All of this year’s Catbirdseat Monthly Mixes have been (re-)posted for a limited time — including the new December Mix, which incorporates many of my favorite songs from 2009. Head on over and check them out while you can.

à la garconnière

Jumbling Towers - “Put Your War Paint On” In this world of gray smiles and clammy hands and incessant, relentless power outages, candles are very important. There are many who believe that candle flames can be inhaled, that they can speak, that they have transformative powers. There is a legend of a young filthy ratter who burned a book he'd written in a candle flame, page by page, to make the words exist in the world. The effects of his efforts are now known as the Night of Hawks and Chains, the most heinous tradition in an already barbarous existence. It is said that only one child in a family of ten will survive this night. The limits of the body's acids and muscles are tested, the mind's tipping point, the spirit's very bottom. There is no grass wetter, colder, than the grass of that horrible dawn.

Jumbling Towers have reached a near-crippling level of darkness with their new album, The Kanetown City Rips. They've generally been a creepy band, but in a Vincent Price kind of way, where it's a smirking kind of ghoul, a deep maniacal tongue-in-cheek kind of cackle. But that was the old Jumbling Towers, or perhaps just not the Jumbling Towers of this record. A band that used to squeeze blood out of their guitars, that would crash a cymbal wide enough to change the tides, is suddenly holding back. The drums have been muted, they're thudding instead of ringing, the guitars are lying dried on the beach. Kanetown is suddenly their Your Blues. But, as in Your Blues, it all feels like it has a purpose. One that may take getting used to, but will find you soon. The album tells a story, or rather gives impressions, of a turbulent and unwelcoming world. From the constant perspective of the "rips", which are kids, themes of adults deceiving children, fearmongering, and revolution abound. There's a throughline to this album that leaves you at once triumphant and unsettled. It's mysterious, unfriendly, and gorgeous.

[This track is exclusive to Said the Gramophone, made available to us in advance by the band, so thanks to them for that. If you like them, see my past writings on them here, and here, and here]

[MySpace | Site | Buy their old records | buy the Kanetown single from Half Machine]

Eels – “In My Younger Days”

BOAT - “Lately” Near the start of this song, David Crane says that New Jersey is a “state without a hero,” which strikes me as a rather weird thing to say, since I can’t think of a state in the country without a greater desire for a pantheon of its own homegrown cultural heroes. For one thing, Bruce Springsteen’s career is at least partially based on being a hero for New Jersey’s working class. That’s the most obvious one. But what about Jon Bon Jovi, the Springsteen of the shore? Frank Sinatra? Jon Stewart? On a smaller but no less potent level, what about Tom Scharpling and Ted Leo? (And what of Brock Peuchk?)

Anyway. I came to BOAT because people were telling me that they sounded like Pavement. BOAT doesn’t actually sound like Pavement though, but they do sound like the indie rock of the ’90s. And you know, Pavement is synonymous with that. I don’t need or want anyone to be like Stephen Malkmus, but I am glad that the pendulum of indie fashion is swinging back to his sort of merry, melodic looseness. Still, I want to be careful in the coming years. I don’t want to just like things because it triggers Pavlovian responses in me, because it reminds me of the music I listened to when I was a teenager. I also don’t want to be too hard on artists for not living up to actually being Pavement or Pollard or Sonic Youth or whatever. BOAT is charming, BOAT has some terrific songs. Their identity needs to evolve beyond “I love the ’90s” if they’re ever going to graduate from good to great, but you know what? I love the ’90s too. I can live with this.

Buy it from Magic Marker Records.