koganbot

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=1728

Well, we had to like something from Australia eventually…

[Video][Website]
[7.30]

Anthony Easton: I put this up on my blog a few months ago, and have thought about it once a week or so since then. The message is inspirational in a functionally useful way. I like how it quotes Hole, I like how it appears to be a poppish remake of the sentiments of PJ Harvey. I like how it realizes that collapse is one of the ways of handling the stress, I like how it gets heavy and more angular as the track moves on. This is the updating of 90s nostalgia I can get behind.
[9]

Edward Okulicz: A melodic but pleasingly intense indie-pop morsel which distinguishes itself with the tensely stilted vocal performance of Kate Cooper, who is clear where the music is muddy. The words hint at something a bit dissolute, which gives it a surprising amount of replay value.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Any song that shouts out Hole is worth a second listen, and An Horse’s “Camp Out” doesn’t disappoint in the slightest. There’s a bit of that ’90s alternative sound here, in the driving simplicity of the modest, not anthemic, power chord progression. It’s a disarmingly sincere sound, with an openness matching singer Kate Cooper’s delivery. She sings with the conversational intimacy of a close friend getting something off her chest, like, say, that she doesn’t want to just be a close friend any more. Her clear tones are the auditory equivalent of her looking the object directly in the eyes, but she starts off stalling: “What if, like you said, what I’m looking for doesn’t exist?” But after screwing up her courage, she gets to the point, declaring, boldly, “You want to camp out, and I want to fuck around in the dark.” There’s nothing reserved about the track, but there’s a lot of vulnerability in its sparseness; “I’m surprised how we fit together,” Cooper sings, willing it to be so. There’s something at stake here, and that risk transforms a song so basic into a tune so essential.
[10]

Alex Macpherson: There’s possibly a decent song lurking somewhere in here, but it’s pretty much buried beneath a bog-standard, unimaginative arrangement and a singer whose emotional range stretches only to “diffident” and “petulant”.
[4]

Matt Cibula: Very much not my sort of thing but I like it just fine for what it is. Extra love for the specificity of the conflict in the relationship; demerits though for not being A House. (Sometimes I think On Our Big Fat Merry-Go-Round is the best-constructed album of all time.)
[6]

Rodney J. Greene: Trashed but tuneful garage-band bad girliness. Manages to be coy and unapologetic and winsome all at once. I bet they’re a blast to hang out with.
[7]

Martin Kavka: For an allegedly out lesbian, Kate Cooper is remarkably cagey about her pronouns: “This is a song for the one that I love / I haven’t met them yet.” Still, it’s been a long time since indie was this plain, honest, and, well… indie.
[7]

Iain Forrester: I really like the earthy, rough feel to this, splashy drums and all. It’s appropriate for lines like “I want to screw around in the dark”, lends an urgency throughout and is a fine workaround for a less than naturally gifted singer. The feel is quite Stories From the City and gets a fair bit closer to the successes of PJ Harvey than some others, like Howling Bells, have managed.
[7]

Ian Mathers: The vocal resemblance to Tegan or Sara is kind of distracting, but I’m not sure that duo ever came up with as compelling a tension as the one this singer generates between the way “Camp Out” starts out frightened of the possibility of never finding love and ends with her stating “you want to camp out / and I want to fuck around / in the dark.” Songs about relationships that are neither idealized nor ending (yet) are surprisingly rare on the ground, and “Camp Out”’s blunt honesty and rhythmic drive makes for one of the better examples the form has seen recently.
[7]

Michaelangelo Matos: I already liked the rough, loose music before deciding to sit down and concentrate on what the stray lines that kept jumping out at me might add up to. Then I noticed Kate Cooper’s opening salvo: “This is a song for the one I love/I haven’t met them yet/But I’m quietly confident”. Maybe she is, but her guitar isn’t quiet atall, and by the time she got to “My hips won’t give anything/Not tonight, not to you/But I think we both know you will stay”, I had to admit she was right. Want to hear the rest of this album bad.
[8]

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=1709

Let’s have a war! We haven’t had a war in ages! Come on, let’s have a war!…

[Video][Myspace]
[6.00]

Martin Skidmore: I haven’t made up my mind about them. At times there is something deeply interesting about what they are doing, at other times they just irritate. Their approach to music and lyrics and flow are all distinctive, which is valuable, but I don’t think it always works. This is fun and oddly thought-provoking, but I am not keen on the instrumentation.
[6]

David Cooper Moore: There are a several factors worth considering when trying to understand why this seemingly throwaway novelty has somehow been such an enduring, even transcI’M AT THE PIZZA HUT! I’M AT THE TACO BELL! I’M AT THE COMBINATION PIZZA HUT AND TACO BELL! I’M AT THE PIZZA HUUUUUUUT, I’M AT THE TACO BEEEELLL….I’M AT THAT COMBINATION PEE-ZA HUT’N’ TAH-CO BELL. (i’m at the PIZZA hut. i’m at the TACO bell. i’m at the COMMMMbination PIZZA hut and TACO bell.)
[10]

Tal Rosenberg: PIZZA HUT! COM-BI-NATION PIZZA HUT AND TACO BELL! TACO BELL! COMBINATION COMBINATION! PIZZA HUT AND TACO BELL! I GOT THAT PESCADO SMELL! Greatness lies at the heart of the absurd. TACO BELL! PIZZA HUT AND TACO BELL! COMBINATION TACO BELL! PIZZA HUT! PESCADO SMELL! I ROLL A LOTTA Ls! PIZZA HUT AND TACO BELL!
[9]

Chris Boeckmann: After hearing this song, I told a lot of my friends about it. It took me, oh, 12 hours to regret that decision. Somehow I doubt I’m alone. This is how shit like “The Macarena” happens. I don’t know how, but we just barely escaped pop culture catastrophe.
[2]

Martin Kavka: Can the subaltern rap? Not these guys. Can privileged diasporic kids pull the wool over NY critics’ eyes by dropping the names of various theorists of race and postcolonial identity? Sadly, yes.
[1]

Chuck Eddy: Definitely wins the Best Song Of 2009 By Any Duo That Wrote A Halfway Coherent Response to a Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker Essay About The Death Of Hip-hop Award. And it’s also one of the year’s best songs, period, thanks at least as much to the sound — the utter off-kilter dance-punk propulsion of the guitars/horns/voices in the Wallpaper remix — as to the water-torture lyrical conceipt that unsurprisingly aggravates novelty haters so much. Me, I’m a novelty lover, and what this mostly reminds me of is “Cookie Puss,” the Beastie Boys’ very first rap single from 1983, which was probably no more or less legitimately hip-hop than this is. But I don’t expect these guys will ever make any records I love more than this one.
[9]

Matt Cibula: Oh, the war within me about this song. Suffice it to say that the bad guy won and got to rate this blurb.
[7]

Ian Mathers: Wasn’t this a sketch on Mad TV? One point for the “that taco smell, that pescado smell” part, which was at least funny the first time.
[1]

Jonathan Bradley: Das Racist stop just barely short of sensical here; their musical “Who’s on First” skit doesn’t actually include a punchline. Even if one of the guys is thinking Pizza Hut, and the other is thinking Taco Bell, it shouldn’t take this much talk to clear up their precise location; these collaborative franchises tend to make clear both chains are represented within their walls. The joke, if it is a joke, works at a liminal level; the gag disappears if you see it anywhere but out of the corner of your eye. Yet maybe this is merely evidence of my desire to contrive cleverness out of grand stupidity: “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” really works because its shouted confusion and insistent funk bass is distinctly reminiscent of the experience of ending up in a crowded fast food restaurant after a night out. There’s a lot of noise, people are yelling at each other trying to work out what’s happening now and what’s going to happen next, and amidst fluorescent lights, fast-food grease and barely-appetizing odors, the party goes on.
[10]

Alex Macpherson: I hate comedians so much. Dude speaks like he’s mugging to the camera like a twat, and with every new line — particularly the hahas — I purse my lips further in disgust. There is nothing to this unnecessarily extended skit beyond the joke, and the joke isn’t funny. KM fucking T.
[0]

Edward Okulicz: If you had to listen in on the conversation in person, you’d want to throttle one or both of Das Racist but, man, when Wallpaper’s FAT CHUNKY RIFF OF DEATH comes in, it’s pretty much play along and love it, or turn into a ranting ball of hate at how astonishingly inane it all is. I choose love.
[9]

Kat Stevens: When I clicked on that link back in April, I’m not sure why I kept listening past the first 44 seconds of tuneless dumb stoner wailing. But I’m so glad I did – at second number 45 the track explodes into furious Pigbag ska-bosh, converting anxiety and revulsion into mirth and celebration. And countless internet memes which I feel partially responsible for kicking off (sorry). I doff my hat to Wallpaper: they have polished a turd so hard it’s turned into a glorious titanium Colossus.
[10]

John Seroff: Not since Gay Bar has a novelty song been so meaningless, loopy and exciting. A lot of the appeal is in the rumbling low-rider roll of droning synth-sax, sandy percussion and hot-dogging power-chord guitar; even sans lyrics this is still a stoner movie soundtrack waiting to happen. But I suspect the lynch-pin is in the pronunciation; the constant repetition of “COMbinashun piece’a huh ‘n’ takkabell” ouroboros past rationality into a pretzel of nothing that’s just as nutty and stoopid as Lexie Mountain’s Hot Dogs but much more catchy. Quoth the band: “At one of our first shows, we just started repeating that line over and over and people seemed to like it, because people seem to like dumb shit. I know I like dumb shit.” Forget Jamaica Avenue, this party is on at the corner of Alfred Jarry and Dr. Demento. Bring your own weed.
[8]

Erika Villani: Okay, true story: I was hanging out with my two best friends, Stephanie and Jaime (who lives in Brooklyn), and we had spent the whole Saturday sitting on my bedroom floor, sharing two pizzas, two pints of Ben & Jerry’s, and a few six-packs of blackberry beer while we listened to Hannah Montana and our favorite songs from High School Musical 3. When we ran out of Disney Channel music, I was like, “You know what you guys have to hear?” and played them this and Cazwell’s “I Seen Beyonce” back-to-back. Jaime borrowed my MacBook so she could Tumblr about it, then spent five minutes giggling to herself and said, “Oh, Internet,” and I took my MacBook back so I could Tumblr about that. And the whole time, Stephanie was @replying celebrities on Twitter. So, in conclusion, this is either the best or worst song in the whole world, and I honestly can’t tell which.
[5]

Anthony Miccio: Less than the sum of its parts.
[1]

Rodney J. Greene: Nothing against electro novelties on principle, but this could only benefit from less crazy stupid vocals and more crazy stupid beats.
[4]

Frank Kogan: The absurdist routine is already impossible to fend off when, 44 seconds in, the Wallpaper guys turn this into goth funk and do serious damage; meanwhile the Cheecher and Chonger in the spotlight continue emphatically not to get their bearings.
[9]

Jordan Sargent: What’s great about this is that it plays out like an extended introduction sequence for a superhero TV show where the heroes get too stoned to even coordinate their good samaritan endeavors. And the ridiculousness is both funny and not cloying, the way the middle verse just devolves into near incoherence -— “I got that taco smell” -— is pretty much the humor that you get when this amount of marijuana is involved. Which is why I can understand if people find this annoying, but I love it.
[8]

Anthony Easton: In a world of 3OH!3 I remain unconvinced of the genius of Das Racist.
[5]

Occasionally, we must all find time in our day to reflect on just how ridiculously awesome Annie Lennox once was. This video, which is now 26 years old, still looks like it could’ve been made yesterday. Don’t get me wrong, I love Lady Gaga… but I bet Annie Lennox has forgotten more about pop music and the art of music video than Stefani Germanotta will ever learn.

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2009/12/ft-advent-calendar-1st-december/

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=16364

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/wedge/2009/12/frightening-force/

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=16374

jengrrrl

thrace_

Blake Lively

Leighton Meester

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2009/12/the-ft-top-100-tracks-of-all-time-20-chic-good-times/

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=16352

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=1703

Yeah, he doesn’t seem to get photographed much, this lad…

[Video][Myspace]
[7.22]

Tal Rosenberg: Luxury on high speed. The dance floor on low speed. Just cruising. Gorgeously.
[9]

Matt Cibula: Adorable. Sublime. Slightly boring.
[6]

Ian Mathers: This smoothly executed slow burn sounds kind of like the kind of track I imagine Daft Punk’s “Emotion” was fondly making fun of. Nothing much happens for six minutes, and the singer seems kind of disengaged for the sentiment she’s expressing, but it’s hard to resent the sweet spot Jones spends so much time massaging here.
[6]

Martin Skidmore: The bassline is very close to Chic’s magnificent “Good Times”, as is the guitar playing, but this is subdued house, with a rather lovely and soulful female vocal. I feel as if it needed something more in the music, or some more words for the vocalist to sing, as I got a bit bored after halfway, but there is a warmth here that I like.
[6]

Rodney J. Greene: Somewhat slavish nu-disco with a ghost-in-the-machine vocal and synthonic bridges that compulsively warp between key signatures in search of an unattainable higher level. Jones manages to do everything right and this is totally enjoyable, but, like those synths, he never quite finds the spark he’s looking for.
[8]

Martin Kavka: This DFA-distributed house track is most notable for having key changes that come out of left field the first time you hear it. Subsequent listens are a letdown.
[5]

Michaelangelo Matos: You can dismiss this as mere retro if you like. It sounds precisely, utterly like circa-’82 roller-boogie electro, with the same guitar plucks and Prelue Records-era plastic synths, both warmer in retrospect, and in Jones’s hands more overtly melancholy, which the low-medium tempo aids. So little changes musically that when the chords switch up at 2:57 on the bridge (haha, “bridge”) the shift is unexpectedly huge, an emotional surge in a track pregnant with feeling but doing its best to keep everything in check. The throwback quality makes sense for a song whose only lyric (the title, not counting the occasional “oooh, na na”) communicates the kind of longing only deep immersion in memory can soothe. My single of the year.
[10]

Frank Kogan: I remember back in the day Boris Midney had a project appropriately called USA-European Connection. This reminds me of that sensibility, an international night world of lounges and discotheques and late-night bachelor pads, all painted smooth and slightly mysterious.
[8]

Mallory O’Donnell: The DFA label, despite any flirtation with trendiness or hype, have maintained the kind of quality control that Prelude or Easy Street must be futuractively jealous of. Which is to say they’re nothing more or less than the best disco label around, which is saying quite a lot. “Living Without Your Love” is a fine, if unsurprising outing, with a lovely vocoder-rippled lead vocal that will make you continue to never want to hear anything autotuned again. That said, it’s not a patch on the A-side, a melting boogie caramel of sweet wonky perfection.
[7]

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=1706

Somehow, probably still best known for working with Groove Armada. Oh, and “Dollar Sign”. Which is tremendous, btw…

[Video][Myspace]
[7.50]

Melissa Bradshaw: One of the most unmistakable, celebrated voices on the UK urban scene since garage over the toughest funky riddim: Banton plus Stush is the symbolic funky-bashment fusion from heaven. Absolutely one of the biggest hits on London floors this year.
[10]

Chuck Eddy: In the “Sirens Remix,” $tush is as much a siren as the actual sirens when she wants to be — i.e., her ear-piercingly squeaky “Fuck! you and Fuck! your playlist” part. And otherwise, she’s the police car itself, speeding to run you down.
[8]

Anthony Easton: I am impressed by how quickly she works, and the Minnie Mouse squeaks.
[6]

Alex Macpherson: Hard House Banton’s loose-limbed “Sirens” was one of those club tracks that seemed both so rhythmically fucked-up and such a satisfyingly complete entity that you could never imagine anyone even attempting to vocal it, let alone improving on it by doing so. After hearing “We Nuh Run”, you can’t imagine how “Sirens” ever existed before Stush got her hands on it. Her patois-driven, pissed-off, nineteen-to-the-dozen chat transforms a house instrumental into a batty-shaking, waist-wining soca anthem; she rides the twists and turns of the galloping beat with ease, tongue-lashing everything from the racism of the British media to girls giving her screwface in club toilets. “We Nuh Run” has the best intro of any song in 2009 – sirens and chants building the tension before Stush finally snaps with an attention-seizing opening line, “They don’t wanna have a pretty dark-skin gyal pon di TV,” at the precise moment that the bass drops. Incredibly, the song only gets better from there. Every few lines, there’s another example of why Stush is one of the best, most distinctive MCs around: her mocking mimicry of vacuous, insecure girls in the third verse’s comedy of manners, her outraged squeak of “DJs all refuse to play this – fuck you, and fuck your playlist!” She may sound like a fluffy animal, but this chipmunk has teeth that can fuck you up.
[10]

Edward Okulicz: Few have ever squealed with such gleeful, spontaneous enthusiasm or righteous command, though to be a bit of a downer, any particular part of this song is indistinguishable from another making it seem like it’s about nine minutes long. I have to admit, it wasn’t until I looked at the lyrics that I understood; they took me back to the time when I was five and hearing a swear word was like the worst thing ever, and Stush sounding like she actually is five most of the time completes the illusion.
[5]

Martin Skidmore: Modern dancehall, or something like that, with plenty of energy, but the prominent bassline sounds rather tentative, and I kept wanting the track to really explode. I really like Stush’s dancehally vocals, except when she breaks into squeals, but this never quite takes off as I was expecting.
[6]

Rodney J. Greene: A nails-tough voicing of Hard House Banton’s hectic UK funky anthem “Sirens,” Stush’s forceful chatter peppered with spontaneous squeals. Her mantra passes comment upon the riddim, as defiant of the implied boys in blue as any of her named nemeses.
[8]

Ian Mathers: While “We Nuh Run” is basically yet another version of the classic “I awesome and I will lay waste to all who oppose me” track, that stridency and momentum as well as the personality of Stush’s performance (”DJs who refuse to play this / FUCK you and FUCK your playlists!” is genuinely charming in context) raises it to the top of its class.
[7]

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2009/12/picos-de-europa-tetilla-cheesy-lovers-46-47/

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=16347

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=1718

Remember how we managed to score “Love etc.” over a 7 without anyone really expressing any enthusiasm for it? Well, this is sort of the reverse…

[Video][Myspace]
[6.00]

Alex Macpherson: For fuck’s sake, people, get over the robot thing. You are not cute.
[2]

Jonathan Bradley: Expressing emotional emptiness via automaton metaphors is now as hackneyed as rhyming “honey” and “money,” or “city” and “lights are pretty,” but this little Beautiful Small Machines number is so disarmingly left-field that I’ll give them a pass for this one. The most bizarre — and prospectively grating — aspect of the song is its odd collision of twee pop and chirpy Venga Boys-derived Eurodance; as tinny as it is, that four-to-the-floor thump sounds like its fresh out of late ’90s Ibiza. Seems lobotomized pop-ravers are an excellent match for arrested-development indie kids, though, because “Robots in Love” aches deliciously. The android conceit is simply unnecessary while Bree Sharp can name drop “QotSA” and Aqua Teen, or sketch sweet scenes like, “When he said, ‘I love you girl’/It was four in the morning… It should have come with a warning.” Utterly charming. (Also, Sharp rhymes “started to malfunction” with “hit me like a punch in.” No reason to mention that, but: credit where credit is due.)
[7]

Anthony Miccio: The chorus metaphor doesn’t cohere nearly enough to forgive including a cliche as moldy as “push comes to shove,” but the song stands out from the tweelectronica pack all the same, with Bree Sharp’s country-pop vocals and a Franz Ferdinand break after the first chorus that’s oddly never revisited. Sadly, these are just the kind of quirks that would get smoothed out if they brought in pros to fix the lyrics.
[7]

Rodney J. Greene: The singer’s unappealing yet characterless voice is mixed front and center, but I’m not sure subsuming it into the tinny production would help other than to obscure some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard. Not only does this contain the most hackneyed expression of the digital love cliche yet, but it is littered with insultingly obvious rhymes and dealbreaker pop-cult references. The opening lines are “QotSA on the hi-fi/ We were talking via wi-fi/ So much Aqua Teen and sci-fi,” and it only gets worse from there. I pressed stop in disbelief after “In the afternoons/ When we lay like spoons,” and left myself to wonder if this took place in June.
[1]

Michaelangelo Matos: Very catchy mid-’90s alt, but when I honed in on the words — “Then we started to malfunction/Then it hit me like a punch in all our hours of connection and affection/When he said ‘I love you, girl’/It was only science fiction” (yep, she hollers it triumphantly, as if she’d punched the air so hard when she wrote the lines that she’d share that euphoria with the rest of us) — the whole thing went clunk.
[5]

Anthony Easton: If love is like Arithmetic, and Sex is Calculus, then romance has nothing to do with biology. For some reason, this song talks to me as both a man and as an aspie, who has spent the last year on one set of romantic disasters after another. We should take the chorus as an ironic attachment to some kind of refusal.
[8]

Martin Kavka: A genrefuck elegy for the decade coming to an end. The first verse sounds like I Am The World Trade Center remixing Usher (while namechecking Queens of the Stone Age!). The song then drives through Kelly Clarkson Done Wrong subdivision before making a right turn at Disco Strings Boulevard, a left at Throbbing Indie Bass Lane, and finally parking at The House Of Pure Pop.
[9]

Ian Mathers: Well, the first seventy-five seconds here proves to me that someone can adapt Owl City’s sonic and lyrical approach enough to make me not completely hate it, but once the guitars come in I suddenly notice how much that (pretty good) chorus sort of reminds me of modern pop country. And then there’s strings for a second. And the middle eight is kind of a mess. In fact the whole thing is kind of a mess in that everything-but-the-kitchen sink way, but the chorus does manage to tie it all together, and “Robots in Love” sprawls in a way that’s lovable, not annoying.
[7]

Iain Forrester: Bubbly, instant electronic pop meets pure-voiced country inflected heartbreak. Sounds like a combination of the best of Taylor Swift and The Postal Service, though neither would pull off ‘wi-fi/hi-fi’ or the ‘erotic exploration’ line with such a light touch. Heads straight to the top of the 2009 robot love pile ahead of “The Girl and the Robot”, “I Am Not a Robot” et al.
[9]

Matt Cibula: Got some love for Bree, and very much like the direction she’s headed here, especially with the disco strings undercutting the song’s basic wispiness.
[7]

Chuck Eddy: Her singing is hardly devoid of blood running through it, but she still manages to seem way more like an automaton than the synths (which start out really catchy). Pretty sure that’s not what she means when she calls herself a robot.
[4]

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/pop/2009/12/the-ft-top-100-tracks-of-all-time-22-joy-division-%e2%80%93-love-will-tear-us-apart-and-21-scooter-%e2%80%93-ramp-the-logical-song/

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=16225

http://katstevens.tumblr.com/post/264738080

Vampire Weekend - Cousins.

It’s lovely to see good use of the z-axis in a music video, even though i) going back and forth in an alleyway doesn’t necessarily restrict things to one dimension ii) I keep expecting a flashing police light to pop up at the bottom of the screen.