This is another one of those tracks that's been around for awhile but HEY I didn't have time to blog about it before. I heard this other YACHT track today on XMU (natch) and it reminded me that I love this track waaaay more.

I know this band is weird, like, really weird. But this song is honestly a love song to me. A love song to everyone and everything that makes you feel loved and complete and whole and...well, loved.

I mean, let's go over this:

I used to live

in a heartbeat city

I swear I'd fall in love every minute on the street

You might be walking around the corner

and our eyes might meet

"Where you been darlin, darlin?

We've been holding this moment for you;

I told you your dreams would come true."

Furthermore, the song gives me this lovely, giddy, nostalgic feeling similar to the one brought about by the first Toy Story film. I like to imagine that the things I love, all around me, lead their own secret lives and somehow manage to fit me into them so neatly and subtly that I don't even notice.

I might be washing up the dishes

and the kitchen might SAY

Hang around baby, baby

Hang around baby, baby

We'll be baking a cake for you.

So here's to you and all of the voodoo cities surrounding you.

Song of the Day: Memoryhouse--"Lately (Deuxieme)"

"Lately (deuxieme)"

I was originally going to write this post about Bat for Lashes but I decided to put that post on hold and talk about this band called Memoryhouse and this really lovely track of theirs, "Lately (Deuxieme)."

This is the first I've ever heard of the band and I'm really in love with the song, mostly because it features the reverb loop used prominently by Jon Brion throughout the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack:

I'm not entirely sure music bloggers have picked up on the sampling but I'm also not entirely sure everyone else in the world is as sonically obsessed with Jon Brion as I am.

Exhibit A) Upon seeing the film Punchdrunk Love for the first time, I recognized Jon Brion as the composer based on the score's clever usage of a miniature piano. My film professor was boggled.

Exhibit B) The name of this blog.

Anyway, Memoryhouse. To me, "Lately" is like 3 minutes of wonder, blissed-out wonder. I think it has something to do with the bass drum undercurrent rippling beneath the Eternal Sunshine loop. It's like a summer stormcloud that occasionally becomes a muted dance synth. Muted wonder, maybe. Possibly because Eternal Sunshine is so indelibly associated with this track, it makes me think of two kids on a beach, holding hands and looking up while the tide comes in.

The track is introduced by a turntable needle clicking into position on a record and we listen to the looped reverb. Which, of course, takes me to the end credits of Eternal Sunshine when the two characters are forever captured in a film reel of a snowball fight. The clip snags and repeats itself, over and over, possibly into eternity, begging the question of whether or not the lovers are meant to repeat their same mistakes again and again, eternally to the point of timelessness.

The lyrics, from what I can tell, are as follows:

Lately, I'm not sleeping

I'm not breathing

without machine

Lately, my heart's been breaking

my heart's been breaking

through the seam.

Shut me off

Shut me off

Shut me off

Shut me off

I'm not sure a refrain has been so piercing since Wait, they don't love you like I love you. The song itself is so dreamy and lo-fi and unobtrusive that it's...jarring to listen to the sorrow in the verses, the poignant sensation of being so vulnerable--unable to breath without aid--in the wake of heartbreak.

Download Memoryhouse's new EP, "The Years" here.

This is a Memoryhouse cover of my favorite Grizzly Bear track, "Foreground." How great is this group??

Song of the Day: any track by the xx

The trouble with choosing a song of the day is narrowing down the choices to just one. And, sometimes, that's just impossible. For instance, with London-based duo the xx, how do I pick one song as better than the rest when I'm equally obsessed with the three tracks I have on my iPod? So I guess today is more of a "Band of the Day" and I hope everyone can get behind that. Not that it matters because I make the rules and can therefore thrash them.

So. the xx. Let's not get started on how their April show at the Varsity is sold out and tickets on stubhub are being offered at ridiculous, Decemberists-level prices. I'm over it. I'm not but I"m trying to be.

I'm making the trek to SXSW to see them (probs). If I think that way, I really can be over it.

The xx sort of exploded onto the scene last year and, while I recognize my tardiness to their indie-world domination party, I'd like to offer up the excuse that I WAS IN AFRICA. So, now that every other music-obsessive has had their turn to gush about the xx, it's my turn to slobber all over their slow-simmering, sexy beats.

"Heart Skipped a Beat" is a person favorite of mine because I'm a sucker for the lyrics and the juxtaposition between R&B drum machine and indie guitars. Seriously:

Please don't say we're done

when I'm not finished

I could give so much more

I like to point out to people that relationships are inherently unequal; someone always loves the slightest bit more, the tiniest bit better. And what happens to that person when it's all over? Where does that unfinished love go? Apparently into this verse, repeated 7 times:

Sometimes, I still need you.

And it's the way they sing it to each other, her voice so emotive and gorgeous--his, so flat and complementary: the perfect parry between lovers.

Heart skipped a beat

and when I caught it you were out of reach

but I'm sure, I'm sure

you've heard it before

The xx never spoke truer words than those. And, to better serve that point, the duo repeats those verses 4 times. What a sentiment, right? Falling for someone, experiencing the slightest of delays as your body adjusts to the sensation, missing said person by inches, days, what have you. Damn it's good. This song is actually too good.

Then you've got "Crystallized", which starts out with such an ace riff. It's like, I alternately want to play air guitar and seduce someone.

What is that???? I"ll tell you what it is: Sex. Let's be honest, her voice is like an orgasm in this song, seriously. The only thing sexier is Karen O. And the lyrics? Don't get me started.

You applyin' pressure

to help me crystalise

and you've got the faith

that I could bring paradise

I'll forgive and forget

before I'm paralysed

Do I have to keep up the pace

to keep you satisfied?

Um. I don't think it takes a huge stretch of the imagination to guess who's applying pressure and where and what's happening between these two. But, you know, if you're not convinced:

I've been down on my knees

and you just keep on getting closer

Then you've got the pas de deux at the end, with the vocals overlapping while the duo sings complementary lyrics. This is good stuff; in fact, this is great stuff. When I tell you I'm in love with the xx, I really really mean it.

Just for kicks, I'm throwing in their bomb remix of Florence + the Machine's "You've Got the Love"--I think it's great when remixes are even better than the originals. There's pretty much nothing this band can't do. Google them and amuse yourself with the various ways in which music bloggers fall over themselves to praise their fucking brilliant sound.

Song of the Day: Temper Trap--"Sweet Disposition"

8

This song has just been all over the place. First, it was put to sweet use in the surprising (500) Days of Summer (which obvs should have beaten The Hangover for a Golden Globe). Now, it's being used pretty effectively to promote the new ABC legal drama The Deep End. The track succeeded on both counts, for me anyway. I was def psyched to see Summer and I'm now hooked on the promos for The Deep End, even feeling that law school might not be such a bad idea...

Maybe that's taking Temper Trap's infectious, grand single a little bit too far.

But, seriously, try not to be moved by that soaring falsetto which so effectively opens the track.

Sweet disposition

Never too soon

Oh reckless abandon

like no one's watching you

It just gives you license to throw yourself into all kinds of wild endeavors. It's a song that spends 4 minutes swelling and swelling without reaching a finite conclusion; the track effortlessly carries you along with the Joshua-Tree-influenced guitars.

(No but seriously, the opening bars are so damn close to Where the Streets Have No Name, it's eery).

Meanwhile, the lyrics press you toward an inconclusive abandon, a celebration of youth and youthful love and the things we'll do for that noble end.

So stay there

cause I'll be comin' over

and while our blood's still young

it's so young

it runs

and we won't stop til it's over

won't stop to surrender

It's so so good. Maybe the majority of American teens will spend this prom season making out to Use Somebody but I think Sweet Disposition is a real dark horse candidate for stealing hearts this year.

Get your lighters (or lighter apps) ready.

Song of the Day: Fanfarlo--The Walls Are Coming Down

I don't know a lot about this band. Admittedly, I don't know anything beyond this song. Fortunately, we have wikipedia to fill in those rather large blanks. Fanfarlo is a London-based group of 4 guys and one lady who put out their debut album in early 2009. Perhaps most importantly, lady Cathy plays the saw. Have you ever seen someone play the saw? It's effing brilliant.

But, for me, the chorus of their single, The Walls are Coming Down, tells me everything I really need to know.

The walls the walls are coming down,
the here and now is coming round
It will some day let you down
The ships the ships are coming in,
the great ideas are wearing thin
There is nothing left to do

Let's start at the end. Who doesn't love a slow-build, or really, a build of any kind? For me, that's a sucker punch--throw some appropriately placed strings and I've caved entirely.

The first time I heard this song, I loved it. It leaves you with a utopian feeling, a sense of building by tearing down. The staccato strings at the 1-minute mark could be well placed jabs in a Jenga game, just before the twoering structure comes crashing down.

At first, judging by the optimism in the strings and vocals, I considered this a positive destruction, a worthy act of deconstruction--some sort of giddy demolition of the barriers that divide us. Or the musical equivalent of two people finally meeting on a level without their protective pretense and defensive posturing. Walls coming down on so many separate levels at once and all of them leading to something freer.

Then I started really paying attention to the melancholy in the lyrics, masked by the triumphant brass, etc.

For atoms have gone as far as atoms will go

Your books write themselves,
they line up in row after row

And then I started thinking. With everything melting together and uniting and, well, globalizing, we're homogenizing too. It's this uncomfortable trade-off for less conflict/greater unity. Like we're hitting a utopian wall--the "end of history" so to speak. So then I started loving the dichotomy between the way the song is orchestrated and what the song is actually saying. There is nothing left to do.

Furthermore, on an individual, less grand-scheme basis, it's true that the walls people put up between themselves can oftentimes be more satisfying than what's behind them. You know the feeling? Of finally getting a hint of someone's vulnerability and then realizing, in a rush, that you weren't prepared to actually see beyond the walls, that you lack the ability to sustain that level of connection or kinship or whatever it is that's binding. Or, maybe you've experienced the dawning recognition that there's nothing left to do now that the walls are coming down and whatever is beyond has been laid bare. Where to go?

It's a triumph and a letdown at the same time.

So, that's it really. Where do we go from here? Is there anything left to do? Aside from watch this awesome video.