January 24th, 2011

Music recommendations

I got some new cds for Christmas, and they are the best. Well, currently, anyway, in my mind–the very best in the world. I do this with music, go through periods of intense infatuation where I can listen to a song 40 times on repeat. It never entirely goes away–I don’t start to hate the music or anything–but gradually other favourites move in. So basically what I’m saying is, you can trust the picks, but perhaps not the extreme intensity with which they’re offered.

One of these most-beloved albums is If I Don’t Come Home, You’ll Know I’m Gone by The Wooden Sky. Dangerous, to have an album title with a comma in it, but they totally pull it off. My current favourite, listen-to-ad-nauseum obsession is the track Something Hiding for Us in the Night, which has this wonderful powerful beat that’s just about my walking pace, so as I listen to it as I walk down the street, it’s like I’m in the Wooden Sky army. What do the lyrics mean? Not sure, but I think they’re beautiful, nonetheless: “Yeah, but you’ll keep a car running / outside of my bed/ So baby, don’t you worry now / it’s all in your head/ But I keep on repeating / all the last things you said / Oh, I know at first / you probably wanted me dead.” What? I don’t know, but something–definitely something.

Everybody knows about The Arcade Fire, they’ve been in the New Yorker, etc–but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t actually as good as the hype suggests–they are. I have loved every album so far, and I think The Suburbs might just be the best one yet. Some of the songs are little stories, and some, again, I can’t quite parse, but City with No Children is my favourite now, a gently rockin’ number about missing childhood as well as children and, a theme of the album, writing letters. Lovely, powerful, catchy–all the best stuff.

Truly, Katy Perry’s inane song Firework shouldn’t be included with the above complex music. Its only lyrical achievement is reminding us that the word fireworks has a singular. The rest is just synth’d up strings and inane high-school inspirationals, eg., “You don’t have to feel/like a waste of space / You’re original / Cannot be replaced.”

Even the video is mainly histrionics and CGI, but I can’t resist suggesting you watch it (link above) for the moment around 1:50 where a magician on the way home from a gig gets mugged. The muggers go through his pockets and get…long strings of silk scarves. And then they rip open his jacket and…doves burst free. It’s really beautiful, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that set-up before. Wonder who on the Katy Perry Brain Team came up with the idea??