Full mix available on Muxtape; newest songs are always on top.
My goal of the Weekly Mixes is to give a good sense of what I’m listening to and why. In general, they’ll be in two parts; one on Sunday/Monday and one later in the week. This one, by virtue of the infancy of the blog, is coming in at the tail end of the Sunday/Monday time frame. In addition, I’m still learning Wordpress 2.5, so bear with me. Oh, and all tracks will be deleted in a week, and if someone wants something taken down, email me and I’ll do it right away.
The Magic Numbers – This is a Song
It’s fitting that the very first track on my very first mix on here is entitled “This is a Song.” Well – yeah. The Magic Brakes make sweetly harmonious jangle pop that’s like a cool ocean breeze on an early summer day, sunroof and windows gaping open to let the salty air in. It’s throwback 60s, but in a good way.
Portishead’s third full-length, unimaginatively titled Third, has been lingering in the rumor mill for years. Led by the soulful quavering of Beth Gibbons, the band’s beats defined a subset of trip-hop throughout the late 90s, even if they did not release a good many albums. All this is to say that Third is far more dynamic than the previous studio albums. While still haunting, it is not as beat driven; guitars are often mixed forward as in this song, and melodies are developed around other aspects of the band besides Gibbons’ voice.
Of course, Gibbons is still a driving force, and in this song, her wail is like that of a lover ripped away; a mother watching a son dragged to war; an addict in forced rehab. It speaks to the failure of the status quo, to an unnatural tear in the fabric of the universe. As the person in the song deteriorates over the loss, the quiet guitar that begins the song is replaced by the distant hum of the beat, the drumbeat of white horses carrying her away from the tragedy.
M83’s newest disc, Saturdays = Youth, evokes a simpler time – one of The Last Starfighter, Pretty in Pink, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Transformers that didn’t suck. Their throwback 80s sound is sweetly pretentious in the same way that the 80s were – soaring keyboard strings, laughably melodramatic spoken interludes, and edges softened with the hope that the future would sound as sweet as the music they were making. But it doesn’t suck – well, some of it does, but not this song – instead, it recalls the most charming elements of the decades overwrought culture and updates them slightly for the 00 palette.
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