Soundtracks: test test test

Having written and published the Design Introspective for this blog today, I'm opening another new semi-regular column here, Soundtracks, the natural evolution of my music review blog posts.

In previous posts (really just the Kind of girl article, actually), I've linked to mp3s for your listening pleasure: without a proper plugin for playing audio files within WordPress installed here, I'm a little hamstrung there, really — so the Soundtracks column is here to change things up a bit.

I'm going to make my own mixtapes, companion "soundtracks" to the Word-Text-Communications experience. These will be album-length stuff, with about nine to thirteen songs in each, and in each mixtape I'm going to play around and try to make something worth listening to.

Best of all? Go ahead, download it. I'll link you later in this article. Download and give it a listen — tell me what you think about the listening experience of these soundtracks.

I originally intended for my first mixtape to be called Six Star Songs, after a playlist on my iTunes where I keep twenty of my favorite songs ever, and "ever" is a particularly contentious word considering the flux of new music I start listening to & loving; "ever" is something not to be taken lightly, judged in multiple heats in separate areas ("mood", "lyrics", etc).

In the end, I found that Six Star Songs wouldn't quite work, considering it was an incredibly unfriendly primer into my taste: you'd warp back and forth from mellow to intense, and not even in a good way. And that playlist had the incredible flaw of simply having too many songs by a single performer (I counted at least six or seven Metric songs). The ideal mixtape shouldn't be a repackaged album — that would be uncreative and derivative, neither of which I wanted to be —. The ideal mixtape should have a mix of many different sounds, performers, and musicians to create a perfect flow in music. I can't claim I know enough musical theory to posit my soundtrack as "a perfect flow in music", but I liked the arrangement I've made here. So, here goes:



test test test is my first mixtape for Soundtracks, and the link connecting everything in this album is clear: the female voice. It's all women's voices in there, from mellow and unadventurous to lush and powerful; the language shifts a bit from English for a brief one-track reprieve in Armenian in track 5 with Bear McCreary's A Distant Sadness, starring Raya Yarbrough's gorgeous vocals.

The criteria for this album had been fairly simple: it had to start slow, and end dark; it had to be all female voices; and no band/performer can appear twice. I cheated in that last criteria, I admit, mainly because Metric's my absolute most favorite band and thus they're allowed to cheat; in another instance of rule-bending Jenny Lewis's vocals appear twice here, but under different names (Rilo Kiley being the band for which she became famous as a vocalist; Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins being her recordings with Chandra & Leigh Watson).

The Mandate is an absolute must in any soundtrack of favorites for me: there's no way I could compile a mixtape without including Metric's The Mandate. It's a dirt-off-your-shoulders track with such sheer attitude that I play it on days I'm feeling down to get a boost in self-confidence. The Mandate starts the album off slowly, and we have another slow song, Amy Studt's ballad Furniture. I love Amy to bits, having purchased her debut when I was decidedly a lot younger; Furniture was the only real gem in her album My Paper Made Men. Taken on its own, though, it's a superb song, and when packaged in test test test I say it's bang for buck, the right choice to carry the torch from The Mandate to seamlessly transition to Kind of girl's The More, a song whose album I still praise over and over again. Bear McCreary's A Distant Sadness is admittedly very different from the rest, but the unique strength of Raya Yarbrough's pained vocals make it even more beautiful.

The music stabilizes itself, and the next few songs become increasingly more complex/louder(?). Metric's Too Little Too Late, my favorite song ever according to Last.fm, comes on track 7, and mellows down for The Good That Won't Come Out Of Us by Rilo Kiley, a song that gradually builds up: and in time for the madness-induced Hey Pretty from Poe off of her 2000 album Haunted (already ten years, Poe? When are we going to get RePOEzessed?) — a personal all-time favorite album, I must add. As the chaos from the end of Hey Pretty dies out we've got the last song in the tracklist, Exordium Intro 2 by Shiver Skin.

Enjoy your music responsibly; make your own mixtapes and link me. I'd like to know what'd be the companion soundtrack to your blog.

POSTSCRIPT: Since starting Soundtracks, some friends have started uploading their mixtapes too, so check them out: "Living The Song" (Volume 1, Week 1) by BobbyD.