Remember when I said I probably wouldn't use mixtape.me regularly? Apparently, I lied. Or rather, I spoke without yet having the Truth. And the Truth is that there really aren't any better tools for creating full mixes, which I now plan to do on a regular basis. But then again, that could be a lie, too. You just never know.

But let's live the lie for a little while. I'm hoping to do a weekly mix to re-find that fun of building and planning mixes. Some of them will be themed, like the amusement park, but without the disgusting blue water from the flume ride that made you stick to the car seats on the way home, and some of them--like today's--will just be the best of what I've listened to for the month.

So plug in the headphones or crank up the Airfoil and listen on in to my favorites for March:



Dan Deacon, "Build Voice"
As uncreatively titled as most of the songs on Bromst are, they're still fantastic slices of true musical craft, meticulously arranged with no loss of thrill. Note: give this one about a minute to start up.

Phoenix, "1901"
The same type of note-perfect craft that Dan Deacon has, with more of an eye on the pop. In other words, a lot more fun.

Estelle feat Kanye West, "American Boy"
A gem from last calendar year, this got stuck in my head for a full day on my vacation a couple of weeks ago. You have to give the head what it wants. It knows things about you.

Beck, "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat"
Now THIS...is how you do a Dylan cover: by not trying to sound like Dylan. A raver.

Mclusky, "To Hell With Good Intentions"
In short order, this has become the standard for volume music to me. The muted strings at the breaks is the sound of adrenaline.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, "We Call Upon The Author"
Next to Friendly Fires, Dig, Lazarus Dig is the album I most need a 2008 late pass for. This album absolutely defines badass.

P.O.S., "Goodbye"
P.O.S.'s "Never Better" has been one of my favorite listens of the last few weeks. His lyrics may force the politics a little too much, but the hooks are strong enough to not worry to much about that.

U2, "No Line On The Horizon"
Bono actually sounds old on this track, but for some reason, that's a comfort for me. Maybe it's because this song is the most genuine he's sounded in years. Meanwhile, Larry Mullen plays the same beat he's been phoning in since 1991. Which is what it is.

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, "I Am Goodbye"
Beware isn't hitting my swoon buttons like Lie Down In The Light did (yet), but it's the same high quality that I think Will Oldham isn't capable of not creating.

Vetiver, "More Of This"
Endlessly lovely, leading to endless listens.

Camera Obscura, "My Maudlin Career"
I'm almost a little nervous to read the lyrics to this song. If the true meaning of this song is as melancholy as I think it is...I just don't want to know.

I love the stories of the people in loud bands who give up a career in volume for an acoustic guitar and careful arrangements. It usually takes a little time for them to make the transition, but the comfort of the quiet usually comes. It seems to be a relatively recent trend and it's a welcome one: It's a rejection of the rock ideal that once you stop wanting to rock really hard, you need to hang up the guitars. But the spirit of punk wasn't volume: it was doing just what you want and what you feel is right.

Vetiver, "More Of This" (2009)

get Tight Knit

Vetiver's first record was pleasant enough, but it made so little of an impression on me that I didn't even bother checking out their second. My close friend and longtime musical guide Christian encouraged me to check out their new one, and I followed the recommendation to a lovely reward. "More Of This" is a particular joy: the backing vocals folding over on the lead vocals with a thick stew of guitars and a little no-frills pepper of drums. It's breezy but never weak; just a perfect little song that immediately cheers and makes the wait for those beautiful spring days seem even longer.

Last Christmas, I was talking over the songs in the Pitchfork 500 book with my brother-in-law Michael. We went back to Michael's home recording studio and he played me Refused's "New Noise"--which I'd never heard before--out of his perfect studio speakers. The tight noise of the main riff of that song when it hit at 1:07 brought out the familiar feel of excitement that comes with volume.

Refused, "New Noise" (1998)

get the whole album

About halfway through the song, my eight-year-old nephew wandered back into studio and listened with us. It was a great sight: he seemed almost scared of this awesome noise, but the excitement was there, too. There was a look in his eyes that was familar: awe that music could sound so powerful. I don't know if this will be a defining moment for him or something he won't remember. His dad is a power pop enthusiast with a home studio, so this kid's been familiar with distorted guitars since the day he was born. But I swear that I saw that boyish instinct to loud music come out at that moment, visceral and pure.

There's that part of me that's always desperately wanted volume and excitement. The problem is that so few artists are capable of delivering the goods. Most metal is surprisingly uptight and compressed, the lyrics are pretentious and everything from the band names to the album covers hammer home DEATH BLACK ROTTING DECAY DEATH. Okay. We get it.

Even when you try to turn to reviews of metal, it leads you up the same dead ends. Every metal review uses the same adjectives, only swapping out band names. There's no real description of the music or what makes it stand out, just a bunch of violent adjectives that tell you nothing about what you're in for. It's pounding, slashing, thunderous, wrenching and murderous. In other words, it's metal.

Punk and hardcore are a little more thoughtful, but way too much of it is just spastic and sloppy and nothing more. Sometimes you get to the intersection where thought meets primal emotion, and there you find Fugazi or Refused, but too often it speeds away and you're left behind and figure maybe if no one's going to give you the loud stuff right, you may as well look for something else.

Which is why it's been so exciting to get songs like "New Noise" that I never paid attention to when they were first around because I had dismissed anything tagged "loud" as someone else's music. It's no surprise that it's in a list like the Pitchfork 500, where these songs are alongside indiepop and hip-hop as songs that are just plain great: genres need not apply.

Mclusky, "To Hell With Good Intentions" (2002)

get the whole album

This song is about as pure loud as it gets, and yet it's still all about the feel, that freeing feel of a shower of volume, of unrestrained thrill. It's joking around with friends and screaming to feel alive, not to pretentiously welcome death. It has a small but sharp hook--sing it!--but it's not a pop hook; it's a hook that's there only because it feels good and right. It's perfect.

Watched Velvet Goldmine last night. It takes place in the early '70s, just as the glam-rock movement is warming up in the UK, and follows the lives of Brian Slade (a Bowie resemblance) and Kurt Wilde (an Iggy Pop resemblance) as they mold the new genre. The film itself is more of a musical more than anything...borrowing or mimicking songs from Bowie, Eno, Iggy, and others throughout, but is distinctly original in its 'rags to riches' rock tale delivery. Think Citizen Kane meets Boogie Nights, set to music...if that's possible. Aside from a few over dramatic performances from a few axillary roles in the film, I think its one of the better music movies I've seen in awhile.

Non spoiler, a seminal scene in the movie involves the lead actors performing Brian Eno's 'Baby's On Fire' at a concert while the director takes the viewer through a montage highlighting the sex and drug revolution so closely related to the Glam movement. Also, if you ever wanted to see Christian Bale in drag, this is your movie.

Brian Eno, 'Baby's On Fire' (1974)
download mp3

This morning, one of my friends on Facebook offered up bait that was too juicy to resist. She said that she didn't like the Decemberists, and called on her friends to defend them. And if it isn't clear yet after reading any more than one of my posts, I love defending the music I love.

I rambled on a little bit about how they're hit or miss, but I still felt like it wasn't enough to just describe it. I needed a way to give her (and the other people on the comment thread) a few songs--just enough so they would listen and hear my points. Links to YouTube videos would be restricted and laborious to type in. Muxtape is dead.

Then I remembered a feature I had read about called mixtape.me, and it worked perfectly.



Mixtape.me runs off of the same Seeqpod search that blip.fm and others use, so as long as someone's posted it somewhere on the web, but you can also use any mp3s you've posted anywhere (related post: my guide to hosting mp3s for free).

THE GOOD: While it doesn't replace the late, great Muxtape, it's a definite step up from the other online mix options I've seen. It pulls in lyrics and info on each song from last.fm and LyricsWiki and is easy to create mixtapes really easily and quickly. Dragging and dropping are a snap, as are embedding and linking.

THE BAD: White and gray text on a black background? Come on. What we all loved about Muxtape was it's simplicity. While I might use mixtape.me for some embedding work, the horribly ugly look of it is going to leave it as a tool of occasional convenience rather than something that I'll look to often.

THE SUGGESTED: Besides a cleaner (or at least more customizable) look, it would be nice to have better social control. I don't have any friends yet (I'm areseven if you want to be my first and give this a try), so I guess I can't address the social aspects, but the ability of to find random mixes or recommended music is one of the things that could make this more useful. There's a "Popular songs" option, but it's hard to believe that those are the most popular songs.

Finally, Last.fm support would be great, having full information and comments on the embedded player would be nice, and the ability to put my own Amazon associate ID into the embedded player would be incredible, though a perfectly understandable long shot.

In all the conversations around albums vs. single songs, there's rarely mention of a lost art: the standalone strong single or compilation track. The Beatles were the masters, of course, but Belle & Sebastian did it as well as anyone for a while: treating a non-album track as its own separate work, rather than a track pulled from it's album's context or a throwaway leftover.

The Decemberists, "Sleepless" (2009)

buy the Dark Was The Night compilation for a good cause

The Decemberists are one of the few artists around now (actually, the only one I can think of at the moment) whose non-album tracks are worth just as much attention as their full albums. Their single series last year was full of classic-sounding Decemberists stuff, and now they've put out the standout track on a standout compilation.

I can't be the only one whose reminded of "The Engine Driver" on hearing "Sleepless", but that's a good thing. A damn good thing. Like that song from Picaresque, it's a fairly drab verse with a glorious chorus and a maudlin hook that can make the words "drooping" and "plodding" turn into great compliments.

I can't really say I'm too looking forward to Hazards of Love, since all descriptions of it seem required to use phrases like "prog" and "rock opera" and reference bands like Heart and ELP. But if there's anything on that record as beautiful as this, it'll be worth every cent.

A common thread in record reviews is how an artist is staying the same, not trying anything sonically different. Most of the time, this is less bad than boring. There's plenty of times where you hear exactly the same sound out of the same artist and it makes you shrug and go back to the album it sounded like.

But there's also those times when it's a comfort and a thrill that a band has stuck with a sound you loved so much, like how, every now and then, there's a movie whose pat happy ending you're glad to see, just because it feels right.

Phoenix, "1901" (2009)

get the mp3 for free

Phoenix's third album It's Never Been Like That was one of the best full albums of 2006, one of those albums that never got old. From the sounds of this first single from their upcoming new album, they haven't taken a single new step in a new direction and that...is perfectly okay with me. As long as they keep turning out tracks that have this level of energy and hooks, they're welcome to keep jogging in place.

Camera Obscura, "My Maudlin Career" (2009)

get the mp3 for free

Not staying quite as static as Phoenix, Camera Obscura seems to have found reverb and atmospherics. But Tracyanne Campbell still has her go-to melodies that vary very little from the past tracks. And that...is perfectly okay with me. Camera Obscura has that magical ability to constantly turn in irresistible moments. Even when you can pick at it, you can't deny it, and the fact that they've barely strayed from their past makes me that much more excited for the new record.

It took a good friend from Chicago to get me into KiD CuDi, possibly the state of Ohio's fastest rising Star. I'm sure anyone who has been to a mildly 'active' bar in the last few months has heard the single 'Day N Nite' (and it's many remixes). CuDi joins DC's Wale as a member of Kayne's new class of upcoming artists coming up the line. This track is off his mixtape...an album is due out this year on Kayne's label.

KiD CuDi, 'CuDi Get' (2008)
download mp3

It took me a while to be sold on rap in the 80's. The whitebread neighborhood that I grew up in Houston wasn't exactly the most fertile environment for new sounds of any kind, and I stubbornly resisted it, even while a part of me loved "The Show" and "Going Back To Cali". It wasn't until Paul's Boutique, Nation of Millions and 3 Feet High and Rising and the classic sounds of the early '90's that I really learned to love it, and I refined my appreciated for rapidfire raps and creative backing tracks.

In the last few months, I've revisited a lot of older music, thanks largely to the Pitchfork 500, and I've realized that as stubborn as I was being back then, I also was listening to my tastes. I like my rap like I like all my music: creative and clever, meticulously thought out as well as off the hook. I can enjoy the early days and the party songs and the hardcore stuff, but what I love, what really connects with me is creativity. Then and now.

Purexed - P.O.S. (2009)

The standard line on P.O.S. is how his early love of punk fused into his later discovery of rap, but it actually took me a few listens to really hear the punk influence. It mostly just sounded like smart music that was as concerned with getting all the pieces in the right place as it was wanting to smash all the pieces to bits.

I guess you really can hear the punk come out in the chorus of this song, with the hard hitting snare beats that's a lot more spazzy teen than tight marching-band drummer, but it doesn't matter with a hook as big and irresistable as the first couple of lines to the chorus and the smarts of pairing "face" with "bassline". It just sounds less like someone who's consciously melding two genres of music and just using what he knows to make something that works. Which is where all great music comes from.

A few months ago I went through a pretty unhealthy David Lynch phase...watched close to everything he has filmed (including all of Twin Peaks...and the bullshit followup movie, which led to some interesting social/seasonal quirks). Regardless, I discovered one of Lynch's greatest films, and my favorite, Blue Velvet, which features one of the most brilliant uses of music in film I have ever experienced. Without giving away the movie, the song 'In Dreams' by Roy Orbison acts as both background and foreground to the film. The most memorable moments in this surrealist thriller involve this beautiful Orbison ballad. The song was originally released in the 1963, but he rerecorded it (the following version) for Blue Velvet.

This is the one song i look for first every time i encounter a jukebox.

Roy Orbison, 'In Dreams' (1985)
download mp3

(Nutshell: Put audio players when you post songs on a site, instead of just links to download mp3s.)

Let me just get this out of the way: it really irritates me when music sites don't offer embedded audio, when they just put in a link to the mp3 and then figure that you're only going to download it. But I don't want to download songs unless I know I want them in my library, so give me an option to hit a play button, listen once, and decide whether or not I want to add it to my library.

Fortunately, there's lots of easy options to do it. If you're on a Wordpress blog, it's incredibly easy. But if your site isn't on Wordpress, you can still add the option to turn your site into an ineractive listening booth. Or something.

Our option: The Naive Harmonies GroinGrabbingFacePeeler™ Audio Player
Okay, okay...it's not trademarked. And no, we didn't develop it or do anything else besides download it and then shove it in (sideways*). And it doesn't grab your groin unless you get it drunk first. But it's the option we've gone with: a nice, clean, customizable, single-song player.

It begins with this player. The trick is that the actual player itself and the files need to be hosted, but you can take care of the hosting for free with one of these options, and the hosting of the player and the javascript can be done with those as well.

The downfall, if you haven't guessed, is that it requires a little more technical knowledge and patience. We have to copy the code from a shared Google doc every time we embed it. But the upside is that you get a clean and highly recognizable player for your site.

But if you're into easy...

The easier alternative: Yahoo's Music player
I probably should have listed this one first, because it's about the easiest way to have embeddable audio on your site. All you have to do is put in a link to an mp3, and that just triggers the player. Plus, it will allow you to queue them, turning your site into a kind of radio station. Full details and instructions are available on Yahoo's site. It's a piece of cake.

I guess that the only arguments against it would be that it's a little confusing, and from my perspective, it doesn't really call out the mp3 like the inline audio player does. Those are minor concerns, though.

To answer your next question: yeah, I'm not sure why we're not using it here. Limo, let's schedule a meeting. Bring scotch.

The free and legal option: Lala.com
If you don't want to deal with the worries of copyright infringement, Lala.com is a fantastic service. You can embed the vast majority of the content on their site, as songs, entire albums or playlists of your creation, and most of it is the entire song. The catch is that a listener can only listen to the full song once, and then they can only get 30-second sound samples, but if you're embedding a song in a blog, the chances are that people will only need/want to listen to it once anyway.

The downside of this service is that you're going to be limited in what songs you can share. Obviously, you could only embed songs that have already been released, and any live versions or obscure stuff isn't going to be on there. But Lala is as close as we've come to the YouTube of music. It's much easier to use than Imeem (which I hate) and has a very impressive catalog.

I want to write something more on Lala.com, because I think that this site represents the future of internet audio. It's still buggy and getting on its feet, but even for something that's relatively new, it's an impressive site. Highly recommended.

Finally...
If there's another good option that I've missed, let me know what it is in the comments. And I've just given a rundown of the options here, without giving detailed instructions or tips on implementing them, but if you have any questions, ask away in the comments and I'll tap 'em out.

* Pulp reference? Anyone? Anyone? (crickets)