On a related note, as we approach 2010, we will once again pass through a threshold of science fiction movie disappointment (we haven’t even made it to Jupiter!) much the way we did when we passed 2001. The next scheduled Disappointment Threshold for me will be when we reach 2015, the year of Back to the Future II, and we won’t even have hoverboards to show for it.

1.) I have previously plumbed the depths of the Prelinger to make a video for Jeff Buckley’s “Be Your Husband.”

If I could buy one album from the last 10 years for everyone I know, that album would be Transmitter by Spiraling. I can’t say enough great things about this band. I have a hard time describing their sound: keyboard-led power pop with great songs, lyrics, arrangements, vocal harmonies, drum parts. Just look at my Last.fm page. They are the band I listen to most. The next runner-up is more than halfway down the scale.

Maybe it’s just because the band speaks to me as a musician and music nerd; maybe you won’t enjoy them as much as I do. They’re an independent rock band with great pop hooks but they aren’t anyone’s “buzz” band. Pitchfork probably wouldn’t like them. Prog fans may find them too poppy while pop fans may find them too proggy. But those are the bands I tend to like most.

I remember the first time I heard them. Jamie made me a CD-R of Transmitter and shortly afterward I bought a real copy. I pestered Chris King at Sticky Fingerz to give them gigs, and I got their CD to the Riverfest booking people, who gave them a choice slot opening for Live back in 2006. They’re actually a big reason I moved to New York – they were some of the first friends I had up here, and I’ve been delighted to have seen just about every show they’ve played up here in the last two years.

Buy a CD. If you don’t like it, I’ll buy it from you next time I see you.

• John Hodgman and former Daily Show head writer David Javerbaum at Barnes & Noble. Woefully under-attended due to crappy rainy freezing weather. There were like 10 of us there. I got my picture taken with them. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3A.
• Super-guitarist Steve Morse playing one of my all-time favorite tunes of his.
• Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid’s music and video presentation, Artificial Afrika. Part 1, Part 2

Fortunately I was on the end of my section, right by the gate, so it was easy for me to catch Amy, Alllie, Caroline and Matt. They took up a spot right next to me. My boss, Marya, also stopped by to say hi. The crowd eventually had to be turned back because there were no more chairs.

Our hour-long composition started around 7:45, slowly building, section by section, into the final climax. Toward the end, the sounds became so huge and otherworldly that people started standing up to receive it.

We finished to a long ovation. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.

UPDATE: The New York Times estimates 10,000 people showed up.

Ibanez PGM100RE and Radius 540R

The guitar at left is another $150 (with case!) Craigslist bargain. No more guitars for me for quite some time. But then I always say that…

There weren’t as many acts this year that I was face-slappingly excited to see, although the trip itself was thoroughly enjoyable simply because of the weather, the chance to bike around town, and to see a guitar show and record convention.

This is the first year I took videos, though:

St. Vincent
Nellie McKay
Maps & Atlases
6th Street on Thursday

Sadly I neglected to bring my camera’s battery charger, so my documentary efforts were cut short by Friday evening. D’oh! Still, I managed to get in a few nice pics of Andrew Bird, Ben Harper, Gomez, American Princes, and a bunch of St. Vincent, my new crush.

All this in addition to my usual batches of old signs, peculiarities, sundries and whatnot.

Spindrift
The West

If you’ve been sitting in your apartment dropping acid and watching Sergio Leone movies and wondering why there isn’t a rock band willing to be your theme music, wonder no more, for Spindrift is rolling across the badlands like Randall “Tex” Cobb in Raising Arizona, gunning for you. Spindrift haunts your dreams and fuels your nightmares like a sixgun-wielding chupacabra. One listen to “Speak to the Wind” or “Red Reflection” and you’ll be hopping the next old Chrysler to Mexico with a trunk full of guns, whiskey, mescaline and Mexican blackbird hookers. You might even fight a bandito or two. Or shoot a man in Fresno just to watch him die. These guys and girl are so cinematic they even have their own movie, The Legend of God’s Gun. It has two stars on Netflix, so you know it’s a quality flick. So mount up, muchachos. Tonight we ride.

www.spindriftwest.com

Pet Ghost Project
Cheer Up ~ It’s Raining

The downside of DIY is that so many recordings sound the same. Given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of guitars, you’ll end up with a lot of the same plodding, monochromatic excretions, not to mention a lot of flying poo. That said, if you wait long enough, you might eventually get “Celebrate Youth”* by Pet Ghost Project. It’s a five minute instrumental tour de force of everything that is great about a guy in his basement playing a lot of instruments, laying down Beach-Boys-on-a-budget harmonies and toying around with found sounds. But it’s just the overture; there’s songwriting smarts here as well. The all-too-brief “Violent Dreams” features a choir of fear and sadness. “Age of Automatics” has the requisite trading off between whispery verses and occasional bursts of histrionic glossolalia over a bed of buzzy electronics. And if walls of fuzz are your bag, “Mexican Apartment” has you covered.

* The Rick Springfield reference may or may not be intentional.

www.petghostproject.com

Build Buildings
Ceiling Lights from Street

Glitchy, ambient electronic is trickier than it sounds. It might even be easier to make than punk rock, but that also means that doing it really well becomes twice as hard. At worst, it’s bland wallpaper. At best, it sustains a meditative mood of clarity. It suspends the world around you and makes you pay attention. You become more alert to the details. Ben Tweel of Build Buildings knows how to facilitate this musical mindstate. Tracks like “Letter Codes” and “Numbers” aren’t just recycled Boards of Canada brain paint, they’re more like synesthesia – the perceptual mixing of color and sound. Like hypnosis, you awake from them feeling refreshed and perhaps wondering why the clock is an hour ahead. It’s easy to criticize the genre for being tomorrow’s Muzak, but if that comes to pass, then the world will be better off for it. Maybe we’ll all pay closer attention to ourselves.

www.buildbuildings.com

Alina Simone
Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware

Setting aside the novelty of a girl from suburban Massachusetts opting to sing in her native Russian, and being aware of the fact that her album consists of cover tunes from the late Russian punk-folk singer Yanka Dyagileva, we are left with just the voice. It’s strong, and the comparisons to Cat Power are easy to make. Haunting female voices are a dime a dozen these days, but there is something else here. Defiance. Strength in the face of tragedy. Simone is more Edith Piaf than Chan Marshall, and while most people won’t know enough Russian to understand a word she’s saying, the vibe tells us everything we need to know. Sure, she’s singing someone else’s songs in a language we don’t understand, but that just leaves her all the more naked before us.

www.alinasimone.com

Lieutenant Marscapone
Paragraph

Sometimes a band comes along with its own mood, a feel that pervades every track. Take Crowded House for example – even their sunny songs had a lingering sadness to them. Lieutenant Marscapone has a similar thing, and like Crowded House, they specialize in two-part vocal harmonies, Everly Brothers style. Their tunes also have an almost ambient quality. Even when they’re amped up and fuzzed out, they maintain a constant, almost uncomfortable, melancholy. It’s like they know nothing good is going to come of this. This isn’t to say that they’re mopey, indie rock Eeyores, though. It’s some other flavor I can’t put my finger on. Mastering this level of maddening subtlety is certain to frustrate music writers, but don’t let that stop you from checking out cuts like “Lytic Cycle” and “Immobile,” two tracks that, like the cheese for which they are named, may require some time before the cream makes itself apparent.

www.myspace.com/ltmarscapone

Build
Build

You heard it here first: the Next Big Thing in indie rock is chamber music! For far too long, violinists and cellists have been confined to the texture corner of rock bands, or the gimmicky cover acts. Rarely does The Man ever let them actually compose songs with any compositional depth, because when they do, they get lumped into the bins where only the adults shop. Perhaps now is finally the time, since rock music as a cultural force is either dead or exceedingly smelly. Maybe there can be a day when the collective listening palettes of the nation’s young adults can become as diverse as they think they are. Perhaps someday we, as a country, will get over lyrics and timbre and start listening to notes and actual, you know, music. Until then, we have brave souls like Build, who can wrap peppy math-rock arrangements like “Magnet” together with ambient minimalism like “Imagining Winter.” At least NPR will play them.

www.myspace.com/buildbuildbuild

Steinski – What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective
Steve Stein is hip-hop’s Missing Link between old school rap and today’s collage-sample producers like Prince Paul and DJ Shadow. I wrote about this phenomenal album in-depth here back in July.

Spiraling – Time Travel Made Easy
I have a hard time finding enough great things to say about my favorite band. The new album is more laboratory-crafted syth-pop-rock with a proggy edge. “Victory Kiss” is the greatest radio single you’ll never hear. “Cold Open” is the best album intro (and title for an album intro) I’ve heard in a long time. And “The Future” is one of those songs I wish I’d written about how disappointing it is that we’re almost to 2010 and we haven’t made any headway into the life promised us by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Jetsons, the 1964 World’s Fair, or hell, even Back to the Future II[1].

Panic at the Disco - Pretty. Odd.
I know the young teenagers like this band a lot, but I don’t hold it against Panic. I still haven’t heard their first record, but this album shines like a thousand Christmas trees. Clearly they wanted to make a grandiose Sgt. Pepper statement with it. It may be the best sophomore record I’ve heard by any band since Jellyfish’s Spilt Milk.

Sonny Landreth – From the Reach
The world’s greatest slide guitarist goes the star-studded route, with help from Eric Clapton, Eric Johnson, Robben Ford, Vince Gill, Dr. John, and Mark Knopfler. I’ve been dying to see what Sonny and Eric Johnson might do on record, and “The Milky Way Home” does not disappoint.

Other fine releases from 2008: Take Shelter by Boondogs, Play by Brad Paisley, An Invitation by Inara George with Van Dyke Parks, and Other People by American Princes.

Pre-2008 music that I discovered for myself this year: Mew, Mika, Mulatu Astatké, Pelican, The Factory, The Nines, Henry Cow, Soft Machine, Hawkwind and Dada’s amazingly gorgeous final disc, How to Be Found. Honorable mention goes to the distinctly nonmusical but no less compelling Conet Project.

Albums I’m dying to hear in 2009: the new records from The Mercury Program, David Mead, Owen, and The Bird and the Bee.

1.) Although I have to say I’m impressed that my mom’s TV does display her caller ID so we’ll know not to pick up when Flea calls.

Villa Vina
Tin Veil
The Secret Life of Sofia
Super 400

And I’ve got no problem at all with music that’s soft, pretty—even wimpy. I’m a middle-aged family man. I have nothing invested anymore in being thought of as a badass.

This may be the very reason why my musical tastes are all over the map: I have nothing invested in being thought of as anything other than someone whose tastes are all over the map.

While I’d like to admit that I’ve never much cared for what people think about the music that I like, somewhere in college, as I was transitioning out of metal and guitar wizardry[1], I think I subconsciously was guided by the desire to be known as someone whose music collection had no borders, someone to whom nothing was musically off limits. Working at a college radio station, I saw a lot of people putting limits on what they could or should listen to or not. Indie/college rock demands that you not listen to a lot of things: 80’s rock isn’t cool, jazz fusion isn’t cool, mainstream pop isn’t cool, thrash metal isn’t cool[2]. I certainly wanted no part of that hierarchy of badassery. If loving Huey Lewis and the News and Megadeth is wrong, I didn’t want to be right. And I still don’t.

By the way, I cannot recommend more highly that you go back and read each and every weekly Popless entry to learn about a lot of music you’ve probably never had the time or inclination to listen to – here is the first installment of Popless. And here is the index of all the articles.

1.) Or more specifically, “being thought of as someone who was a guitar badass.”
2.) Except Slayer, because there’s a certain hipster credibility to Slayer, because Slayer is the scariest band most indie rockers have ever heard.