybe her personality is growing up a little bit.  The first single off Human Again  is the emotion-leaden "Ghost," about feeling lost, alone, and disembodied by love.  Michaelson always has a way of taking themes that sound overly sentimental, and stabbing at the part of your heart you didn't know still had feelings. In "Ghost," amid strings and piano, she sings, "Do you know that I went down to the ground, landed on both my broken hearted knees? I didn't even cry." And later, "It's like living in a bad dream. I keep trying to scream, but my tongue has finally lost it's sound." See what I'm saying? Feeeelings.



There are some weaker points to the album, as Human Again seems to take a panoramic tour of musical history. "Fire," which after "Ghost" is probably the strongest track on the album, starts, again, with an orchestral arrangement, and quickly speeds into a tempo from the 80s. "This is War" has a similar late 80s sound. You can imagine it playing as the credits role after a 13-year-old Joaquin Pheonix has saved the world Cold War annihilation.  "Black and Blue" sounds like the 90s, "Blood Brothers"--definitely the 70s, can't we all just get along and smoke peyote?  But the most obviously retro-influenced song is "End of the World," which may as well be a cover of Bread's "If."



Now back to feelings. The song voted most likely to punch you in the gut is "I'm Through," about moving on with someone new, but feeling the aching distance between the promise of happiness and the comfort of a familiar touch.  The song, set to a soft, lonely piano, highlights Michaelson's vocal dexterity while crooning mournful lines like "I know there'll come a time again when everything will fit right in, and I won't have to see your face in strangers on the street."  If you'd like a more cheerful version of this song, the iTunes version includes a bonus track called "Always You," which is exactly that. Spoiler alert: They stay together in this one!





Like Michaelson's other albums, there will be a few duds that will be skipped on a fairly regular basis, but that's a good sign that the other tracks are still in rotation.  Ingrid always brings something new to every album; here there's lyricism with less quirkiness, but something deeper, darker perhaps, more mournful. This record sounds like, for the first time, she wasn't just making music to have fun with fellow uke-strumming friends, but to produce a serious musical project.

Best of 2011: Songs from December

LP - Into the Wild
Don't be fooled by the uke-laden opening. It really starts rocking when you get into it.  Then you may recognize this song from the "Accessories" Citibank commercial where the woman puts her points toward the "rock she really had in mind."  It's a little weird to see a big bank, which let's just all admit is inherently evil, sell an ideal that counters popular patterns of female consumption.  Wait, she means climbing shoes! Instead of buying a diamond and fitting snugly into a stereotype, she climbs a big, freakin' mountain.  The new American dream in consumerism may not be to merely consume, but to experience.  (I bet they're calling them adventurcations now, but I feel a little sick every time I type a portmanteau.) As a left-wing, commie, socialist, hippie, conglomeration of derogatory terms I get called, I have to admit, the only way I could love this commercial more is if the voiceover said, "my girlfriend and I were thinking of going on vacation." Now, I try not to publicly make statements about a person's sexuality unless they do so openly, and I really don't know that much about LP except that she just signed to Warner Bros and is working on her debut album. So I'll just say that she has a pretty solid lesbian following. And every time the camera opens into that aerial shot, and LP's voice comes screeching in with, "Somebody left the gate open," I want to climb a big, freakin' mountain too. I hope somebody leaves my gate open. (That's not a euphemism.)

PS. If you go to her website, you can get a free download of this live recording.



The Black Keys - Tighten Up / Unknown Brother
I was a little late jumping onto the Black Keys bandwagon, but here I am.  Just about the time they released El Camino, I was putting "Tighten Up" and "Unknown Brother" on repeat.  I've listened to a lot of their music in the last month, but these are the only two songs that I've really fallen for. Though, after listening to the depress-fest that is "Unknown Brother"--Those jingle bells are really deceiving--"Tighten Up" is my favorite. When it came time to chose between which song to include on the list, I went with the one with the best video.



GROUPLOVE - Tongue Tied
If you've seen the new iPod Touch commercial featuring this New York based-band, you've probably walked around for hours afterwards singing, "Take me to your best friend's house. I loved you then; I love you now."



Gotye - Somebody I Used to Know
This song barely made the list.  I heard it in passing a few weeks ago, but didn't really like it.  Then I heard a great cover and had to compare.  Now, two days later, I can't stop listening. The combination of passionate voices in harmony and lyrics like "You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness" and "Now and then, I think of all the times you screwed me over." It's a great breakup song.  Everyone knows the feeling of moving someone you once really loved into the "somebody I used to know" category.  Really, I'm pretty sure I wrote this song first, at least five times.




Ingrid Michaelson - Parachute / Parachute / Ghost / Somebody I Used to Know/ Every Single Song
I. Love. Ingrid. I love pretty much every single song she does. I had listened to Parachute a lot, but sometimes songs come back to you and touch you in a way that they never did before.  I really like the video too.  There was a huge backlash against it.  Apparently, a vocal portion of her fanbase (of which I am a member) thought the video "wasn't her," whatever the hell that means.  So she shot a new one that's more of an homage to New York than what happens if you take too much cold medicine and fall asleep reading The Little Prince.  Ingrid has a new album coming out next month, which is why I didn't already include the first single Ghost. More on that later.

And here's where a few covers come in. First, there's Ingrid's own cover of Gotye's song, then there's British popstar Cheryl Cole's cover of Parachute, which she took to the top of the UK charts. If you thought Ingrid's video was weird...at least it didn't have Flamenco dancers wearing their suspenders weirdly and gowns stolen from Oxbridge undergraduates.



Kensington - Let Go
You can't really sit still when this Dutch band gets going.  It doesn't matter that the entire chorus just repeats the contradictory lines, "We gotta let go. We gotta let go. We gotta hold on. We gotta hold on. We gotta let go" because it's so damn peppy.

Rounding up December has been pretty difficult because most of my favorite songs of the year, I started listening to (or listening to more) in December.  Like "Into the Wild," "Let Go" is packed full of energy, and they'd probably make my top 5 of the year. I'll be listening to both of these songs on repeat well into 2012.

Best of 2011: Songs from November

When I listen to "Attaboy", I imagine the opening credits of the movie about my life. It's a pretty short movie, for lack of interesting plot material.  And south Mississippi is played by Ireland.  But the thing that gets me about watching this video is that these musicians--each a master of his own instrument--recorded in the same room together, not in separately little cubes separated by thousands of miles and then pieced together by a skillful engineer.  And you can see how much they enjoy being Goat Rodeo.



I know I've already covered a lot of Sarah Jaffe in October's songs, but here's Clementine.  It's been about every third song in my ears for two months now. It's so good. Seriously, listen.

See? So good.



People are usually pretty shocked that I like One Republic.  They're boys! And they're on the radio! Hell, they're on commercials for Disney World.  But then, my friends are usually shocked at how much I love Disney World too.  But these are just great songs.

Here's another.

Best of 2011: Songs from October

If September was a month of male vocalists, the ladies invaded my iTunes with a vengeance in October.  One of those women was Sarah Jaffe.  This is one of those great finds that was sent my way by my buddy over at Engine145.  Even though we rarely agree on music (or Lenny Kravitz), she has a good ear for knowing stuff I'll like. This next one, just to warn you, is NSFW.



See, I told you.  The thing that makes this song scandalous is not the language, it's the fact that it's a woman using the language.  This is a cover of Drake's song, and no one bats an eye when he sings these lines.



"Bedroom Eyes" was a free download on iTunes one week, and it was one of those rare occasions when it's actually a good song. Dum Dum Girls have since become one of those bands like Fleet Foxes or The Black Keys that are available in vinyl at your local Urban Outfitters.  You know what I'm saying. But it will make you dance.  It's like Florence + the Machine, but without the annoyance of actually listening to Florence.



I first heard of BOY from Dorothy Surrenders, the best written blog on the internet. Really.  And that's all I have to say about the matter.

Best of 2011: Songs from September

When you're done watching that, I'll continue.  Go ahead, I'll be here all day.

Isn't that the  BEST thing EVER?! It's all I can do to keep myself from embedding it again.



This is City and Colour, the "band name" of Dallas Green. Get it?  Dallas Green /City and Colour. The u's because he's Canadian.  Anyway, this is a lovely song, that I liked the first second I heard his voice.



I've always loved Joe Purdy, but somehow this song had escaped me.  Purdy also sings one of the songs that I stayed on the repeat play list longer than maybe anything else....The City.

Best of 2011: Songs from August

I said when I started this list that many of these songs were not from 2011, and August's playlist really proves that. Two important things happened in my music-listening life back in August.  The first was that I finally got Spotify, after waiting for years for it to make it to this side of the Atlantic.  Spotify doesn't take the place of Pandora, but it does have some advantages, like listening to songs when you want to, instead of waiting for them to randomly show up.  The other advantage is the ability to make playlists and share them with friends, so if you've got a little Bill Withers obsession, like I do, you can share songs with other like-minded music fans.



The second thing happened, oddly enough, in a Starbucks, where I ran to get out of a storm.  I sat down, had a cup of coffee, and "Cry to Me" started playing.  And any child of the 80s knows exactly where they know this song from. So I took advantage of my newfound technology to set a retro playlist that kept me, well, grooving, as it were, through a very large stack of work. Here are a couple more songs from that Spotify playlist.





And in case you haven't figured out what playlists are good for, here's your final hint.