The problem comes when something good is released, but doesn’t find its way onto eMusic. Then I have a dilemma – do I wait and see if it turns up later (which it often does, 2-3 months after release), or do I turn to an alternative option – buying the album on iTunes (frequently DRM-plagued) or Amazon (no DRM, just the stinging guilt of disloyalty to my girlfriend…), or getting the CD (no DRM, less guilt, more physical objects cluttering up my apartment…)

The upshot is often that I’ll dither for quite a while after a record comes out before shelling out cash for it, which means I’m sometimes hopelessly out of date on key releases.

So it is with Fleet Foxes, whose album I finally got around to buying in November, some 5 months after its actual release. I don’t feel completely left out on this one – I saw them play a fantastic show at SXSW in March, so I knew what some of the fuss was about. But still, 5 months is a long time to wait to properly listen to what is, in my opinion, the best album of the year.

Let’s get the cringe-worthy crap out of the way first. Beach Boys, Crosby Stills and Nash, Simon and Garfunkel, blah blah blah.

What’s fantastic about the Fleet Foxes’ first album (called, originally, “Fleet Foxes”) is that, yes, it reminds you of lots of acts. But really, it isn’t like any of them. Actually achieving this these days is a surprisingly difficult feat to pull off – just ask Coldplay (“here’s our Radiohead song; here’s our U2 song; here’s our Eno song…”).

The Beach Boys references seem to come from the solidly surf-style guitar underpinning many of the more energetic songs, whilst the more ‘folksy’ comparisons are obviously picked up from the combination of soft acoustic guitar and shameless harmonising.

You can keep comparing – at their crescendo (on, say, “Heard Them Stirring”) the choir-like harmonisations sound more like the most triumphal moments of Sufjan Stevens’ “Illinoise”. Or maybe the Polyphonic Spree, minus-tiresome-cult-overtones. The record is also awash with reminiscences (deep bass, those surf guitars) of the Crystal Skulls, which is unsurprising given Christian Wargo’s appearance.

(Side Note: searching for the Crystal Skulls on Youtube is painful, thanks to a glut of Indiana-Jones-related nonsense, still, here’s a live performance:

)

I could bang on and on and on about the Fleet Foxes record – it’s a rare thing in being an album which never really lets up, deeply satisfying little hooks and turns falling from it throughout its length. Rare is the day, these days, when I actually listen to an album without skipping at least 1 track.

And, in keeping with the season, it offers up an unmistakably wintery/Christmassy song which is (oh rare and precious thing) actually not completely annoying:

Yay! Snow!

They’re never far from the surface of the band’s songs, often taking on central roles in the way a guitar might elsewhere, and the effect is beautiful. It’s a refuge from the standard guitar-bass-drums-vocals formula which makes up a large portion of modern Rock.

I have a particular fondness for horns in popular music, which I can trace back to the protracted Britpop period. For many people, Britpop might be most memorable as a Tabloid-newspaper-fueled “feud” between Oasis and Blur (with Jarvis Cocker standing bemusedly off to one side muttering about underwear), but to me there was a much easier, and more rewarding way to establish the ebb and flow of the movement – horns. Namely, the Kick Horns. Whenever I bought a new CD, I’d scan the liner notes for evidence of the Kick Horns’ presence. You could claim to be “Britpop” without them, but it all rang a bit hollow.

The thing about the Kick Horns, interesting as their ubiquity was, their contribution was generally to add an upbeat, triumphal air to Britain’s poppy opuses. Or opii. Or whatever the correct plural is. Horns these days though, they’ve moved on a bit. Rather than being the shiny detailing on a song which is underpinned by something else, they’ve moved a little more into the fore, and broadened their range – from Jazz stylings to Mariachi leanings to Marching Band pomp.

And yet, important as the horns are to Beirut, it’s actually deeply unfair of me to focus on them. Beirut’s music is made of a far more complex interplay of elements. Accordion; trombone; violin; Jack Condon’s distinctive voice; wheely bins.

Um, well, at least, there’s wheely bins in this fantastic version of Nantes, recorded in the streets of Paris:

Since Simon is firmly stuck in the music of an increasingly distant decade, the premise here is simple: to highlight interesting artists and tracks which are, ahem, somewhat more recent. Using the same meandering-narrative-spliced-with-Youtube format which has served him so well.

How recent is “more recent”? I’m starting with a “last 5 years” rule-of-thumb, hopefully with a heavier emphasis on new(ish) releases, as and when I get my hands on them.

We’re kicking off somewhere completely arbitraty, mainly because this song happens to be the current one which I can’t skip past if I see it skit by on the iPhone.

Behold, Shearwater’s “Rooks”!

It’s beautiful, wintry, evocative, and depressing as fuck. Key “stuck on repeat” moment: 1:37 in when the lyric “we’ll sleep until the world of man is paralyzed” crashes into a mournful New Orleans trumpet line which would be startling if such things hadn’t been done to death by Beirut recently (more on them next week).

To be honest, the track is very much the stand-out on the album (“Rook”, Matador, 2008), which is certainly listenable, but not worthy of many repeat plays as a whole. Shearwater are often most interesting when they remind you of someone else.

“Home Life”, for example, makes me think of the interminable “Natural Beauty” which closes Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon”… not that it’s a musical reference which everyone is going to leap at, but it reminds me of sitting in a field in the middle of nowhere watching the sun go down when I was 15.

“The Snow Leopard”, on the other hand, spends a whole five minutes threatening to turn into Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song”, which is just odd.

But here’s something that’s been rattling around my head for a while, and it needs to get out.

Contemporary songs which capture the essence of a particular city. I have a burning need to compile lists of such things.

So let’s start with the easy ones…

Sufjan Stevens – Chicago (er, Chicago)

I’ve spent less than a day in Chicago, but besides being an incredible piece of music in its own right, this song sums up my limited experience of Chicago perfectly.

All things go, all things go

Somehow it sums up the closeted, slightly dirty feel of downtown Chicago, the run-down neighbourhoods nestling uncomfortably next to the freeways that lead into the brighter centre (freeways you can never access, due to construction work on the ramps).

It sums up the bus station, a nexus for crazy shouting homeless people tucked underneath the breathtaking modern city library. And it sums up Millenium Park, a beautiful space full of modern art which, by the nature of its newness, remains completely disconnected from the city which surrounds it.

Interpol – NYC (New York)

I had seven faces,
Never knew which one to wear.

The subway is a porno,
The pavements they are a mess.

Chosen with even less authority than my transitory experience of Chicago. See, I’ve never even set foot in NY. And yet somehow, I’m pretty sure that I know her already. She’s the slightly more glamourous, less historied sister to London, a city I know and love deeply; a place I still carry with me in my very bones.

And this song is about the inevitable relationship that you have with such cities. You have to love them, the instant you set foot in them, because they desperately need that love. And you need it too. You need to love and be loved in return.

And yes, the city will wear you out, make you scream to the roots of your soul, but still you’ll love her. Kiss her quietly in corners where no-one is looking. Because every second you spend in her, she shapes you and makes you into someone subtly different. Subtly (you like to think, as does she) better.

New York Cares.

Mountain Goats – You Or Your Memory (Los Angeles)

I checked into a bargain priced room on La Cienega
Gazed out of the curtains at the parking lot
Walked down to the corner store just before nightfall in my bare feet…

The only tangible connection between this song and LA is that reference to the major thoroughfare of La Cienega, but somehow, once that connection is made, the entire bittersweet lament becomes rooted in what must be, ultimately, one of the most impersonal urban areas in the world.

LA is lonely, even when you’re with good friends. Somehow it’s impossible to completely shut it out – the desperate posing, the horrow-show grimace of the waiter who’s achingly desperate to “make it” somehow. Wherever you go in Hollywood, Venice, Santa Monica… that same relentless distressing need.

This song isn’t about that need. It’s about the oppostite of that. About escape, hiding, dealing with personal grief in a cheap motel. And yet the psychic backdrop of LA, all its intensity versus the private moments we all need sometimes… that just makes it all the more poignant.

And down there in the dark I could see
The real truth about me

…and epihpany that LA perhaps needs a little more of.

And I’d love to continue in this vein, but, well, my mind fails me at this point. Nominations, please. Cities and their defining songs. Send me a postcard. Or an email. Or a comment.

Yes, that same end of the world so desperately craved by the Christian fundamentalists, waving their “No Fags” banners and eagerly scurrying to renounce womens’ reproductive rights. Because the end of the world will bring Jeebus sailing back down from heaven to cast away the sinners and take the righteous to heaven.

Only Jeebus probably ain’t coming. Even if he does, his dad is a sanctimonious asshole who long ago stopped caring or understanding what it means to be human; what it means to be a part of his apparently exalted creation. Do you really want to share the “heaven” of an entity given to frequent bouts of divine wrath; an entity whose idea of fun is a monstrous arboreal confidence trick? I’ll pass, thanks.

I guess I heard about original sin. I heard the dude blamed the chick. I heard the chick blamed the snake.

Because what it means to be human (or one small, raucous reflection of it at least) is right here, in a small downtown music venue somewhere in America, and it’s belting out impassioned storied songs about belief and confusion and delirium whilst Craig Finn bounces around stage growling out his bar-room narratives like a certifiable madman, and for an hour or so everything is wonderful.

Tonight’s poster-children, this moment’s embodiment of what it means to be human is called The Hold Steady.

“There’s so much joy goes into what we do up here” Finn says to the audience after a couple of songs, and it’s self-evident as each new tune starts up and he grins and gestures and mouths asides away from the microphone.

And what you realise, swept away in songs about weird parties (“they start lovely, but they get druggy and they get ugly and they get bloody”) and a messed-up little hoodrat named Hallelujah (“the kids all called her Holly”) is that this is art – it’s alive and it’s honest and it’s human.

It’s about the twisted beauty of the ugliest moments and the fractured joy which life brings us, and when you listen for a while you start to understand what makes the human race so fantastic – these highs that we can reach when we just let go and dive headlong into the moment.

No, it doesn’t stop the horror of the world – the bloody massacres, the natural disasters, the famines, the coming energy crisis or the dour-faced self-appointed Moral Guardians Of America. And it doesn’t remove our responsibility to do the best we can to mitigate the horror, however tiny or vast our individual and collective reach may be.

We may well find ourselves battling through a slew of this horror in the decades to come, and really there’s nothing so new about that. But when the opening chords of “Multitude of Casualties” fire up again in your head outside the venue, you realise something.

That even if we have to fight our way tooth and nail towards a better world, it is worth fighting for. Because we deserve a better world, a world where the delirious beautiful art of folks like the Hold Steady belongs. And whilst we do what we can to get to that place we should carry these moments in our hearts, a blueprint for a future where everyone can dance and smile and dream. A future where we all know how a resurrection really feels.

It’s strange to feel how a simple hop across the Atlantic can change the status of your musical tastes. Orbital are pretty well-known and loved in the UK and a lot of my friends there are die-hard fans. But all of a sudden I’m living somewhere where hardly anyone seems to have heard of them, except maybe in passing. A quick change of address and I’m suddenly “underground” (relatively speaking.)

But anyhow, here I am, back deep in the first dance music which ever really caught my attention.

And it’s not without a sense of sadness in a lot of ways, because Orbital have hung up their synthesisers (or so they say) – no more live gigs, festival or otherwise; no more albums.

Perhaps it’s for the best. After the release of “In Sides” in 1996 they’d really hit their highest notes. The later albums have a few beautiful moments on them, but they feel bitty and confused, the stand-out tracks like sore thumbs between increasingly ham-fisted attempts at doing something “the same, but different.”

Perhaps the saddest thing is that their attempt at a sort of “Greatest Hits” album, “Work”, is a neutered, weak version of all that was good about Orbital. In order to fit a broad selection of tracks on the disc nearly all the songs are in truncated 4-minute versions, often missing some of their most sublime moments. And the Metallica-ruined version of their classic _Satan_ should be burning in hell, not residing on this collection.

It feels like an attempt to appeal to two markets – would-be fans who find 15-minute techno opuses offputting, and absolute completists who’ll be happy with a few off-cuts which haven’t been published before. I don’t think either camp wins.

I’m a big fan of burning CD compilations for the car these days, so this week’s project has been a proper “Best of Orbital” collection. It ended up at 2 discs, slightly randomly organised on a whim, in an attempt to alternate faster, briefer songs with some of their longer, slower tracks (oh, and fit everything into 2 80-minute CDs.)

Anyway, apropos of nothing, here’s my eventual listing (which, I suspect, will spawn at least one comment on this piece… you know who you are…)

Disc 1

1. Forever (1994 – Snivilisation)
2. One Perfect Sunrise (2004 – Blue Album)
3. Lush 3.1 (Original) (1993 – published on “Work”)
4. Funny Break (One is Enough) (2001 – The Alltogether)
5. Impact (USA) (1994 – Diversions; original version on the Brown Album)
6. Satan (1991 – Green Album)
7. Way Out → (1999 – The Middle of Nowhere)
8. Halcyon + On + On (1993 – Brown Album)
9. Out There Somewhere? II (1996 – In Sides)

Disc 2

1. The Girl With The Sun In Her Head (1996 – In Sides)
2. Frenetic (2002 – Work)
3. Doctor? (2001 – The Alltogether)
4. Style (1999 – The Middle of Nowhere)
5. Sad But New (1994 – Special version of “Snivilisation” track “Sad But True”, published on the “Times Fly” EP)
6. Illuminate (Short Version) (2001 – Originally on The Alltogether; this version from “Work”)
7. Are We Here? (1994 – Snivilisation)
8. The Box (Single Version) (1996 – Full track on In Sides)
9. Belfast (1991 – Green Album)
10. Chime (Original) (1990 – Their first track)
11. Planet of the Shapes (1993 – Brown Album)

Yes, many people might have problems with this collection. All three of the “overly poppy” songs which “serious” Orbital fans love to hate (Funny Break, Frenetic and Illuminate) are on there, but that’s because I secretly love good pop, and Orbital really did know how to make it.

Some people can’t forgive the fact that Orbital finally made a studio version of their Doctor Who theme cover; always a staple of live sets that drove the crowd wild. But it captures the essence of what they did best on stage in front of a field-full of blissfully happy hippy types, and it reminds me of my stints as one of those hippies.

Elsewhere are some of their longest, most intricate tracks; some people find them boring and repetitive (Somewhere Out There, Are We Here? and Planet of the Shapes in particular). But these are the other end of the spectrum – the places where their compositional mastery comes to the fore – these songs are modern Classical Music.

A quick note on the inclusion of Sad But New, rather than the original. It’s broadly the same track, but begins with the final words of a John Major speech – “…new age travellers [applause]“. Something about that sums up the mid-90s in Britain for me – the awful scapegoating of minorities by a struggling Conservative Party; anyone who was alive in Britain at that time doesn’t need the rest of the speech to know what it said.

And yet by shortening it to a patently ridiculous soundbite, somehow the track makes a profound statement about those politics. All the more profound given that Michael Howard chose to rail against “travellers” again in the 2005 UK General Election. Plus ça change…

I could go on for years about what makes Orbital’s music amazing. It’s somehow very, very British, mixing introspection and the occasional dash of politics with odd moments of humour. And amazing breakbeats. And beautiful melodies.

So where to start if you’ve never partaken? Because really, even if you’re not into electronica, you should try it some time.

For me, the classic albums are probably the Brown Album ( Lush 3, Impact, Halcyon + On + On together with a 2-minute loop of Lt. Worf from Star Trek: TNG and some digeridoo!) and Snivilisation (an album with a consistent mood, and stand-outs Forever, Sad But True, Philosophy By Numbers and Are We Here?).

If you’re a little older than I am and not that into glowsticks and hundreds of Beats per Minute (hello Dad!), then In Sides probably contains the largest number of truly melodic, “classical” tracks (the two-part, 24-minute closer Out There Somewhere? has to be heard to be believed). Just beware of later versions which have a version of the theme to “The Saint” as the final song. It’s not a terrible track, but it’s not how the album was originally recorded.

But whatever, get hold of some Orbital and revel in the fact that the tiny, rainy island of my birth can bring forth such beautiful sounds.

Oh, and by the way, if you see your mom this weekend, would you be sure and tell her SATAN SATAN SATAN…