10. Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

Download audio file (billcallahan-toomanybirds.mp3)
“Too Many Birds” (buy)

For someone with a voice as oaken and stout as Bill Callahan’s, he sure has a fleet-footed deftness in tackling ephemeral subjects, crafting Byzantine-tinged fables about familial burdens or grappling with the sudden loss of a perfect song that appeared in a dream and dissipated in the morning. This album, for me, is a little like an old Navy peacoat: heavy and maybe a little musty at times, but reliably built and familiar enough with broken-in grooves to comfortably return to when the weather demands it.

9. St. Vincent – Actor

Download audio file (stvincent-marrow.mp3)
“Marrow” (buy)

I’m unreasonably suspicious of music that’s too polished; it’s probably some kind of latent handicap in music appreciation that resulted from being weaned on grunge and punk and the circumstantial necessity of recording imperfections in early rock and roll. It’s like I need to hear a bum note or cracked voice every now and then to know it’s human and not factory-made. But this year, faced with a definite resurgence of scrappy and (g)lo-fi bands, I found my patience with that old way of thinking wearing thin, and it took St. Vincent with a flawless orchestral pop record — with overtures to Disney scores, even! — to break through and show the error of my thinking. Actor is a pitch-perfect construct, but still emotionally heartfelt and filled with inventive and bedazzling compositions. Hell, even the feedback and discord is exquisite. It also helped that St. Vincent’s live show was one of the best I saw all year.

8. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Ashes Grammar

Download audio file (asunnydayinglasgow-closechorus.mp3)
“Close Chorus” (buy)

There was a lot of top-notch shoegaze revival-type stuff this year — Memory Tapes, Fuck Buttons, the Big Pink — but it was A Sunny Day in Glasgow that really reinvented the genre in their own image. Sure, there are echoes of your Lovesliescrushings and All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, but Ashes Grammar requires total immersion — it’s a record so texturally rich and rhythmically fluid that it’s impossible to wrap your head around it in just one, or twenty-one, listens.

7. Pomegranates – Everybody, Come Outside!

Download audio file (poms-thislandusedtobemyland.mp3)
“This Land Used To Be My Land, But Now I Hate This Land” (buy)

I probably recommended this record to friends and strangers more than any other this year. It really boggles my mind that Everybody, Come Outside! didn’t catch on more than it did — a concept album loosely based on a restless time traveler, with influences equal parts Fela Kuti and the Wrens. What’s not to love? This album has so much heart and charm, plus, it’s filled with some of my single favorite moments laid to tape in 2k9 — the zany chorus on “Southern Ocean” where the boys shout the names of all the other oceans and feign going overboard; the exhausted exclamation “I’m so tired of living in a city where I can’t see the stars at night!” on “This Land Used To Be My Land, But Now I Hate This Land;” the guitar lick on “Svaatzi Uutsi.” This album is rife with the spirit of adventure, and I can’t wait to see where the Pomegranates go next.

6. Fever Ray – s/t

Download audio file (feverray-whenigrowup.mp3)
“When I Grow Up” (buy)

Gothic, gnomic, unmistakeably Scandinavian — Fever Ray’s self-titled debut was one of the most original and eerily engrossing albums of the year. It’s hard to put it on and not be transported to an alternate dreamworld where mossy synths slink under pebble-skipped beats and mechanically monolithic voices emanate out of thin air. But for all the dark curvatures of Fever Ray’s planet, there is a light, or at least an organic glow, that emits under every surface, making it curiously uplifting.

5. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – s/t

Download audio file (pains-comesaturday.mp3)
“Come Saturday” (buy)

How did this make it so high on my list? The curmudgeonly critic in me feels obligated to gripe about how unoriginal the Pains of Being Pure at Heart are, how their whole sound is one big derivative trawl of so many obscure twee bands of yore that even mentioning C86 would be to obvious, how even their cover art rips off My Bloody Valentine. But you know what, my inner curmudgeon can stuff it, because I love this album. I love the everlivin’ shit out of it. I put this on when I’m feeling down, when I’m feeling good, when I’m staring at spreadsheets, and when I’m getting my drank on. I listen to it all the goddamn time. Why? Because they sound like a hundred other bands I like, but better.

4. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

Download audio file (anco-intheflowers.mp3)
“In the Flowers” (buy)

For better or worse, Merriweather Post Pavilion has become the defining album of the year: the object of massively hysterical online hype, the heralded savior of a post-guitar/bass/drums indie landscape, a Billboard-climbing success that introduced broad swaths of casual listeners to subterranean electro-psychedelia, an impassable line in the sand for testy critics, a prime example of everything wrong with music today. But, to my ears, MPP still sounds as weird and invigorating today as it did when I first heard it 12 months ago. Each track pulses with life — bulging, pumping bass rhythms that you feel in your gut; playfully infectious harmonies; gleaming and luminous electronics laid down so thick it’s like being bathed in starlight. This is music to get lost to.

3. The xx – xx

Download audio file (xx-basicspace.mp3)
“Basic Space” (buy)

Out of the 11 tracks on xx, there are at least six that are stone cold singles. At least. I won’t dwell on how young these London kids are, or how meticulously cohesive their debut aesthetic is, or how they unintentionally went toe-to-toe with Peter Bjorn and John in revitalizing a Young Marble Giants-indebted minimalist R&B style in 2009 and wound up schooling the whistling Swedish indie stars, but I feel I should emphasize how good this band is. They’re really fucking good. Breathy boy-girl vocals, echoic guitars that are just teased, never battered, leaving most of the rhythm up to the imagination. With so many bands clamoring for attention by being louder, faster, flashier, it’s refreshing to find a group willing to pull back and let you come after them.

2. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Download audio file (phoenix-lisztomania.mp3)
“Lisztomania” (buy)

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is at or near the top of plenty of “Best of 2009″ lists. This is not shocking. It’s a brilliantly executed, head-to-toe catchy, glossy pop tour de force. What is shocking is how defensive its defenders are, as though there were something to be embarrassed about over rock that is (at least partly) soft, French, and impeccably detailed. Apparently there are people out there who are virulently and vocally anti-Phoenix (or at least, anti- the success of this particular album) — this I find shocking!! Who are these people, and how can anyone be so foolishly anti-melody, anti-hook, anti-big-lovable-chorus, anti-this-adorable-fan-made-music-video and still call themselves music fans? Inconceivable!

1. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

Download audio file (dirtyprojectors-usefulchamber.mp3)
“Useful Chamber” (buy)

I listened to Bitte Orca practically every morning for three months after I first picked it up. Just the thought of the opening windswept riff on “Cannibal Resources” causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. But for all the time I’ve invested in this record, I still find it hard to articulate in words how I feel, viscerally, about this music. The arrangements are stark, but rhythmically complex, with the bass often played as a a lead that weaves into David Longstreth’s intricately filigreed, art-damaged Jùjú guitar work seamlessly, drum machines that mimic the palpitations of acoustic percussion, and the joyously ascendant harmonies of Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman that lift my stomach into my throat when the rest of the music drops out. It’s fantastic and, without taking this too literally, spiritually revitalizing. There are very few components to each song, but each element that is included is crucially, spectacularly vital.

RELATED: Here are my 10 favorite EPs of 2009.

10. Deerhunter – Rainwater Cassette Exchange

Download audio file (deerhunter-famouslastwords.mp3)
“Famous Last Words” (buy)

Deerhunter is window shopping on the Rainwater Cassette Exchange EP. With “master the art of psychedelic drone rock” checked off their musical bucket list, the band has taken the opportunity to set aside their heavier sonic baggage and experiment with a leaner, more diverse set of styles. In the course of a spare fifteen minutes, Deerhunter manage to traverse from languid tropical punk to hyper-compressed Krautrock to a jangly, piano-and-tabla Georgian raga before returning to the tremolo-tinged garage rock they mastered back on Microcastle, all without breaking a sweat or indulging in so much as a single extraneous guitar solo.

9. Johnny Headband – Phase 3

Download audio file (johnnyheadband-wastintime.mp3)
“Wastin’ Time” (download)

Resurrecting the frenetic energy of rave-era Primal Scream with the clamoring expansiveness of TV on the Radio, Johnny Headband have released a beast of an EP — a post-apocalyptic bacchanal rife with electrically charred bass, sandstorm guitars and howling, multi-tracked harmonies. It’s just a shame that a noise this bombastic wasn’t heard by more people outside Detroit.

8. Julianna Barwick – Florine

Download audio file (juliannabarwick-cloudbank.mp3)
“Cloudbank” (buy)

Spectral choral music for the driftless. Recommended for those who thought Sigur Rós were too structured for their tastes.

7. Animal Collective – Fall Be Kind

Download audio file (anco-whatwouldiwant.mp3)
“What Would I Want? Sky” (buy)

Animal Collective became one of the most fashionable bands to hate on this year for releasing one of the most inventive and enjoyable albums of 2009 (funny how that works, huh?). Regardless of your undoubtedly fixed opinions on the band, Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist appear to be completely oblivious to the maelstrom of hype and web 2.0 academic treatises they’ve sparked as a result of Merriweather Post Pavilion and decided to cap the year off with one of their most curiously cohesive and playful EPs yet.

6. Flying Lotus – L.A. EP 3 X 3

Download audio file (flyinglotus-infinitum.mp3)
“Infinitum (Dimlite’s Re-finitum)” (buy)

It’s utterly inconceivable to me how music like this was conceived. It’s like a photo negative of a what I expect a song to be: textures are reconfigured as percussion; beats are spliced, reversed, and processed into jittery, techno-futurist melodies; vertical planes become three-dimensional vectors; up is down; black is white; rhythm is the bass, and the bass is the treble. If this is what the future sounds like, I remain hopeful that I’ll get my hoverboard after all.

5. Jon Hardy & The Public – Little Criminals: Songs From Randy Newman

LITTLE CRIMINALS by Jon Hardy & the Public from theFOUNTAINstudio on Vimeo. (download)

It was meant to be a brief affair: for one night only, St. Louis’ hardest working band was going to pay tribute to one of America’s greatest living songwriters. But the resulting collaboration played to the others’ strengths so well that it would have been criminal to lose the effect to the woozy memory of bar lore. Randy Newman tends to play the role of a satirical schlemiel, but when his work is played with the forthrightness and brio of Jon Hardy & The Public the songs feel invigorated with new purpose and meaning. Great songwriting should allow for artful interpretation, and both are present here.

4. Beirut – March of the Zapotec/Realpeople Holland

Download audio file (beirut-mynight.mp3)
“My Night with the Prostitute from Marseilles” (buy)

March of the Zapotec/Realpeople Holland is an odd job. It’s two completely separate EPs, really. For Zapotec, Zach Condon took his Balkanized brass balls down to Oaxaca, Mexico to recruit a ragtag band of native horn blowers to backtrack his somber, wayfaring songs. It’s fine; about what you’d expect. But what really got me excited was Holland, “Realpeople” being Condon’s nom de plume for his pre-Beirut bedroom pop project. The resulting tracks can be a little undeveloped at points, but the strange juxtaposition of Condon’s mournful croon with the wistful gurgling of cheap electronics produces some of the most listenable synth pop this side of the Magnetic Fields’ Holiday.

3. Washed Out – Life of Leisure

Download audio file (washedout-newtheory.mp3)
“New Theory” (buy)

Beachy, headphonic, chill. During the interminably long Summer of Death, 2009, the slow jam sampledelica of Ernest Greene’s Washed Out provided just the sort of escapist and nostalgic salve needed to reassure anxiety-wracked blogbros that everything was going to be a-okay.

2. Destroyer – Bay of Pigs


(buy)

When it was announced that Dan Bejar was going to release a 13-and-a-half minute “ambient disco” track based loosely around the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, there was no doubt that it was going to be anything short of epic. And where Kennedy failed with his CIA-trained Cuban exiles, Bejar delivered. Even in the most obtuse sense, I’m still not sure what — if anything — the song “Bay of Pigs” has to do with the actual event in 1961, but with blisteringly surreal lyrics about how “a ransom note written on the night sky above remind me what, in particular, about this wine I love,” I’m not about to start complaining. Bejar is in fine form here, popping up like a harrowed and woolly narrator to regale us of the time he was trapped inside the sea’s guts or bathed in golden sunlight, only to recede back into the foggy aether of synthesizer just as mysteriously as he arrived. The acoustic guitar, when it finally kicks in, feels like a life raft — the sturdiest, most reliable instrument in sight. If it weren’t for a certain French band who penned a tune about a Hungarian composer, this would be the single greatest song of the year. Oh, and there’s another track on this EP. It’s okay.

1. El Perro del Mar – Love Is Not Pop

Download audio file (ElPerro-Heavenly.mp3)
“Heavenly Arms” (buy)

There’s a lot to love here: the battered sincerity of 1980′s Lou Reed, the fluid bounce of Balearic funk, the spectre of G.K. Chesterton, the amorous and classical voice of Sarah Assbring. This isn’t a happy record — El Perro del Mar’s rarely are — but it’s spiritually nourishing, full of poignant and unchained melodies that exude a deep, inner warmth. It’s a remarkable maturation for Ms. Assbring as a songwriter, who has set aside the conventions of 1960s girl group acts here for the light groove of organic dub, but it’s the maturity and patience demonstrated within these songs that give them their allure.

El Perro Del Mar “Change Of Heart” from The Control Group on Vimeo.

Please stand by as we sort through some behind-the-scenes tommyrot and technical rigmarole. We pray this will only be a temporary inconvenience. In the meantime, please to enjoy some Jarvis.

Eleanor Friedberger – “Ray Bouvier”

Matthew Friedberger – “Take Me Round Again”

Songs removed by label request. Feel free to download this track instead:

“Keep Me in the Dark (Eleanor Friedberger version)”
(from Take Me Round Again)

Well, it was a fun idea in theory. Kudos to Matt and Eleanor for following through on a promise to their fans.

Previously

Take 1 | Take 2 | Take 3

Download audio file (Lou-Heavenly.mp3)
Lou Reed – “Heavenly Arms”
(from The Blue Mask)

Download audio file (ElPerro-Heavenly.mp3)
El Perro del Mar – “Heavenly Arms”
(from Love Is Not Pop)

In an obvious sign of aging, I’m starting to appreciate The Blue Mask more than just about any other Lou Reed album –- more than the pandrogynous decadence of Transformer or the druggy improprieties of Street Hassle. It’s a totally ordinary album about ordinary things. Reed sings about the joys of home ownership and the bland appeal of heterosexuality and how easy it is to skate by as a low-level, functional alcoholic. Things I can identify with! But despite its evident normalcy, The Blue Mask closes with one of the most triumphant anthems Lou Reed has ever written.

“Heavenly Arms” is a gloriously ragged and unkempt love song, full of declarative purpose and a naked passion that’s strong enough to lift it up beyond its bruised and battered delivery. Lou stretches and bends the name “Sylvia” (for his then-wife Sylvia Morales) over three measures, over and over again, flubbing notes and falling back into the morass of his and ex-Voidoid Bob Quine’s scraping guitars. It’s not always pretty, but it’s sincere. This isn’t just cheap lip service about “the glory of love,” this is a man overcome. Hell, I’d almost call this song a spiritual if I didn’t know it was coming from the slanted mouth of some leather-clad degenerate.

But I’m almost ashamed to admit that I never gave this song much consideration until I heard it covered.

Treated by El Perro del Mar, “Heavenly Arms” is cleaned up and comforted. While Lou sings like a man in the middle of a maelstrom, Sarah Assbring offers solace from the whirling shitstorm of “a world full of hate.” She takes a song that’s graceful in nature, and gives it its due diligence in the delivery –- billowing harmonies, supple counter-rhythms, plush synths, lots of empty space. She sounds so confident and sure in this song, it probably wouldn’t even occur to you that it was a cover unless it was pointed out. Her mini-album Love Is Not Pop follows the example set by “Heavenly Arms,” with each of the seven tracks coming across as a minor revelation, and, if you care, it’s one of the more pleasing purchases I’ve made recently.

I was lucky to catch El Perro del Mar open for Peter Bjorn and John over the weekend, and I was really astonished at how well these new songs translated live. Stripped of all the Balearic and vaguely ‘80s soft jam production values on the studio recordings, they really come into their own with just guitar, bass, and drums. It made me realize (a) how much more creative some bands could be with just the guitar, bass, and drum set-up, and (b) how, if you’re going to try that approach, it helps to have a flawless rhythm section and a captivating vocalist. Assbring herself, who in all her press photos looks like a Jean Seberg clone permanently stuck in a black-and-white French New Wave film but who actually looks quite different in person, engaged the entire show doing this kind of dancing that was like an exaggerated walking in place. This was kind of strange, I thought. I always thought of her music as being a sort of close the blinds and pour a bottle of red wine for one type of music, but I guess this new mini-album is a kind of dance album. Just a very private, adult kind of dancing.

Carl Sagan (feat. Stephen Hawking) – “A Glorious Dawn”

Today marks what would be the 75th birthday of Carl Sagan, noted astronomer, agnostic, exobiologist, and turtleneck enthusiast. He’s perhaps most popularly recognized as the host of the 1980′s PBS series Cosmos, where he explored the incomprehensible complexities of the universe with a child’s sense of wonder and a poet’s ease of metaphorical flourish.

In honor of Carl Sagan Day (which was, for some reason, two days ago) composer John Boswell cut-and-paste the Cosmos narrator into what sounds like a Black Moth Super Rainbow after-school special: sun-drenched psych-pop, speckled with analog space dust and shopping mall keyboards, complete with heavily vocoderized mindbombs about the “exquisite interrelationships of the awesome machinery of nature.” Even Stephen Hawking, the T-Pain of programmable voice synthesizer, makes a cameo, dropping eight bars of theoretical imponderables over the bridge.

You can download the track at symphonyofscience.com, or you can try to pick it up on limited-edition vinyl via Jack White’s Third Man Records. Get behind me Sagan!

Download audio file (Olympians.mp3)
Fuck Buttons – “Olympians”
(from Tarot Sport)

Lately, I’ve been a little reluctant to write too much about new music. Don’t get me wrong, I still think the whole “writing about music” thing has some value, but every time I read another thesaurus-less blogger gullibly slap the same gauche, overreaching adjectives on any moderately promising FLAC that streams across his torrent, or another eager-to-please reviewer try to justify wholly questionable historical antecedents on bands that barely qualify as upstarts for the sake of page hits or guest spots, I cringe. I’ve done it myself. It’s embarrassing. Worse, it’s insincere. As readers, as fans, it’s easy to get worn out and desensitized to repeated claims about the “greatest” this or the “most amazing” that. It stops meaning anything after a while.

And then I hear an album like Tarot Sport, and I think to myself, Well, shit. This is really fucking good. How else would I describe an album like this if I didn’t use words like “epic” and “Vangelis-esque” and “erupting with sweeping, psychotropic grandeur” and “the best album of the fourth quarter of 2009 (so far)”? I can’t. And so I’m back at square one.

I should back up a bit.

I didn’t much care for Street Horrrsing. Idiotic band name. Idiotic haircuts. And the music, the thing behind all the flashy cultural signifiers, was grating, preening, directionless, full of obnoxious brattles and yelps that neither shocked nor awed. But several folks, some of whose opinions I hold in high regard, thought differently. So I bit my tongue.

But when I heard the Buttons were tapping Andrew Weatherall to produce their next album, I softened my guard. Weatherall, after all, was one of the key figures who put the -adelica in Screamadelica, and it seemed unlikely he would make things worse. Now: I don’t want to overstate his importance. It’s possible he did little more than readjust microphone placement in the studio and press “Record.” I don’t know. But the transformation from the teeming mass of Danse Manatee-derivative noise on Street Horrrsing to what we get on Tarot Sport is nothing short of remarkable.

Perhaps the Animal Collective analogy is appropriate. This music goes beyond noise. It’s noisy, for sure, but here the dithering squabble of stereo distortion is spruced up and coupled with the blissful modulation of synthetic sine waves that embrace passionately and meaningfully, resulting in the climactic epiphanies of late-period post-rock (I’m thinking of, for example, Mogwai’s Happy Music for Happy People). Plus, there are the unmistakable tropes of dance music — the lithe, expansive percussion; the trance-inducing swooshes and hypnotically repetitive bleeps and boops — that set my heart racing and pupils dilating. The songs on Tarot Sport follow the structure and benchmarks of older music that I find familiar, and maybe that’s why I’m so willing to give myself over to the easy and well-tested moments of climax, but Fuck Buttons permute their influences here in a way that feels fresh and invigorating. Much like Animal Collective have done of their past few records, Fuck Buttons have taken the primordial, Ur-language universality of noise and pared it with more popular, futuristic forms of songwriting.

Ultimately, this is music that’s meant to be ascendant. Just look at the song titles — “Space Mountain,” “Surf Solar,” “Flight of the Feathered Serpent,” and the granddaddy of them all, “Olympians” — these tracks are designed for climbing over peaks and launching into the atmosphere. And you can feel it when you listen to it — upswing is followed by more upswing, crescendo is piled upon crescendo, and just when you think you’ve plateaued, just when you think you’ve reached as far as you can go, they find a way to take you higher yet. It’s like hopping aboard a Trimaxian Drone Ship and soaring weightlessly through the air at unimaginable speeds while the geometric shapes of developed land below parse and multiply and invert and reveal themselves to be parts of much larger patterns that could only be seen from this new, higher vantage point.

Groan.

I know, it’s all a bit overwrought, but isn’t that why we all subject ourselves to the continual headache that is the hunt for new music? For the occasional and absurdly grandiose “Eureka!” moment of discovery? It’s okay not to be embarrassed by that feeling when you find it.

Download audio file (lou-waiting.mp3)
Lou Reed – I’m Waiting for My Man
(from American Poet)

Fuck me, I’m bad at this. I know, I know, after three-plus years of blogging you’d think I’d be past the stage of intermittently putzing out like a complete amateur, but there you have it. I’m a schlub. In the past, when no one read the blog, it didn’t matter if I zoinked out on my duties. But now that like four or five people actually read this damn thing on a semi-regular basis (Hi, Mom!), lately I’ve been getting called out in public for my laziness, obligating me to write off my mental flightiness and leisure pursuits as though they were some cheeky personal foibles, like I was some minor character in a Bronte novel, which of course never goes over well. Sheesh.

Anyway, sorry to keep you waiting. Here’s a taste of what you might have missed while I was out, but which you’ve probably already caught up on by now:

-St. Vincent came to St. Louis, and I was absolutely smitten.

-The Kanye West/Lady Gaga tour was canceled, only to be replaced by a Lady Gaga/Kid Cudi tour, which is a major downer.

-Kanye did release a short film with Spike Jonze that managed to be both entertaining and arty. Win?

-I was lucky enough to catch the Dethklok/Mastodon/Converge/High on Fire tour, and even though I cowered far in the back I still managed to get subdued, sullied, desecrated, and other adjectives that indicate I received a thorough good thrashing from monster guitars. Also, I realized that the most “metal” thing I own is a heather gray herringbone cardigan, which, believe me, is not as bad as the time I wore a polo shirt and pleated khakis to see Switchblade Symphony because I obviously don’t have to foresight to purchase fetish wear for casual nights out on the town.

-Scotter ate at a Cracker Barrel.

-He probably composted the leftovers.

-Jumbling Towers were interviewed by Tiny Mix Tapes, and for some reason the pull quote is about prayer.

-Phaseone dropped a new mixtape and received accolades from P4K.

-There was a huge turnout for the almost all-local Gentlemen Auction House/Blind Eyes/out-of-town-band/Beth Bombara show at Off Broadway last Saturday, which was great to see. Sadly, I was reminded why it’s not cost-effective to drink Maker’s Mark exclusively all evening.

-Sunset Rubdown are playing Off Broadway tonight. Have you seen the video for “Black Swan” yet? It’s got skeletons.

-I listened to a lot of old Weezer and Nirvana, because I’m feeling weirdly nostalgic for the ’90s and because advertising is telling me that I should drop everything and rush to the mall to buy a $70 designer flannel.

-Some bands released some songs. Your life was forever changed.

-This happened.

Uhm, I think that about sums it up. Or, that’s it for now. More later.

Download audio file (Islands-Heartbeat.mp3)
Islands – “Heartbeat”
(from Vapours)

I know I linked to this article last week, but it bears repeating:

More importantly, those years saw indie types paying more attention to things outside the indie world– this website’s coverage, for instance, widened significantly– and indie, in its thieving magpie way, started seizing at things, assimilating them. People embraced house acts, got excited about the possibility of “dance punk,” dabbled with underground rap. At first, plenty of folks derided these trends as faddish, embarrassing, or somehow even elitist, like the people who went for them were trying to fool someone. But as far as I can tell, things changed. You can see it just visually: Neon t-shirts and skinny pants and fashion and “hipster”ism– the stuff some indie kids recoiled from when new electro came along– won out. Daft Punk and M.I.A. have big old parking spots reserved for them in the indie world. All sorts of new things wound up getting absorbed into indie’s sensibility, because indie is a superb thief: It gets into things and then picks up their trappings. Electro, minimal techno, French house, the production on hip-hop and R&B singles– at this point you probably don’t think twice when an indie act grabs something from these genres; you don’t think twice about whether the result is “indie” or not. It’s assimilated, just another option.

Now, I have no idea if Nitsuh Abebe was listening to an advance copy of Islands’ Vapours when he was writing this, but he might as well have been. Nick Thorburn is a notably eclectic songwriter, whose own style of indie rock is as influenced by twee-folk and progressive rock as it is by calypso and dancehall (which is not even touching on his many forays into hip-hop, whether in collaboration with rappers like Busdriver or Subtitle, or as an idiosyncratic side-project like Reefer or Th’ Corn Gangg). The result is almost always unexpected and weirdly appealing. But now we’ve reached a point where he can release a song like “Heartbeat” that mixes the cloudy keyboard timbre of Elton John’s “Daniel” with a double-tracked lead vocal that borrows heavily from contemporary auto-tuned R&B, and rather than coming across as something startling or bewildering, it sounds comfortable, pleasant. It feels safe. I could totally imagine hearing this on a TV show. And that’s not an insult; it’s a solid tune. It’s just a prime example of indie assimilation bringing about new syntheses of taste, where things will go from here is anybody’s guess.

CLERK
Can I help the next person in line?

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER
(approaches, hands clerk a document)
I’m plowing through a stir fry like it’s the last one ever
Tied to my porch with chicken wire and clever
When Vargas dips his fingers into my sticky rice
And up floats a letter from the DMV, very nice
I’d better run down and get my license renewed
Or my cargo line of plastic dolls from Beaconsville is screwed

CLERK
OK, let’s take a look. (pause) Um, is this gentleman with you?

ELEANOR
My brother Matt had my shoes in the cab of his blue truck
He drove out to the bad side of the bluffs with Tony, just my luck
I used the old Fiesta from the parade float to track him down
But some pirates stole the gas so Matt drove me into town
He wouldn’t give my shoes back til I told him my plans
That’s why we’re both here in line getting fluorescent tans

CLERK
Oh.

Read the whole thing here. I laughed, anyway.