Yeasayer Represent

White people are making the best music again. That's been the theme of the past half-year for me. Not like it's a competition, but there were some dark, dark days there for the white man.

Yeasayer - "Madder Red"



Yeasayer - "Grizelda"

Owen Pallett + Patrick Watson

This new album Heartland by Owen Pallett is really beautiful. It's a mix of small ensemble orchestral instruments and a bit of Nintendo soft synths. Usually stuff this gentle is a bit more twee than I can take but the material and the vision is really strong.

Owen Pallett - "What Do You Think Will Happen Now?"




Owen Pallett - "Red Sun No. 5"





Pallett reminds me of Patrick Watson, whose album Wooden Arms was one of the great unsung masterpieces of last year. I've been meaning to post some of these cuts for a while and the new Pallett reminded me to. Watson has such an original approach to writing and arranging. He's got the kind of pretty voice that could get him Keane-sized fans, but he's got more of a Buckley-esque ambition to alienate the easily distracted. For this I thank him.

Patrick Watson - "Where the Wild Things Are"




Patrick Watson - "Fireweed"

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"