Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s a hypnotic riff and what sounds like an airplane noise, and then the vocals appear, understated at first then building.  My favorite Saul is a little unrestrained (a la both “Grippo” and “List of Demands”), and I hope for some of that from this new album.  In fact, perhaps it’s in the air. Right now I am listening to this on repeat in order to not listen to my neighbors fighting through the wall. They’re not screaming or anything but if I try, I can still hear them. Maybe that is the reason I want the song to be louder, more brutish. “Explain My Heart” hints at dark undercurrents in its second verse, when the pitch and pace both rise, but overall the song remains cool as the title command repeats until the end. It’s a beautiful four minutes, good for fall in the city.  Listen now. 

The link for the download at Saul Williams’ website is here.  

The link for Saul’s Twitter is here.

Everyone knows how much this band means to me (a little too much, maybe), so it´s a pleasure for me to find that their latest Let It Sway will be released on August 17th via Polyvinyl. In line with talking about travel, this record took the guys across the US to record with Chris Walla and to find several other ladies to write songs about. I just received my digital copy a few days ago, and I’m loving every second of it — they’ve found a way to synthesize virtually every influence on this one, and it serves for some moments of eerie promnesia (tell me you don’t hear Pinkerton on “Phantomwise,” or Nothing Feels Good in the closing bars of “Stuart Gets Lost”) and, better still, new insta-classics that’ll soon become inextricably bond to memories of my late summer months.

You can check out more from SSLYBY at their page on Polyvinyl. I also recommend heading over to iamwarmandpowerful.com for alternate takes, live performances, demos and other miscellany. As a former Tape Club member myself (Phil sent me the last SSLYBY pin!), I’m very, very pleased to find all these nice things available in one place.

And as you can tell, we’re on a summer hiatus here at Girlpants. I hope you’re well, and that you’re doing something somewhere that means just that.

But I digress.  Below are some links that effectively update us on a portion of the fascinating matter that is music in the summer. 

• John Darnielle performs 2009’s The Life of the World to Come in its entirety, and you can view the video at Pitchfork if you act quick-like etc.
• If you live in New York, you should plan to attend Northside Festival.  This year’s tremendous lineup includes Wavves, Au Revoir Simone, Titus Andronicus, Liars, and about 928347 times more.
• Everyone ever has already done an “anticipated summer releases” list, so I’m not gonna rehash. But heyo, Arcade Fire! They’ve put up the track listing for their highly anticipated new album Suburbs, and with this track listing have surfaced also some tracks for listening. Below is a radio rip of “Ready to Start,” gorgeous and slow-building. You can also listen to “Month of May” here.
  Arcade Fire — “Ready to Start” 
   
• Indie Rock Café has a good post on recent summer releases that are easy to miss in the uproar over heavy hitters. Personal highlight for me is the Lou Barlow song “Losercore,” but the post also covers Cary Ann Hearst, Apollo, the Vita Ruins, and Communist Daughter.
• Also, you should know that you can stream the Lou Barlow EP = Sentridoh III at Merge’s website. “Gravitate/One Machine” is so good. It’s hot outside plus a thousand humidity today and this song is making me want to box someone.
• And finally. Does anyone inspire as much crit lately as Lady Gaga? I know this might be old news (and the publication title may be a tad hyperbolic) but I follow this all-Gaga journal with fascination; some recent pieces posted discuss hysteria, commodity feminism, the Gaga/Illuminati connection, and Gaga as Kate Bush response. (Another topic of note might be Gaga as George Bush response, but that’s not an article I’m going to write this summer.)

It is with interest that I’ve been following this weird week (month) of bizarre endorsements – does it not seem like everyone is shilling for someone these days? Some are artistic collaborations, some are out-of-genre forays, some are fundraisers, and some are straight-up curious wtf moments (like when Bob Dylan teamed up with Victoria’s Secret). Here are a few of my favorites genre mixups and lateral pop culture moves of the past week.

• Iggy Pop and the Stooges played Ray-Ban’s rerelease party for the Aviator glasses. More on this here. While I’m sure it was cool to see Iggy Pop perform live, I can’t help but cringe when Google predicts that I’m going to type in “Iggy Pop Raw Power” and I have to disappoint it by typing in “Iggy Pop Ray Ban” instead. Yes, this is about me, girlpants.
• Beck, Vampire Weekend and others are on the soundtrack for the new Twilight venture. The savvily indie track listing was revealed on MySpace (who uses MySpace still?) and you can see it here. Obviously this means that Vampire Weekend will now and forever become a mall goth band, moody and dark save their colorful, colorful hair.
• Janelle Monae and Of Montreal, together at last. By collaborating, they’ve created what my iTunes had already tried to create by rapidly shuffling back and forth between the Idlewild soundtrack and Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? back in 2006 (seriously this was a problem). Luckily the song itself is way more rocking; listen to it here at Some Kind of Awesome. It’s actually pretty Of Montreal-heavy for being on Janelle Monae’s upcoming album, The ArchAndroid (with its Baduesque cover), out on May 18th.
• Nina Persson of the Cardigans and A Camp has teamed up with Swedish designer HOPE to reveal a limited-edition collection that will become available in August. I think this is lovely because I have always been a bit of a Nina Persson fan, and because A Camp is really good (watch the ABBA-parodying video here for proof), and because at the release party, the fashion collection was ingeniously paired with avant-garde snacks, etching HOPE forever into my brain by creating a food memory.
• Richard McGraw, whom we’ve discussed here on Girlpants before, has released the mp3 of his reworking of Leonard Cohen’s punch-in-the-eye classic “Chelsea Hotel #2”. It is not a cover, but a re-imagining of the emotional crux of the song into something set in McGraw’s hometown of Newburgh, NY. Listen to “Balmville Motel” here.
   

Well, soon anyway. There’s a precociousness to them that could stand to mellow a bit. Consider the backstory, in which childhood friends Sam Lee and Alex Kaplow go to France for a summer, work on an organic farm, and mix down the album on their Macbooks. C’mon dudes. Jason and Ben once tried a similar thing in Lake Worth, working at the YMCA and recording onto a minidisc. It kind of sounded like Lightning Bolt.

Like this neatly-wrapped slice of summer resume building, their debut album Real Life Color has a sense of diligent overachievement. They less evoke their various influences than splice them together in a way that can seem simulacrum-ly. My favorite song of theirs, “Monster,” is a well-researched composite of indie dorm-room bangers. I hear Ezra Koenig fronting the Postal Service covering Arcade Fire, basically. But despite some lyrical missteps (“a silver spoon to feed me lies”? really?) it’s a frighteningly good approximation, and these considerations are more or less forgotten in the fun of listening to it. Especially live, where Kaplow bounces like a pinball across the stage, brushing the hair out his eyes and crowing into the mic like a bantam rooster.

And that’s the thing. It strikes me that they’re enjoying themselves, processing their influences in a way that doesn’t feel particularly calculated. And if they’re this good this early, well fuck. How good will they be after life throws them a few sucker punches and broken hearts? Sam will be graduating from Yale in mere weeks, after all. I can’t help but think of another pair of New England collegiate breakouts, who happened to be headlining the same festival. They started out doing something pretty distinctive and then unexpectedly segued into an album of genre exercises. It seems like Magic Man just might be on the opposite trajectory.

Magic Man’s album Real Life Color is available for free, in all of its glory, here.

What really tipped me over was last year’s Teengirl Fantasy stuffs (sent as the subject line to my school email address, thanks Eric!). Aside from some brief trips to Delicious Scopitone, my indie rock is cut-and-dry guy/girl harmony/no harmony bedroom/backyard business, so when I heard this glo-chill(“trill”)wave stuff I was charmed. These latest 2AM explorations the last few nights have made other things (coffee, letters to friends, nice breezes) seem less magical by comparison.

Nite Jewel’s “What Did He Say” should be percolating under velvet-suffocated speakers in a sad strip club. Kinda fortunately, it’s not (and hopefully never will be), and instead got into my crappy Altec-Lansing speakers somehow. Gonzalez is proprietress over the thick slabs of muddied bass and banshee vocals; the stance is cool and decidedly un-affected, making popular nightclub ironist/nostalgicist and/or handsome dude Girl Talk look like a kid with a broken Walkman WM-EX1HG (they’re also attractive women). Check out “What Did He Say” below – I also threw in her remix of Caribou’s “Odessa”(I like it more than the orig):

Nite Jewel — “What Did He Say”

Caribou — “Odessa (Nite Jewel Remix)”

Twin Sister has been plugged over at Gorilla v. Bear and Stereogum, and they seem pretty cool to me (no Papin sis thing either). “Lady Daydream” snuggles up nicely with the late-nite dreamer’s vibe I got going on here:

Twin Sister — “Lady Daydream”

I’m adding Coma Cinema to the sat jams because I’ve been playing “Flower Pills” each day this past week when I wake up. It’s soft and sweet, and makes a nice bookend to the preceding thirteen tracks on Baby Prayers, which is free to download on their website.

Coma Cinema — “Flower Pills”

In the next inning, I’ll round up some decidedly anti-anti-dance stuff and nominees for best SXSW ear dongles. Outsies.

Image by Helga Steppan.

To celebrate the occasion, Palmer released “The Truth,” a free download, featuring Jason Webley on guitar and Sam Kulik on trombone. The song is a story-of-everything-ever, in Amanda’s endearing kind of way; most of all, though, it celebrates freedom. You know you like freedom. And no matter what anyone says, I am not over this lady – she can keep oversharing, making clumsy comments and posting her trademark near-nudes willy nilly around the internet.  It’s just a picture of a girl getting Twitterer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The above is off Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and it is one of my favorites, as it celebrates one of my favorite kinds of humor. Have a good Thursday and try to be as awesome, please.

01. Cryptacize — “My Thomania”
from Mythomania (Asthmatic Kitty, 2009)

They’ve got Nedelle and what’s-his-face from Deerhoof. And tracks like “Blue Tears” and “” are just too much fun to leave for the last decade. “My Thomania,” which can (but probably shouldn’t) be treated as the title track for the album, contributes to a veritable potluck of –manias going on in 09, “Lisztomania” being a principal one, but also the lesser-known and rarely-acknowledged “Tulipomania” that I found at a used book store this past weekend being also important. Just listen for the chorus. [Buy]

02. The Postmarks — “My Lucky Charm”
from Memoirs at the End of the World (Unfiltered Records, 2009)

Remember how I said I didn’t like Acid House Kings? Well, I think I cracked a bit on that position after my friend Eric D. put Memoirs on a few weeks ago. Like the Kings, the Postmarks craft pop like it’s something you sneeze out occasionally. Oh look, another perfect-pop booger. It’s like that. If this song doesn’t make your tears pink then something’s not working right. [Buy]

03. Cotton Jones — “Gone the Bells”
from Paranoid Cocoon (Suicide Squeeze, 2009)

It’s the guy from Page France being all mopey, but it works. Even the most desolate tracks like “Gone the Bells” have a shimmer and bounce about them, that the entire album comes off bright-headed from a slow-burned haze. Apparently, the full band title is/was “The Cotton Jones Basket Ride,” which I’m starting to think describes a travelin’ sensation buried somewhere on this record. [Buy]

04. Nurses — “Lita”
from Apple’s Acre (Dead Oceans, 2009)

Simplicity is strategy on Apple’s Acre. The entire record is built on vocal harmonies and light percussion. In many ways, it feels like Two Dancers turned inside-out: the same morbid curiosities occupy Nurses, and the insistent pull of rhythm and melody is at once haunting and mesmerizing. “Lita” is my favorite track, and it’ll be yours too soon enough. [Buy]

05. Hayden — “Let’s Break Up”
from The Place Where We Lived (Hardwood Records, 2009)

There’s no bad Hayden album, and there’s no bad Hayden song. I think Hayden fans have come to expect this from him year after year, which is why The Place Where We Live is somewhat disappointing. So I guess I’ve included “Let’s Break Up” on that principle alone: it’s yet another charming Hayden narrative about coincidence, failure, and self-deprecation. Even though you could call all that a big whiney complaint, thing is, I wouldn’t want it any other way. [Buy]

06. The Love Language — “Sparxxx”
from Self-Titled (Merge, 2009)

Not to be confused with that band I mix’d about back in Feb., The Love Language is a frontispiece for Stuart McLamb’s four-track recordings. Here McLamb’s booming, theatrical affectation butts heads with micromanaged orchestration and that washed-out (frequently clipping) tendency of the high peaks on record. Overall this is a fun listen, and if you’re interested check out “Lalita,” “Nocturne” and “Nightdogs” as well. [Buy]

07. Hanne Hukkelberg — “Bandy Riddles”
from Blood from a Stone (Nettwerk, 2009)

I don’t get this song, but I like it. I think she’s Norwegian or something, and her other albums are supposed to be insta-hit material, so check those out after you listen to “Bandy Riddles.” Also, this album takes the album cake for coolest album cover on the mix, with runner-up being them dogs in Dog Day, featured in the stuff that follows this stuff. [Buy]

08. Dog Day — “Rome”
from Concentration (Outside Music, 2009)

“Dr. Dog Dies in Hot Car” – headline, or another terrible band name involving dogs? Hah! Alright anyway I like Dog Day, in part because they seem cool as fuck all, but also because they sound like they seem. Concentration got little to no press last year, even though it’s jammed to the gills with great tracks like the stoned “Judgment Day” and periled tale “Neighbor” (sounding a bit like Beauty Pill here in that exchange of vocal duties and eerie emphasis on house parties with demons). Another band with that uncanny ability to sound like every other band that sounds like New Order and still find something to do different. As they say over at AMG, highly recommended. [Buy]

09. The Wooden Birds — “Seven Seventeen”
from Magnolia (Barsuk, 2009)

Make no mistake, this is the latest American Analog Set record. On “Seven Seventeen,” Andrew’s hushed voice is still smooth as glass, and the palm-muted, strummed percussion sets the pace to heartbeat. Just cue Leslie on backing vocals and bring in some thick tremolo. Beautiful song, beautiful album; expect nothing less from these folk. [Buy]

10. Jonathan Johansson — “Säg Vad Ni Vill”
from En Hand I Himlen (Hybris Records, 2009)

Jonathan Johansson, for lack of a better introduction, is from another world. His music is thoroughly engaging, often spirited and triumphant, and lyrically incomprehensible to most of his admiring audience. He’s definitely not an alien, but his music manages to sound otherworldly while rooting that unfamiliarity of language in a familiar cultural nostalgia; Jonathan’s point-by-point reduction of 1980s electro-pop titans into his own earnest compositions resonates with the sounds of the era while somehow transcending the period altogether. I love this record from start to finish; it feels like I’ve known every melody on it for quite some time, and I plan to enjoy them for years to come. [Buy]

Get a good mix here: [Multiupload]

I’m done for today’s post, but I’ll be back sometime next week. I’d like to return to 2008 in April with another mix. See you in that time and place.

So I imagine this post is a reaction to recent news about the band: after cutting the name down to “Quiet River” about a year ago, Paul has recently announced his decision to retire the project altogether. He is now starting to uncover a bunch of unfinished and semi-finished work rescued from past machines. His last show as Quiet River High will be on his birthday, April 3rd, at a currently undisclosed location. Though I know he’s moving on to bigger and better stuff, I will miss this.

I now find that this post is untimely; I should have written it much, much earlier (I never thought I had the words to tell him or anyone else what his work meant to me), and yet it might seem premature now to aggrandize music that has ostensibly been kept intimate in a circle of friends and hasn’t truly run its course just yet. But before it’s gone, before it becomes just another thing kept between family and friends, I wanted to write about it. I’ll give the warning that what follows isn’t the type of stuff I normally exhibit here – it’s bare, and it’s tough to write.

Paul has been recording for a long time. Accordingly, there are a lot of songs that never make it to finalization, songs that see reconstruction and recreation in later works, songs that have been played for years and years before they are set down. It often seems to me that he’s got a piece of the song figured out before anything else, a line of writing, a melody or progression, that inevitably becomes structural to the final product. For me, his songs are remarkable because they seem to reveal the process of writing and recording itself. They’re earnest, and that’s what makes them so enjoyable; every piece that contributed to the development of the song is there if you listen closely. Sometimes the songs are absolutely bare for that same reason; the pieces seem to work simply because they’re unfinished, and acknowledged as such. Yet for everything that Paul doesn’t finish, he’s got two complete albums that have come from this process.

A little bit about Paul’s direct inspirations: as a singer-songwriterly type, Paul totally sounds like Townes Van Zandt and (of course) Jeff Buckley. As his brother, I can tell you that we spent the better parts of middle and high school listening to neither musician. We were big on The Get Up Kids, Saves the Day (for a time, virtually anything on Vagrant), At the Drive-In, Pedro the Lion, and Jimmy Eat World, amidst some offerings from Dad of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Jeff Beck. Eclectic as those tastes may seem (see I’m being funny here), I find it strange that none of Paul’s music really sounds like any of the aforementioned groups. I don’t think it was ever Paul’s intention to emulate any of his favorite bands/musicians, and I don’t think that he does on any conscious level. Paul’s music is way too personal for that. Maybe that’s why I can draw comparisons to two of the late-greats and still feel like I’ve left something out entirely. On his best tracks his voice manages to balance vulnerability and force (it would seem that these are otherwise oppositional registers, right?), as even in his quiet moments his voice is strong.

Perhaps what really comes from Paul’s background in music is his appreciation of the album format. Theme and sequence are crucial for Paul, as his albums are structurally-founded on the correspondence between tracks. These are *albums* in every sense of the word; I listen to them from start to finish, and I get the impression that they’re meant to be listened to that way.

Below I’ve given a reading of his two albums, Loki Grimm and Lazuli. The albums appeared within a year of each other; Loki Grimm was the result of a long process, while Lazuli seemed to be almost instantaneous. I think this comes across in how both albums play out: Loki Grimm is slow-paced and brooding, while Lazuli is fast-paced and immediate. Of course there are moments on both records that defy this categorization, but it’s easy to hear the influence of either process in each recording. I’ve also provided some tracks from both records (thanks Paul) as well as information pertaining to their creation.

Quiet River High – Loki Grimm

There’s a particular mythos to this album that I don’t think anyone outside of my family knows. I don’t mean that to seem even remotely insulting, it’s just something very oblique, even to the people for whom this album matters most. “Loki Grimm” was the name of one of my dad’s various bands in the 70s. During this time, Dad ran a paper route in the Bronx on his bike and used that money to pay for a studio room to practice in. I guess you can call him a studio musician here, given that he practiced for eight hours a day, playing various gigs as they came up. The name “Loki Grimm” is itself borrowed, and I think this is a reoccurring theme in Paul’s work; later on in the decade, Dad and co. would take the name “Train Wreck” from a headlining band after said band didn’t show for their first gig. I can see the decision made in an instant that night at the Emelin Theatre, although I know that there’s more to it than mere happenstance. For Paul, I think that the title for his first album is, of course, in direct reference to this exchange, but it’s also about the spectre of this figure on our lives: Loki Grimm suggests a trickster, a devil in pantomime, an acknowledgment of something (or someone) beyond death. Death is an important theme (for Paul and me alike), and there’s no listening to this record without encountering just that: “Loki Grimm is always waiting / to take you back with him,” Paul concludes on the title track. With his introduction in “The Devil’s in the Fog,” the pale shadow arrives early in the record, yet Paul always seems to welcome it: “Lead the way / through the darkness, / I am not afraid,” cautioning to the listener to “please take your time with him, / he killed me once, / he’ll do it again.” Immediately thereafter is Paul’s rumination on death and dreaming in “Sleepwalker,” a song I’ve seen take stage over the past few years in many different formations, and the search for lost love in “My New Dynamic.”

That’s not to say that every track is depressing – “My New Dynamic” and “No Home” are probably the cheeriest songs I’ve heard Paul write. Yet by the end of the record, “Wilt,” the theme has completed its meditation, in lines that seem resigned to its work on life: “just ‘cause / we were young / doesn’t mean that we were wrong,” Paul announces in retrospect.  In a sense, the theme that survives the record is not death, but love: in my favorite line on the album, Paul sings “love is a rogue wave, / it had been there all our lives, / just to sweep us away.” This emphasizes the importance of several pairings on the album, most notably the pairing between “Albatross (Sink)” and “Sink (Reprise)”; the opposites are placed in direct dialogue, and are forced to take on each other as complimentary pairs rather than antinomies.   

It’s plain to see this invocation of love and death in the “Sister/Brother” suite, which I’ve uploaded below. It’s the most intense coupling on the record, and easily my favorite.  Don’t let the length deter you, both tracks are (really) fast-paced.

Quiet River High — “Sister”

Quiet River High — “Brother”

Paul also employs tons of collaboration on this record. While most of the songs are just Paul – “The Devil’s in the Fog,” “Albatross (Sink),” “Lark,” “Loki Grimm,” and “Wilt” – he’s got great musicians throughout. On “Sleepwalker,” “Sister” and “Brother” he’s got our good friend Jeff Rose, easily one of the best drummers I’ve heard, as well as Kilian Duarte, who’s currently finishing up at Berklee and plays bass like nobody’s business.  

Quiet River — Lazuli

Paul immediately went to work after Loki Grimm on a new batch of songs that soon became Lazuli. I remember that the title had been picked out long before any tracks were recorded. It’s a completely different album than the last, which I think is a response to comments from friends that the first is a slow and sad; it’s heavy, it’s fast, and a bit more optimistic. But for several reasons, Paul never did anything with this album. There’s no true album cover for it either. In many ways, this album is a product of the first *true* Quiet River line-up, with Nate on guitar, Matt on bass, and Jack Beal on percussion. For that reason I’ve less to speculate about this record – it’s not Paul’s album in the same sense as Loki Grimm, although in many ways it’s much more consistent in tone and pacing – and simply that much more to praise about the music itself.

I think this album demonstrates a huge accomplishment for Paul, and for that reason alone I want to see it properly released. It’s the product of a lot of hard work, of strong friendships, of outstanding production and musicianship, and (most importantly of all) it’s absolutely enjoyable. From the grand opening sequence “1948, 1949” to closer “Jamie,” Lazuli is truly exciting work. It also hosts a proper version of “Asleep at the Sea,” one of Paul’s earliest and best-known songs finally getting the full-band treatment.

“Lapis-Lazuli” is probably the most accomplished track here: Paul’s approach is intimate, his lyrics matching his soft register and bright composition (it’s the only truly acoustic track here, and definitely the most charged). “Wise Blood” has got to be one of my favorite songs of all time (seriously), although on any given day “Anchor” competes with that. I’ve provided both below.

Quiet River — “Wise Blood”

Quiet River — “Anchor”

You can listen to and/or purchase Paul’s music here. Check out his current projects A Hunter’s Pace and Goolsby, and if you’re interested, he’s got a bunch of videos up on his youtube channel.

Thanks for reading – for friends and family, this might seem sparse, but know that it’s difficult to put this into words. I know many people probably have siblings that they feel this way about. I think that, for me, Paul’s music represents much more than I am currently capable of expressing. I think of him as a true friend, which is more than many can say of a brother, but that’s not my point here: he is someone I feel is sometimes older than me, someone much more rooted in the ways of the world, and certainly someone I will forever idolize and always respect. I wish him luck and much love in his next project.

01. Cannibal Ox — “A B-Boy’s Alpha”
First off, sorry for starting this mix with the line “My mother said, ‘You sucked my pussy when you came out / don’t ever talk back / I handed ya life and I’ll snatch it back.’” That’s downright confrontational, and frankly not at all appropriate for children. And it’s not even the most confrontational birthing image Cannibal Ox were capable of delivering on their first and thus far only studio record, a pretty remarkable set called The Cold Vein. Try this one on for size: “You were a stillborn baby / mother didn’t want you, but you were still born.” Daaaaaaaaamn. But anyway, this song—it’s basically a narrative of two kids growing up in the ghetto, surrounded at all times by death and loss, honing their skills, and eventually arriving on the scene as a fully formed artistic powerhouse. In some ways, it’s a striking lyrical accompaniment to the Neil Young song we’ll get to later on—just two kids trying to make it to adulthood without their brains getting splattered all over the pavement. (Ben)

02. Looper — “The Treehouse”
Looper is a little-known side act fronted by the bassist of Belle and Sebastian which got its start in the late 90s with a low-key and intensely earnest first album. The band is much the same today; that is, little-known. In order to maintain the journalistic integrity of this fine institution, I have to admit that this song does not remind me of my childhood, but it does succeed at invoking an image of a childhood. I was never much for climbing trees, personally. I was more interested in communicating with them. No, not aloud, I’m not crazy. Telepathically. (Jason)

03. Ous Mal — “Tähdet”
“Have you ever used the memory palace?” Bobby casually asked me this the other day. I haven’t. So, Ous Mal is Olli and Iiris, who are both younger than me (shock) [Editor’s note: patently impossible!] and make tunes that are virtually impossible to revisit. Boomkat calls it “highly enjoyable Scandinavian lo-fi melodicism,” I call it total Eerie, Indiana: the tracks seem to change each time I put on Viime Talvi. Employing sampling, field recording, collage, and live instrumentation (everything is done analog), the duo construct melodies that seem to escape listening, making you feel like nothing but those old memories you try to inhabit. In “Tähdet,” I feel like I’m caught in a time-trap; it sounds like young summers, like playthings, warm attics; it’s television snow, it’s dirty brown hair; it’s distant but oddly personal. It reminds me to take better care of my memories. (Joel)

04. Laila Kinnunen — “Tanssilaulu”
As you may know from my biography, my childhood was spent in the bear-infested wilds of Finland. This song represents the old Finnish classics we always used to hear while wrangling woodland creatures, shocking city folk with our crude and forward ways, and binging on lenkkimakkara. Kinnunen has the iconic Finnish voice—unadorned but playful, and easy on melody, and when I listen to this song without listening to the lyrics as I imagine most of you might, I imagine it to be both melancholy and mysterious, which are qualities that embody the music I heard as a child. Kinnunen, a superstar in her time, had a kind of wholesome sexiness that 60s pop everywhere must have had, but with a strange sense of timing and humor (for this last bit, you should also view the video for her interpretation of “Hernando’s Hideaway”). (Niina)

05. Neil Young — “Powderfinger”
Now, you might think I chose this song simply because it includes the words “mama,” “daddy,” and “brother.” But no! Well… kind of, yes. But really, I think this song is one of the best at capturing the exact moment when a boy transitions into manhood and leaves the frivolity of childhood behind (“daddy’s gone, my brother’s out hunting in the mountains / Big John’s been drinking since the river took Emmy-Lou / so the Powers That Be left me here to do the thinkin’ / and I just turned twenty-two / I was wonderin’ what to do”), even if this particular manchild dies in the transition (“raised my rifle to my eye / never stopped to wonder why / then I saw black / and my face splashed in the sky”). Internet scholars variously claim that this song is set in the turmoil of the American War of Independence, the American Civil War, or, most likely, Canada’s Red River Rebellion of 1869, but in the end it really doesn’t matter what the setting is. It’s all about the character. (Ben)

06. Bob Dylan — “Just Like a Woman”
After Ben carelessly left a bag of blow on his desk and I stole it and snorted it, I got to thinking. Childhood, as any good anthropologist will tell you, isn’t just a period in your development. It’s a stance, a set of relationships between you and the world. You can snuff it out, or you can try to smuggle it into adulthood, but I think most of the time we just amateurishly pave it over. By that definition Dylan’s hood classic is also a classic of childhood, of the way its wounds persist, suffocating you and those who would love you. This live cut, which switches the studio version’s cantina waltz for a lonely stumble home, seems fitting to the sentiment. (Mike)

07. Zookeeper — “I Live in the Mess You Are”
Babies populate Chris Simpson’s songs. They’re practically everywhere. Take “Delivery Room” from his Belle City Pop! ep (it’s about a delivery room and the babies in it). Or “I Was Born in Omaha” from his Start Here–days in The Gloria Record (also about dem babes, ‘cept here he’s being one). While “I Live in the Mess You Are” don’t got a baby in it, it’s totally about childhood. With an opening alarm clock ring, Simpson (figured as St. Francis) leads a drowsy, dow-eyed children’s chorus and ramshackle, anthropomorphic baby rhinoceros circus trope in a street parade through sunny-side-up wonderment. It’s some imaginative heartachery that would make a Windsor McCay dream look like a funeral. I don’t have to justify it; Simpson has always been one of my favs, and he’s always taking me back to those moony names and faces peeking in the past from my own growings-up. (Joel)

08. The Mo-dettes — “White Mice”
“White Mice” is a brilliant song from The Story So Far…, the Mo-dettes’ classic album. I have included 80s girlpunk on this list for two reasons: first, because I’m told my ma was in her heyday a bit of a punk rocker, and I believe this has gone on to genetically influence some of the choices in my life (some!) (I don’t include most!). And the second reason is that I often used to joyride in my first and only car, a baby blue 1990 Civic hatchback, blasting sweet-ass punk rock and remembering freedom. I consider sixteen to be pretty much a kid, so y’know. All talk about punk aside, this song itself is a lower-key exercise in mesmerization. It opens with a rolling drumbeat copied many times over, including on that jangle you might remember called “Young Folks” from a coupla years ago. The lyrics are hilarious—“don’t be stupid don’t be limp, / no girl likes to love a wimp”—and in general it has a singsong quality that I associate with songs I really loved as a kid. Also, the handclap parts are interactive, which all children enthusiastically respond to, so feel free to play this for your junior. (Niina)

09. Alsace Lorraine — “You Are Like Charles Lindbergh to Me”
I came of age right on the cusp of mp3s, but for a few years I would actually go to record stores and try and build up my laughably meager vinyl collection. I picked up Alsace Lorraine’s Through Small Windows because of the cover—some oddly shaped girl standing on a balcony, staring into the distance. I couldn’t tell you exactly why it appealed to me, but I brought it to the counter and the almost classically aloof record store clerk started jabbering about how much he liked it. For a couple of minutes I got to nod along like I knew who he was talking about, and was afforded a glimpse into some of the music dork socialization mechanisms that probably don’t matter as much with, uh, cool blogs like girlpants around. It turns out Alsace Lorraine was a great blind buy. Wispy twee pop in the vein of St. Etienne, but modest enough to feel like your personal little secret. This first track trades precisely in that kind of homegrown funcraft. It celebrates those goofy teenage relationships that are really like rebuilt childhood worlds unto themselves, made up of summers, inside jokes and odd totemic figures like Charles Lindbergh. You could probably draw a line from this to the xx’s VCR, and it’s a perennial theme that Alsace Lorraine just did right for me. (Mike)

10. God Help the Girl — “The Psychiatrist is In”
Imagine Dylan’s little girl in her second act. She gets her shit together, settles down and for some unknown reason is flashing her kind, smiling eyes at you. Oh, she’s quite sympathetic. She was a case when she was young too, and can help. Of course, the offer to ‘listen to your stories’ is at once more childishly sly and “adult” than most psychiatry is capable of. Those slightly swaying, decorous bongos, that honeyed voice; Dan Bejar once said “nothing does the body good like another body,” and that’s basically the therapy Catherine Ireton is proposing here. Sort of like the twee version of “fuck the pain away,” after it’s cooled into a sheepish kind of sad bastardism? I guess this is growing up. (Mike)

11. Nedelle — “Our Little Selves”
Nedelle could be seven (she has a song called “Tell Me a Story” that begins with a carefully-described puppy dog tongue, and it’s obvious that her rhyme schemes are lifted from Grover).  Or, she could (probably) be a regular adult who sings about the joys of being a kid. Her song “Our Little Selves,” on 2005’s From the Lion’s Mouth, makes this theme absolutely transparent, as she announces “sound the bell / our little selves are enough.” It’s a simple image, but it’s Nedelle ability to bring this simple image to life with fable and anecdote (storybookisms that really flourish in her latest record The Locksmith Cometh) that animates From the Lion’s Mouth. It’s an album that, for anyone with a sappy side, is drenched with tiny reminiscences. And what more is childhood than that ever-present, self-mythologizing nostalgia? Little, I say. (Joel)

12. Chad VanGaalen — “TMNT Mask”
Whenever I hear this song—which is probably just about getting stoned and sitting next to the river—I inevitably think of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, protagonist of David Mitchell’s excellent coming-of-age novel Black Swan Green. Jason is a melancholic kid of a certain sort—the kind who writes and publishes poetry at the age of 13, and who will later grow up to be an internationally acclaimed novelist. The kind who avoids the other kids his age and goes to sit by the lake in the quiet winter evening, skate around the frozen expanse, watch his ghostly shadow skating on the opposite side. VanGaalen’s music here evokes pretty much every bleep and bloop and horribly artificial drum machine beat of the book’s Thatcherian time period while marrying it to a distinctly aughties aesthetic. The song’s only concession to childhood as such is the mention of a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle mask / sunken to the rocks, plastic face half-buried” in the riverbed, as melancholy an image as they come. (Ben)

13. Finally Punk — “5 Yr Old Angst”
This is a rather literal choice, as the song is a temper tantrum set to music, including childish angry growls and a refrain of “I wanna go outside!” that perfectly encapsulates the frustration of any person whose minute-to-minute activities are controlled by their parents. Beyond that, though, this is a band that seems to play just to make noise and doesn’t mind punctuating a song with a piercing shriek or two: the adult equivalent of a kid banging cymbals together and screaming words to a half-remembered song. It might say something that, as much as I appreciate the notion of obnoxious noise as a form of music, even I can only take this band in small doses. (Jason)

14. M.A. Numminen — “A Proposition Is…”
M.A. Numminen is a revered Finnish eccentric who makes up for his distinct lack of singing ability with his awesomely capacious randomness. His voice is a snarl at best, sometimes cracking, sometimes wandering off key, but it’s all in your face. And this song simultaneously discusses Wittgenstein and brings to mind the multiple albums that Numminen cut for children in the 1990s—awesome x2. Sure it’s all standard rock n’ roll riffs, wanky solos, and reckless piano mashing, but more than one childhood memory I have becomes in recollection accompanied by these very dulcet tones; here is hoping that you love Numminen, too. If not, then consider it an edification in philosophy. (Niina)

15. Ponytail — “7 Souls”
Ponytail is a frankly ridiculous band that does not perform in order to communicate a message or even to use real words. I like a lot of bands where the vocals are wielded like just another instrument rather than to add meaning through lyrics, but these guys take it to an extreme. So why did I pick this song? About a minute and twenty seconds into this track is exactly what getting out of school on the last day before summer vacation should sound like. (Jason)

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