Sunday Night Spotlight | No. 3 | (on a Tuesday)

your guess is as good as mine

Little Dragon is a Swedish pop group. Among other things I've professed my love for on here, European sugar-pop is probably my biggest guilty pleasure of any. It makes no sense to me: I hate things that sound like the 80's. I hate pop music (in its current state). But I love Swedish people. Okay, I've only ever seen one Swede in my life that I know of, and that was Lykke Li. But I imagine they're all just as cool as her. I'm extrapolating here. Either way, Little Dragon are at least deserving of a Sunday Night Spotlight -- even if it is Tuesday.

They make slightly downtempo and dreamy pop, and lead singer Yukimi Nagano (yes, half-Japanese, half-Swedish), sounds eerily similar to Lykke Li, which is probably why I like Little Dragon so much in the first place. The quirky instrumentation is definitely there, mixing slippery drums with synthesizers, whistle noises, and even one song seemingly sampling that noise Mario made when he jumped up. Yukimi's flighty voice is the perfect compliment to all the above, delivering an airy accompaniment in cutely endearing English. There's so much summer in recent release Machine Dreams that it's a shame it just came to this side of the ocean in the fall.

Little Dragon - Never Never

"Never Never" is probably as downtempo as Little Dragon actually gets, but it still carries with it a bit of swagger, lilting along on the strength of the drum hits and Nagano's perfectly up-and-down, side-to-side vocals. It has a bit of a lounge-y feel to it in the verses, but never feels old or staid thanks to smile-inducing bridge and chorus, with its synthesizers working on overtime to produce the desired pick-me-up. When you listen to a song like this and call it "pop," you're ostensibly putting in it in the same dimension as the tunes you hear when you turn on the radio. But all you hear on the dial is a bastardization of the genre -- Little Dragon delivers pop music with a retro vibe, and in the way it's supposed to be heard.

Little Dragon - Swimming

"Swimming" on the flip-side is Little Dragon at its quirkiest. "ooooh-oooh"s abound, and the simple piano chords lay down the basis of a boy-girl story -- told on top of a tune you could easily imagine soundtracking a silent film, at the part where the couple-to-be is running around the park, playing a most-flirtatious round of hide-and-seek, peeking out from the trees just in time to see their crush and run off to their next hiding spot. (Wow, if that's not evocative enough - whether good or bad - I don't know what is. Try imaging Charlie Chaplin and seeing the whole thing in black-and-white and that might help a bit.)

Yukimi is good at some juxtaposition of sultry and kooky, her voice emoting both at different times, with the aide of that complimentary instrumentation. On top of "Swimming" and "Never Never," there's a few other tracks from Machine Dreams that border on dream-pop, thanks to their deft use of atmospherics and space. It just goes to prove that what you don't use is just as important as what you do -- silence is not nothing, it is simply the absence of sound, and sound and silence have to work in an effective tandem to make music truly great. Little Dragon know when to carry on a beat, when to cut it short, when to change it up. Sometimes they may over-indulge, like the "why'd they do that?" break on "Looking Glass," but largely, Machine Dreams is an enjoyable album, full of everything there is to love about 80's-tinged European pop music at the moment.

Buy Machine Dreams here: Amazon

LCD Soundsystem

I fucking love LCD Soundsystem. I'm just putting that out there. My dad can't stand them. My roommate complains about me playing my "shitty" music whenever I put them on in the car. I can't really find many people I know at all that like them, let alone as much as I do. I don't understand it. There's nothing particularly offensive about their sound. It's punk- and disco-inflected dance music -- without the over-aggressiveness of some strains of punk, and borrowing from disco influences in an almost pretentious fashion (I'm not even joking: they literally have a song called "Yeah [Pretentious Version]").

LCD Soundsystem - Tribulations

Band front-man/lead singer/DFA Records boss James Murphy is the essential cog to LCD Soundsystem, with his matter-of-fact delivery and stunning knack for turning what are seemingly monotonous subject matters and beats into minutes-long opuses on life and death and everything in between. Obviously, he crystallized the latter pinpoint-perfectly on top-ten-track-of-the-last-10-years "All My Friends," but the guy's been doing it with his cohorts in LCD Soundsystem for years in one way or another. Their 2007 album Sound Of Silver is also widely considered one of the best of the last decade, and it's certainly among my favorite albums ever. Recently though, I've been listening to their first release, a double CD simply titled LCD Soundsystem, a compilation amassing one disc of earlier singles, and a second disc of then-new for 2005 material.

Both are certainly great CD's on their own, and could easily have their own glowing reviews from me, but for some reason, I tend to favour the disc of their older material. There's no great discrepancy between any of their three discs really: 90% party-ready jams, and 10% slower numbers that cover everything from how shitty New York got in the last decade, to the heart-aching departure of someone you really love -- all corkscrewing their way into your psyche in seven- to eight-minute cuts.

LCD Soundsystem - On Repeat

Maybe that's the one thing about LCD Soundsystem that makes them a hard band to get into and appreciate: the formidable length and structure of their music. The elements themselves are fine, and rarely stray from the usual dance-floor fare: hi-hats, drum machines, atmospherics, crunchy guitar, and (God love James Murphy) more cowbells than are probably a good idea. Either way, the manner in which all of those culminate is truly something to marvel at, if you really take the time (quite literally) to do it. There's one Sound Of Silver track - "Get Innocuous" - that for about 30 seconds, takes a fast-paced kind of "banging on alien steel" sound, and transforms it bar-by-bar into an equally quick but simple ticking noise. I mean it's intricacies like that that I really appreciate about these guys, but that may go unnoticed or just plain ignored.

But getting back to it, it really might be that musically density that forms a wall between eager ears and musical minds. When even the above-mentioned "All My Friends" spends its whole first minute of seven repeating the same piano loop over and over again (the source of my father's frustration with the group), I may start to understand some people's hesitance at getting into LCD Soundsystem. Begrudgingly, I'll even admit that James Murphy's voice is - realistically - not the most pleasing thing to listen to for the three hours of their music I have in my iTunes.

LCD Soundsystem - Great Release

But it's not always so much how he's saying what it is -- it's without a doubt what it is he's actually talking about. And it really is more like talking than singing. I can barely think of any lines he actually rhymes with proficiency, and it seems like most of his lyrics are stream-of-consciousness verbal assaults on ageing and friends and socializing and love and getting fucked over and music and what's cool and what's not. And all of it is endlessly quotable. For me, James Murphy is nothing short of a modern philosopher. In reference to above quotability, I could write an entire post on the genius musings contained in LCD Soundsystem's tracks, but the best way to pick them out is to actually give the tunes a listen.

This is possibly the best analogy I have for LCD Soundsystem's music: Remember "The Sunscreen Song"? Sadly, not as many people as I thought do, and its lyrical content and origin are an entirely different story, but if you imagine Baz Luhrmann in that song is some kind of fatherly figure doling out advice to you on your graduation day, James Murphy is like your best friend yelling life advice over the dance grooves at a house party. And when you really think about it, it's as simple as that.

Buy LCD Soundsystem here: Amazon

look in the book...

Pointless musical trivia: Pink Mountaintops' members come from the same collective of artists that form Vancouver's Black Mountain -- which also produced the indelible Lightning Dust outfit. It's like a gift that keeps giving. I've already broken down some of Lightning Dust's and Black Mountain's previous work, and as much as I appreciated some elements of their music, Pink Mountaintops seem to take the best of both groups, with folk-inflected and sometimes plodding rock music, along with more uptempo jaunts and cathedral filling wails.

"Execution" and "Vampire" are the singles already released from Pink Mountaintops' album Outside Love, and I knew what to expect from those songs having already heard them, but when I delved into the album itself, I was pleasantly surprised with one track in particular. "Holiday"is outfitted with harmonica, tinkles, acoustic guitar, and a campfire melody -- something that's a bit of a change of pace for a group with its feet well-set in the comforts of straightforward rock and dreamy psychedelia. I mean, I'm talking like I'd toast s'mores to this tune.

Pink Mountaintops - Holiday

It's actually a pretty mournful song in lyrical content, lamenting friends who have left "on holiday," and preaching about bastards and cowards, but you'd never guess from the sea-shanty-like sway of the thing, drowned in expressive yet almost monotonous singing. In view of the Peaches-sounding guitars and garage-rock drums of cuts like "The Gayest Of Sunbeams" (yes, you read that right) and ballroom twirls of "Come Down," Pink Mountaintops certainly make use of the many musical styles they have under their belts, and are no worse for it. The whole album still sounds like a whole piece, with good flow from start to finish and a good number of strong tracks.

Look at that. I set out to write a little snippet about "Holiday," and I ended up with a mini album review on Outside Love. But it felt organic and natural, a lot like Pink Mountaintops' music.

now I'm just crazy, and fucked in the head

Girls really had to grow on me. No, not like that -- Girls, the band. Maybe a bit less than the xx, I was wary of the hype surrounding these guys. Pitchfork's review had a most interesting story on the band's background, but that still wasn't enough to get me to listen to the group. An initial listen to "Laura" didn't convince me of their talent any more either. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I half-recall listening to the particular track featured in this post, "Lust For Life," but if I really liked it that first time (in the summer if I remember at all), it would certainly stick out in my memory a bit more than it seems to right now.

No, it took a very random and recent listen to "Lust For Life" for me to warm up to Girls even a little bit. I'm still not totally into them, and it hasn't even been two weeks that I've had the track I'm speaking of. But -- damn is it ever catchy. At 2:25, I've probably taken longer pees. But the ridiculously jangling guitars, the almost-cartoonish half-croon/half-whine of lead singer Christopher Owens, the barely-there beach vibe, the sustained tempo of the whole thing (not much time to really do anything different with it anyway), the out-of-nowhere harmonica riff that for the life of me I can't place quite which 90's TV show it reminds me of...for God's sake, it's not really fair that a song with really only one verse can be this good. Even the way it trails off at the end is irresistible, and I frankly can't get enough of the song.

Thankfully -- and probably a big reason why I like the song so much -- what it's lacking is that "chillwave" beach-haze, symptomatic of this summer's drowned-out, barely-audible excuses for sun-soaked soundtracks. The song could've easily went that way, but laid bare (or what some people might call "not produced with layer-upon-layer of tape-deck hiss, pushed to the background vocals, and unrecognizably distorted guitar"), it sounds ten times better than anything else of a similar ilk put out in the last six months.

Girls - Lust For Life

Obviously if you wanted to, you could delve into the deeper meaning of the track, as there's certainly enough there to work with. Owens' probably-personal longings -- some we can relate to (sun tans, beach houses, bottles of wine) and some we can't (boyfriends, for those of us heterosexual males; and fathers, for those of us who grew up with them) -- abound. Vulgar thoughts of insanity and matters of the heart even wander their way into the condensed-soup of a song, but it never feels like too much -- rather, it feels just right. Even if seemingly nothing in Owens' world is.

did you dive too deep, like you always do?

Music for me isn't just the sounds. It's the feelings and the memories and the stories associated with those unique sounds. Sometimes it's complicated, like a concert experience. Sometimes it's as simple as a memorable tune in your car or on the radio (not a great chance it was on the radio nowadays though). "Lions For Scottie" by Hey Rosetta! has a very abstract backstory for me.

My younger sister occasionally borrows my car. While I usually listen to my mp3 player when I drive, she brings along her own mix CD's, which she tends to leave in the car afterwards. After I moved out this September, I started taking quick drives around town, as opposed to the half-hour treks I used to commute on before my move, so that meant either forgetting or foregoing my mp3 altogether. As alluded to above however, the radio absolutely sucks in Halifax. So on those quick drives, which would sometimes extend into mini-shopping trips or proverbial taxi rides for my roommates, my sister's CD's came in more than handy.

On one particularly eclectic mix, I found some Noah & The Whale, Death Cab For Cutie, Joel Plaskett, some oldies, and a few Hey Rosetta! cuts. Very representative of my sister's listening habits to say the least. Those Hey Rosetta! tracks really connected with me though -- until then, I'd really only listened to one of their songs with any consistency, aside from seeing them in concert this summer. So picking her up one night from work, I asked if the songs were indeed by Hey Rosetta!, and told her how much I liked them. A while later, I got the band's two albums (as well as a concert ticket for their Halifax show this December) and though I'm still missing a few songs, they've got a solid catalog already just from that pair.

"Lions For Scottie" really stood out to me for one reason or another though. It's one of the more immediate songs the group has, starting with a few drumstick hits and launching into a full-out assault right off the top. It doesn't build and well up like most other Hey Rosetta! tracks, and singer Tim Baker's vocals are among his most exuberant and impassioned on the Plan Your Escape disc "Lions For Scottie" comes from. Though the album cut is 7:41 long, the meat of it really only extends 3:26 in, then gives way to a markedly more somber and diametrically opposed affair. In iTunes, I left that self-titled "Extended Mix" alone as part of the whole album, and cut myself the shorter version for easier listening to the single. Take a listen to it for yourself here:

Hey Rosetta! - Lions For Scottie