Mux086: October 2011

Comfortably awaiting a download or stream.

1. Grinderman - Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man (feat. a 21-year-old Jack Kentala) (Grinderman 2)
2. Black Lips - Katrina (Good Bad Not Evil)
3. Metric - Gold Guns Girls (Fantasies)
4. Spoon - Me and the Bean (Girls Can Tell)
5. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Timorous Me (The Tyranny of Distance)
6. The New Pornographers - Challengers (Challengers)
7. Lykke Li - Dance Dance Dance (Youth Novels)
8. EMA - Breakfast (Past Life Martyred Saints)
9. Male Bonding - Bones (Endless Now)
10. The Mountain Goats - Jenny (All Hail West Texas)

For whatever reason, I'm rediscovering that Metric's Fantasies is an amazing album. Easily one of the best bands in the Broken Social Scene family, if that makes any sense.

Not that these muxes are trade secrets, but when I'm working out the sequence, it's pretty obvious what goes where if you check my Last.fm stats. If you're that kind of weirdo.

Rookies:
EMA

Mux079: Muxed

You know what to do.

1. Calvin Harris - The Rain
2. Annie - I Don't Like Your Band
3. Battles - Ice Cream
4. Feist - My Moon, My Man
5. Lykke Li - Little Bit
6. Wilco - Kamera
7. Bibio - Lovers' Carvings
8. Times New Viking - Fuck Her Tears
9. Devin Davis - When I Turn Ninety-Nine
10. Coma Cinema - Business As Usual
11. Phoenix - Love Like A Sunset

Rookies:
Coma Cinema
Devin Davis

Notable albums for Q1

I don't think albums are often associated with fiscal quarters, but now seems as good as time as any to air out my early list for albums that might end up on some sort of year-end List:


Bibio - Mind Bokeh

The guy sounds more like Boards of Canada each passing day. Not a problem since the last BoC album was somewhat underwhelming and is now ancient. This is far more consistent than the scattershot Ambivalence Avenue, though there isn't as immediate an earworm as "Fire Ant."


Braids - Native Speaker

First heard them opening for Baths. The lead singer is gorgeous, and at the time I didn't realize that a song like "Lemonade" is about mass casual sex. If only I connected the dots in the post-set lull when I exchanged approximately five words with her.


Cut Copy - Zonoscope

I miss the guitars from In Ghost Colours and skipping their upcoming show at First Ave. doesn't mean I'm writing this off as the most dull Cut Copy record. I haven't given it enough listens to really nail down my favorite tracks. My gut reaction is that the band is trying to fill in the post-LCD Soundsystem music world with stuff like the hella-long opener "Need You Now" and fifteen-goddamn-minute closer "Sun God."


Destroyer - Kaputt

The best smooth jazz album ever made.


The Dodos - No Color

After the slight misstep of Time To Die, this is much more in the vein of the often-schizo Visiter. Which is a good thing.


The Go! Team - Rolling Blackouts

Maybe skipping Proof of Youth made The Go! Team suddenly sound as energetic as their debut (and not the bastard US version). As far as I can tell, there isn't much annoying rapping, and most of these tracks make me want to run onto the field at a sporting event or something.


The Hood Internet - The Mixtape Vol. V

Even if this wasn't any good I'd list it if only for the sake of completion. The Mixtape Vols. I and II had the good fortune of being the Hood's first stuff and, thus, having several years' worth of indie-whatever to use for backing tracks. Now with their output hovering around three major mixtapes per year, it's not a surprise that a lack of new material takes away some of that Oh Shit! magic from the first few tapes. But still good. And free.


James Blake - James Blake

I'm kind of going in circles on this one. I can't decide if I like dubstep James Blake (see "CMYK" off the EP of the same name) or singer-songwriter James Blake (see every track off his self-titled except a few). Sure, "The Wilhelm Scream" is one of the better songs of the year, and "Limit To Your Love" is probably my favorite cover ever (and sort of The James Blake Showcase of what he can do), but without careful listening, the rest of the album can fade into the giant swaths of silence that Blake isn't afraid to commit to tape.

(Put my head in a noose. On the Wikipedia page for Blake, it says his primary genre is "post-dubstep." And on the stupid post-dubstep page, it basically says the only difference is getting rid of the "wobbly" dubstep bass and playing around 130 BPM instead of 140. Yep. Real important.)


Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes

Not many listens, but it's nice to hear Lykke expanding her range beyond the whole twee-fairy sound of Youth Novels.


Radiohead - The King of Limbs

Some days I just want to call it and slap this up on the sidebar as my favorite album of the year. It's already my most-listened-to album ever, partly due to its insanely-short running time, and also because I usually skip "Feral" and sometimes "Little By Little," or what I like to call Radiohead On Autopilot. It just sounds like all the uninspired, gloomy tracks that clogged Hail To The Thief and Amnesiac. But I skip tracks on every single Radiohead album. I only listen to half of OK Computer and two thirds of Kid A, so listening, at the least, to six of eight tracks results in a healthy 75% listen rate.

Also, while some people think they're clever when calling In Rainbows the band's best album, I see that mostly as a good collection of songs instead of a capital-A Album. After all, In Rainbows is comprised of a lot of live staples the band finally committed to recording, like "Nude," "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," "House of Cards," and "Videotape." While The King of Limbs might not have the unity of their masterpiece Kid A, it eschews the straight-ahead (albeit really fucking good, like "Jigsaw Falling Into Place") rock of Rainbows and puts Radiohead in their element: pushing into new sonic territories, like the steady pulse of "Bloom" or the flanged piano on the gorgeous "Codex."


The Rural Alberta Advantage - Departing

Two plays, and given that half of it is already in my temp playlist for future muxes, I expect many more.


Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972

I think you can listen to a Hecker album once and get it. His stuff plays great on plane trips, but unfortunately I haven't been on one in a while.

Mux074: April 2011

(Given that I'm still in the process of fixing my Mac, I'll make up for the stark lack of blog posts and unleash this mixtape into the wild a few days early. I think I hit a good stride with this one.)

If by "new" I mean "came out in 2011," there's a nice amount of "new" songs. And also a rookie that I've been trying to put on muxes forever, albeit only tracks from their first album.

So download or stream at ye olde Dropbox.

1. The Strokes - Machu Picchu
2. No Age - Valley Hump Crash
3. Sleater-Kinney - Rollercoaster
4. The Go! Team - Rolling Blackouts
5. The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist
6. Braids - Lemonade
7. Bear In Heaven - Dust Cloud
8. Lykke Li - Love Out of Lust
9. The Rural Alberta Advantage - North Star
10. The Dodos - Companions
11. Gold Panda - You (Part 1)

Mux rookie:

• The Strokes

Mux018: February 2009, the reissue

Listening to old music in preparation for the dreaded year-end list.

Dropped.

1. Friendly Fires - Jump In The Pool
2. Hot Chip - Ready For The Floor
3. MGMT - Kids
4. Animal Collective - Summertime Clothes
5. Lykke Li vs. The Field - Dance, Dance, Dance In My Field (The Hood Internet Remix)
6. Thom Yorke - Atoms For Peace (Four Tet Remix)
7. Max Tundra - Fuerte
8. Digitalism - Pogo
9. Franz Ferdinand - Lucid Dreams (Album Version)
10. Flying Lotus - Auntie's Lock / Infinitum

Mux020: April 2009, the reissue

These make good background for my breakdowns and shot lists.

Have at it.

1. The Thermals - A Pillar of Salt
2. Max Tundra - Will Get Fooled Again
3. Lykke Li - I'm Good, I'm Gone
4. The Juan Maclean - No Time
5. The National - Secret Meeting (Remix)
6. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Stay Alive
7. The Kills - What New York Used To Be
8. Handsome Furs - Radio Kalininbrad
9. Phoenix - Countdown (Sick For The Big Sun)
10. Cymbals Eat Guitars - Share
11. Dan Deacon - Get Older

Mux020 (Sort of) and muxes of old

I'm in Chicago with my iMac, and since all my MP3s on my PC, I can only listen to my latest mix/mux/whatever on my iPod without having the ability to rip the files. That said, here's a sort of IOU for this mix; that is, unless you have the files and can compile it yourself.

Mux020: April 2009
1. The Thermals - A Pillar of Salt
2. Max Tundra - Will Get Fooled Again
3. Lykke Li - I'm Good, I'm Gone
4. The Juan Maclean - No Time
5. The National - Secret Meeting (Remix)
6. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Stay Alive
7. The Kills - What New York Used To Be
8. Handsome Furs - Radio Kalininbrad
9. Phoenix - Countdown (Sick For the Big Sun)
10. Peter Bjorn and John - At the Seaside
11. Cymbals Eat Guitars - Share
12. Dan Deacon - Get Older

And, surprisingly, the vast majority of my mixes are still up. Here are the permalinks, and I've checked a few of the Mediafire/Megaupload zips that, also surprisingly, still work.

• Mux003
  
• Mux004 and Mux005
  
• Mux006
  
• Mux007 and Mux008
  
• Mux009
  
• Mux010
  
• Mux011
  
• Mux012
  
• Mux013
  
• Mux014, Mux015, and Mux016
  
• Mux017
  
• Mux018
  
• Mux019

Mux018

A little semi-electronic flavor. Download Mux018 via drop.io. The tracks:

1. Friendly Fires - Jump In The Pool
2. Hot Chip - Ready For The Floor
3. MGMT - Kids
4. Animal Collective - Summertime Clothes
5. The Hood Internet - Dance Dance Dance In My Face (Lykke Li vs. The Field)
6. Thom Yorke - Atoms For Peace (Four Tet Remix)
7. Max Tundra - Fuerte
8. Digitalism - Pogo
9. Franz Ferdinand - Lucid Dreams (Album Version)
10. Flying Lotus - Auntie's Lock / Infinitum