Flak Magazine: Eric Wittmershaus' 2002 annotated mix CD, 01.31.03

Like most of the tracks on Neon Golden, "One Step Inside Doesn't Mean You Understand" requires a few listens before its intricate pop brilliance settles in. The arrhythmic, almost randomly plucked strings that open the song are its heart, but the group keeps adding layers: cello, piano, contra bass, a slew of sampled beats and live drums and, topping it all off, Markus Acher's fragile vocals — very much like a Teutonic, less precious Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian.

The comparison hardly does Acher justice, though. Unlike Murdoch's band, The Notwist continues to evolve with each album; with Neon Golden, the group has assembled the year's most cerebral, romantic, affecting pop album. Neon Golden came out in Europe in January on City Slang. Domino is giving the album its long-overdue (but still appreciated) US release on Feb. 25, with the band tentatively scheduled to tour the States in April.

2. "Check Fraud" | Fog | Fog | Ninja Tune | 3:18

The same lo-fi, indie-rock-meets-hip-hop aesthetic that drives "Pneumonia" (see the main list) makes "Check Fraud" go. But while "Pneumonia" has that air of bedroom pop slackerness about it, the instrumental "Check Fraud" has a lovely movie-score-on-a-budget feel. Equally solid is the Kid Koala remix from the 12" single, also on Ninja Tune.

3. "June" feat. Copywrite | RJD2 | Deadringer | Def Jux | 6:04

Lyrically, Def Jux's artists have done a great job leaving behind mainstream hip-hop's celebrations of tripped-out cars, hot women and the gangsta lifestyle. And the label's catalog is as solid musically as anyone's. If RJD2's stunning, mostly instrumental Def Jux album, Deadringer, has a fault it's that two of the three songs with vocals feature emcees bragging about how RJD2 and, presumably, Def Jux are redefining hip-hop. Guest MCs Blueprint and Jakki's pumping up of RJD2 and the Def Jukies sounds like played-out hip-hop braggadocio any way you slice it. What's more, the music these guys are pumping up, which draws endless comparison's to DJ Shadow's first record, doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel. RJD2 digs up some great samples and mixes with the best of them, but let's be honest: The wheel was reinvented a long time ago.

That's why "June" is the most refreshing track on the album. Copywrite's rapping bookends the song, which has a long instrumental bit in the middle. The beats sound more like they've been lifted from a record by Can than some old R&B 45 as Copywrite sings first of the hardscrabble life of being an indie hip-hop MC "ain't all nice and fine/ sometimes I feel my whole life's a rhyme." But the song's final verse, in which Copywrite laments the passing of what sounds like an emotionally distant, frequently absent father, is the best moment on an album full of great ones:

"I keep the time we shared close/ It sucks to lose/ It also sucks we had to share the month of June/ I would have shared eternal time if it were left/ Each month I celebrate my birth I'm reminded of your death"

It seemed like all anyone in music could talk about for the first few months of 2002 was Title TK, the Breeders' long-awaited follow-up to 1994's Last Splash. Now that the year's over, no one's talking about one of the year's most profound flops. Every music critic in their mid-20s hoped Title TK would take us back to the days when we rocked out in our bedrooms and cars to songs like "When I Was a Painter" and "I Just Wanna Get Along." But Title TK's lone moment of divinity was a minimalist ballad. It's a lovely tune, but it's no fountain of youth.

Blackalicious' "Blazing Arrow" steps into the gap the Breeders failed to fill. A bouncy, fun hip-hop tune that samples Harry Nilsson's "Me and My Arrow," "Blazing Arrow" urges the listener to "make your disc and play this tape in your Camaro." And at just 2:40, it's the perfect mix-CD candidate.

Equally fun is Mr. Lif's "Get Wise '91," which features a looped, old-school house-party beat coupled with devastatingly political lyrics that describe President Bush as "using evil's axis/ to ask us/ to all become fascists." The whole Emergency Rations EP pairs Lif's diatribes against America's post-Sept. 11 foreign policy with the slick, catchy production. It'd be an insidious bit of propaganda if most of Lif's lyrics weren't so damn right-on.

7. "Ping Pong" | Anti-Pop Consortium | Arrhythmia | Warp | 2:43

A-PC uses a ping-pong ball bouncing between speakers to set up the beat, dropping it in and out of the song like a chorus. The verbal wordplay gets a bit too intense, and the emcee seems to be showing off a bit — "White-wig slang Wolfgang/ English chamber orchestrating a deadly banger cliff-hanger/ The Stranger with anger/ Prospect Park, the strangler." Yeah, right. But just when you think the song's about to bog down in three-dollar lingo, they let loose with, "Yo priest, throw the shit that keeps them on their toes like ballerinas." Catchy stuff.

See the main mix.

9. "I've Got Pictures of You in Your Underwear" | Ballboy | Club Anthems | SL | 3:36

Including this song is cheating a bit because Club Anthems is a compilation of singles released in 2000 and 2001. But the singles all came out in the UK, and I didn't have any of them, so... Ballboy does a good job of mixing the Scottish spoken-word stylings of Looper and Arab Strap with jangly, Smiths-esque pop goodness. This song, "Donald in the Bushes With a Bag of Glue" and "I Hate Scotland" all merited consideration for this little compilation.

10. "To Us" | Cranebuilders | Various Artists — A Charabang Trip to the Lights | Earworm | 2:50

A Charabang Trip to the Lights compiles 19 songs from six bands that were due to be released as 7" singles on Earworm, a tiny label out of England that, since 1996, has put out an eclectic, well-packaged catalog of releases by relatively obscure bands. (Most of the releases have been on vinyl, to boot.) But Dominic Martin, the guy who runs Earworm, decided to call it a day last fall and, rather than let unreleased music wither on the vine, released A Charabang Trip to get the songs into the ears of eager listeners. "To Us" isn't anything mind-blowing or earth-shattering (For those keeping score at home, it would sound right at home on Galaxie 500's debut album, Today, a great album but hardly a bastion of originality in its own right). Nonetheless, it's a fun little nugget of pop goodness from a consistent compilation of pop songs.

I wanted this track for the main mix, but I yielded to Wayne's love of "The Mess Inside" from the same album. For me, "Jenny" is the superior song, if not for its chorus of "The pirate's life for me!" then surely for this couplet:

And you pointed your headlamp toward the horizon/ We were the one thing in the galaxy God didn't have his eyes on

I avoided writing about "Upward Over the Mountain" in my review of The Creek Drank the Cradle because I knew I'd end up writing about it at the end of the year. But then, as was the case with All Hail West Texas above, Wayne and I both suggested different tracks from the same album. We went with Wayne's pick, "Promising Light," for the main mix because that song is shorter and it let us get another song into the feature.

Nonetheless, I can't resist the urge to comment on it at length. Sam Beam excels at creating warm, old-fashioned blues (the kind found on Seymour's 78 RPM records in Ghost World, not the kind played by Blueshammer in the same movie). Like a lot of blues songs, "Upward Over the Mountain" is a love song. But it stands out from the rest of an album full of great love songs because it's about parental, rather than romantic, love, chronicling the dual effect of distance and years on the relationship between a mother and son.

And though it's a topic that I, a Midwesterner living in California, can especially relate to, nearly every guy who doesn't hate his mom will find something to identify with in Beam's languid tune, which takes its name from a line in the chorus: "So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten/ Sons are like birds flying upward over the mountain."

13. "The Charles C. Leary" | Devendra Banhart | Oh Me Oh My ... The Way the Day Goes By the Sun is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit | Young God Records | 2:50

Were Devendra Banhart not a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, his music would be "outsider music." Like a lot of the stuff on my year-end list (The Mountain Goats, Alexander McGregor, Fog), Banhart's work was recorded at home on a four-track. But unlike those artists, Banhart's offbeat tunes recall the madcap, half-crazed tunesmanship of Syd Barrett, Daniel Johnston or Tiny Tim rather than anything conventional within the folk or indie rock pantheons.

Make no bones about it, Oh Me Oh My has its difficult spots. When listening to Oh Me, Oh My... it's hard to avoid feeling like the victim of an elaborate practical joke, as Banhart cranks up the nonsensical dial to 11. Yet within Banhart's silly, strange world are moments of divinity. The sea chantey "The Charles C. Leary" is one such moment. The song's so lo-fi you can hear cars in the background. Yet that's part of what makes the song work — just before Banhart really lets loose, a car accelerates on the distant, Southern California pavement.

Alexander McGregor's self-released mini-album has fueled many a late-night Flak writing/editing binge. Even though it clocks in at about 25 minutes, it's the kind of disc you can put on repeat and listen to for hours. This is the only omission from the main mix I'm kicking myself over not getting in. But it's six minutes long, illustrating a downside of home-taped music: These guys don't make radio edits.

"Making Movies" is the simplest of Aguirre's multi-instrumental stews. Though he works in a mournful muted trumpet near the end, the majority of the song features the songwriter singing in English and Spanish, an homage to his musical (and familial) roots. It's a breathtaking tune on a hell of an album, and would have made the main mix were it not six minutes long.

Aguirre Returns will get an official reissue at the hands of Boston startup Eskimo Labs. Watch their website for further details.

15. "See America Right" | The Mountain Goats | Tallahassee | 4AD | 1:52 | Flak review | mp3

See the main mix.

16. "Blizzard of '96" | The Walkmen | Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone | Startime | 3:02

Last year's mix CD featured The Walkmen's "We've Been Had," which cropped up on a 2001 EP only to show up again on Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone (and, more recently, a Saturn commercial), giving the Walkmen the unique distinction of having two songs from the same album appear on consecutive best-of lists. Yet Another Rock Band From New York, The Walkmen stand out from the herd because they know their way around like a recording studio like no one else.

All the songs on Everyone have the same, warm blankety aesthetic. It's as if the band recorded its debut album inside a giant chamber of an underwater cave, with one microphone hanging from the ceiling. Tambourine and loudly thumped bass drum and toms anchor the song, but its heart is the reverb-drenched saloon piano that crops up again and again on the album. The band has struck gold with this technique and, though the superlatives are already flying left and right in this feature, has come up with the best produced album of the year.

A three-piece outfit whose songs owe as much to noise-rock acts like My Bloody Valentine and Medicine as they do anything from the world of hip-hop, Dälek knows how to bring tha noize. The group toured the country relentlessly in 2000 and 2001; if you saw them opening for De La Soul, Prince Paul, the Roots, Solex or any number of artists you didn't forget it.

Showing rap-rock hybrids can be innovative, challenging stuff that goes beyond Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit or Rage Against the Machine, Oktopus and DJ Still lay down a dense, impenetrable fog of record scratches, guitar wash, industrial beats and whatever odds and ends they dig up, while the group's MC, also named Dälek, raps intensely over the top of the mix. Easy listening this ain't, but it's beautiful noise.

See the main mix.

19. "Earthcrusher" | Mr. Lif | I, Phantom | Def Jux | 3:47

See the main mix.

Ending things with global thermonuclear war seemed a little bleak, so instead, I conclude with this vaguely optimistic little tune from Baby Bird's Black Album, a 16-song disc of untitled tracks included in the six-CD boxed set The Original Lo-Fi, which was probably the best $40 I spent on music in 2002. The Black Album as a whole is weaker than the other five discs of Baby Bird material included in the set, but this is nice.

E-mail Eric Wittmershaus at ericw at flakmag dot com.