—and has the following cover songs:

1. Harry Nilsson & John Lennon “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (Bob Dylan cover)
2. Deerhunter “Cool” (Pylon cover)
3. MGMT “Lucifer Sam” (Pink Floyd cover)
4. Neil Finn with Johnny Marr “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” (Smiths cover)
5. Squarewave “Black Eyed Dog” (Nick Drake cover)
6. Sloan “Cars” (Gary Numan cover)
7. High Cold Star “The Eraser” (Thom Yorke cover)
8. Parenthetical Girls “Under the Ivy” (Kate Bush cover)
9. Enon “White Rabbit” (Great Society/Jefferson Airplane cover)
10. Les Demoniaques “Teenage Lust” (Jesus and Mary Chain cover)
11. Sea States “Thirteen” (Big Star cover)
12. Greg Laswell “The Killing Moon” (Echo & the Bunnymen cover)
13. Nine Inch Nails “Zoo Station” (U2 cover)
14. Bird “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (Iggy & the Stooges cover)
15. Mike Viola, Lyle Workman, the Section Quartet “1000 Umbrellas” (XTC cover)
16. Charles Bradley & the Menahan Street Band “Stay Away” (Nirvana cover)
17. J.C. Brooks and the Uptown Sound “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” (Wilco cover)
18. Eagle and the Worm “Tightrope” (Janelle Monae cover)
19. Big Daddy “A Day in the Life” (Beatles cover)
20. The Saturday Morning Canasta Club “I’ve Just Seen a Face” (Beatles cover)
21. Jon Brion “Play the Game” (Queen cover)
22. Films of Colour “Slow Burn” (David Bowie cover)
23. Steve Earle “Breed” (Nirvana cover)
24. La Resistance “What We All Want” (Gang of Four cover)
25. Johnny Cash “If You Could Read My Mind” (Gordon Lightfoot cover)

…

1. Fidlar “Max Can’t Surf”
2. Parenthetical Girls “A Note to Self”
3. The Canyons “My Rescue”
4. The Human Hearts “Cheap Sunglasses”
5. Big Fresh “Rumours”
6. Dent May “Eastover Wives”
7. Holler, Wild Rose! “Indigo Summer”
8. The Sandwitches “In the Garden”
9. Stevie Jackson “Man of God”
10. Shelby Earl “Under Evergreen”
11. A Classic Education “Forever Boy”
12. B and Not B “Tomorrow Never Comes”
13. Dntel [ft. Ben Gibbard] “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan”
14. Lissy Trullie “Madeleine”
15. The Baseball Project “C’mon Prince (Stay in Milwaukee)”
16. Saul Williams “Patience”
17. The Birthday Suit “Do You Ever?”
18. Craig Wedren “Cupid”
19. Blue Öyster Cult “In Thee”
20. Milagres “Here to Stay”
21. Rebecca Zapen “Lakewood”
22. Chuck Jackson “I Keep Forgettin’”
23. The Nocturnes “The Road”
24. R.E.M. “We All Go Back to Where We Belong”
25. The dB’s “Revolution of the Mind”

+ … bonus!

Comments link below…

I think it was a pretty good year musically. I had some tough decisions on what to cut just to get this down to 25 tracks, one from each of the top 25 albums. As I usually do, I’ve organized the albums in tiers that reflect, roughly, their rank; within each tier I’m just listing them alphabetically. Life’s too short to waste time on figuring out an exact rank – for me, at least, that changes every time I listen to something.

2011′s Top Ten

Richard Buckner Our Blood, The Bye Bye Blackbirds Fixed Hearts, The Caribbean Discontinued Perfume, Destroyer Kaputt, Robyn Hitchcock Trømso, Kaptein (unaccountably released only in Norway; fortunately, easy to get here by way of Hitchcock’s website), The Mountain Goats All Eternals Deck, Radiohead The King of Limbs, St. Vincent Strange Mercy, They Might Be Giants Join Us, (best album cover of the year, by a wide margin), Wild Flag s/t.

The Next Fifteen (rounding out the contents of the mix)

The Black Watch Led Zeppelin Five (album title of the year), Comet Gain Howl of the Lonely Crowd, The Decemberists The King Is Dead, Emperor X Western Teleport, PJ Harvey Let England Shake (nearly made the top ten), The Joy Formidable The Big Roar, Mars Classroom New Theory of Everything, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks Mirror Traffic, Mekons Ancient & Modern, Momus (with John Henriksson) Thunderclown, Thurston Moore Demolished Thoughts (I would not have thought he and Beck could make a fantastic acid chamber-pop album, but here it is), Okkervil River I Am Very Far, Trolley Things That Shine and Glow (Milwaukee content…but they earned it, baby), Tom Waits Bad as Me, Wilco The Whole Love (everyone loves to hate these guys now…and I underestimated this record at first, but it’s just really good from beginning to end (and a couple good “b-sides” as iTunes bonus tracks, too).

The ones that tempted me to make a 30-song mix

Damon & Naomi False Beats and True Hearts, Sloan The Double Cross (this was also the year I realized I’d neglected Sloan, one of the most consistently fine bands of the past 20 years: that title, renderable as “XX,” celebrates that tenure), Wire The Red Barked Tree, Robert Pollard Lord of the Birdcage, Lifeguards Waving at the Astronauts. (The Pollard Count: this year, I acquired five albums with Robert Pollard involvement (six if you count the free download of Let it Beard demos…which, uh, you probably shouldn’t). One of them (Mars Classroom, his collaboration with Gary Waleik from Big Dipper) is in the top 25, his solo album and the latest release from his Lifeguards project with Doug Gillard are in the next 5…while the supposedly final album from his Boston Spaceships project (the aforementioned Let it Beard) bubbles up a bit lower down. And there was also Space City Kicks. And yes: I already have the first item in his 2012 discography, the Guided by Voices reunion album (and associated singles). 2012 is the year it’s revealed there’s actually six Bob Pollards (the one we see drinks the beer for all of them) and that full-person duplication was perfected in Dayton, Ohio sometime in the late ’80s.)

Next batch

David Bazan Strange Negotiations, Dum Dum Girls Only in Dreams, The Fall Ersatz GB, Fountains of Wayne Sky Full of Holes, Fucked Up David Comes to Life (this one accomplished the rare feat of getting me to listen to near-metaloid bellowing croaks from Damian Abraham: I also found it just too long, in an almost overwhelming way. Five minutes of this sounds like a paradise of a thousand guitars in a wind tunnel; twenty minutes is still pretty damned brilliant…but eighty? Too much for me… Actually, I admire them for not breaking it up with a piece for recorder and harpsichord halfway through or something…), John Wesley Harding The Sound of His Own Voice, David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights Left by Soft (holy kippered herring but “Diamond Mine” is a fantastic song…not sure why NZ folks with guitars do these songs that sound as if they could just circle around a chord sequence for six hours…but it’s so good I kept hitting repeat, and the rest of the album probably suffered for me by comparison…), David Lowery The Palace Guards, Maritime Human Hearts, Peter Bjorn and John Gimme Some (dumbest-ass album cover of the year), Sam Phillips Cameras in the Sky, R.E.M. Collapse into Now (R.I.P.), TV on the Radio Nine Types of Light.

Some albums I either haven’t heard or haven’t heard enough of to judge

Mike Viola Electro de Perfecto (but so far, sounding like it might be one of the best power-pop albums of the year – coulda been a contenduh for the top 25 if I’d heard it before last week), Atlas Sound Parallax, Eleanor Friedberger Last Summer, Real Estate Days, Wye Oak Civilian. And I’ve decided to count the Anton Barbeau/Andy Metcalfe/Morris Windsor (Soft Boys) collaboration Three Minute Tease as a 2012 release, since its physical edition isn’t officially out till 2012 (or so sez I: I make the rules ’round here).

Some disappointments, too – if it’s not listed, either I haven’t heard it or it was indeed a bit of a disappointment.

esc

1. Trolley “The Calico Cat”
2. Destroyer “Downtown”
3. PJ Harvey “The Words That Maketh Murder”
4. Richard Buckner “Escape”
5. Comet Gain “Clang of the Concrete Swans”
6. The Mekons “Space in Your Face”
7. Wild Flag “Black Tiles”
8. The Decemberists “This Is Why We Fight”
9. They Might Be Giants “Canajoharie”
10. The Bye Bye Blackbirds “Open a Light”
11. Okkervil River “Wake and Be Fine”
12. St. Vincent “Surgeon”
13. Tom Waits “Bad as Me”
14. The Mountain Goats “Estate Sale Sign”
15. The Caribbean “Supply Lines”
16. The Black Watch “The Maid’s Been Round”
17. Wilco “Born Alone”
18. Emperor X “Erica Western Teleport”
19. Momus (with John Henriksson) “Futura Bold”
20. Thurston Moore “Illuminine”
21. Robyn Hitchcock “Light Blue Afternoon”
22. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks “Stick Figures in Love”
23. Mars Classroom “New Theory”
24. Radiohead “Little by Little”
25. The Joy Formidable “Whirring”

Comments please.

1. “Amber Hands” S.C.U.M.
2. “Think in Stereo” Boy + Kite
3. “Talking Science” You Can Be a Wesley
4. “Circle Drive” Conrad Plymouth
5. “The Way It Will Be” Gillian Welch
6. “You Can’t Keep Me” Amy LaVere
7. “Cliché” Male Model (1981)
8. “An Arcade from the Warm Rain That Falls” Comet Gain
9. “Every Melting Degree” Violens
10. “The Strawberry Coast” The Larch
11. “These Words” Megafaun
12. “Return to Pepperland” Paul McCartney (1987, unreleased)
13. “You’re Already Gone” The Dig
14. “Speaking Politely” Sleepy Kitty
15. “Get a Summer Song Goin’” The Fall (2010, vinyl only)
16. “Painting Dollar Bills” Fay Wrays
17. “Ghost in the Garden” Her Space Holiday
18. “You’d Smile Back” The Caribbean (Daytrotter Session rec’d 2010 released 2011)
19. “Love” The Nocturnes
20. “Inland Valley Water Table Blues” The Human Hearts
21. “Excuse Me Who Am I Talking To?” Regal Degal
22. “Revelations” Devon Williams
23. “Come to Mary” Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter
24. “Murderous Joy” Carter Tanton
25. “Gold Faces” Okkervil River

+

First up, chronologically, is New Order’s “Broken Promise,” from their underrated Brotherhood album. Despite the idiot genre-tag on this, if there’s a synth on this track, I’m not hearing it…instead, there are about a zillion guitars (the album was sort of divided into a guitar half and a synth half). The verse begins with a fairly typical sequence, moving from A minor to E minor by way of a brief stop at Dm and F major (i-iv-VI-v for those of you scoring at home). The chorus basically oscillates between C and A major. But here’s one thing about those zillion guitars: pay closer attention to what they’re playing, and you’ll notice they’re often playing slightly different chords. For example, it sounds to me like one guitar is playing a G major instead of C major in the chorus…essentially giving us a Cmaj9 instead. And that D forming the 9th in the C chord? Curiously, it shows up hanging suspended in the vocal harmony on that Am chord…I’m not entirely sure a minor chord with a 4th arbitrarily tacked on even has a proper name. This sort of trick – expanding the harmony by either playing different but compatible chords simultaneously, or adding on single extra notes that recharacterize the chordal coloration – is arguably post-sixties rock’s distinctive way of expanding its harmonic field: it doesn’t stack thirds on top of one another, or substitute based on sevenths or sharping or flatting notes of a chord (the way jazz does); nor does it dispense with conventional harmonies in favor of “unspellable” (within the bounds of guitar-tab language, anyway) complex harmonies in the manner of 20th-century classical music. As “Broken Promise” progresses, those guitar voicings become more and more dense (and since Peter Hook often plays double-stops or chords on his bass, the harmonic texture becomes even thicker).

After two verses and two choruses, we get to what seems like an instrumental bridge, on a different chord sequence (F, G, E…with various suspensions) – except that in fact, halfway through the song, this sequence forms the basis for the rest of the song. And it’s here that Bernard Sumner’s zillion guitars really do their work: I really can’t parse out everything that’s going on, except on top of that F I’m hearing everything from C chords to G chords, ninths stacked on top of the G, and simultaneous Esus4 and Bsus4 resolving to their respective major chords…again, on top of one another. And of course, all those guitars’ overtones are ringing out in the upper register…by the end, what’s really going on is two bars of white-note-ness, sharpening slightly in the second bar, to two bars of vaguely E-major-flavored chordage: you can fake it by just mashing down every note in those chords’ scales (F, G, E). We end somewhat suddenly on one of those chords that’s complex to name and describe but very simple to play: open fifths on the lowest two guitar strings, muted D string, highest three strings left open. Or  at least, that’s a close simulation (again: zillion guitars).

The next song is Chris Stamey’s “All the Heart’s Desire/Black Orchids.” This one begins with a similarly common minor-chord sequence – Am, G, F – and modulates for the chorus to variations on a similar sequence – E-flat, B-flat, A-flat. But (in much less detail this time) what Stamey does is offer different variations on those three-chord cells for nearly every four-bar phrase of each verse and chorus: you get the sense he tried to figure out ways to evoke a similar feel using different three-chord sequences. “Black Orchids” is essentially a long instrumental postlude…using similar variations on that sequence, but changing less rapidly and instead moving through some unexpected modulations (and out-of-chord guitar soloing), finally settling into a long solo based on a transposition of that initial three-chord sequence.

The last song is one of my favorites, the Wrens’ “I Guess We’re Done.” Structurally, rhythmically, and harmonically, this song’s based on a hoary old fifties-based song structure. It begins with introductory material not heard later in the song (actually, that tactic fell out of favor pre-fifties…although you’d occasionally see it resurrected later, such as in the Beatles’ “If I Fell”), but the verses are based on I-iv-IV-V…and that fifties ballad feel is reinforced by the lilting 6/8 rhythm. But I said “based on”…and the Wrens go all over the map with that one. The bridge…the bridge comes from another planet, wanders woozily around, and finally reconnects with the main chord sequence…but that wooziness is sound-painting of the lyrics: our narrator stutters around several different attempted-reconciliation scenarios, different times, places, ideas…he can’t make up his mind, and neither can the chords. Actually, I’m not entirely convinced by the bridge…I can follow the logic chord to chord, but overall it seems almost random – but the movement from the intro to the first verse? That is completely incredible to me: it both makes perfect sense and surprises me every time. And there’s something quite compelling to me about the contrast between the lyric’s desolation and the (forced?) jauntiness of the song’s style and rhythmic base…(As an aside: This song might win the Wrens’ “most intertextual” award: I count lyrical references to at least three other Wrens lyrics…and this song itself was referred to in the lyric of “Boys, You Won’t Remember”…)

New Order “Broken Promise” (Brotherhood, 1986)

Chris Stamey “All the Heart’s Desire/Black Orchids” (Fireworks, 1991)

The Wrens “I Guess We’re Done” (Abbott 1135, 1997)

The man in the image purportedly is David Stewart, “Malt Master” of Balvenie Distillery (their caps). He’s described as having “over 45 years of experiencing handcrafting the finest malt whiskies”; that is, he is a skilled craftsman and, as such, is by most definitions a member of the working class.

So why is he dressed in an expensive-looking suit like a member of the professional middle class might wear? While I’m sure Balvenie takes care that anything in the distillery that comes into contact with their whiskey is sterile and free of dirt and grit, the rest of the factory floor is…a factory floor. I rather doubt Mr. Stewart actually wears such a suit while he’s working…except perhaps when tourists are scheduled to come through.

But the middle-class and wealthy audience, potential consumers of The Balvenie (the superfluous article adding that je ne sais quoi of sophistication), are unlikely to accept expertise in the image of a man dressed practically for work—even highly skilled, discerning, even aesthetically demanding work—on a factory floor. No, they cannot accept that such a man could really have expertise in their discriminating connoisseurship of expensive single-malt whiskey.

So slap a suit on him. Everyone knows a man in a suit and tie always knows more than a man dressed in work clothing (except, of course, about things that the upper middle class is uncomfortable actually doing for themselves…such as fixing their car, landscaping their yards, etc.).

It’s hard even for me to remember now just how important R.E.M. was to me. They were without question my favorite band for at least ten years (from about 1983 to 1993). I still know Murmur‘s every last nook and cranny, and find the album almost impossible to simply listen to without singing along. That album, in particular, probably held putative “Favorite Album Ever” status for longer than any other (I’m still not sure what, really, might replace it in that status).

And of course, the band practically invented not only a certain variety of American indie rock (not yet called that) but the support system, the touring and labels, to nurture it. And a slow steady rise in sales and visibility, which up through the end of the IRS years was unimpeachable in its integrity.

Sure, there were problems. If I’m honest, I’ll acknowledge that every album (except Murmur and possibly Document) had at least one or two tracks of filler…enjoyable filler, usually, but songs that I’m pretty sure even Stephen Malkmus forgot when thinking of his “least favorite song” by R.E.M. And near the peak of their popularity, both Green and Out of Time  had songs that were felt blocky, chunky, unfinished or just not very good ideas. (Guest rapper on an R.E.M. album? Bad idea in 1991…utterly inane idea in 2004 – but we’ll get to that.) But those moments were more than made up for by excellent, thrilling songs, so they were easy to overlook.

I know, I know…the doubters are going to say they should have hung it up when Bill Berry left, that they’ve been completely irrelevant ever since. Since music is neither a popularity contest nor a current-events quiz, I really don’t give a damn about that. I think Up is a very fine album, and its rough or questionable moments a byproduct of an admirable urge to move on and not stick in a rut. While Reveal showed the weakness of that approach (way too many songs in the same key and tempo in a row…and not enough of them good), and Around the Sun was unquestionably the band’s nadir (yep – that guest rapper surely didn’t help), Accelerate really was a return to form—maybe not top form, but as good as Reckoning, or Monster, or Green? Sure, why not? And while Collapse into Now repeated a recurring pattern of second-similar-album-not-as-good-as-its predecessor, it’s a much better ending than (god forbid) Around the Sun would have been. And Live at the Olympia was a damned fine live retrospective, showing that several of the band’s latterday songs stood up just fine next to their classics.

Sure, those later records could never have the influence or significance of the earlier ones, and inarguably the second half of the band’s career is not as strong as its first.

But I’ll still miss them. And I’m still very thankful they were able to make all the music they did. I cannot overstate how important the band’s music has been to me, and will remain.

Thank you, R.E.M.

A few installations featured multiple pianos – a mile-long row of grands surreptitiously placed on the center line of an interstate highway in Montana, fifteen pianos carefully stacked in an empty lot in Trenton, New Jersey. Her most ambitious multi-instrument work was A Thousand Falling Pianos: as many pianos as possible, a hundred at least, were dropped in carefully calibrated intervals from several planes, onto the desert floor of Nevada, in an area ringed by a perimeter of sensitive microphones hundreds of yards from the impact zone. The signal from these microphones was mixed and recorded: she hoped to transform, through distance and repetition, the brutal sound of a single piano exploding onto the ground into a muffled series of timbres, different instruments landing in varying ways and making different sounds. The resulting sounds were oddly calming.

Ten years after creating the Jungle Piano, she returned to the site to find vines entangled around the metal framework of the harp, the strings disarrayed and carried off by animals, bits of wood covered in mossy soil, small creatures nesting in the stuffing of the piano bench’s seat. The organic decay and repurposing suggested a new course: she would grow organic pianos, rather than passively chart the decay of mechanical instruments. She consulted geneticists, prosthetics manufacturers, AI enthusiasts, specialists in regenerative healing…and eventually, her research culminated in her Bone Piano: living sinews stretching and growing, like strings, over a bone skeleton, encased in a chitinous, resonant exoskeleton but with enormous horn membranes (derived from elephant ears) to act as resonators. Despite the borrowed DNA, this piano was more plant than animal: it lacked any sort of awareness. And it was sterile. It could not reproduce.

Presumably.

Here’s the first one of that last set, for 2011. This time, I’m doing something different: I edited the whole thing into one large mp3 file, and the link below should allow you to stream it (assuming I haven’t somehow messed up – it worked on my ‘puter).

So then: shift.

1. Noah and the Whale “Barracuda” (John Cale)
2. Sex Beet “Dirty Boots” (Sonic Youth)
3. Dum Dum Girls ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” (The Smiths)
4. John Wesley Harding with Fastball “Star” (Stealers Wheel)
5. Kelly Willis “Success” (Iggy Pop)
6. Bruce Springsteen “I Want You” (Bob Dylan)
7. Robyn Hitchcock “Be Here Now” (George Harrison)
8. The Shins “Strange Powers” (The Magnetic Fields)
9. Pattern Is Movement “Time” (David Bowie)
10. Arrington de Dionyso’s Malaikat dan Singa “Hot Head” (Captain Beefheart)
11. Brad Laner “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day” (Chicago)
12. Fort deClare “Ventura Highway” (America)
13. The Coral Sea “Where Is My Mind” (Pixies)
14. Nightlands “Trouble” (Lindsey Buckingham)
15. Austra “Woodstock” (Joni Mitchell)
16. Easy Star All-Stars ft. Citizen Cope “Karma Police” (Radiohead)
17. LCD Soundsystem “Live Alone” (Franz Ferdinand)
18. Of Montreal “Expecting to Fly” (Neil Young/Buffalo Springfield)
19. The Pearly Gates “Dark Globe” (Syd Barrett)
20. Mahogany “Bunker Soldiers” (Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark)
21. Richard Thompson “Legal Matter” (The Who)
22. Maria McKee “I Wish I Was Your Mother” (Mott the Hoople)
23. Willie Nelson “What Was it You Wanted” (Bob Dylan)
24. Doc Severinsen “In the Court of the Crimson King” (King Crimson)
25. Nouvelle Vague “Blister in the Sun” (Violent Femmes)

(PS: No, track 24 is not a joke)

Playlist (should open in iTunes: if that doesn’t work, open it up in a text editor and download it from the URL)

Probably the best-known song of this type is “Hey Joe” – covered by about everybody, but Hendrix’s version is likely the most famous. Hendrix is at least smart enough to keep an undercurrent of almost creepy menace in his performance…but it’s overshadowed by his exuberance which makes the song a bit hard to take.

What do to recover such songs? Well, one thing is to, first, discard the most distinctive arrangement details of the famous versions of the song: Robert Plant covered “Hey Joe” a few years ago, and discarded the chord sequence and Hendrix’s scalar runs. But more important, Plant creates an atmosphere of creepy dread: you really don’t want to know the narrator, and you want to know “Joe” even less. Plant wants you to understand that we’re talking about a cold-blooded murderer here.

Neil Young’s “Down by the River” seems clearly to be a rewrite of “Hey Joe,” or at least an attempt to address similar ideas, and while Young switches things up by singing exclusively in the narrative first person – and there’s an implicit threat to whoever he’s talking to in “be on my side, I’ll be on your side” – there’s an odd, dreamy lassitude in his version, especially in the lead-in to the chorus, which, again, moves the listener away from the brutality of the act (then, Young has said he doesn’t intend the song to be taken literally…not that the song tells you that at all). Low and Dirty Three covered “Down by the River” a few years back, and they made the telling decision to strip away the chorus (which is also the confession) and sing it once only, near the end of the track. This would be very effective if you weren’t familiar with the song (which, of course, nearly everyone is), but it works on listeners who know the song nearly as effectively, by disturbing your expectations – which, again, brings into sharp focus the blunt fact of the chorus: “Down by the river, I shot my baby…dead.” (They also chose to have Mimi Parker rather than Alan Sparhawk sing the track…which changes things a bit, depending whether you take Parker to be implying a female narrator, or whether you hear her singing a character who happens to be male, a common-enough folk tactic.)

(I edited “Down by the River” by removing the first four minutes or so of artsy, ambient doodling…)

Robert Plant “Hey Joe” (Dreamland, 2002)

Low and Dirty Three “Down by the River” (In the Fishtank 7, 1999)