I was going to upload my December and January playlists together but I haven’t written January yet s

I was going to upload my December and January playlists together but I haven’t written January yet so here’s December. A good mix, but a bit shorter than usual because Decembers are busy. Maybe that’s a good thing! Anyway.I Loves You Porgy - Nina Simone: There’s something very interesting about both Scott Joplin in 1911 and George Gershwin in 1935 both trying to remake the most european artform of opera in an american mould by drawing on and incorporating the african american musical tradition. From two very different experiences, an actual african american and a jewish american watching from the outside, you get two very different works. There’s lot of interesting reading on the wiki article about the depictions in Porgy And Bess, controversial at the time for requiring a majority black cast but then controversial again much later for its racial sterotypes and old fashioned attitude. There’s also some good stuff about South African theatre companies trying to put on all-white productions during apartheid which is just plain funny. Anyway all this to say this version feels like a reclamation of sorts, it’s just so plainly beautiful and perfectly performed. As someone in the youtube comments said “This song is about the complete lack of power a young woman has over her life.” and it really comes out in all of Nina Simone’s performances. I first heard this version on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=ewNw78TpRPk and it’s a minor thing but there’s something to be said for just how incredible of a piano player she was on top of everything else.Silent Circle - Acid King: If you read my November playlist you saw that I found this band via the wiki article for Ricky Kasso who the new Aesop Rock + Tobacco song was about. It’s fucking great. Female vocals really adds a whole dimension to stoner metal - a huge haunted presence over the muddy water.Emulsion - Anatole: Normally the whole ‘classically trained’ electronic musician thing always ends up sounding like Radiolab, but I actually really like this. It’s fully formed and borrows equally from both sides without sounding like it’s from 1998 like these things often do. I don’t like that it’s called Emulsion though. Very Radiolab name. Very Bandcamp bedroom project with Atlas in the title.Come For Me - Sunflower Bean: Sunflower Bean have always looked and sounded like a Portlandia sketch but they traded it all in for for rockin out on their new EP King Of The Dudes and I couldn’t be happier because it’s absolutely great. This song reminds me a lot of I Can Hardly Make You Mine by Cults which is one of my favourite songs ever so great job Sunflower Bean!tt1pd - Autechre: Let me first apologise for putting another 20 minute long Autechre song in these playlists but let me also say this: it sounds good and if you let it be it’s an absolute journey.Klapp Klapp - Little Dragon: Little Dragon are one of the hardest bands to be a fan of I think. They just consistently don’t live up to their own potential. For every transcendentally amazing song that you just can’t stop listening to over and over like Ritual Union or Klapp Klapp they have a whole album that’s a complete snooze where nothing else is even slightly interesting. I don’t know how they do it. This song though, is absolutely amazing. The bassline, the vocal performance, the weird ringtone sounds at the end, the effects on ‘she said’ - just perfect!Maple Leaf Rag - Janice Scroggins: I was searching around spotify for different versions of Maple Leaf Rag (very cool guy) and found this one from a pianist named Janice Scroggins who plays it like I’ve never heard before. She even composed her own little intro as well. It’s a really beautiful relaxed and dynamic version of a piece that too often gets slammed out at full speed and crushed in the process.Christ’s Saints Of God Fantasy - John Fahey: The wiki article on John Fahey’s christmas album contains a very good introduction to the oddball that is John Fahey. “As Fahey recounts, “I was in the back of a record store in July and I saw all these cartons of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas albums. The clerk said it always sells out. So I got the idea to do a Christmas album that would sell every year.” The New Possibility has been one of Fahey’s best selling recordings, selling over 100,000 copies initially, and has been continually in print. Fahey’s original liner notes discuss the German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich’s reference to the birth of Jesus Christ as “The New Possibility”. Fahey notes the scholarly research on the secular and mythological/superstitious ideas connected with the “Christmas Story”. These liner notes were removed in later reissues. When asked why, Fahey said, “I just didn’t feel that way any more”. As a result of John Fahey’s competing desires to make money from a christmas album and have a big think about christian existentialism we get the 10 minute slice of heaven that is Christ’s Saints Of God Fantasy.Someway - Polica: I love the rhythms of this song so much. The drums plus the claps and the vocals matching it in the chorus are just so good, and the little fill before the chorus is great. Also this is tangential but I really love this other Polica song that they’ve never properly released and only seem to play live https://youtu.be/o98D8s9xhUk?t=921Shadow Waltz - Joe Pass: Joe Pass is untouchable. Delicate and freeflowing but completely unafraid to take an unexpected or angular direction at any point. He’s just incredible. The absolute shock at the end of this song when you heard the audience and realise that was just a raw live take, amazing.Only One - Kanye West: This song makes me cry. It’s just so sad and beautiful, it’s Kanye speaking as his mother about him and as himself about his daughter. On Genius is says “At a show in Uncasville, CT in 2014, Kanye expressed his sadness over the fact that his daughter and mother were never able to meet, “There’s only one thing I wish I could change out of everything that’s ever happened. I wish that my mother could’ve met my daughter.” I think this song makes a good companion to FML, it’s Kanye at his rawest completely owning up to his own worst impulses and fears and trying to be the best he can. It makes every dumb thing he does all the more heartbreaking because he’s already written like three songs about how he knew he was going to do it and let everyone down.Dead Men Tell No Tales - The Receiving End Of Sirens: The very best thing about 2005 emo is the lyrics. The feeling of absolute certainty that this is genius when in reality it’s kind of just a string of unconnected wordplay on nautical themes. It’s great. Anyway if you’re dumb like me this song rocks and the big chorus where he goes abandon SHIIP and it all gets loud? damn that slaps. The sort of layered overlapping vocals like they have in the chorus is something I dearly miss, it’s just so much fun and nobody does it anymore. I can count like five of the same guy here at the same time, that rocks.The New Stone Age - Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark: This is the sort of song I’ve carried with me always since I first heard it a few years ago. Screaming about the new stone age and “Oh my god what have we done this time” is very much a mood, and moreso because this extremely angular chaotic song opens an album that sounds nothing like it and is mostly quite pleasant downtempo synthpop. It feels like someone screaming just before the lights go down at a movie.Do The Icepick - Primitive Calculators: According to wikipedia Primitive Calculators were 'described by British critic Everett True as sounding like “a very aggressive Suicide” which feels apt whether he’s referring to the band or the act.Discow - Handbraekes: A friend of mine has a theory that the number one way to make a song good is to make the central lyric just the word 'disco’. Justice learned this in their remix of Skitzo Dancer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02pztBhVWeU and Handbraekes have proved it again here. Disco disco disco.Oodles O’ Noodles Babies - Meek Mill: I am completely blown away by this song every time I hear it. It’s so viscerally real and heartbreaking. It lays everything out in such a straightforward way that it becomes shocking. This and Violence by Parquet Courts were both some of my favourite songs of the year and I was thinking the other day about the way they parallel each other, as essentially both sides of the same story of american violence. “Allow me to ponder the role I play in this pornographic spectacle of black death”/“Killed my lil’ cousin, I’m like, "Damn it, man” had to see the footage on a camera, man”, “What is an up and coming neighbourhood and where is it coming from?”/ “they called it the projects, they put us in projects, what they gon’ do with us?”, “I’m on my mom’s steps, it’s like a bomb threat, the violence pursuing us”/“A promise, a pact that the world never kept, violence is daily life”John Taylor’s Month Away - King Creosote & John Hopkins: I am grateful every day that I have lived both sides of this song and am no longer on the bad side but instead relaxing in a park and thinking about how I’d much rather be me.Catamaran - Bear Vs. Shark: I love how this song feels like someone barged in almost immediately and started singing a different song and the rest of the band is just trying to keep up with them for the rest of it. “got your bones spread it out on the dance floor chomping-” [some guy none of them have ever seen before barges into the studio and pushes the singer to the ground] “BITS ON YOUR WAY TO THE SUPERMARKET”Trauma - Meek Mill: This Meek Mill album would be so good if it was about half as long, it kind of vacillates between incredible good introspective songs like this and Oodles O Noodles Babies and kind of boring party songs, which is fine it’s not done well enough to have both wildly different moods on the same album. I made a playlist where it’s just the serious songs and I’ve been listening to it a lot, an album of the year contender in my opinion. A thing I really like about this is how much ever single thing he’s saying is from his experience. The closest he gets to a dramatic embellishment on this is when he says “my celly mom just died he wanna use my collect” then in the Genius annotations says “It wasn’t really actually my celly, a guy I was on the block with was like, “Yo, Can I use your phone call? My mom just passed away”. I let him use a 3 way, call his family, do what he did, yeah”Let England Shake - PJ Harvey: I’ve never gotten into PJ Harvey, I’ve never really tried so I guess I’ve got that in my future. I did, however, give this album a courtesy listen when it won the mercury prize in 2011 and not think much of it. Suddenly I woke up one day with this song that I’m sure I’ve only heard once stuck in my head and discover it’s very good. So there’s something to its longevity at least.Bird Of Feather - Cog: Been thinking about Cog a lot this past little while for completely unknown reasons. Basically they’re the Australian Tool and one of myriad bands that just completely aped Tools style. They have a lot of lyrics about Society and a music video where a guy is working in an Office and then has some kind of a breakdown about The Rat Race and goes Nuts. Basically they’re good as hell. The singer Flynn Gower has a whole subheading on his wiki article for Facial Hair, which reads in its entirety: “Amongst his musical pursuits, Gower is known for his intriguing facial hair. In a style that evokes images of a catfish, Gower, for the past decade has sported an almost entirely shaved moustache, besides the edges, which are quite lengthy.[original research?]Hellhound On My Trail - Fleetwood Mac: I love this song so much purely for what I assume is a mistake. The line “If today was christmas day, then tomorrow would be christmas eve” has fascinated me for so long. Some man eternally pursued by the dogs of hell walking backwards through the calendar a day at a time, from christmas to christmas eve to december 23rd before eventually waking up the day before his own birth torn apart by hellhounds.Introitus / Inroit Repice In Me - Gregorian Chant: Stereogum had a really good article a little while ago about how gregorian chant was a really big fad for a while in the 90s https://www.stereogum.com/1876765/per-chants-to-dream-how-evensong-almost-conquered-the-charts/franchises/weird-90s/ which is very funny to consider and I hope it happens again. I don’t particularly remember why but I guess for some reason I was listening to gregorian chant on new years eve, so that bodes well for 2019 I think.​ listen here -- source link

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