Todd Goldstein spent the last few years playing guitar in the Brooklyn indie-pop band, Harlem Shakes. To those who were listening closely, though, Goldstein has always also been ARMS, a persona he’s been crafting since 2004. As ARMS, Todd takes up a decidedly slower, sweeter, sloppier endeavor, working alone and singing in a sad, idiosyncratic baritone. ARMS’ debut full-length, Kids Aflame is a labor of love by an artist with an ear for the beauty in noise, the primacy of melody, and the timelessness of melancholy pop music.
Thom Yorke / All For The Best
The very early ’90s Nickelodeon live-action ‘kids’ show, Pete & Pete, more or less defined (and, to be honest, still defines) my early sense of the funny, beautiful, strange qualities of youth. The theme song still gets me a little misty — it’s called Hey Sandy, by a band called Polaris. That band’s lead songwriter, Mark Mulcahy, was recently the subject of a pretty star-studded tribute album (it’s got The National, Michael Stipe, Thom Yorke, and others) in the wake of his wife’s tragic death. Thom Yorke’s cover of Mulcahy’s song, All for the Best, sounds like the his own solo stuff — minimal electronic beats, scary-sounding samples, a buzzy electric guitar that plops in out of nowhere — but is a little sadder than anything he could have written on his own. It suits him.
Uninhabitable Mansions / Do You Have A Strategy?
I used to copy edit at a magazine in New York, and in the process, I met the guitarist of this band, Uninhabitable Mansions. After years of hearing about this unassuming guy’s band, I finally got to hear their new record, Nature Is a Taker, and damn, this is some pitch-perfect indie pop. My hat goes off to them big time. The band has a few members of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Au Revoir Simone, and I’m sure comparisons will be made by lazy writers and bloggers — the charmingly unsteady vocals, the running-down-a-big-hill melodies and energy and all that — but really, this stuff is its own beast. What great, timeless pop songs. Geez. I’ve listened to this one, Do You Have a Strategy?, at least fifteen times this week.
Young Offenders / Life Without Buildings
I don’t know much about this band except that they broke up and that they’re clearly British. Never heard anything quite like it, though. I’d throw them in the Fall, Hold Steady, Wilderness school of batshit speak-singing vocalists, except that this band sounds weirdly like a girl singer from a dream-pop band from the ‘90s got really angry, drank a lot of coffee, and started spewing words too fast for her band to keep up. Compelling stuff.
Xiu Xiu / Under Pressure
This is hands down, my favorite cover in recent years. What a weird, canny combination – Xiu Xiu and Queen. It’s the kind of thing that seems so left-field that it almost swings back around and becomes mind-crushingly obvious again. Anyway, Jamie Stewart over-emotes the shit out of the vocals, a free-jazzy saxophone skronks around in the background, and Michael Gira from Swans pops in and deadpans the whole ‘turned away from it all like a blind man’ bridge like he forgot he was singing one of the biggest, best anthems ever. It’s especially worth it for Jamie’s explosive ‘what can’t we give love one more chance?’ bit. He sounds like he’s getting stabbed.
Matthew Dear / Don and Sherri
I don’t talk about it much, but good electronic dance music — techno, house, dubstep, whatever — is one of my purest pleasures. Matthew Dear’s near-perfect record, Asa Breed, straddles all of my favorite various genre-worlds awesomely. It’s pop music with the pacing and production of techno, but more in debt to the actual dance-music world than, say, Hot Chip or Cut Copy. This guy’s tracks are incredibly well considered, detailed things, great on headphones — all the little richocheting synthy pings in the chorus couldn’t fit together any better, really. And they also happen to be total bangers that work great at high volume in a club. Bless this stylish bastard.
Helvetia / Old, New Bicycle
Helvetia is one of those bands who seem to exist in a context-less musical universe — even having done my homework on the band (they used to be in a slowcore group called Duster, apparently), I still think of their album, The Acrobats, as this transmission from another world. The song Old, New Bicycle is a rock song with guitars, technically, but it’s got this distinctly dusty lo-fi recording quality that I love, and odd use of the recording medium as an instrument (octavized vocals, snippets of guitars, looped drums) that give it a hazy, unreal mood that sounds like a particularly hot, druggy summer. It’s a great tune, too — really well written and catchy.
James Blackshaw / Cross
I have a huge music-crush on James Blackshaw. He’s a young guy, and a total virtuoso at the 12-string acoustic guitar — but not in the flashy, technique driven guitar virtuoso way. His compositions are long, fluid, sad-ass ragas with more than a bit of twentieth century classical composition technique holding it together. It’s just breathtaking, mind-altering beauty and I can’t take my ears off it. All of James’ records are great, but his most recent, The Glass Bead Game, might be my favorite. The first track, Cross, brings in droney strings and ping-pong-y women’s voices (Dirty Projectors-style) behind those cascades of chiming strings. It takes an unbelievable amount of patience and restraint to make music like this heartbreaking, and I salute the shit out of James for it.
Yo La Tengo / Last Days Of Disco
One of my favorite songs of all time from one of my favorite albums of all time. There’s never a wrong time to listen to Yo La Tengo, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a simple, sincere guy-meets-girl-and-they-both-like-music story, (’and the song said let’s be happy/I was happy/it never made me happy before’). It’s got brushed drums, tons of atmosphere, distant feedback, great slide guitars, perfectly pitched lyrics. It’s almost seven minutes long, but I wish it would last all day, sometimes.
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