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Cole Moore Odell
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What’s Big Boi? What’s Outkast? What’s Dirty South? What’s hip hop? What’s popular music? What’s music? What’s this dark place where I seem to have wedged my head?
Contrary to this thread, M83 and Real Estate are not in a steel cage death match or the movie Highlander. There can be more than one good record out this week. It’s not a zero sum game. If you love M83, try not to worry so much about a single post on a single site.
I’d be curious to know when Kip thinks the House of Love went off the rails. For me it was somewhere in the middle of Babe Rainbow. Up through the “butterfly” album they were firing on all cylinders. I even love the Spy in the House of Love b-sides/throwaways collection.
Yeah, you’re right, I just think a music site ought to know better.
What is it with Stereogum *and* Pitchfork both calling “A Song For You” a Donny Hathaway tune? Not only did Leon Russell write it, he recorded it and put it on his debut solo album a full year before Hathaway covered it for his own second record. Dozens of people recorded “A Song for You”–you might as well call it an Andy Williams (who took it to #82 on the charts) or Carpenters song. I guess it’s because Hathaway has some kind of cred while Russell is, unjustifiably, a semi-forgotten classic rock footnote, but this attribution is just incorrect. There’s no reason to single out Hathaway in relation to Vernon’s cover.
As someone who was there in ’92 I can attest that there’s no “apparently” about it; “Here” went onto the first mixtape I made for my new senior-year-of-college girlfriend…who subsequently became my wife. While I can’t credit Pavement entirely, they were in there somewhere.
This list is mostly interesting to me in the way it shows how younger (I’m assuming based on the “apparently” comment) fans regard the albums. For me it was a straight line from Slanted downward. Actually, for me Wowee marks the pivot point where the band’s tendency toward archness started to overwhelm its tendency toward obscurity, and where its burgeoning musicianship started to annoy me–all those on-a-dime start/stops and sing-songy vocal lines that mirrored exactly what the instruments were doing.
For my money, I agree with some of the commenters above–the band was at the peak of its powers during the “Watery, Domestic” recordings–especially if you include the b-sides to Trigger Cut, “Greenlander” and the amazing songs from their Peel Session highlighted by “Kentucky Cocktail.” Given that I like them best at their most oblique, I think it’s fitting that my favorite album would be one that doesn’t actually exist.