workoutwednesday

This one’s good for the arc trainer, I find.

Of course, you realize this means war…

132 bpm 1: Taken To The Front of The Line

Had a Dream (Sleeping with the Enemy) (edit) – Roger Hodgson Life During Wartime – Talking Heads Hell’s Half-Acre – Robbie Robertson Street Fighting Man – The Rolling Stones Love Of Life – Swans House On Fire – Arkarna Cope – Gigolo Aunts Give The Po’ Man A Break – Fatboy Slim Children of the Revolution – T. Rex Dad’s Gonna Kill Me – Richard Thompson (cooldown) The True Wheel – Brian Eno

Notes:

I swear, I only have two Roger Hodgson mp3s—and this is the other one. That said, there’s a great joy that radiates off his music, solo and with Supertramp, even when the song is as grim as this one; the jaunty piano, the rubbery slides of the fretless, the high, pure vocals and the surprisingly scorching guitar work. If you can get past the ponderous intro and the frankly unhinged video, it’s a fantastic piece of power pop. (I edited about a minute 15 off the album track, shaving the intro down and excising the long bridge to approximate the radio/video mix.)

I first heard this Swans track on an ancient mixtape I got from my friend and sometime artistic collaborator Oscar Stern. I lost track of Oscar for a few years, and all trace of his excellent comic Wu Wei appears to have disappeared from the Web. However, I am amused to find him now fronting a band of his own. Rock on, Sweet William.

You know, say what you will about the Joel Schumacher Batman movies (go ahead; you wouldn’t be the first and it wouldn’t be the worst) but between them the two soundtrack albums had some pretty heavy hipster cred. Maybe not so much the U2 and the Seal, but honestly: PJ Harvey, Sunny Day Real Estate, the Flaming Lips, Nick Cave, REM, Soul Coughing, Underworld, the Pumpkins, Moloko, Massive Attack… and, uh, these guys.

Gigolo Aunts came out of Potsdam by way of Boston, and fell by the wayside when Nirvana broke. Neither particularly punk nor (Syd Barrett references notwithstanding), particularly psychedelic, this is just good old-fashioned Loud Guitar Pop; in the early 90s, The Kool Kidz thought it was “too pretty.”

Story of my life.

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Urban decay on the elliptical machine, and the bright lights of my hometown won’t be getting any dimmer… 144 bpm 3: Bright Lights Big City The Lighthouse – Amon Tobin City of Blinding Lights – U2 IT – Genesis Shattered – The Rolling Stones Futures – Zero 7 with José González In-Between Days – The Cure London’s Mine – White Rose Movement Hymn From A Village – James Moaner – Underworld One of Us Is Gonna Die Young – The Ark (cooldown) We’re In Yr CornerI – Cornershop

Yeah, okay: This mix didn’t come together entirely by accident. But I didn’t have to massage the tracks too much on the technical end.

I’m a little disappointed with the way that “It”—excuse me, IT—works in this context. The (second-) most tuneful and straightforward rock song on all The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, it—I beg your pardon, IT—suffers from a bad mix; the drums have no punch, and the bass just sort of meanders around when it should be driving the song.

Note the segue from the line “It is only rock and roll, but I like it” into a Rolling Stones song. Is very clever, yes? Is funny joke! Everyone please to laugh now!

There’s a neat symmetry to José González’s collaboration with Zero 7. González, of course, first made a name for himself (in the States, anyway) with his cover of The Knife’s “Heartbeats,” taking a heavily electronic song and turning it into a folky ballad: now one of his original folky ballads is transformed into piece of a glitchy electronica. Is very clever, yes?

To accompany “Moaner,” I almost linked to a YouTube clip of a segment from The Vagina Monolgues with the same title. Is very clever, yes?

I’ve worked out to this mix for months, and the unexpected entrance of “One Of Us Is Gonna Die Young” skunks me every. Single. Time.

Lastly: I cannot vouch for the reliability of those Cornershop lyrics; yeah, they’re from the official artist site, but I wouldn’t put it past Tjinder to fuck with us, would you? Sing along if you dare.

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I’m writing this on a Monday, and yesterday read an interesting article about LCD Soundsystem/DFA mainman James Murphy. I like Murphy’s style. I like his forthright anger and confusion. I like his aesthetic, his refusal to recognize the boundaries between rock and dance music. I like that a self-described “fat guy in a T-shirt” is determined to work his way back to fighting weight. I may not be a musical genius, but we’ve got that much in common, at least.

126 BPM: Looking For A Sound That’s Gonna Drown Out The World Mofo (Popmart remix) – U2 Come Out (Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone) – 120 Days Twins – Linda Lamb Talk – Coldplay There’s A Drink in My Bedroom And I Need A Hot Lady – Lindstrøm Hustler – Simian Mobile Disco Electric Avenue – Eddy Grant Orange Alert (DFA remix) – Metro Area

What’s best about compiling music for sessions on the StairMaster is that the tempos—the high 120s—are a breeding ground for funk. Where most of my faster mixes veer towards the dance-y side of rock, the StairMaster stuff tends to the rockin’ side of dance. Not that there’s a bright dividing line; but it’s a way for me to hear a lot of great music that I’d somehow missed before.

The U2 track is something I cobbled together myself; the band used a recording of their cover of “Pop Muzik” as entrance music for their 1997 Popmart tour, the segued into “Mofo” as their opening number. Eventually they released “Pop Muzik” as a B-side: that version had a long fade of an ending, dissolving into a wash of crowd noise, electronic swoops and rumbles, and occasional dubby fragments of melody. The edit wasn’t difficult: it took a couple of careful listens to find the entrance point, and a minor tweak to put the two tracks in the same tempo.

Pop isn’t my favorite U2 record by any stretch, but it’s for my money it’s their last album to succeed more than it fails; lyrically, it’s the last time Bono really put himself on the line (“Mofo” is as nakedly personal a lyric as he’s ever written), and musically it’s the last time the group were looking forward to find new ways to be a rock band, instead of running through a catalog of the tried and true. The record makes more sense now, ten years on, than it did at the time: it’s really not a million miles away from what James Murphy et al. are doing now. And if nothing else, it finally does something worthwhile with Bono’s fucking hamronica.

I got 120 Days from an mp3blog (the name of which escapes me now), knowing nothing about them. I still don’t, really, except that they’re associated with Lindstrøm; the kind of electronica that I dig is, I’m discovering, not so much a small scene as a highly cross-pollinated one, with favorite artists forever collaborating, influencing, responding to one another. I like that.

The last time I heard Linda Lamb, she was collaborating with Vitalic under the name Silures; that jaunt yielded the squawky, juddering “21 Ghosts.” This one, even sans Vitalic, is similarly mighty. The riff takes the quintessential boogie riff—that slinky, John Lee Hooker-derived sequence that powers songs as diverse as ZZ Top’s “La Grange,” Goldfrapp’s “Ooh La La,” and (yeah) LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House”—and turns it inside-out, making it fearsome instead of insinuating.

This is the Coldplay track primarily notable for its wholesale rip-off of a Kraftwerk song, by the way. (U2 must have finally sent a case-and-desist.) Neither Kraftwerk nor U2, though, would have allowed the rhythm section to be buried by such a murky mix. For that we have to thank Radiohead—or, more properly, Coldplay’s incomplete understanding of Radiohead, and their mistaken application of murk to what should be a crisp, forthright rock song, in the mistaken belief that it will lend the song some gravitas.

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A forty-minute run, a messy freeform mix. Pure in form, wayward in intention.

152 bpm 2: Back In The Fight Always Forever Now – The Passengers 200 Ans d’Hypocrisie – Les Negresses Vertes Who Is “In,” Who Is “Out” – Mick Harvey Back On The Chain Gang – The Pretenders No More Heroes – The Stranglers Open My Eyes – The Nazz Teardrop – Massive Attack with Liz Fraser Formaldehyde (Last Words Of A Lottery Loser) – Johnny Boy Lace Virginia – An Emotional Fish Transmission – Joy Division (cooldown) The Queue (edit) – Winter Equinox

Notes—brief this time, cos that’s how I’m feelin’ it:

I always though “Always Forever Now” sounded like a great movie. Too bad it’s not real; oh, Brian Eno, you scamp!

I used to be in a band that did a version of “No More Heroes.” This comes as no surprise to anybody who’s ever met me: you can’t listen to the radio for five minutes without me saying, “I used to be in a band that did this!”

The Nazz, of course, were an early Todd Rundgren outfit—the finest British Invasion band to emerge from Philadelphia. Watch your step during the guitar solo: there’s a series of wicked (and impeccably executed) time changes that might throw you. Just keep going; it all ends up on the one again.

“Teardrop” is better known these days as the theme to House. I don’t watch House, myself. I’ve seen it once or twice, and watching it with a medical professional beside you on the couch is an interesting thing. One of D’s maxims is, “When you hear hoofbeats, don’t look for zebras”—because, naturally, 99.99% of the time it’s going to be horses.

There’s a Sufi proverb that says much the same thing: “If he tells you a dog has run off with your ear, do you chase after the dog, or first look for your ear?” On House, though, it’s All Zebras, All The Time, and the dogs run in packs with ears dangling from their jaws.

In this context, “Teardrop” is in half-time—that is (to get technical), while for most of the songs in this mix the running cadence plays out the four-four pulse, here your feet are tapping eighth-notes. I think it works here to break up the monotony and give you the perception of a breather (though your pace never actually slackens).

Two songs by An Emotional Fish in as many weeks? That’s damned odd.

Actually, I remember now how that happened. I reworked this mix a while ago: originally I had a different song in this slot—Jarvis Cocker’s remake of “I’ve Just Come To Tell You That I’m Going.” It’s another one in half-time, and in the end it was just too languid, came too soon after “Teardrop,” sapped all my energy.

And it was maybe too much Gainsbourg for one mix. The thought of using Gainsbourg’s songs for self-improvement and healthy living would no doubt have horrified him, and after a while these things just collapse under the weight of their own irony.

A huge, unashamed retro-bash, this one, reeking of hair mousse and shoulder pads. Good for the intervals trainer or a gentle run. Or, you know, dancing.

148 bpm 2: Turn It Up High, Captain Vertigo – U2 Mickey – Toni Basil 88 Lines About 44 Women – The Nails China – Red Rockers UnAlone – Translator Space Age Love Song – A Flock Of Seagulls She Sells Sanctuary – The Cult Hazy Shade Of Winter – The Bangles That Demon Jive – An Emotional Fish Mr. Jones – The Psychedelic Furs Sultans Of Swing – Dire Straits (cooldown) Dream Brother – Jeff Buckley

Lots of video links this time around. It wouldn’t feel like the Eighties if we couldn’t look at the haircuts, now would it?

“Mickey” was out at about the same time as Josie Cotton’s “Johnny, Are You Queer?” and it took me forever to realize that they’re basically the exact same song, except “Mickey” is miles dirtier.

God, I love “China”—all the interlocking guitar and bass riffs, and that huge chorus. Years ago, I worked out a solo acoustic arrangement that I still bust out from time to time. Red Rockers never really got their shot. Maybe their politics made people uncomfortable; they wanted to be the American Clash, and the leap-and-bounds musical progress they made from their first rote-hardcore record to the spaghetti-western pop glory of Good As Gold makes me think they had it in them. Jim Riley, the drummer, made his bones in Stiff Little Fingers; he and Rockers bassist Darren Hill eventually went East and ended up the rhythm section for Boston also-rans the Raindogs—another band that didn’t get a fair hearing.

When people remember Translator—if they remember them at all—it’s for “Everywhere That I’m Not,” rather than for this power-pop gem, though “UnAlone” is, to my ear, a far better song, and the one that I remember getting radio play back in the day. Eh. Whaddayagonnado?.

I’m inordinately pleased with the transitions in the first half of this mix, by the way.

Flock of Seagulls: GAH! THE HAIRCUT! The Cult: Captain Jack Sparrow sings! Both: Man, that’s a lot of smoke.

Not very coherent today. Shut up and dance, I guess.

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