Mixtape 11: Early June 2005

1. Why? – Pantone Cyan

2. The White Stripes – My Doorbell
3. The Mountain Goats – Palmcorder Yajna
4. Animal Collective featuring Vashti Bunyan – I Remember Learning How to Dive
5. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Black
6. The Fucking Champs – Never Enough Neck 1
7. Lotion – Sandra
8. We Are Wolves – Little Birds
9. Sonic Youth – Unmade Bed
10. The Jam – Away From the Numbers

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For much of the time since June, I've considered this my absolute worst playlist. I felt that several of the songs were weak, that the mix didn't form anything cohesive, that each song was added just for the sake of doing so. Recently, I've begun to reconsider. While there are a couple of missteps (the Animal Collective track, blasphemy or no, is pretty boring), there are also some gems. "Palmcorder Yajna" is an immensely satisfying rock song, the kind that could have been written 30 years ago, if not for some weird lyrical non sequiturs the likes of which didn't really rear their head in the '70s. "Black" finds Will Oldham churning out another quietly devastating folk dirge. Here, as on just about all of I See a Darkness, it comes down to Oldham's voice, his guitar, and to a lesser extent his beard. The lyrics, though somewhat detached and concerned with wordplay, have a real beating heart: "And as a friend, and as a comrade / and all the things that these implied / I made him leave what it was that he had / used to keep us unallied." I became interested in Lotion's 1996 album Nobody's Cool initially for the same reason many did: the Thomas Pynchon-penned liner notes. The music is not too shabby either--"Sandra" is a classic love song, except all the things that were only hinted at in the old standards and ballads of the 50s are explicitly stated here. It kind of goes as far as one can go. "Unmade Bed" is Sonic Youth as Murray Street's Radical Adults, a little older, a little wiser, unafraid to take their time, let the melody repeat, build on itself, form intricate patterns. Now that I write it, though, I realize that that's what they've always done, so maybe they haven't really matured at all.
Also, while I'm not one for tooting my own horn, I would like to mention that now that We Are Wolves is getting so much press and is riding the kind of hype wave previously reserved for a certain other lupine band of Canadians, I was there six months ago. That's all.