Mixtape 292 • I Got Cracked
Don't you be giving Vundabar the hairy eyeball, because they will mess you up.
Don't you be giving Vundabar the hairy eyeball, because they will mess you up.
The weather is rushing up on us, and this mercurial ambiance fits tonight’s opening cover from Yo La Tengo, as they take a blistering Ramones classic and turn it into a bit of beach blanket bingo. Respect was paid later in the show with the original “Rockaway Beach,” which sure sounds like a fun place.
Sure, bring your slick neon-tinged indie rock in here. I don't care that you sprinkled keyboards and saxophones all over in addition to the stabbing guitars, distressed vocals, and plucky bass. It just needs a beat we can dance to.
It’s been about six months since the previous compliation of music that was played on the 11pm-midnight section of the Mixtape — the late-night temporal space that receives music that is strange, harsh, and/or repetitive that is known as The Final Hour. This is the second anthology from this pool of music, presented through the entirety of tonight’s Mixtape to allow those whose schedule leans towards the earlier hours a chance to experience. Hark!
After a dormancy of a few years, The Dodos have re-emerged and proven to be anything but extinct. This duo makes a sound that is easy to recognize but hard to describe, a sort of acoustic progressive metal filled with droning rhythms and cascading guitars that you can clearly hear on the appropriately-titled “Unicorn”.
Bill Callahan has been wandering the halls of music for quite some time now, his deep voice and aimless arrangements a constant hypnotic presence.
Forward-looking dance funk, the kind of music that immediately makes you grab the closest person by the wrist and drag them to the dance floor.
Modern electronic soul, richly layered and intricately produced, with decidedly old-fashioned influences from ‘60s girl groups, ‘70s AM radio, ‘80s club hits, and so on.
The thin Nebraska ice crackled ominously as one of the occupants of the well-appointed tent leaned back on their recliner. They peered at their line, descending into the near-freezing water and vibrating sympathetically to the sounds of the radio. The other ice-fisher threw a log on the fire, pausing in recognition at the song before smiling and turning it up.
The vessel floated silently across the Mississippi, as silently as a hovercraft possibly could, which was not very silently at all. The two occupants of the walnut-paneled bridge listened intently to the sounds of the radio above the drone of the fans, one of them spinning the wheel with wild abandon, the other plotting an imaginary course over river and land using a nubby pencil and printed map. The sextant lay unused, for it was, after all, night.