Mixtape 14: Late July 2005

1. Secret Machines – Nowhere Again
2. Frank Black – Space is Gonna Do Me Good
3. Wilderness – End of Freedom
4. My Bloody Valentine – When You Sleep
5. Gorillaz – DARE (Video)
6. This Bike is a Pipe Bomb – Selma
7. Pixies – Allison
8. Silver Jews – Punks in the Beerlight (Video)
9. Death from Above 1979 – Blood on Our Hands (Justice Remix)
10. The Geraldine Fibbers – Yoo Doo Right (Can cover)

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Sometime around here is when I began to read Richard Fariña's brilliant novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. It had been recommended to me by a trusted friend as "the darkest, funniest book ever," an understatement. I can't describe the connection I felt with the text, the author (who died in a motorcycle accident the night of a party celebrating the book's release), and the friend, when it comes down to it. I won't get all the way into it--suffice to say that the book is brilliant, and, what's more, it's inextricably linked in my mind with this playlist.
The Secret Machines track is yet another one of those songs that had been hanging around my iPod for some time just waiting to come up on shuffle. "Nowhere Again" is probably the closest my mixes have ever come to straightforward rock. It's got a hook like a Jackson Five song or something, where you don't even need more than one listen for it to sink in. Or a New Edition song. Or a Backstreet Boys song. I like it, though, really. "End of Freedom" falls on the other end of the spectrum. It builds slow, with a hypnotic layered drum riff that soon is accompanied by a single feedback-strained guitar, not unlike Sigur Rós in its gradual build, and the fact that it sounds like a bow is doing most of the work. When Wilderness' frontman Jason Johnson's bizarre, almost atonal vocals are added to the mix, the effect is kind of eerie. The new Silver Jews record started floating about around this time, and "Punks in the Beerlight" is a pretty good representative of the entire Tanglewood Numbers aesthetic: first of all, even though Daniel Berman has gone electric, he hasn't abandoned the usual cast of fringe of society characters that populate his songs. The Dylan comparisons don't end there, but I'll leave them and focus instead on the lyrics. On paper, or screen or whatever, they may seem kind of purposefully dumb or, at best, somewhat maudlin. The delivery, though, will have you believing otherwise. It's kind of refreshing to hear a love song that's completely free of irony (especially one on which Stephen Malkmus plays). Namedropping Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, of all people, may seem like something Pavement might have done. I can see Malkmus in the video with all the hair in his eyes (maybe he's even winking underneath, but who can tell). But Berman means it. He even means "I'll always love you to the max."