James' Best Songs Of 2009 [Part One & Two]

UPDATE: Part Two is now available. I've updated the link so that it's all one giant file. Enjoy.

Since this is my first year posting on Facebook (to which this article is now linked), I’ll explain: At the end of every year I select my personal favorite tracks released within the preceding 12 months, zip them up, and then post a link where anybody and everybody can download the mix. The idea is to give people who aren’t crazy music nerds (like me) a chance to sample some of the truly great stuff that came out this year.

Obviously I can’t listen to absolutely everything, so don’t be offended if you’re favorite band isn’t on here (unless your favorite band sucks). This is just the stuff I’ve listened to over the past year and liked/loved. If you don’t like it/love it/aren’t interested, well . . . don’t download it. Simple enough.

Usually I limit myself to one CD-R worth of material, but this year I’m changing things up a bit. Because I liked so much stuff this year and didn’t want to exclude any of it, I’ve decided to release a second disc worth of extra songs.

I know, I know. I spoil you.

Please share this with absolutely anyone you want and also: let me know what you think

Oh, and I even made iPod art (included in the .zip). How cool is that?

Here’s the tracklist:

Part One

01. Grizzly Bear – “While You Wait For The Others” [from Veckatimest]
02. Dirty Projectors – “Stillness Is The Move” [from Bitte Orca]
03. Sonic Youth – “What We Know” [from The Eternal]
04. Thom Yorke – “All For The Best” [from Ciao My Shining Star]
05. Phoenix – “1901” [from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix]
06. St. Vincent – “The Strangers” [from Actor]
07. Built To Spill – “Life’s A Dream” [from There Is No Enemy]
08. Dead Man’s Bones – “Lose Your Soul” [from Dead Man’s Bones]
09. Bat For Lashes – “Daniel” [from Two Suns]
10. Woods – “Rain On” [from Songs Of Shame]
11. The xx – “Crystalised” [from xx]
12. Animal Collective – “My Girls” [from Merriweather Post Pavilion]
13. The Antlers – “Two” [from Hospice]
14. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Zero” [from It’s Blitz]
15. Bob Dylan – “I Feel A Change Comin’ On” [from Together Through Life]
16. The Mountain Goats – “Hebrews 11:40” (from The Life Of The World To Come]
17. Sunset Rubdown – “You Go On Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)” [from Dragonslayer]

Part Two

01. Animal Collective - "What Would I Want? Sky" [from Fall Be Kind]
02. Taken By Trees - "To Lose Someone" [from East Of Eden]
03. The Thermals - "When We Were Alive" [from Now We Can See]
04. Radiohead - "These Are My Twisted Words" [self-released single]
05. Bill Callahan - "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" [from Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle]
06. Dinosaur Jr. - "Over It" [from Farm]
07. Bon Iver - "Blood Bank" [from Blood Bank]
08. Fever Ray - "If I Had A Heart" [from Fever Ray]
09. Girls - "Lust For Life" [from Album]
10. Japandroids - "Young Hearts Spark Fire" [from Post-Nothing]
11. Neko Case - "This Tornado Loves You" [from Middle Cyclone]
12. Destroyer - "Bay Of Pigs" [from Bay Of Pigs]
13. Sunn O))) - "Alice" [from Monoliths & Dimensions]
14. Rock Plaza Central - "O Lord, How Many Are My Foes" [from . . . at the moment of our most needing]

And here's the download link: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=S352YD1I

Enjoy.

P.S. If any of you want either the 2007 or 2008 mix, let me know and I’ll send you a link for those as well.

Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan [1962]

I was attending a birthday gathering for a friend at a local bar a few nights back when I explained to said friend (and fellow Dyan fan) my desire to use my newly minted blog to embark on a career long retrospective of Bob Dylan’s mountainous body of work. Imagine my surprise then, when another member of the party chimed in, with considerable derision, “Yeah, except all his albums sound exactly the same”. I, of course, became immediately defensive and was in turn met with a line of argument so juvenile and problematic that I won’t do said person the dishonour of recounting it here.

Reflecting on it now, I remain baffled as to why anyone would make an accusation of sameness against an artist as consistently complex and challenging as Dylan. This is, after all, the man who was booed and harassed throughout his entire 1965 tour exactly because he refused to stay the same. This is the man who mastered the folk tradition on his first album (Bob Dylan) and then proceeded to revolutionize it⎯and protest songs in particular⎯on his next two (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’) before releasing a dashed-off collection of surrealistic love song (Another Side Of Bob Dylan) and then abandoning the folk scene altogether to completely revolutionize rock and roll on his next three (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde). Even John Lennon has been quoted as saying that when he first heard “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, one of Dylan’s first electric singles, he thought it was so “captivating that he wondered how [he] could ever compete”.

And that’s just his career from 1962-1966. In 1967⎯after three straight rock masterpieces⎯Dylan switched gears once again and released John Wesley Harding, a haunting, biblical country album (whose companion collection of homemade recordings, The Basement Tapes, is a stylistic wonder in itself).

And that’s just the first five years of a career that has now lasted nearly fifty. In that time Dylan has produced 33 studio albums (not to mention countless live records and B-sides compilations), a highly acclaimed book of memoirs (Chronicles: Volume One) and a variety of paintings, drawings and other artworks that are frequently exhibited all over the world.

I could, of course, go on and on. But I’ll stop here. And, in the off chance I haven’t yet made my point allow me to assure you that, by the time my 34-post retrospective wraps up, I most certainly will have.

So, without further ado, let us begin:

For some, Dylan’s career begins with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second album and the first on which he wrote all the material (well . . . mostly), but it was actually an album of folk covers (with one very notable original) that introduced Bob Dylan to the world. And so it is with this oft-overlooked LP that we must begin our journey.

Bob Dylan’s first album, self-titled and released in 1962 when he was only twenty years old, didn’t sell very many copies, nor did it garner him that much attention outside of the small circle of dedicated folk fans who, having already witnessed his burgeoning skill as a performer, suspected the young man’s potential and spread the word best they could.

Listening to Bob Dylan now, it’s not hard to see why this record gets ignored so often, it really is a proto-Dylan record: necessary in order for what came next but in many ways disposable, especially in light of his later work. The voice that barks the title track “You’re No Good” is familiar, but suffers from an affectation that, while harmless and well-emulated, is nonetheless the sound of a confident performer who has yet to fully establish his own distinct voice. Which is fair enough, Dylan had only just begun to pen his own lyrics and had yet to build up the confidence necessary to step out on his own as a songwriter in a scene where most singers just played the old classics. Few dared to write their own material and, whenever they did, well . . . they just stuck to the script.

But it wasn’t the 1920s anymore. The depression was over; the world had changed. And the music had, too. Rock and roll was a living, breathing thing and it was slowly shaping itself into the genre to beat, at least among the younger generation of post-war babes: young men and women that were just about to enter an increasingly troubled, post-atomic society (in which America was slowly becoming a force to be reckoned with; the new global superpower). The folk traditionals and the depression era ballads by men like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were beautiful and whole and amazing in their own right but these were different times and, in the Greenwich Village folk scene, few had truly realized this.

At least not yet.

As far as an album of folk covers go, Bob Dylan is perfectly serviceable. The performances are raw and passionate and sparkle with real energy and authentic emotion. But they can’t be more than what they are, which is old, familiar and well-worn folk songs. Songs which, while sturdy and powerful, no longer spoke the language of the world into which they were introduced. That is, of course, with one glorious and unexpected exception.

“Song To Woody” is the first song of any substance that Bob Dylan wrote (as he himself puts it in Chronicles: Volume One) and it a harbinger of everything that was to come. Though now it might seem like small, even insignificant track, it is argugably the song in which Dylan the performer becomes⎯forever and always⎯Dylan the artist. Even if the song is only a homage to what came before, it is the absolutely the first step toward what Dylan would soon become: an audacious, challenging and strikingly original creator. And, if "Song To Woody" is, perhaps, not quite the total revelation of a fully-formed artist, it is certainly the catalyst for everything that was about to come, for in little over a year Dylan would return his next album, and with it a first single that would leave little doubt to his singular talent--- a song called "Blowin' In The Wind".

The rest, of course, is history. A history which I’ll be revisiting over the coming weeks and months.

So look out.

For now, I’ll leave you with two free downloads (including the aforementioned Guthrie tribute) and the suggestion that you give Bob Dylan a spin. If only for the sake of introducing yourself to some really excellent old folk songs. The fact that they happen to sung by a man who would soon change irrevocably the very definition of the word “song”, and in the process would alter forever the course of popular music itself, is just icing on the cake.

Enjoy.

MP3: Bob Dylan - "Man Of Constant Sorrow"

MP3: Bob Dylan - "Song To Woody"

Child Of God - Cormac McCarthy

One of his early novels⎯his third to be published—Child Of God is not a book on the same scale as Cormac McCarthy’s later masterworks, such as Blood Meridian, but is nonetheless a gripping and stylistically unmatched character study from a man who seems always able to boil his narrative down to its barest essentials and, in doing so, reveal the hidden (and often horrible) depths of madness and depravity to which mankind, with its dark and troubled heart, so readily descends.

Set in the early 1960s in a backroads town in East Tennessee, Child Of God tells the haunting and deeply disturbing tale of one Lester Ballard, an impoverished outcast whose unfathomable lusts escalate into unspeakable acts of violence and degradation. In a lesser writer’s hands the story and its many frightening events could have easily turned to exaggerated horror-pulp, but McCarthy is (and apparently always was) rather adept at handling this kind of lost soul, imbuing Ballard with a vulnerability that, while never allowing for sympathy, still manages him some level of humanity despite his growing list of terrible deeds.

His prose is, as ever, brilliant: spare and minimal, evoking only the barest details required by the story but feeling somehow more detailed for it. His depictions of nature, which are many, I find especially beautiful. Here’s an example:

The hardwood trees on the mountain subsided into yellow and flame and to ultimate nakedness. An early winter fell, a cold wind sucked among the black and barren branches. Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watched through moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecoloured moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand had sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens.

Pretty gnarly, eh?

It should be noted for fans of The Road, that while that book is bleak and depressing and clearly the work of the same writer, it is not indicative of his more consistent style or themes. I’m not saying that to scare people off, as I do hope that more people start reading McCarthy (which seems likely since so many of his books are currently being made into films). I just thought it was worth pointing out.

Enjoy.

Wings Of Desire [Dir. Wim Wenders]

Those of you who read the above title and assume, as I once did, that you are unfamiliar with the film in question are, most unfortunately for everyone, quite mistaken. You see, Wings Of Desire is a film that most people (and by people, I mean, of course, North Americans) are at least somewhat familiar with. Why is that? Because, as is too often the case with foreign-language masterpieces such as this, Hollywood decided it needed to do an English-language remake. Because, obviously, subtitles are like, totally lame and hard to read. The steaming pile of --- poorly acted, schmaltzy, Goo Goo Dolls-soundtracked, completely-misses-the-point-in-every-conceivable-way --- shit in question?

Why, City Of Angels, of course.

But let’s not get stuck on that. Sure, after watching Wings Of Desire my hatred for the Hollywood whore-factory that allows such bastardizations to be made (and, even worse, to be made with great financial success) is freshly re-ignited. However, none of this is the fault of the film being discussed here, and I fear focusing too much on what-they-got-wrong-in-the-remake will overshadow and obscure all-they-got-right-in-the-original, which, to be quite honest, is just about everything.

Wings Of Desire, released in 1987 and set in Berlin, tells the story of an angel who grows tired of his ageless immorality, spent endlessly observing, but never experiencing, human life, and decides to forsake his painless but (literally) black-and-white world in order to join the ranks of the living, with all its myriad colours, even if that means suffering; even if it means eventually having to die.

Deeply philosophical, meditative, beautifully acted and gorgeously shot, with a terrific soundtrack, Wings Of Desire is the kind of movie that one watches not realizing that their mouth has fallen open in complete and utter awe. A love story, certainly, but one built with such graceful artistry, such appreciation for the minute and all-important details of life and what exactly it is to be human, that it reaches a level of transcedance and evocation that great art so often attempts but so rarely achieves.

A special mention must also go the work of Peter Falk, better known to older generations as Lt. Columbo, who plays himself (and perhaps a bit more) in what is easily the most inspired bit of stunt-casting I have ever had the pleasure of viewing.

I, for one, am now very psyched to see some of Wenders’ other films (Wings being my first foray into both his work and German-cinema in general). Criterion, ever the handy resource, is releasing Paris, Texas early next year, till then I suppose it’s the video store for me.

Enjoy.

Smog - Knock Knock

I tried once, maybe five years ago, to get into the band Smog. Spurred on by my enjoyment of the single "I Feel Like The Mother Of The World" I decided to download some random albums of theirs (or, more accurately, his, because Smog is undoubtedly a one-man show), in this case Red Apple Falls and The Doctor Came At Dawn, to see if perhaps this was an artist worth obsessing over. Turns out that Bill Callahan (who is Smog, though not anymore) was worth my adoration, I just didn't know it back then, listening to each album only once before relegating them to the eternal abyss of the modern hard-drive.

After Joanna Newsom, Callahan's then-girlfriend, released her album Ys., which featured a Smog-guest vocal on centerpiece song "Only Skin", I briefly considered giving his work another chance. But it wasn't until this year's Bill Callahan solo-album (for he has, as of late, retired the Smog moniker), Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, that I decided to return to the Smog catalogue and reap the many rewards that, it turns out, were always there waiting for me.

Which brings us to 1999's Knock Knock, my favourite-so-far Smog album (though I thing both Red Apple Falls and Dongs Of Sevotion are absolutely amazing, too). Rumoured to be (and certainly sounding like) a breakup album about Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power), Knock Knock is a harrowing collection of mostly dark, minor-chord laments on love and loss, often very slow and always very minimal. That isn't to say that the album doesn't have its moments of brevity, but even lighter and/or warmer-sounding songs like "Teenage Spaceship" and "Hit The Ground Running" deal with lyrical themes and ideas that are either mournful or troubling (or both), though with more hidden optimism than some of the more relentlessly negative numbers.

Lyrically, Callahan is ever-full of evocative imagery. Probing the coldness and isolation of mankind with a poet's keen and steel-eyed gaze. Not to mention that "Cold Blooded Old Times" is a title so good that it wouldn't seem out of placed next to the name Cormac McCarthy. Sample lyric:

Cold-blooded old times
The type of memories
That turn your bones to glass
Turn your bones to glass.

Awesome, eh? It's just too bad the song got placed on the not bad soundtrack-wise but awful film-wise High Fidelity OST. Bah. Oh well.

So kids, the lesson here is this: listen to more Smog. Or else, maybe, just don't write things off after hearing/seeing/reading/dating them once. Because sometimes the second (or third) time is the charm (and sometimes shit just sucks, but I digress . . .)

Oh, and there's a song from the album available for download below so no excuses . . .

Enjoy.

MP3: Smog - "Hit The Ground Running"

The Complete Monterey Pop Festival [Dir. D.A. Pennebaker]

To say I have a soft spot for rock and roll is something of an understatement. I find the form so stupidly transcendant I often wonder at the scale of my adoration. That being said, I'm not terribly well versed in concert films/documentaries, I mostly get lost in "the album" and ignore the visual documentation though the reasons for this are a bit more complex than one might think.

Obviously I've seen The Last Waltz and Stop Making Sense, and I've seen Don't Look Back and Dig! and The Devil & Daniel Johnston (the latter three being certainly more documentary than concert) but when it comes to concert films, that is, films in which live performances of songs or sets are recorded, well . . . these days the whole affair is just so tepid and anti-septic and, dare I say it, boring that I've sort of checked out for the most part. I think the problem mostly has to do with the lack of actual film-makers (and by this I mean artists) making films about music and the abundance of bands who allow artless but techinally sound cameramen to make their concert films --- scratch that, because these aren't films, they are just video-recordings of shows --- which are generally straight-to-DVD and feature mostly unabridged sets shot in a perfectly accessible manner with quality sound (and now in HD!) but lack totally any and all sense of soul.

That's why when I see something like Monterey Pop, directed by D.A. Pennebaker (who also did the Dylan-doc Don't Look Back), my mind is so thoroughly blown; my eyes entranced for the entire proceedings. And I was high, too, but that's beside the point. Because Monterey Pop is a film. It's not just a recording of a band (or, in this case, a bunch of bands) playing. It captures more than just music, it captures everything about what makes music great in an inventive and emotionally evocative way: the colours are vibrant and swirling; the cameras cascade from inventive shot to inventive shot; the bands explode off the stage, brought to life before our very eyes. No one performing here is simply going through the motions, each band gives a spirited performace, some even going to far as to be maniacal (both Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix brutally destroy their guitars, the only difference being that Hendrix sets his on fire first). In truth, none of the bands on here are favorites of mine (well, except Hendrix, and I do enjoy The Who and Otis Redding quite a bit) but the way the film is paced, the way it so clearly demonstrates the love for its subjects (and the powers which they possess) pulls me past all that, invites me in, holds me. Not to mention that the very long and absolutely stunning closing performance by sitar master (and Norah Jones seeder) Ravi Shankar made me hop over to eBay the very next morning to purchase some of his used LPs. Talk about learning something new.

It's also worth noting that this deluxe boxset features an extra disc with complete sets by Hendrix and Redding, the former set being nearly three times as long as the latter. Oh, and it also includes over two hours (!) of outtake performances. All that combined I can't see why any fan of rock and roll (or, specifically, I guess, classic rock, though that title is troublesome) would not want to see this. As for me, I feel an intense desire to go back and explore this mostly dead style of music film-making, which is convenient since Criterion (who do a great job with this package) is releasing Gimme Shelter, a Rolling Stones performance-documentary about the tragic Altamont killings, this upcoming Tuesday.

Now if only I could get P.T. Anderson to make an epic Radiohead concert film then all would be right in the world.

Enjoy.