Mixtape 319 • The Beat
A collection of songs referencing their own internal rhythmic structure, or perhaps providing commentary about tempo and meter in general.
A collection of songs referencing their own internal rhythmic structure, or perhaps providing commentary about tempo and meter in general.
Peach season is hot and heavy here in the Grand Valley, but I have yet to reach peach oversaturation. Give them to me in anything and everything, sure, I’ll try it. A special selection tonight in the form of The Beat, a one-hour set of music self-referentially dedicated to its own rhythmic components, after which things took their usual turn for the weird.
Let's have a skeptical listen to My Favorite Lies, a collection of songs about falsehoods, fabrications, and outright deception.
Tonight, we start with a special presentation of My Favorite Lies, a one-hour collection of songs about untruths, deception, fakery, and more. Moving on, we filled the rest of the evening with the usual variety of genres, mostly from the last few months. Of particular note are new releases from Holiday Ghosts, Adrienne Lenker, and Alejandro Escovedo.
If you’re looking for subtlety and innuendo, keep looking because Mannequin Pussy is out of stock.
A very quiet night, perhaps everyone is hunkering down for the leap day. Featured is IDLES, who all look like they could recommend a good IPA, and also would be willing to kick my ass for thinking so. Tonight featured more than our usual ration of covers, starting with a not-unlikely take on Beck’s “Loser” and following up with takes on tracks originally made famous by Muppets and Devo.
The new album from Jen Cloher is magnificent, and when her Twitter account favorited the playlist entry for the lead track tonight, I near swooned. I recommend you listen to I Am The River, The River Is Me from start to finish, and enjoy something you’ll be doing for years to come for the first time. In other news, our recently adopted cat Princess Otoboke Beaver (aka Pris) gave birth to four healthy kittens on St. Patrick’s day — Ziggy, Stardust, Spider, and Mars.
Maybe it’s the lackadaisical groove she can effortlessly establish, or her warm confident voice, but listening to Madison Cunningham is like sinking into the sofa for a new episode of your favorite show, a general feeling of ease, comfort, and complete enjoyment. Also, maybe you thought you heard a dirty word during “Tounge-Clucking Grammarian”, but you didn’t — let’s face, there’s a lot of rhymes for “clucking” that could register a false positive.
Mimi Parker, vocalist and drummer and half of the Minnesota band Low, passed away a couple of weeks ago while I was traveling. It’s a shocking loss and an abrupt end to a musical career that was still unfolding; the band’s last two albums, coming at the tail end of a discography that spans decades, showed a blossoming new direction for an act that was famed for their quiet and glacial approach. We open the show with Low’s rendition of a Bee Gees classic in tribute.
When I was younger, still developing my musical tastes, in an era where the Beatles were closer to those days than Nirvana are to these, I hated on Yoko. It's what we all did. The older me, like Stephin Merritt and the many other luminaries on Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono, appreciates the inexpressible beauty and uncompromising nature of her art.