Switching things up this week from my usual selections. Poliça is an electro-pop group from Minneapolis who are great at blending drums, bass, and yes Auto Tune. What I love best about this record is how crisp the sound is while still maintaining a sense of dreaminess. The tracks oscillate between heaviness and softness and often times some hard hitting lyrics.

Vocalist Channy Leaneagh explores themes of break-ups, feminism, and death and I like how the darkness of some of the lyrics isn't overbearing and obvious due to the instrumentation and how the sounds seamlessly blend together. I think all of these elements put together are what makes the record as cohesive as it is.

So Leave, Tiff, and I Need $ are my favorite tracks off the album. I have a feeling this might be a controversial choice here but I'm super curious how you all feel about it.

6:55 PM

When you think of avant-garde jazz, or at least when I think of avant-garde jazz, I think of the loud, dissonance, and chaotic music of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane's later years. And while Alice certainly had music within that realm, Journey in Satchidananda is the exception. After her late husband's death, Alice converted to Hinduism and went a musical path that set her music apart from all the avant-garde jazz being released throughout the 60s and 70s.

Combining elements from third stream jazz, hindustani classical music, and post bop, Alice created a beautiful and spiritual masterpiece. With help from fellow spiritual jazz pioneer and saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, who is the main soloist throughout the album, Alice went on to create an album that really makes you feel like you are being taken on a musical journey.

If you are able to, dim the lights, light some incense, and just relax and listen to the beautiful music on this album. Alice went on to create some of the most amazing free jazz, fusion jazz, and new age jazz until her passing in 2007, but in my opinion, Journey in Satchidananda stands as the defining album of the spiritual jazz movement.

11:23 AM

Cibo Matto - Viva! La Woman (1996)

If you take hip-hop, rock and roll, and Yé-yé (60s French pop), blend it together and serve it fresh, what would it taste-- er, sound like? The answer is the delicious smoothie known as Shibuya-Kei, a genre that lends its name to the Shibuya ward: Tokyo's main shopping district. The music of the genre perfectly captures the cultural richness, hip fashion styles, and attractive nightlife of this area.

I have wanted to share a Shibuya-Kei album here for a while, and I think Viva! La Woman is a good fit, as its one of the most popular albums to come out of the genre, at least in the U.S. Band members Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori conceived this album while living in Greenwich Village. In the liner notes, Hatori is credited for "singing, howling, moaning, sighing, thigh tapping" and Honda for "programming, keyboards, beach guitar, coughs". Most of the song titles and much of the lyrical content on this album are centered around food. The band name itself, "Cibo Matto" is Italian for "crazy food". This album opened up a whole other layer of satisfaction and appreciation from me when I read the lyrics (it's kind of hard to understand their broken english sometimes) so I would recommend doing that, but it's not necessarily vital to the enjoyment of this album.

Cibo Matto would go on to release two more albums, inducting Sean Lennon as a member for their 1999 album, and going on hiatus for a decade before reuniting and releasing their final LP to date in 2011. Out of the three, I think Viva! La Woman is my favorite, and I hope you all enjoy it as well.

7:43 AM

Nostalgia is a funny thing.  For me it seems to come around more as the weather warms up in the Northeast.  While for the past six or seven years I haven't been there to experience it, I remember the feeling quite well.  Spring is a liberation after the hell that is four or five months of winter.  And then summer in New England is an extension of that liberation; to me, there's no better feeling than walking, hiking, or just being outside on a beautiful New England summer day.

So with that being said, I'm going to go with an album that carries a lot of nostalgic weight for me.  I remember specifically listening to this album a lot in the warmer months, and it was one of those albums I remember getting into around the same time I was getting my driver's license and tearing up the mean streets of Newton, MA.

Breakfast with Girls by Self is, in my eyes, a near masterpiece, even though it's really not something I'd typically be that into.  Self is actually just multi-instrumentalist Matt Mahaffey, from Murfreesboro, TN.  Do you remember that Expedia.com jingle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHl4X6KiJLQ)?  Him and his brother wrote that.  But I digress.  Mahaffey plays all the instruments on most of the songs on the record, and he also produced it (with the help of some others, including, weirdly enough, Ken Andrews of Failure, a band in which Greg Edwards of AUTOLUX is a member.  Autolux have a new album out today, folks.  That's the point of this aside).

You'll find a wide range of genres and influences on the record.  There's electronica, rock, hip hop, funk, sampling, among other things.  Mahaffey has cited influences such as Prince and Pixies and you can hear both of that and a lot more.  He's also toured with and helped on some Beck records and, especially on some of the weirder songs on Breakfast with Girls, I hear a definite Beck influence.

I find the first half of the album to be stronger than the second half, but there are still great tracks towards the end, so give it a full shot.  I know some of you won't like this, but it's always a fun thing for me to revisit and am curious what y'all think.

My personal favorite songs:

The End of It All
Suzie Q Sailaway
Paint By Numbers
What Are You Thinking?
It All Comes Out in the Wash

9:49 AM