Songs on Repeat: Had A Lot of Things to Say

Like many children who grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I have spent most of my life relentlessly pretending that I actually live within the city limits, because trying to explain to people that you live in a town that is too small to possess a zip code is just too depressing.

With anyone who lives outside the Philly area, this usually works. But good luck trying to fake street cred in State College, where at least half the population is also trying to pretend they're from my gleaming metropolis.

Thus, the fact that I will actually be living in a city this summer -- I have an internship with MSNBC in New York -- makes me ridiculously, irrationally excited, to the point where I have accumulated a small playlist of songs that remind me of my impending summer adventures.

This includes:
- Pretty much every song ever written by Bishop Allen, for no apparent reason
- "Song for Myla Goldberg," by the Decemberists, which includes the admittedly blindingly obvious line "I know New York, I need New York, I know I need unique New York"
- "Gates of the Old City," by Looker, which reminds my former roommate Heather of Mary-Kate and Ashley and reminds me of Bishop Allen. Double win.
- "You Can't Hurry Love," by the Concretes, which readers of this blog will remember from a past Songs on Repeat post
- This song:



I have no idea why this particular song ("Wires," by Jason Schwartzman's solo effort Coconut Records) makes me think of dashing around New York, but it does. And yes, the band is another gimmicky project of an actor-turned-musician, which usually frightens me (see: Duff, Hilary), but Coconut Records has proven to be appropriately indie enough for me so far.

And there's no denying that "Wires" is catchy as hell, at least in my book. After all, it features punchy guitar chords and a xylophone, which is pretty much all I require of a song. There's also a great part that involves what I think is a Wurlitzer towards the end where everything just sort of soars upwards, and it's lovely. So: cheers for this song, and for New York, where I will be blogging from the Village in t-minus nine days. Score.

Quick blog note: Next up will likely be a LOST review, which I haven't posted yet because I am still attempting to wrap my head around the season finale, which was mindblowing and brilliant and almost made me cry. Stay tuned.

Songs on Repeat: Love Ain't Far

As much as I hate to admit it, I am a secret Motown junkie. I adore the Supremes, I am a sucker for the Temptations, and Martha Reeves is one of my personal heroes.

I attribute this mild obsession to something akin to Stockholm syndrome — back in the day, I rode an hour-and-a-half-long bus to high school every morning, and my bus driver, Socks (who is another story entirely), insisted on playing our local "oldies" station, Sunny 104.5, over the bus radio. At full volume. For the entire ride. After months of attempting to fight the powers that be (earmuffs, headphones, and various pleas to turn down the music proved futile), I gave in. I can pretty much sing the entire Sunny 104.5 repertoire from memory now, which is kind of pathetic.

Thus, when I found a song called "You Can't Hurry Love" by a Swedish band called the Concretes, I went in expecting some indie cover of the Supremes' hit. I couldn't have been farther from the truth.



There is no reason, really, why I should enjoy this song as much as I do. It has about three lyrics, it's over in two minutes, and it's mildly repetitive. But it's catchy as hell, man, and as far as my repeat songs go, that's usually all that matters.

Of course, now that I've spent several paragraphs waffling about my minor Motown obsession, I feel I should include a video of The Supremes' seminal "You Can't Hurry Love" as well.

Songs on Repeat: Sun Been Down for Days

At approximately 36 seconds into Wilco's inimitable "Hummingbird," there's this awesome little cello part that gets me every. single. time. It's only a few measures long, but it's absolutely gorgeous. Sometimes I just play the first minute or so over and again, because I am admittedly kind of pathetic.

Oren Lavie's "Her Morning Elegance" features a little cello riff early on, too. And maybe I'm just a sucker for what is arguably the best instrument ever (I haven't picked mine up in two years, but I'm not ready to say I used to play it just yet), because iTunes informs me that I have played this song 30 times since Sunday night, and that's not counting the play count on my iPod.

Usually my repeat songs of the week are sort of pleasant little things that I decide to start out my mornings with, but this one's different. It's minimal as anything -- those fantastic cello sections nearly drown out the muted organ and xylophone in the background -- but it's one of those songs that just works. I can't explain it.

Also, the music video is pretty much one of the most adorable things I've ever seen. It's probably one of the reasons I can't stop listening to the song.

Album Review: The Hazards of Love

I've listened to the Decemberists' latest album, The Hazards of Love, twice through so far and read countless reviews of it, and I'm still kind of torn about it, to the point where I've been sporadically bothering my friends all day to ask their opinion.

One minute I adore the lilting melody of "Won't Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)"; the next I want to tear my hair out over the overtly metal nonsense that is "The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing." I've wavered between getting sucked into the album's overarching plot (more on that later) and dismissing the entire thing as too weird for words. It's hard for me, because I adore the Decemberists beyond all reason, to the point where I regularly yell "WE LOVE YOU COLIN!" at the stage at their concerts. I've spent years defending the band against its standard criticisms: their music is weird, their references obscure, their lyrics pretentious as all get-out.

But I'm going to say it: The Hazards of Love is weird, obscure and pretentious. It's a prog-rock opera in the grandest sense of the word, with dense, pulsing guitar riffs and crashing organs and a surprising amount of what metal would sound like if Led Zeppelin was planted in 1872. The whole album is a loosely connected story about a heroine named Margaret, her lover/baby daddy/son of the Forest Queen, William (who turns into a fawn during the day, randomly), said Forest Queen, and the Rake, who, sadly, is not a common garden tool, but a widower who murdered his children because he missed being a bachelor. Whew.

True to form, frontman Colin Meloy warbles delightfully throughout the album, and the band brings on guest singers to voice Margaret and the Forest Queen. Becky Stark provides suitably waifish vocals for Margaret, but props to Colin for getting Shara Worden to sing as the Forest Queen. Even as the band descends into metal sludge halfway through the album, Worden's soulful growl slides above it all. She absolutely owns her half of "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid," one of the best songs on the album.

The Hazards of Love is ambitious and grandiose and sometimes insane, and a lot of the time, this works. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for the Decemberists' 2004 EP The Tain, which had a lot of the same epic elements, but I occasionally found myself drifting off in its dense melodies and climactic chords. It's not an album to pull a few catchy singles off, but as a cohesive musical whole, it works. It's easy to forgive the band for the distracting, stuttering distortion on "The Abduction of Margaret" when it's followed by the absolutely gorgeous folk tune "Annan Water." And some of the prog is, admittedly, pretty good -- "The Rake's Song" features some deeply disturbing lyrics but subversively catchy rock. For the most part, the album slides between thick prog rock and sweet, poignant love songs, each song bleeding seamlessly into the next.

That being said, part of the Decemberists' charm once lay in the fact that they could mesh epics like "The Crane Wife 1 & 2" with folk-pop goodness like "O Valencia!" on the same record. Hazards is all epic and no pop, which -- while it produces some crazy and interesting musical concepts -- kind of saddens me. Seasoned Decemberists fans know that Colin Meloy can make a song about a lost bicycle sound like the best thing you've heard in days. He doesn't need to sing about a shape-shifting fawn-man to convince us of his musical genius.

It's interesting to compare Hazards to the Decemberists' EP series, Always the Bridesmaid, released last fall. While Hazards represents what I think everyone's been fearing a little bit ever since The Tain -- the giant, inaccessible, "oh-god-what-were-they-thinking" concept album -- the EP series is almost a return to how the band began: sweet, melodic ditties about things as ordinary as a rainy day or a road trip through New England.

It's fun to rock out a little to The Hazards of Love, and the album definitely has its high points. And you have to give the band credit for taking on such an ambitious project, even if it falls a little flat at times. But for me, the Decemberists will always be about the mesh of the epic and the mundane, the pairing of wonderfully complex lyrics with choruses that will get stuck in your head for days. That's not Hazards, not by a long shot. But something tells me that Colin Meloy won't be sticking with Rakes and fawns for long.

Download: "Annan Water," "The Rake's Song," "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid"

Songs on Repeat: America Can't Say No

Note: Every week or so, I find a song that I listen to nonstop, on loop, for at least a day. It is pathetic, but it's my repeat song of the week, and I'll be writing about it each Thursday. Cheers.

I've been gearing myself up for the Decemberists' latest album, The Hazards of Love, by listening to old Decemberists songs pretty much nonstop. On the off chance that the album is absolutely terrible (the reviews are starting to worry me), I figure that I can still comfort myself with the orphans, chimney sweeps and starcrossed lovers that are standard Decemberists fare.

"16 Military Wives" was playing on loop on my iPod today, and it's a little different from the rest of the band's sea-shanty-packed catalogue -- it's a protest song, and probably the most upbeat of its kind that I've ever heard. It's snarky, timely, and it features a lot of indie-rock god and Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy warbling, which pretty much seals the deal for me:

Fifteen celebrity minds
Leading their fifteen sordid, wretched, checkered lives
Will they find the solution in time,
Using their fifteen, pristine, moderate liberal minds?

Golden.

When I went to see the Decemberists at the Electric Factory in Philly this past November (by far my favorite venue in the world), they played this -- and then led the crowd in a chant of "Yes We Can!" It was a week after the election, and it was brilliant.

Also, it has the best music video in the history of ever: