VIRGIN

Listen to VIRGIN by Traffic Sound.

Another quick one while we're away... Virgin was also on the mix for a long time until we decided that Meshkalina, another Traffic Sound song, should go on in its place.

Virgin is more sophisticated in its arrangement and production; it's really solid, in fact. It's the title track to Traffic Sound's best album and therefore one of the best albums to come out of this whole period. I haven't listened to it much since the beginning of the month and am looking forward to hearing it again in a minute!

I'd write more but the beach beckons... have a good Friday!

Photo: View of Manhattan Bridge through a screen.

EVERY NIGHT

Listen to EVERY NIGHT by Los Mockers.

Happy Boxing Day! We'll ease back into music here with some songs that didn't make it onto our Holiday mix for whatever reason. Today's selection is from Los Mockers, who we've already alluded to being the Uruguayan Rolling Stones, and here is the aural proof.

Like the Chocolate Watchband, the Mockers had their Jagger and Jones imitations down pat, which could yield some pretty good tunes in their own right, but could also leave them open to being mere copyists.

Every Night is one of my favorite Mockers tracks, and as so it sounds like good early Rolling Stones but with its own thing. It's a good arrangement and recording, how it comes straight into that ascending guitar line and leaves plenty of space for the drums and vocals to accent the groove.

See you back here tomorrow (hopefully, we'll be blogging from Maine) (hopefully, having beaten the sailors).

Photo: Federal courthouse, dirty window.

Now available: Everybody's Saying Music Is Love!

Our full holiday mix of classic South American pop music is now available for download. Click here or on the picture on the right. Artwork and everything is included. Happy Holidays!

The back cover:

The full tracklisting:

SIDE ONE
1. Persons and Faces : We All Together
2. El Pino y la Rosa : Los Shakers
3. Mañana : Totem
4. Jerusalem : Ana y Jaime
5. Te Recuerdo Amanda : Victor Jara
6. Everybody on Monday : Laghonia
7. Maybe I Know : Monik
8. No Tengo Idea : Almendra
9. Siempre Tu : Los Shakers
10. Navidad En El Peru : Coral Infantil Colegio de Chiclayo

SIDE TWO
11. La Pata y el Pato : Climaco Sarmiento y Su Orquestra
12. Mi Cueva : El Polen
13. Profecia : Vox Dei
14. Meshkalina : Traffic Sound
15. Green Paper (Toilet) : Pax
16. It's OK : Telegraph Avenue
17. La Quebra' del Aji Corre Que Te Pillo : Los Jaivas
18. Estamos Seguros : Los Delfines
19. Stone : Texao
20. Lo Más Grande Que Existe es el Amor : We All Together

More facts and figures:

-- In the end we picked from about 500 tracks. We picked songs from Peru (especially), Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia. We also considered songs from Venezuela, Paraguay, and Bolivia. We didn't consider Brazil because that's a whole different kettle of fish!

-- We All Together, Laghonia, and Monik are related acts. Different iterations of much the same personnel.

-- Monik's Maybe I Know is a faithful cover of Lesley Gore's 1964 hit. I think that the cover improves on the original, which is a little sterile for me.

-- The cover art is taken from all the different photos posted on the blog over the last year.

-- The refrain "Everybody's Saying Music Is Love" will be familiar to those of you who attended the wedding in August.

-- The sound quality is pretty mixed. We apologize for the tinny mp3 vinyl rip sound on some of the tracks, but these songs simply aren't available around here in any other form. It's sequenced to be not too jarring.

-- There's one Christmas song on the mix. The song title gives away which one that is!

-- There's one other song that's not really in a pop/rock idiom: La Pata y el Pato, a cumbia from Colombia. Think of it as a short, sweet palette cleanser.

-- The first half is more pop, second half more rock.

-- If you're on Facebook you can join our blog group. To be honest I don't know what the purpose is either!

-- There's really only one ballad on the mix, Te Recuerdo Amanda, Victor Jara. It might be his best-known song. It's also one of the most beautiful songs out there.

-- Vox Dei is the longest track at seven and a half minutes. It's also the prog-iest.

-- The last track has been featured on the blog before. But since I got that song from another blog, and that blog had the name slightly misspelled, I hadn't been able to get a good recording of it, until one day I realized it wasn't "Los Mas Grande" but "Lo Mas Grande"! It's fixed on the mix.

MI CUEVA

Listen to MI CUEVA by El Polen.

El Polen was an acid folk group from the Andes. Boy were they. Mi Cueva lays it all out: quenas and antaras (what sounds like the pan pipes), charangos (what sounds like the ukulele), and an unmistakeable hippie sensibility that connects over time and space.

Mi Cueva sounds superficially like Simon & Garfunkel's El Pasa Condor (those pan flutes), but this is heavier, deeper, and more interesting. I love how it builds and blossoms into those gorgeous vocals. I think it shares the same beauty and sensibility as Bros by Panda Bear (which may be a stretch but is definitely a mutual compliment).

Photo: View of Villarica through a car window and the trees.

NO TENGO IDEA

Listen to NO TENGO IDEA by Almendra.

I've learned through the last few months that I'm not the hugest fan of Argentinian rock. As far as I can tell, the scene is all about brittle guitar soloing and needlessly fussy arrangements. (Either that, or a massive massive Stones fetish, which is how it sounded to us when us when we visited. As one blogger puts it, "few bands from Argentina these days overcome their OMG Rolling Stones = teh awesome phase." Check out that link for proof.)

Anywayz, I do know with some confidence that Almendra is one of the most important Argentinian rock groups, and I've got most of what they recorded. Some of it is very good, some of it is not to my taste (see above). But I love No Tengo Idea for a very specific reason, and that reason is, it sounds almost exactly what you would imagine the Kinks would sound like if they decided to do a Victoria or Lola-era jam with Spanish lyrics. Seriously, doesn't that sound like Ray Davies vamping along? I think this is a very funny observation.

Photo: View from Acela.

EL PINO Y LA ROSA

Listen to EL PINO Y LA ROSA by Los Shakers.

Somebody on the internet recently argued that the last album by Los Shakers, "La Conferencia Secreta del Toto's Bar," is 'better than Sgt Peppers and Pet Sounds put together.'

Now that's loco. But I tell you what, just like there are a litany of pop albums whose greatness wasn't recognized upon release (Forever Changes, Radio City, etc.), "La Conferencia" is ripe for examination.

As mentioned on Monday, Los Shakers were known as the Uruguayan Beatles in their day. But their day was 1965, and their sound aped "Meet The Beatles" era Lennon & McCartney. For some reason, though, the band went on a recording hiatus, and the music scene passed them by. Similarly to The Zombies, when they went to deliver their album to the label in 1968, the label rejected it, the group split up, and the album was stillborn.

What a shame. The music on "La Conferencia" is a revelation. Clever arrangements, brilliant modulations, gold plated melodies, confident incorporation of candombe and tango styles, great performances, great recordings. It's light years ahead of what made them famous.

We actually put two selections from this album on this year's Holiday Mix as a tribute to our infatuation. Anyway, see what you think. A real highlight: El Pino y la Rosa.

Photo: Downtown view.

JERUSALEM

Listen to JERUSALEM by Ana y Jaime.

Jerusalem is the second song we're featuring from this year's holiday mix, Everybody's Saying Music Is Love.

Today we bring you another act whose exposure here is all out of proportion with their quality. For the life of me I can't find out the first thing about Ana y Jaime, except that they are sister and brother, and while they become a well known folk act in Colombia, they were only 15 and 17 when they recorded the album from which Jerusalem is taken. 15 and 17! But that's all we know! (It would help if we had the liner notes to the CD reissue, but we don't.)

Jerusalem has such a great melody and sturdy arrangement, I have a hard time believing these kids wrote it. At the same stage, I'm pretty sure it's not the same song as the English-language hymn. One way or the other, these two sing the hell out of it. They "harmonize as only people who are closely related by blood can" (that's Gram Parsons (possibly) via Corbett).

Listening to the mix, Amy awarded Jerusalem the title of "most beautiful song." No stronger endorsement can this humble blog offer...

Photo: View from Ayasofya.

EVERYBODY ON MONDAY

Listen to EVERYBODY ON MONDAY by Laghonia.

Everybody on Monday is the first song we're featuring from this year's holiday mix, Everybody's Saying Music Is Love!

Just a few days before we set off for Maine, I was on the internet and downloaded this random album by a group from Peru I had never heard of, named Laghonia. I did a search on my favorite music board, I Love Music, and couldn't find anything on them (somebody says there's only two copies of the original album!) Unbelievable cos I was blown away by how good it is.

So the first thing on my list after we got back from getting hitched was to start collecting this stuff in earnest. We had already told the blog about We All Together, a group that has a small cult following as being among the best Beatlesque bands out there. Well, it turns out that all of the principal members of We All Together had previously been members of Laghonia, so it's no surprise that they sound alike.

Both bands are heavily into late period Beatles. But where We All Together's sound is more Badfinger/Gilbert O'Sullivan, Laghonia's sound is more stoned psychedelic. If you've ever heard Spirit's "The Family That Plays Together" (and you have), then you'll have a good idea what you're getting in to.

Everybody On Monday was written on the spot following an unusually hard rain in light and dry Lima. That spontaneity is reflected in a great recording--all George Harrison guitar and Hammond Organ (the only one in Peru!). Live, organic. And everything comes together in a wonderfully mellow extended coda.

It's just amazing this music is not more well known. So do your part and listen! :)

See you back tomorrow for more holiday mix tunes.

Photo: View of Manhattan Bridge through a screen.

Happy Holidays! Enjoy some music from us!

Season's greetings! This is our favorite time of year, not because we get presents (though that's nice too), but because we get to share our Holiday Mix with all of you! As many of you know, every year we've sent out these mixes to our friends, and every year it's become a bigger production. In fact, this here blog started solely to distribute the one from last year.

So that brings us to this year, and I have to say, it's probably the best one yet:

Everybody's Saying Music Is Love.

Every mix has a theme, and the theme of this one is Classic Pop Music from South America. It sounds obscure doesn't it? Well, trust me, if you love the Beatles, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, Santana, Jethro Tull, Badfinger, Simon & Garfunkel, Carole King (that is, all that classic pop and rock music from the late 60s and early 70s), then you'll definitely want to hear this.

Just as the British Invasion swept the U.S.A. and revolutionized music on this continent (as Corbett has been discussing this past week), so it did in South America. Particularly in places like Lima and Montevideo, local musicians picked up guitars and tried their best to sound like their British idols. (Groups from the latter city even formed their own "Uruguayan Invasion" of Argentina, with Los Shakers as The Beatles and Los Mockers as The Stones.) Over time, just as in America, bands married local and foreign musical idioms with ever more sophistication and style. For those willing to look, there's a universe of great music all of these acts have left behind.

Long-time readers will already be familiar with groups like We All Together and Almendra, but we've gone scouring the internet for music from all over South America. Everybody's Saying Music Is Love mixes twenty of our favorites.

Each day this week we'll be previewing five of our very favorites. The full mix, including all of the artwork, will be available for you to download beginning on Friday. And the week after, we'll be sharing some great traditional Christmas songs (traditional? well, you'll see), so you should stick around for that too!

Here it comes again

Evening folks! Most of you won't be reading this tonight but a short short recap of the weekend's events is called for. Saturday morning followed the usual routine: a walk, then settle in on the couch for the soccer. Two nice things about our match: one, we won with some super stylish goals and pretty decent defending, two, at halftime we firmed up some arrangements on getting the ceiling finally put right. More on that a little later.

Amy and I spent some time Saturday cooking for a pot luck dinner at Helen & Oren's house to watch the OU game. Splendid stuff, though Maddox and I were both unusually downbeat at the end: depressed at how we managed to throw away a great chance to play for the national championship. Ah well, we'll be looking forward to buying all the preseason magazines next year listing us as the number one team in the country.

Today I visited Laura and Corbett to preview this year's Christmas CD for them and to hear some of the songs he's blogging this week. We're going on a five-songs-per-week schedule through Christmas at least: too much good material!

Before that Amy and I attended Luke's first birthday party. Luke's arrival on the scene was one of the very first posts on this blog. Speaking of, we wouldn't be doing ourselves justice if we didn't note that this weekend marks the one year anniversary of the public debut of this here blog! Happy birthday to us!