The Opening Acts

Pas/Cal – Last Christmas

The fine folk at the Romantic Air Recording Company have a 9-song sampler of holiday tunes that can be downloaded for free. It’s called Christmas Party and features 3 contributions from the equally-fine folk in Computer Perfection. As mentioned on the Computer Perfection site, this was released last year, albeit just as the holidays were ending. Thanks to the Gregorian calendar, it is once-again relevant and well worth your time.

Click here for the album and its accompanying artwork.

Previously:
From The Inbox: Free Xmas EP From Wiaiwya
More Xmas Goodies

Related:
Finally, Computer Perfection

There are at least 17,000 post-millenial songs in my various hard drives. I listened to every single one of them yesterday afternoon, and picked out the fifteen best songs.

Some things:

- The first half of the second sentence above is a complete lie. I actually spent about an hour on this.
- This is obviously not in any way comprehensive, as I have neither the time nor inclination to make some massive, 500 song list that would better represent the music of the decade.  My sole objective was to make a mix that flowed nicely together. 
- We’ve already covered Gordon Downie, The National, and Richard Hawley in prior end-of-decade posts (see links below), so I’ve left them out.
- Favorite songs from 2009 are getting their own post, probably next Sunday, so they’re left out too.
- I love Stars and think the songs that comprise the first half of Set Yourself On Fire are damn-near perfect. However, I think Memphis’ “Incredibly Drunk On Whiskey” is even better, so the side-project wins out.
- I am not a Sufjan Stevens fan.  You could correctly say that I absolutely can not stand him. But I’ve got to give him props for “Come On! Feel The Illinoise!” – that’s just a wonderful song. The rest of that album gets on my fucking nerves, though.
- In doing a little bit of research – mainly to make sure that some of the earlier songs on here were released after 1999 – I came across this Pitchfork review for Lambchop’s Nixon. The writer is a fucking moron.
- If you like what you hear, please purchase the albums which feature these songs.
- If I had to pick 1 of these as my song of the decade, it would be the last one.

Press ‘Play’ on the Yahoo Media Thingy at the bottom left to listen to it as a mix. Or just listen to your favorites. Either way, enjoy the songs.

1) Lambchop – The Old Gold Shoe 
2) Beulah – A Good Man Is Easy To Kill
3) Pas/Cal – Poor Maude
4) Sufjan Stevens – Come On! Feel The Illinoise!
5) Memphis – Incredibly Drunk On Whiskey
6) Yo La Tengo – Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House
7) Sigur Ros – Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur
8) Okkervil River – The War Criminal Rises And Speaks
9) Broken Social Scene – Ibi Dreams Of Pavement (KCRW Session 11-08-05)
10) Destroyer – Your Blood
11) The Spinto Band – Oh Mandy
12) Crooked Fingers – Sleep All Summer
13) Jens Lekman – Shirin 
14) The Clientele – The House Always Wins
15) The Lucksmiths – Fiction

Agree? Disagree? Let me know your favorites (or chide my glaring omissions) in the comments.

Previous End Of Whateverness:
The Opening Acts’ Obligatory Album Of The Decade Post: Carl’s Choice
The Opening Acts’ Obligatory Band Of The Decade Post: Tyge’s Choice
The Opening Acts’ Obligatory Band Of The Decade Post: Carl’s Choice

In the nascent (i.e. crappy) days of this blog, an aimless ramble of mine eventually touched upon the goodness of Computer Perfection, a lovely group of poppy Michiganders spawned from the remnants of Pas/Cal.  The end of that post mentioned that Computer Perfection’s debut album would be released later in the year.

That was in January.  After a very long wait, “later in the year” finally turned into “this week”.  And that debut album turned into the snappily-named We Wish You Well On Your Way To Hell.

Here’s the lead-off track, which terrifically sets up the 11 tracks that follow:

Computer Perfection – Able Archer

And here is its accompanying video:

You can listen to 4 more songs over at the band’s website. Among those four songs is the incredible “Sweetie Pie”, whose ten minutes come dangerously close to achieving the second word in the band’s name.

Still more Computer Perfection can be heard at their Myspace page. Buy the album through Darla or Amazon (I recommend Darla, for they are wonderful people).

After The Zookeepers sent me the 47-second song that I posted last week, it got me thinking about other songs in my music collection that were around one minute long or less. By this I meant actual, fully-formed songs – not interludes or any other type of quick album filler.  A hasty perusal of my music collection yielded the following mix.

So sit back and enjoy what is, most likely, the shortest collection of songs you will ever hear.  As usual, my criteria for themed mixes is the following:  fuck you, I’m gonna do what I want.  The result of this is that a couple songs go a couple seconds over the one minute mark.  Deal with it.

This mix is dedicated to my ex-girlfriend, who always called me The Minuteman.  I assume it’s because of my vast knowledge of the American Revolution.  Yep, that must have been the reason.

Enjoy.

1) Silver Jews – Introduction II
2) Pulsars – Wisconsin
3) Stephin Merritt – Shall We Sing A Duet
4) The Lucksmiths – $30
5) Euros Childs – Cynhaeaf
6) Pavement – I Love Perth
7) Belle And Sebastian – I Don’t Want To Play Football
8) Max Tundra – Pocket
9) Casiotone For The Painfully Alone – Happy Mother’s Day
10) Pas/Cal – Grown Men Go-Go

Know of any other worthy one-minute songs? Let me know in the comments.

In between catching some baseball and a couple Stanley Cup games this weekend, I ended up watching the Bud Light Lime commercial with that song by Santigold about a hundred times. It didn’t bug me as much as I thought, which is a credit to the general awesomeness of the song. I don’t know how effective it is selling beer, though, as no song in the world is good enough to make me want to try Bud Light Lime. Piece-of-shit swill mixed with a touch of lime is still primarily piece-of-shit swill. But here I am talking about Bud Light Lime – the ad works. Fuckers.

Here are two of the more surprising songs that I’ve heard in commercials over the years:

The first one is from a couple months ago, when a song by The Boy Least Likely To ended up on a Coke commercial that aired during the Oscars telecast. I’ve never seen the commercial again, so I don’t know how effective it was. Good song, though.

The Boy Least Likely To – Be Gentle With Me

A couple years prior, “Bem, Please Come Home”, a very nice instrumental from PAS/CAL, found its way into a Saturn commercial. As a result, sales of Saturn vehicles went through the roof, fueling the good times of its recession-proof parent company, General Motors. Way to go, PAS/CAL!

Pas/Cal – Bem Please Come Home

Since all posts could use some pictures or video to spruce things up, we’ll end things with this Honda commercial, featuring a track from Great Lake Swimmers that I posted here before I knew that it was in a commercial. Now I know why it ended up being downloaded so many times. Good for them.

(photo from royalchild.com)

I’m late to the game on this one. Actually, I’m late to the game on just about everything nowadays. After spending a good chunk of 2008 on the road, I’m still far from being caught up in all the music that I missed while driving endlessly across the interstates. Fleet Foxes? Just heard them last week for the first time. The new Animal Collective album will have to wait, as I’ve yet to hear the Water Curses EP. And I’m still not sure what a vampire weekend is (OK, that one’s a lie). In order to maintain my hipster cred, I propose that being the last person to hear a hyped band is now cooler than being the first.

Computer Perfection were featured 1 year ago today (!) in mp3hugger. They’ve also been kudosed over at RCRD LBL and Earfarm (one of my irrational rules for blog-reading is to stop reading as soon as a reverential Goonies reference is made, hence I didn’t get too far into this article). Though all 4 members were also in PAS/CAL, Computer Perfection has so far managed to avoid their former band’s penchant for overlong pop songs crammed with way-too-many ideas (though I will argue with anyone that “Poor Maude” from the Oh Honey, We’re Ridiculous EP is the best song written in the current decade we’re in). In fact, they’ve accomplished the rare feat of writing a 10-minute song (“Sweetie Pie”, which can be found on their Myspace page) that not only doesn’t feel overlong at all, but is remarkably filler-free.

Apologies for that convoluted paragraph (it’s like a PAS/CAL song in writing!) – I will reign in my overuse of paranthesis for the rest of this posting.

Moving on: Even though they have been accumulating bits of praise throughout the past year, Computer Perfection have yet to officially release an album. According to their Mypace page, this should be rectified at some point early this year. This of course means, then, that I’m not late to the game after all.

Here’s an mp3, which was humbly “borrowed” from their Virb page:

Computer Perfection – Able Archer [Play]