Dauthan
20-something | newlywed | grad student
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Eight days ago, I took Amanda out to a new Japanese steakhouse and sushi place. We both enjoyed everything about it, but this post is about two micro-stories related to that date, not the date itself.
1. The restaurant was playing what seemed to be a mix CD of au courant radio pop, heavy on female dance pop vocalists; it was pleasantly incongruous. At one point “Kiss Me Thru the Phone” played, and I told Amanda about the time I was driving to visit Tyler (and Bane and Skala) in the summer of 2009 and heard an Indiana State University radio station DJ sheepishly introduce what she said was a special song to her and her boyfriend. The song was “Kiss Me Thru the Phone.” I suppose it’s appropriate that I heard it on a college radio station during the summer; a time when college students are often separated from significant others.
2. As I mentioned, the restaurant was exceptional. Amanda said that the pickled ginger that came with our sushi tasted “like Anthropologie. Or Christmas.”
It feels unusual to say this about a compilation, but Absent Fever’s Generation Y Not has become one of my favorite releases so far in 2012. Click through to listen or download.
I’ve grown particularly fond of the contributions from Dreams, who also released a quite good EP through Absent Fever last year, and an even better one this year. The sample in “Don’t Care Bout Her” ebbs and flows perfectly, giving the track an emotional arc as-of-yet unmatched in Dreams’ other work.
Caves also have a new song here, but it doesn’t touch “1993”, one of my favorite songs from 2012 so far. This was my first exposure to Honeydrip, whose gauzy, garage pop When You Dream is really promising.
Most impressive, at least as far as Generation Y Not goes, is how cohesive it is when taken as a whole. It is the most promising release from a label that has put out some surprisingly good music in the last year.
I pre-ordered Best Coast’s The Only Place today, and the tracklist for it, revealed this week, has “Up All Night” as the record’s closing track. “Up All Night” is one of my favorite Best Coast songs, but I can’t imagine this version is what to expect on the new record - the band doesn’t hide behind nearly as much noise anymore. I expect lush Jon Brion strings on the album version, actually.
Regardless, it conveys the heartbreak and loneliness present in Best Coast’s best songs in a devastating way - perfect for a closing track, really, now that I think about it. I’m not about to complain about having two different versions of a great song, anyway.
mp3 - Best Coast :: Up All Night (Jeans Wilder / Best Coast split 7” version) (via Stereogum)
I just stumbled across this gorgeous demo of Teen Daze’s “The Harvest”, which was one of my favorite songs of 2011. It’s been hiding on the bandcamp of Two Bicycles, a Teen Daze side project of sorts.
James Dean, ca. 1948 [detail]
Fairmount (Indiana) American Legion baseball team
(photo by Michael Ochs/Getty Images)
I initially felt let down by Best Coast’s Crazy For You, because it wasn’t an album’s worth of “Something in the Way” and/or “When I’m With You.” I still love those songs, but man, Crazy For You is really, really great in its own right.
The higher fidelity recording on the LP does wonders for the hooks, subtlety, and detail present in songs like “Boyfriend”, “Goodbye”, “Bratty B”, and “Our Deal”. I’m hopeful that working with Jon Brion on their record due this year will only highlight those things even more.
There are probably some records slipping my mind right now, but the next Best Coast record joins the High Highs LP (which I’m guessing might come out this year), Sleigh Bells’ Reign of Terror, and the forthcoming The xx record as my most eagerly anticipated 2012 releases.
Edited to add that I somehow forgot to put Purity Ring’s debut LP, assuming it happens, on this list.
Judging by the twitter and tumblr and music blog reaction to the new Cloud Nothings record, Attack on Memory, this is a minority opinion, but I still think the best Cloud Nothings song is the first one I heard.
Maybe I’m too young (although I’m a year or two older than primary CN guy Dylan Baldi), or too poorly versed in the touch-points on the new record, but I think I really just prefer a song with a catchy pop-punk hook to the direction the band has gone in since. I didn’t care for the first widely available Cloud Nothings full-length much, either.
I should probably add that, somewhat unsurprisingly, the one song I do like quite a bit on the new record is “Stay Useless”, what with its Strokes-y riffs and snide verses.
