I admire how few concessions this song makes. I figured that after a few introductory measures they’d clean up and smooth out that guitar triplet, but nope, it stays fragile-sounding and rough around the edges the whole time. The expected “TICK two three TOCK two three” 6/8 slow-jam drum never really materializes, requiring you to lean into those rich-sounding chords, which are themselves constructed largely from a subtle interplay between piano and bass. Synth strings and a watery organ sound and a snippet of piano played backwards are sketched in here and there, but you really have to wait for them. Beyoncé’s vocals, to paraphrase her lyrics, pull you in close and won’t let you go — there’s simply no ignoring those big whooping “OO!” sounds at the end of each line, nor a chorus structured around the simple phrase “make love to me,” nor a final verse that sets this lovemaking up as an alternative to a world at war. And when the climax finally comes, all that pent-up energy isn’t diffused into a dully loud full-band finale with a full-fledged beat or whatever, but poured into a reach-for-the-sky guitar solo. Everything surrounding it stays relatively restrained; the guitar does the shouting. Then it all just kinda disappears. “1+1” is, fittingly, more than the sum of its parts, all of which are astutely selected and intelligently, unapologetically deployed to transport you to a more beautiful place for four minutes and thirty-five seconds at a time.

King Missile – Happy Hour

The other day my wife told me how glad she was to have come of age, culturally speaking, in the early to mid ’90s. We’ve had this discussion several times, because every time it becomes apparent how easy it was to have really terrific music placed right in front of you by the paltry-by-today’s-standards number of outlets geared toward putting music in front of teenagers, by god, it’s worth talking about. A case in point for me is this, the concluding and title track to the album that “Detachable Penis” came from. I still think “Detachable Penis” is very funny (“He wanted twenty bucks, but I talked him down to seventeen”). But what I couldn’t have known when I brought home the CD in its giant cardboard longbox from Tower Records was that the album that surrounded that novelty classic was stuffed with really first-rate alternative-rock musicianship. Some of it was pastiche of genres I really didn’t have any experience with yet (“VulvaVoid” is shoegaze! “Trapped” is mid-period time-to-rock-happily R.E.M.!), some of it was spoken-word weirdness and wordplay draped atop roiling hard rock I had no problem appreciating (“Sink,” “Ed”), and a lot of it is just crushingly morose songs about complete failure. “I’m Sorry” and “Heaven,” the third-to-last and penultimate tracks, contain lots of imagery of crushed birds and breaking things that can’t be repaired, all delivered with John S. Hall’s twerpy speak-singing to undercut the heaviness. No such undercutting takes place in “Happy Hour,” a dirge I put on to this day when I want to feel unremittingly awful. Funereal organ, some kind of electronic reverse-tape effect that sounds like something shuffling into a grave, lyrics that conclude with the lines “While the flesh fell off our bodies and we lost our limbs,” so fuzzy and distorted you can’t make it out without the lyric sheet, and on top of it all a melancholy, briefly beautiful piano chords and, finally, a guitar that sounds like it’s bleeding to death. Back then you could stumble bass-ackwards into shit like this all day long. You had it so easy you weren’t prepared for a time when you’d need a song like this.

Gang Gang Dance – Sacer

Because we absolutely, positively need more art-pop that sounds like T’Pau’s “Heart and Soul.” It took me forever to place what I was hearing in this standout track from Gang Gang Dance’s engrossing, energetic new album Eye Contact but even before I struck upon what I think is the most direct influence, this song’s project of rehabilitating big sky’s-the-limit mostly English alternative pop sounds from the ’80s had my full support. Everything about it makes me feel like I’m sitting in some teenage bedroom I never had, playing it at full volume and sharing some secret delirious joy with myself. That stop-start beat, with its synth stabs and big flat reverbbing drums, is just made to dance to in your mirror, awkward and uncaring, while Lizzi Bougatsos’ vocals run the impenenetrability of Liz Fraser (another icon of rhapsodic interiority) through a strange Bollywood filter. Which works perfectly, because to me the appeal of all the Big ’80s bands was just how far away their world felt from mine, like these were transmissions of heartache and happiness and emotions too intense to filter down to me as anything but pure excitement, in a secret language of adult glamour I was lucky enough to understand for three or four minutes at a time.

King Crimson- Lark's Tongues in Aspic Part !!

I’m a sucker for supervillain team-ups, but I’m particular about them as well. Conventional wisdom holds that supervillains’ villainy will always undermine their collaboration in the end: Megalomaniacal master-planner types will spend as much time maneuvering against one another as against their mutual enemies, the more dignified types will clash with the real wild ones, and before long the team-up’s either in pieces or at each other’s throats. Fie, I say. Reality is little more than a constant stream of examples of horrible people working together quite effectively to advance their agendas, and I see no reason to believe that evil men and women of sufficient means and motivation couldn’t pool their resources and crush the resistance of their do-gooding rivals, scattering broken Avengers across the Eastern seaboard and erecting enormous matching statues of Doctor Doom in New York Harbor and Magneto in the San Francisco Bay.

This is the feeling I get when I listen to this live version of a ’70s King Crimson instrumental, performed by the band’s “double trio” incarnation twenty-odd years later. Robert Fripp’s the mad scientist in this model, bespectacled and seated quietly on a stool as he makes his guitar sound like it’s actually capable of biting your head off with those first few notes. His fellow avant-guitar legend and collaborator-with-everyone-interesting Adrian Belew is a jaunty Joker-like presence by comparison, bouncing around as he draws out soaring, piercing sounds from his instrument. Two drummers pound away, laying down a suppressing fire of time-signature changes, percussive miscellany, and ear-smacking loudness; they include math-rock monster Bill Bruford (late of Yes) and session guy Pat Mastelotto (late of everyone from Mr. Mister to …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – he’s kind of like the jobber who gets tapped by one of the big boys and surpasses everyone’s expectations) . Every good supervillain team needs a bald guy, so there’s Tony Levin, supplying the low end for one of the band’s bass-heaviest compositions, and teaming up with Trey Gunn, who compliments Fripp’s already science-fictional-sounding Frippertronics by playing instruments with names like the Warr Guitar and the Chapman Stick. The song itself is like an assault — impossibly loud from the start, like many King Crimson tracks it relies on repetition, crescendo, and melodic lines that rise ever higher in pitch to create the impression that it’s somehow getting louder and more urgent still. The constant rhythmical shifts, nearly impossible to predict unless you’ve heard the song a million times, make the riffs feel like they’re jumping out of the grooves to try to get to you as fast as they can. It’s just a sinister, angry-sounding song, and it ends with the band basically burning it to the ground, the sonic ashes a monument to their triumph. Everyone worked together to make something awful and awe-ful.

“THERE IS A FREEDOM IN VIOLENCE THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND! AND LIKE I’VE NEVER FELT BEFOOOOOOORRRRRRRREE!!!!!” And with that top-of-her-lungs chant from singer/songwriter Merrill Garbus…it’s samba time! For all of about twenty seconds, that is, before “Riotriot” resumes the twitchy, nervous-sounding, quiet minor key groove it occupies for the bulk of its duration. I don’t want to give the impression that the song isn’t interesting up until that dramatic point — not at all. Something about its timid swing and Garbus’s hushed vocals suggests that it’s being delivered on tiptoes, looking over her shoulder to see if anyone’s listening. And that’s fitting given that Garbus is singing about seeing a riot cop in action from her window and having a sexual fantasy about him. But deep into the song things start getting a little buzzier, a little crackier and more urgent, and Garbus’s vocals start crescendoing, and then BLAM! this huge, huge moment hidden like an Easter egg at the 2:47 mark. Garbus does this sort of thing on all three of the highlight tracks from Tune-Yards’ excellent second album Whokill: there’s also the ecstatic horn section that comes from out of nowhere in “Bizness,” and the sections that involves shouting “MY MAN LIKES ME FROM BEHIND!” (every word delivered like a punch) and gorgeous woo-ooh-ooh high notes respectively in “Powa,” I feel rewarded by songs like that — it feels like their creators did something extra to make each part interesting and unpredictable, and gave me a payoff for sticking around that a traditional verse-chorus-repeat structure just wouldn’t deliver. I suppose it’s the same sort of thing I like about “Liar”‘s genuinely dangerous-sounding transitions between rest and aggression, “End Come Too Soon”‘s magnificently miserable ending, “Long Distance Runaround”‘s flipped switch between jaunty piano piece and forward-leaning math-funk. And though I hate to be the guy who takes something he likes and then says “unlike all that other shit,” fuck it: Surely Garbus’s attention to things like dynamics and song structure are what help put Tune-Yards head and shoulders above so much of indie rock’s unimaginative, amorphously strummed same-iness, where within fifteen seconds you’ve heard every trick up a given song’s sleeve, while her ability to take a sentiment as disturbing as finding freedom in violence and slam convincingly it into a “Fool in the Rain”-style party interlude is roughly twelve bajillion times more interesting, entertaining, insightful, and listenable a treatment of violence in art than some trollish shithead putting out two albums’ worth of rape jokes and daring you not to get them.

Wonderful though the trimmed-down video version may be, I’m posting the full-length album version of this song instead. It’s in this version, with its leisurely intro and extra lines and lacerating instrumental section before the third verse, that you get the full effect. It’s a different feeling than the usual “quite verse/LOUD CHORUS/quiet verse” altrock model, mind you; it’s not so binary, so on/off. Each time the loping groove nears the end of a verse, it kind of shakes out and tightens up and only then turns up the volume — it grows into the loud chorus, and you feel that potential contained within the rest of the song. Overall it radiates a sense of lazy coiled menace, like a big dangerous animal dozing in warm weather that suddenly opens its eye when you get too close. I like a song that can surprise you like that, a song that does its thing for a while but eventually says “alright, fuck it” and rears up and punches you right in the face.

Wild Beasts – “End Come Too Soon”

The lyrics to this song really couldn’t be simpler. With haiku-like precision, Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto sketches a succession of rapturous nights with a lover, all of which head inexorably to the same conclusion: the end, come too soon. That premature end — the ends of things we wish would never end are always premature — ends up overshadowing all that came before, so that where Thorpe started by singing of “blessed” and “divine” nights, he ends by saying “your skin looked waxen in the fading light.” Loss, whether through death or separation, colors everything in the same dreary gray. Once that point is reached, the music’s gently pulsing beat and cooing backing vocals take a break, as do the high plucked guitar notes and endlessly cycling piano, giving way to ambiguous electronic tones. It’s as if the band collectively pauses, draws a breath, and then lets it all out in an enormous wave of grief embodied by Thorpe’s wordless, repetitive cry, the highest and loudest notes he hits in the whole song, sung over and over again. He ends by repeating the title phrase over and over and over as well, eventually just shortening it to “too soon, too soon, too soon,” like it’s all he can think to say. As the finale of the band’s astonishingly cerebral, subtle, sensual, and controlled new album Smother, it’s an overwhelming moment of anti-catharsis, and it gets my vote for song of the year so far.

Friendly Fires
“Hawaiian Air”
from Pala
XL, May 2011
Download it from Amazon.com

I’m not a lyrics person, not up front anyway — my initial experiences with a song are almost always going to be solely music-based, perhaps with an assist from the song title. So when I arrived at this standout track off the second album from the shiny-sounding English dance/rock group Friendly Fires, saw the title, heard the galloping beat and the soaring synth wash during the chorus and that little birdlike noise that keeps repeating, I figured “Okay, cool, it’s a song about being in Hawaii and being awed and amazed by the beauty of it all.” Everyone loves a good “transformed by the beauty of my vacation destination” song (what’s up, “Tahitian Moon”?) especially one with as openly hedonistic a beat as this one, so hey, no problems here. Then I finally listened to the record enough to pay attention to those lyrics, and lo and behold, singer Ed McFarlane never gets off the plane. He’s not singing about the water and the volcanos and the trees and the hula and such, he’s singing about feeling someone’s knees in his back and getting stuck in his seat due to turbulence and “watching a film with at talking dog.” The “Hawaiian Air” of the title isn’t the oxygen, it’s the airline. The realization made me chuckle, but beyond the lulz, what a warm, humble, relatable thing to write a big, soaring, epic-sounding dance track about. McFarlane’s voice already manages to pull off the trick of being simultaneously ultra-(R/r)omantic and also really intimate and friendly-sounding; this song doubles down on his preexisting appeal. A real treat.

Prog rock is lambasted for its bombast and excess, but at its best restraint is its true hallmark, along with an ability to lock into a groove and do it to death as much as any of the funk bands that were the monsters of prog’s contemporaries during their mutual heyday. One of my all-time favorite classic-rock radio jams — it counts as one, since like “Sgt. Pepper’s (Reprise)/A Day in the Life” or “Time/Breathe (Reprise)” or what have you its two halves segue together and are never played separately — the combo better known simply as “Long Distance Runaround” puts both qualities on ample display. The first half is all about holding back: After faking us out with a squiggly guitar filigree and rhythm-section churn, the song settles down into a main section characterized by a softly jaunty keyboard part, complemented by the broken-up phrases and clipped delivery of Jon Anderson’s vocals and a joint guitar/bass line from Steve Howe and Chris Squire that drops in a few notes every so often and then cuts off almost as soon as it begins. It’s a restrained approach well suited to Anderson’s lyrics, which sing of the frustration of opportunities squandered and expectations never met, and it creates a refreshing amount of space around each instrument, if that makes sense — you feel present in a room with various musicians contributing every so often, then holding back, content to let things linger in the air. Lyrically, the second half of the song may consist only of nonsense — the taxonomic name of a fish chanted as though it contained the secrets of the universe — but the instrumentation seems to house all the angst lurking beneath the pinched and placid surface of the first half. Essentially a drum and bass duet with Squire overdubbing a rather extraordinary range of approaches to his instrument and future King Crimson behemoth Bill Bruford providing a tight percussion backdrop, it seizes a 7/4 rhythm and exploits it, introducing new and increasingly menacing bass elements every few turns of the screw. It’s difficult for me to hear it and not nod my head along, leaning into the music as it barrels forward.

I’ve probably listened to this song more often after catching it by chance while flipping around my car radio presets than on my iPod, and in that context it shines even brighter, I’d say. Music on the radio often comes through as a wall of noise, filling every available sonic space, sounding emitted rather than performed and recorded. “Long Distance Runaround”‘s dynamics give my ears empty spaces to dart into, and I can “see” the rest of the music from that vantage point as it plays, instead of merely sitting there and letting it blast over me.

Let me pick up where I left off with Jeremih and Adele the other day. This is why I find myself reaching for the pop radio stations even more frequently than my iPod when I’m in the car these days: It’s a cavalcade of “Holy shit, did you hear this?” moments. There are absolutely any number of awful boring songs on there, from Bruno Mars’s novelty turd about sleeping late to the mercenary house tracks delivered by Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez. But in between you have these oddball amusement-park rides/sideshow attractions, like Katy Perry and Kanye West dueting about alien anal probes as a metaphor for strange love; or Britney Spears mounting back-to-back comeback hits with choruses that are a gag from Monty Python’s “Hungarian Phrasebook” sketch and simply the word “oh” repeated respectively; or pop’s slattern-in-chief Ke$ha having the sheer cajones to call a song “Blow,” packing not one not two but three entendres into a single syllable. Yes, I even enjoy Ke$ha now, at least as far as the material from her follow-up EP Cannibal goes: When one of her songs comes on I can listen till the end and know that for better or worse I will never get bored, which is a lot more than I can say for Usher.

If you’re detecting a degree of cultural condescension here…well, you’re probably right. I do not listen to this music exclusively, nor in chunks larger than a single at a time more often than not, and as such I’m going to react to this stuff differently than would someone for whom it’s their entire musical environment. When I get tired of the bombast and spectacle I can retreat to the new Wild Beasts record. Radio pop is certainly not a genre I turn to for subtletly: After all, Lady Gaga’s “Judas” is straightforward enough to be passed off as an outtake from Jesus Christ Superstar, yet compared “Hey Baby (Drop It to the Floor)” it’s goddamn Finnegan’s Wake.

I think that’s the problem it’s faced on the charts, more than Gaga fatigue or faux-controversy backlash or annoyance with that herky-jerky beat or the feeling we’ve been here before but better with “Bad Romance”: It’s not 100% clear, in completely idiot-proof fashion, what she’s singing about. Most songs on pop radio today are about wanting to dance or wanting to fuck, and they come right out and say it. “C’mon get me on the floor, DJ what’cha waitin’ for?” “Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it.” The booming subgenre of affirmation pop is just as blunt: we are who we are, the show goes on, I’m on the right track, etc. To the extent that pop has employed metaphor at all over the past several years, it’s usually done so with all the complexity of a Madlib: people are fireworks or extraterrestrials, they wear halos, their love is an umbrella. Gaga’s not really doing much more than that in “Judas”‘s love triangle — she’s just using proper nouns instead of regular nouns. But because she casts Jesus, Judas, and Mary Magdalene in the leading roles, suddenly it seems like you’ve got some kind of Da Vinci Code to crack. Does she mean the real Judas? Hand to God, I heard a DJ ponder this aloud. And thus she breaks radio pop’s current custom: In a dance song, you sing about dancing. In a love song, you sing about love. In a sexy song, you sing about sex. In an empowering song, you sing about empowerment. In a break-up song, you sing about breaking up. This leaves very little room for kings with no crowns or “in the conjugal sense, I am beyond repentance.”

I first heard Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” on the local alt-rock station. This is a testament to the radio station (101.9 FM in New York — listen to it for half an hour and chances are you’ll hear something rad, like “Down in It” or the full album version of “Personal Jesus” or Luka Bloom’s cover of “I Need Love” or the by-god lead single from King of Limbs) as much as it is to the song, but it’s the song I’m focusing on here. And despite its being a reasonably big hit on the pop-dance stations, where I’ve also heard it played, you can see how it fits in with the rock narrative: A woman sings her guts out about heartache over live minor-key instrumentation, with a reasonably cryptic metaphor (“rolling in the deep” isn’t as one-to-one the standard “our love is like” formulation) and a sharp edge or two (those chanted high-pitched backing vocals during the chorus, to me the weirdest and therefore best part of the song). The first time I heard it on pop powerhouse Z100 I felt like I should mark the date down in my diary, so unlike everything else on Top 40 stations it was, even the nominally rock- or country-influenced stuff, most of which could conceivably be covered in a “Disney Princesses Live!” stage show. “You gotta hear that Adele song!” I gushed to my wife. “It’s the real deal.”

So I thought until I gave it a second or third front-to-back listen. Then I realized that it was something else besides dark and unique in the landscape and impeccably sung: kinda boring. Verse, bridge, and chorus all basically take a single melodic line and repeat it, revealing nothing new about those notes with each new iteration, and leaving nothing to discover in repeat listens. Adele’s got a terrific blue-eyed soul voice, but in much the same way the Walkmen’s world-weary last-call schtick gets old when that’s all they do, singing every line with voice-cracking intensity leaves the listener with nowhere to go, no emotional arc to follow either upward or downward. You’re just stuck in that same old familiar spot, and you know what familiarity breeds.

By contrast, Jeremih is working with a dramatically inferior instrument. But in his goofball “please grind against me and/or give me oral sex” anthem “Down On Me,” he and his producers work that much harder to keep things interesting. Establishing the basic template for the vocals, a follow-the-bouncing-ball monotone of staccato eighth notes, they quickly work against expectations: Jeremih stops short, letting the final syllable of several lines drop from his mouth like that cigarette that got stuck to Ackroyd’s lip in Ghostbusters. Then they distort his vocals, pitchshifting him way downwards for a repetitive nonsense non sequitur: “BANG BANG BANG BANG.” Then he marvels at his would-be conquest’s body with a weirdly specific comparison (“What, you work at Bally’s? Look at your physique”) delivered in a sleepy mushmouth. Then he heads upward in both energy and register for the autotuned chorus, affecting a weird pseudo-South Asian accent of all things, as anonymous hip-hop “HEY!”s echo in the background. Then 50 Cent returns after a brief cameo in the intro for a verse that returns to the earlier ratatat vocal rhythm before dipping into distortion a couple times to hide cusswords or emphasize how he’s not going to put shit on blast. Then he does exactly that, slowing way down to deliver a few lines about how he’s going to stuff his oversized penis into her potentially too-tight vagina (I am not kidding) as an overdubbed choir of Jeremihs sings “Daaaaaamn….oh-oh-oh aw daaaaaaamn.” Then it’s back to the chorus, only this time it ends with the title phrase done in a chipmunk voice. Then there’s a third verse that sounds more like a middle eight, one that repeats an oddly respectful characterization of the girl’s personality: “Say you independent / get it from your mama.” All the while the music bubbles and tinkles and whizzes along, the beat dropping in and out like someone you momentarily lose sight of at a club only to lock onto again. It is a thoroughly, thoroughly weird song, and as cheesy and gross as its message and mien are, it’s not just an earworm but something I can listen to over and over again and find new things to geek out over. It makes Adele’s respectable pleasure feel shallow indeed.

I couldn’t tell you when it happened — maybe it was when I heard this chorus…

Kiss me
K-k-kiss me
Infect me with your loving
Fill me with your poison
Take me
T-t-take me
Wanna be your victim
Ready for abduction

…or when I heard this bit of Kanye West’s cameo…

I’m’a disrobe you
Then I’m’a probe you
See, I abducted you
So I tell you what to do

…or maybe it was the glossily futuristic minor-key stomp of the music, or the overall “lover as alien invader” metaphor—but at some point while listening to “E.T.” on one of the local pop radio stations in the car, I realized that if it had shown up on a mid-to-late-’90s album by KMFDM or Lords of Acid, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. The science-fictional lyrics, the conflation of love, death, and violence, the brinksmanship with nonconsensuality as turn-on, the notion that great sex is so scary you could lose your agency and identity to it, the shiny sleazy heaviness of the sound…it all sounds awfully familiar! Listen to “You Belong to Me” by Lords of Acid and “A Hole in the Wall” by KMFDM and tell me I’m wrong…
(more…)

I love this song because it’s very stupid, but it’s also sweet and fun and has a message I can get behind (Friday is a nice day of the week), whereas every day I hear things on the radio that are just about as stupid as that, but that are made by legions of mercenaries with the intention of being hugely successful, as opposed to some girl’s sweet 16 present or whatever this was. I’ve been listening to the radio a lot in the car on the way to and from the hospital a couple times a day, and even before I heard of this song I was like “Wow, being stupid really is the way to pop success today.” “Friday”‘s just an exaggerated version of the many many idiotic sounds you can hear on the radio over the past couple of years: Ke$ha doing a song based on “there’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance,” Lady Gaga’s ridiculous “You’re Lebanese, you’re Orient” “Vogue” rap in “Born This Way,” the existence of “Forget You,” that song T-Pain did with Pitbull that goes “Hey baby GIRL” with the most strident autotuning he’s ever done, Britney doing a song based on the kind of pick-up line Larry would use on someone in the Regal Beagle in Three’s Company, Drake’s cameo in “What’s My Name” featuring the middle-school sex joke “the square root of 69 is ate-something,” the goofy singing in “Down On Me,” the powerfully and enjoyably dumb “Like a G6,” the car-alarm cadence of “Black and Yellow,” that part in “We R Who We R” where they make Ke$ha say “DJ turn it up tup tup tup tup tup” like a robot someone poured water on, Snoop’s cameo on “California Gurls,” Ludacris’s cameo in “Baby”, the entirety of “Bedrock”…”Friday” is the equivalent of the kind of sci-fi movie they’d watch on Mystery Science Theater 3000, not the really dreary soul-crushing ones but the exuberantly and energetically bad ones, the ones where you know they set out to make something that felt like Star Wars or whatever but had no taste or judgment and thus got certain things went waaaaaayyyyyy out of control, only in this case things were already out of control, and she/they just takes it that much further and makes it that much less sophisticated. At least Rebecca Black has an adorable smile and is singing about something I can RELATE TO.

Radiohead released their latest album, The King of Limbs, the other day. I don’t think I see much value in viewing it through the lens of “Radiohead’s weakest album” as does my friend Matthew Perpetua. I get what he’s saying about it being a relatively minor work in their catalog, but to me that’s not because it’s a failed experiment, but on the contrary, because it’s so firmly in the vein of some of their previous work, Amnesiac most especially — which really was an experimental break from their great strength through Kid A, which was melodic catharsis — and also Thom Yorke’s solo album The Eraser and some of the In Rainbows songs. Personally I locate it on a spectrum of lush minimalism (that’s a thing, right?) that also includes Yorke’s album and also recent records by James Blake, the xx, and a couple of Spoon tracks — songs where melody is suggested with such instrumental restraint that they almost feel unfinished, or like the fingers can’t quite push the keys all the way down or strum the strings the whole way. (I also hear the skewed ghost soul of How to Dress Well, but I think that’s because I accidentally left the “Vocal Booster” equalizer on my iPod from when I listened to the Inkstuds Al Columbia interview, so the high notes and loud parts were clipping during my first few listens before I figured out what was up.) It’s also quite a showcase for Phil Selway’s crisp, thumpless drums. I like it, and even before it came out I realized that my nearest point of comparison to Radiohead, in terms of a band that audibly grew from record to record (even though there were some stops and starts and misfires here and there) and yet maintained this consistent a discography across its career, is Led Zeppelin, the second-best band of all time. So good for Radiohead for being really really good.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is the Deluxe Edition of Station to Station by David Bowie — between the all-ought breakneck onslaught of the 1976 live performance in my hometown arena of Nassau Coliseum and the simpler, woodier sound of the analog-remaster version of the album itself, it’s a point-blank blast from the European cannon.

Click here to buy it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Drawing Down the Moon by Azure Ray, released by Saddle Creek — quiet glowing balladry.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is One Life Stand by Hot Chip, released by Astralworks — their mixture of heartstring-tugging and butt-shaking is one of my favorites.

Hot Chip – One Life Stand
Uploaded by EMI_Music.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Ring by Glasser, released by True Panther — melodic and dark, it twitches and pops until it gets airborne.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Sir Lucious Leftfoot…The Son of Chico Dusty by Big Boi, released by Def Jam — meaty beaty big and bouncy.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Subiza by Delorean, released by True Panther — endless summer.

Click here to download it from Amazon.