mp3: Mary Timony Band - Hapi Holidaze
from Kill Rock Stars Winter Holiday Album
by Various Artists
Kill Rock Stars
The last one to the party as always. If you haven’t chosen to buy the Kill Rock Stars Winter Holiday Album by now, what’s the chances you’ll do so after Christmas? Not that it’s simply a Christmas thing, but still.
This post is just an excuse to bring up my darling Mary Timony, who I’m always delighted to listen to any time of the year.
mp3:Postcards From Italy
from Gulag Orkestar
Ba Da Bing!
Buy at NapsterSo this is kind of an experiment because a couple of months ago I signed up for the IODA Promonet deal giving me access to thousands and thousands of mp3s to ‘blogify’. Well, until now I obviously haven’t used it.
Why start with Beirut? I’ve witnessed this album receive so much love this year, both from people I know and people across the internet. But for some reason I’ve never heard the album and thought this would be a good way to try them out. If you’ve ended up in the same boat as me and seen the name thousands of times but never got around to downloading, now is your chance. I quite like it.
Happy Christmas and all that crap.
It’s been a quieter month in Stayfun land, with broken computers, travel and endless work getting in the way of good music exploration. But most of those have been solved now, so here I am on Christmas Day with some quick thoughts.
Berlin is super cool. Hugely hyped by all the hip kids these days, but they’re pretty much right. Berlin is a nice place to be and I want to go back.
It’s a pain when hard disks and Windows totally conspire against you and leave you with nothing but a base system on an ancient hard disk with absolutely no audio or video media. The situation was resolved with the purchase of a 400GB Samsung drive which is doing a good job currently. It’s quiet. Maybe not as quiet as I desire, but it’s screwed into the chassis currently, rather than hanging off elastic like my previous setup, so that plays a big part in any noise.
As for work, I’m officially on holiday, but I sometimes wonder if I’m borderline workaholic because when I don’t have work to do, I’m never fully sure what to do, and often end up finding bits of work to do. Of course I could never be a proper workaholic. I’m too lazy for that.
Enough rambling. Here is some music:
mp3: Tchaikovsky - The Nutcracker excerpt - Pas de deux: Intrada
It’s Christmassy. This track is also a bit dramatic. It’s in honour of going to see it performed on Friday night in Amsterdam by the Tchaikovsky Perm Ballet, who put on a very pretty show.
mp3: Monkey and Bear
website: http://www.dragcity.com/bands/newsom.html
You get extra points as a musician if you can actually change my mood with your music and make me notice things I wouldn’t have bothered with if the earphones hadn’t been in. So it is, about 3 months after everyone else, I think, that I’ve discovered Joanna Newsom’s Ys and I think I might be somewhat addicted to it. My braidio (brain radio, ahem) is tuned to it all the time, and currently, if we dip in, we hear my mind (unsuccessfully) trying to play back the bit in Emily about how the meteorite is the source of the light and the meteoroid, and the meteor ice. God, it’s a tiny part of the song, but it makes my head turn upside-down. I wasn’t keen on the singing pixie elements, or what I saw as that anyway, from her last album so avoided her, but Ys has completely won me over and now I have to go back and find The Milk-Eyed Mender just to prove to myself whether I was wrong or not to disregard her.
Oh, and the bit about putting all the names of the stars in verse so she could remember them for some reason gave me a little jolt, and I’m not sure if it’s the romantic old man or the bookish child in me, probably both, but it made me fall in love even further.
Monkey and Bear as a single song is so full of ideas and twists, the gorgeous close harmonies at the start lulling me into a 1920s black-and-white cartoon reverie, then suddenly it seems to be alive, lush with colour, with phrases - musical and verbal - suddenly coming out of the greenery and surprising me. It’s simply gorgeous, a mental treat, in a few senses of the word. The wordplay - Your feast is to the east just a little past the pasture - was always going to get me, I’m a sucker for that, and music like this that rewards your patience, stops you looking for distractions because you want to be inside it and it only, just seems so much richer and worth hanging onto. I had another listen to stuff from the first album yesterday and it still doesn’t grab me in the way this new album seems to - Ys seems to have a breath of life about it that I can’t detect in the first one, and if you’d replaced her with a less distinctive singer, I’m not even sure I’d say it was the same artist that had written the songs. It’s one of those albums I want everyone to listen to, but know most people will hate it. Ahhh. So it even appeals to the indie isolationist in me. Lovely.
Buy.
Following on from Dermot yesterday, and it won’t be the last Kristin Hersh post of the year, as I have another idea up my sleeve. I just noticed another post on elbows earlier:
http://ashleyplath.blogspot.com/2006/12/kristin-hersh-learn-to-sing-like-star.html
Visit there to sample a b-side from the upcoming ‘In Shock’ single.
mp3: In Shock
website: http://www.throwingmusic.com/
On the way back from a horribly rainy lunchtime this afternoon, I walked into the lift and ‘In Shock’ came on my mp3 player.
And it cast me back to the old days, when I would frequent Throwing Music Online, Kristin Hersh’s internet home, where around the time of new releases, something akin to the most intense parts of The Crucible would occur in text form - individual posters would reel backwards clutching their eyes, screaming in a shrill manner, while glaring at the ceiling, “I saw The Devil put 4 songs from Sky Motel on Soulseek!” or “Jesus and his saints will cast out those who fileshare Works in Progress 2, you are stealing the sacred communion from the mouths of her babes!” and so on, but these days, we’re all a bit more insouciant about such things. I mean, as a fan, I would buy Kristin’s new album if it consisted of a recording of her accidentally dropping things on the floor and apologising, to be honest, but it’s always nice to have a preview.
This waiting around just seems so…’90s. But to stay on the safe side, here’s an already broadcast radio version of the song, ‘In Shock’. I don’t want to be burned as an mp3 witch by the marginalised hordes. If I’m pretending I haven’t got the whole album, I’d say “it bodes well for the album”. But as I do already have it, you may as well know that I think the album is great, and a lovely surprise in places.
And so there I was in the lift, rained on, cold. ‘In Shock’ cheered me right up. I like the way the piano and guitar have a duel, geographically, somewhere about 10cm between my ears, which tickled my little brain. It made me jiggle about like some sort of dislodged egg for 15 seconds until someone came into the lift and I turned it down. I might sometimes get excited, but I’m also polite. I like listening to loud music, but I don’t want anyone having to witness me listening to loud music. Goes to show, there are limits, you know.
Pre-Order (if in the US and get free mp3s)
