I saw Washed Out play live a while back after being introduced to the Life Of Leisure EP by my friend Jean. Well, the live show was a dud (hey Washed Out dude: watching you sing to your iPod is not very entertaining). But the EP is echoey and bouncy and sounds like waking up at the beach in a hammock, curled up next to your favorite synth. I look forward to future recordings.
I only occasionally leave the sound cave for sustenance and/or diversion, so bumping into new music the old-fashioned way, i.e., hearing it on the radio, happens somewhat infrequently. But in one of those too few serendipitous moments, I heard this track and immediately needed to know whodunnit. I have been reading about Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III) and was planning on checking out her music; well, I think I may have found my Summer Jam '10. It's relentlessly catchy and fun, and the lyrics mention droids, secret Santas, fairygods, and underpants. In other words, resistance is futile.
The Velvet Underground were a jam band. Not, perhaps, in the same category as your Phishes or String Cheeses, but they jammed and jammed—anyone who loves the 1969 Live album or the even jammier Quine Tapes (featuring several half-hour versions of "Sister Ray") already knows this. So in addition to inventing alternative rock, goth, industrial, dream pop, and so many other sub-niche genres, they also proved that New York noise, applied to simple r'n'b chord changes, could create the same sort of hypnotic grooves their hippy contemporaries were tripping to in the psychedelic ballrooms of San Francisco. 
Some of my earliest memories of music were born in the back of a maroon 1968 Volkswagen bus. I can recall looking out the window at the dry Idaho landscape in the late 70s and early 80s, while soft adult contemporary pop gently streamed out of the tiny AM radio: "Africa", "Chariots Of Fire", "We Just Disagree", "Cool Night", "Sailing", "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All", "Forever In Blue Jeans", "I'm Not In Love"...the list goes on and on, and while my pesky inner critic has been conditioned to mock and dismiss such margarine glop, the fact of the matter is that these soft hits are burned into my cerebral cortex. They are my nursery rhymes; I have given up on even calling them guilty pleasures. Like hearing the Johnny Carson theme song and instinctively knowing it's bedtime, exposure to adult contemporary smooth jams circa '77-'83 lulls me into the back of my parents' VW like a hazy childhood daydream.
Originally written by famed 60s hitwriters Gerry Goffin and Carol King (the same team known for such immortals as "Up On The Roof", "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", "One Fine Day", and many many others), this track was first recorded by the Monkees in 1966. Their version is upbeat but pretty slight (and I say this as a Monkees fan), a chipper throwaway. Blues handyman Taj Mahal recorded it first with his little-known band Rising Sons (which also featured Ry Cooder), but that version, while gruffer and bluesier than the Monkees', still sounded a little off. The third time was the charm: rerecorded for Taj's 1969 Giant Steps, it became a gentle stroll, an invitation to better days. This was on almost every mixtape I made in college.
I first found this track on the amazing and highly recommended compilation A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding in Your Mind: Volume 1 by The Amorphous Androgynous. A punchy riff rocker, it recalls the best T. Rex (especially the lyrics), but what really knocks me out is the unique rhythm: check out the stuttering, shifting drums. Apparently blue honey is some sort of psychedelic mushroom concoction; the swooping string arrangements and acid guitar certainly have that psilocybin tinge. I once played this about fifteen times in a row while driving around. I still need to check out Pop Levi's albums (The Return to Form Black Magick Party from 2007 and Never Never Love from 2008), but in the meantime I think I'll throw this one on a few more times.
The opening track of 1989's hallowed Disintegration, "Plainsong" is a stately dirge that makes you feel like you're entering a cathedral. Of course, it's a gothic cathedral. But instead of a vicar in vestments, the celebrant is Robert Smith, with his ratty hair and eternally smudged lipstick, and the next seventy minutes is a high mass, a wedding and a funeral, the Cure's biggest album and their most stylistically uniform piece. It has some light touches (e.g., the delicate and weird "Lullaby", the sad love song "Lovesong"), but overall, Smith's gloomiest church is drenched in echoing organs and always-flanged guitars. Disintegration is not my favorite Cure album (I prefer the wild variety and more adventurous music of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me), but holy shit, if you were a teenager in the 80s (or, if you were ever a teenager), then this album's overwhelming mope captures, more than almost any album I can think of, the helpless unrequited yearning of young angst. The religious devotion with which this album is adored by fans was perhaps already implicit when it was released: the 1989 tour was called The Prayer Tour. I dread listening to it, almost, since it summons a time and place, an age, of existential sadness; "Pictures Of You" had me crying in my car yesterday. 
Los Angeles-based laptop beat producer Flying Lotus has been getting a lot of press lately, thank to his excellent new record Cosmogramma. The record's rubbery, quick tempos and jazzy layers strongly recall, for me, the orchestral sweep of DJ Shadow's immortal 1996 opus ...Endtroducing, but updated sonically (it's grimier and hence less melodramatic), rhythmically (the beats here skid and careen and flutter rather than lope), and the presence of real (i.e., non-sampled) singing and instrumentation by some pretty big names show how Flying Lotus, also known as Steven Ellison, is taking his laptop out of the house. 
One of the best things about the Beatles is that they had, and continue to have, thousands and thousands of copycats. Unfortunately only the Beatles can be the Beatles, but that has never stopped people from coming up with Beatles-esque songs, some of which are blessed with genius, even if it's only parrot-genius. Writing, playing, and singing an efficient, economic three-minute pop song which has memorable melodic and/or rhythmic energy remains the musical equivalent of Mt. Everest—you can get there, but it ain't easy.
The popularity of video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero reveal our culture's ultimate secret fantasy: to be greatest musician ever to thoroughly rock Jeremy's mom's rec room. Most wannabes, though, will never pass into the stratocastosphere through speedy button-pressing; guitars are easy to play (sort of, with practice), but hard to play very well. The great guitar heroes are knighted for their speed, dexterity, riffage, soloing, and other sonic tricks, but the list of incredible guitarists who also happen to incredible singers or songwriters is pretty small. So the most famous guitarists are generally ones who sing or write as well. But some of my very favorite guitarists are sidemen, content to sit at the sidelines squeezing beautiful noise out of their guitars. 
It's probably going to turn out to be true that there really is a time and place for everything. I happen to have a soft spot for soft rock, especially anything on adult contemporary AM radio between 1976 and 1983. I do not, however, have a soft spot for smooth jazz, though can I imagine it has its uses, at least in dentists' waiting rooms. Smooth soul I can usually do without; I've never really gotten Roberta Flack, and most 80s smoove soul leaves me cold. But it's hard not to like the soothing sounds of Sade. I'm not a huge fan (are there huge Sade fans?), but her best tracks summon a willowy, calm mellowness that somehow takes the elevator (music) to the rooftop patio. She has other uses, too: 1992's Love Deluxe is one of the all-time great makeout records, even if at times you feel like you're making out at The Limited.
Animal Collective have turned out to be one of the best bands of the last decade. Their earliest records are noisy and a little diffuse, but their soundcraft and writing have gotten catchier while continuing to be pretty wildly experimental. Some of their stuff sounds a little too woolly and woozy, but their basic ingredients (loops, layers, distorted samples, yipping and yelping, hootenanny tribalism, post-drum-circle rhythms), while potentially annoying when pried out of context, contribute to a whole greater than the sum of the individual parts. I recently saw their weirdo music video/art installation/acid horror flick ODDSAC, and it messed with my cerebral cortex. In a good way.
A bad cover song makes you miss the original; a terrible cover can make you wish the original had never been written (Michael Bolton, hang your head in shame). The best covers always seem to end up sounding like originals, forcing you to choose between the old and the new. A truly great cover is a usurper, eclipsing the original version altogether, as Hendrix did with Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower". But regardless of how drastically a cover reinvents an original, the one thing that makes good covers work is the artist's ability to take up ownership of the song, if only for a few fleeting moments. And if you can wrest a great song from a great artist, there's a cubbyhole in Valhalla with your name on it.
I'm pretty sure the first time I saw a laptop on stage at a rock show, I rolled my eyes. Along with the flute, triangle, and keytar, the laptop is hard to 'play' without looking like a nonmusical nerd (visualize playing "air laptop"). I have tended to avoid seeing computer-based music live, since on several occasions I have stood there, bored, watching the star of the show stare blankly into a computer; I might as well have stayed at home and blasted the record. Over the last decade, though, the quality of computer-generated music has made me rethink the new songcraft. The best electronic artists, in transcending the physical dexterity necessary to play, for instance, a saxophone, have proved that one can build a song from scratch on a computer, not unlike a composer drafting a classical opus on a sheet of paper. This is not to say that laptoppers aren't dextrous, of course—what impresses me about the best computer music is its writing. The real innovation lies in the limitless access to every possible sound. Rather than choosing a guitar and a rack of effects pedals, the laptop artist can take a sound and manipulate it into tones and textures not possible with standard instruments. 
Glancing briefly at my music library, it is clear that I have more music by The Fall than by any other artist—some 80-odd titles, with more, no doubt, on the way. The sheer quantity of Fall music is matched only by the overall high level of quality. What other band has bashed out an album-a-year for the better part of thirty years? At a certain point in any review of Fall music, one almost inevitably turns to Fall review clichés, as it is difficult to discuss The Fall without using words like umpteenth or caustic or curmudgeon. But the clichés can be useful shorthand: Mark E. Smith yearly corrals young, often non-professional musicians into studios and has them lock into very simple, loud riffs while he growls and spits, slurring abstract detective poetry to the thudding backbeat. It is not a surprise that MES routinely cites Philip K. Dick as a favorite. If any musician is worthy of the title of metaphysical detective, then it is MES. His trademark vocal tics have mutated over the years: the amphetamine squeals and nagging declamations of the 80s have morphed into coughs and wheezes, but the lyric fragments—when you can decipher them—retain their puzzling aura, and recent records have even shown a softer sense of retrospection which is almost, well, autumnal (sorry). This most recent record will not perhaps make it to anyone's top ten Fall albums (there are too many, anyway), but it sits nicely on the shelf with the others from the 2000s, topping (in my opinion) Imperial Wax Solvent and Reformation Post TLC, though not the decade-best The Real New Fall LP or the erratic but occasionally brilliant Fall Heads Roll. As Neil Young once said to a fan complaining that all the songs sound the same, "It's all one song!" In the case of The Fall, this too is true, as the 80-odd titles crowding the shelf function best as a monolithic unit, a life's commitment to words, repetition and noise. 
