A Proper Pairing (Feeling Bad Never Felt So Good)

I've been meaning to write about Ben Pilgrim for ages (well, since October). "God Should Have Made You Ugly" got stuck in my ear and I compulsively listened to it for a month and promptly moved on. I was immediately reminded of that glorious song when I heard Sam Owens' "Kind of Man" yesterday.



"God Should Have Made You Ugly" is a bittersweet lament about the deadly combination of beauty and cruelty. The track is a sloppy single take, with a rough-hewn voice and acoustic guitar. The harmonica captures the sound of lamenting spot on.



Sam Owens' "Kind of Man" does not have a gorgeous demon to exorcise, but the song caught me with the same vibe as "GSHMYU". The issue is similar as this girl needs to go, but the attachments are reversed: She is hooked and won't let go. Owens takes an appropriately different approach, with his sweet voice and a soaring chorus, though the solo acoustic genre remains the same.





Ben Pilgrim - "God Should Have Made You Ugly" [MySpace] [Last.fm]

Sam Owens - "Kind of Man" [MySpace]

Death Cab: New Album May '08

Or so their website (and the entire internet) says. Funnily enough, I was listening to a string of DCFC songs that had come up on shuffle when I read about the new album.

Death Cab for Cutie - 405 (Acoustic) [via]

Re: Pitchfork: The Top 100 Tracks of 2007

I have a few observations that have been rolling around in my head for the past week and a half. First of all, my immediate reaction to the thought of a top 100 list was the usual, "Who can accurately list the top 100 of anything?" I stand by this statement and it is fairly obvious Pitchfork's list loses integrity around number 20.

In general I can rarely take issue with any top 10 list. For any song/album/movie to make it into somebody's top 10 it has to be fairly pleasurable. But honestly, "All of My Friends" [youtube] at #1? Of all the tracks on Sound of Silver, you go with the 7 and a half minute, 1 chord exercise? Okay, technically it is two chords, a Bmaj and a Dmaj9, but the chords are so skeletal that the B/E perfect 5th is played the entire time. How can any self-respecting person listen to those two notes for 7 and a half minutes? I've never quite bought in to massive adoration of LCD Soundsystem (another song at #7?!), but this song is nowhere as good as Pitchfork (and a few others) claims it is.

On a less critical note, something that jumped out at me as I listened to the list was the concentration of tracks that ran for more than 5 minutes. 37 of them, in fact. This fact resulted in my spending way too much time making my way through the list.