The Cosmic Mixtape

“the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but they keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there’s no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.”

–Charles Bukowski, “Alone With Everybody”

“I’ve got to admit it’s getting better
A little better all the time.”

–The Beatles, “Getting Better”

It’s been a while, but no apologies, right? I have 1995 spam comments awaiting moderation right now. They’ve been steadily building, and now they’re a massive pile I can’t really get rid of. If this was a poem, or if I was more introspective, that might mean something. But metaphors are a little too easy nowadays, doncha think? So let’s lose ‘em.

Some days are easier than others. This ain’t one of those days. But some days are like that, I hear (even in Australia).

So for better or worse it looks like I’m back. I’ve got to admit it’s getting better, right?

Better, better, better.

* I am growing a beard, in the least active sense of the word “growing.” Really, I’m just “not shaving.” What happens from there is entirely my face’s doing.

* The path to my apartment on campus ends in a slope that is constructed in such a way as to become coated in deadly, invisible ice whenever temperatures drop below, say, 65 degrees. This, coupled with my natural lack of physical grace, is just sort of a countdown to disaster.

* I have one of those coats with the trendy strip of faux-fur on the hood. Let it be known that I do not condone the killing of animals for fur, be they real or imaginary.

* My schedule generally consists of three items: working in the kitchen, writing songs, and watching episodes of the American “Office” that I bought off iTunes. Can you guess which one occupies the most of my time?

* I’m so fucking glad I don’t work in an office anymore. I can say stuff like that now, because in ten years when I’m working the night shift at 7-11 and most of you out there have, you know, homes, you can laugh at me then.

Apparently, someone out there on the intermenets is extremely interested in alerting me about the availability of phentermine. While I appreciate the thoughtfulness of this particular notification, I see no need to notify me of it 294 times. Today. So, on the off chance that you cosmic mixtapers are leaving a comment that contains the word “phentermine” don’t be surprised if it is disintegrated as if by a bucket of acid before your very eyes.

Try using a synonym! Thesauruses are fun and easy to find on the interweb. As is, apparently, phentermine.

Although they are both delicious in their own way, I’m tired of smelling like barbecue sauce and dishwashing liquid. The past week on the Vineyard has been pretty hectic, which is I think is good–I wasn’t sure what to keep doing with myself with nobody around (ed’s note: believe it or not, that was not meant to sound dirty). I’m getting acclimated to the kitchen, though thank Gid (God’s second cousin, whom I just invented with a typo) I’m only going to be working lunches and dinners from now on, because getting up for breakfast was starting to be a bitch.

Anyway, we played our big opening show on Saturday, and with the exception of a few mild guitar mishaps everything went swimmingly as we did our best to wow the doe-eyed new people. I think someone got some pics from the show–if I get my grubby hands on them I’ll post ‘em up here. For right now, you should check out some of the music of the line-up that performed:

Now that the students are here and stuff is starting to get rolling I need to get my ass writing some songs. Yep. Showcases are tonight–time to scope out the new talent. More later.

Well folks, here we are again, teetering over the precipice of a new year, the expectations tearing at our collective jugulars like a pack of rabid wolves. There’s only thing to do: take refuge in the warm blanket of the past. Or at least attempt to categorize it, analyze it, and file it away in one nice, neat little unit. In that spirit, here I go up, up, and away, with a little recap from the last year.

The Cosmic Mixtape Presents…
A Completely Unobjective List of the Top 10 Albums of 2006

Here are the rules: a continental US release in 2006, only full lengths, no EP’s, no compilations (sorry, Sufjan). With that nasty little bit of business out of the way, let’s waste no more time and delve right into…

Number Ten: The Pipettes with We Are the Pipettes

Yeah, they have the whole image, they have matching polka dot dresses, and they’re cute as a bag of buttons, but below the kitschy exterior is a bedrock of some totally awesome pop songwriting and unfailingly fun execution. They sound sort of like what you might get if Phil Spector produced a Spice Girls album. But good. No, seriously, it’s really good. While I doubt girl groups are going to come back in vogue, I can certainly dig this mini-revival.

Standout Track: “Your Kisses Are Wasted on Me”

Number Nine: The Walkmen with A Hundred Miles Off

These guys walk the fine line between soul and cool, and every time you think they’re leaning too far in one direction they manage to swing back with a rad lick, raw wail, or even the occasional drum fill to suck you back into their hip brand of rock and roll. What really managed to surprise me about this album was the way that the band could keep mixing the same musical ingredients (reverbed guitar, drums low in the mix, Dylanesque vocals) to new and interesting effect. Very tasty.

Standout Track: “Emma, Get Me a Lemon”

Number Eight: Matthew Friedberger with Winter Women

How good is this album? Let’s put it this way–it’s good enough to make me forget Holy Ghost Language School, the most wince-inducing musical journey of 2006 and companion LP to this gem. Winter Women is as accessible, tuneful, and interesting as that other album was painful. Friedberger indulges his pop sweet tooth in some of the most gorgeous melodies of the year without losing his lovable weirdness and love of sonic flourishes and texture. More, please.

Standout Track: “Up the River”

Number Seven: The Black Angels with Passover

Whew. From it’s subject matter to the cover art to the droney, druggy sound, there ain’t nothing light about this album. What Passover lacks in whimsy is more than makes up for with rock. While most bands that discover psychadelics are more than happy to pick up the ole acoustic and go all Syd Barrett, these guys prefer to pummel you with sweet riffs, ominous vocals, and drone that’s somehow catchy rather than sleep-inducing. It’s like the last thirty years never even happened.

Standout Track: “Manipulation”

Number Six: Sunset Rubdown with Shut Up I Am Dreaming

Standard adjectives fail me when attempting to decribe the sound of this album (well, adjectives other than “awesome” or “radtastic”)–there’s some yodeling, there’s some indie, there’s some weird instruments, there’s a little Arcadey Fieryness, but none of it comes together sounding like any one thing. Let’s just leave it by saying that this is one of the most passionate, desperate, and even just plain emotional (I know, I hate that word, too) albums I’ve heard in a long time (without being embarrassing, boring, or juvenile). It’s earnestness will convert even the most jaded black-wearing hipster. Is black still cool these days? I don’t know.

Standout Track: “Stadiums and Shrines II”

Number Five: Joanna Newsom with Ys

Okay, so a combination of early reviews, the album art, the freakin’ album name, and the fact that all the songs are really long had me convinced that I was going to hate this album (I’ve got a pretty poor tolerance for meandering of any kind with pop songs, which makes me wary of anything that creeps over five minutes). Still, I decided to pick it up since I mostly liked The Milk-Eyed Mender and because I have a subscription to Emusic and this album only counted as five downloads. Man–I’m so glad I was wrong. This album is totally spellbinding, with Newsom’s already talented songwriting skill leaping to new levels of creativity and her keen melodic sense kept firmly in place. The phenomenal strings don’t hurt either. So yeah.

Standout Track: “Emily”

Number Four: Neko Case with Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

Most of the people who talk about Neko Case’s albums tend to focus on her voice. Don’t get me wrong, Case’s gorgeous voice is certainly worth talking about, but the reason this album is so high on my list is due to the atmosphere, vibe, and songwriting as much as Neko Case’s incredible singing. Listening to this album is liked being sucked into a suburban spaghetti western film noir–Case has loaded the disc with twanging guitars, cryptic lyrics, and some of the most alluring, knotted melodies and song structures I have ever heard. Like most women, the weirder she gets, the more I like her (that’s a hint to all you silent admirers from the interweb).

Standout Track: “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood”

Number Three: The Decemberists with The Crane Wife

I need to preface this review by saying that no matter what happens, if a Decemberists album comes out in a given year, it’s gonna show up on my year end list. They bring me too much joy for it to be otherwise. Now, before all you digital haters try to step, know this–the boys and girl of this beloved band have really earned it this year. Colin Meloy’s songs are just as full of his trademark tales and hooks as ever, but this album sees the band branching out musically to incorporate prog, metal, funk, et cetera into their folk-rock mix. Not only do they not embarrass themselves, they manage to keep their sound fresh and never lose the Decemberishness that we (me) all love.

Standout Track: “The Crane Wife 1 & 2″

Number Two: Belle & Sebastian with The Life Pursuit

Let it be known that I would kill to write these songs. Seriously, just tell me who. Promise me that I’ll get the talent to come up with these gems, and I’ll make sure grandma comes down with a serious case of knife-in-the-back. Am I joking? No. This album was my first serious exposure to Belle & Sebastian, and I was absolutely floored by some of the best pop songs I have ever heard and was prompted to go out and buy the entirety of the band’s back catalog. When you have tunes like this you don’t even need lyrics, but Stuart Murdoch just keeps bringing the goodness with unique and engaging mini-stories. He’s even hampering my writing ability, since the best words I was able to come up with in the last sentence were “unique” and “engaging” and I’ve resorted to a startling amount of hyperbole. Whatever. I might actually mean it. Bastard.

Standout Track: “Another Sunny Day”

Number One: The Hold Steady with Boys and Girls in America

Okay, it’s about two in the morning and since the prospect of trying to find good words to describe my favorite album of the year is not particularly appealing, I’ll make this simple: if you like rock music in any capacity at all, please go and give this album your time. It deserves it. This album is somehow aching, fist-pumping, beautiful, playful, thoughtful, heavy, light, and so much else at the same time. Craig Finn is one of the great lyricists of our time–if there was a Mount Rushmore for songwriting, he’d be second from the left. This is a Great album with a capital G, and while I don’t have much power over the rock and roll canon I know that, for whatever it’s worth, this is one of those albums that will bring me pleasure for the rest of my life.

Standout Track: Um, all of them. Yep.

Man, it must be late. I’m getting mushy. Well, that’s it for now. If anyone has any thoughts or lists of their own, I’d love to hear/read them.

After more than three thousand miles, several Ginger Ales from the beverage cart, and one plane trip that felt a lot like the spooky part of Flight of the Navigator, here I am maxing and relaxing on an island off the old part of the US. It’s raining cats and dogs (literally, there is an abundance of canine and feline precipitation) and I am hanging out at the Lodge, where the people in the Executive track at the Contemporary Music Center wheel and deal and where there is a creepy Christian library in residence from the campus’ use as a summer camp. Seriously, some of these books terrify me. It’s pretty quiet here (quiet being a relative term, as the majority of the few people here are in a rock band and tend to, well, rock) and it’s nice to have a little respite before the place swings into action in a week or so.

My main goal for today is to find food somewhere, as the house chef doesn’t arrive for another week and because I have no car to go to a place with food. While it’s somewhat unlikely that I will die of starvation, I want you all to know that I lived my life the way I wanted to: with panache!

More to come later. I think it’s time for me to put together my top albums from last year.

I’ll let you all in cyberland figure it out.

It’s the little things that remind us we’re all getting older, inchworming our way toward maturity, children, and–the inevitable consequence of the previous items–death.  Some people might be moved to ponder their own mortality when staring at a beautiful sunset, or by watching their baby take his first steps.  As for me, well, I got all maudlin and “big picture” when I was watching TV this past week and saw an advertisement for Buzz Ballads and Killer Buzz, the new ridiculous made-for-cable compilation CD’s featuring–you guessed it–all your favorite mid-nineties plaid-wearing alterna-rockers.  Whoa, hold it.  Those cheesy commercials are only meant for eighties bands with too much hair.  They’re for sad thirtysomethings who want to remember when their life still had, you know, potential.  They aren’t for me, or for the music I used to listen to on the radio and worship when I was thirteen.

This forced me to have a few painful revelations.  First, I remember every single friggin’ word of every single one of the songs on that scrolling list.  Second (related to the first), Collective Soul is nowhere near as awesome as I remember them being.  Finally, I realized that most of the things that seem vital and important for us now, when given enough time, become fodder for bargain-bin commercialism, hindsight ridicule, and gauzy sentimentality.  For example, here is a telling quotation from MusicSpace.com:  “finally found the songs that really ment something.. these songs hold memories ans meaning ulike the songs from now” –nikki from cali.  After calling in a crack team of linguists to translate that utterance into a readable sentence, my only response was, Really?  While some of those songs continue to rock my face, it’s hard to imagine that we’ve somehow as a society artistically floundered since our peak of Verical Horizon and Lifehouse.  I guess at the end, the beast of the warm fuzzies comes to get us all.  If we can’t admit that the things we loved weren’t as world-shatteringly good as we used to believe, we might as well jump headfirst into the pleasant waters of nostalgia.

At least the Gin Blossoms are still totally awesome.

or, Knock and the Door Shall Be Opened

Argyle is the new brown.

Freak-folk is the new dance-punk.

Project Runway is the new American Idol.

Girl hair is the new girl pants.

Synthesizers are the new screaming.

Blue is the new red.

Trysexual is the new metrosexual.

President Bush is the new President Bush.

Community college is the new high school.

Sex offenders are the new hate criminals.

Orange County is the new South.

Google is the new Apple.

Harry Potter is the new television.

YouTube is the new MTV.

Stem cell research is the new cloning.

Detachment is the new angst.

Borat is the new Edward Said.

Blogging is the new thinking.

Facebook is the new student union.

MySpace is the new church.

The iPod is the new Bible.

Oprah is the new Jesus.

Scientology is the new Mormonism.