It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say we’ve had some shakeups at the Girlpants offices. When I say offices, I mean offices: we had some pretty nice ones, but we lost them in an ill-considered card game that big time hustlers Joel and Mike initiated against a rival blogful of poker-shark web journalists. Then several hard, unmusical years passed, and we could nary afford a seven-inch as we lived on oatmeal packets, the paltry nickels from our freelance stump grinding, and whatever Ben could scare up spanging by the highway on-ramp with his “Opinions: 25 Cents” sign. But our hard work (and the steel toes I had to pawn) paid off, because we finally collected enough minutes on the internet café card to be able to print out the application and–blessing of fiscal blessings–got that government bailout.
And now we’ve landed here, in the amore month, and we’re about to romance your ear-betweens with this love-themed mix. It’s not Valentine’s Day anymore, but who cares? Love is better late than never.
01: The Mountain Goats — “Cai Dao Blowout”
They say women look for their fathers in the men they date, which sounds like Freudian bullshit to me. But they fuck you up, your mum and dad, and in “Cai Dao Blowout,” John Darnielle asks the perennial question of well-meaning boyfriends everywhere: “When the ghost of your father comes to town, what the hell else can you do?” There’s a lot to like about this song: the way the ramshackle banjo and organ give it a buzzy, backyard-summer-evening feel, the way the word ‘citronella’ unfolds into an unexpectedly pretty sound, all the funny bush-devil antics (knocking over furniture? Getting into the reception on the wireless? LOL?) But what really gets me is how affectionate it is. While JD writes bitter, loathing and doomed pitch-perfectly, he doesn’t always connect with the more heartfelt stuff. But he here manages to capture a rare kind of sweetness: resignation at its lightest and warmest. This is a song about loving someone and wanting to do everything you can for them, even when you can’t do anything at all. Hardly the stuff of a valentine’s day crush, but we should be so lucky to be loved like this, in all of our stupid, helpless vulnerability. (Mike)
02: Acid House Kings — “This Heart is a Stone”
I was never a big fan of Acid House Kings. Actually, I’m still not a big fan of Acid House Kings. They make that kind of cutesy, innocuous, soundtracked-pop that makes me think of a teeny kitten getting smothered by a soft, marshmallow pillow (a familiar nightmare for all, I imagine). I confuse them with just about every other Swede combo/trio/quartet (well, maybe not ABBA); I hit “skip” every time one of their songs ruins a sweet run of blissed-out glo-fi (rare); I think I made a mean face at Nina Persson when I thought I saw The Cardigans outside a Jiffy-Lube last week (doubtful). Yet needless to say, I still listen to the Acid House Kings, and now find myself putting “This Heart is a Stone” on a crummy love-mix for cranky hipster people. And this is a song about cranky hipster love, about hearts calcified into small pockets of coal. On the opening bounce, Julia Lannerheim begins “They say your middle name is ‘Trouble’ / but I know it’s Caroline” and “They say that you only bring heartache / but I know you brought a bottle of wine,” that self-knowing delivery suggesting the type of tongue-in-cheek playfulness that is so tongue-in-cheek it’s like there’s a smaller tongue inside a smaller cheek tucked away inside. Coupled with that long pause right before the insta-classic chorus (“This heart is a stone / no one will ever break it / this heart is a stone / just for you it breaks easily”) and you’ve got mixtape fodder for years of catty Carolines who are lookin’ for the right guy to cleave that heart-shaped carbonate rock. (Joel)
03: First Aid Kit — “Hard Believer”
This song puts me in a corny but genuine mood. I want to believe there is a bit of Emmylou influence in the singing style of the Swedish sisters that make up First Aid Kit, and listening to the crystalline melody and harmony makes a statement even as brash as this one pretty easy to back up. But though most of the other songs lack the necessary melancholy, “Hard Believer” delivers and that’s the reason to pick this song off their debut, The Big Black and the Blue. “And it’s one life / and it’s this life / and it’s beautiful” – these are not complex lyrics, but set in the framework of this melody, they’re words that you want to wail when you’re drunk. And love, like the best Americana, should be spoken plainly and timed as tight as a rope walk. (Niina)
04: The Shondes — “Make it Beautiful”
From the Shondes’ upcoming album My Dear One, which is one album I’m highly anticipating. The gorgeous blend of riot grrl and classical instrumentation is what makes their sound, and this song, so fucking irresistible that I can’t even make a halfway decent metaphor to describe it. The Shondes have a special magic with melodic breakdowns, and this song is no exception, with its self-conscious lyrics about structure. Singer Louisa’s voice makes the instruction “let’s make it beautiful” seem more like a command than a coax, and I’m totally along for the ride. (Niina)
05: Pia Fraus — “Loveloops”
It’s tough not putting this song in the mix, although I know what it’ll do to my reputation: make my colleagues pin me for some sort of sappy, depressive, aspiring song-smith who thinks any and every song with the word “love” in it means that the “special feeling” is somewhere buried in that composition (please take note the repetition “and again / and again / and again” that loops into sunny hysteria at the end of the song, and further note that I don’t own no song-smithy). Here I appeal to higher reason: Pia Fraus is a band all about feeling music, and After Summer is one of those records that has a feeling of its own. I put “Loveloops” here knowing its bright synth leads and soft boy-girl vocals don’t lend to the lovelorn atmosphere of a few of the other cuts — the heady-drone tracking from beginning to end like a wave of August heat,an ambient nostalgia in each note — but with hopes that it’ll serve as sanctuary from the trials and tribulations of love lost. (Joel)
06: Why? — “Good Friday”
Awesomely named band frontman Yoni Wolf is something of a specialist in heartbreak and longing. Having made an entire album’s worth of songs about those two subjects in Elephant Eyelash (also: family, drugs, suicide, and death in general), he turned around and made another, even better, album about the exact same stuff with Alopecia. Like most of my favorite lyricists, Yoni has the rare ability to employ seemingly nonsensical, or at least impressionistic and scattershot, verse to sneakily devastating effect. “Good Friday” is about many things, in that it covers a pretty stunning array of scenes and moments for a song that runs just under four minutes–but at its base, this song is about the process of assimilating the loss of love. A litany of the ways the narrator tries to forget, the lyrics are at the same time intermixed with admissions of pain and confusion as well as fonder reminisces, leading to a conclusion in which he gives the girl the best sendoff he can muster. In a roundabout way, it covers the entire breadth and depth of a relationship in the space of a pop song. (And hey… the music is awesome, too.) (Ben)
07: Xiu Xiu — “Chocolate Makes You Happy”
Then again, in the vagueries of romance, there is very little solid. As we dart through the shades of delirious love-lorn innuendo like guppies through a miniature ceramic diver mask, all the while we secretly long for something obvious. Luckily there’s chocolate, which we can use to mash into our eat-faces when we don’t get that phone call we deserve. And even more luckily, Jamie Stewart’s new Xiu Xiu iteration drops this month, and it contains this dark and danceable tidbit concerning chocolate. It may also concern depression. It may also want to make you reconsider being happy. But that’s not my issue, that. (Niina)
08: Rocketship — “Naomi & Me”
“You were in my favorite band, Naomi understand I’ll do all I can…to love yoooou.” Let’s be honest, the best Valentine’s Day crushes are the ones you don’t actually know. None of the blemishes and complications of speech–why write lyrics when you have the hook in all of her pure, pop perfection? This is something twee understood inherently, in all of its radical idealism. Sometimes all you have to do, as Rocketship demonstrate, is sing along with the ‘Oooos.’ (Mike)
09: Love Connection — “All Over”
I wanted to include something on the mix that I’ve been digging recently, and figured (by name alone) that Love Connection fit that bill. They’ve got their first record out now on
Sensory Projects/Inertia, and after d/ling it on a fanciful whim (I was cheery that day), it’s been on constant rotation in my bedroom. What I know about Love Connection I’ve gleaned from
their Myspace page and an interview on Mess + Noise: Dean Noble, Kobi Simpson (who is adorable), Nathan Burgess, and Michael Caterer are from Melbourne, and they play music. I’m fond of labelmates Minus Story, and I’ll use their frantic, wide-eyed, fractured psych-pop as a frame of reference:
they are not similar at all. Instead they remind me of Mojave 3 and Miracle Fortress, with that same hazy, whirling hum circling each finely-tuned track. Spoiler alert: “All Over” is the last song on their album. From that breathy line “I love / the way / you talk / to the friends / inside / my heart,” “All Over” grows and grows in warmth, building to a fuzzy wash of synth paired with a meticulously-patterned, clean guitar line. It manages to be sweeping and big while sounding tiny; it’s the part of our mix that will probably make you feel tingling under your nice button-up shirt when thinking about a girl.
(Joel)
10: jj — “My Love”
11: jj — “Intermezzo”
A low-level buzz band that snuck into the eardrums of a few listeners last year and refused to leave, jj are a mysterious act from Sweden, but you’d never be able to tell that from their sound (accent aside). Like their labelmates Air France and groups like Lindstrom and Studio, the anonymous act incorporate elements of what has come to be known as the Scandinavian balearic sound. I’m not enough of a specialist in this genre to be able to tell you exactly what that means… just that I know it when I hear it. “My Love” is a simple pop song with lyrics that don’t aspire to much–a simple tale of love lost, but this time from the other side of the divide. Unlike Yoni Wolf’s emotionally crippled protagonist, this one is empowered enough to tell her former lover that the “next time you see me; you better stand in line.” “Intermezzo” is an instrumental outro that carries “My Love” to a charmingly ramshackle conclusion. (Ben)
12: Florence + the Machine — “You’ve Got the Love (XX remix)”
I dunno, I just imagine icy, coked-up Cupids floating over the beat, plucking their celestial harps. This remix is all pizzicato, really, from the two-step beat to those chirpy lasers and weirdly precise tabla samples–a perfect 180 from the ringing power chords and belted vocals of the original. And so with the sound, the feel. They take Florence and the Machine’s exalting “you’ve got the love” and even it out into a groove, an encouragement. If you’re too cool for valentine’s day–which, let’s face, would be pretty fucking cool–this’ll be playing during your makeout session in the club tonight. (Mike)
13: Genius Sir — “Girl U Want (Devo cover)”
“Girl U Want” is pretty simple and pretty dead-on in its assessment of the sort of blinders love (both in air quotes and out) can put on you. Inbetween the repeated chorus of “she’s just the girl you want,” the lyrics elevate said girl to “the top of the greenest tree,” from which she “sends out an aroma of undefined love; it drips down in a mist from above.” First recorded by Devo, this homebrew cover of the song was put together for the recent
Hipinion Totally or Totally Not: 80s compilation by boarder Genius Sir. To my ear, it somewhat miraculously captures and even improves on the manic energy and the barely masked hopelessness of the original, while substantially upping the tempo.
(Ben)
Get the mix in full (with special edition cover art!) here:
(links updated to correct iTunes tagging/importing issue)
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