The oughts were a decade of rule breaking, fusion, and creative stealing. Every decade from the past century had its influence on this decade. Creativity and struggles abounded as an entire industry adapted to a new way of producing and consuming music.
The young and beautiful Lykke Li released her debut album Youth Novels early in 2008, which was met with great fanfare through the blogosphere, which had been primed with the early release of Dance, Dance, Dance. In the song Lykke Li claims that her dancing hips lie and she is actually terribly shy. I love how wonderfully unique, catchy and adorable this tune is.
I wrote about this track as one of those fabulous crooked trees, those fabulous tracks that are both strange and wonderful. Passion Pit independently released Sleepy Head early in the year, which resulted in multiple labels vying for the artist to sign with them. In the end, Frenchkiss Records won out, and the album Chunk of Change was released in mid September.
The Empire of the Sun are a diversely talented pair from Australia. I posted about their haunting track Country earlier this year, but neglected to tell you about their ridiculously catchy, soon to be pop classic Walking on a Dream (I wouldn’t doubt that you heard about it anyways!). It took a couple of listens for this track to sink into my psyche, but it didn’t take long before I was searching through the tracks on my mp3 player so that I could hear this gem again.
The young pair from Brooklyn dropped an amazing album on the scene with help from The Flaming Lips producer, Dave Fridmann. Oracular Spectacular contains several stand out tracks that made MGMT one of the top bands of 2008. While I adore the majority of the album, Electric Feel is the stand out track that I listen to over and over. Sadly, I didn’t get around to posting about MGMT this year, but I’m excited to post about their future offerings.
This song isn’t even officially out yet, it’s set to hit the shelves January 13th, 2009. But, I have the satisfaction in knowing that I posted about it 8 months ago. This killer track earns my top spot in this year’s best of list with the fresh, thick sound that The Crookers bring to the up and coming rapper Kid Cudi, aka. The Man on the Moon.
Tom Waits told us, the audience at his show in late 2000 at the Orpheum in Vancouver, a story about the unpopular crooked tree in a forest full perfect, straight trees who triumphs when Bob the logger is instructed to cut all the straight trees. Waits has retold this story many times I’m sure. I’ve included a bootleg of him telling this story during the show he did in Seattle a couple days later. In essence the story celebrates the beauty of the strange. I love that which grabs your soul and says “I am fabulous” while simultaneously telling your brain “Look at me! I’m terribly odd!”. The combination is tireless. This post is a tribute to those special tracks that lighten the soul in unconventional ways, those crooked trees.
From Vancouver, Kid Koala is a favourite at The Biltmore. He had long been on the Ninja Tune record label, and unveiled the new Kid Koala website about a month ago, which is worth checking out. Fender Bender is likely his best known song, with it’s funny little scratches seemingly having a conversation amongst the city traffic and cool rhythms of Kid Koala’s unique genius. The video for Fender Bender, below, is both strange and interesting, just like the song.
There is a quite a debate going on over at Wikipedia about whether or not Passion Pit is worth of ‘Band’ entry, or any entry for that matter. They are most definitely a band! A group of 5 guys from Boston that have very recently released their first album Chunk of Change on Frenchkiss Records. Their debut track Sleepy Head hit the blogosphere with quite a bang in the early summer. Since then they have been signed to a proper label and have been getting regular airplay on Radio 1. Sleepy Head starts with a thumping, thick beat, clapping and an extremely high pitched voice, that is almost annoying but is some how doesn’t quite reach that level. The tune is quite catchy with a unique complicated layering of odd sounds that comes together like some kind of modern symphony.
I have long loved this track! It’s opening gets me every time. A friend busts in on another who is transfixed by a test pattern on the television. The first friend takes his deeply plagued compadre to doctor, who’s response is:
Well, there are two things to be done
First of all, we put him in the hospital
And withdraw all television
And then, we give him this… Radio
The Avalanches are sample masters! Using diverse samples in such creative ways. Their best known album, Since I Left You, which Radio is from, reportedly used over 3,500 different vinyl samples. There is much speculation on what the Avalanches are up to these days. They’re website promises and upcoming release, but has remained unchanged since 2006, so really only time will tell.
For good measure, here’s The Avalanches video for Frontier Psychiatrist, because it’s really too delectably silly to miss!
