Mixtape 17: Early September 2005

1. The Fiery Furnaces – Mason City
2. The Double – Icy
3. The Silver Jews – Animal Shapes
4. Jonathan Fire*Eater – The Shape of Things That Never Came
5. The Max Levine Ensemble – Fuck You I’m Not PC?
6. TV on the Radio – Dry Drunk Emperor
7. Spoon – He Was Soon to Undergo an Experience
8. Fatlip – What’s Up Fatlip? (Video)
9. A.C. Newman – Homemade Bombs in the Afternoon
10. Why? – Yo Yo Bye Bye

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I try to allow myself at least one opportunity every year to scoff at hype--to ignore critical darlings, and further to deride them and their success. It allows me to stay free of critical groupthink, so I can avoid following the herd and saying ridiculous and untrue shit like "Interpol sounds like Joy Division." I like to be able, every now and then, to listen to a band and say "Fuck the hype." In 2004, that band was The Fiery Furnaces (well, them and Joanna Newsom). I gave them a shot back somewhere around the time when Rob Mitchum of Pitchfork said that Blueberry Boat changed the way he thought about music forever, or something like that. I was unimpressed, to put it kindly. If the Broadway-style melodies weren't enough to turn me off, I wasn't loving Eleanor Friedberger's nonchalant, half-spoken vocal delivery. The instrumentation was interesting, but the arrangement seemed deliberately bizarre, and unnecessarily overproduced. The verdict was in: Blueberry Boat stayed on my iPod, but not in my heart.
Well, perhaps I just needed time. I came back to Blueberry Boat on September 7th, on the recommendation of a homie. Doing a little preliminary investigation, I noticed that "Mason City" was the most downloaded Furnaces track on iTunes. I gave it a shot and, wait a second, it was glorious. I saw through the hype. I suppose I could finally appreciate the music now it was out of the context of endless buzz. The complex and beautiful melodies, the wonderfully bitchy lyrics, even the vocals--I appreciated these and more in a way that I could not have in the fall of 2004. "Mason City" is probably the most accessible track on Blueberry Boat. It's got three relatively straightforward sections, the first and last sung by Eleanor and the second brought to us by Matt, the unsung Jonny Greenwood of the group. The two-person group. The band is redeemed in my eyes, and so is Rob Mitchum.
But I still don't like Joanna Newsom.
A final note on this list: TV on the Radio's "Dry Drunk Emperor" was released online for free download on September 8 in response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. It's one of the great songs of 2005, and its lyrics can be found here.