Best of 2006

I do this every year. The point is not what was necessarily the artistic best of the year, but actually what I read or listened to or saw (and usually what actually ends up on this list in a combination of all three) that actually meant the most to me. As a result this, list has almost no criteria even though I like to think I have good taste. But everything on it is something that matters a lot to me.

Cormac Mccarthy
There’s something happening here, and it is clearly and completely terrifying. We will sacrifice a lot for each other, but all of that is not enough. Somewhere there are trees of dead babies and bones with the flesh boiled off of them. Somewhere people are in love, but it cannot be here. Parts of the world are burning, and we want to see them, we want to touch the ashes. The ashes are stark, but hell if they aren’t beautiful.
At some point in January, I went on a serious reading binge when there were many, many other things I should have been doing. At the end of this was a borrowed copy of Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, which is often considered to be Mccarthy’s best novel. It is certainly the most intense, and most harrowing. I had a bizarre experience reading Blood Meridian that I rarely have with books—when I finished it about forty-eight hours after I started it, I had virtually no idea what the specifics of the book were. This feeling was weird, and intriguing. I had read his Border Trilogy before, but this novel was different. Over the year, I read this book three times, and I read four other Mccarthy novels. I read them in different places, in different mental conditions. Mccarthy books don’t teach me anything—their common thread is their violence, and that they exist in a world where you are always surprised to see a radio or a truck on a dusty road. In other words, Mccarthy doesn’t write about us and our angst or trauma. But he writes beautifully, and his books get at some kind of greater, desperate experience which has more in common with our world than we’d otherwise think. These books are essentially modern, they are psychedelic, and they are impossible to read just once.

Camera Obscura, “Let’s Get Out of This Country”
With no offense to Camera Obscura, I mean the song and not the album. I mean the song because it was on repeat this summer, the Scottish lilt and string hook splitting their way through all the heat and angst and horror of months back at home. If I had to analyze what parts of my life are based on some vague form of escapism, it would probably horrify me. But this song is so simple in its wishes: I want to be in a different place, and I want to be there with you. Though the second part of the sentiment is not something I strive to practice in my daily life, “Let’s Get Out of This Country” explains that, on all counts.

Readyville

C’mon, baby do me a favor. C’mon baby, tell me it’s too late. An El Camino is a car, to ge me where I’m going, even if it’s not where I’m supposed to be. The heart’s all cold, but the tongue’s all gin and this paperback is giving me a heart attack. Though we’ve been here for ages, we still act like little kids.

Ah, alt.country, love of my life! Twee will never supplant you, my darlingest darling, my flannel-clad, slide guitar-welding, whiskey-drinking paramour. It’s not just about half-broken windshield wipers and singing songs loudly in Chicago. It’s about spending all your money on cheap flowers and drinking until you’re honest, even when that turns out to be boring.


The Squid and The Whale, Kicking and Screaming
Technically, I saw both of these movies in 2005. But I watched them much more in 2006. Squid is saved on my computer desktop, and I watch it with alarming frequency. In contrast, Kicking was impossible to find for quite a while—it was only released on DVD at the end of the summer, and my video store lost their VHS version. Both are by Noah Baumbach, who, for some reason or another has a real ability to write things that captivate me. Kicking is the only movie I’ve found that replicates what I loved about high school movies for the liberal arts set. When Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation” comes on at the end, we are left depressed, nostalgic, and meaningfully hopeful. I appreciate that. Conversely, I like movies that make me cringe, but Squid and the Whale has a real heart. Brooklyn in all its decrepit gentrification, Knopf, hate where there was love, longtime emotional scarring written really beautifully, and skin peeled off the lower lip. Trying, but not hard enough, and everyone is sad for all the right reasons. These are human failure at its loveliest. The awkwardness of adolescence, and the more upsetting awkwardness of adulthood—all unavoidable.

Voxtrot, s/t EP
Personally, I think this is a stupid band name. And Voxtrot sometimes writes about stupid things. However, their songs are filled with such vibrancy and such understanding that I forgive them for saying that we’re young and stupid and raised by wolves. We are, at points. We can shake our bodies and wreck our minds, and you are the wrecking force in me whether I like it or not, so I might as well tell you. Voxtrot came out with other records this year, but the first hit with such a charming immediacy, and I listened to it so much, and I danced to it so much, that I can’t even fathom last spring without these songs.

The Mountain Goats, “No Children”
When your heart breaks slowly, you find something to steel yourself against. Driving in Philadelphia and screaming the words, in a field in Chicago, in cars all over the country. Every place means something different, because we kept changing. The irony is this is a song about things staying the same forever. Maybe we aren’t so hopeless after all. I still hope that our few remaining friends give up on trying to save us, but for entirely different reasons.

Charles D’Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum, Tom Waits, “Hold On”
The Dead Fish Museum was a book I pined for all spring, desperate for its newly printed pages, too poor to afford it in hardcover. “Hold On” could be about D’Ambrosio characters—the utter stillness in a scene, all the things that make sense about chance, and so beautifully articulated that it really does matter. Everything ends up hollow in both instances, but we are trying. We discover that trying is what matters.

Marat/Sade
France gave me horrible dreams the whole way through. There is something surreal about suddenly being half incommunicado with the world while in a place where you feel like you’ve already seen everything, but in your head. There is a sense of weirdness and foreboding, there is a specific flood of beauty and there is an anticipation for moving away from such weirdness. I read a lot, and I read in English because I thought it would chase away whatever was confusing me. I don’t like dreaming in other languages.
Marat/Sade was written in German, so maybe I was undermining myself a little bit. My copy broke in half on the plane home. Stiff binding, but excessive over-reading. The play is railing against nature and the nature of the self. The play is complicated and brutal, and I appreciate that. The characters are all someone else inside of someone else, and the audience is confused and horrified. A distance from beauty is good.


The Blow
Chicago streets and parks in the sunshine are an odd thing to associate with music about personal strength and personal weakness and complication and relationships, but that expanse is the best thing about the Blow. Chicago goes on forever, and everything is visible, the only barriers are what we’ve constructed. We are neurotic, but justified in being so. The city glittering at night some point later, cheap plastic sunglasses and something lovely trapped in those sounds. I think I get it now, or I think I’m getting at it. The Blow is adorable and accurate, and they make some of the most articulate pop songs I’ve heard. These songs make me believe in some commonality of experience that is not immediately apparent. I don’t know about being on the same level as anything, but this is music that is about the desire for both intimacy and inevitable betrayal. The Blow maintains a safe and logical distance from the songs while being so intensely involved in them enough to make a heart stop.

Josh Ritter, “Girl in the War”, Okkervil River, “O, Dana” & Rhett Miller, "My Valentine"
Trapped in a thunder storm, talking on a cell phone, completely drenched and horrified as much as I was eager. Shivering cold and nervous. Everything happened and I was either too far away from it or too close to do anything. Josh Ritter says, “Peter said to Paul, ‘You’ve got to rock yourself a little harder. Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire’. And us talking to God is Laurel begging Hardy for a gun.” So falling asleep with this song on repeat isn’t a bad thing, but it’s an admittance that something is horribly wrong. “O, Dana” is a Big Star cover, but it’s the same thing, in different terms. And "My Valentine" is about overcoming ambivalence towards real appreciate and real action. It starts with a Dylan Thomas reference ("Love in the asylum is a beautiful thing") and goes on to something that isn't complex or well-thought so much at genuine. Admit that you’re hurt and uncertain, admit that you’re angry, and admit that you're happy with what you've got. Telling the truth is something to strive towards, and is consistently unavoidable.

Kentucky, approximated.

A year ago (and isn’t it funny that we don’t think of anything else this time of year but what happened a year ago?) I never would have assumed that I would go to Kentucky several times in 2006. But down through Indiana we drove, and I saw horses and drank bourbon and moonshine. This is mostly on account of the Damnwells song, which I like a lot, but I have noticed a strange amount of Kentucky in music I like by people who are not from Kentucky. That was a bad sentence, but I think you get the gist.

Neko Case, “Bowling Green”
Neko Case’ fantastic in this, an indiscreet song about pretty girls and lucky men in Bowling Green. It’s a rollicking direct hit, but charming and wry (as all good Case belters are). The times when I love Neko Case the most is when she writes these kinds of songs that are only vague characterizations but are inflamed (in the best possible sense) by Case’s voice, which (again) is utterly enrapturing.

Ryan Adams, “Oh My Sweet Carolina”
“I miss Kentucky/ and I miss my family,” sings Ryan Adams on this, which is arguably one of the best songs on Heartbreaker, a record composed entirely of great songs. Emmylou Harris sings back-up vocals, which are entrancing and sharp all at once. This song makes me catch my breath every time I hear it, and it makes me appreciate all the things that I love about Ryan Adams—his good voice, his good lyrics, his accurate sparseness and deft character development, and his beautiful evocation of something that is just far enough away to be interesting and just close enough to be intimate. “I was trying to find me something, but I wasn’t sure just what/ and I ended up with pockets full of dust.”

The Damnwells, “Louisville”
Louisville means little to me but pictures of nice-ish office buildings and a congested bridge. I saw the Damnwells open for Rhett Miller a few years ago, and they didn’t have any songs like this in their set—everything was exuberant and a little dumb, if I recall. This song is the opposite—it’s thoughtful and careful. It’s a love song, but of the wrong sort—“I don’t want love to conquer Rome, just your voice and a sleeping pill. I’m gonna trade in Friday nights for a piece of your heart”. This is a sentiment that I might not empathize with, but there’s lilting recognition here, that there’s a nonsense to what we desire but also a logic that’s quite beautiful. Cities and girls are interchangeable in pop songs (cities and boys too, though not in this instance), but I’m appreciative of any song that acknowledges why exactly that is. And even though I speed through cities and stall on bridges, other people might cry crossing that river.

Tom Waits, “Jockey Full of Bourbon”
Oh goodness is this self-explanatory. Tom Waits at his ultimate strength—articulate but bizarre story, whiskey voice, and a whole lot of hole where there might be heart or vice versa (and you can never tell).

Ways to waste a holiday.

1) Philadelphia radio has gotten really awful. WXPN, my chosen station, has somehow regressed to a mixture of un-listenable and very, very white contemporary adult alternative, and seventies proggish crap. It’s unnerving how little I want to listen to them. Even my favorite DJs have been playing too much Jethro Tull and My Morning Jacket for their own good.
This failure means I’ve been tuning in to a lot of the pop hit stations in Philadelphia. These stations seem to play two things, which share in common their ability to totally baffle and amaze me in their Dadaist poppiness. The first is the song “Fergalicious”, which is the second single from Fergie’s Album The Dutchess [sic]. AHHHHHHHHHHH. In this song, Fegie extols the virtue of her own body in roughly the following order: she’s not sleazy because boys can only look at her (no touching), but she’s accessible (“Fergalicious/ but I ain’t promiscuous/ I blow kisses/ that gets them boys on rock-rock/ And they’re lining down the block/ just to watch what I got”). She also is “up in the gym just working on my fitness” quite frequently. Fergie is also apparently “tastey” [sic, and it IS spelled out) and “delicious”. Aside from teaching spelling errors and a bizarre love of the gym, and also encouraging girls to not be “treated like clientele”, “Fergalicious” doesn’t seem to have a point. However, the song does include a quick Spanish lesson (“4, tres, 2, uno”) and an assurance that Fergie is not trying to take your man. Just in case you were worried. However, “Fergalicious” has a catchy (infectious) beat and is highly entertaining in its strangeness.
Unlike the Fray, which is just baffling.
The other bizarre pop single frequently played in Philly is the Fray’s “How to Save a Life”. The Fray have been boggling my mind since this summer, when they had a hit on Maine radio with a chorus that displayed a completely arbitrary attention to detail and a weird grasp of both the English language and narrative structure: “Everybody knows I’m in over my head/ with eight seconds left in overtime/ She’s on your mind”. Huh. I don’t even know where to start analyzing that. “How to Save a Life” is similarly strange, though according to the comments on songmeanings.net it is about a father and a crack-addicted teenager. This makes some sense, as the Fray do evoke many clichés about knowing best and “talking”. However, this song also switches person extensively, and could be about almost anything. So even if the crack epidemic in America is a problem, its bland evocations of God and “where did I go wrong?” could fit just about any problem (say a stampeding elephant or the apocalypse or a sex addict?). It's amazing how nondescript music can get.

2) Do you want to know exactly what James Bond drinks in each and every installation of his book series? I never did, but in the throes of a family holiday, it can get very interesting. For instance, in Casino Royale he tries to order a 1945 Taittinger and is told by the sommelier to drink a 1943 Brut Blanc de Blanc instead—and he complies. Shocker. Visit: www.atomicmartini.com/007

3) Pitchfork came out with their list of top 50 albums and top 100 songs of 2006 a few days ago. It is completely awful. I can’t start with how much I dislike Pitchfork’s esoterically and triumphantly hip yet horribly cliché coverage of most indie rock. They often ignore actual quality in favor of weird hip factors which don’t quite add up. However, I should note that I often (unconsciously) do the same thing, so I acknowledge how difficult it is not to do. Though with Pitchfork’s Pazz and Jop style of ranking (everyone on staff does a list and point values are assigned to make a final compilation, sort of like a mix tape by committee), one would think this would be avoided. I forgot to post it here, but I had a top five albums list published a few weeks ago in the University of Chicago Maroon. Find it here. Despite the thought I put into it (a significant amount), it is actually not quite representative of what meant a lot to me in the past year. I’ve done a detailed write up of that for the past few years. See them directly below.

2004, 2005.

These are my top lists from the past two years. Verbatim.

2005:
1) Joan Didion. We, my friends, are all the dreamers of the golden dream. We are the victims and the murderers and the people trying to get by on love or money or hope or sex or failure. We lose ourselves, and years later we realize that we are not ourselves without the people who we love, and when we lose them we have to continue to be ourselves anyway, even without them. Sometimes we have to sit and wait for a wave to hit us. Sometimes we have to witness the awful, sometimes we have to watch Jim Morrison fuck up on the precipice of a new, shitty era, sometimes we have to watch ourselves fuck up and then we stand tall and move and wear flowers in our hair and put on our sunglasses and keep thinking and keep writing and we stare at the sky and feel that weird sense about everything being okay, in the end. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, and we tell ourselves stories so that when we die, we will have threads to hold onto, things pulling us. I read six Joan Didion books this year. And I learn lessons from every sentence.

2) Bright Eyes. Because driving around downtown and screaming the most emo lyrics ever can be beautiful. Because sometimes it's good to admit that you're in trouble, as long as you do it eloquently. Because Conor is an intense little kid, and a ghost and because he recorded an alt.country record. Because this time last year I sure as hell did NOT want to marry him. In the end, I think Bright Eyes might be a phase. That kind of staggering intensity shouldn't apply to me for long. But this is my phase, and this is my shitty winter and my days of drinking whiskey and wine and feeling that everything is sometimes too difficult and sometimes too fucking easy.

3) M.I.A. The night before I graduated high school, I went to see M.I.A. I remember dancing and jumping and feeling so lovely and sweaty and I didn't care. I want to be M.I.A., or possibly sleep with her (actually, that's just a paraphrase of something I'v heard said a lot this year). Neither of those two are a very viable option, so I'll setlle for just listening to her music and trying (and failing) to sing along. It's drama, but it makes me smile.

4) Adrian C. Louis, "Colossal American Copulation". For a brief period this spring, I was good friends with really truly messed up kids who were trying to get better. The way this poem works is lovely. It's a personal history of a personal vendetta against the self. And in the end, it's not about being angry at yourself (it never is), so much as everything that you really truly can't control. And that's what fuck is about, really. It's about the control you never really had and will never get. Fuck that.

5) Twee. Ha. I'm liking my juxtaposition. I'm still pretty unable to listen to a lot of twee pop in a row. But: Stephin Merritt is sort of me, if I were a gay man. He's sarcastic and unstable and prolific and suspicious of love. And Belle & Sebastian can be lovely (and sarcastic, yay!), especially ignoring all those horn solo bits. And our days in Kansas really shouldn't have lasted, though I wake up every morning to something different, I think. But in the end, this item is really a concession. We argue about Tullycraft's punctuation all the time. I think in the end, it's a personal decision. For me: Fuck me. I'm twee?!?

6) Charles D'ambrosio. This was a year of reading things forever, even things that I loved. Orphans, his book of essays, was tiny but took me about two months to read just because I had to keep going back and reading sentence after sentence again. It was that beautiful. Essays about walls and home factories and biosquats and families. In the end, it'll all make sense. In the end. Possibly. We go to bed and say our prayers or we won't say them, and we'll sleep together or we'll sleep alone. And we'll miss "The Point", and then we'll find it in a bookstore in Chicago and feel a little better about it all, a little closer to home.

7) Dar Williams "What do you love more than love?"/ Sufjan Stevens "Chicago", "Casimir Pulaski Day". At the end of the summer, after everything was fucked up but before I realized that it would effectively stay that way forever, I would listen to these songs. They're spiritual, so it's a little weird for me. A Buddhist pop song about building new relationships with yourself, and two very Christian songs about running away from those relationships and effectively dying. These are songs about questioning your own desires and realizing that sometimes you have to give in to whatever is pulling you towards it, or pushing you away.

8) Veronica Mars. I also want to be Veronica Mars. She is so much better than I'll ever be. This show is wonderful, even when it isn't.

9) The Mountain Goats, "The Sunset Tree"/ Okkervil River (entire works. Not as entire as if Miranda was writing this though). Lit bands who write about victims and fucked up girls. They're overdramatic, but they know how to twist the knife. "So this is what the volume knob's for" and "We have seen this stuff, and we have seen enough" are the two most sincere, awfully harrowing statements I've heard this year. And yeah, I often need a little reminding (especially when it's cold out and I'm walking around Chicago, alone, feeling, well, shitty) that people are worse off emotionally than I am, and that it takes years for wounds to heal. That's a strange statement. These bands get in touch with things I'm afraid to feel, I think. They do it well.

10) Ryan Adams. Nothing makes me more comfortable than listening to Mr. Adams. For that, and much, I am entirely grateful. I could go into a bizarre psychoanalysis here (I mean, really not the healthiest guy to make you "comfortable"), but I won't.


2004:
1) The Shins "Chutes too Narrow". I remember hearing the live version of "
Gone for Food" at least forty Iimes one night in december. I didn't like this record until later that winter, when i was driving back from silk city and the windows were down and we were blasting 'Kissing the Lipless'. Since then.

2) Susan Neville "The House of Blue Lights". I read the story, 'The Increasing Distance' at Governor's School. It was just so good-- the way I want to write if I really write. Susan Neville's prose is really beautiful and poetic, but I feel it is also really subtly character focused and intense.

3) Ryan Adams "Love is Hell pts 1 and 2". This was my driving music last winter, when things were really shitty at school. Such a winter album! Lt makes me think of salt-stained gray roads and the sun hitting the steeple of Lasalle and sort of laying there, bleeding.

4) T.S. Eliot "the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". I've never loved a poem as much as I loved this poem last spring, when everything felt intoxicating yet really, painfully still.

5)"Freaks and Geeks". Any show that makes me cry this much and obsessed with Deadheads is a wonderful piece of art. Sometimes too brutal to watch because it so accurately captures high school.

6) J.D. Salinger "Franny and Zooey". So many of the things that meant the most to me this year were about paralysis, and none more than this. I love the glass family, but more importantly I love the slightly off world that they inhabit-- the dressing gowns and baths and cigarettes and winter coats.

7) Deborah Eisenberg "What it was like, seeing Chris"- I wrote my best college essay about reading this story again and realizing how profoundly it has affected me the first time I read it. More importantly, I actually believed every word that I was writing.

8) Wilco "a ghost is born". I know you all think this is a shitty record. But it's a mood piece, it's a definition, and it's beautiful to listen to. Jeff Tweedy is my aesthetic. enough said.

9)the Decemberists "Red Right Ankle" and "July! July!". two songs. I know that two songs is not everything this band really means to me. but one song is everything tender and scary that I've been forcing myself away from. and the other is summer and its wonderful grossness and fervor.

10)Neutral Milk Hotel "In the aeroplane over the sea". This album has so many far flung emotional implications for me, and I get the feeling it's going to gather more in the coming year. because I listened to "King of Carrot Flowers" everyday for a month. and because I drew a picture of it in my notebook and that kept me occupied forever. Because sometimes I need something that makes me feel better, and this does.

With days that were numbered and samples for six cents.

Leave it to myself (and my friends) to take a road trip based, at least in some part, off of twee pop songs. Drove down from Chicago through Lexington and onto Dollywood, past the hundred yard stretch of Tennessee which contains a fireworks warehouse, an Adult Superstore, and a gigantic cross, past Pigeon Forge and its myriad lit-up Christmas display (animatronic flying pigeons, anyone?). But the roads in Tennessee through the Smoky Mountains are breathtaking, and we got to Dollywood before sunset. To be fair, I think we had all wanted to go to Dollywood before we were aware of the Tullycraft song by the same name. And The Tullycraft song has very little to do with Dollywood itself. Dollywood was all Christmas lights and charmed excess, cross-eyed reindeer and badly designed amusement park rides. Everything there was pretty fantastic. Or just pretty, along those lines.
We stayed the night in Gatlinburg (no songs written about it, thankfully), and pressed on to Nashville. It was raining and gray, we were tired and groggy on a diet of southern-fried everything. So we went to the Nashville Parthenon, a full-scale replica of the Athens’ original—but in concrete. It brought new meaning to the sort of lame and desperate (yet endearing) Casiotone for the Painfully Alone song “Nashville Parthenon”, or at least I think we’d like to believe it did. I’m not quite sure.
For the most part, our little jaunt was a success. Never have I seen so many Best Westerns in one town, that’s for certain.

Without the weight of being whole: On Remixes.

I was always really hesitant to like Mirah, possibly because she has a completely different sense of what to emphasize than what I’ve found appealing about her. At first, she is stark and somewhat angst-ridden, with choruses like “If we sleep together, will it make it any better?/ If we sleep together, would you be my friend forever?”, which though charming, are kind of off-putting to my particular psychic make-up. However, on a closer listen, Mirah is absolutely spot-on. The same song with those adolescent lyrics has beautiful, well-composed gems of couplets: “Hey friends, don’t you think we’d better cool it down/ You’re always getting curious and leaving town… It’s not like we forget about who we are/ So choose a path and follow it, take a pill and swallow it/ It’s not forever we can fool around in the dark”. These are reflective—these, I appreciate.

So, K records just put out a double (!) album of Mirah remixes. Though I am short on cash (sort of—mostly I’m just saving up to buy Dolly Parton memorabilia when I go to Dollywood next week), I have managed to download/track down several of the tracks from Joyride: Remixes. At first, I was hesitant. But part of the problem with Mirah was always her starkness and her honesty. Most of the remixes manage to highlight Mirah’s voice and lyrics (inevitably, when thought out, the best parts of her songs) without obfuscating them. I find the remix of “La Familia” (which I quoted above) particularly good. It’s by a guy named Guy Sigsworth, who I am sure I am indie-illiterate for not knowing [ed. He was in Frou Frou, which makes total sense. This song has their slickness, but with Mirah’s soul]. It makes the song wonderfully intricate, not so plain and sad. To me, at least, Mirah was unappealing in her mournfulness. These remixes tend to move past that, to a blossoming version of the original vision. Though they might not be better than the originals, they are interesting enough to get one through, say, a finals week.

And there is love beyond compare: Radio Playlist 12.4.06

Karen Dalton/ In the Evening, Who Can Tell (Who’s Going to Love You the Best): Sinking is easy at this age. Karen Dalton, with her beautiful voice and sad reworkings of lovely songs, died alone and strung out.
Vetiver/ I Know No Pardon: We have a huge capacity for regret (elucidated by strings).
Okkervil River/ O, Dana: Come on, we have someplace better to be. Let’s try to go.
Sing-Sing/ Going Out: And getting there can be half the fun, melancholy as it seems.
Eux Autres/ The Sundance Kid: If we mythologize ourselves less, we might be better off.
Canasta/ Imposters: Or worse off.
Destroyer/ Breakin’ the Law: The more we learn, the more we’ll grow. This song will get better in a few years.
Dolly Mixture: How Come You’re Such a Hit with the Boys, Jane?: But we’re jealous and petty and silly, sometimes in a very justified way. Being snide is okay, as long as it isn’t all we are.
The Blow/ Parentheses: The little things end up mattering more than we’d think. It’s okay to cry in supermarkets, if you are so inclined. I’ll give you a hand.
Joanna Newsom/ Emily: And we are insignificant in terms of the cosmos, but that doesn’t mean we are insignificant to one another.
Swan Lake/ The Partisan But He’s Got to Know: Seriously.
Hidden Cameras/ Death of a Tune: We know how to sing, and yodel, and dance.
Josef K/ Pictures (of Cindy): Or maybe we don’t.
Julie Doiron/ No More: And we’re pretty fucking sick of it all, so we deserve a vacation.
Tom Waits/ Bottom of the World: Which we don’t yet get. Tom Waits writes strangely compelling songs.
Wednesday Week/ I Don’t Know: We are charmed by the things that intend to charm us, often to our detriment.
Juana Molina/ Micael: But we sometimes forget to acknowledge that we ourselves are charming.
Lesser Birds of Paradise/ Take the Leaves: We work to get better, but often end up getting nowhere.
The How/ When I Was a Boy: And nostalgia has value in its own right.
Voxtrot/ Sway: Yet being too nostalgic is a problem.
Elf Power/ Feel a Whole Lot Better: Most definitely. Not that a good cover of a Byrds song isn’t charming in its own right.
Memphis/ Incredibly Drunk on Whiskey: I’ve been thinking some of suicide/ but there’s bars out here for miles.
Manhattan Love Suicides/ Suzy Jones: I want you to want me.
Camera Obscura/ Dory Previn: Or, at least I did. Now I just want to be alone.
Tullycraft/ Dollywood: And I want to go someplace fantastic just to be ridiculous, and it is important that this is my choice and my kitsch and my triumph.

To think, I'd ever give a shit.

I have a bone to pick with Jane Austen. I like her books, and I think she does excellent and charming satire. However, there’s something the matter with Mr. Darcy—specifically, that the canonization of Pride and Prejudice means that precocious girls in middle school read about him, and advance into adolescence with the weirdly optimistic notion that assholes might suddenly stop being assholes because they fall in love. These kinds of girls usually as cynical and self-righteous as any Austen heroine (of course, many have a pleasantly acidic center consisting of a lack of confidence and self-esteem), but they (and maybe I’m including myself in this), are oddly moved by any narrative featuring such a charmed transformation. I’m talking about Tristan and Jess on Gilmore Girls, and lots of John Hughes movies, and Buffy, and Ten Things I Hate About You (which, I and many of my friends can still quote from at the drop of a hat).

But what can we do about this? Not very much. We can fall in love with bad guys and wonder if they’ll change because we love them (unlikely), or we can recognize the pattern and keep ourselves from liking anyone at all (which is just as harmful and certainly not a step towards becoming truly independent and unencumbered adults). Or maybe, we can listen to more pop music (in my mind, always helpful).

The Manhattan Love Suicides have a pleasant tongue-in-cheek name, and a debut that was just released on Magic Marker. They are low-fi and vaguely twee, and their single “Things You’ve Never Done” is the perfect antithesis to any Austen-related angst. It has a poppy guitar riff, heavy drums and syncopated handclaps (yes). They lyrics tell the story of deciding to leave “this dirty town”, and at the same time, leaving a guy who is apt to walk away. The characterization is exactly that of a Mr. Darcy or Petruchio—“I’ve told you once, I’ve told you thousand times/ This ain’t no play and you don’t need to learn the lines/ The things you’ve said to me have overstepped their mark/ I guess it’s true your bite is much worse than your bark/ They could write a feature on the things you’ve never done/ Ten inch headlines on the front page of the Sun.” The singer goes on, a grounding description of the kind of relationship we tend to romanticize—the one based on witty but horrible rhythmic banter verging on verbal abuse. As the song ends, with more handclaps and a distorted guitar, she sings, “You really blew it/ and I say screw it”, and, ostensibly, packs up for someplace better. This is the antithesis of Heavenly’s desperate “kiss him ‘til he’s obsessed”, and I think we could all use a little more of the getting up and walking away from the things that upset us.