Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl (Broken Social Scene)

The other day my 16 year old brother (see photo right to get a visual of our relationship) asked me what two albums he should get his two girl friends for their birthday. Now, when graced with such a question one can only begin to reminisce back to their old 16/17 year old days. Times have changed, and my personal favorite albums when I was at that age probably won't have the same effect on 17 year old girls today. There are some exceptions though. After serious deliberation of what two albums these girls should hear, most likely two albums they've never heard of (especially coming from my hometown), but more importantly two albums that would change their lives for the better and hopefully open new doors of music for them, I concluded on:





RADIOHEAD | IN RAINBOWS

This album is without a doubt a love album. It's their most straight forward work yet. Thom Yorke says the lyrics are about "that anonymous fear thing, sitting in traffic, thinking...". Teenage girls love to drive, so why not give them that good ole contemplative soundtrack they desire but can't seem to find on pop radio stations. Instead of Taylor Swift, give a girl "All I Need" or "House of Cards". Instead of Miley Cyrus, show her "Reckoner". Let her hear how haunting a tambourine can be. If there's one productive thing Twilight has done to our world, it's put Radiohead on preteen girls' iPods ("15 Step" is played during the credits of the first Twilight and Thom Yorke's "Hearing Damage" is featured on the New Moon soundtrack). This album changed my life when I was 17, I know history can repeat itself.

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE | YOU FORGOT IT IN PEOPLE

Now, I didn't know this album when I was 17, but it still hits home. Kota, my co dj, told me that when she was 17, she made a playlist about being 17 and discovered "Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl". The lyrics are what do it. They somehow turned nostalgia into a song, leaving you absorbed in memories. From start to finish, this album is filled with emotions. There is nothing stagnant about this album. And that's why I love it.



After some serious pondering, I began to make a list of more albums for a seventeen year old's listening pleasure. With that being said, inspired by the Broken Social Scene song "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl", I give you

ALBUMS FOR A SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE | MERRIWEATHER POST PAVILION
Only good things can come from listening to this album. You either get it, or you don't. If you do, your world expands. If you don't, you can't help but wonder what else is out there.





ARCADE FIRE | FUNERAL
People should know what's going on right above us. Canada has some pretty good things to offer. After "Where The Wild Things" came out, I saw Arcade Fire on just about every girl's iPod I looked through. People who hear Arcade Fire tend to enjoy it which is why more people should hear it. "Wake Up" would be my go to song for this album because it is just that good. But as far as build ups and hardcore jam sessions in cars go, "Une Annee Sans Lumiere" takes the cake.





500 DAYS OF SUMMER | VARIOUS ARTISTS
I'm not a fan of romantic comedies. Really not a fan. But this one I like. Maybe it's The Smiths, Wolfmother, Regina Spektor, The Temper Trap or a Pixies cover of "Here Comes Your Man" that does it. If there's one way to show a girl good music, put awesome bands in a romantic comedy soundtrack.





KINGS OF LEON | AHA SHAKE HEARTBREAK
Gosh I miss the cocaine days of Kings of Leon. This album was written about all types of girls: taper jean girls, girls who drink milk, girls who cause erectile dysfunction and even transvestites. It's common sense to give a girl this album. Trust me.





DR. DOG | FATE
Let a girl know there are adorable short men with suspenders who bounce around and sing about being in and out of love. She'll dig it. And then afterwards, she'll require Dr. Dog to be a prerequisite in a guy's library before he can ask her out.






THE DODOS | VISITER
It's folk pop. I think. Everything is straight forward on this album, but done rather exceptionally well. There needs to be more female drummers. Hopefully the crisp off-beat percussion on here will do some inspiration.






NICK DRAKE | PINK MOON
Hide all her Jack Johnson or John Mayer and give her Nick Drake. Tell her he was only 22 when he recorded this. Tell her this is from the 1970s. Tell her he was such an introvert he recorded his album while facing a wall. Tell her he was a rather attractive gentlemen. Tell her Heath Ledger was obsessed with him. Let her listen to his guitar picking. Let her hear his words of wisdom. If you do this, you'll see a change. She'll be outside more, appreciate life more, and maybe, just maybe...hide those Jack Johnson and John Mayer albums forever.





Here are some of my personal favorite albums back when I was 17:
THE YARDIBRDS | Rave Up
KINGS OF LEON | Youth & Young Manhood
LED ZEPPELIN | Physical Graffiti
THE SUBWAYS | Young For Eternity
THE VINES | Winning Days
PAOLO NUTINI | These Streets
BECK | Guero
MARIE ANTOINETTE SOUNDTRACK | Various Artists
DEATH PROOF SOUNDTRACK | Various Artists
ONCE SOUNDTRACK | Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová
JUNO SOUNDTRACK | Various Artists
THICKER THAN WATER SOUNDTRACK | Various Artists
SCRUBS SOUNDTRACK | Various Artists
THE BLACK KEYS | Magic Potion
TV ON THE RADIO | Dear Science
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND | The Velvet Underground & Nico
T. REX | Electric Warrior
MODEST MOUSE | We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
SUFJAN STEVENS | Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State
WHITE STRIPES | Icky Thump
RADIOHEAD | In Rainbows
SONIC YOUTH | Rather Ripped
SPOON | Gimme Fiction
GIRL TALK | Feed The Animals

Helicopter (Deerhunter)

Last night I had the undeniable pleasure of seeing Deerhunter here in New Orleans. I saw them open up for Spoon back in March, but this time around things were different. Drastically damn good different. First difference, their new album. "Halcyon Digest", released in September 2010, is in my opinion the best Deerhunter album to date. It's yet another emotionally rich, sensitive, and atmospheric work from Bradford Cox (singer, guitarist and brain of Deerhunter). And as predictable as that may sound, after one listen to this album you realize that it's predictable and surprising in all the right places. "Halcyon Digest" might be an easy listen compared to past Deerhunter albums, but it takes more effort to digest. Cox has said "music always takes special forms when it's intertwined with nostalgia." This album reminisces his youth, and the past of others. Though the album in its entirety is superb, there are two songs that stick out for me: "Coronado" and "Helicopter".



"Coronado"
This song has saxophone. I repeat, this song has saxophone. Need I say anymore?



"Helicopter"
This is possibly the saddest song ever written. On the album, Bradford Cox explains the true story behind it.

"Dima (real name Dimitry Marakov) was born in 1986 in the town of Nalchik, Russia. From a young age, he dreamed of working in the fashion industry as a designer. Lacking the moral or financial support of his parents, he actively sought out contacts within the industry through the internet. At the age of 14, he became acquainted with a successful fashion photographer in St. Petersburg who invited the boy to come live with him and work as his assistant. Dima accepted the offer and moved in with the photographer. According to friends of Dima, he became the older man’s lover for approximately the next year. He eventually grew dissatisfied with the lack of benefits he had been promised would result from the arrangement. He left the photographer to become live-in lovers with a wealthy man who provided the financial backing for a conglomerate of pornographic gay websites. It was at this point that Dimitry adopted the stage name Dima and, with the help of false documents that corrected his age to the legal 18, began a successful career modeling naked and starring in hardcore sex videos on the gay websites financed by his lover.
Between the age of 15 and 18, Dima was a highly sought after pornographic model and performer. He saved the money he made from modeling to pay for the tuition at a leading college of fashion that he hoped to attend when he reached 18. At a certain point, Dima began supplementing his income by renting himself out as an escort within his lover’s circle of associates and acquaintances. According to friends of Dima, they included several leading figures in the entertainment industry as well as one of the most powerful men in Russia’s world of organized crime. Dima began to express concern to his friends that the organized crime figure had become obsessed with him, but he refused to accept their advice to stop seeing the man because of the large amount of money these dates were earning him. Sometime in 2005, Dima abruptly left his lover, gave up his modeling career, cut off all communication with his friends, and moved in with the organized crime figure. The last public Dima sighting was late that year when his friend Ignat Lebedev, who was also working as a male escort at the time, accompanied a client to a private sex club where he claims to have witnessed a very thin and confused looking Dima being forcibly sodomized by a group of perhaps ten to fifteen men. Lebedev claims his client identified one of the men as the organized crime figure and dissuaded him from speaking to Dima for his own protection.
Lebedev claims he described what he’d seen to Dima’s former lover and was told Dima had been killed the previous week and that he shouldn’t speak of this again. Lebedev reported both incidents to the police, but after interviewing the lover and being told Lebedev had made the story up, they declined to investigate the matter. In 2006, Lebedev persuaded a prominent Russian gay journalist to write an article on Dima’s disappearance, but during the course of investigating the story, the writer was abducted by unknown assailants, beaten, and told he would be murdered if he wrote the story. Dima has not been seen or reliably heard from in three years, although in early 2007 another organized crime figure, Evgeny Ershova, who was awaiting trial on an unrelated murder charge, claimed that in late 2005 he witnessed a young male prostitute matching Dima’s description be pushed out of a helicopter over a remote forest in the north of Russia. Before Dima’s ex-lover died of lung cancer in late 2007, he reportedly confessed to friends that Dima was sold as a sex slave to a man in the Ukraine in late 2005 and had lived until late 2006 when he’d committed suicide."

With that being said, please take a listen.



I have to thank Daytrotter for my discovery of Deerhunter. With that being said, here's the session that started it all for me: DEERHUNTER DAYTROTTER SESSSION!

Buffalo Girls (TV On The Radio)

Discovered a delicious treat, but this may be the most hipster blog post I ever write. However, it has good intentions. Yesterday, prior to our radio show, my co-dj Kota and I were expressing our love for TV On The Radio. It was in this conversation that Kota broke the news: TV On The Radio's debut self-released album called "OK Calculator". Yes, it is exactly what you think. Yes, it alludes to Radiohead's "OK Computer". Yes it was created in 2002, a whole year prior to their very first major release of "Young Liars EP". Yes, it may be primarily a capella. Yes, it is rare if not impossible to own on hard copy. Yes, thanks to modern day technology and mediafire you and I can now own it. Yes. Yes. and Yes. Not to be hipster, but you kind of have to already know TVOR to appreciate this. Of course, it’s not even remotely polished up, but can you really expect to have it any other way? "OK Calculator" scales pretty much every style they could later go onto incorporate. At times it isn’t shocking that this would be the same band that would create "Dear Science", and at other times it sounds so devoid of any real musical theme that it becomes hard to think of as the band's ‘roots'. Even if that’s not a bad thing, it’s disheartening to think they’ll never pull out these ideas again. Granted, at the same time, it’s a blessing. My friend Sarah suggested the following after Kota told her about this album, "Can we name our future band's first album 'OK Smartphone'?"




"We made this disc OK Calculator and left it in cafes and just different places. Just 24 tracks of four-track stuff. And that's on-line now. We sold a few of them on our first tour, a couple, but then the CD burner broke, etc. That's on-line and someone wrote about it as "the extremely rare but superb OK Calculator" and I’m sitting there going, "Are you kidding me?" Rare, yeah, rare because we're making them ourselves, and superb, that's not up to us, but it's not superb. (laughs) I’d be the first person to tell you. There's more hiss on some of those songs than there are songs. And it's fun, and I love it, but I wouldn't call it superb."
-- Tunde Adebimpe, in a 2004 Downhill Battle interview

Download and Enjoy :)

Little Faith (The National)

Here are some albums I've been getting down to pretty hard lately:
(Grooveshark has been giving me a rather hard time lately with exporting these playlists I make. So, I apologize for any technical difficulties.)


The National | High Violet

It's a pretty depressing album, but a good one at that. Play this for those long contemplative solo drives.


Beach House | Teen Dream

Had the pleasure of seeing Beach House live and fell immediately in love. This album doesn't even do her voice justice.


Modest Mouse | Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks EP

My friend Tyler played this in his car for me. I had never heard Modest Mouse like this. Thank goodness I do now.


Air | The Virgin Suicides Soundtrack

Favorite French band simply because of this soundtrack. Walking to this album in between classes slows down time just a bit.


Animal Collective | Strawberry Jam

"Peacebone" was the very first Animal Collective song my little ears had the pleasure of hearing. Sometimes you just need to go back to your roots.