The May Girl­pants Mix arrives on your hot little screen fash­ion­ably late, its due date being around the middle of the month. It wasn’t entirely my fault though. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say this but Girl­pants might be bought out by MTV2 [editor’s note: don’t you mean “sell out to…”?] and this has divided the staff con­sid­er­ably. Joel’s been the most vocal sup­porter, prob­ably because the nu-emo on con­stant rota­tion is closest to his own tastes, and he doesn’t mind writing about Taking Back Sunday on Thursday. Niina–ruthless cap­i­talist that she is–just goes where the money’s at, so she’s in, but Ben isn’t so hot on the idea ’cause he won’t get to write about what­ever Japanese sludge-core he’s cur­rently abasing him­self with. As for yours truly, I went on strike, deter­mined to keep the flame of indie rock alive and pure. Finally, after much cajoling, pleading and promises of new girl­pants I relented. What can I say? Indie rock is impor­tant but so is looking hot in fly jeans. Look for my next post on Atreyu.

This month’s theme is songs about girls. Orginal, I know. Niina’s hand­clap mas­ter­piece was a hard act to follow and I wanted some rich source mate­rial to work with. This mix does a good job of decon­structing of what’s gen­er­ally a pretty vanilla genre, I think; a genre that Joel cap­tures more or less per­fectly in his Luck­smiths write-up. Yea you’ve got your Ditty Bops and your Weezer, but you’ve also got your Grizzly Bear and your Tuung, which rework the “boy meets girl” dynamic in pretty inter­esting ways. Unfor­tu­nately, as I write this I’m get­ting ready to leave town and go meet my grad school com­mitee(!), and so I leave the sequencing of Kate, Anne, Lauren, Lola, Min­erva, Aura Lee, Suzanne, Audrey, Danielle Steel, Mar­ilee, Jenny and Jenny Again in Ben’s capable hands. Hope you enjoy!

[down­load the entire mix as a .zip file!]

01. The Ditty Bops – “Sister Kate” — The Ditty Bops (buy)
This song totally makes me wonder about its epony­mous Kate, a being whose very shimmy pro­vokes the song’s self-conscious-but-driven nar­rator to observe “I may be late but I’ll be up to date when I can shimmy like my sister Kate.” Maybe it’s just teen angst, maybe classic older sib­ling envy, but I still wanna know what it is that Kate’s doing exactly to make it “shake like a bowl of jelly on a plate.” What, fur­ther­more, is the mys­te­rious “it”? If I knew, then maybe I would, you know, really get the song’s good-natured jeal­ousy, but for now, I might have to just enjoy it for its charm­ingly irrev­erent doo-wop and its immac­u­lately exe­cuted har­monies (not to men­tion the bicycle horn in the begin­ning). Which is fine. Some mys­teries are better left unsolved. Kate remains enig­matic, but so be it. –Niina

02. Envelopes — “Audrey in the Country” — Demon (buy)
Told from first-babe per­spec­tive, Envelope’s “Audrey in the Country”, from their superb 2006 disc Demon, dips in and out of the fur­ryvi­sion, buzzy and bob­bing like a very spe­cial child. Prob­ably the shortest number on this mix (hell if I know), this song is good and down­load it and please be gentle, sweet ladies of the night. –Joel

03. Weezer — “Suzanne” — Avail­able on the Mall­rats OST or Blue Deluxe (buy or buy)
No one does regres­sive, slightly moth­ering (“you gave me flowers and said don’t you cry”) Girl songs like Weezer–for me and plenty others, they are the tem­plate for every sub­urban nerd who thinks he might get the girl, and who remains bitter and sat­is­fied when he doesn’t. In other words, they simply had to be included here. Suzanne con­tinues where Buddy Holly left off–restaging 50’s era sexual pol­i­tics as emo sen­si­tivity. No suprise then, when the 6/8 doo-wop time sig­na­ture puts a sunny retro sheen over the sad, bor­der­line pathetic lyrics. In many ways this was Weezer’s only move, or at least their best one. Just like your high­school sweet­heart, Suzanne is catchy, fun and worth remem­bering once in awhile. –Mike

04. The Luck­smiths — “Danielle Steel” — What Bird is That? (buy)
If I was Marty, Tali, or even Mark from The Luck­smiths, I’d date Danielle Steel. Better yet, I’d write a catchy tune called “Danielle Steel” and instead write about a girl who has “the mind of Sharon Stone / and the heart of Danielle Steel,” a ver­i­table “best of both worlds,” if you will. Then I’d date that girl. I’d take her to the movies, I’d take her to the movies again, and then I’d take her to see the parade, buy a pop (we call soda “pop” in Jupiter), and slink my arm round her slender side. Man do I love you, dream-based-apparition girl. –Joel

05. Aark­tica — “Aura Lee” — …Or You Could Just Go Through Your Whole Life and Be Happy Anyway (buy)
I never, ever pass up an oppor­tu­nity to use this song on a mix, which means that it’s been on approx­i­mately fif­teen of them since I started making mixes way back in the misty green depths of the early 00s. But I am unashamed! Here it goes on another. This “Aura Lee” is not, as best as I can tell, related to the Civil War folk song of the same name, though it does share some winter imagery and the same vaguely girl-related sub­ject matter. The wintry theme car­ries through to the music itself, with fuzzed out, dis­tant shoegaze gui­tars that tread lightly over a blanket of subtle drums. It’s the sound of Slow­dive stum­bling snow­blind through your laptop’s innards, get­ting all tan­gled up in the wiring but pressing on anyway. –Ben

06. Grizzly Bear — “La Duchesse Anne” — Horn of Plenty (buy)
Having recently joined two mem­bers of the g-pants gang at the Books show at which this band opened, I can say that Grizzly Bear are a lot more explo­sive live. A lot. But on this album they stay sub­dued, pre­fer­ring to ven­ture mostly into avenues better described as “haunting,” and this song is a per­fect example. The lay­ered vocals lan­guish (or more like “l’anguish,” OH) over the per­sis­tent guitar riff and other sounds like bluish curliques of smoke from a lover’s lonely cig­a­rette in the wee hours before a sad soli­tary sun­rise. It’s plain­tive and under­stated, like most of the rest of the album, and it’s lovely. –Niina

07. The Moun­tain Goats — “Jenny” — All Hail West Texas (buy)
I can’t help but think Jenny is the bike here. Whereas alot of bands use names as a quick and easy way to flesh out fem­i­nine arche­types, John D. just seems like too good a writer to need a trick like that–characters prac­ti­cally claw their way out of the tape hiss. It’s notable, I think, that his recur­ring pair of war­ring, volatile lovers only recieve the enig­matic des­ig­na­tion “Alpha”. Com­pared to the rest of All Hail West Texas–which piles on the misery and doom–Jenny is pretty lively, but like “Riches and Won­ders,” it’s got all sorts of dark cross­cur­rents, not the least of which is to who or what Jenny actu­ally refers. So why name the motor­cycle? I’ve got my pet the­o­ries: the nar­rator fetishizes the bike as a sub­sti­tute for the girl he’s slowly losing, as a con­den­sa­tion of their relationship’s best, and maybe most fatal qual­i­ties (“nine-hundred CCs of raw whining power”). Maybe, if you can’t love someone any­more, you can at least love the new Kawasaki she rode in on. –Mike

08. Tunng — “Jenny Again” — Com­ments of the Inner Chorus (buy)
Though it sort of steals the melody from Lennon’s “Oh Yoko” and though it apes the Books with its spoken word sam­pling, this one’s a sweet, sweet tune–a per­fect piece of dreampop whose placid, hushed mood nearly suc­cess­fully con­ceals a har­rowing story of murder and life­long regret. The lyrics are fairly straight­for­ward, but there are sev­eral lines that hit with a pecu­liar force. “Your edges dif­fuse in the light,” says the victim to his killer, and, in turn, the lis­tener to the song. –Ben

09. The Crash – “Lauren Caught My Eye” — Wildlife (buy)
Ben thinks I’m goofy for this, but holy crap, I love this song. I was orig­i­nally going to pick “Phoebe” from the same album for this mix’s theme, but this song is a jubi­lant, smiling, glit­tery Europop mon­ster that just won’t quit lurking in the metaphor­ical closet of my music taste. Maybe, because you are intrepid at making con­nec­tions, you remember that The Crash were men­tioned in the afore­men­tioned pantster’s recent inter­view with Magenta Sky­code. You’re right. And yeah, I dig on The Crash. Je né sais pas. Hope you do too. –Niina

10. The Rain­coats — “Lola” (the Kinks) — The Rain­coats (buy)
With erratic gui­tars and bash-happy drums the Rain­coats assail this Kinks classic about a hap­less boy and a beguiling trans­ves­tite. One of the great things about writing a song around a girl’s name is the way you can wrap a melody around it, and Lola’s delec­table syl­la­bles are lov­ingly twisted, punc­tu­ated and stretched–the pop song equiv­a­lent of Nabokov’s unfor­get­table opening paean to Lolita. The droll female vocals add another layer to the sexual con­fu­sion, re-fashioning the song as an excer­cise in equal-opportunity gender play. –Mike

11. Deftones — “Min­erva” — Deftones (buy)
Min­erva was (as us lib­eral arts majors ought to know already) a Roman god­dess, respon­sible for the gov­er­nance of many things–chief among them, poetry. (And she was also cred­ited with the inven­tion of music. Thanks, wikipedia!). The Deftones’ “Min­erva” is prob­ably one of her lesser works in the poetry realm. The small snip­pets of lyrics that make any kind of sense do seem to out­line some kind of muse figure that the god­dess might be aligned with, but it’s pretty skeletal. Musi­cally, well, I guess it’s prob­ably not exactly tops there either, but it’s a rare ray of (murky) light in the per­petual cesspool of modern rock radio. Even if its album was a bit of a step back from the highs of Around the Fur and White Pony, this song is a gem and the closest they’ve come to fully assim­i­lating MBV into their post-hardcore sludge gestalt. Chino can still wail like no other and oh, those gui­tars aren’t far behind. –Ben

12. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin — “Gwyneth” — Broom (buy)
Hey, another song about a girl, what do you know! It’s all like, Jenny, 867‑5309, yeah! YEAH! Haha, keep ‘em coming! But to be serious, folks, “Gwyneth” is quite dar­ling. A graceful step back into a quiet calm and pretty sense of wonder, it’s prob­ably my favorite girl-based song, ever–gentle sweep, golden moments, hair-meets-your-eyes sad­ness, let little yarn unfurl. –Joel