Vanity Site

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Malajube - Pâte Filo
Malajube - Étienne D'août

Oh Canada, I love your music. This band is from Montreal and they sing all their songs in French because, unlike Wolf Parade, they are a real Montreal band. Yes, they have some of the signature Montreal sound—orchestrael stylings, glockenspiels, ramshackled energy, romantique lyrics and so on. But they are a little more hyper and je ne sais quoi. The first song is quickly becoming one of my favourite autumnal songs and the second is a great hymnal ballad.

I see that Pitchfork has just posted a review of their album and has recommended it. I haven't read the review (as everyone needs to have some music that you don't hear through the pitchfilter) but I'm sure it'll be informative.

I'm using a new filesharing site called zshare, which hosts files for longer than yousendit and is all around better.

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The Good The Bad And The Queen - Herculean

Damon Albarn's (lead singer of Blur and Gorillaz) new side project The Good The Bad And The Queen (I like it, short and punchy) has just released their new single. Damon Albarn is one of my musical heros and methinks he's a genius.

Some Links

Official site.
Wikipedia page.
Myspace page.

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Jay-Z - Show Me What You Got

Clearly, news this big cannot wait. Jay-Z’s new single! The single that will take him out of his always unbelievable retirement! The return of hip-hop! Hyperbole! Exclamation marks!

Okay, I’ve been playing this song on repeat for the last hour. Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. Jay-Z’s flow and lyrics seemed a little phoned in at first. But it is growing on me with every listen. I’m loving it now, literally smiling while I write this.

2. Nice Just Blaze beat. The Flava sample doesn’t quite work, and the rhythmic clutter would have overshadowed any other rapper, but Jay-Z is the master of the track. Note that he’s not making any concessions to anything that has happened in hip-hop since he released Black. No hyphy, snap, crunk. Nothing Southern at all. He comes back riding an organic, big beat, big horn East Coast beat at a time when the New York sound is less popular than it has ever been.

3. It’s a fall track. He didn’t come back with a summer banger. A triumphant return that includes both major and minor chords.

4. Yes, there’s a Jordan reference.

Welcome back Hov.

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Diddy - Everything I Love (Ft. Cee-Lo and Nas)
Ciara - Promise
John Lennon - Well Well Well

I hate Sean Puffy P. Diddy Daddy Combs. His flows are bad. His songs are bad. His videos are bad. His persona is annoying.

He's rich. Which means that he got Kanye West to give him a brilliant beat, payed some talented rapper to ghostwrite a decent verse for him and apparently he's also hired a rapping coach. All of which is to say that is actually a good song. Heck, when he says "I'm the heart of the city/ I'm a part of the sewers/ I'm the honourable Diddy" and Kanye's mammoth horns rise like the Empire State out of a typically bare-bones drum track, it's actually amazing. He's still one of the worst rappers ever, but on this song he manages not to be completely outshone by Cee-Lo and Nas, which says a lot.

Ciara's new single is called Promise. It's got great production and a good melody during the verses. Okay, she does this really cheesy spoken word intro thing. And the chorus is a couple of tons too sappy for me. But from 0:31 to 1:18 it's great. It's like Kraftwerk meets Beyoncé meets Junior Boys.

And because I realize that Ciara and Diddy is way too much guilty pleasure for most of you (and probably most of me), I've included a song by John Lennon. It has a killer riff. John Lennon screams on it. It's off the classic Plastic Ono Band. It should appease the rockist within.

Break Up The Boredom
I want to do something a bit more exciting. So it's time for some best-of-2006 (thus far) action. Geez, Peter, it’s not even November yet. What is it with music nerds and lists and year-end retrospective stuff?

But I don't want to do the normal 'single of the year' garbage. Why can't lists be creative? Some categories I'm thinking about:

Best Song That The 13 Year Olds Like and I Like
Best Billboard Number One
Best Use of Metaphor In A Hip-Hop Song
Best Story Telling In A Hip-Hop Song
Best Canadian Song Heavily Influenced By the UK
Best Canadian Song Heavily Influenced By the US
Best Canadian Song That Could Only Have Come From Canada
Best Sensitive Indie Boy Ballad
Best Song That Scared the Sensitive Indie Boys
Best Remix
Best Cover Song
Best Song That Pitchfork Hated
Best Song from 2005 That I Took a Year to Discover
Best Song That Only Makes Sense Within the Context of Its Album

Have any ideas? Any songs that you feel need 'best-of' mention?

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The Dears - Whites Only Party
Björk - Who Is It (Vitalic Remix)
The Kinks - You Really Got Me
Nina Simone - Baltimore

The Dears need no introducing and their new album is full of good stuff. I'm not sure I agree with their choice of production style, but their melodies are strong so I'm not complaining.

Björk's Medulla came out quite a while and French electro-wiz Vitalic's remix of Who Is It? is an enjoyable take on the original. Besides scoring her hubby's film, what's Björk been up to? More importantly, when are we gonna see a new Björk album? In the meantime, you can read an interview about her visit to tsunami-devestated Indonesia here.

The Kink's are one of the most influential bands ever. Listen to any British rock from the last 5 years and you will probably find more than a little Kinks in it. I love how timeless You Really Got Me sounds. Wikipedia has the goods on The Kinks here.

Now for the track that I'm the most excited about. Nina Simone is one of my favourite artists and vocalists, in part because she has articulated righteous anger and bitterness better than any other artist with the exemption of Bob Dylan. I don't think this song can be properly understood without the context of her sixties output. Unlike many of her fellow black singers, Nina was much more of a folk singer. Her aesthetic was stripped down and performance driven. On Black Is the Color, it's just Nina and a few spare piano chords. Even on her soul songs, she never sounds overproduced.

But Baltimore is an overproduced song. It has a kitschy and unnecessary string section. What's more, the song is not anchored by Nina Simone's piano playing but by a guitar-driven reggae rhythm. It also end with a needless guitar solo. I normally love it when artists try new things, but the critic in me has no choice but to say that Nina made a mistep with this song. But, why then, do I love this song so much?

I think it is because against such a painfully pristine setting, Nina's voice seems to voice the sadness of Baltimore's urban decay so much more. The instrumentation is the promise of what a city should be: clean, organized in a clear grid, showy. Her voice is the actuality of the city - I don't think I can think of another song where she sounds as world-weary. And she sounds very world weary in many songs. But when she sings the world "Bal-ti-more" in a stuccato, descending, melodic line and then uses the same figure for "just to live" it breaks my heart.

"Because the city's dying / And they don't know why." The song's arrangments want to get out of Baltimore. They try to alleviate the songs hearbreaking empahy (or at least acknowledgement of mutual suffering, this is Nina Simone after all.) They try to place the song in a nice area of a nicer city. But Nina's voice travels in the opposite direction, back towards the hookers and the bums. And this fight, between trying to white-wash and trying to expose, is what makes the song so powerful. Baltimore seems so neglected, because for the duration of the song, it feels like Nina is the only one living it in.

Okay. I promise I'll never write that much about a single song again.

One More Thing
Jay-Z is coming back! YEAH! Read the full story here. You better not screw this up Jay, because then I'll have to shave my head, put on sacloth and eat bitter herbs.

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Junior Boys - In The Morning
Junior Boys - First Time
Junior Boys - FM
Junior Boys - Birthday

Tim was asking for some more Junior Boys' songs so here there are. In The Morning is probably one of the best singles of the year. Every single synth, guitar and vocal line could be the crowning hook of a stand-alone song. Catchy though it is, it's power grows with each new listen. It has immediacy and is a grower.

Okay, I'm running out of hyperbole, so just download the songs.

New Features?

So I'm thinking of bringing back the Live Info feature, but I know it'll break my heart since I've decided not to go to a single concert until I've bought a guitar or an I/O box for recording. I'm also considering creating two new features. One would be an album review that I would write every week or month or something. The other would be an article on an issue in music—like whether music has become more racially segrated since the 60s or not, why current rock trends are almost entirely reliant on past styles, why putting reverb on snare drums is almost always a bad idea and so on.

Thing is, these articles might be boring. I would probably enjoy them, but would you? I don't want this blog to be boring or all about me and my opinions.

Oh, and if you haven't already, check out Pitchfork's Top 200 song of the 60s.

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Kinda Acappela Stuff
Outkast - Hollywood Divorce
Little Brother - Life Of The Party
Junior Boys - Count Souvenirs

Yes! VanitySite is back! I'm very excited to be able to share my favourite music with you again. But this is a new VanitySite, for the new music will trickle in once a week, rather than pour in once a day. Also, all posts will be cross-posted in facebook.

Sweet, so let's talk about the music. Two hip-hop songs and one electro-pop song. The new Outkast album is being generally derired by the critics and the era of Outkast Are Our Generation's Musical Saviours appears to be over. But there are some good songs on the new album, including Hollywood Divorce. The synths are incredible, and Lil' Wayne is, as he has been for the past couple of years, unstoppable. Plus, Snoop Dogg actually drops a very decent verse. Surprisingly good.

The next song is an unusual one: a humourous hip-hop song that comes from America. Great beat, catchy chorus, bursting with joie de vivre. Hopefully, this will inspire 9th Wonder to buy a new drum machine.

Junior Boys are indie darlings that hail from Hamilton. This song has a synth line that fills me with a desire to pack my bags and travel around the world. It's a powerful song that calls forth a barrage of images every time I listen to it. Great stuff.

See you soon.

I miss posting music so much! So I'm going to splurge and post a whole bunch of stuff. The next post will probably be sometime in September.

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Kinda Acappela Stuff
Björk - Vökuró
Ladyfuzz - Staple Gun
Vera Hall - Death, Have Mercy

Electro Pop
Barbara Morgenstern - The Operator
Junior Boys - In The Morning
Hot Chip - The Warning
Bonus
Hot Chip - Boy From School

Hip Hop
Termanology - Watch How It Go Down
Jay-Z - 44 4s
Lil' Wayne - Sportscenter

Stuff Recorded In Berlin
Iggy Pop - Passenger
David Bowie - Heroes
U2 - Acrobat

What a lot of music. I'd end up writing up an essay if I started talking about these songs. Download Boy From School, if you didn't the first time I posted it. It's one of the best songs of the year, methinks.

Enjoy.

So, since there was an utter lack of any emotional outpourings after I warned that I might pull the plug on this blog, I've decided to declare that the hiatus begins today. No more 7 songs a week. No more live info. No more link bonanzas. I'll miss it. But thanks for downloading and occaisonally commenting.

I made this site to share with my friends good music that I thought they hadn't heard before. Hopefully, it's lived up to that. I'm still listening to music and I still want to share it, so I'll post stuff occasionally. But in the meantime, I'm looking forward to writing songs, taking photos and finally listening to Annie Mac again.

See you in a bit.

Okay, I've missed the last three days. Normally I would back-date the posts so it looks like I posted a new song every, single, bloody day. But I'm lazy. The songs:

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Gregory Isaacs - Rock On
Martha Reeves and The Vandellas - Easily Persuaded
Clipse - Ultimate Flow

The Tracks
Rock On - My favourite reggae song. Ever. I like it even better than any Bob Marley song.

Easily Persuaded - A massive-sounding soul stomp about wanting "yer man" back. Great soul vocal on this track.

Ultimate Flow - Many rappers talk about how they aren't happy, but few can deliver such pathos in a single line: All the money in the world, and I aint fulfilled. It doesn't sound like much on paper, but when the beat drops behind him and Liva mutters it after an whole 70 minutes of unrelenting braggery, it means a lot. The beat is beautiful, the chorus is catchy. It's one of my most played hip-hop songs.

The Warning
I've really been enjoying this blog and it's an awesome way to share the songs, news, links and opinions that I need to get off my chest and share with my friends. But I want to concentrate heavily in the next month and a half on writing songs and shooting photos. And, ironically, this blog is starting to interfere with my search-for-new-music time. I just don't know how much longer I can spend between 15 - 60 minutes a day updating this site.

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Death From Above 1979 - Black History Month (Josh Hommes Remix)

I was a bit surprised to see that Josh Hommes, lead-singer of Queens of the Stone Age, was a remixer. But he's not a bad knob-twiddler. In fact, he does a really job on this song. Taking one of the only mid-tempo songs on the album and surrounding it with holy feedback that sounds like church bells, he gives it a long and beautiful intro. The fuzzed out bass does come in and the rocking and dancing eventually starts. But then Josh starts to discover the joys of playing things backwards and using crescendo-baiting synths. It's surprisingly captivating stuff.

Remix Week Is Over
Yup, it lasted more than a week and I've still got remixes to share, but variety is good. So farewell Remix Week, it's been fun while it lasted.

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Snoop Dogg - Drop It Like It's Hot (Remix Feat. Pharrel & Jay-Z)
Mike Jones - Back Then (Remix Feat. Jay-Z & Aztec)
Young Jeezy - Go Crazy (Remix Feat. Jay-Z & Fat Joe)

Hip-hop remixes are notoriously dodgy affairs. But when Jay-Z declares retirement and can only rap in remixes, the odds of them sucking decrease. These are three of the best things Jay-Z did in 2005.

Drop It Like It's Hot - How do you remix such a massive song? Pharrel creates a brand new beat that is weird enough to work. He also, like in the original, raps. But it's not that painful. But it's all good since Jay-Z is in top form, as is Snoop Dogg.

Back Then - Perhaps the worst beat of the three. Perhaps the worse line-up of other rappers. But, unquestionably, the best verse Jay-Z has delivered in years. Mike Jones does his typical thing, ie. repeating things endlessly. ("Back then hoes didn't want me, now I'm hot hoes all on me" x 1 billion times.) But the second chorus is great. You have to wait til' the 2:30 mark till it comes, though. And then Jay-Z builds a layered, slow building flow touching on the usual subjects: his father leaving him, escaping the long arm of the law, being a boss, being a great rapper, etc. Chorus again. Then a faster flow, and then it's over and Aztek tries not to suck too much. Oh, I found the beat listenable if you listen to how the organ and bass guitar interweave.

Go Crazy - This song's beat is like an update of Can I Live (off Jay-Z's debut Reasonable Doubt), so it's fitting that he raps on it. Perhaps best stand-alone track of the three.

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The Killers - Somebody Told Me (Mylo Remix)

Mylo is a great remixer.
This song has cowbell in it.
Download it.

The fine folks at yousendit.com seem to have fixed their problem. Which means you can now download Supermassive Black Hole and the three Lucifers.

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The Egg - Walking Away (Tocadisco Remix)

I derided the typical dance remix a while back. The one that thumps along for a good long while before anything interesting happens. Well, this remix waits for 30 seconds before the super-catchy synth line comes in. It repeats over and over again (which is okay, since it's so good) until the 1:15 minute mark, when it debuts the chopped up guitar part. And finally, at the 2 minute mark, when any self-respecting pop song is starting to think about calling it quits, the voices creep in.

In a nutshell: in its form, it's a formulaic dance remix. But it manages to become more than the sum of its parts.

I would have included the original, but it's so boring that I couldn't even listen to it all the way through once. And I tried three times.

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Method Man - Bring The Pain
Missy Elliott & Method Man - Bring The Pain

The original Bring The Pain is an amazing song. One of the best Wu-Tang solo tracks for sure. The reworked version by Missy? This is what Pitchfork said about it:
"Unlike the Wu classic, there's nothing raw or vital about this baby. The production is identical to the original but smoothed out on an R&B tip with pop feel appeal to it, and even Missy's slick croon seems diametrically opposed to the spirit of the original".

If we try to divorce our perception of Missy's version from the mind-blowing original, we'll find a catchy song that showcases Missy's wonderful store of flows. But, as with yesterdays' post, the original can't be topped.

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Bloc Party - Two More Years
Bloc Party - Two More Years (MSTRKRFT Remix)

I know that we've already had a Bloc Party remix this week, but Two More Years is one of my favourite songs. I like it better than anything on Silent Alarm. This is what I said about it on my Top 22 of 2005 list:

"Bloc Party is great. But sometimes their rhythm section takes over the song and strangles the melody. Not on this song. For me, this song justified the post-punk revival." It was my third favourite song of 2005.

The remix, crafted by normally masterful MSTRKRFT, is a letdown. To me, it seems formulaic and it doesn't serve the song well. Glitchy keyboards and fuzzed-out bass doesn't always improve a song. And they don't keep the glorious, glorious chorus intact.

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Editors - All Sparks
Editors - All Sparks (Cicada Remix)

So much catch up to do! Okay I'll start with this one. I worked bloody hard for this one, literally hours of searching. I'm getting sick of the post-punking that is persisting and persisting, but when it produces songs this good I can't complain. And when it produces remixes this excellent I can't complain.

Since yousendit.com is still not working, I'm using rapidsharing now. You just have to wait 25 seconds before you can download the file.

It seems Yousendit, the site I host my mp3s on, isn't working. If this isn't fixed soon, I'll repost yesterday's posts on a different site.