2007 that was (by Tim)

Young Jeezy - Put On

http://www.zshare.net/audio/196897551a2c2718/

Every year needs at least one high-octane end-of-the-world dirgathon rap track that makes you feel impossibly small and puny. Last year I guess it was the big DJ Khaled track which I didn’t actually go for all that much (of course the year before we had T.I.’s “What You Know” obv) so I’m pleased that 2008 has offered up the massive “Put On” which I can enjoy with uncompromised masochistic fervour.

Not much terribly surprising to this (as if surprise is really what you want from a grinding tectonic plate of a rap anthem): Young Jeezy’s typically on the down low, muttering about life in the hard lanes, Luda’s Vegas-ready punchline extroversion, Wayne stumbling about stoned, Trae and Rick Ross both rapping through gritted teeth, Kanye contributing a kinda overrated but still fun autotune devotional interlude (now used to more high profile effect on his own “Love Lockdown”) worthy of ‘serious cat’ lolcat photos. But what a groove: the tinkling dystopian synth arpeggios, the playground-in-hell recorder loops, the dazzling faux-fanfares, and just… the sheer largesse, the bloodied but unbowed implacability of it all.

Alphabeat - Fascination

http://www.zshare.net/audio/187585316795d3fb/

Normally I’d be rather suspicious of a song like this. I mean… it’s rather INDIE, isn’t it? The almost inhuman chirpiness of it, the tweeness of the band and especially the boy/girl singers (both of whom may be oddly cute, but nonetheless in an almost criminal twee manner), the “LOOK AT MOI” grandiosity of the verses, the “DO YOU SEE” explosiveness of the choruses, and the “LOOK AT MOI DO YOU SEE” ridiculousness of the middle eight leading back into that chorus.

I know all of the above, and yet it simply cannot dampen my enjoyment of this song, which reminds me of a hungover drive from Melbourne to Geelong one Sunday afternoon six years ago with three equally hungover friends and a tape of greatest hits of Huey Lewis and the News for company. And I love this like I love Huey Lewis, or Pat Benatar, or mid-eighties Phil Collins: this stuff is simply Beyond Good & Evil, indeed beyond the master/slave dichotomies that suspicious music fans like myself spend so much time constructing to show how X is good because Y is bad. It simply is.

Taylor Swift - Love Story

http://www.sendspace.com/file/5myu87

My two biggest non-2008 obsessions this year have been Fela Kuti and Taylor Swift. Fela, of course, invented afro-beat. Taylor meanwhile is the latest young star of mainstream country, her 2006 eponymous debut album one of the best pop albums of this decade – certainly as a collection of confessional pop only Ashlee Simpson’s ‘I Am Me’ (and, perhaps, Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Breakaway) comes close.

Those suspicious of mainstream country tend to think that an example of greatness in this arena would require some fundamental undermining, subversion or, at least, transcendence of the style’s modus operandi. Taylor does none of this: her first album is glowing, maximalist studio-perfected country-pop, every inch of the stereo speaker filled with glowing guitars, hokey mandolins, gratuitous violin refrains. Taylor’s voice is just twangy enough to be clearly of its genre without seemed confined by it. Most difficult to pin down is Taylor’s songwriting, which manages to combine the generic with the idiosyncratic in ways that are just endlessly loveable (most famously, her first single “Tim McGraw” is a sweet curse laid on an ex-boyfriend to always think of her when he even thinks of country singer Tim McGraw, let alone hears ‘their song’). Rather than break with tradition, Taylor finds new and interesting ways to say things within that tradition; if you’ve never quite “got” with mainstream country I can’t think of a better gateway drug. Plus, she’s definitely one of the best lyricists in pop right now.

“Love Story”, as you might expect from a forthcoming second album arriving on the back of an ever-expanding public profile, is much more internationalist in feel. Oh, there’s a twangy mandolin throughout, but this is more than matched by the burnished sheen of the almost new wavey guitar and the unexpectedly subtle slow burn of the chorus. The tale of fantastic (in both senses) young love is also much more in line with the expectations of broader pop audiences – whereas Taylor’s first album was filled with the typically country concerns of failed romances, “what does he see in her?” pining, and one of my favourites, “Mary’s Song (Oh My My)” which covers about eighty years of a proudly domestic long term relationship like an ad campaign for life insurance.

Taylor’s capacity for astonishingly on-point specificity is largely jettisoned as she paints more a widescreen, mythological tale of love found, lost and regained, but even if the eventual marriage proposal has an air of broad brush strokes about it (I liked this denouement in “Mary’s Song” just a little more), Taylor finds space to inject the mythic with her own sensibility. “You were Romeo/I was a Scarlet Letter”, she sighs, encapsulating the imagined and then real disapproval of her father and a broader conservative community at her shameful seduction (“Romeo” gets off scot free, of course). It’s rare for pop to find a way to express the intimacy of love while simultaneously painting in the landscape of the outside world, and most songs ultimately plump for one or the other. But Taylor learns as much from ‘Romeo & Juliet’ as you could hope for from an adolescent, and in “Love Story” each world traces the outline of the other, throwing the contours of the other into relief - abandonment is even harder to bear in the face of the whole world's "I told you so..."

In an odd way, I’m reminded of Vanessa Carlton, who at her best combined that earnest literateness with giggly youth and a deadly grip on a good hook – “Love Story” is a companion piece to “White Houses” in my head at least. Taylor is typically funnier or nastier or more voluptuously morose than Vanessa, but the distance is smaller than usual here: “Love Story” sacrifices such shadings for the sake of providing proof that she can deliver an anthem “straight”, without a tear or a chuckle. It’s not all of what I want from her, but it’s as much as I could ask from a wistful, heart-pumping pop song.

Pussycat Dolls - I Hate This Part

http://www.sendspace.com/file/x5hld3

I recently described Nicole Scherzinger – lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls – as a pop Trojan Horse. Ostensibly, Nicole’s songs (and really, almost all Pussycat Dolls songs are basically Nicole songs with the other Dolls providing indistinguishable backing vocals) are straightforward cookie-cutter robot (R&B) pop. And she's not really made any attempt to disprove this (her failed solo career aside - which produced at least a few fabulous and underrated singles most people never heard - check "Superhero"), although she's perhaps contractually obliged not to run down her fellow Dolls in interviews in an effort to distinguish herself. Apparently the new PCD album includes each member singing lead at least once, and on a bonus disc songs written by each Doll. This strikes me as a recipe for disaster but I’m oddly curious to hear the results.

You’ll understand the “Trojan Horse” bit if you actually listen to the better PCD singles, in particular “Buttons”, which you’d think would be one of the group’s more generic efforts. But Nicole is just so ON as a singer and performer and persona, she more often than not can take what are fairly good cookie-cutter R&B tracks and push them over the line with the inventiveness, the precision and the sheer personality of her vocals. On “Buttons”, she stakes out the verses with a declamatory flair, her vocals sounding at once resonant and distant, as if she’s singing down a long, echoey tunnel (it’s a bit Wizard of Oz: her voice an ominous and frightening effect emanating from a large video screen while the real Nicole presumably sings a bit more humbly behind a curtain).

The first single from the second PCD album, “When I Grow Up” struck me as kinda grimly authoritarian, but new single “I Hate This Part” is excellent. Jumping on the increasingly crowded Ne-Yo bandwagon (in style at least: I don’t know who wrote it, but it’s definitely of a piece with “Closer”), nonetheless it’s an unusual and charming mixture of fragile piano ballad wailer and pumping 4X4 pop stormer. This is a great showcase of Nicole’s ability to carry a dramatic song with precise but totally distinct and emotionally charged phrasing (whereas of course the glorified back-ups are not just anonymous but completely inaudible) – switching from firm to frail to strident to resigned with unusual agility and grace. I love, too, how the lyrics short-circuit the generic and specific – the details about driving in a car with your lover listening to the radio because there’s nothing left to say to one another ring totally true.

The music is ace as well: the moody cloud-of-wasps of bassline, the fragile piano, the swarming strings, the way the extra beats in the chorus stuttering around the 4/4 kick imply a sort of collapse or disintegration. But most of all, I love the disarming frankness of its bittersweet conclusion: “I hate this part right here” Nicole admits as she plunges the knife into a moribund relationship, delivering the chorus in a breathy, emphysemic whisper by the end. ABBA were the masters of this sort of ambivalent, self-reflective, pathos-laden pop. It’s rare to hear it being reproduced so effectively today.

Air France - No Excuses

http://www.sendspace.com/file/2paenz

I have a lamentable weakness for a certain brand of twee, tearjerker dance-pop (or sample-pop) that manages to short-circuit the distance between the rave and the bedsit: Saint Etienne’s “He’s On The Phone”, The Avalanches’ “A Different Feeling”, Omni Trio’s “Thru The Vibe”, Amira’s “My Desire (Dreem Teem Mix)” – this is all “LOL Tim” music. Softcore, you know the score.

Air France have released their two-EPs-to-date on The Tough Alliance’s label Sincerely Yours, which already bodes well; TTA have pretty much made “twee, tearjerker dance-pop (or sample-pop) that manages to short-circuit the distance between the rave and the bedsit” their raison d’etre, and made a lot of my favourite music last year. Air France and The Tough Alliance don’t really sound that much like each other, though they do both sound a lot like Saint Etienne. Maybe it’s just that they start to break Saint Etienne down into their component parts, with TTA taking “He’s On The Phone”, “Pale Movie” and “You’re In A Bad Way” (the Pet Shop Boys influence, basically) and Air France taking “Railway Jam”, “London Belongs To Me” and “Avenue” (the A. R. Kane influence perhaps?). So a lot of Air France’s songs are dreamy, exquisite textured, melancholy sample-scapes but aren’t terribly anthemic.

“No Excuses” is where the two sides come back together again: just about the fizziest, trembliest, most joyful thing I've heard this year, all smeary piano and cascading strings and flutes that sound like rave riffs, and cherubs sighing “nah nah nah”, and cheesy handclap percussion, all swirling around in endless layers of fairy floss like ambient happy hardcore.

So many moments to love here: the breakdown of wibbling tinkerbells, the singer sighing “No…” and a ragtag chorus of children shouting “No!” in response, the glorious false ending, like stumbling across an empty field the day after the circus has left town, only to find the entire troupe hiding in the tall grass, waiting to surprise you. I simply have no resistance to this sort of thing; but why would you want to be able to resist this?

The-Dream ft. Rihanna - Livin' A Lie

http://www.zshare.net/audio/1974513803ec0a51/

As with fellow ghost-writer/rival/hypothetical love interest (slash fiction writers get on it) Ne-Yo, The-Dream is more central to the beating heart of US Pop 2008 than many people realize. It’s not so much that his fingerprints are over so much great material of recent times (most notably Rihanna’s “Umbrella”), although there’s that too; what I’m getting at is a certain pop sensibility that just seems oh-so-current.

For one thing, both artists have in their own work made “generic” (as in, clearly of its genre, rather than plain) male-sung R&B a viable career proposition in a non-JT, non-Usher context. In doing so both draw heavily on the mid-90s, a time before staccato post-Timbaland beats and the like crucially remapped R&B’s formal co-ordinates across hip hop lines (I’d propose Tevin Campbell as a touchstone for Ne-Yo and Jodeci as the alter at which The-Dream worships). Back then the R&B club number, the slow jam and the ballad were all much closer to each other, such that many tracks kinda fell into a winning interzone drawing elements from all three. It’s R&B qua R&B, and it’s a unified sound: you wouldn’t and couldn’t love the beat but hate the singer or vice versa. You simply had to buy the whole package, for the mood it conveyed.

In other words (not to belabor the point but) The-Dream and Ne-Yo are not just singer-songwriters in fact but also in feel: on their best work there’s a sense of everything coming together perfectly, lyrics, tune, performance production. For The-Dream in particular, this gives him the opportunity to bring together disparate strands (Bobby Valentino-style suffocating wispiness, R Kelly intensity neurorisis and sex-addiction, Chris Brown winsomeness and directness) into a glorious constellation.

“Livin’ A Lie” most likely isn’t even my favourite song on The-Dream’s debut album ‘Love/Hate’, although that’s probably just a reflection of its absurd strength – how do you choose between the shiny R Kelly bounce of “Shawty Is Da Shit”, the flawless Prince revivalism of “Fast Car”, the bitter dirge “Nikki”, the apocalyptic “She Needs My Love”, the irresistible glide of “Playin’ in her Hair”, the sumptuous coital sludge of “Purple Kisses”, the sci-fi club joint “Ditch That”, the architectural magnificence of “Luv Songs” or the tearjerker ballad “Mama”???

But “Livin’ A Lie” is the one I expect my sceptical readers may actually stoop to checking out. And really you should: it’s the perfect R&B power-ballad anthem for these uncertain times, a megalith of brooding 4X4 pulse, messy “are we? aren’t we?” secretive post-break-up stolen kisses (to be honest though I’m not quite sure what is preventing The-Dream and Rihanna from just getting together again – it seems like just pride and their reputation amongst their friends), and an unstoppable chorus wherein the two symmetrical viewpoints combine in a bittersweet flash of self-insight.

The other thing Ne-Yo and The-Dream have in common is an industrious protestant work ethic absent from pop for two decades: Ne-Yo’s pumped out three solo albums in three years, and The-Dream is set to release his follow-up ‘Love vs. Money’ imminently. Hype!

Empire of the Sun - Walking on a Dream

http://www.zshare.net/audio/192052261b6fe561/

I didn’t want to like this: I disapprove of Australian pop supergroups, and the idea of an Oz pop supergroup trying to jump on the Balearic bandwagon seemed purpose-built to make me wake up one morning and hate myself circa six months ago. Like when you realize that once you actually wanted Mark Latham to be PM.

I was too hasty. For one thing I’ve got nothing against The Sleepy Jackson (who provide Empire of the Sun’s singer) and I actively like Pnau (who provide it’s, um, instrumentalist I suppose). And sometimes Australians get Balearic right: after all, we are responsible for Flash and the Pan and The Avalanches, and I have a half-baked notion of inserting Wendy Matthews into Balearic DJ set lists. More recently and prosaically, Cut Copy’s So Cosmic mix (which this rather resembles in condensed form) was really very pretty.

As is “Walking on a Dream”, or at least it will be until it becomes a modest hit on JJJ (perhaps it is already?) on the basis of sounding vaguely like MGMT. The sheer sleekness of those glittering endless autobahn synth chords, the cynical but nonetheless undeniable lift of the ghostly falsetto chorus. The general lightness of touch. More than Balearic, what this reminds me of is primo Thin White Duke remixes (think “Mr. Brightside” – though not nearly as good as that behemoth to be fair) – a smoothness so smooth it slides right past your defences.

Luomo - Gets Along Fine

http://www.sendspace.com/file/czgnaa

Luomo (aka Sasu Rapitti aka Vladislav Delay aka Uusitalo aka etc.) has the distinction of making not one but two of my absolute favourite albums ever, 2000’s luxuriantly deep dub-house album ‘Vocalcity’ and 2003’s spangly and lustrous epic dance-pop collection ‘The Present Lover’. I was disappointed by 2006’s ‘Paper Tigers’, not because it’s a bad album, but because (largely reiterating the charms of ‘The Present Lover’) it failed to turn my life upside down like its predecessors had – an unfair standard perhaps, but it’s Luomo’s fault for raising my expectations so.

Happily, this year’s ‘Convivial’ is a return to form: if ever so slightly beneath the peaks formed by those first two albums, it’s close enough to tear me up at times (I’m kinda corny like that). The secret of ‘Convivial’ is how Luomo carefully extends that trademark quivering, vulnerable embodied emotionalism (like the thrill that runs up and down your body when someone to whom you’re painfully attracted accidentally brushes your arm) into new sonic territory. Partly it’s gorgeous songs – see the brooding Depeche Mode meets Junior Boys goth-balladry of “Love You All”, or the impossibly kaleidoscopic swirl of “Slow Dying Places”, which is like Mouse on Mars falling in love while on an E honeymoon.

Possibly my favourite track here is “Gets Along Fire”. On the one hand it’s classic Luomo, riding a familiar, trademarkable wistful bass riff and liberally sprinkling cut-up male diva vocals, now celebratory now bittersweet. On the other, it’s quite unlike anything else the guy has done, its chorus irrupting in an astonishing combination of bleeping synthesiser and pseudo-African percussion – someone on I Love Music suggested that it actually sounds like coupe de cale (Ivory Coast dance music sonically halfway between kuduro, and, um, UK funky house I guess?), which I can totally hear.

I have a bad habit of turning it up so loudly that those assailing drums start to hurt my ears. It’s simultaneously the most aggressive and purely joyous Luomo production to date, the muscular assault of its universalist affection like an embrace so fierce it crushes. The marvel, and perhaps the necessity of the Luomo project, is bound up in the shock of physical intimacy; pleasurable, overwhelming, and at times a little scary. “Am I really feeling this?” “Is it you who is making me feel this way?” Yes, and yes.

Scarface- High Powered

http://www.sendspace.com/file/knabw7

Am I growing more aggressive as I get old? Maybe it’s just that hip hop generally has been a bit harder of late: my favourite rap album of the year is Young Jeezy’s vergin’-on-apocalyptic ‘The Recession’, and perhaps my favourite rap track is Scarface’s gritty “High Powered”. Or, not really. “High Powered” is gritty in the same sense that pirates are scary. Scarface has that awesome, won’t-take-your-shit thick flow that’s unimpressed by just about everything, which is lucky because his fixation with fake-ass drug dealers (specifically snitches, roaches, anyone who passes themselves off as bigger entrepreneurs than they are; on his excellent new album ‘Emeritus’ – awesome title btw – he also spends a lot of time talking about being sued) needs that kind of blunt laconic swagger-not-swagger (not-swagger because, well, Scarface doesn’t need to impress anyone) – Scarface is so good at this that “High Powered” positively drips gravitas.

Musically “High Powered” is only gritty in the sense that “This Is Why I’m Hot” or “Grindin” or The Game’s “One Blood” are – parading its screechy screwfaced minimalism (ooh those sudden floods of bottomless bass) front and centre, but ultimately too tuneful and too widescreen and too, um, Jamaican not to end up sounding a bit pop. The way the rhythm breaks into a dancehall beat at the end of each verse is one of those simple but devastating effects that makes me mourn all over again the crappiness of local urban clubs (they never seem to play stuff like this) – it's total bust an ominous move on the dancefloor business.

Plus that awesome reggae chorus vocal “Beep beep goes the sound of my celluleeuuurr” – so dank and lugrubrious! (the title track to this album is another highlight, but the whole thing is great – check it!)

Animal Collective - My Girls

http://www.sendspace.com/file/g2f3jr

Seeing Animal Collective live in Berlin last year was something of a minor revelation, like witnessing a band/artist/etc. stumble onto a wonderful new twist in their aesthetic in real time. I really liked the group’s 2007 album ‘Strawberry Jam’ (and even more so bandmember Panda Bear’s solo release ‘Person Pitch’, one of my top two albums from last year), but as much for what it hinted at as what it was: gleaming through the crevices of those slightly angsty, ridiculously over-stuffed technicolour indie rock songs was a more utopian vision of blissed-out dance-rock, somewhere between the ethnodelic indie that Gang Gang Dance have since made their own, the swooning neo-Balearic of Studio, and the dreamlike sampladelic ambient-techno-pop of Primal Scream’s Orb-produced “Higher Than The Sun”. ‘Person Pitch’ was already inching into this territory, but was so blissed-out as to be positively supine: cross-referencing that sound with the dense and energetic approach of ‘Strawberry Jam’ seemed like the way to go.

This is what Animal Collective did when I saw them, especially during their encore: the combination of starsailing widescreen techno-pop and the trippy light show made it the best fusion of live rock with the feel (as opposed to merely sound) of dance music that I can remember. “My Girls”, the first song to leak from the band’s next album ‘Merriweather Post Pavillion’, excellently captures the sound and the feel of the best bits of that live show. Organ arpeggios, atmospheric keyboard swirls, Panda Bear’s very familiar multitracked Beach Boys-aping declamatory vocal style… None of these things in and of themselves suggest a massive stylistic shift; what’s changed is how these things all come together in a manner that is unabashedly pretty, and unabashedly pop. The slightly reverent intro soon gives way to a brisk (albeit unpredictable) quasi-tribal percussive groove, all woodblocks and what sounds like rolling timpanis, as Panda Bear’s chanting slowly coalesces into an implausible hook: “I don’t mean to seem like I care material things like my social stats/I just want four walls and a door besides, for my girls!” (punctuated at times by an excellent falsetto “woah!!!!”). The actual lyrics are typical of Panda Bear, triangulating the space between earnestness, mundanity and weed-derived epiphany, and I’m not sure how or why it works so well.

In the final minute of this gorgeous song, the steady quasi-disco pulse (not to mention the marvellous handclaps, awesome backwards-filtered strings, those organ arpeggios suddenly resembling italo-house keyboards) leads the song into a too-brief climax that, like Air France’s “No Excuses”, somehow evokes euphoric rave-pop. And then (rather like Booka Shade’s trancey electro-house anthem “In White Rooms”, my favourite track of 2006), it ends abruptly, as if to remind you gently and sympathetically that no one can ever actually feel this good for more than about a minute at a time.

Chris Brown - Dreamer

http://www.sendspace.com/file/1q6e44

The realisation that Chris was maybe the pop star of the year dawned on me quite slowly. Partly that’s because he’s risen to this position by default – no other pop star really had a sustained run of greatness throughout the year that might challenge him (Mariah’s a possible exception, but even then she felt less epochal this year than a couple of years back). Partly it’s that he led off his new album with its worst single, the only-kinda-good club track “Kiss Kiss” which (like most songs featuring T-Pain) really felt like a T-Pain song. And partly it’s that I was slow to warm to his other big singles. “No Air”, his duet with Jordin, is of course one of the greatest songs of the year, but that could be chalked up to Jordin’s efforts. And like most people I talked to, I found the glutinous acoustic ballad “With You” a bit too sugary and limp to begin with, while the neo-trance fireworks of “Forever” seemed pretty but insubstantial. The former won me over through sustained radio exposure, the latter via its particularly inspired recontextualisation in a dance routine on So You Think You Can Dance US. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to recognise just how much I love this guy, such that the maudlin “Superman" (his new duet with Keri Hilson) immediately tugs at my heartstrings whereas before I probably would have dismissed it as overwrought.

Undiluted regard is the necessary mindset with which to approach “Dreamer”, the track Chris cut in tribute to the Olympics. In a manner remarkably similar to Beyonce’s subsequent “Halo”, it combines massive end-of-the-world churning synthesisers with inspirational piano vamps straight from mid-eighties stadium rock (think “Don’t Stop Believing”) and typical 2008 R&B Sturm und Drang percussion. But in a lesser singer’s hands all this would be for naught, especially given the song’s slightly nauseous aspirational optimism. What pushes this over the top is Chris singing with that sort of effortless inhuman clarity that marks him out amidst all the other much more obviously embodied male R&B singers (like, even Ne-Yo can’t aspire to this sort of universalism, though he brings other stuff to the table). This is why Chris works so well with ever-so-slight autotuning on his vocals: it gives him a preternatural quality, like some sympathetic higher being sent to observe and then redeem the human race. In the chorus he divides into a scary multitude of auto-harmonising existential cheer squads, and this manoeuvre is executed with a ridiculous seriousness that probably spelt doom for any hopes of this becoming a popular song. Predictably, I love it.

Lyrically this is some high-stakes (if incomprehensible) stuff: “High speed/like I’m racing/it’s like lightning/sky is blazing/but you’ve lost your way/you’ve been led astray/are there better days/for my Fallen Dreamer?” Narrative is jettisoned in favour of a hearty engagement with the Big Themes (made explicit in the spoken word intro: “Live… or die… I just gotta believe”), which is as it should be – pop usually can’t capture big themes coherently without reducing them to triteness. A poetic incoherence is pretty much always the preferred route, and Chris’ almost religious invocation of emblems of the struggle for survival gives “Dreamer” a kind of accommodating flexibility: even if it was written for Michael Phelps it very easily becomes my personal prop for making it out of bed in the morning.

There's several more yet to be written. Many of the above were written several months ago, if they now seem a bit odd. There's also been a lot of cross-plundering with comments made here, reviews wtc.

haha oh shit i completely forgot that fbook group existed - sorry tim!! i did mean to contribute to it but fbook never lets you know when groups are updated. i pretty much wholeheartedly agree/disagree in all the predictable places. 2008 has been so good, my top 10 tracks currently numbers 88.

should have linked animal collective to a rickroll, but otherwise great stuff as always -- one of the most interesting things to me tho is when u mention listening to fela kuti bcuz on ILM i generally pretty much just associate your posts with new music (a good thing mostly as it keeps me glass-is-half-full about a lot of stuff id otherwise avoid) and ive always found it kind of interesting to get what your context is w/ a lot of older stuff (haha totally crazy that i remember this but i THINK i remember you dropping Disco Inferno in a write-up of a petey pablo song once)

fyi just for future reference it seems like zshare links get dropped pretty quickly now even if it says its still available to download it wont let you get the song on a few of these

i'm pretty sure that's a specific problem with newer zshare links (hence the switch to sendspace on newer posts) - the above links should predate it but if there's any broken links people let me know and I will fix.

The reference to Fela Kuti is a bit of a lie if only because (in typical ILM fashion) I've also fallen hard for Steely Dan this year, after having Aja for years and barely listening to it. Listened to a lot of Rickie Lee Jones, too, but i already liked her a lot. I don't like the slight air of defensiveness that saying "i've been listening to Fela" gives off actually... The impetus for noting it was more that Fela (and Steely) and Taylor Swift (though more her first album than "Love Story") were the music that hit receptors I don't think I'd used much if at all previously. In a lot of ways afrobeat and country-pop are asking for critical articulations of enjoyment that are almost diametrically opposed.

Yeah I think the Petey Pablo thing was "Get On Dis Motorcycle", the sample on which sounds a fair amount like a Disco Inferno track which does a similar trick. I used to make those kinds of "Destiny's Child = Mouse on Mars!" comparisons a lot more. I try to avoid it if i can these days because it usually implies that it's the comparison that validates the worth of whatever yr reviewing.

Whereas the truth (in this case) is that in retrospect the Disco Inferno track sounds like it's trying to work out how to be the Petey Pablo track (sans rapping obv)... An example of the influence flowing backwards effect that mark s used to talk about, if it didn't seem so lolworthy to talk about DI and PP in those terms.

As a general rule I think it's a good idea to be very cautious when trying to write about old and well-known music you're just getting into. Me on Fela or Steely Dan would be tedious and wrong for the most part.

Some writers use that naivete to be better/fresher/more clearsighted than well-versed critics, but I think that's a rare skill. In fact I'm having trouble thinking of anyone offhand.

ha yeah i didnt mean you needed to defend it, sorry --i found it more interesting just for providing a context for what you listened to and i think at the time i was just sorta seeing your writing in some kind of pop-centered universe so it just gave me a clue as to what dimensions you were working in musically --

whats most interesting about actual-serious-ilm music posts to me is its as much about knowing the writer as knowing the music -- an example is guys like dan perry who has a musical background and just knowing that fact helps me 'get' where hes coming from sometimes -- occasionally in ways i think are just wrong, i.e. "this person cannot sing" and im like "thats not the point" (sorry Dan for using u as a rhetorical example here) but other times in ways that help me better articulate what it is that makes music 'work' (or not work) for me.

Anyway point about that paragraph is that i think understanding the context a writer is coming from a lot of times is interesting and informs so much of how people on here write about music and what they bring to the discussion

n-e wayz im drunk and its like 630AM here sunday morning so im out ____

um also sorry for not googleproofing dan's name --

yeah that was my self-criticism kicking into gear there not me responding to you so much. i do find all of that stuff interesting w/r/t other posters here, like when I see you or vahid talking about jazz...

I use Dan in the same rhetorical manner. Sorry dan!

so rad. thanks tim.

argh totally stymied by zshare - 1) i click download, then 2) click download again, then 3) it tells me to wait for 20 seconds which i do, then 4) a "download" link appears, which i click, taking me back to (2) with no downloading ever actually happening

tried in safari and firefox both

same here, with safari and firefox too. It would be great to re-up these, Tim; last year your picks were among the best things I heard this year.

yeah those zshare links are expired/broken

ya not working!!

still, awesome job again...

yeah the zshare links dont work

zshare doesn't allow you to use it if you have ad-blocking on

are some of you not getting directed to the page which tells you this? just a thought

speaking of which, I can be bothered so rarely to download individual mp3s anymore

that muxtape thing mostly passed me by but having got the general gist, wouldn't that be ideal for something like this?

a streaming playlist of all this would be so rad.

Great stuff Tim, as always. But just wondering, I understand AC's My Girls lyrics to be like this:
"I don't mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status / I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls"

status being stats

Tim you rule.

zshare is broken, btw. pretty sure those links aren't dead. it's just the adblocking/popup detection (which is lame in the first place), doesn't work consistently. i have turned off both and I still get stuck in the same loop as Tracer. would be great if someone who can get at the zshare files could upload them all to mediafire or sendspace.

same here, all plugins turned off, don't work

yeah, zshare usually works for me but isn't there.

was wanting to listen to "I wake up early in the morning, to play my con-con-congo" :(

most of those can be found on, like, itunes or similar

i recommend googling the song's name + rapidshare

xpost. they can also be found on soulseek or whatever, but when i was reading tim's bits i was hoping to have the thing down in 30 seconds and listen to it. I is lazy.

the zshare thing should be able to be worked around by right-click/"save target as"

I will upload these to sendspace over the next few days.

Great reading, Tim. What is the name of the Facebook group these are appearing on?

thanks tim!

This thread is so good I almost feel like it should be funded by private donations! Thanks for going out of your way, a lot of this stuff slipped under my radar, I kindof love end-of-years for catchup.

thanks Tim, looking forward to hearing these and re-reading - loved it last year too.

Pnau (who provide it’s, um, instrumentalist I suppose

The other half of Pnau was involved too, he just doesn't have his face airbrushed on the front cover.

nah the zshare links dont work

Jesus dudes, none of these tracks are particularly hard to get hold of if you want to hear them.

(NB - we aren't really meant to allow linking to full MP3s of commercially available music. I've been turning a blind eye here because Tim is Tim and doing sterling work promoting this stuff, but any future links responding to "anyone got that Aeroplane track?" or similar will be deleted).

Tim surely you don't prefer the original 'Fascination' to the Bimbo Jones and Linus Loves remixes

i notice there's a Van She Tech remix of 'Walking On A Dream', as if they read my mind...

the underwhelming “What’s It Gonna Be” by Platinum & H20.

also surprising! maybe it helps if you see the video

"I've been turning a blind eye here because Tim is Tim"

Appreciated! However if you'd prefer I'm happy to just syndicate the write-ups and let people e-mail me or join the facebook group for the download links - let me know if so.

The Facebook Group (which will continue into 2009, perhaps with a name change) is called "Strictly The Best: The 2008 Glamourous Pop Club". I made it quasi-private so I'm not sure if it comes up in searches. Feel free to send me a message on facebook asking for an invite.

hahaha Tim of course you've been getting into Steely Dan and Rickie Lee Jones--you like the Ne-Yo album! it's a '70s singer-songwriter album!

should have been a TIM @ KFC . EDU thread