iJamming.net

I had been planning on one final post of 2007, some kind of overview, maybe a link to my Top 10 Moments on what was a personally challenging year. But mother nature just dropped a fresh eight inches of the white stuff on us, it’s still the school holidays and the ski mountains are calling our name. Campbell and I are off to the slopes. Happy New Year everyone!

REHAB – AMY WINEHOUSE
So, it was a 2006 hit in the UK, and you may be tired of it over there, but it was ubiquitous in the States only from its January 07 release onwards. And come the end of the year, people were still playing it and loving it even as Winehouse herself, who lives it like she sings it, appeared to be in emotional freefall. It’s rare to find a song beloved not only by neo-soul cognoscenti, but by kids, radio programmers, young adults and middle-aged housewives alike, and this was one of the few American Top 100 hits I went along with – even noticed – from the last twelve months. Truly, as measured by impact, effect and omnipresence, this was Song of The Year.

“There’s nothing you can teach me/That I can’t learn from Mr Hathaway”

Watch the video here
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RUNNING THE WORLD – JARVIS COCKER
Another Brit, and another ‘06 release that only made it to American stores (we still use stores?) in ’07. For its prominent use of the C-word, as in “C**ts are still Running The World,” the track was initially hidden at the end of a so-so debut solo album, but once it appeared on the soundtrack to Children Of Men, it proved less possible for the masses to ignore. (Props to the soundtrack music supervisor for daring to include it.) A song of vitriolic anger at the capitalist system, but rendered with humanity and humility, it was Cocker’s finest five minutes since “Common People.”

“Now the Working classes are obsolete,
They are surplus to society’s needs,
So let ‘em all kill each other,
And get it made overseas.”

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THOU SHALT ALWAYS KILL – DAN LE SAC Vs. SCROOBIUS PIP
A Cockney spoken-word electro rocker that throws a new delicious couplet at me every time I hear it. You don’t have to agree with its various commandments; you just need appreciate the fun that went into composing them.

“Thou shalt not attend an open-mike and leave as soon as you’ve done your shitty little poem or song, you self-righteous prick.”

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WANNA BE (featuring Lily Allen) – DIZZEE RASCAL
This inevitable partnership lived up to expectations, displaying British hip-hop-garage-grime at its Cockney rhyming inter-racial best – and even if it did sound positively lightweight alongside American rap, it was all the more refreshing for its piss-take of the gangsta posers.

“What do you know about being a hard man/your mum buys your bling”

Home-made YouTube video, with Talulah from Bugsy Malone as Lily Allen…
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BUCKETHEAD – CARBON/SILICON
Available only from the band’s web site, and entirely for free, this musical adaptation of the book “Snow Crash” uses the same guitar riff for its entire 8 minutes and 45 seconds – and I’ve yet to tire of it. In the middle of the repetition, Mick Jones even references the song itself:

“The choruses of ‘my friend’ part personalizes the song to counteract the rather geekiness of the verses. And to keep it in the rock’n'roll area.”

Hear the song via legal free streaming/download here:
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GRAHAM PARKER – STICK TO THE PLAN
Perhaps because former British native Graham Parker is now something of a Woodstock institution, local radio station WDST got right behind his new album Don’t Tell Columbus and played this song incessantly through the middle of the year. And they were certainly correct to do so, for “Stick To The Plan” is one of Parker’s best, lyrically and musically right up there with Dylan and Springsteen in terms of its relevance, easy groove and clever but never polemic wordplay. I should really have got my hands on the album already, as it also includes songs about a) Pete Doherty, b) Parker’s move to Woodstock, and c) the early 20th century destruction of several Catskills villages to build the Ashokan reservoir for New York City’s water supply, a subject I always thought deserved to be put to song. Expect a lengthier treatise on Don’t Tell Columbus in weeks to come.

“Well God said to the president listen to me/I will advise you on
the way it’s gonna be/So the president got to his knees and accepted his fate/It’s a done deal now if you got some objections too late.”

Live rendition of “Stick to the Plan” (Graham, get with the Net!) at YouTube:

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LONDON I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN – HEARING DOUBLE & JCB SOUNDSYSTEM
What greater honor could New York’s LCD Soundsystem have asked for than an online-only bootleg remix album to appear from England just weeks after Sound Of Silver’s release – and for its closing song to be an actual cover version? Hearing Double & JCB Soundsystem rewrote “New York I Love You” to reflect the contemporary capital of the UK – and then further internationalized the concert with a lengthy finale. It was the kind of instant internet interaction that makes modern music so exciting – and if you do download the song or the album, the LCDRemixed team ask only that you consider a donation to charity; they’ve contributed their own talents entirely for free.
“So the boring collect, I mean all disrespect, in the Islington bars I once dreamt I would drink.”

Hear the song via legal free streaming/download here
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THE SIDEWINDER SLEEPS TONITE – ROGUE WAVE
Stereogum magazine’s tribute to Automatic For The People, Drive XV, was another online-only, free-to-all-comers musical offering, and very nearly made it into my Top 10 albums list. Only a couple of patchy covers prevented it from doing so. Ultimately, the one I keep coming back to is this song by Rogue Wave, one of America’s greatest new wistful pop bands, who rewrote the R.E.M. classic with sufficient imagination to render it almost an entirely new song, without ever insulting the original.

“The cat in the hat came back, wrecked a lot of havoc on the way,
Always had a smile and a reason to pretend.”

Hear the song via legal free streaming/download here.
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THE PRESIDENT’S DEAD – OKKERVIL RIVER
Wishful thinking, I’m afraid, at least if we’re talking about the same President as Graham Parker. But in combining the memory of Kennedy’s assassination with the fictional death of a contemporary President – as imagined thirty years from now – Okkervil River delivered a perfect sub-three minute pop song, almost exclusively on acoustic guitar. Giving away such a great single online paid enormous dividends when the group’s third or fourth album (depending how you count them), The Stage Names, came out to great acclaim, making it onto many End-of-year-Lists.

“If you don’t live through a day for the littlest things,
And the littlest ways made you feel you were blessed
If you died right then, well you know you’d be missed,
But there’s no better state to cease to exist.”

Hear the song via legal free streaming/download here:
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AMERICAN LAND – BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN WITH THE SESSIONS BAND
Another ’06 song to round out the list, “American Land” was introduced on the Sessions Band tour last year and released on the double CD live souvenir that came out early in ‘07. I confess, not having seen that tour, I didn’t pay the new song enough attention. But when the E Street Band closed their set with it in Albany this past November, it walloped me over the head with its poignancy, for fourteen days later I returned to Albany and, only a few hundred yards away from the arena where I saw Bruce play, became a citizen of this “American Land.” Thanks to the ongoing influence of so many great songwriters on this list who intrinsically understand the importance of great lyrics, I intend to use my new-found electoral voice wisely.

“They died building the railroads worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago they’re still dyin now
The hands that built the country we’re always trying to keep down”

And here’s the live version from Bruce Springsteen with the Sessions Band, as it appears on the Live In Dublin CD and DVD:

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To all iJamming! readers. And happy birthday to our Noel, three years old today.

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM: SOUND OF SILVER
Watching James Murphy progress from local DJ/remixer to singer/lyricist/band-leader has been a particularly enjoyable, 21st Century New York experience. But did we ever know he had this in him? Who really imagined the indie-disco-house-rock maven making a second album that would gel so perfectly and contain so many truly fine songs, songs to make you laugh (“North American Scum”), cry (“All My Friends”), and even to get nostalgic for the bad old days (“New York I Love You”) – nor that we would come to treasure his spectacularly non-singing voice. From its spring-time release onwards, I waited to hear if another album would challenge Sound of Silver as my record of the year. Nothing came close.

More LCD Soundsystem at iJamming!

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M.I.A.: Kala
Sonically, however, this album beats all-comers. For that we can thank the U.S. Immigration, without whom Kala would have been produced by Timbaland throughout and probably sounded like any other white British hip-hop artist who hopes to break America by faking American (and inevitably fails miserably). Instead, unable to secure an American work visa, little Miss M.I.A. traveled the world, sampled it on our behalf, and distilled the entire global village into digital sound-bites. Songs? James Murphy eats her for breakfast. But sound? I’ve never heard anything like it.

More M.I.A. at iJamming!

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CARBON/SILICON: The Last Post
For all that I love the free MP3, for all that I praise the notion of the iPod as new transistor radio, there’s still something to be said for the old-fashioned album, especially when it’s been remixed by Bill Price. Mick Jones and Tony James brought in the old Clash producer to clean up the ultra-simplistic dance-punk rock music they’ve otherwise been giving away online for the last few years, sequenced the tracks in a proper order and, in the words of the eternally positive Jones on “Oil Well,” dropped “some love on the human race.” We need it. And for all that I love his nonchalance towards the music business, we need Mick Jones gigging America, putting CDs into record stores and getting on the radio – because his “News” is too good to keep to the web. Welcome back. The world’s a better place for your presence.

More Carbon Silicon at iJamming!

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BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Magic
Yes, I’m as big a boss fanatic as you. And you. And you. But looking at year-end polls, I think we may have gotten carried away: Magic is not the best album of Bruce’s last decade, let alone of his career – or even, necessarily, of this year: a DJ friend of mine places his Live In Dublin double CD with the Sessions Band, also from ’07, over this one, and I understand his reasoning. But still, it is Bruce, with the E Street Band, it’s a proper rock record, he’s America’s working class poet laureate and, on “Last To Die,” “Livin’ In The Future” and “Magic,” he tells it like it is like no one else can do. As for “Girls In Their Summer Clothes” and “I’ll Work For Your Love,” he may be old enough to be a granddad, but oh man, what an incurable romantic.

More Bruce Springsteen at iJamming!

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THE FELICE BROTHERS: Adventures of the Felice Brothers Vol. 1
The legacy of Bruce and Bob, Pete and Woody, Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan, Jug Bands and Medicine Shows, folk and skiffle, bar brawls and hootenannies are all encapsulated in this Catskills-raised band of real blood brothers. The Adventures of the Felice Brothers Vol. 1 appears to be a totally different album from the one they released in the UK this year, which only serves to show how many great songs they keep in their kitbags: certainly, “Radio Song” and “Frankie’s Gun!” are as solid raw material as anything I heard this year. (They are performed, however, much like the live show: gloriously sloppy.) Word has it that Rick Rubin is after them; for those of us who live round Woodstock and long for some young guns to replace the legacy of the (lovable) old hippies, this can only be good news. As there appears to be no cover shot or link to their U.S. “tour-only” album (their MySpace page currently has a couple of its recordings) I’ve listened to so much this past few months, the image and link below are for the European album, Tonight at the Arizona. I’d like to believe it’s equally good.

More Felice Brothers at iJamming!

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YOUTH GROUP: Casino Twilight Dogs
Hyped to us by iJamming! pubber Heggo (R.I.P.) upon its release in their native Australia further back in ’06, Youth Group’s third album was finally released on American soil early in ’07, and I’m truly surprised it did not fare better. Tobi Martin’s yearning voice is far preferable to that of his near-namesake in Coldplay, and his lyrics are not far below that of Tim Booth or Michael Stipe, a couple of other obvious reference points. Back in February, I wrote this, and I still stick by it:” At equal turns dark and ecstatic, Casino Twilight Dogs is the sound of a band on perpetual brink of collective orgasm.” Listening to the album again several times over here at the end of the year, I still feel the same way. It’s an achingly beautiful – and deftly intellectual – power pop album as rarely gets made any more.

More Youth Group at iJamming!

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BUSDRIVER: RoadKillOvercoat BUSDRIVER: Roadkillovercoat (Anti-)
Either the world of psychedelic hip-hop is vast and I know nothing about it, or it’s very small and I’m among the only people to frequent it. Either way, I am surprised that I appear to be the only person I know to have raved about Busdriver’s RoadKillOvercoat. Make no mistake, these are some of the finest – and certainly funniest – lyrics to have been written in a year that didn’t lack for good couplets. Regan Farquhar (a.k.a Busdrive) spends much of RoadKillOvercoat attacking his own comrades in “conscious rap,” and no-one is safe: not vegetarians, not soccer moms, not champagne liberals nor even gays. Yet despite his frenetic word play, Busdriver never forgets his grooves, be they hip-hop, techno, or the best Yes sample I’ve heard. I get up, indeed.

More Busdriver at iJamming!

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UNDERWORLD: Oblivion With Bells
Let’s ignore its apparent commercial failure; let’s not obsess about why rock critics prefer Daft Punk to Underworld. Let’s focus on the purely positive: Oblivion With Bells picked up precisely where A Hundred Days Off left off a full five years ago, Karl Hyde and Rick Smith continuing to alternate luscious ambient soundscapes (“Glam Bucket”) with uplifting romantic dance grooves (“Crocodile”) and maturing gracefully in the process. The album not only contained some of the best song titles of their long and illustrious career (“Faxed Invitation” and “Good Morning Cockerel” pipped to the post by “Cuddle Bunny Vs. Celtic Villages”), but also one of their very best recorded songs: the brilliantly stark and urbanely poetic “Ring Road.”

More Underworld at iJamming!

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ARCADE FIRE: Neon Bible
As can so easily happen, I allowed the hype that surrounded Arcade Fire’s debut album Funeral to color my judgment: I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that it was good as people said it was. So, I figured that if the Canadian minstrels were really all that, the second album would prove as much. And to me, it did. (Even if, to many others, Arcade Fire were an archetypal example of the previously referenced sophomore slump.) I find Neon Bible truly apocalyptic, the sound of a world gone mad, and with no apparent idea how to regain its sanity. That tension, that uncertainty, that fury and misery and apparent hopelessness – and the musical complexity that runs alongside it – makes for one of the year’s strongest sets. The fact that lead vocalist Win Butler has channeled much of Ian McCulloch’s dark majesty is no bad thing, either.

More Arcade Fire at iJamming!

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ARCTIC MONKEYS: Favourite Worst Nightmare
I labored over this one. I suspect there were many better albums released in 2007 than Favourite Worst Nightmare, which I did not find myself playing as much as I expected, nor finding a song above all others to remember it for. But when all’s said and done, I so admire Arctic Monkeys for ignoring their own press, following up their record-breaking debut in a matter of mere months when most bands now take years, for hardening their sound without being deliberately obtuse about it, for the continued lyrical nuggets – and for keeping everything to 37.5 minutes. It’s called getting on with the job, and it’s the proven method for avoiding the second album slump. Cheers, lads.

More Arctic Monkeys at iJamming!

Compiling my Top 10 albums of 2007 for a couple of magazine polls – because I want my vote to count – I’ve been struck by how many second albums have shown up on my list. Typically, the second album is the one that gets made in too much of a rush, after a lifetime to prepare the debut, thereby revealing a buzz act’s inherent shortcomings. Here in America, they even have a term for it: the sophomore slump. But this year was more like the sophomore summit: the second albums by LCD Soundsystem, M.I.A., the Arcade Fire and Arctic Monkeys all made my list. Seems to me that can only be a good thing.

I’ve been making such lists since I was a kid, when I used to compile my own weekly Top 10, so I have fun with the annual polls, even if a part of me opposes trying to define the “Best Of” anything. After all, taste is subjective, right? Well, to some extent it is, but it’s amazing all the same how easily the human race reaches consensus. Take almost any album you’ve enjoyed over the last year, and chances are, you will have most enthused over exactly the same tracks as other fans of that album and chances are, equally, that those tracks will have been or become the singles.

For my part, I always labor to make sure my Top 10 list is balanced. That means that these may not be the albums or singles I played the most over the past year; rather, my list is meant to reflect what I always hope to be my wide-ranging (but ultimately, I admit, western and conservative) tastes. Therefore, every one of my top ten is itself a choice. For example, I loved the new albums by both Underworld and Chemical Brothers this year; I find each act continually consistent. But I can’t justify putting both in my Top 10 list when there’s so much other great music out there, so Underworld gets the nod, in part by default: the Chemical Brothers We Are The Night contains their worst collaboration ever, “The Salmon Dance.” Bruce Springsteen released two great albums this year, but does he really need my vote on either when everyone else has put Magic on their top ten lists – or should I find room for a new act that perhaps picks up on his recent jug band spirit, like the Felice Brothers? Certainly, I like to ensure there’s a couple of albums on my list that aren’t on other peoples’, perhaps partly out of elitism but also from a desire for people to go discover them, and for the artists and labels involved to know that someone out there really did rate them that highly. I talk here about not just the Felice Brothers, but Youth Group and Busdriver too, both of which were released on the ever-consistent Anti- label.

Then there’s the influence of other writers, “tastemakers” and DJs. Had not these people been raving about M.I.A.’s second album Kala – and had I not heard its singles via All Songs Considered, my Podcast of the Year – I might well have passed it up; it’s not like I heard or saw enough at the Siren Festival to make me feel that the Sri Lankan/London native was the Queen of everything hip (and hop). But now that I own it, I believe that Kala is the most sonically astonishing album I’ve heard in the last five years; it is, perhaps, the only truly 21st Century record on my list. Whether or not I find myself playing it relentlessly through next year is somewhat moot: for sheer musical mash-up global digital creativity, it deserves my nod.

At the same time, I refused to be bullied into agreement. Radiohead’s In Rainbows is, surely, the best album they’ve released in a decade, and were it any other act’s debut, it may well have made my list. (My wife has been playing it frequently.) But I’m still on that side of the fence that doesn’t quite understand Radiohead. Fortunately, I’m not alone: to quote Carrie Brownstein, formerly of Sleater/Kinney, and now a contributor to All Songs Considered, when she chose it for that radio show as her disappointment of the year:

“The disappointment is not in Radiohead as much as it is in myself. And Radiohead always reminds what a letdown I am because I never really get it. I cannot be the only person who eels that way. I like music that is difficult and challenging but there’s this blankness that I can’t get over.”

As for the incredible fuss about making In Rainbows available online for whatever price the consumer decided, I applaud the move – but I prefer to champion Stereogum webzine’s tribute to Automatic For The People, Drive XV, and the Sounds Like Silver LCDRemixed project: each was made available for free download or streaming, and neither asked you to put money in the producer’s bank account. Oh, and in my humble opinion, they’re both better albums.

A couple of those online albums’ individual cuts show up among my Songs of the Year – because that’s what that list is for: to highlight the innovative, the unusual, the ephemeral, the throwaway, the single that completely dominated its parent album – and the occasional new classic, hidden away at the end of a double live Bruce Springsteen album. Yet for all that I like to think such Songs of the Year should be disposable, I notice that every single of my choices has particularly pertinent/poignant/poetic lyrics. Words count. Maybe I need another chart entirely for my instrumental dance cuts of the year; sadly, I did not pick up (or pay attention to) as many of those as I should have done.

To be absolutely honest, I did not hear that many complete new albums this year, either. In large part, that’s because I’ve been working on a book about old music, which has provided its own long list of treasured (re)discoveries. I’ve also dropped off a number of mailing lists over the last few years, which is equally okay up to a point; I have enough music in my collection that I’ve never heard properly to last me many lifetimes. But still, as I’ve looked at other writers/DJs/personal lists, and as I’ve revisited the lone tracks by said artists that have made it to my iPod or online radio shows, I realize just how many complete albums I’d love to get in my stocking next week. As long as you’re not judging 2007 by Grammy nominations, it appears to have been a great year for music of all stripes.

And that brings me to my last major point. 2007 has seen, at long last, a return from the lengthy album to the “song,” increasingly made available to the consumer via web sites and/or MP3. As long as my iPod continues to self-load with KEXP and Indie Feed’s Songs of the Day, with the Brilliant show, with the Shortwave Sessions, All Songs Considered, Music That Matters and the Tripwire Podcast, I feel as well connected to new music as I ever have done. And if, in the process, I only get to hear one or two great songs from the best new albums, that’s okay – because there will be an equally great song or two on my iPod tomorrow. Goodbye old-fashioned transistor radio, hello new-fangled transistor radio. And may 2008 bring much more of the same (but different).