I first wrote about this last year, around this time, but since wishing alone didn't migrate all the data from the old site to this  one, I figure I'll post about it again.  Now, this is possibly the single coolest thing that has ever happened, so strap yourselves in.

The UC Santa Barbara Library has taken its collection of old Edison cylinder recordings, digitized them, and made them freely available to anyone, in both lossless and mp3 formats.  This is a treasure trove of turn-of-the-century music and culture.  They've got everything from opera to Vaudeville, all waiting to be downloaded. 

Some of my favorites are Adelina Agostinelli's "Addio del Passato" (heartbreakingly beautiful) and the Edison Concert Bands incredible version of the overture to Wagner's Rienzi (which is sped up to account for the short playback time of a cylinder record).

Hours of fun for the whole family. 

If I had been in a postin' mood yesterday I would have written about Joanna Newsom's new album, Ys, which I listened to twice Monday and twice today.  It has got to be one of the five or six best, most beautiful, intricate pop albums ever produced, and I feel that it is my solemn duty to say as many nice things about it as possible, so that you will run out and buy it as quickly as possible.

First things first: Newsom's voice draws a lot of comparisons to Bjork's, and while I'm a big Bjork fan, whenever someone makes this comparison there's always an implicit "if you're into that sort of thing."  Let me assure you, however unconventional Newsom's voice may sound at first, you are into this sort of thing.  Ys is the sort of music you have been waiting for someone to make. 

Now, there's an orchestra backing Newsom's harp-work (conducted by Van Dyke Parks), and some of the songs exceed nine minutes (most of them, in fact), but don't let any of this throw you.  The orchestra only serves to highlight the swooping, protean character of Newsom's voice, which is at one moment childlike and delicate, at the next, wizened and raw.  The songs themselves are so variable and engrossing that even "Only Skin," weighing in at sixteen minutes, seems to pass before you've even begun to grasp it.

If all of this sounds a little too, well, classical, your on the right track. There is a kind of archaic quality to the composition, but not in a cheap, Enya kind of a way (yeah, you heard me).  The music may recall centuries past, but Ys remains a distinctly 21st century pop album.  The emphasis is still on things like melody and harmony, and the interaction of words and chord changes.

How 'bout some lyrics:

Last week our picture window produced a half-word 
Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird 
We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake 
And pant and labour over every intake 

I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace 
Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place 
Said: "dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you 
And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view" 

Then in my hot hand 
She slumped her sick weight 
We tramped through the poison oak 
Heartbroke and inchoate

A little maudlin around the edges perhaps, taken out of context, but the overall quality of the language and vividness of the imagery ("gape like a rattlesnake") seems fairly well-done for a pop song.  The lack of the words "baby" or "sexyback" will probably turn some people off, though. 

Whenever someone tries to do something interesting with language, there is a certain portion of the population which immediately loses interest, crying "artsy" or "nonsense" or both.  In these moments I like to make a distinction between James Joyce (who I like) and Thomas Pynchon (who I don't).  Now you may prefer to reverse these examples (if you're a philistine) but what I'm getting at is there's good difficult and bad difficult, and Joanna Newsom's lyrics falls somewhere well into the good side of the spectrum.  She is evocative, moving, complicated, and enthralling, and I don't have any idea what she's talking about most of the time. 

Like Finnegans Wake, if you're into that sort of thing.

P.S. Pitchfork's got a pretty good interview with Ms. Newsom. 

Weeks hence, memories of MMS are still keeping me warm at night ("night" being the absolute lack of any local music scene 'round here).  One of the highlights of the Summit was when Sycamore's Japan Correspondent Colin was temporarily kidnapped by fellow-Carolinians Cities, who we should probably talk about right now.

If High IQs win the prize for happiest drummer, Cities' Rob Mackey takes the gold for Guitar Player Most Into The Guitar.  Watching Mackey on stage is like watching a kid play with Legos.  Not only is he off in his own would, he is ecstatic about it.  He's a little difficult to pick out in the mix live, but he shines on Cities' eponymous first album, playing as much with echo and feedback as he does with, you know, the guitar itself.  Simple riffs, staccato notes, lots of sound.

Like most young bands, Cities wear their influences on their sleeves.  It's the sort of thing that drives Pitchfork crazy, but shouldn't bother those for whom Echo and The Bunnymen are not the state religion. Cities, at any rate, benefit from a much more articulate, emotionally evocative, just-plain-better-than-Ian-McCulloch singer in Josh Nowlan.  On the song "Lancer," Nowlan strays in and out of Thom Yorke snear territory, a comparison I am only slightly comfortable making.  On "Barricades and Garrisons," Nowlan earns his Thom Yorke Fan Club decoder ring, chanting "beware the end is near" like a drowning man with a mouth full of water (or, perhaps, bile).  This is, I think, a good role model for a boy to have.

All in all, the cities were another pleasant MMS surprise.  Tight, professional, not-unschooled in their particular genre.  Here's their MySpace.  Try this:

Cities - Capitol (regular click, MySpace download)

Oh, Parlour Boys.  What are we going to do with you?  Never mind the venue I saw you at was so cold I honestly feared for my extremities.  Never mind your lead singer strutted more than Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop at the 67th Annual White Boy Strut-Off, and did that thing where he pretends to make out with the guitar player, 'cause making music is just that hot.  Never mind that you insist on having a "U" in your name when you are from Kentucky and not England.  You have good hooks and you know it, Parlour Boys.  Perhaps this is your problem.

And, shame of shames, your album tracks do not do your live sound justice.  Fire somebody. Today.

Parlour Boys - Lovers (regular click)

 That's that.  Stay tuned for even more MMS recap.  Previous MMS coverage here.  What are we, crazy?  We're just giving this stuff away.

We'll return to our MMS recap next week.  Right now, we have something to talk about.  Today the Mountain Goats release their wonderful Get Lonely into the wild, and it bears no small measure of scrutiny.

Get Lonely is the Mountain Goats' fourth album since signing to 4AD, and the first since the early nineties where John Darnielle sounds truly comfortable recording in a studio.  It is also an overwhelmingly quiet album, Darnielle's voice staying close and low as he tells you what he knows about loneliness, feeling for the edges and plumbing the rich interior.  This is a sad, sad piece of work.

The album opens with "Wild Sage," perhaps its bleakest point.  Lone piano notes accompany Darnielle's syncopated guitar as he describes leaving the house at daybreak and walking along the highway, unable to get a ride.  Darnielle manages to rescue the idea from maudlin self-pity:

    And some days I don't miss my family
    and some days I do
    some days I think I'd feel better if I tried harder
    most days I know it's not true

There is a luxuriousness to the suffering, and when the speaker trips on the shoulder of the highway, he says: "...I think I hear angels in my ears/like marbles being thrown against a mirror."  We are left with this image:

    and along the highway
    from castoff innumerable seeds
    wild sage growing
    in the weeds

I've already spoken about "Woke Up New," but it remains the album’s high point, revisiting the same scene as earlier Mountain Goats songs like “Alpha Omega” and “Korean Bird Paintings (The narrator wakes up to find his love has left him), only now Darnielle is much more acute in his description of the emotional landscape.  “And I wandered through the house/ like a little boy lost at the mall” is a perfectly simple and surgically accurate metaphor, a hallmark of Mountain Goats’ songs.

The last four or five Mountain Goats albums have been almost monographic in tone.  While the songs themselves felt varied and  surprisingly arranged, they attempted to document or describe a specific kind of feeling.  In Tallahassee, there was a fairly clear narrative, and in the following albums, thematic or autobiographical touchstones tied everything together.  The program of Get Lonely is as obvious as it is ambitious: to map the continent of loneliness as clearly and completely as possible in twelve songs.  And it is a daunting thing to hear.

Justin Davidson looks at the art of conducting an orchestra in this New Yorker video presentation.  He examines footage of Wilhelm Furtwangler, Herbert Von Karajan, and Michael Tilson Thomas, and explains some of the seemingly incidental movements these conductors make during a performance.  Karajan in particular is interesting, sitting down and using only one hand almost the entire time.

There were so many stellar bands at MMS (most of whom I'd never heard of) that we might be sifting through them for a few weeks to come. Let's start with three who are not Hot IQs:

First up is Laylights from Denver, Colorado. They sound more like U2 than even U2 is capable of at this point, but they have a much more imaginative drummer. I had to push through a couple dozen people to see if there was in fact a human being doing the things I was hearing, and not some sort of industrial eggbeater hooked up to a drum kit. Verdict: actual living drummer, possibly mentally unstable. Check out "Sparrow" and "Time Lapse Photography" on their MySpace page.

Scourge of the Sea is a band out of Lexington, Kentucky who chose to see based entirely on their name. They completely fulfilled the promise of such a moniker, and won me over when, during a series of soundboard-related technical failures (the microphones kept going out out, a guitar stopped guitar-ing) the band kept playing, rotating personnel to fill in the gaps. Earlier in the set, they had already traded instruments (the bass player became the drummer for instance), but this was something else. This was grace under fire.

Check out their MySpace for songs.

Finally, here's a wonderful video from Margo and the Nuclear So and So's, a band that I did not personally get a chance to see, but if we're choosing purely by bizarreness of name, they win. The video involves some sort of cat army in Mouseland. It's brilliant.

Check back next week for more MMS goodness.

The Midwest Music Summit is rolling into its third and final day, but the Hot IQs have already won the award for Happiest Drummer.  I have to head back to Indy now, but this is really a band worth checking out.  As usual, YouTube has the goods (note the not-even-close-to-subtle Royal Tennebaums reference).

Let me explain my relationship with the Mountain Goats.  There are few living writers (Vonnegut's still kicking around, right?) who so consistently and intensely give me the chills, whose work seems so intimately pertinent to the my world, whose scenes live so vividly in the back of my mind.  Barring momentarily the use of the term writer to describe pop song writers, I can't think of any other pop acts who are as sincerely literate and intensely poetic (in the technical sense), who even approach the level of craft in a Mountain Goats song.  Moving is the word I like to use.  The Mountain Goats move me, and I am thoroughly psyched about their new album, Get Lonely, which hits stores August 22, and which features "Woke Up New." 

This video, directed by Rian Johnson of Brick fame, was officially posted today.  It's familiar territory for a Mountain Goats song: a man speaking to the woman who's left him.  He is brutally honest about the business of putting the pieces of his life together: "And I wandered through the house/ like a little boy/ lost in the mall."  In the chorus he tells us, "And I sang, 'Oh/ what do I do?/ What do I do?/ What do I do, without you?" and it strikes you not as a sappy line from a love song (which it would be in anyone else's hands), but as the complete hopelessness of a lost child or an abandoned lover.  It is a hard thing to make that line ring true, but it does.

If you like this, you should also check out this video of The Mountain Goats playing "Against Pollution," a song which contains the Mark-destroying lines: "A year or two ago I worked in a liquor store/ and a guy came in/ He tried to kill me, so I shot him in the face/ I would do it again, I would do it again/ When the last days come/ we shall see visions..."

My freshly purchased copy of Danielson's latest album, Ships, is making me very, very happy on this New Music Tuesday morning.  More info and free MP3 download of track four, "Did I Step On Your Trumpet," here.

Sigur Ros has released a CD/DVD thing, and in honor of new material from this greatest of non-Bjork Icelandic bands, I'd like to bring you the video for "Hoppipola" from their latest album Takk, courtesy of the Tube:

I'm pretty sure a band like Sigur Ros shouldn't exist today.  They seem to belong either in the first half last century, or a little further along in this one (say, 2050).  Their American debut, Agaetis Byrjun, made the same argument that Faruza Balk did: "Hey, I know I'm a little weird, but I'm so beautiful you won't care."

Next up is Boris, brought to you by Friend-of-Sycamore Japanese correspondent Colin.  Boris are a loud power trio whose name is thankfully easier to pronounce than Sunn0))).  They mainly make fast, riff-heavy rock music that comes across as more American than most American bands nowadays.

Their American label's website does not contain any mp3's (lame), but through the continuing magic of YouTube we are able to bring you the awesome, Anime-inspired video for "Ibitsu" from their 2005 release, Akuma No Uta.  Very energetic, and very good.

In further NPR news, All Songs Considered is carrying the first track from the forthcoming Mountain Goats album, Get Lonely.  Why should you listen to it?  "And then I think I hear angels in my ears, like marbles being thrown against a mirror." That's why.

If you like "Wild Sage," you can snag an mp3 of another Get Lonely track, "Woke Up New," here. 

...that Paris Hilton's new single, "Stars Are Blind" is the #1 download on the i-Tunes top ten (which we all know is a mecca of musical talent and taste), or that I myself have, in a moment of delicious, delicious guilt, purchased this song and listened to it no less than 5.5 times this morning (the .5 being when my roommate walked down the hall and I was forced to dive across the room and hit the pause button...roommates share a lot of things, but I have a sinking feeling that my furtive love of "Stars Are Blind" will not be one of them).    Instead of shamefully tucking my tail between my legs over this, however, I have decided to find ways to justify this newfound appreciation for PH, such as: A.  The lyrics, which, frankly, as a poet, I can appreciate:  "Even though the gods are crazy/ Even though the stars are blind/ If you show me real love baby/ I'll show you mine."  Ah, sweet metaphorical delight.   B.  The Chris Isaak a la "Wicked Games"-esque video (YouTube) and, perhaps most importantly, C.  The fact that Paris Hilton is knee-deep in a Dynasty-style feud with, well several celebrities, to be honest, but first and foremost, Lindsay Lohan. 

Now, I used to like Lindsay Lohan.  She was adorable in The Parent Trap, actually good in Mean Girls, seemed to have just the right amount of disdain for Herby: Fully Loaded, and actually seemed to be making a good transition into a grown-up film career.  She has a hot mom and a seemingly endless supply of bikinis.  And come on, she's spunky! Remember when she and Wilmer Valderamma broke up, and she went on TRL wearing a shirt that said "You were never my boyfriend"? Ooh, you just got rhetorically served!  But now this news has surfaced that she *gasp* hasn't been making it to work on her new movie! She *gasp* has poor work ethic due to her hard partying ways!

Well, I just couldn't respect myself if I still supported La Lohan after hearing about her poor work ethic.  And frankly, who are you if you can't respect yourself in the morning?  Nothing more important to a gal than her self-respect.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a song I need to listen to.   

If there is anything to talk about besides the new Thom Yorke video, I don't know what it is. Some kindly soul braved the choppy waters of copyright infringement and uploaded "Harrowdown Hill," which debuted last night on the BBC, to YouTube. Many Bothans died to bring you this information.

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Weekly feature?  You're soaking in it.

Mara Carlyle is a funny story for me.  I first heard her singing uncredited on a hidden track at the end of the Plaid album, Rest Proof Clockwork.  I had no idea who was singing, "I'm here/and now there's so little chance of escape/face me/face me," like she meant it, and back then the internet wasn't the sum of all human knowledge.  So I forgot about it.

Then Mara showed up singing on a Jamie Lidell remix compilation playing ukulele and the singing saw in an R&B song, the sort of twisted arrangement that warms my cold, dead heart.  I looked up who in their right mind would attempt such a feat, and found out it was someone whose voice I had been lovin' for years.  Small world.  Small british electropop world.

Two things: here is a video that Mara did for her song "I Blame You Not" which somehow manages to be weirder than any Bjork video yet executed.  Think I'm exaggerating? 

Mara Carlyle - I Blame You Not (YouTube video) 

And now, remember what I said about the singing saw and ukulele?  Well, head over to Mara's MySpace page and you can hear (and download) "Game for Fools," a cover of a Jamie Lidell song which benefits from the addition of a miniature guitar and a bowed hand tool.  

Next up is Tiny Robots, a band so obscure they don't even exist. They make music for Song Fight, the iron chef of musical competitions.  Every week, the Song Fight staff picks titles, and dozens of artists enter compositions that they feel are the best expressions of that title.  Usually, the fare ranges from nerdcore to, well, more nerdcore.  But then Tiny Robots showed up with these gems:

Five Nights in Britain - Tiny Robots (3:26)

Mountain Home - Tiny Robots (2:41)

Tiny Robots blew everything else out of the water.  They are currently 4 for 4 in the Song Fight arena.  My favorite so far is "She Gave Up," which has a beautiful hook and inspired production:

She Gave Up - Tiny Robots (3:37) 

After some internet snooping, I think Tiny Robots may be made up of members of a band call Loyalty Day, a quartet out of Berkley, California, but to date I haven't heard any LD songs that quite compare to Tiny Robots.  Sigh, my dream girl don't exist.  But she does have a MySpace page.

Okay, that's it for me today.  I'm driving to Chicago against my better judgement to pick up a friend from the airport.  Enjoy the songs.

Will this be a weekly feature? Only time can tell.

First up is Au Revoir Simone, an electropop trio out of Brooklyn, New York. Much in the same way as Boards of Canada, half of their sound seems to rely on the management of nostalgia: eery vocal harmonies and video game synth lines, sing-songy echoes mixed with simple beats. Imagine if you took all the songs from Sesame Street circa the mid-eighties (all of the weird ones) and whipped them into a custard.

Through the Backyards of Our Neighbors - 3:54

Hurricanes - 3:46

You can read the Pitchfork review here, unless Pitchfork reviews are the sort of thing that make you want to stab yourself in the eye.

Next up are The Hidden Cameras. I found out about them from Veer, and we've already talked about how much I love  Veer.

The Hidden Camera's video for their song "Awoo" (from the album, Awoo) has an unmistakeable Scooby-Doo quality, a group of teens out in the woods armed only with flashlights being periodically terrorized by people in wolf masks.

The song likewise contains cartoonish elements, a tight xylophone line (imagine skeletons tap dancing), and the "awoo"-ing refrain. Once you reach the chorus, though, the xylophones melt away, and the awoos become anthemic, even a little defiant. The song becomes much more than it seemed to be.  It just might be the best song to ever contain the phrase, "unleash my holy power."

And finally, if you haven't picked up the free Mountain Goats track from their forthcoming album, Get Lonely, you owe it to yourself and your family to do so. Get it here.