I'm loving Lloyd's Lessons in Love, even though there's something a little exhausting about it (in a reach-for-a-cigarette kind of way).
In addition to the always-fabulous "Girls Around the World" (best song of the spring/summer, I think), my current favorite is "Year of the Lover", which features this (slightly ridiculous) opener:
Don't make plans for dinner--
I'm a put you up on the stove and take off all of your clothes;
Girl, watch me cook.
And speaking of, um, mood music, I'm always reminded of one of my favorite Amazon reviews of all time, this one for MC Solaar's Prose Combat (a fantastic album in its own right):
Here is what I did: I took "Lover's Rock" and "Diamond Life" and "The Best of Sade" and "Seal" and a French Rap CD called "Prose Combat" by MC Solaar, put them all in my 5-CD changer and put it on automatic shuffle. I had this girl over for dinner who I met in a department store when I was downtown shopping. I got some oysters from the fish store, sliced 'em open on the half-shell, cracked open a bottle of Asti Spumante (that's Italian Champagne) and dimmed the lights. This whole scenario was straight out of this book I read called "9 Free Secrets of New Sensual Power" which is basically some kind of sex-memoir/instruction book for higher consciousness, that is DOPE! So she comes over and I light some candles, we start dancing to all that Sade music and that killer-sexy French rap (that the guy in the book also turned me onto,) and one thing just naturally led to another, just like it said he would ...
Starting with Solange's "Sandcastle Disco", the new Genius inside my computer made a playlist for me that included Janelle Monae's "Violet Stars Happy Hunting!" (from Metropolis: The Chase Suite), reminding me how much bizarre fun that song is.
It's all androids and manic energy, and it's just what I needed.
And I think to myself
(Impossibly, they're gunning for me)
Wait, it's impossible
Now they're gunning for me (and the police are after you)
And now they're after you (For loving, too)
Leave it to me to be more than a year behind on hearing about a new Ark album (Prayer for the Weekend). It's happened before, after all--and the album hasn't been released in the US (joining all but one of their other albums as import-only).
I'm still absorbing it [1], but so far, it's more of the glam-disco pop that The Ark do better than anyone else, so that makes me happy.
Previously: I saw The Ark perform live, which show ranks among the best I've seen.
[1] Yes, that probably makes it sound more complex than it really is. The Ark don't make "difficult" music, generally, and that's a good thing.
From the Embarrassment of Riches department: Choosing a favorite track from Solange's Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams is tough, people!
In fact, I've only listened to the album straight-through once, because I keep skipping back to my favorite tracks: "T.O.N.Y.", "Would've Been the One", and "Sandcastle Disco".
Fluxblog has a good writeup of "Would've Been the One". I liked this bit, in particular, because it calls out the bass line, which is just incredible when it builds into the chorus:
This [tension] comes through in her voice just as much as the track, with does some nice tricks with sustained digital decay and boasts a bass line that shifts from a loose, airy groove to a tight, nervous chug as it edges up to the chorus.
And here's the video for "Sandcastle Disco":
I've always loved what Bill Drummond said about the road trip evoked by KLF's Chill Out. From an interview in X Magazine in 1991:
[Chill Out is] a frighteningly evocative composition: a single forty-five-minute-long ambient road-trip across the southern gulf coast of the United States. Surprisingly (especially after hearing the record), it's a trip that the band's never actually taken.
Drummond's up-front about that aspect of it. "I've never been to those places. I don't know what those places are like, but in my head, I can imagine those sounds coming from those places, just looking at the map."
In 2002, I served on jury duty for a week, and every day I'd take the 38 Geary from the Outer Richmond (where we lived at the time) down to the federal courthouse. It was a dreary, foggy ride, around 45 minutes in total, and I'd make the trek early in the morning, around 7am.
And every morning, I'd listen to Chill Out, and I'd imagine that I was taking that road trip through the south.
At Divisadero, I'd hear "Elvis On The Radio, Steel Guitar In My Soul"; at Polk, I'd hear "Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard"; and while walking from the bus to the federal building, I'd hear "A Melody From A Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back".
And now, listening to the album & just looking at the map, it all comes back.
I'm pretty surprised by how much I enjoy the new Walkmen album, You & Me, never having been much of a fan in the past. It's big, and nostalgic, and kind of dark.
Kind of like the season one finale of Mad Men, which I just watched a couple of weeks ago. The best part, where Don is leading the Kodak people through the campaign for the slide projector, while showing slides of his family:
It goes backwards and forwards, and it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called "The Wheel"; it's called "The Carousel". It lets us travel around and around and back home again.
Anyway, You & Me is out August 19, but you can buy it now for $5 (5 dollars!) from Amie Street. And in so doing, you'll be helping kids with cancer. So, you know, you'd sort of have to hate music and kids not to buy this album.