Records Of The Year: Brave Irene

Getting caught by surprise is kind of hard to do these days. Sure, there's still flat tires and finding a twenty on the ground, but you generally know a lot about the band or movie or restaurant you are going to check out. You tend to have a pretty good idea about what you are getting into. Add to that the fact that I am voraciously looking for new music and keeping track of my favorite people pretty steadily. Or so I thought.

I still don't know how I didn't hear that Rose Melberg had a new band - and I'm still lucky that I found out when I did. Because it's awesome. And I haven't stopped playing it since I got it in November.

I've been a massive Rose fan since she was in Tiger Trap twenty years ago. I love The Softies - a perfect blend of tender harmony and hook-laden indie pop. And her solo stuff has been pretty darn good too. Happily, her new band, Brave Irene, distills the best bits of her career so far. Jangly guitars, overdriven Farfisa organ, sweet harmonies, catchy songs... it's not gonna change the world but it's gonna keep me in a good mood.

Brave Irene is an EP with eight great songs. I love them all, but start with Tangled (one of my top, top tracks of the year), Grass Running, and Good Ideas.

Those three are on my Spotify playlist Marquee Mark's El Perfecto De 2011.

So how did I track this fine band down? Well, it sure helped that they are on my label of the year: Slumberland Records. (Making an amazing comeback exactly when labels are supposed to be a thing of the past. More on them later...)

Tracks Of The Year: You See Everything by Low

Easily the most beautiful song to make my list this year, this is such a welcome return from the mighty Low.

I've stuck with them since the start but I haven't been excited about a Low record in almost 10 years. To their credit, they haven't been phoning it in but I've been less than thrilled about most of their new styles and sounds.

And yet, You See Everything (and the rest of the C'Mon album) aren't retreats to the original Low sound. If anything, there's a defrosting of the old Duluth chilliness that permeates the early records. But that doesn't mean that it's all sunshine and rainbows here.

You See Everything is an abstract take on relationships and tensions swaddled in a lush, warm blanket of acoustic guitars, brushed drums, and strings - and of course the honeyed voices of Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk. (Mimi takes the lead here, and I'm not going to lie and say I don't favor her selections. Her voice has become more subtly expressive over the years.)

The song builds slowly and by the the time the violins swoop and swirl, you've got to have a cold, cold heart to turn away here. Lovely.

You See Everything is featured on my Spotify playlist Marquee Mark's El Perfecto De 2011.

Records Of The Year: Yuck

Quite possibly the best record of 2011 and 1991.

Instantly familiar and immediately engaging, the Yuck album is almost completely derivative of other sources, but when you love those sources, you tend to be a little more forgiving. And when the songs are as catchy and appealing as the bulk of the selections here.

Here are my three recommended picks:

• The Wall: A Teenage Fanclub Catholic Education-era throwdown with bonus Dinosaur Jr. shredding and vocals run through the Kim Gordon Goo processor.


• Suicide Policeman sounds like a mellow Lemonheads/Sea and Cake teamup.


• Operation feels like Teenage Riot turned sideways, but it's as infectious as the Sonic Youth source code.

The homages/rip-offs abound. There's little bits of Yo La Tengo, Codeine, Helium, Pavement, Sebadoh, Bettie Serveert, GBV, and pretty much every other alterna-superstar of the nineties you can remember. The big influences are Teenage Fanclub, Dino Jr., and Sonic Youth... and like J. said, everything's cool with me.

If you don't know anything about those bands - or if you aren't hung up on spot the influence, Yuck still shines. Again, good songs can be played any which way, and the band is clearly enjoying the ride. One of my favorite live shows, although it was jarring to realize that these kids were barely around for the beginning of the decade they are tapping into.

Those three songs mentioned above made my 25 Most Played new songs of 2011 so you'll find them on my Spotify playlist Marquee Mark's El Perfecto De 2011.

Pity about the awful album cover, though, so I'm substituting a band photo which highlights the drummer's awesome 'fro.

Records From 2010 That I Slept On Until 2011

Please don't make the same mistake and ignore:

• Tame Impala - Innerspeaker (Dreamy psychedelic wigouts that get better with each listen. Why Don't You Make Up Your Mind is one for the ages and Jeremy's Storm is a beautiful tangle.)
• The Soft Pack - S/T (Super caffeinated garage rock. You need the whole thing but Answer To Yourself and C'Mon are powerpop with attitude, thanks to Dave Koe for this one!)
• Nina Nastasia - Outlaster (Another spooky, mysterious gem from Nina N. and a return to form after the dissonant You Follow Me)
• Deerhunter - Halycon Digest (I think I'm guilty of Deer confusion, probably like a lot of people. Just to set it straight, I'm not so much into Deerhook or Deer Tick, I'm into the one that makes understated indie pop with fragile melodies and crystalline guitar sounds)
• Weekend - Sports (I hate to say goth but it's goth in the ancestral sense of Joy Division and Bauhaus with added menace.)

(After I listed Deerhunter, I realized that I failed to get around to listening to the new Atlas Sound album yet, so that'll likely be on my list of Records From 2011 That I Slept On Until 2012. The queue starts here!)

Tracks Of The Year: Gangsta by Tune-Yards

Gangsta clocks in at 3 minutes and 59 seconds. At the 2:25 mark, the song completely and utterly derails. And yet, like a deranged marathon runner, like a thrice-reanimated zombie, like a cartoon car that loses its tires and then its wheels and falls apart only to win the race because its bumper falls across the finish line, Gangsta keeps fighting. Things fall apart, according to Yeats, Achebe and Questlove. But sometimes, things come together because they are falling apart.

I've sung the praises of Tune-Yards in the past, so I'll hop to it here. Gangsta and the Whokill album are the great leaps forward I'd hoped for after their sloppy-but-genius Bird-Brains debut. New flavors and sounds (and musicians) enter the mix but the creative spark remains. The risk of Bird-Brains' edgy spontaneity succumbing to maturity or polish (a.k.a. boringness) seemed high, but mere seconds into Gangsta when Merrill Garbus becomes the police siren she's sampled, you know that tame isn't going to an option.

Weirdness makes music fun for me, but Gangsta is powered by a monster groove and that's what keeps this song a must-listen for me. Those horns! That bass! Those drums! (And when each of those pieces resurface after that 2:25 mark, it's like they are trying to reignite the whole rocketship.)

You'll find Gangsta (and another dandy Tune-Yards jam, Es-So) on my Spotify playlist Marquee Mark's El Perfecto De 2011.

Oh, and I brought up Questlove for a reason, not just to be high-falutin'. Tune-Yards played Gangsta on Jimmy Fallon with the Roots and it was epic. Please do check out both versions.

Rediscovery Of The Year: Cry – The Rock*A*Teens (1997)

So, you’ve never heard the Rock*A*Teens? Now, why is that? Surely, it’s not because they shamelessly pilfered their name from the 50’s beat combo whose “Woo Hoo” has soundtracked a million commericals? Or because they were the only male-fronted reverb-overdosed rockers on Indigo Girl Amy Ray’s Daemon Records? Or the messed-up punctuation that probably made it hard for your local record store to even order it in the first place? Well, rectify that and dig into this Southern-gothic-noir gem.

Led by Chris Lopez, who went on to form the equally obscure Tenement Halls, the R*A*Ts are intense. The music alternates between driving and langorous – and the hard-luck subjects of the songs are so richly realized that you find yourself hoping that these are fiction and not auto-biography.

I’d always been fond of “Cherry Red Compilation” – a grimly nostalgic ode to mixtapes and lost loves – and this piledriver still holds up. But for some reason, I’d written off the album as a whole and let Cherry Red live on as a fragment of a mix (how novel!) So 14 years later, I discovered a raft of great songs that simultaneously celebrate and curse the life of a loser. “I Am Forgetting” is a brilliant rave-up. “Losers, Weepers” is a smoldering hanger-on. But “Black Ice” is the true epic. A tale of a crazed drive home – or maybe a Dixie death trip – dripping with gritty Carver/Bukowski-ish lyrics and sung with such a passion that if you aren’t feeling it by the first chorus, you may already be dead.

"Black Ice" is featured with a bunch of resurrected oddballs on my 2011 Rediscoveries Spotify playlist.

Fun facts: This album, along with the first R*A*Ts record, features an almost-inaudible Kelly Hogan. (I’m pretty sure that’s why I bought this is the first place – and probably why I shelved it, since I couldn’t hear one of my favorite singers.) And they ended up on the Rudy and Go-Go cartoon show’s compilation album. Vote Goat!.