Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun: a melt-the-snow mix

Winter is officially upon us - the snow is dusting my front lawn as I type, and my heart is constantly threatening to cease blood-flow to my toes. I figure there's nothing better than a bit of music to heat up the atmosphere and bring some life back into the frozen corners of our homes and automobiles.

Here is a mix that might aid that effort. Merry Christmas!


1. Ce Matin-La / Air
2. D.A.N.C.E. / Justice
3. Seasun / Delorean
4. New Theory / Washed Out
5. In The Morning (featuring Andi Toma) / Junior Boys
6. As Serious As Your Life / Four Tet
7. Ready 2 Wear / Felix Da Housecat
8. Transformers (Ghosthustler Remix) / Futurecop!
9. All My Friends / LCD Soundsystem
10. Hello Jenn, I'm A Mess / Evangelicals
11. Fragile / God Is An Astronaut
12. No Comply / Studio
13. Baptism / Crystal Castles
14. Up, Up, Down, Down, L, R, L, R / Truckasauras
15. Windowdipper / Jib Kidder
16. A Paw In My Face / The Field
17. Don't Save Us From The Flames / M83
18. Flim / Aphex Twin

Download the full mix here.

Top 10 of '10

A brief overview of my music-listening experience in 2010...

10. The Morning Benders Big Echo
The opening track “Excuses” is wonderful. It’s very reminiscent of a 1950’s “At Last” Etta James type of chord-progression, yet still bringing something completely new to the table all at the same time. The album continues from there and stays very strong.

9. Sufjan Stevens The Age of Adz
I was actually surprised by this album. Not as much surprised in the obvious shift of sound that Sufjan chose to make, but honestly surprised by how good it is. This guy just knows who to make music and how to achieve the exact sound that he is trying to achieve.

8. Blitzen Trapper Destroyer of the Void
In all fairness, this album is extremely up and down. There are some great high points, but then there are some very mediocre low points. But, the high points are very strong. The opening track, which is the title track, is seriously awesome. The only descriptive which I can think of, in an attempt to describe this song, is to call it “Queen Folk”. And I don’t mean “Queen Folk” in the sense of something that some guy from Montgomery, Alabama (while travelling to New York City for the weekend) would say when he saw a bunch of trendily-dressed men hanging out together and so he yells, “Hey, look at all dem Queen Folk o’er dere!” I mean “Queen Folk” in the sense of somehow combining Queen (the 70’s rock band) and folk music… if Freddy Mercury and John Denver had a child, what kind of music would it make? (Sorry for making you picture what Freddy Denver would look like.) But, this song is serious. And there are other really, really strong points on this album… about a handful of them. And when those strong points shine, this album was on it’s way to being as excellent as anything that was released this year… but, for the remainder of the album there was almost the feeling that they didn’t keep trying… that they kind of did what bands used to do… the kind of bands that used to make their living off of successful singles… the kind of bands that would just record a few good songs (and make those few songs excellent) and then just put some filler around them on the album. Blitzen Trapper was on their way to making the best album of their career, and then it feels like they just got lazy before they were done.

7. The Walkmen Lisbon
My first five to ten listens of this album I really wasn't all that impressed and I felt pretty strongly that You & Me was far superior to Lisbon. And, though I still think that You & Me is the better album between the two, Lisbon has now grown on me a ton and I am actually in the middle of still appreciating this album more and more. At this point I assume that if I were asked about this album a couple of months from now I would have an even higher opinion of it... it just keeps slowly climbing the charts for me. I have no clue how they chose to produce and record this album, but they somehow give you this feel that you are sitting in the center of a large room (almost like a big high school wrestling room... I know that's random, but something that expansive with cold, concrete walls and no windows), you feel like you are sitting in the center of this large room while they are recording this album on all sides of you... there's a lot of near-empty space, and yet even the remotest of spaces are still filled with just enough sound. Great production, great sound, and it keeps getting better the more I listen to it.

6. New Pornographers Together
First of all, I want to say that Challengers was a massive letdown (other than the title track, which was beautiful). Fortunately, Together brought back everything that I love about the New Pornographers. This was certainly no Twin Cinema, and with all of the side-projects that these guys do (or, maybe New Pornographers is now all of their side-project at this point) I don’t think they will every recapture the pop perfection of Twin Cinema. But, nonetheless, I really enjoyed this album.

5. Arcade Fire The Suburbs
Arcade Fire officially recovered from the “sophomore slump” with The Suburbs. (Though some may not feel like Neon Bible was a “sophomore slump”, it was good but certainly not great in my opinion.) The Suburbs was great… and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” was honestly shockingly good and completely unexpected from these guys. A really strong album.

4. Beach House Teen Dream
Beach House has had a certain and specific sound for a number of years. I remember them opening up for The Clientele a few years ago at The Basement and there was not a person in the entire room speaking (I’m not sure if anyone was even breathing). It was one of those live-music moments that I wish I could go back and re-experience. They have had some amazing tools to work with from the start (Victoria Legrand’s voice is both mature and moving to degrees that hardly anyone else can currently compete with), but it wasn’t until Teen Dream that they finally learned how to really use those tools to the full implementation of all that they could do. I think that their sound finally came together on this album and it turned out to be a beautiful album.

3. Local Natives Gorilla Manor
I know this album came out at the beginning of the year, so I hope you haven’t forgotten already, but please remember how fun this album is. Give it another listen… this a really solid album.

2. Suckers Wild Smile
This is the one band that kicked me in the teeth this year. Please, please, please go and see these guys live. If you take my advice then I will go ahead and preemptively tell you “Your welcome”.

1. The National High Violet
On the surface this is not “my style” of album. It’s honestly not what I usually think of as “my favorite album of the year" type of music… but, as it turns out, “Runaway” was my favorite song of 2010 (by far) and it is definitely not the type of song that is usually my favorite “song of the year” type of song. (Grizzly Bear’s “Two Weeks” was far and away my favorite song of 2009 and, for what I love about music that makes perfect, logical sense… “Runaway” is obviously in an entirely different category from a song like “Two Weeks”.) I love the song structure… which is to say, there really is no traditional structure (what exactly is the chorus and what is the verse, and is there a bridge in there?). I’m listening to it right now… my goodness, do me a favor and play this song right now and close your eyes and turn up the volume and take it all in… wow… so good. This is also the first album I’ve really fallen in love with in awhile where I only “kinda” liked it at first, but kept listening to it, and then a few months later I was mesmerized by it (it honestly took about that long, but for some reason I kept it in my CD changer in my car that whole time because I continued to grow increasingly intrigued… yes, I still listen to music on CD’s). “Conversation 16” is an excellent song, which is followed by “England”, which rocks. This whole album is strong top to bottom. “Terrible Love” is such a perfect album opener… the way it enters (also the way those drums come in… which very much brings you into that The National type of sound, and yet the smooth “oohs” that show up later in the song introduce something more promising). I’m always a huge fan of album bookends, which is to say that I put a lot of weight (probably too much weight) into songs that open and close albums (but, I’m just a huge fan of albums taken as a whole). With that said, in my opinion, which I recall was the opposite of Pitchfork’s review of this album, (I remember them pooh-poohing this song when the album came out, for some stupid reason… I don’t know why) but I think “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” is a gorgeous closing track. It’s one of those songs that carries me along on top of it’s waves (I hope that vaguely makes sense because being carried along on top of the unending, rolling waves of the ocean is the feeling that I get when I listen to this song), it’s one of those songs that I wish was twenty minutes long, I just want him to keep singing “Vanderlyle, cry baby cry/ Oh the waters are rising/ Still no surprising you/ Vanderlyle crybaby cry…” until I fall asleep. And, then I’ll wake up tomorrow and push “Play” again.