Timely Tunes ~ a new feature

When your kids know more than you do about something, it’s only smart to take advantage of that. For instance, my daughter, Lisa, built this website for me and provides tech support. And now I’m utilizing my son’s encyclopedic knowledge of music to provide a new feature for Life With Dee.

So often I hear people my age make the claim that there isn’t any good music being produced these days. And while I *do* think the late 60s/early 70s was an amazing decade for music, there is still SO much music being made which is worth listening to.

Several years ago Chris spent a few hours playing songs for me in order to gauge my tastes in music. He would play something from his extensive collection of downloaded music, I would listen for a bit and then give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Basically, this was live Pandora. This gave him a really good grasp of the music I like and ever since we both subscribed to Spotify he has made it his mission to send me songs and expand my music listening repertoire.

Now, I realize not everyone has a personal music curator so I decided to share mine. I asked Chris to periodically select a few current songs that I would like, write a little bit about each one and then make a playlist. These playlists are not just the new songs but incorporate older, familiar music, as well. Chris started making mix CDs back when he was a young teenager and quickly developed a reputation for his skill.  I still have all the ones he made me through the years and some of his friends have told him those are the only CDs they have in their cars. Now he makes Spotify playlists which means I can share some of them with you.

So, without further ado, here is the first edition of:

 “Timely Tunes”

by Christopher Piercy

• Kurt Vile – “Pretty Pimpin” (from b’lieve I’m goin down…, 2015)

Kurt Vile makes music that sounds simultaneously of the future and the past. He makes music that sounds effortlessly unfussy, yet perfect, in the way that Neil Young did at his best. His last album, Wakin On A Pretty Daze, was one of the best records of recent memory, and if this first single is any indicator, his follow-up is going to be pretty stunning as well.

 

• Destroyer – “Times Square” (from Poison Season, 2015)

Vancouver’s Dan Bejar has been incrementally refining his idiosyncratic id since 1996 as the frontman of Destroyer, as a periodic contributor to The New Pornographers, and as a member of Swan Lake. He winds his way through labyrinths of abstract lyrics that remain emotionally vivid, and his last two full-length records with Destroyer, 2011’s modern classic Kaputt and this year’s equally strong and engaging Poison Season, have seen him embrace a smoother musical palate without losing any of the lyrical edge of his earlier work. “Times Square” is one of his best pop compositions yet, with an arrangement that wouldn’t sound out of place on Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town”.

 

• Beach House – “Levitation” (from Depression Cherry, 2015)

Sometimes consistency can be the bane of artistic expression. But every so often, a band stumbles onto a sound so perfect, that to drift too far from the blueprint would be ridiculously counter-productive. Beach House have been one of those rare bands for five albums now who haven’t strayed too far from their basic dream pop sound and still managed to release a nearly perfect discography. The duo, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, continue to make music that sounds eternal.

 

• Diplo & Sleepy Tom – “Be Right There” (Single, 2015)

Diplo has been an inescapable thread in the dance music fabric for a decade now, from his early Hollertronix mixes which highlighted Baltimore club music and Brazilian baile funk, to his collaborations with M.I.A., his work as part of festival mainstays Major Lazer (whose #1 hit “Lean On” was easily one of the best songs of 2015 so far), and more recently as one half of Jack Ü with Skrillex and as a pop music titan; producing hits for Madonna and making Justin Bieber palatable on the inescapable “Where Are Ü Now”. When I first saw him, a decade ago, he DJ’d in a tiny tent to less than 200 people, but the last time I saw him, the crowd was in the multiple thousands. You can try to ignore him or lump him in with the rest of the milquetoast EDM producers churning out interchangeable molly-popping festival “hits”, but I think that would be selling him short when he composes fully-formed pop songs as pleasurable as this.

Christopher Piercy used to blog at Silence in Architecture and his mother keeps hoping he will revive the site. In the meantime, for a glimpse of  how music has impacted his life, you can read “A Personal Music History” which he wrote a few years ago. It also explains quite a bit about our weird family.