Matt Ulery

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Matt Ulery

Y’all mind if I poach NPR Music’s 50 Favorite Albums Of 2012 just a little bit more? No? You guys are the best.

I had the chance to take bassist and composer Matt Ulery’s album By A Little Light for a spin yesterday and have fallen more than a little in love with it, and not just because it features eighth blackbird, the sextet that’s held an Ensemble-in-Residence position at the University of Richmond since 2003 and probably holds the record for mentions on Artsline, WCVE’s daily arts and cultural calendar.

For me, the work’s most remarkable quality, aside from its outright beauty, is the way it allows for originality and brightness to flow through one another.

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Astro

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Astro

I have yet to start this year’s top albums post. Is it because I’m a procrastinator? Yes. Well, yes and no.

I haven’t started yet, in part at least, because I’m still finding out about amazing albums that were released in 2012. In fact, I’m convinced that mid-December is the most wonderful time of the year to be a music lover. Year-end lists are worth their weight in gold when it comes to discovering new bands, and I’ve found one list to be particularly Fort Knox-ish: NPR’s Music Top 50 Albums of 2012. While so many lists simply confirm what you already knew — either about the site that posted them or about the quality of the albums that everyone knows everyone loves — NPR’s stands out by virtue of its breadth, with lots of great classical and international releases I had no idea existed. Particularly strong are the Spanish-language contributions, and Chilean group Astro is proving to be a clear favorite. Clear and distracting.

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G-Dragon

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OK, so now what?

What should America do with K-pop now that the “Gangnam Style” flood waters are starting to recede? Do we explore the rest of PSY’s catalog, or do we act like the whole horsey dance thing never happened? Should we start checking out other K-pop artists, or should we go back to ignoring the genre’s steady, world-wide march? I think we can all agree to continue complaining about dubstep, but it’s going to be really interesting to see where the American market for K-pop goes from here.

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Dave Brubeck

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Dave Brubeck

I was more than a little sad when reports of Dave Brubeck’s death started to surface yesterday afternoon. It’s weird, mourning the death of someone you never met and likely never would, but Brubeck’s music was very important to my parents when they first started dating, and it was especially important to my father, who himself died a few years ago.

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Dan Deacon

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Dan Deacon

I dunno about you, but I could use a pick-me-up.

I fell while running last night. It was dark, the sidewalk was uneven, and I ate it in spectacular fashion. My hands got pretty scraped up, but the wounds to my pride cut much deeper. If I had to use one word to describe the feeling I had when I was lying on the pavement, it would probably be “dorky.” There’s something really lame about that type of sports injury, because it brings into focus just how un-rugged modern life can be. It’s not like my hands got torn up while fending off a lion or building a log cabin. I was jogging. In the ‘burbs. Listening to my iPod. Wearing neon-colored clothes. And I fell.

So like I said, I need a pick-me-up, and I’m looking to you, Dan Deacon.

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Trails and Ways

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Trails and Ways

It’s early December. The time of gift idea generation. In fact, did you know that the word “December” is actually derived from an ancient Sanskrit word that means “Shit, what was that thing my wife said she really wanted when we were waiting in line at Banana Republic back in April?” It’s true!

The good news is that, if you have a friend or significant other who has a record player and eats food, you can cross one person off your list right now, thanks to Turntable Kitchen. If you haven’t heard of it, Turntable Kitchen is a really neat site that marries two of the Internet’s most conspicuous obsessions — conveniently, the two Mrs. YHT and I blog about — and they offer one of the coolest gifts I’ve seen in ages: the Pairings Box.

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ROSTAM

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The Internet is chock-full of awfulness. It’s everywhere you turn. If you don’t believe me, simply scroll down after watching any YouTube video — seriously, ANY YouTube video — and you’ll encounter the very bottom of humanity’s communicative barrel. Just ask Josh Tillman, who recently sat down to respond to a few of the thoughts posted below a Father John Misty video (it’s worth watching — he kicks things off by aptly comparing YouTube comments to “shitting on your own face”).

But things aren’t all bad. There certainly are some Internet good guys out there, and I count Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij among their ranks.

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Meshell Ndegeocello

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Pour Une Âme Souveraine

OK. Before going any further, I need to go ahead and post this link to the “Wild Night” video. Let’s just get that out of the way now, because you and I both know I was going to work it in somehow, and Meshell Ndegeocello’s new album, Pour Une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone, deserves your undivided attention. (Seriously though, that “Wild Night” video is one of the best things ever crafted by humans. I’m pretty sure it went in and out of style about 5 times in the few minutes it took me to rewatch it just now. Just incredible.)

I’ve been on a big Nina Simone kick lately, one that started in earnest when I stumbled across her To Love Somebody covers album a few weeks back. (I’ve been scouring record stores for the thing to no avail, though I did pick up a copy of The Amazing Nina Simone, which is, itself, amazing). Like so many others have been, I was struck by Simone’s ability to make songs her own, even folk standards that had already been revisited a number of times and Dylan songs that could not be more distinctive in their own right. Her voice is simply unstoppable. It’s an immensely powerful, singular method of expression that makes an indelible mark on anything it touches, and I know for sure that I’ll never hear the original versions of the songs on To Love Somebody the same way again.

So how on earth do you go about making an album like Pour Une Âme Souveraine? How do you interpret one of the great interpreters of music without the tool that made her great? It’s a really interesting question, and it’s one Meshell Ndegeocello answers with grace and creativity.

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The Most Americans

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So raise your hand if you’re excited about the new Ginger Baker documentary! Good friend of the blog Greg recently passed along this New York Times review, which paints a pretty intriguing picture…

Animated sequences depict a ship, rowed by the drummer’s red-haired avatars, zigzagging the globe — from London to Nigeria to Los Angeles and other spots on the way to his current home in South Africa — leaving a trail of not entirely metaphorical smoldering wreckage.

Animated sequences? Red hair? Not entirely metaphorical smoldering wreckage? Count me in!

In full disclosure, Beware of Mr. Baker will, whenever it gets distributed more widely, be my formal introduction to a figure I’m only just now learning about. Though I own a few Cream albums and have heard “White Room” and “Sunshine Of Your Love” as many times as any living, breathing human should have, I can’t say that I would have been able to tell you a single thing about him before I read that Times review. As it stands now, I can tell you that he was the drummer for Cream, was nicknamed for his hair color, and seems to have racked up a substantial amount of antipathy in his time, despite being, according to some, the greatest rock drummer ever.

The weird thing is that, before reading that review, I had already sketched out a post about a red-haired drummer who I consider to be the greatest I’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t going to be about Ginger Baker. It was going to be about Kevin Walsh.

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Pretty & Nice

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Us You All We

When my vinyl habit started gaining steam a few years back, I set a few ground rules that were designed to keep things from spinning out of control, wallet-wise. “Just old stuff” was the first one. I told myself I’d stick to records released in vinyl’s heyday, and I tried for a while, but that notion was doomed from the start. As financially convenient as living in the past — a past I wasn’t even alive to see and hear for myself — would be, it doesn’t make sense. Too many amazing new songs are pressed to vinyl each year, and depriving my turntable of the chance to spin them is just plain cruel. (Nobody puts Pioneer PL-510A in the corner, OK?) Once the floodgates opened, I had to come up with new new-vinyl-buying rules, one of which comes into play when thinking about Pretty & Nice’s new Us You All We EP.

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