How I Spent My Summer Vacation, by Ben Girlpants

There are a lot of up front protes­ta­tions to be made before pre­senting an all-time top what­ever list. If the list isn’t par­tic­u­larly gender-neutral (mine includes exactly one female vocalist), the writer is required to employ some dis­claimer to the effect that s/he likes plenty of female artists, it’s just that, you know, the world of rock ‘n roll has been his­tor­i­cally male dom­i­nated, so it’s nat­ural for a list to con­tain so many male acts. If the list doesn’t include enough genres (mine fea­tures exactly one album that couldn’t be called pop or rock), the list­maker feels com­pelled to point out that s/he lis­tens to many genres, but simply tends to prefer the tried and true. If the list is pre­dom­i­nately Anglo (mine is pretty much exclu­sively so, with one quasi-exception) it’s common to claim some kind of nat­ural con­nec­tion to the music that’s impos­sible with for­eign tunes.

I’m not sure I buy any of it, really. My expla­na­tion for my caucaso-anglo-mascu-rockin’ ten­den­cies is this: at my for­ma­tive musical age (16ish) I was given five albums: Radiohead’s The Bends, Blur’s Park­life, Pulp’s Dif­ferent Class, Afghan Whigs’ 1965, and Portishead’s Dummy. Put them all together and you’ve got a lot of wussy but unde­ni­ably white and mostly male rock ‘n roll. There you go.

So here’s a list of the albums that have come to form the bedrock of my musical edu­ca­tion (in no par­tic­ular order):

01. Wilco — “She’s a Jar” (from Sum­mer­teeth)
Being There is more fun to pump your fists to, and Yankee Hotel Fox­trot is a better expla­na­tion of our post-everything malaise, but Sum­mer­teeth is a per­fect pop album and “She’s a Jar” is a per­fect song. Tweedy’s poetry has a macro focus here com­pared to his later bird’s eye per­spec­tives and as a result the emo­tional con­nec­tion is all the more direct.

02. Blur — “Coffee & TV” (from 13)
13 is one of three albums I can think of that com­pletely floored me on first listen. Like the other two, I’ve grad­u­ally drifted away from it, but I return from time to time and it’s inevitably nearly as tran­scen­dent. “Coffee & TV” is what I’d call the song least like the rest of the songs on the album, but the truth is they’re all pretty much all over the map. Graham Coxon’s closing guitar freakout is almost com­ical in its struggle against the rock­steady drums and cheerful keys.

03. Slow­dive — “When the Sun Hits” (from Sou­vlaki)
Nine out of ten people who’re familiar with the bands give me shit when I say I prefer Slow­dive to My Bloody Valen­tine, but in truth I feel a little disin­gen­uous every time I make the com­par­ison. I don’t really think they sound much alike at all. Sou­vlaki is one of the best mood albums I know of, and “When the Sun Hits” is one of my favorite exam­ples of musical onomatopœia–which isn’t the right term, but what I mean is this: a song that con­veys the feeling of its title, but through the music rather than the lyrics.

04. McLusky — “Day of the Dead­ringers” (from Do Dallas)
I would have a hard time num­bering the rest of the list, but I can say with rel­a­tive cer­tainty that McLusky’s Do Dallas is my favorite album and that “Day of the Dead­ringers” is my favorite McLusky song. If I had to give you some­thing, then I think I’d give you nothing. If I had to give you some­thing, then I think I’d go to hell. Yeah.

05. Pulp — “Monday Morning” (from Dif­ferent Class)
For some reason, no one else I know seems to love “Monday Morning” as much as I do, but, well, fuck them. It’s a bril­liant song. The tempo change in the chorus and the hope­lessly anthemic nature of the whole thing is pure Pulp to me. (Side note: I was watching Trainspot­ting the other night at about 2am and “Mile End” came on during the whole Rentboy-as-real-estate-agent sec­tion and my heart went all aflutter. And not because of Rentboy, I swear.)

06. John Van­der­slice — “The Man­sion” (from Life and Death of an Amer­ican Four-Tracker)
I’ve written about JV here before, and I’ve used his songs on mixes before, but this is my favorite song of his from my favorite album of his. More songs need to use dra­matic, heraldic horns, and more songs need to sound like this. As usual, John’s vocals are waaay up front and, as usual, that’s a good thing because the lyrics are golden–a simple but affecting breakup story blown up to epic emo­tional pro­por­tions by its sur­round­ings. (For an iso­lated little glimpse of Vanderslice’s bril­liance in pro­duc­tion, check out the simple, near buried, but totally on-melody upward-snaking synth at around 0:59.)

07. My Morning Jacket — “The Way That He Sings” (from At Dawn)
At Dawn isn’t really a songs album–all of them are great, but there aren’t really any that stand out as stun­ningly mix­worthy like, say, “One Big Hol­iday” from It Still Moves. Any song from this record will be a quiet, con­tem­pla­tive moment in what­ever mix you put it on, but that’s alright… nearly every mix needs one or two of those moments. “The Way That He Sings” pre-echoes Z’s “Word­less Chorus” with its, well, word­less chorus; and that chorus echoes the cen­tral sen­ti­ment of the song: “why does my mind blow to bits every time they play that song? / it’s just the way that he sings, / not the words that he says, or the band / I’m in love with this soul, it’s a meaning that I under­stand.” That’s as good a cen­ter­piece for an all-time favorites mix as I can come up with.

08. Destroyer — “Eng­lish Music” (from Streethawk: A Seduc­tion)
Streethawk, on the other hand, is absolutely a songs album–any of these tracks could have worked here. I chose “Eng­lish Music” because of its deft mix of irony and casu­ally looping free-associative sto­ry­telling and because it’s a damn fine song.

09. Can — “Sing Swan Song” (from Ege Bamyasi)
Can is the excep­tion to at least two of the cat­e­gories out­lined at this post’s opening. Non-Brit/American band? Check (Ger­mans + Japanese singer!). Not of the 90s or 00s? Check (70s, even!). Ege Bamyasi is one of four equally awe­some albums from Can’s heyday (the others being Mon­ster Movie, Tago Mago, and Future Days) and an awe­some illus­tra­tion of their status as a band both far ahead of their time (seam­less inte­gra­tion of modern-sounding studio wiz­ardry with organic, live jams) and very much of their time (live jams, sounds good when you’re on drugs). A beau­tiful album and a beau­tiful song.

10. The Moun­tain Goats — “Source Decay” (from All Hail West Texas)
I said to Niina the other day that I’d real­ized I like Tal­la­hassee more than All Hail West Texas, only to imme­di­ately recon­sider and revise: I like Tal­la­hassee’s songs more, but AHWT remains the jewel in JD’s musical-narrative crown (who’s gonna take it from him? nobody). “Source Decay” is an epic on an album inten­tion­ally devoid of any epic ten­den­cies, a study in details and closeups. It’s the sound of a life in review, a recog­ni­tion of stasis, and a des­perate desire for an epiphany that just won’t come.

11. George — “Tip Top Song” (from The Magic Lantern)
Ah, hey, here’s a female voice. I’ve also written about this one before, but let’s see what else there is to say. “Tip Top Song”, unlike the George tunes I posted about last time, is short and sweet with its dou­ble­tracked vocals and char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally chug­ging, scraping beat. Mangion’s voice is a rock, as always. Hmm, not much more to say, I guess, except that you should really check this one out so that there’s more people for me and Niina to dis­cuss it with.

12. Hrvatski — “Cir­rus­minor” (from Oiseaux 96–98)
And here’s the last out­lier in the mix. Hrvatski is an elec­tronic artist, all break­beats and machine glitchery. Here’s the curve­ball, though: this is a cover of a Pink Floyd song. It’s indu­bitably the most unchar­ac­ter­istic song on the (con­sis­tently excel­lent) album, but it still man­ages to show­case its obses­sion: the “amen break”. I won’t try to run down how and why Oiseaux dis­sects the break since it’s been exten­sively cov­ered else­where, so I’ll say instead that though it works well here, it’s ulti­mately sec­ondary to the majestic drone that builds on the corpse of the Floyd song from about 2:40 onward. Yeah, that’s 10 min­utes of drone. Head­phones required.

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This is #1 of 4 mixes this month, each of which will (hope­fully) illus­trate the author’s favorite albums and whatnot. We’re hoping to have them all up by the end of the month, so keep checking back.