I don't like holidays. I'm celebrating this year by locking myself in a hotel room for two days with my girlfriend about 100 miles away from anyone I know. It's been OK so far. My girlfriend can be pretty stinky though.
Now she's biting me. How great.
Oh well...
Happy Jesus Day!
Eventually* there will be a "Best of 2009" and a "Best of the Decade" and a couple playlists and shit you can download. I'm very very very slowly working on them. Sorry there hasn't been an update in a while but it is the end of the year and nothing good comes out during this time. I've been busy unicycling and touching myself.
I listened to album for the first time almost completely through on Lala for free, and by the time I hit this track, Pardon Me, I just had to buy the album. It's got a nice funky vibe to it, and the lyrics had a pretty awesome bite that I really liked. Letting me listen to an album for free, totally uninterrupted, works when you're trying to sell me music. Good job, Lala.
I stumbled onto The Blow because YACHT's Jona [last name omitted because I don't have internet access and can't look it up] did (probably) all of the music/production on it and I like the sound of his stuff. He doesn't disappoint here---if anything he kind of one ups his future work in YACHT because there's a lot of detail and nuance in Paper Television's songs that you can't really find in YACHT. No offense, Jona, different groups, etc, and my love for YACHT is undiminished.
The chick's singing and songwriting, and I won't even try to pretend that I have any idea what her name is, is uniformly pretty rad across the whole thing. The most popular song, True Affection, has a cute little lyric: "I was out of your league / and you were 20,000 underneath the sea / waving affections" (which reminds me of a Red Wire Black Wire lyric that goes: "I wave my tentacles at the moon / screaming why must you leave so soon").
I discovered this thanks to Pitchfork tagging it lovingly with their "Best New Music" icon. I only mention this because Bear in Heaven's Last.FM page is laden with people making a wide variety of disparaging comments, from the usual "This band sucks now that other people listen to it" to equating Pitchfork's positive review as something of a scarlet letter---which I suppose are basically the same thing.
I'll make this really, really short: anyone who spends time actively, vindicitively hating a website on the internet---not even a real person they know, mind you, but an ambiguous non-entity of alledged unforgivable pretension---is a goddamn moron whose opinion means (or should mean) absolutely nothing to anyone.
Now, Bear in Heaven is some interesting shit. The obvious standout track initially is Lovesick Teenagers which you could listen to on Hype Machine I'm probably sure, so go do that. After that you end up with a whole album of really puzzlingly catchy music that seems really simple.
A lot of the simplicity I percieve I think has to do with my recent forays into trying to make music of my own (I feel a little like that I listen to so much music that I should just inherently know something about making music---but it turns out that I don't) has exposed me to the synthesizer arpeggiator. For those unfamiliar (because I was, which puts me at 24 years without ever touching a synthesizer) an arpeggiator allows you to hold down a key or several on the keyboard and the synthesizer automatically repeats those notes over and over again on at a tempo you set. Various effects make it sound all cool and shit but for the most part it's just notes ascending/descending over and over, usually in 16ths.
The thing is that Bear in Heaven uses arpeggios made this way all across the album. In nearly every song it actually seems that the arpeggio spit out by the synthesizer is the foundation on which the song was built. It's kind of cool, how rich and alive the arpeggioes sound across the whole album---they're obviously synthesizers but when layered with guitar, drums, and the singer's reverb laden vocal, you get such a fantastic wall of sound built out of such a simple formula.
This is good stuff. Pitchfork is right, this is definitely some of the "Best New Music".