Eleven Meals Left. No, Thirty Meals left.

I had a dream last night where I was running out of meals in the dining hall and feeling really stressed out about it. There was this guy standing there that I kind of know in real life and he was talking about starting a band called something like "Rock Guardian and the Move" and for some reason it made me really mad. The Move was a British rock band from the sixties, contemporaries of the Kinks and such. So we're just standing there with our trays and getting ready to get our food and I just butt in in their conversation and for some reason started naming off every band that Roy Wood was in besides The Move as an alternate name for their band. Roy Wood was a guy who played in a band called the Move, by the way.

"Oh yeah, what about Rock Guardian and the Electric Light Orchestra? Or the Shazams? Or Wizzard? Or Eddy and the Falcons?" <- That was what I said last night as I slept.

Why would I do this? This seems overly pedantic. I believe their reaction to me doing this was shock and lame looks at me. I woke up and felt a little bit embarassed.

Mott the Hoople

"Honaloochie Boogie" just came on and I swear I saw God somewhere in the piano.




I'm trying to rewrite how I write songs. Its a difficult process, its like I'm trying to remember how I used to write songs. And at the same time I'm going through my mental discography and think of all the songs I've written that would be considered 'great' by the largest number of people, like 'cuba' and 'mole man' and 'cakewalk' and 'dinosaurs and aliens' and 'vertigo agogo' and 'hangover' you know, I'm trying to recapture those precious times when high school Tyler sat down and said "I'm going to write a great song" and then did and nobody cared.





One of the T.A.s in my Epic Heroic Literature class will eat two or three Altoids at a time, like they were candy. CANDY! I feel I should add that his name is H. Christian Blood.

Songs Shouted Last Night

"Reptilia"
"Do They Owe Us A Living?"
"Washington Post"

Don't Stop Me Now

I promise I'm not going to do that thing where I write a list of every song thats on my compilation and then talk about each song individually. That felt like a chore and cluttered up the webpage. That said, I've got about six spectacular (or four spectacular and two very good) compilations that I've been listening to amid the fog of other current music. There's this transition on the one that's been with me the past couple of days:

It goes from "The Ugly and the Beautiful" by (The Real) Tuesday Weld into "No Children" by The Mountain Goats. "The Ugly and the Beautiful", like Marcello Carlin said, is very Bewilderbeast (the best non-Elliott Smith folk album of the past ten years), its all these chord progressions you can identify, but man. Could you think up such a nice arrangement for them? I mean, this is great. It could be made with my keyboard, but I'd have a hard time pressing the keys at just the right times, panning everything on the one and threes into the left channel and everything loping in the twos and fours in the right channel and that really-nice-but-probably-a-keyboard cello line.

The lyrics are really good too. Really good, really standard. Something about how love is a secret entryway for the ugly to become beautiful. You listen to them and you think 'oh, psh, yeah' but you feel it the same way in your heart as in your brain. Normally you'll process something and it will only go through your brain, but these lyrics affect your heart equally. I don't want to oversell it. The song is very warm, very welcoming, very five years ago for me.

"No Children" is emotionally devestating in the best way possible. Its either my second or third favorite Mountain Goats song, certainly my favorite sounding Mountain Goats song. There's all these spectacularly crushing lyrics like 'I hope that our few remaining friends / Give up on trying to save us'. Oh my God. And how about 'I hope I cut myself shaving, I hope it bleeds all day long'. They are the exact opposite of the last song, they nail exactly what you feel instead of nailing a feeling that you wish you'd invented. And its scary.

Anyway, the coupling of these two songs, and especially that I've listened to the compilation twice through not expecting this transition and not being prepared for what it does, its a good feeling. Well its a feeling, and any feeling is a good feeling.

But seriously, its like it relaxes my brain and makes me feel fine and then REND.

Why I'm Not Listening to the new album by _______________

LCD Soundsystem: Its too drab, too not-Fall, too long.

Daft Punk: I'm afraid its a fake and I'm afraid its not a fake.

Beck: Because he's lost the funny.

Bright Eyes: I don't think either of the new albums are as good as Lifted, which I'm not listening to either.

Trail of Dead: Because I heard this one is not as good as their last one and you will never catch me listening to their last one ever again.

What I might be listening to: The Real Tuesday Weld or Grizzly Bear

"Tusk"

I listen to Fleetwood Mac's Tusk as if I had a conscious brain when I was three. When I was three, my family went to Disneyland. When I was there, I have a memory of eating Frosted Flakes for the first time and a Disney squirrel coming up and eating some of my cereal. We could have been sitting by a pool. The Frosted Flakes were perfect, though they did not bring out the tiger in me.

I'm hearing the song "I walk a thin line" right now and the backing vocals and the double tracked drums and the superappropriate reverb on everything remind me of walking through a strange, but friendly crowd. Your brain is moving fast and the music is moving slow, so your perception of the entire situation lies just about in the middle of things; not quite centered. When I first discovered Tusk I had to listen a few times in a row to make sure that the album was really that good.

A lot of the album is produced in this semi-country/western way where the drums are the focus, but they aren't the meaning. All of Fleetwood Mac's good albums are produced this way. They avoid the twang and that's all the difference. Though this album doesn't have the smash hits of Rumours, it has so much more soul. Not just soul as in 'oohhh yeahhh', but soul as in you look at each song like a puppy in a store window, they are just running around jumbling themselves up and you know that you can't ever really OWN one of them and even if you could, you wouldn't be able to pick one. And when you finally get it home, its SO ADORABLE and the focal point for the next couple weeks until it becomes a fixture.

Back to Disneyland. I have no memories of music until I was about seven or eight and my mom listened to a lot of country music. I have a lot of memories of early morning drives and K.D. Lang or whoever, sharp voiced singers that could never really endear themselves to me. It was so much more about pulling things together, making sense of drinking in bars or dancing for attention with those singers. With Fleetwood Mac, everything is so much more ambivalent, but solid. 'You feel good, I knew you would, funny that you understood', every lyric is brilliant and stupid.

My mom doesn't like Tusk that much.

M.I.A. - Arular

Too angry, too fashionable.

Winter Quarter 2K4

There were a lot of trips to Fresno. I remember listening to a particularly brilliant mix CD I'd made in the car with Vanessa. It had a Fall song that didn't sound like the Fall and a Cure song that didn't sound like the Cure and a bunch of songs that did sound like the bands that played them and we had the Grey album (which we listened to like five seconds of before deciding it useless) and we had a Style Council album (Marcello Carlin wrote something about it, so of course I give it a burn) and we had the Franz Ferdinand album which we both enjoyed together exactly once through before deciding it useless. My friend April was very patient about giving me rides far out of her way and even a couple of times listening to CDs I chose. We played a wide variety of Mario brothers games and listened to Modest Mouse and Beulah in her room.

It rained very few times which ill-prepared me for this current month, last year it rained only when convenient, this year I always left my room as it began raining and got to wherever I was going as it stopped. I made great compilations that depressed me thoroughly as I do now. My evenings were split between long walks around the campus. This year the evenings are shorter, more fulfilling walks. Last year, I got good exercise. This year I eat late night every night. I saw my brother a few times. I wrote no songs. No, I wrote three songs.

Today is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year. Not for me specifically, for the rest of the world, its some sort of statistic. But if I look at my January 24th of last year, this year seems pretty great. Oh wait, last year we recorded a single when I was home for the weekend. But hey, wait, this year, I think we recorded a better single this weekend. So both years, not bad. How do I mangage to avoid this Jan 24th depression? It seems like I'm untwentyforthable. Oh, how much work I have this week. Oh, how little I desire to begin it. Oh, I'm going to write about Love Drums.

About two weeks into doing what was then-called Love Drums (and filming the Love Drums documentary) I turned to the Sterling-manned camera and said 'This isn't Love Drums, this isn't good enough'. Love Drums was going to be the monumental album where I proved to the world all of my talent and gave them all a spectacular set of songs. We would sell eighteen million copies in Brazil alone. Love Drums became Artillery, this collection of oddly thought-up semi-punk songs. But talking to Sterling in the backyard early one morning, it was a whole new beast. It was one of these terrifying break-up moments, I looked into the eyes of my significant other and admitted that we could never make each other into something beautiful.

Its here where I overstep my bounds, telling myself that I can be whatever I want to be, saying that I'm only going to write great songs. Saying that I'm only going to be with people that I really like. Saying that I'm only going to make something with my life. Its success or nothing. Most of the time, though, it doesn't seem like I'm striving for success. It seems like I've built up in my brain this undeniable ABILITY that I can just call up at any time and do whatever is to be done in the best way possible. Sometimes this happens and its amazing and things go really well but a lot of the time things go normal or worse. Sometimes I'll stop what I'm doing and look at what I'm doing and suddenly I've regressed five years. I'm sitting in the theater room at Fresno High not knowing what to do because anything I'd do results in something being done. And if something gets done, chances are it won't have the intended (read: perfect) result.

I found myself enjoying a Prefab Sprout album rather thoroughly today. Its been probably the best thing I've ever bought with two dollars. Even better than the good-luck tsumani chopsticks before taking the GRE. I felt old and young at the same time when Paddy McAloon asked me through headphones 'What are you, twenty-one?' the target audience of the band is clearly 25 and up, so at once I'm sophisticated and old before my time. I nodded my head, yes, Paddy, I am twenty-one. Tchaikovsky didn't even start playing music until he was twenty-one.

W.E.E.K.E.N.D. Weekend

Transcribing the notes I took in my pocket seems a little useless. Things went well this weekend. You know, the fabulous mix of wonder and wonderin whats going to happen next. Mike and I wrote a song while waiting for a bus that turned out to be the wrong bus and we ended up back exactly where we started (in a complicated way). It became the acapella hit of the weekend. We were heckled by gentlemen of the night for wearing pants too tight (gotta let it hang low, poppa) we were instructed to write a book about 'what happened earlier today' and, after making a million dollars, make a million copies. My State I.D. was held hostage at USF two different times, once so I could stand in Nick's friend's roommate's room while he had a heart-to-heart 500 yards away. The room was very clean and pleasant and had a view of the USF field where people were getting ready to play baseball.

We had huge, free, breakfast that we carried around as we imagined where to walk. We saw the Moving Units along with lets say 200 kids. I was happy that none of the kids really bought into it. Earn your sweat, the Moving Units. I found two Disco Inferno CDs that I want but didn't buy them because I already have them but it was a good buy. I DID buy 'Two Wheels Good' by Prefab Sprout (known to me as 'Steve McQueen') it was in the bargain bin. You GUYS, PREFAB SPROUT. We ate at a couple healthy places where I tried to get the least healthy things and it backfired and was gross for me, I ended up getting a donut from next door instead. I did my usual dreamy browing-the-donuts thing and made my selection and the guy behind the counter put on Devendra Banhart and we had a moment.

I saw Mike Park. I took a free poster from him and our eyes met. We were in Seth's car for a long time and sang some crust-punk classics all the way through, with impeccable detail, the skat part of "Bob" for example. A lot of times I'll find myself thinking things like 'I should stop singing so hard before my throat gets messed up forever'. I like how forever-damage is to be considered in my daily actions. I'm kind of concerned that I will die of throat cancer, but maybe not that soon.

Nicky and the Dreamers continue to shock and astound at impromptu shows around the globe. Or the Porter/Kresge area. We're listening to the songs and deciding which ones make the final cut to the album. Every single song is a single. A poorly recorded blissfully performed single. When was the last time you were in a band where you knew all the words to all of your songs and all of your friends did also? Not since junior high when all your songs were Weezer covers. You were pretty popular back then because you were almost-Weezer. Well, we're pretty popular, and for non-Weezer reasons. We walked for about thirty miles this weekend.

I'm getting really into the Mountain Goats. These lyrics: "People say friends don't destroy one another / What do they know about friends?". There's other great lyrics and you have to hear them. When John Darnielle is on he's ON and I feel like I'm getting not only a great song, but a great life lesson and a great songwriting lesson. He does these things where he will have the song title and have it be seperate from the song in a way that makes them both more exciting. Sometimes I'm thinking that there's one trick to all these songs and once I figure it out, I'll be 'in the money', but so far I haven't. And I've discovered about five or six great songs in the past hours.

Happiness abounds in a very bittersweet way.

"Time is a series of evenly placed moments that terrify me. In these seconds and minutes and hours its a battle between unmemorable Tyler and memorable Tyler in a struggle to assert himself to history.

I'm 21 years old and am not famous yet. The age question has me comparing my accomplishments to both celebrities and friends. Its too late for me to be a child prodigy. Some of my favorite musicians and entertainers didn't get anywhere until their mid 20s or 30s.

In the midst of all this, I have to prepare for mediocrity as a back-up to greatness. As much as I want to be world-famous, I have to be ready for the impending reality of life outside of college, where one has to struggle to find a job, and doesn't have the same kind of connections or opportunities.

During any given day, I have to divide my time evenly between doing the things that matter to mediocrity (schoolwork) and the things that matter to greatness."

I've just this morning recovered from the weekend.

There's No Such Thing As Victory

I had this dream last night where I went into a shed in some backyard in Fresno (it could have been my backyard or Dan's backyard) and it was my secret hiding shed. The room was very small but it had a ladder that led up to a larger loft. On top of the loft there was a small red boombox (the kind that Jeff Goldblum has in Buckaroo Banzai) and an obscenely large number of wires, indicating that Conner probably created this monstrosity for me. I turned it on and it just started playing some random soft music. I sat there for a while and then started looking around the shed and noticed that there was a big hole in the fence of the backyard and somebody could walk by and easily notice my hiding super shed and steal my stereo. Instead of freaking out about this, I left and went inside.

My house had apparently become an M.C. Escher drawing, but that didn't worry me at all, what worried me was that in the kitchen (it was a really nice kitchen, full of stainless steel and tiles) my mom was watching some breaking news (my least favorite kind) about a spaceship pilot that was going to attempt a crash landing on the east coast because the landing gear had screwed up and etc etc. So I left the house and started walking around the neighborhood and the train that runs on the tracks by my house stopped by the canal by my house and it was forecast that the spaceship was instead of landing in Boston was going to land in Fresno.

The spaceship landing was really awkward, this big plane thing hit a bunch of trees and the door at the bottom swung open and the pilot tumbled out. Later I was watching it on the news and apparently the pilot was only three feet tall and had suffered a bad head wound. I remember wondering to myself how each person I knew would react. I also remember getting ready to tell people that this was all just a conspiracy to distract us all from wartime atrocities.

Me reading a 300 page book is like me trying to read every billboard for three hundred miles. Especially if I think I know where its going.

The Process

So from now on, I'm going to pick something to write about, some sort of situation/mood I want to convey and I'll write it, but I'm going to write it around other people so it won't be sucky. The pressure that comes from other eyes is so great that it implodes any bad ideas I have. I have written very few bad songs with other people in the room. Its like if someone is sitting there you have to entertain them as opposed to just filling the room with words about being lonely. The other option is to be short and make something really artsily pretty so that it will engage and woo them. Whenever I do this, it feels like a cheap shot.

Its when you are alone that you write lyrics like 'drums in tune/ ready to / use every last cord (chord) in the room / instruments / prepare for this / standard last stand and miss'. Jesus Tyler. Corsair was such a self-fulfilling failure, its like I'm writing lyrics about why it can never work. The first song for example, we do this pretty neat chorus once and once only. I don't know what that statement means, especially in connection to the rest of the song and especially as the beginning of an album. "I saw the light and I looked the other way", AKA 'I CAN make a pop album but I won't'. Of course it is a pop album, it is a pop album about failing at pop albums. It is still in the top ten percentile of albums released last year. I am not being generous.

When you hear the Nicky and the Dreamers album (being released later today or this week) you will say a few things: first 'this clearly was not recorded on two inch tape on a fostex 356*' second 'holy fiddle faddle, this sounds so much better than anything recorded on a sony panasound 538*' third 'wow how long has it been since live tracks have been interspersed with studio tracks, that's such a fricken punk thing to do' fourth 'keyboard is a little quiet on a few of these songs' fifth 'hey, wait a minute, those words that that guy on the cd were singing just a few minutes ago I'm singing now. This is unusual!' sixth 'thanks for the CD, David' assuming you know somebody named David and they handed you the CD.


* I don't know any names of musical equipment, which I figure is best. Every moment I'm not listening to equipment jibber jabber I can listen to music.

How much better, how much better, could my life get?

School Work

This morning, as I dropped my sock in the ocean on accident I thought 'now would be a good time for Arthur Russell'. Later as I was walking by an art gallery I thought 'I'm so happy I don't have any headphones on, my ears would hurt so much.'

Our new band this weekend, Nicky and the Dreamers wrote and recorded an LP and then played a show. I also recorded a dance single to commemorate the landing of the probe on Titan.

Max are you in Fresno? Have you receieved your copy of Corsair? Send me an e-mail.

To Remember=

* Remember. Or if you can't remember, make it memorable.

For Future Reference:

This is how you do it:

Look at yourself in the mirror and say "This is how you do it"

"I'm in the top quartile, maybe higher
I'm going to write a great song

History has taught us the lesson of melody
But the future will teach us the lesson of rhythm


Play the people what they like
Especially if they don't know if they like it yet

Play it like you are playing it for the first time
And by some miracle your hands know it,

Like they've played it before.
And if it works out, Spectacular."


There's a solution in ev'ry corner.

Tremendous

Tremendous successes this weekend, all across the board. Asteriskes next to the successes of attempted feats.

Mountain store trip *
Shop show *
GRE Test *
Beating Nick at Pac Man
Santa Cruz Diner *
Win-ter Quar-ter 2K5! *


The last thing on the list there is something you will be listening to soon. We'll record it and it'll hit the radio and you'll be like 'wow'. Also another song we have.

I wonder how many folks now are making music that we will look back in five years on and cringe at. Half? How strong is the desire to grab on to the popular tendency? The surrender to this desire is the great rock that these poor fifty percent are dashed against, sea-worn and sunk. Not the popular sound, the popular tendency.

Remembabies:

As we were finishing up Artillery ("mastering" "cover art" and "error checking") Conner had to get his truck fixed up in some odd way. As we waited we decided to truck on over to this strip mall that had a Radio Shack and a KFC. At the Radio Shack Conner said some things like 'no, that's not the one we need' and 'Tyler, SERIOUSLY, stop doing that'. And at the KFC we both said things like "this really is a half-gallon of soda!" and "I feel sick from chicken". There was a cool business card at the car place that I either forgot to take or gave to Vanessa and she didn't care about it.

Through this next part we listened to "Try As I Might": We weaved our way down Emerson (the funnest street in Fresno, its got a skate park, an elementary school, few stop signs and is windy as all get-out). At the end of the street we got out of the truck (even though we both felt like death from chicken and Dr. Pepper) and started putting mystery drums into the back. We got home and had to hide everything really fast in case mom got home and asked about all the new drums. Conner started getting ready for work and I asked about all the new drums.

"You said you wanted to do another album"
"Yeah?"
"So I got the hook-up"
"So you are going to play this next album only on toms and rims"
"No"
"What if I asked you to?"
"Probaby still no"
"Can you rent Anchorman at Longs?"
"That's not out for another five or six months"
"But when you rent it we'll watch it three times in one day"
"Yeah, but you don't know that yet"

Conner went to Longs and I started burning copies of the CD. Grayson came over and we went to make copies of the album cover and have Japanese buffet.

Next Time: Hiding all the Orange Mountain Dew. Literally ALL.

I wanted to post this after midnight but couldn't make it:

Sometimes when I'm lonely I need the computer to provide a certain warmth. Sometimes it does. Other times, I find myself downtown buying cheap records because I like their covers.

The Style Council.

Memorables

A memorable part of the Artillery sessions was this terrible squealing noise that Grayson's monster cable made whenever it was A) plugged into an amp and B) touched in any way. Because apparently the Monster cable guarantee is 'our cables never break unless you look at them wrong, in which case they create a din that banshees shy away from'. Seriously, if you know me and Conner you know we treat our instruments (and especially the instruments and equipment of others) like they are ice cream kittens. With ice cream kittens you just pet them and keep them at a sensible temperature or else they will melt and die. And lord knows we wouldn't want the death of cute sweet fantasy animals on our hands, we've got enough talent stuck on there to deal with as it is.

Anyway, if you've ever seen a war movie where a bunch of guys are relaxing in a bunker a few hours after the last mortars have been shelled and then WHAM! three guys die because its an attack closer than you'd thought! That was me, Sterling and Conner every five minutes, resting our ears from the hideous racket and then reminiscing about the good old times when 'it wasn't like this at all' and then WHAM! the wall blows open and Conner gets sucked out 15,000 feet above ground.

Next time: Our various Surgeries

Rememberies

My favorite moments of 2004 were the ones immediately after we finished Artillery. Grayson and I made copies of the cover art, had japanese food and stayed up until four am watching Nashville (unsuccessfully). The next morning around seven am I felt a stomach turning. Sterling came over to film Conner and I playing the riff to "Cigarettes and Sidewalk" (up til that point all that we had written of The Drop). He had no film. I told Conner to make the drum part spectacular while Sterling and I stepped out for a moment. I could hear him, I said, because we'd be right behind the house. We went over to Maria's Uncle's house where she was housesitting and Maria made me tea which made me feel better for most of the day.

Vanessa had to go to the zoo for a field trip that day and I ended up tagging along. The entire time at the zoo she would look at animals and ask questions about them (there was a worksheet that had to be done) and I would sit on a bench and complain about wanting to die. I had many Tums in my pocket, each taken (unsuccessfully). Tums always work every other time. We went to Vanessa's Aunt and Uncle's for dinner but we had to leave a little early because I was feeling emergency sick. She dropped me off at my house and I was sick for three days, every once in a while waking up to perform some sickness action or write down a song title. When I came to, thanks to a lot of seven-up and crackers (no medicine, I think), I had a piece of line paper with some song names written on it: "Society Beat, Cakewalk, Full 24 Hour Spectrum of Pop, Song for Kyle MacLaughlin, Five Scenes of the Street from Prague" And a head apparently full of ideas. This was going to be our sell-out album.

I was tired of doing great albums (like Artillery) and not getting ANYTHING from it. This time, we'd do a straightforward dance-rock album, like the Faint or the Arcade Fire or the Interpol and people would have no choice but to like it.

Things quickly got out of hand and we were discussing how many rhythm tracks we had just recorded of varying styles that were sometimes dance-rock, but a lot of the times not. When Max climbed aboard, we suddenly had a wealth of keyboard knowledge at our disposal, I could say "jazz" and there would be a jazz piano line, I would say "super mario brothers underwater theme" and there would be a jazzy interpretation of the super mario brothers underwater theme, I could say "free jazz" and we'd have to work on it, but gosh darn it, after a while there would be free jazz.

We put this sign up on the outside of the studio (my back door) that said "Free Jazz" and suddenly there was this line that extended all the way to Maroa of people all wearing dark sunglasses. In the Day Time! We had to write a bunch of songs really fast to accomadate our accidental promise. Four weeks later we all sat around in Dan's back room and watched me enjoy listening to my album. I'm sure Max liked it also.

Next time: Me at parties this summer.

Will Eisner

Fifth and sixth grade found me going to the Fresno State library a lot with my mom. After I had gone through all of the books with pictures of guns in them, I moved on to all of the old comic book archives. Krazy Kat still cracks me up and fills me with wonder. But the comic that struck me in the most profound way was The Spirit. Its the story of some detective guy that wears a mask and doesn't really have any particular super powers, except he's pretty good at punching, and even better at getting punched. Many of his adventures ended in a bittersweet way, with a petty criminal dying as a result of a chase, not getting the girl, almost getting the girl but then she dies. It was like the Spirit felt all the pain of the city simultaneously. I knew that there was something going on beneath the semi-superhero facade and felt some sort of instant bizarre connection.

The reason I'm writing this is because there are a lot of (earlier) James Rabbit songs that I wrote specifically with The Spirit in mind. He is an essential literary figure for angst, certainly my favorite comic book character. Will Eisner, the creator and artist of the series, died yesterday after heart surgery.

Top Five Of the Year 2004

5. Interpol – Antics
I think it’s a better album than Turn on the Bright Lights. TOTBL’s singles are better, but this album is more consistent and more pleasant and more advanced. There are so many parts where they reach these near-Strokes paths of greatness and you think ‘man that’s great, nearly as great as Reptilia’. I wrote something about a month ago about how the good-bad lyrics make the album. Its like the opposite of the Destroyer album, with Destroyer you’re listening to it and thinking ‘man, I’m going to be so smart when I figure out what he’s singing about’, but with Interpol your almost supposed to not listen to, like if you accidentally do you will become stupider. They have this great texture that would probably be good for driving to New York, but not through it.

4. The Strokes – Live at Alexandra Palace
Shelved by the Strokes themselves, (‘not dynamic enough’) still one of the best things to come out this year. A contrast to their miniature skyscraper recording sound, this album has this cavernous recording quality where the songs just roar out of there. And unlike other live performances they nail the tough parts. Like on Conan O’Brien when they flub the best part of Reptilia? Man that was priceless. In a bad way.
Here you get all the hits and all of the fun of being at a Strokes concert with none of the sexy oceans of hair to deal with.

3. Blood Brothers – Crimes
If last year you told me that the Blood Brothers would place higher than the Strokes on my list of the year, I would have punched you in the neck and not called for an ambulance. Plus, the Strokes didn’t actually release anything this year. I don’t want to think about that last album that this band did, or any of their other albums or any other hardcore band, or any other hardcore albums, this album is an anomaly. If they do another, it is two anomalies or a twonomaly. If they do two others it is called a hat trick, which in hockey is very difficult.
Here, the Brothers decide to skip over playing any sort of music and play some sort of wonderful amalgam. It isn’t hardcore; it only has vocals in common with that. It isn’t metal, the riffs aren’t meaty enough. Its just kind of somewhere in no-man’s land. And boy, what they do in there. This album reeks of careful planning, the songs find a new sense of excitement within themselves. Its like they sat there and asked themselves what kind of record they would most want to hear if they were them and then did it. The title track starts off side two of the vinyl. Can you imagine how many people just listen to that song and then pick up the needle and put it back at the start of the side and listen to it again and by that time the water’s boiled? I smile thinking about that.

2. Arthur Russell – Calling out of Context
This record takes me back to a childhood that didn’t exist, though I wish it had. Long car drives and a lot of healthy food. The landscape is painted in 80s colors that didn’t burn into our retinas but settled in, a modification of sixties wonder and a bridge to 2000 Technicolor. This is dance music that has the best of what dance music is supposed to be. It’s got these beats, simple. So simple that if anybody else played them, they would not be counted as real beats. And then its got these melodies, these little keyboard melodies that you can play on this keyboard right here. I swear I’m playing them as I type this: c c d d d d e e. And then the vocals come in and its like Zam!
At least two songs from this album have made me feel powerfully nostalgic for something that never happened, or hopeful for something that might never happen. Pretty much I feel like a forty eight year old woman when I’m listening to it.
So in my future I’m walking along a pier and I’m wearing some shoes that I wouldn’t wear now, because I’m older and I know that the style isn’t important when nobody wants to look at you anyway and I don’t care if I get a little salt water on them. It listens like an epiphany you have on Christmas. Not anything religious, mind you, its just a lovely coincidence.

1. Fiery Furnaces – Blueberry Boat
I don’t know what to do about this. Whenever I even think about this album I get excited. It’s too much to even think about listening to it. Okay. Here we go. There’s two kinds of bands. There’s the A kind of bands that when they describe what they sound like its either another band that they like or a genre that they sound like.
Example: “Hey, we’re The Messy Hair. We’re kind of a Hard Rock outfit with Radiohead and Hip-hop influences”
And while these bands, God Bless ‘em, work together as a cohesive unit and play hour-long shows, it gets real old. Your listening to them like you listen to minutes 20-80 of a lecture: progressively less. Unless the teacher comes up with some great melody. Which they won’t.
And then there are the B kind of bands where its usually two or three people and there’s always at least one other member that’s ‘new to the band, since tonight’ and they play like jug and harpsichord and pie tins and they describe what they sound like as the lyrics that they write.
Example: “We’re the Glengarry Glen Goulds. We do songs about John Updike books and end every concert with a Q and A sesh.”
As much as you love the B bands, as heartwarming as 20 minutes of amateur plunking and diagecic thumping from goofy lit majors is, its almost better to just imagine the band then actually take your time to watch them.
The Fiery Furnaces, every bit as adorable as the B bands, are infinitely more informed and creative. Its like the time they would have spent with a joint are spent having some great life experience that they can just ditch as an hilarious and evocative lyric later during practice time.
So that’s why the Fiery Furnaces are the second best band around today, but why is Blueberry Boat such a good album? Part of me identifies with the anti-musician in Matthew, spending time playing the guitar along to records that you realize you won’t ever beat and so you play against them and somehow it comes out all better. Really, what sounds cooler, almost getting the same guitar sound at Pete Townshend or playing minor fifths an eighth note behind the opening notes of Baba O’Riley?
So this album is lots of minor fifths and eighth notes behind the Who and beyond them. The Who never wrote lyrics this delightfully carefree or arrangements this nutty. So maybe they had a better ear for pop hooks, but that’s the only reason that you don’t have a Blueberry Boat poster on your wall right now, its just a little adjustment that we can make to Matthew Friedberger’s ear. Thousands of posters, Matt.
For as many times as I’ve praised this album and the band I get mad sometimes. I can hear what they are and where they are and I’ve read what they are working on and I want to just say ‘hurry up’. Get more albums out. I need more Fiery Furnaces. No other band on this list (besides the Strokes) do I care if they release a record in 2005 or 2006 or ever again, they are all good ending points or departure points or whatever. Blueberry Boat is a monolith that towers above every other album recorded this year. January 11, 2005 this new collection of unreleased B-sides comes out. I have most of them, its not going to be enough. Please Fiery Furnaces.


Albums from this list that I may never listen to again:
Bearsuit, Arcade Fire, Electrelane, Destroyer, Kanye West

Best 15 albums of 2004 part two
(Because I left the list in Santa Cruz and had to do an album these last three weeks)

10. Kanye West – College Dropout
Jess Harvell’s least favorite hip-hop guy. His sense of groove is definitely not the most profound. Despite this, this is possibly the most palatable hip-hop I’ve ever heard. My personal problem with hip-hop is that it is so difficult to listen to. As a teen I got the whole talking fast thing down, but I needs me pop hooks, and once per song (the chorus) just is not enough pop hooks. Hip-hop is not the most melodic thing, and when it is, it is melodic in a confounding way. They’ll sing the chorus but it will move up a quarter step somewhere so they have to take the instruments out and its almost like new classical music, but not quite. Kanye West (who if he’s responsible for that Cam’ron song whose name I can’t remember but really liked gets double credit) has this way around melodying a hip-hop track to the point where its pretty much a pop track to rap over.
He’s on this list more for what his songs on the radio and MTV meant for me, waking up Spring ’04 to “It All Falls Down” and thinking ‘how did they get him to look in the mirror without the camera showing’. Its rare that I can make it all the way through a hip-hop album without hating myself at the end.

9. Magnetic Fields – I
We all knew Stephin Merritt was going to fail, but if you are going to fail, at least fail like this. The unfollowupable 69 love songs (unfollowedup previously by several crappy film scores) looms large over this, we’re listening to the cello-in-a-disco song and thinking ‘really? Really, Stephin?’ There are a couple of stellar tracks, but the ratio is the same pretty much as the 69 love songs, and there are so many more of those.
Okay, pah. Lets forget that other album. It seems Merritt has honed in on this certain style of acoustic cabaret that he milks frequently through the album. There’s plenty of smart lyrics and attention to how people used to write songs. Do we have much of a place for this in 2004 though? Clever rhymes, killer end.

8. Of Montreal – Satanic Panic in the Attic
I think everybody who got this album listened to it thirty or forty times and got sick of it. That’s my story pretty much. But revisiting these songs in a non-sonic matter, that is looking at the tracklist, I’m thinking ‘hey, so many semi-classics’. The opening four, City Bird, Chrissie Kiss the Corpse, How Lester Lost His Wife, the closing two, pretty much an unbeatable record as far as this year goes. The voice, yeah, its off-putting, the 2003ness of the electro song, yeah, its off-putting, but he’s clearly moving towards something. If you heard Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies, you liked it a lot, really genuinely liked it, but you couldn’t get your head around it, and chances are neither could Kevin Barnes. I had a chance to speak with him for a moment and he mentioned that he was mainly influenced by Os Mutantes, which is a good reference point for this album. It would have been a better reference point if EVERY FUCKING 18 YEAR OLD HADNT DISCOVERED THEM and they were still semi-secret. But then, Jorge Ben? No he hadn’t heard of him. Yet.
Obviously the best part of the album is the closing song, where Of Montreal leaves the Athens closet (I’m just going to say they’re from Athens) and takes their post-college selves to Africa and decide that no, not an entire album’s worth of it, but one. One track. Its guitarlicious. Probably the best guitar work popular ears will hear this year. Okay, I just listened. Maybe not the best guitar work, but I really like that sentence so it stays.

7. Nelly McKay – Get Away From Me
She lies about her age and her hair color and goes on the View and sings songs directly to the people she’s singing against and is on Letterman the next minute doing the entirely cutesy thing. Too bad she didn’t really catch on this year, she’s got one heck of a voice and an adorable feminist agenda. The album I like the sound of for the same reasons I like Rufus Wainwright albums, it’s a bunch of expensive studio people sitting in a studio thinking of how to back up these wunderkinds and flipping back the pages in the recording log book to the time when there were bassoons and glockenspiels and they take them out and dust them off and then Rufus lisps through things (his album wasn’t so great this year) and Nelly soars and slur-raps (not the best rapper) but they’ve got good sounds to them.

6. Stars – Set Yourself on Fire
The cutest non-cute band on the list. I would not play this for anyone else, but its good as a document of what you should aspire to, should you choose to be a doddering milk and kisses band. There are no great songs on this record that you would change filenames to ‘Celebration Guns!!!!!!!!!!OH MY GOD!!!!!!’, but they are all pleasant and well-crafted enough that I enjoy them all together as a cohesive whole, just around no other human beings.