Best Shows I Watched in 2009

I would have difficulty coming up with a top ten list of best albums for this year and I've been posting the individual tracks that I got excited about throughout 2009, so instead I'm just going to post a list of 10 television shows that I loved.

It's kind of shocking how much TV I've consumed this year. My job as a composer requires a lot of waiting - for files to bounce down - as well as breaks to decompress, when I've been at the studio for longer than 12 hours basically concentrating the entire time. So I like to come to work armed with TV series that I can watch and stop, watch and stop on my laptop, without needing to be commit hours of my full attention the way I would with a movie. The comedies work best for this, like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Eastbound and Down. But so does the pulpier stuff like Dexter and Nurse Jackie.

I also think that TV is better art than ever. With the quality takeover of cable over network programming, as well as the built-in space of serialized television to tell a story slowly over the course of six months, there is more freedom available for cable shows to get it right. The Wire showed everybody how a detailed story produced in a way that took the viewer's intelligence for granted could have the same depth-of-experience payoffs as reading a good novel. And now shows like Damages and In Treatment are following suit with long story lines that build in cumulative power, as well as less serious stuff like Entourage and Hung that manage to be poignant through humor as well as maintaining long story arcs.

So here's my list with minimal commentary.

Mad Men - Nothing else can touch this show. It's like an immaculately scripted dream.

Damages - I predict that in the next year or so everybody is going to catch up to the brilliance that is Damages. Insanely addicting. This show is beyond good and evil, in the way The Wire was. Morality is beside the point. Glen Close plays a bitchy high-profile attorney who bullies and breaks the law to get what she wants. The non-linear format of this show is a huge part of why it works.

Hung - This show has a really unique tone to its funny. Ann Heche is hilarious as a psycho ex-wife trying to bond with her kids, and though the premise might seem far-fetched if spelled out in a one-sentence synopsis (high school gym coach becomes gigolo), the true genius of this show is how it makes it all seem so believable.

Glee - This show is insane (it's also the only one on this list on network TV). I personally hate musicals. And yet... It's kind of Election meets High School Musical (you almost know that's how it was pitched) and so it has both wholesome and subversive elements. There are also lots of allusions to other classic high-school-gone-wrong movies like Bring it On.

In Treatment - Gabriel Byrne's psychiatrist Paul Weston is probably the fictional character I feel the most empathy for (next to Bolano and Lima from The Savage Detectives). This show is definitely a slow-building storm and season 1 ended by blowing up Weston's life. Season 2 takes a bit of a calmer tack as he tries to put it back together, but I enjoyed the new patients and the new setting.

Jersey Shore - Guidos.

Nurse Jackie - Edie Falco's first show since The Sopranos, on which she was probably the best thing. A crabby nurse who goes through work high on pain killers, trying to do some good but really just trying to make it through the day. Funny and drab and very original.

Entourage - I never get tired of defending this show about shallow-ish dude-bros living in Hollywood. It works on different levels and I like them all.

Eastbound and Down - I couldn't get this show out of my head for weeks after watching it. The first season is a six-episoder which is basically one long movie cut into parts. Some of the blackest, most unrepentant humor available on the market. Like a bad dream re-imagining of Talledega Nights. Danny McBride is one of the best things in the new Comedy Mafia of Will Farrell and Judd Apatow's troupes. Super pathological character work on the level of Ricky Gervais in the original The Office.

Curb Your Enthusiasm - I have much in common with Larry David.

The Goode Family - Mike Judge (King of the Hill, Office Space, Idiocracy) has a new cartoon about well-meaning NPR-grade liberals who frustrate themselves to no end with their anxiety about living a PC lifestyle. To the people who will get the jokes, this is brutal but affectionate satire.

Midlake 4 Life

Something about these new Midlake tracks seems appropriate for the season. It's the cold end of the year, the ground is hard, the leaves have dropped dead and we too can let the past drop from our memories - and then we can start again.

There's a "Greensleeves" quality to Acts of Man with its fireplace warmth, gentle acoustic guitars, flutes and soiled mix that seems out of time, haunted and wrapped in ivy. I can't tell if he's singing about the wicked in power or just dethroning himself. Either way, I'm down.

Let's live in full this year. Happy holidays.
Daniel

Midlake - In the Ground [From Acts of Man]


Midlake - Rulers Ruling All Things [From Acts of Man]

Co-sign: Rihanna

I can't help but hear the tracks on Rihanna's new record in the context of her publicly getting the shit beat out of her, and then taking another beating in the press and on the blogs (oddly, in most of the black blogs I read I see more support for Chris Brown and a weirdly emotional hatred for Rihanna). Her response is to release a record cover where she's covering her eye up (so you don't see it's swelled shut) and a record - Rated R - that is so smart and aggressive it says: you've got the size but I've got the dignity. So I really dig the giant attitude she's bringing here. No victim. Some of my favorite cuts are "Hard," "G4L (Gangster for Life)" and "Rude Boy," in which she drops reverse misogynistic lyrics and sounds 50 feet tall, in bondage gear wielding a tech 9 and a designer strap-on. Lines like How'd I feel down there on your knees?

"Hard" is just producer/writer The Dream being The Dream. Listen to that track 50 times to know how smart it is. "G4L" sounds like a Bjork track from Vespertine, just way tougher, the chorus erupts into an anti-hook, pure emotion and 15 Rihannas moaning. And "Rude Boy" is sensationally wide and so, so filthy. It's a great move bringing the Caribean term "Rude Boy" into American pop culture.

I like my pop this raunchy and I love Rihanna's swinging dick.

Rihanna "Rude Boy"


Rihanna "G4L"

Daniel - Damn (I Wish I Was Your Lover)

Daniel "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover"


Get it at iTunes.

R Les for Pres

There is nobody else doing what Ryan Leslie is doing right now. He's found some sweet middle ground between Dilla-ugly concepts of what a beat can be, futuristic synth pop production, moody D'Angelo-isms and black top 40 r'n'b writing. The complaint about Leslie is that he never goes far enough out down either road - experimental or pop accessibility - but I like the balance and minimalism. So much of the best black music today is ruined with obnoxious lyrics, fatuous track lengths, invisible session players and a reliance on tacky cameos. I like that R Les plays his own instruments, keeps his songs short and his productions lean, and that he doesn't manage to spout out anything so fucking morally prehistoric that it's a deal breaker for even my already crass sensibilities.

Transition is his second record in '09. To which I say, WTF. Possibly he rushed this thing out, but I think it benefits from not being fussed over. It seems impossible, but I think it's even more stripped down than his previous release, Ryan Leslie. Some of the production on that album had a little bit more futurism and rough edges, which is missed, but song-for-song, this might be my favorite.

Download a live recording of Ryan Performing his fantastic single "Something That I Like" earlier this summer. Then listen to some streams from the record (including that same single, featuring Pusha T from Clipse) and aquire this music for yourself.

mp3 Ryan Leslie "Something That I Like (Live at the Penthouse)

Ryan Leslie "Something That I Like (Feat. Pusha T.)"



Ryan Leslie "All My Love"



Ryan Leslie "Zodiac"

Ennio Morricone - State of Grace Opening Titles

I can't answer why State of Grace (1990) is not held in higher, more revered esteem. It's an Irish gangster movie set in Hell's Kitchen featuring Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, Gary Oldman and Ed Harris. Beyond being a near flawless movie I'll always remember it for having the only love scene I can think of in cinema that actually approaches reality.

I also can't answer why Ennio Morricone's masterful score is not in print, or why no performed and recorded version of any of this score's titles was ever produced on one of Morricone's greatest hits compilations. (There is one version of State of Grace I saw on iTunes (on Ennio Morricone: Film Music Maestro), but it's a pretty shitty synthesized fake.

So here's a rip I made of the opening titles, using my laptop. It's such an amazing use of orchestral color. Morricone always did his own orchestrations and it's hard to think of any film composer working today who can get this kind of texture. They just don't make em like this anymore.

I love the way this piece falls effortlessly back and forth between major and minor keys, like someone drifting in and out of sleep. It sets the tone for a great story about fragile things in the thorns of violence.

You're welcome!

Ennio Morricone - State of Grace Opening Titles

We Were Once A Fairy Tale

Spike Jonze / We Were Once A Fairytale from background on Vimeo.

Spike Jonze is killing me these days. I find it an encouraging testament to the elasticity of human potential to watch a skater kid turn into one of the preeminent philosophers of our time. Where The Wild Things Are was part Camus, part Cassavettes and completely without filters. I felt something every second of that film. At the end Claire and I are both wiping our eyes and I realize that, because Jonze's story was told from such a deep, subconscious place, Claire and I, 6-year-old daughter and father, were able to experience a movie from an identical vantage point for the first time ever. To our reptilian, primal brains, we're all the same age.

Jonze has also just released a short film starring Kanye West called We Were Once a Fairy Tale and I suppose some people will think it's too abstract to accept, or even dig it for its abstraction as kind of unassailably out. For all its magical realism it seemed pretty straightforward to me, and again Jonze is defying filters by tweaking the public shortcomings of his film's lead actor - getting under the dirty fingernails of fame, a trapping Kanye West has been vocally struggling with. Gutsy all around. West, in a white tux, makes an ass of himself at a high-class club (his performance is so believable I have to wonder if he actually got drunk to to it), wanders into a bathroom, vomits a gush of rose petals, and then comes face to face with his own demon, literally.

Watch this with headphones on because the sound design is overwhelming. The whole time you'll feel like you're in a womb.

El Perro Del Mar

This album makes up for the lack of new Sade and Kate Bush albums in the world.

El Perro Del Mar - "Change of Heart"


El Perro Del Mar - "Heavenly Arms"

Repost: Fennesz's Full Blast

Followers of the Hebrew g-d believe that h-s name is so holy it can't be spoken, only referred to. Muslims believe it's a sin to make an image of their prophet, and aboriginal Australians won't let you take their photograph lest you capture their soul. I'm a shitty mystic, but there is something about the music of Christian Fennesz that makes me want to avert my descriptive gaze - to shuffle in backwards, eyes downcast, to the sacred temple of his sound when trying to write about it. It would seem crude to do anything like talk about process, or actual instrumentation, or, g-d forbid, his software. Because in the end it all ends up dumped in a sea. The black fathoms of hot crackling blast. The liquid void. The holy drone of his music.

This time last year I was compiling a year-end best-of list of sorts and a sentence kept popping up in my mind that I never posted: the best album of 2007 was the one Fennesz never released. By that I didn't mean that I had gotten my hands on a leaked draft of a new work by the Austrian sound sorcerer; I meant that 2007 was both the year of my discovery of Fennesz and the period of my life most suited to resonate with the disembodied beauty of his work. It was a year of psychic house cleaning during which I destroyed more fixtures of false belief than ever before. I spent a lot of hours staring at candles, cross-legged on wood floors in dark rooms, fighting with silence. Hours of peeling away the layers of mental dust and paint that had caked onto the walls of my thought. It was subtractive work - taking my mind down to its most minimal, looking for the Still, Small Voice underneath it all. I don't know what, if anything, I found in all that subtraction, but what stayed with me was a better sense of my environment and a certainty that the great spiritual battle of our time is to make war with clutter - the full blast of stimulation and information gushing at us on a daily basis. (Sadly, I'm barely fighting it. I spend more time on my computer than ever. If this blog goes dark, feel free to hope that I left to care for my soul.)

The more I allowed myself to melt the more Fennesz I played. On thick summer nights I'd find the room with the best cross breeze, throw a mattress down and smoke out to Venice. As I listened with chemically widened ears, I knew that Fennesz was making the true music of our age. An ambient requiem for an entire generation of souls sizzling in a digital frying pan - cell phones, microwave ovens and power lines, piping us full of disease and bathing us in a black sea of anxiety. Fennesz, it seemed to me, was the only artist making any music of spiritual concern. It was wordless, wide stuff. Our own voices, bouncing back to us off canyon-like walls of city buildings in reflections of distortion and smeared melodies.

That summer I also took Salvia, the diviner's sage, a few times. I loved and respected it as a leafy portal to lucid dreaming as well as a dangerously powerful magnifier. With Salvia environment is key because it will take the slighest sights and sounds in the room with you and project them up on a massive wall like flickering puppet shadows cast ghoulishly by candles. Idiots cocktail the stuff like a party drug and get sucked screaming out windows and have their souls steam-rolled like doomed 'toons in a Warner Bros. cartoon. I only did it alone, in silence and in the dark. But this one night I was careless and took too big a hit. I came to on all fours, sweating the shapes of my forearms and shins onto my yoga mat, without memory. The fan of my macbook's hard drive eight feet away, a barely perceptible hum under normal circumstances, became a deafening helicopter blade chopping the air just above my head and descending upon my bedroom like the whirling, flaming sword of an archangel.

That Salvia trip taught me something about our true natures and how we weaken them. That we humans are engines of power and dream who muffle the godlike boom of our souls by smothering them in paper-mache nests that we build our whole lives, strip by flimsy strip, until they are as hard and containing as a bomb shield. A piece of information here, some empty stimulation there. NPR, cable, radio, magazines, blogs, records, movies. We're caked over in false security like the shivering homeless - passed out on winter benches, swaddled in makeshift newspaper blankets.

That is what Fennesz's music sounds like - the quiet beneath the debris. It's a vital hum that never competes, never tries to rise above our filters. We can only go diving for it, and once submerged we are given over to dream. Sitting down for the first time to listen to Fennesz's new recordings, Black Sea, immersed in headphones and staring out the window at a heavy snowfall, I saw things. I saw a lumbering dark giant carrying a black Santa sack over his shoulder in which he carried light. I saw him sidle up to the side of a house at night and peek down into its chimney. I saw the giant dump the contents of his bag down the chimney like an electric Pentecost which poured through the home, blanketing every sleeping person in it in currents of white-hot healing.

Fennesz - "Glide" [From Black Sea]



Fennesz - "Rivers of Sand" [From Venice]



Fennesz - "The Point of it All" [From Venice]

Thom Yorke Live

"Black Swan"


"And It Rained All Night"


This band is just killing it. I have to imagine that playing The Eraser live would be any drummer's dream and Joey Waronker has brought the deep hip hop kick drums and busy stick clatter to nasty life.

Choosing Flea was an inspired move. He has such a cartoonish persona that people forget what a sensitive and versatile musician he is. But this material is actually right in line with his signature sound - when most people think of Thom Yorke's solo material they think of glitch programming and moody piano, but there is also funk bass driving most of the tracks.

Melanie Fiona "It Kills Me"

"It Kills Me" leaked last year and I've been loving on it ever since. It's a rare thing when a single this catchy grabs my attention for a while... and then won't go away. There are, like, ten different hooks in this thing. Collect them all.

I guess the hugeness and theater of it give it a Supremes/Motown quality but for some reason I hear Ennio Morricone and the scores he did for the epic Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.

Download: Daniel "Sugar Fish"

Daniel "Sugar Fish" [From Lazrus]

D. Grant's "Purple Trilogy"

D. Grant is the drummer in Alkaline Trio and this year he released a three-song EP (downloadable as one 11-minute mp3) called The Purple Trilogy, which features my friend and former bandmate Arun Bali on axe.

D. Grant "The Purple Trilogy (feat. Arun Bali)"



It's really hard to believe that the first song, "Betray U, Betray Me," is not an actual Prince composition. The second is a purple original, but was never properly recorded by its maker, and–– well, I'll just let D. Grant explain. From the myspace blog post where you can download the file:

This is the culmination of nine years of work, my "Purple Phase" as it were. It started as a new wave project with my friend John Reynolds, turning briefly into a collaboration with Hunter Burgan, and ended up essentially a solo project (with the aid of guitar maestro Arun Bali.) The basis of "Betray U, Betray Me" came from a song written back in 2000, originally performed in the vein of Tubeway Army. It has been rewritten here in the spirit of the project. "Electric Intercourse" is an unreleased Prince song - originally written for the Purple Rain soundtrack, i stumbled across a live version of the song and desperately wanted to hear a proper recording. Members of The Revolution were consulted in using the correct gear and getting the right sounds. Both of these songs sat unfinished for many years, until I recently recorded vocals while staying with a friend in Detroit. Recognizing that I had two slow R&B jams on my hands, I needed something to complete the picture. "After Funk" comes from another idea penned back in 2000 - a short, explosive instrumental number again showcasing the talents of Arun Bali on guitar. Clocking in at 11 minutes and 11 seconds - this is the Purple Trilogy.

Instant Classic?

Kid Cudi requires no further hype. His debut "Man on the Moon: The End of Day" hasn't even dropped yet and it already feels ubiquitous. But I'm happy to jump on this man's bandwagon.

Cudi is a protoge of Kanye West and West's new minimalism is a welcome influence here. Cudi's arrangements are really well thought out and uncluttered. Simplicity rules. One of the best examples of this is the song "Pursuit of Happiness," which features MGMT (as well as Ratatat) and manages to sounds as blissful as a MGMT song without any of that group's sonic mess.

Not all that glitters here is gold, and the one-note-ness of Cudi's autobiographical subject matter (Cudi didn't fit in/couldn't get girls, now he made it - so everybody can suck it, literally or figuratively) get's monotonous. But the following four songs here, in particular, are certifiably unstoppable and are some of the best new music I've heard all year.

Kid Cudi "Heart of a Lion"


Kid Cudi "My World (Feat. Billy Cravens)"


Kid Cudi "Sky Might Fall"


Kid Cudi "Pursuit of Happiness (Ft. MGMT and Ratatat)"

Major Lazer "Cash Flow (Feat. Jah Dan)

I'm very jealous of this singer's name. Why didn't I think of that? I'm also jealous of this groin-rattling bass line. I've listened to this song at least 20 times in the past 24 hours.

"When you're rolling in style..."

Major Lazer - "Cash Flow (Feat. Jah Dan)"

Mos Def - "No Hay Nada Mas"

What the first drag sounds like.

Mos Def - "No Hay Nada Mas"

New Record "LAZRUS" Out

My full-length record "Lazrus" dropped digitally last week on iTunes and will hit full online distribution as well as physical CDs in the coming weeks.

Download the first single, Goodbye Sillhouette.

Daniel - "Goodbye Silhouette".

XLR8R said of the album and the single: An album of melancholy electronic pop. Summoning Jamie Lidell's soulfulness and Ben Gibbard's plaintive vocals, "Goodbye Silhouette" is a gem of lovely melodies from a city more known for its hard-edged techno.

To sample or purchase the full album, follow this link.

Since I'm still a bit squeamish about this whole blogging-about-my-music thing, I'm just going to post the press release below. But I should say that I am extremely proud of this album. It was a labor of love but it's the only record I've ever been a part of making where I experienced no burn out with it at any stage. Even now, close to a year since I finished it, I am in love with its sound, its joy and its sadness.

Moodgadget Presents: Daniel "Lazrus"

Daniel "lazrus" Available: 7/21/2009 | Format: Digital Similar Artists: Jamie Lidell, Thom Yorke, TV on the Radio When Daniel began making songs again last summer it was on donated software and borrowed instruments. That's because two years earlier, in a fit of depression, he had quit his band (post-rockers turned synthed-out indie soul group Judah Johnson), sold all of his gear and stopped making music for the first time since he could remember. It was the kind of drastic decision that gets made when there don't appear to be any other options. Eventually, though, passion and time won out and Daniel's deeply musical nature emerged again in the form of avante pop and futuristic-soul songs. He broke the silence with "Goldversion," an experiment which came out sounding like a cross between Al Green and Kraftwerk. With a lyric consisting solely of the mantra "In love," it was unlike anything he had ever written before and its vocoded croon and out-of-synch synth arpeggiations triangulated a vision for him of a new sound somewhere between the classic German synth music of Cluster and early Tangerine Dream and the progressive r'n'b of D'angelo's Voodoo. More songs soon followed: the unsettling slow jam "Hard Core," the Zen poem meets Motorik beat of "Goodbye Silhouette," the synth-bubbly afrobeat of "Sugar Fish," and "Arrows For Ever," which sounds like an acoustic Prince ballad circa Sign of the Times until a blast of distorted keyboard pads drowns everything out. Lazrus is the sound of Daniel's reconnection to music, the result of a two-year separation from the talent he loves most. It's a breakthrough not only because it's the first affirming music he's made after a history of being stuck in a minor key, but because it's his first overt embrace of soul music - that odd frequency somewhere between melancholy and joy he tuned himself to during his Motown-soundtracked early years as a white kid in a black city. Though it was mostly home-recorded, it sounds bigger than a laptop: Daniel fulfilled a long-standing wish to play all of the instruments himself, from drums to glockenspiels (with the exception of a handful of gorgeous overdubs by members of Zoos of Berlin and Judah Johnson), and he feels its performances are the most inspired work he's ever done. Like its title, Lazrus sounds like a slurred resurrection - dirty, confused, holy and gorgeous.

Cass McCombs - You Saved My Life

Even before the silhouettes start dancing before the star machines this video gets to me. I don't know why, because there's nothing to it. But it makes some kind of sense. From video footage following the singer through an outdoor fair (looking for someone?), it rolls like a snowball into something haunting.

Brass Monkey - You Keep Me Hangin' On

Below is a post I did in February of '08 where I decided to come out of the closet and start posting Reggae - which I personally refer to as "Jamaican soul." For my first post of Jamaican soul I decided to contrast two covers of the Supremes classic "You Keep Me Hangin' On," one by Mike Dorane and the other by the master Ken Boothe. The Suprems original was already one of my favorite songs of all time, so the fact that I was sitting on three versions of the same tune, all of them revelatory in their own unique way, just seemed to say that this was a song that could do no wrong.

This weekend I was going through the latest of The Complete Motown Singles reissue series and found yet another, really sick rendition of the song by a group called Brass Monkey. I thought I couldn't love this song anymore - thought there was nothing more to pull out of it arrangement-wise. Not even close.

The Brass Monkey treatment of "You Keep Me Hangin' On" is weirdly modern, from the mix to the guitar tones, to the stop-start drumm figure. And goddamnit, the ugly sound that comes out of his throat at the 2:40 mark is a sign of desperation. I hope he's okay.

Brass Monkey - "You Keep Me Hangin' On" [From The Complete Motown Singls, Vol. 11a]


Older post:




About three years ago, a friend turned me onto the Trojan Records Originals box set, a collection of early reggae recordings, some of which later became hits when other groups covered them (Like "Red, Red Wine"), but all of which were the first productions of the songs. We were particularly fascinated with a track called "Please Don't Make Me Cry" by Winston Groovy and its brilliantly goofy arrangement that featured a use of synthesizers about three decades ahead of its time.

As I borrowed and began to absorb the box set, I quickly got obsessed with these recordings. The productions are often shockingly quirky, with really bizarre and angular hooks, the warmest drum sounds of all time, and an addicting distortion in the mixes. There are deeply soulful performances featuring some of the greatest soul singers I've ever heard. Genius actually, and I don't use that word lightly. I think that some of these guys, like Alton Ellis, Ken Boothe, Delroy Wilson and Dennis Brown are easily on par with the great American soul singers like Sam Cooke, Al Green and Smokey Robinson... only weirder. Unfortunately, while those American artists received recognition in their lifetime and a lasting legacy, many of their Jamaican counterparts were mostly unknown outside of their native country (sometimes even in their native country) during their paltry "careers" and are today largely forgotten.

I've always had a bad association in my mind with the word "reggae" that probably stems back to college and the abuse of Rasta paraphanalia in dorm-hippie culture. Bob Marley is the name brand for the genre, and his most famous records left me cold (I've since come around to the greatness that is early Wailers). And I'm not sure if I can really get with music being made today under the reggae label. But after getting hooked on the Trojan Originals box set, I began a dig for more material of similar style and quality, and it's an obsession that is still going strong. I now have probably between 50 and 75 cuts that I personally consider essential.

I think that the emotional quality of this early Jamaican soul music (which is how I've decided to refer to it) just fits my life and temperament better now than the darkness and theatricality of the groups I used to get off on, like Fugazi, Radiohead or PJ Harvey. There is definitely a melancholy current flowing beneath the surface of these tunes, a kind of resigned sadness that is part of most third-world culture. But there is just as much joy and warmth, which is just something I find more interesting these days. Not a fake, peppy joy, but an earned joy, that was yanked from down deep. Plus, it's just rhythmic Christmas for me, with pockets so sick that all I can do sometimes is just laugh at how good they are.

It's weird. These days, besides electronic music, I listen to Jamaican soul music probably more than anything else, but I've barely blogged about any of my discoveries. I guess part of me just wanted to keep it to myself or didn't know if other people would hear and appreciate the same things I was hearing (my girlfriend, for example, couldn't care LESS). But today, I'll start adding a pinch of it into the mix of this blog.

Since I already made the Detroit/Jamaica comparison, I think a good place to begin would be with two cover versions of the track "You Keep Me Hangin' On," which was a huge hit in the 60s for Motown group The Supremes.

The first version, "Set Me Free," is by Ken Boothe, who occupies about as much space on my mp3 player as any other artist of any genre.





Ken Boothe - "Set Me Free" [From Studio One Soul]




I first heard this track in a restaurant outside of Cincinati. My band was there to play a show and when we got to the venue, it was closed - the promoter had flaked. Luckily someone pointed us to a local burrito joint. The place nearly saved our souls. Besides serving burritos the size of watermelons, the jukebox was stocked with tons of old soul and reggae. When this track came up on the system, I think I had an out-of-body experience from the combination of good 'rito and good jams.

I love how Boothe doesn't even bother to use the original title. I also love the whacky Ennio Morricone meets Shuggie Ottis instrumental tag on the intro. Eventually, the track descends into extremely crude dub in its second half, but it doesn't matter. Boothe did his damage. Listen to how Boothe's singing constantly plays with going flat. It's kind of his signature move. He stops just this side of letting it get ugly every time.

As much as I adore Boothe's rendering, I think I might love this Mike Dorane version even more. It's more low-key, but the way he arranges the chorus is brilliant, singing a falsetto harmony of the traditional melody instead of the melody itself. He's basically banking on the fact that the listener already knows the tune, and that that implication is strong enough in the listener's mind to supply the hook while he provides embellishment. It's a bold move, and totally works.

Sadly, I couldn't even find a decent photo of Mike Durane on the internet.

Mike Dorane - "You Keep Me Hanging On" [From Trojan Soulful Reggae Box Set]

La Roux

La Roux singer Elly Jackson conveys something that I hear in so few contemporary singers: the basic pleasure of singing itself. In the few singles La Roux has released so far there is always a moment or two when Jackson lets some kind of howl or "ooh" loose and you thank god that some jackass producer never threw a pitch corrector on it. Her flatness and sharpness is always on target.

I prefer the super gutted Skream remix of "In For the Kill" to the original, not only because of how much exposure it gives Jackson's singing but because the song has the kind of melody that needs the track to stand out of its way. Kate Bush is right.

La Roux "In for the Kill (Skream remix)"


"Quicksand" is crazy good, and crazy astute at bringing its influences back from the dead fully intact.

La Roux_Quicksand from _del on Vimeo.

Noah Harris and the Nagant Quartet - Three Nights in Chicago

Noah Harris is a songwriter from Champaign, IL that I met probably seven years ago. My band was on an epically bad tour (which we named The Trail of Tears Tour after the fact because it had been so poorly booked). We shared a bill with Noah at a coffee shop in Wisconsin and I watched the room go still as he chased the demons out with his voice, acoustic guitar and strong fingers. Days later he put us up when we came through Champaign. He made us breakfast and it made us happier to be around him. He can do that.

We kept in touch and then years later he asked me to produce a record for his group Elanors, a collaboration with his wife Adriel. I’m not sure how it happened, because it happened gradually and slyly, but I ended up getting so obsessed with Noah’s music that I forgot it wasn’t mine. And there was a while when I cared more about Noah’s music than my own. That was a happy time. That collaboration went deep, maybe too deep. We made a band to tour the record (Movements), and even did a pretty swanky small East Coast tour, but nothing much came of the record or the band and eventually Noah went off in another direction.

Honestly, I was sore about the way things turned out, but I kept tabs on his music from a distance. After all, the friendship started in worship. At first it was difficult to separate the hard feelings from my feelings about the new songs. But time and music won out.

He’s billing himself as Noah Harris and the Nagant Quartet at the moment and I’m pretty sure he’s finishing a record with solo voice, piano and string quartet. He released a promo single earlier this year, called “Your Side,” and it’s crushingly good. If you live in the Chicago area, catch one of his three nights at the Chopin theater coming up. Everybody knows about the physicality of seeing live music. Not everybody knows about the healing benefits of being in the room with orchestral instruments and the unnamable calm that comes from bathing in those vibrations.

More Noah and ticket info: here.

Noah Harris - "Your Side"

I recorded this in my living room one night in the middle of the Movements sessions, after dinner. It was a brand new song then that Noah was just working out. You can hear the crickets getting in on it.

Noah Harris - "The Song About the Sea"

BULBZ streams

My EP, BULBZ, is available here. Stream away.

Daniel - "Love Lockdown (Like Ripples") [Kanye West/Radiohead]


Daniel - "Does Not Compute" [Prince]


Daniel - "Cruise With Me" [Smokey Robinson]

BULBZ

BULBZ is a three-song covers EP I made. It's released today on Moodgadget. It's kind of a teaser for my full-length, which will be released later in the summer. I covered Smokey Robinson, Kanye West, Radiohead and Prince.

You can choose your own price and download the EP here.

BULBZ is a brief vision of Top 40 in a parallel universe of blown speakers and circuit-bent taste - tuneful, danceable and soulfully sung by Daniel, formerly of Detroit-based Judah Johnson [Flameshovel].

BULBZ began as an experiment, an excuse for Daniel to teach himself the popular recording software Logic. It didn't take long for him to figure out ways to abuse its array of soft synths and powerful sound processors. The result is a three-song covers EP that is both the most electronic and accessible thing Daniel has ever done as well as the first time he has ever released any non-original music. "It's stupid that I've never put out any covers before," he says. "There are songs I've loved over the years that feel closer to my heart than my own."

"Cruise With Me," is a synth-soaked rendition of Smokey Robinson's "Cruisin'" that begins over a stark 909 drum beat and ends in a cascading waterfall of Clark-inspired distortion. "Love Lockdown (Like Ripples)" is Daniel's fantasy of a reconciled Kanye West and Thom Yorke and mashes West's "Love Lockdown" with echoes of Radiohead's "Reckoner," two tracks that felt game-changing to Daniel when they were first released. "Does Not Compute" is the most faithful rendition of the three, staying close to the source of Prince's "Something in the Water" (1999) while amping its atonal keyboards and crushed drum programming up to the levels that have made it a favorite in Daniel's live sets.

Daniel will release his debut solo full-length, Lazrus, on Moodgadget later this summer.