December 2008 Archives

Here it is - as expected, a New Year's countdown/list/recap. I'm not sure why, but people's obsession with lists seem to grow more stronger during this time - this unique time where the end and beginning meet.

I was racking my brain on what to feature on this blog: The site's milestones perhaps? Nah, too little to recap. A list of the best indie songs to come up within the year?  Nope. If anyone's ever noticed, I have never been current when posting to this blog. Case in point: I've featured  songs that have been in existence for more than a decade. In any case, this is a music database - a vessel for the old and new, and a place for rediscovery. A list of season appropriate indie songs? I guess I can give that a try...

I would have loved to go on and give you guys a top ten - but after the realization that New Year's day songs are scarce compared to Christmas themed ones, I've decided five is the magic number. How many popular New Year's Day songs do you know of, not counting Auld Lang Syne and U2's New Year's Day?


Fifth on this very special list is a song that mentions the words New Year's Day only once, despite being set on that very day. The Decemberists 'Grace Cathedral Hill' gives you a walking tour of San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, down to Hyde Park Pier, while eating hotdogs and pondering on the intricacies of life and love. The Decemberists do what they do best in this song,  great imagery and making simple ordinary stuff, like a hotdog run, seem so wonderfully romantic. It's a perfect theme song for anyone who's down and out at the beginning of the year - depending on your mood, it might reduce you to a heaping emotional mess, or make you nice and happy inside like all beautiful songs do.

  Listen to Grace Cathedral Hill | Download at eMusic | Buy at InSound


What list wouldn't be complete if I don't throw in a song from my favorite sub-genre? This one comes from a band that does it best, Glasgow's twee-pop band, Camera Obscura. Happy New Year is a song about tying loose ends - closure for a relationship perhaps, or just setting things straight once and for all. At the end of the song, the singer sings one of the songs most memorable lines: 'Happy New Year, you're my only vice' - something that sort of hits home for anyone who's ever been stuck on someone. Something to add on to your New Year's resolution list, maybe?

Listen to Happy New Year | Download at eMusic | Buy at InSound


Time to liven things up a bit. This next song is an uppity beat of a tune from The Mountain Goats called This Year. I'm going to cheat a little bit here, since this actually isn't about the New Year. Listening to it again I'm thinking, it might actually belong to the songs-you'd-like-to-listen-to-after-highschool-graduation list. But how could I not include a song with the chorus: "I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me". To some of us, this new year won't exactly be a fresh new start, more of an extension of last year's problems...and more. Then again, what better way to ring in the New Year's with a battle cry. Yes, 2009, I will face you head on, singing in a Proclaimers-i'm-gonna-walk-five-hundred-miles kind of way: I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me!

Listen to This Year | Download at eMusic | Buy at InSound


If you ask me, you can never have enough twee songs. The next one up my list is 'My Year in Lists' . How appropriate is that? :)  It's an anti-love song about making New Years Resolutions. Frankly, I don't believe in setting a up any New Year's resolutions - so I don't. But then, that sets me up as goal-less and with nothing to aim for - to which some might say, may be bad. Well I guess, I can give the Christmas excuse for it, it's like we should make it Christmas everyday - I don't need the New Year to have a resolution, it'll be New Year's everyday. I resolve everyday to wake up, eat breakfast, go to work... and probably make my goals higher than that.

This less than two minute song from Los Campesinos! is a real treat. Anything that starts with 'Send me stationery, to make me horny' is as good as gold.

Listen to My Year In Lists | Download at eMusic | Buy at Insound


New Years will always be bittersweet. Sometimes more bitter than sweet, as proven by the songs I just mentioned. This band has a great knack for bringing out the sweeter side of bittersweet, which is why I love them so much. Stars' A New Year mixes bittersweet with irony: New Year's gives us that weird happy/sad feeling of thinking back and pitying our wretched existence (alas! all the potential that we never lived up to) at same time being thankful that we're still alive (we've survived all these years, this might count for something!). As always, we're hopeful - we all are, that's why we wish everybody else a Happy New Year. So while Stars' is thinking of something that rhymes with hopeful, I on the other hand, hope you guys have a happy and safe New Year's eve. Enjoy!

Listen to A New Year | Download at eMusic

No one loves Christmas more than Sufjan Stevens. From 2001 to 2006 (with the exception of 2004, when he recorded his Illinois album) - Sufjan created Christmas albums, originally distributed among family and friends as Christmas gifts, complete with self-made album covers. These albums were released the public to in 2006 as a boxed set - and became a hit for everyone else who, tired of the usual Christmas album fare , saw this as a fresh new alternative.

If you haven't heard of Sufjan's songs yet, you check out this link - http://xmas.asthmatickitty.com/ where Sufjan not only offers a sampling of his Christmas album, but also a game in 8 bit, a dress-your-own-Sufjan e-card and a couple of high quality photos like the one on this entry, of classic Sufjan, in all his glorious dorkiness (courtesy of Danny Renshaw).

In the spirit of sharing, the site also streams entries from last year's The Great Sufjan Song Xmas Xchange, whose winner got the chance to own the rights to a Sufjan Stevens song.  

And what better way to bring on the Christmas spirit with a video of Sufjan Stevens 'Put The Light on the Tree'. Merry Christmas everyone!

Actually this is just something for one kid - mine specifically. If you've checked out the About section of this magnificently glorious website, one of my inspirations in putting this up was my cutie-pie son Paolo, and his growing love for music. This is from a kid who I never thought would be music loving  - not with his significant disdain for any loud sound and (early on in his life), an i'm-going-to-die-if-you-don't-turn-that-off reaction to any radio left playing in a room. Luckily, I found the magic combination - music inside the car.  He usually kept nice and quiet during car rides, and I thought, it was just the distraction of all the things he can see out the window that kept him from reacting to the stereo music. All that time, his silence in the backseat was not because of tolerance to the sound emanating from the speakers behind him, it was because he liked listening to the music. And then it was out of the bag - my dear old sonny boy, loved music. At first, he sang along, hummed along to the songs I played. Then he began singing in the shower and oddly, started to form a weird (but cute!) habit of  humming while he ate. My son, was like me: a true blue music junkie - and what parent can't be proud?

One of the earliest songs he liked was a cute number by my all time favorite band 'Architecture In Helsinki'. He liked it so much that he named my car the same name of the song - 'Wishbone'.

Here's a video of 'Wishbone' by Architecture In Helsinki. It shows how morose zombies uncharacteristically singing a ridiculously upbeat and catchy tune, can become a hit with the kids (or maybe just mine...he did laugh uncontrollably at the cricket bat bludgeoning scene in Shaun of the Dead).

Somehow, the 80s revival is still in chic and it hasn't died down. We're still awash with 80's nostalgia, not just with music, but with 80s TV shows being made into movies ( The A-Team, 21 Jump Street). In pop music, Madonna could've ridden that wave if she could, but being a prominent 80's icon, she would've needed to go back to her Lucky Star / Material Girl phase. Instead, she put on her dancing shoes and leotards, and with her Farah Fawcett hairdo and a couple of Abba track samples, tried to force another 70s comeback. That was shortlived. But at that same moment in time, Gwen Stefani was more successful pushing the 80's back in, with the 'oh-mickey-you're-so-fine' inspired Hollaback Girl and her uncanny resemblance as a young Madonna, singing songs like 'Cool'. Even if that were three years ago, the 80's revival seems to be staying strong.  

In the indie music scene, The Black Kids seem to know how to milk the retro 80's comeback for all that it's worth. No one can argue that this band is very much influenced by the 80's. Frontman Reggie Youngblood, tends to sound just like Robert Smith (especially in their debut single 'I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend') and with their latest single off their Partie Traumatic album - 'Look At Me (When I Rock Wichoo)', he confesses creating the song while failing to learn a Smiths song. 'Look at Me' doesn't sound like The Smiths at all, but it actually sounds a bit like 70's to early 80's dance pop. Their music video is a trip down memory lane with a ton of Saturday Morning cartoon references. The video starts with a frame by frame re-enactment of the Dungeons & Dragons intro, coupled with a Silverhawks inspired Black Kids logo. It also shows the band members dressed to represent some kind of 80's cartoon character (with Speed Racer and Thundercat's Snarf as the more obvious ones).  A dare say, you'd be surprised to find out how much you were addicted to cartoons back in the day with how many 80's cartoon references you can name.

Check out The Black Kids' 'Look At Me (When I Rock Wichoo)' video. The video is also embedded after the jump (ugh, I hate MySpace's autoplay videos).

(edit: It did bug me that they had a Speed Racer reference since it wasn't much of an 80's cartoon. But then again, why would they make a girl speed racer anyways...unless it was Tess from Pole Position. There you go!)