Mixtape 23: Early December 2005

1. Belle and Sebastian – The Blues are Still Blue
2. Sunburned Hand of the Man – Flying Colours
3. Akron/Family – I’ll Be on the Water
4. Sonic Youth – Disconnection Notice
5. Destroyer – Painter in Your Pocket
6. Mogwai – Travel is Dangerous
7. Fannypack – Seven One Eight
8. Nouvelle Vague – In a Manner of Speaking
9. A Band of Bees – Chicken Payback
10. Caribou – Bees

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As 2005 wound down, I admit it, I started to celebrate a bit prematurely. The idea of a full year during which I lived and breathed bitchin' music had been a little overwhelming at the outset, and I was (and remain) pretty proud of myself for making it the whole way through. That said, I might have lost a little focus. I ended up padding the end of this playlist the day before it was due. It's still a good mix, I think, but I also know it could have been better.
"The Blues Are Still Blue" finds our friends in Belle and Sebastian back in the mood to cull through an era of popular music and select for themselves only the juiciest pieces. Here they've settled on a choice cut of T.Rex/Stones swagger rock and infused it with their own unique lyrical sensibility, composed of equal parts anachronistic references and misused hepcat koans ("teaching mamas and papas how to be a little cool", etc.), a child's idea of what's rad. The whole thing, unsurprisingly, ends up being damn fun.
I think in the last post I called Liars' "It Fit When I Was a Kid" scary-sounding, but I didn't know scary until Sunburned Hand of the Man came a-knockin'. These experimental funk crazies make music so unnerving that I had to select the tamest track from their album No Magic Man for fear that any other song, upon multiple listens, would transmit into my brain the coordinates for the welcoming celebration of the reborn spirit of Horus on the eve of the winter solstice or something. I have enough things about which I can legitimately freak out; I wasn't ready to subject myself to any more.
Akron/Family jump genres like it ain't no thang. They're ridiculously talented, sure, but they're also fearless. "I'll Be on the Water" is a hushed pastoral lullaby, simple and confident. But it's also something else: timeless. It's not only that the melody could have been heard floating on what must have been the smoke-filled air of the Newport Folk Festival (now the Dunkin' Donuts Folk Festival, if I'm not mistaken) in the early sixties, but rather a whole air of authenticity that the song embodies, bolstered no doubt by the lo-fi recording, just a guy and his guitar, takin' care of bizness, though what he's really doing is calling out to a lover, "If you have to stay / I'll be on the water / Catching the next wave / You can meet me where it breaks." There's a real joy in this song, an easy kind, where it's okay just being alive.