This Week's Soundtrack: June 11, 2012

This week's soundtrack is seriously shaped by last week.
1. "The Coming Tide" - Luke Winslow-King: I've been listening to and enjoying Luke W-K's new album by the same name all week.
2. "Oh Susannah" - Neil Young & Crazy Horse: The lead track from Americana. By now, a collection of remakes of folk tunes is a little been-there/done-that, and his version of "Get a Job" doesn't change enough to be interesting. Still, I love Crazy Horse's native stomp, and spelling out "banjo" gives the song a sense of humor I hope I'll discover in some of the other tracks.
3. "Hey, Hey We're the Gories" - The Gories: The Detroit garage-punk band plays Saturday night at Siberia with the 3-D Invisibles.

4. "Face Down in the Gutter" - Quintron: A lot of this last week was spent at the Music Box, where Quintron conducted the final, improvised-within-a-framework shows. He mapped out the performance and signaled players in and out of the mix.
5. "Unforgettable Super Lady" - Javelin: The guys from Javelin were two of the performers at the Music Box.
6. "Armoire" - Curren$y with Young Roddy and Trademark: From The Stoned Immaculate. With Lil Wayne, I always felt like the mixtapes were the testing grounds for ideas that would take shape on Tha Carter II and III. With Curren$y, I wonder if the major label releases are the ads for mixtapes, which are where his music really lives.
7. "Crew Love" - Drake with The Weeknd: The Weeknd plays the House of Blues Tuesday.
8. "Street Parade" - Theresa Andersson: The title track from her most recent album. Part of the reporting for my story on Theresa in the current issue of OffBeat was done when she shot the video for this song at the Music Box.
9. "I Can't Make it Alone" - Continental Drifters" Susan Cowsill singing lead on the Dusty Springfield classic. Cowsill performed Dusty in Memphis in its entirety Saturday night at Carrollton Station.
10. "No Easy Way Down" - Dusty Springfield: If I'm going to play a Dusty cover ...
11. "Pacific Coast Highway" - The Beach Boys: From the new That's Why God Made the Radio. I wasn't eager for this album despite my love of The Beach Boys because of the sound of the title track and its nostalgia - usually my least-favorite of the band's modes. Most reviews agree that the last three songs give the album a reason to live; so far, this is my favorite of the three.
12. "Dreamer" - Dennis Wilson: From Pacific Ocean Blue. I think Beach Boys' obsessives overrate this album, but Dennis developed an authentic writing voice when Brian couldn't be counted on, and that gives his treatments of conventional subject matter life.
13. "Bells" - Quintron: Like "Face Down in the Gutter," this comes from his Sucre du Sauvage album, and it's more in keeping with the experimental nature of the Music Box performances. The ambient sounds were recorded in City Park during the time when Quintron installed himself as a museum exhibit at NOMA as part of his "Parallel Universe" show with Miss Pussycat.
14. "Little Boxes" - Teenage Head: A year ago Saturday, my friend Imants Krumins passed away. He kept seeing Teenage Head and giving them a chance way longer than anyone else did. I wish the original mix of Teenage Head's debut album could be found online instead of this artificially revved-up version, but since it's what we've got, it's what we go with.
15. "I Zimbra" (12" version) - Talking Heads: Right now I'm plowing through Jonathan Lethem's entry in the 33 1/3 series, Fear of Music. Lethem's wrestling with a lot of ideas starting with the question of how to address the album now while honoring his changing relationship to it over the years, and I wish he was handling that challenge with less circular writing. I've rarely moved so slowly through a 33 /13 book.
16. "Back.te.riality" (Magas remix) - Die-6, Magas: Chicago's Jim Magas was also among the performers at the Music Box this weekend.
17. "Express Yourself" - Diplo feat. Nicky Da B: From Diplo's new Express Yourself EP. This is one of the handful of non-New Orleans tracks to get bounce right.
18. "I've Got My Mind Set on You" - Luke Winslow-King: Also from The Coming Tide. Here he and Esther Rose cover George Harrison.
19. "Free State of Jones" - Cary Hudson: Blue Mountain's Cary Hudson periodically does a solo show on the House of Blues' patio, the Voodoo Garden. He'll be there as part of a songwriter's showcase Wednesday at 7 p.m.

This Week's Soundtrack: June 4. 2012

When Carrie Brownstein was blogging for NPR, she wrote a post expressing her displeasure with the iPod shuffle feature:

most of us don't like the notion of random, even when the choices presented to us are culled from our own collections. It's like if there were a robot randomly selecting what we wear each day. Sure, it's our own closet and our own clothing, but we don't want to wear sweaters on 80-degree days, or to put on some magenta silk top that only looked good in the dressing room. With music, it boils down to mood and context, as well. 

I've never understood looking to your iPod to know your mood, though I'm always fascinated by Scott Tennant's efforts at Pretty Goes with Pretty to coerce iTunes into giving him what he wants through a process of grading and categorizing that exhausts me to think about.

I like to see what my iPod has in store for me. The first four songs on this week's soundtrack popped up last week during a bike ride, and they were so perfect for setting a mood that I decided to start with them. Here's this week's soundtrack:

1. "East of the River Nile" - Augustus Pablo: Maybe the funkiest track of the dub master's career.
2. "Bob Hope Takes Risks" - Rip, Rig & Panic: This post-punk band led by the Pop Group's Mark Stewart features a young Neneh Cherry on vocals. I'm curious about her upcoming collaboration with The Thing on avante-garde jazz and rock covers including Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" and the Stooges' "Dirt."
3. "You Can't Beat Two People in Love" - James Brown feat. Lyn Collins: I'd dumped this James Brown comp on my iPod without listening to it, and I hadn't heard this track before it came up. Until I checked the title, I thought Collins was singing, "You can't be two people in love," which made the song my new favorite anti-schizophrenia anthem.
4. "Quasar" - Scientist: Dub producer Scientist was at his peak with a series of elaborately titled album, my favorite being Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampire. This comes from 1981's Scientist Meets the Space Invaders.
5. "Small Talk" - Sly Stone: Some days the baby annoys me; on others, we're good.
6. "Buddy X" - Neneh Cherry: One things leads to another.
7. "Haunted Jukebox" - Saint Etienne: I'm not sure why I've been so curious about a new Saint Etienne album since they were never more than a casual affection in the past. This has the charming unassuming quality that I always liked about them.
8. "Girl Like Me" - Ladyhawke: At The Guardian, Matthew Horton wondered what 2009's class of '80s-centric synth-pop musicians were going to do for an encore. Since Ladyhawke lasted for one song for me - "Magic" is in my iTunes, though I can't remember it - I was intrigued by the hopes someone had for her.
9. "Monster Mouth" - the Popinjays: All this female-centric UK pop brought this to mind. I wish their Tales from the Urban Prairie was on Spotify.
10. "Came Out a Lady" - Rubblebucket: This regrettably named Brooklyn-based band plays Tipitina's on Tuesday night.
11. "Good Old Desk" - Nilsson: Nilsson's dissolute legend and often-woozy catalogue can overshadow how talented he was at his peak. This perfectly odd track from Aerial Pandemonium Ballet is a great reminder.
12. "Fading Into Obscurity" - Sloan: From the aptly titled Never Hear the End of It. I've never failed to reach the end of an album I enjoyed more, but there are so many ideas in each song that I can't process that much music. This is a great example - check how many songs has the band crammed into 4:10.
13. "Solid Gold" - Keith Moon: Nilsson made me think of this. Tony Fletcher's Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend is great for its depiction of Moon, Harry Nilsson and John Lennon drunk and adrift in Los Angeles. They were among the first wave of musicians to discover how remarkably much money could be made through rock 'n' roll, and they were on the cutting edge of the corresponding indulgences. Rather than sounding sordid, their lives seemed pointless at that juncture.
14. "What the Hell I Got" - the Blue Shadows: I hoped to find this by Montreal's Michel Pagliaro, but Spotify says "non." Instead, I'll go with the rockabilly-ish version by Vancouver's Blue Shadows (which included . This is how the songs has generally been covered.
15. "Fiya Wata" - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros: From the new Here. I'm still waiting to here it as rousing as their set was when the Big Easy Express visited New Orleans in 2011, but I didn't hear that kind of excitement on the previous album either, so maybe it's a live thing.
16. "O.F.Y.C. Showcase" - The Fall: Another iPod special. I put Your Future Our Clutter on my iPod without hearing it, and each time it comes on, I'm ecstatic. The world almost always needs a four-to-five minute-long interruption by Mark E. Smith.
17. "5 a.m. in the Morning" - Hannibal Buress: Comedian Hannibal Buress plays the New Movement Theater Wednesday night, and this is the first time I've been really excited to see a comedian in a while. He's got a distinctive, authentic voice that anatomizes his interactions with the world in scientific detail.

(Coming soon: MySpiltMilk.com)