Songs for a Snowfall

We New Jerseyans and New Yorkers might get a foot of snow tomorrow, so what better time for a wintry playlist?  Let these excellent tunes accompany your shovelling, snowball fights, and/or (spiked?) hot chocolate drinking.  The snowy soundscapes presented here range sonically and emotionally, capturing the many paradoxes--stillness and movement, warmth and frigidity, renewal and death, love and despair, youth and experience--that winter embodies.  Enjoy, and stay warm!

1. Bon Iver - "Blood Bank." A song about falling in love in winter: And the snow started falling; we were stuck out in your car.  You were rubbing both my hands, chewing on a candy bar.

2. Bright Eyes - "Gold Mine Gutted." Beginning as a love story, this song ends by describing a lover's possibly fatal drug addiction: Only smoke came out our mouths on all those hooded-sweatshirt walks. ... All those white lines that sped us up; we hurry to our death.  Well, I lagged behind, so you got ahead.

3. Kanye West - "Street Lights." Whereas the other two of Kanye's "lights" songs ("All of the Lights," "Flashing Lights") are celebrations of his fame and success, "Street Lights" captures an isolated and despondent West, who turns a cab ride (in what feels to me like a snowy New York) into an existential journey: I know my destination, but I'm just not there.

4. LCD Soundsystem - "Someone Great." The song's cold, brooding, mechanical sounds epitomize not only LCD's album title, Sound of Silver, but also the numbness one feels after losing "someone great": There shouldn't be this ring of silence, but what are the options when someone great is gone?

5. Explosions in the Sky - "Snow and Lights." Moving from heavy snowstorms to light flurries back to a climactic blizzard, "Snow and Lights" lives up to evocative its title without saying a word.

6. Vampire Weekend - "Step."  (See the post below): They didn't know how to dress for the weather.  I can still see them there huddle on Astor: snow falling slow to the sound of the master.

7. Minus the Bear - "Hooray."  Describing a snowball fight and "warming on alcohol" in bars, "Hooray" celebrates youth--or acting youthfully--and the weather that brings out our joyful qualities: It's cold, and snow's actually on the ground of this no-snow town.  And instead of cars, streets [are] trafficking in sleds.  Men become boys again.

8. Crystal Castles (feat. Robert Smith) - "Not In Love."  Synths are ideal for capturing frigid sounds, but the sleety waves of synthesizers here are especially effective--and appropriate for Smith's unfeeling exclamation, "I'm not in love." 'Cause it's cold outside; when you coming home?  'Cause it's hot inside; isn't that enough?

9. Arcade Fire - "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)."  The imaginative opening lines from Arcade Fire's debut remain among the group's best poetry: And if the snow buries my neighborhood ... Climb out the chimney and meet me in the middle of the town.  And since there's no one else around, we let our hair grown long and forget all we used to know.  Then our skin gets thicker from living out in the snow.

10. The XX - "Shelter."  "Shelter" reminds me of watching snow fall from behind a pane of glass: the separation between coldness and warmth is thin.  This song's warm guitars and Croft's shaking, almost insecure voice shatter that barrier, allowing these conflicting feelings to coexist in an unsettling love song: I find shelter in this way: undercover, hideaway.

11. Bright Eyes - "Something Vague."  Conor Oberst epitomized so many of my adolescent winters that he gets to make two appearances here.  On what may be his angstiest, but also one of his finest, albums, a young Oberst quivers as he paints a sad portrait of an alcoholic: You see your breath in the air as you climb up the stairs to the coffin you call your apartment. And you sink in your chair, brushing snow from you hair, and drink the cold away.  And you're not really sure what you're doing this for, but you need something to fill up the days.

12. The Good Life - "A Golden Exit." The final song from The Good Life's Novena on a Nocturn represents both bitter ends (of relationships, even of life) and cathartic renewals: I can feel the chill in the air between us.  I can feel a winter coming; we're frozen in our stares.  ... I woke up this morning to the silence of falling snow.  These graces of beauty have left me so cold.

Top Albums of 2012, 2-1 + Honorable Mentions

2. mewithoutYou - Ten Stories.  Anyone that's a fan knows the story: mewithoutYou began as a post-hardcore band with spoken- and shouted-vocals and heavy instrumentals but gradually became less heavy and more experimental with each album.  The band's last record, It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's All Right, completely deviated from the group's hardcore foundations for a more melodic, singalong aesthetic.  Moreover, whereas earlier albums focused on Weiss' personal struggles, Crazy! centers around fables concerning anthropromorphic animals and vegetables.  So when mewithoutYou announced that their fifth album would be released in 2012, it was anyone's guess where the guys would take their sound.

I don't know anything about truth, but I know falsehood when I see it, and it looks like this whole world you've made.

To my relief, the first song I heard was the thunderous "Fox's Dream of the Log Flume," which features one of Weiss's strongest deliveries ever, as he shouts his last-gasp vocals for two and a half minutes.  Weiss also leads the equally relentless instrumentals, as the rattling guitars, thumping drums, and grooving bass follow his volatile vocals up and down the windy track.  The song is a part of a larger narrative about a circus train's crash in 19th century Montana, and here we listen to the conversation between the escaped Fox and Bear.  But this is not a simple allegory; it's a densely-packed discussion of truth, existence, God, love, and death.  We have brilliant one-liners like, "some with certainty insist 'no certainty exists,'" and there's even some comedy, as the bear recollects: "I asked her, 'do you ever have that recurring fantasy / where you push little kids from the tops of the rides?' She shook her head no and I said 'Oh, neither do I.'" But while culling Weiss's lyrics is often inspiring, it's not always illuminating to the song's grander message: the Fox had once "mistook signs for signified" (or mistook words for something real or concrete) and thereafter tried to find Truth separate from language ("tied my word-ropes in anchor bends").  But the Bear questions whether the Fox can certainly deny all certainty in language and directs some blame at the Fox for their aimless travels: as the Fox withdraws from the world's illusions of truth ("all the bearing points we thought we knew") they move "waywardly on . . . it's still dark on the deck of our boats / haphazardly blown, broken bows."  Between language and silence, certainty and doubt, the Bear announces: "I think it's pretty obvious that there's no God / and there's definitely a God."  Then, during the song's climax, the fox imagines their death in the album's boardwalk/carnival-themed imagery: " I charged at the waves with a glass in my hand / and was tossed like a ball at the bottle stand / and landed beside your remains on the stones / where your cold fingers wrapped round my ankle bone / while maybe ten feet away was a star / thousands of times the size of our sun / exploding like tiny balloons you'd throw darts at." 

This mock trial can no more determine my lot than can driftwood determine the ocean's waves.

The song is a stunning commentary on religion and post-structuralism: if language creates illusions that block Truth, how do we seek and communicate Truth outside of language?  The Fox claims certainty exists, but the Bear is skeptical, finding contradictions in seemingly oppositional binaries: certainty/uncertainty, existence/nonexistence, Truth/Falseness.  The song invokes numerous questions: Why must animals discuss these very human issues?  What does each animal represent?  What does it mean to sing a song renouncing language?  We never receive answers, though we do see the Bear and Fox again in the album's penultimate song, where the weary Bear envisions St. Agnes and jumps off a cliff: "We'll fly in straight lines as from carronades / we'll crash like tidal waves, decimate the islands / as our hollowed lumber falls like water, ends where I start."

Did you come knocking on my door?  Or did I come to yours?  Whose ship came washed up on whose shore?

As if the lyrics were not rich enough, the box set I purchased comes with a twelve-inch lyric booklet with interpretive drawings of each song, providing an interactive and extremely rewarding aesthetic experience to accompany the music. The album is a gift that keeps giving: Weiss's lyrics are difficult but certainly not impenetrable; it simply takes time and experience to unlock his messages.  But it's not just the lyrics that are profound; the music on Ten Stories is wonderfully varied, from the big electric guitars, heavy bass, and wild drums on opener "February, 1878" to the deceptively heavy melodies of "Grist for the Malady Mill."  mewithoutYou also find new ground on songs like "Cardiff Giant," which contrasts bright, jangly guitars with Weiss's heavy screams, and "Fiji Memory," which features wailing guitars over acoustic strums.  

I saw how far I've traveled down the solipsistic road. I climbed out to ask for directions. . . .  [They] asked about the passage from the Bible on my wrists, but I couldn't catch my breath enough to answer.

I know I sound like a fanboy when I describe this album, but Ten Stories is the most engrossing record I've heard all year; each song has layers of meaning that need unpacking to adequately convey its brilliance, and frankly I'm still digging into many of them.  Like mwY's other albums, I imagine I will be listening to Ten Stories for a long time, and it will grow with me over the years.  Overall, Ten Stories represents the intersection of the band's heavier roots with its more experimental, melodic ambitions -- a kind of Hegelian synthesis, which is fitting, since the album ends by quoting Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit:

all circles presuppose they'll end where they begin, but only in their leaving can they come back round.

1. JAPANDROIDS - Celebration Rock.  I had a hard time deciding between mewithoutYou's sacred "stories" and Japandroids's secular "celebrations," but the reason I ultimately gave Celebration Rock the nod is a simple one: it's the record that made me happiest this year.  Celebration Rock is a fantastic album, an enormous leap forward from the occasionally amazing but mostly uneven Post-Nothing.  I blasted this album in my car all summer, screaming along with Brian King as he shouts, "OH YEAH! ALL RIGHT! Hearts from hell collide on fire's highway tonight."  The duo said that they anticipated their fans' live reactions to their new songs while recording their fittingly-titled album, and they shouted and screamed to their songs as if they were their own fans.  It's a pretty cool recording philosophy, and it shows.  Plus, it worked.

September Mixtape

Highlighting the songs I've discovered, rediscovered, or repeatedly played each month. The order reflects an attempt to create a cohesive mixtape, not to rank the songs in any way. 

In one month, Spotify has opened my eyes to so much new music, especially recent work from artists I've enjoyed in the past but recently neglected.  So let's get to it:

September Mix from kevstevxx on 8tracks Radio.

1. Passion Pit - "I'll Be Alright."  Another devastating song whose title could end up being the ironic epitaph of troubled lead singer Michael Angelakos.  Like almost all of PP's music, though, this bubbly pop track is catchy and enduring.

2. Crystal Castles feat. Robert Smith (of The Cure) - "Not in Love."  I always liked the original of this song because of the waves of synths that kick in during the chorus.  But it felt understated (as does the large majority of Crystal Castles's electronica) because of Alice Glass's murmured vocals.  Smith's addition totally reinvigorates "Not in Love," transforming the pessimistic line "I'm not in love" into a triumphant anthem.  I've listened to this song over and over again; it's so catchy, builds up gradually, and has a huge payoff at the chorus.  I need check out The Cure now.

Crystal Castles (left) with Robert Smith.

3.  Passion Pit - "Mirrored Sea."  The ghostly yet zany synths that open this song are perfect.  It's such a unique, evocative sound that somehow blends seamlessly into the frenetic keys on the verse.  These discrete parts then intersect at the chorus, and it somehow works.  Sonically, this may be as dark as PP is going to get, but it's impressive new ground to tread, and it importantly balances out the sugary, "gossamer" sounds on this sophomore album with something weightier, more brooding.