OOTMix Seven

A power quartet if there ever was one. Pete Townshend, the guitarist, once mentioned that he felt like the drummer in the group, keeping time with his rhythm guitar, with John Entwhistle’s melodic basslines acting as the guitar, and Keith Moon’s drumming serving much like keyboard riffs and accents. Then there’s Roger Daltrey’s voice, both soaring and searing at the same time. Their 1971 album Who’s Next contains many of the songs that they’re known for (“Baba O'Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Behind Blue Eyes”), but I decided to go with some of their early, more gritty material. Enjoy!

So: Dashboard Confessional. Probably reminds y’all of being 14, being an ugly-as-fuck adolescent, and getting your heart broken for the first time, imagining getting your heart broken for the first time, and generally just being piiisssedddd 24/7. For me, Dashboard reminds me of when my older sister was 14, was an ugly-as-fuck adolescent, and just hated everyone, especially my parents, with a simmering loathing that continued for years. I, however, was 10, in elementary school, and found myself listening to such angry music as a soundtrack to my pretty darn happy life. Maybe that’as made it difficult for me to feel correct emotions about angry songs. I love them; they make me laugh; they make me smile; they make me feel nostalgic and romantic. Listening to “The Best Deceptions” and hearing about how his girlfriend cheated on him when she went abroad, or to camp, or wherever, and hearing how freaking angry he is, but underneath that hearing how cleverly he describes the depths to which he’s caught her being a conniving little bitch, it just makes me laugh inside because of the absurdity that this is the kind of music I listened to in fifth grade.

Also, I find certain of his songs to be just absurdly romantic. “Hands Down” makes my heart want to bleed on a stranger. “Stolen” makes me feel antsy and like I need to find someone to love forever, just to have them break my heart. Basically, I've been an angsty, cynical, hopelessly romantic teenager on the inside since the time I could ride a bike. It’s nostalgia now, and makes me smile.

This music is heavily influenced by TV (particularly documentaries) of the 1970s, and is meant to evoke nostalgia. It’s all a mixture of crazy analog techniques, and as a result sounds very warm and a little bit tripped-out. The following quote pretty much sums up the unique ways BoC produce their tracks:

So I am the most indecisive person ever, as we all know. But I chose Jason Robert Brown because to me, his songs evoke an incredible ephemerality and they express the momentary in a way that I think is really powerful. He talks about “Songs for a New World” as being a show about moments – moments when we're faced with choices, or moments when we’re on the edge of something and we have to decide how we’re going to deal with it, if we’re going to give in to fear or push through, just…the tiniest moments expanded into something more. The best way I have of describing his music is that it makes me think of bubbles. No, really! They’re sort of momentary but fixed in that permanent in-between floating and popping and what I’m really trying to describe is that his music makes me unnecessarily philosophize but GIVE ME A BREAK I’ve been making spreadsheets for weeks with no outlets via essay-writing so YOU HAVE TO DEAL. :P In any case, I just have a thing for these songs, so hope you like!

There was a period of several months in high school where Ben Gibbard (the lead singer of DCFC) pretty much single-handedly defined my playlist: first via the straight-forward indie-emo-rock of Death Cab, then later through the peppier-if-still-downtrodden blips and bleeps of the Postal Service. I still think he’s one of the best male crooners currently in the biz.

And of course, it doesn’t hurt that he’s backed up by such solid tunes. The early albums, where the group has yet to fully discover its emo tilt, are consistently pretty good, but their mainstream breakthrough, Transatlanticism, is about as excellent an example of the album format as you’ll find, great track after great track combining to build one cohesive whole. Plans and Narrow Stairs, their two most recent albums, have continued along that track, helping to establish DCFC as one of the darlings of the teenage indie music scene. It’s a reputation they well-deserve.

I first stumbled across SC during my sophomore year of high school, and although I quickly latched on to the stripped-down solo work of their lead singer, Mike Doughty, it took me several more years to really dig into the band itself. Which was maybe understandable, given that they sound unlike pretty much anything else I’ve ever listened to. The band was fond of describing their own genre as “deep slacker jazz,” and I struggle to come up with a better description: part alt/grunge-rock, part jazz fusion, part beatnik slam poetry, part early hip hop. Soul Coughing basically took four wildly talented musicians (a singer/guitarist, a drummer, a double-bassist, and a sampler player), stuck them together in a small room, gave them a lot of hard drugs, and waited for something to happen. The result was three wildly inventive albums in the mid-’90s.

For me personally, Soul Coughing opened my eyes to a lot of the more experimental work going on in modern music, from aggressive and discordant arrangements to ambient drone pieces. It taught me that a song can be unconventional and still be catchy as hell. And it showed me that if you’re willing to spend a bit of time looking, there are some really unique, really good bands out there just waiting to be discovered.

The group split none-too-amicably at the turn of the millenium – not surprising, given that the controlled chaos in their music was driven by the controlled chaos of their own lives – but they left behind one of the most original and (in my opinion) most enjoyable bodies of recorded work in modern music. If I have a favorite band, this is it.

Ellie Goulding is awesome for many reasons, but the first of them is that she’s got a really unique voice. It’s kind of odd, actually, but it adds a lot of humanity to her music. This is quite important, since she’s basically a singer-songwriter along the lines of many of the artists we do (Sara Bareilles, Regina Spektor), but the difference is that she teamed up with a very electropop-ish producer. The arrangements are very, very elaborate, and if she didn’t have the voice she does, she’d get lost in them. It also helps that her lyrics, while slightly impenetrable, are full of interesting images and allusions. In any case! She’s awesome, and I’m glad that I found out about her via OOTMix 6 before “Starry Eyed” (the song she’s known for in the U.S.) became a big thing. Enjoy!