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"This condition I got is crucial..."

A couple of things:

• 

  Adore
  As an addendum to last week's vox hunt--which I answered--another great love song, perhaps one of the greatest songs in forever: Prince's "Adore".
• The remix of Ciara's "Promise", featuring R. Kelly, is really very, very good: "Even though I'm Kells / and I've got all of these chicks chasing me".
• My favorite line from this last week's episode of The Office: Andy saying to Michael, "gonna go home, get my beer on, get my 'Lost' on".
• Ghostface's Fishscale, from last year, continues to offer up new favorites every couple of days, still, eight or however many months later. This week it's "Big Girl", with Ghostface doing his soulful thing over The Stylistics "You're a Big Girl Now".
• A fantastic post on The Tofu Hut about Amy Winehouse, whose "You Know I'm No Good" sounds so much better on Ghostface's More Fish, and whose "Back to Black" (the song, but also the album) is fantastic.

Vox Hunt: This Goes Out To All The Lovers

Audio:  Share a great love song.

Breakfast In Bed

Orange Juice's "Consolation Prize" gets my top vote for great (greatest!) love song ("I'll be your consolation prize--although, I know..."), but since I've already posted about it, I'll go tonight with Dusty Springfield's "Breakfast in Bed", from the so-brilliant-I-could-have-chosen-anything-from-it Dusty in Memphis:

You've been crying; your face is a mess.
Come in baby,
You can dry the tears on my dress.
She's hurt you again, I can tell--
Oh, I know that look so well.

Calling "Breakfast in Bed" a love song might be stretching it a bit, but it strikes me as a sort of reverse-gender "Consolation Prize", in a way: a main character who can provide only a shoulder to cry on or a hand to hold (or otherwise, as the case may be), but who will never be more than a part-time diversion. Though, as you'd probably expect, Dusty sounds a lot more confident, sexy & sly about her role as the other woman than Edwyn does about being his crush's fey best friend.

"You'll never destroy that stuff."

My 2006, in brief:

Number of blog posts (visible to me!):
157: This was my first full year of blogging, and I kind of really liked it, plus I like the looking-back-at-the-year thing that it affords (yes, it really took me five years to get blogging, but so I'm kind of slow).

Favorite used purchase:
Maddy!

Favorite photo of Maddy:

Maddy's new money

Favorite concert:
Justin Timberlake at Roseland

Favorite album:
Ghostface Killah, Fishscale

Favorite book:
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

Favorite Songs:
They may be singles, and if they're not, they should be. These were, for me, the 13 most absolutely incredible songs of 2006 [1]:

B'day

Beyoncé, "Irreplaceable"
Full of the simultaneous vulnerability & confidence that (one imagines) can only come when you're kicking someone out the door, & this time for good; that slight tremor in her voice at "and keep talking that mess, that's fine" gets me every time. (listen)

Butch Walker & the Let's-Go-Out-Tonites, "When Canyons Ruled the World"
Second-hand LA nostalgia. (listen)

Cat Power, "The Greatest"
As before I am so, so impressed with Chan Marshall & her newfound Dusty-isms. (listen)

CSS, "Music is My Hot Hot Sex"
In a year in which I listened to more new music than ever: yes, well, it really is, isn't it? (listen)

Destroyer, "Looter's Follies"
It just builds, & it builds, & it builds, and even at just 3 minutes into this 7-minute song, it sounds like it'll explode from overblown la-la-la's--and so, yes, it's a little ridiculous in places ("I looked up, I looked around / a famous Toronto painter shot me down"), but I can't help but love it. (listen)

Fishscale

Ghostface Killah, "Underwater"
From the most consistently great album of 2006, one of the most haunting & strange songs of 2006. (listen)

Honeycut, "Exodus Honey"
This reminds me of Spandau Ballet via PM Dawn, and I really, really like that. (listen)

JC Chasez, "Until Yesterday"
First heard/seen at JT's show at Roseland, where JC walked out on stage to thunderous applause, this is easily the most under-appreciated single of the year: it's some sort of modern power ballad that just keeps working, inexplicably. (listen)

Justin Timberlake, "My Love"
"Sexyback" was, well, a little disappointing--and then I heard this, and it was like the whole world was right again. My favorite song of the year. (listen)

White Bread, Black Beer

Nelly Furtado, "Promiscuous"
The assorted sins I had associated with Nelly Furtado--mainly terribly bland & insincere light folk--have all been erased because of this song. (listen)

Office, "Dominos"
A summer happiness song. And I'm sure it's all in the name, but it's like the song from a really happy, funny musical put on by the folks from "The Office"--every time I hear it, I see Jim, Pam, Michael, Dwight, &c. singing along to a big musical production wherein they celebrate the coming of the new week, and the associated romantic tension therein, and that just makes me smile. (listen)

Scritti Politti, "The Boom Boom Bap"
The greatest unexpected surprise of 2006, without a doubt: a new Scritti Politti album, and this moving ode to old-school hip hop. (listen)

TV on the Radio, "I Was a Lover"
In the end, the album left me sort of cold, and "Wolf Like Me" was my favorite Power Song of 2006 [2], but not much more; but "I Was a Lover", with its Dirty Projectors-esque strange horn sounds, was truly amazing. (listen)

And that was 2006.

That's it. Hello, 2007.

[1] And this time, as opposed to last, I actually bothered to try writing something about each.

[2] Not that I actually really exercised much during 2006, but still.

Help The Coup!

Pick a Bigger Weapon

So scary: The Coup--whose Pick a Bigger Weapon was one of my favorite hip-hip albums of the year--were in a terrifying bus crash last week while on tour. They're all (mostly) physically okay, but they lost all of their equipment, clothing, personal effects, &c.

If you haven't heard The Coup, you should--listen to some of their songs. And then, if you can, help them out by donating via the Paypal button on their MySpace page.

QotD: Top 5 in '06 - Music

What are your top 5 CDs/albums of 2006? 
Submitted by eliz. s.

I guess I'll answer this now, although in theory, I'd like to wait until nearer to the end of the year, and I'd actually like to write something about each of these albums, &c. Well, and so, I've got 6, instead of 5. I did my best to narrow it down, but 5 is just asking too much!

Destroyer's Rubies

Fishscale

That Striped Sunlight Sound

The Day I Turned To Glass

FutureSex / LoveSounds

White Bread, Black Beer

More reading.

Books I've read in the last couple of weeks:

The Blind Side made me sort of confused in an inspired way; Norwegian Wood made me sort of depressed; Feeding a Yen & The Soul of a Chef both made me hungry & want to cook and then eat some fucking food right now; and The Ghost Map made me think, which isn't an adjective like the others, but oh well.

The Ghost Map--which is just generally brilliant stuff about maps, and cities, and diseases, and technology, and science, &c.--contained a passage I really liked, from p.96 in the hardcover:

There is a lovely symmetry that comes from telling the story this way, because a city and a bacterium are each situated at the very extreme boundaries of the shapes that life takes on earth. ... In a city like Victorian London, unchallenged by military threats and bursting with new forms of capital and energy, microbes were the primary force reigning in the city's otherwise runaway growth, precisely because London had offered Vibrio cholerae ... precisely what it had offered stockbrockers and coffeehouse proprietors and sewer-hunters: a whole new way of making a living.

I approve of all of these books.

"My guitar is missing a string..."

The Day I Turned To Glass

I think Honeycut's The Day I Turned to Glass [1] may be one of my favorite albums of the year. It's just so clean, so impeccable, so very white soul, so Scritti Politti/Phoenix/George Michael/late-period Orange Juice/ABC. As a point of reference, my favorite moments on the album remind me a lot of Phoenix's Alphabetical, one of the best albums of the past couple of years.

And there are so many great moments to choose from! The effete Scritti-esque ballads, like "Butter Room" and "Silky"; the playful funk groove of "Crowded Avenue"; the very Spandau Ballet-esque "Exodus Honey"; &c. Every day I get another couple of seconds of song stuck in my head, and it's always a different song. And every time, that little song snippet makes me happy.

[1] via Krissy, who mentioned it when she was on Live 105.

"You could throw a party..."

I saw Scritti Politti live tonight, which is amazing in & of itself, as it's something I didn't ever think I'd be able to say. The funny/sad thing is that I completely forgot about the show--thanks to Harold for reminding me!

Green was sick, I guess, and so he mentioned that they skipped a couple of songs. That's too bad, but the show was still fantastic & fun & full of energy, and Green's voice sounded amazing. They played a bunch of the new tracks from White Bread, Black Beer, but also some older representative stuff, like "The Word Girl", "Wood Beez", "Die Alone", "The Sweetest Girl", and "Brushed with Oil, Dusted with Powder" (which was gorgeous).

My only wish was that they'd have played one of the older ballads: I'd have taken any or all of "A Little Knowledge" (probably my favorite Scritti song of all time), "Overnite", or "Oh Patti (...)". But that's okay.

From White Bread, Black Beer, "The Boom Boom Bap" was bass-thumping beauty--it's the best ballad ever written about hip-hop, or so I'm saying. And as good as the album is, everything sounded even better, more energetic, with a live band. Green's usual multitracked vocals were accomplished with between one & three backup singers per song.

Anyway, I feel like there's more I could say about the show, but I'm not sure what it is, except that watching Green--who, before early this year, hadn't performed for over 20 years, and who'd never toured in the US--perform is truly a thrill, and that you should go to see Scritti Politti in concert--or, at the very least, listen to the new album. It's fantastic.

This was a very tasty salad.

Really good salad

Frisée, fried up chunks of bacon [1] and fresh bread; a chopped shallot; and a poached egg, on top. The dressing: equal parts red wine vinegar, dijon mustard, and olive oil, with salt & pepper to taste.

So so good!

[1] Maddy really wanted some bacon. I had it all chopped up & nice up on the counter, and she went up on her hind legs to try to get to it, trying to give me the look that makes me believe she deserves it. Everyone loves bacon!

"A thousand violins..."

What are some of your favorite, forgotten albums that have stood the test of time?
Submitted by PeterGibbons.

The interesting part about this question is the word "forgotten"--does it mean forgotten by me, or forgotten in general? I think I'll interpret it as underappreciated albums that I really love, albums that could be underappreciated in a context as broad as the overall genre or as narrow as within the scope of the artist's own recordings.

Here's a short list just from glancing at my iTunes library:

• Black Sheep, A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
• Bryan Ferry, Bête Noire
• Manic Street Preachers, Gold Against the Soul (see this post)

The Glasgow School

But so really, my biggest forgotten favorite must be Orange Juice [1], the late 70s/early 80s pop band from Scotland featuring Edwyn Collins (later of "A Girl Like You" mini-fame), so forgotten that their albums are pretty impossible to find. [2]

With Orange Juice, it's all about the context: imagine angry bands like the Sex Pistols riling everyone up, and fighting with them & spitting on them, and just being generally unpleasant; and then imagine a group of fey popsters playing jangly guitar indie pop, dressing all camp, and getting all sorts of shit thrown at them during their performances by aggressive punks. That was the story of Orange Juice.

But it's not the whole story, because that's just all too sad & pathetic, and Orange Juice are anything but. They were funny in their misery, took pleasure in their sadness, and sang bouncy pop gems about, well, mainly, being lovesick. But, and here's the important part: they realized the ridiculousness of it all, and so spent half the time feeling sorry for themselves, and the other half making fun of themselves for it.

Take the canonical example, "Consolation Prize," sung by a narrator stuck on a girl with terrible taste in men--she prefers men who belittle her, who "crumple up [her] face a thousand times", &c. And then meanwhile we've got your narrator, who listens to her tales of woe about her various beaus, and who knows he's better than all of them, so he does everything he can to impress her--dressing up all camp, wearing his hair in an oh-so-stylish fringe ("like Roger McGuinn")--and all he can do is make her laugh. He's the funny friend that she turns to when she's down about her love prospects, but it's oh so sad, because he's got a thing for her.

And all the while, he knows how ridiculous he must seem:

I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn's;
I wore it hoping to impress.
So frightfully camp, it made you laugh--
Tomorrow I'll buy myself a dress.
How ludicrous!

And Edwyn sings, "I'll be your consolation prize--although, I know...", and there's this pause of a second or two, and then the song builds for about thirty seconds to the rousing (well, as rousing as Orange Juice ever get) repeated outro, "I'll never be man enough for you." And there it is: it's simple & it's funny & it's sad & it's just wonderful.

Listen to "Consolation Prize".

[1] I've written about Orange Juice before.

[2] Orange Juice's original albums are very hard to come by. Every time I'm at a record store, I drift towards the O section, looking in hope to find Orange Juice albums--"maybe they've been rereleased," I think. I'm always wrong. That said, The Glasgow School is a fantastic collection of early singles & their first album, Ostrich Churchyard.