Mixtape 13: Early July 2005

1. Stephen Malkmus – Pencil Rot
2. Name Withheld
3. Le Tigre – Deceptacon
4. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – In This Home on Ice
5. The New Pornographers – The Jessica Numbers
6. Sufjan Stevens – The Lord God Bird
7. The Mountain Goats – Dance Music
8. Jeff Mangum – Engine (Stream)
9. Pavement – Major Leagues
10. Destroyer – It’s Gonna Take an Airplane (Stream)

* * * * *

Summer, in the city, is the best thing in the world. I didn't really get that until this year, for some reason--I always said that I couldn't stand the weather, that there was no good TV on, etc. I guess all this is still mostly true, but there's also a real joy to life in the summer. Or maybe I just loved this playlist that much. "Pencil Rot" is an opening track if I've ever heard one. Not since Radiohead's "Optimistic" has a song burst out of the gate with the same kind of confident rock swagger. Whenever sports stars tell reporters that their favorite song is "In Da Club" or "Eye of the Tiger" because it "pumps them up," I wonder why they don't just try a song like this. "In This Home on Ice" is glorious, one of those songs where you wonder how it was only just produced now for the first time; it seems so obvious in retrospect. "The Jessica Numbers" starts off with gunfire-like staccato strums, and then explodes into the frenzied Canadian superpop we all know and love. It has the time signature tweaks we've all come to expect from The New Pornographers, along with poppy, almost Motown-sounding harmonies. "The Lord God Bird" is from NPR's All Things Considered, which hired Stevens to write a song about Brinkley, Arkansas (read all about it here). It's pretty good, but a little frightening now that I know that Stevens is hella Christian. My mp3 of "Engine" is from Mangum's most recent known show (excluding his appearances with The Olivia Tremor Control and Elf Power), on February 4th, 2001 in New Zealand. He introduces it as "a children's song," and proceeds to drop a melody worthy of Francis Scott motherfucking Key. The Destroyer song is my way of almost cheating (I don't use more than one track by the same artist on any given playlist) but then, the New Pornographers and Destroyer play tremendously different music, and "The Jessica Numbers" isn't a Bejar song anyway. "It's Gonna Take an Airplane" is kind of theatrical, I guess, and maybe even a little melodramatic. But it's pretty, and there are handclaps.