[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Amanda Palmer - I Will Follow You Into the Dark (Death Cab Cover)
(via okayjokesover, strangely, marxisforbros)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Angus & Julia Stone - Tubthumping (Chumbawumba cover) (via filigree)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Sondre Lerche - I Guess It’s Gonna Rain Today.

(via sarahjcooki)

It is. This is the perfect tune for today.

britticisms:

I noticed a couple of things recently. First, many of the songs that I’ve been posting recently have ‘girl’ in the title. Second, I own a lot of songs that have ‘girl’ in the title. Third, I haven’t made a mix outside of Brooklyn Radio in a while. Therefore, I present the latest “mixtape” for BRITTICISMS titled Songs About Girls. Most of the songs have ‘girl’ in the title, though I stretched a bit with the Os Mutantes song. Either way, the music is straight-forward, simple, and good listening.

“A Pretty Girl is Like…” by The Magnetic Fields

“A Minha Menina (My Girl)” by Os Mutantes

“Sunday Girl” by Blondie

“Velocity Girl” by Primal Scream

“Silly Girl” by Television Personalities

“Nowhere Girl” by B-Movie (1981 version)

“Girl Afraid” by The Smiths

“Girl on the Wing” by The Shins

“Graveyard Girl” by M83

“Girlfriend” by Phoenix

“Post-Modern Girls” by The Strokes and Regina Spektor

“Candy Girl (demo)” by Trailer Trash Tracys

“Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” by Broken Social Scene

“Cherry Blossom Girl” by Air

DOWNLOAD THE MIX HERE.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Do You Realize? by The Flaming Lips

(via thedarkspark, daniellei)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Ladytron - Seventeen

When you’re 21, you’re no fun.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The Lucksmiths - Self-preservation

And, yeah, we’re a mess
But let me just stress
That we’re both at our best in a tight spot
And whatever comes next
If we leave the nest
Don’t settle for less than what we’ve got

Blacklist anyone who tries to attack this
They can say what they like but the fact is
They know nothing about us

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

ninefruits:

howdiabolical:

Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear

“I told you I was gay” © tarts

Seriously! Sing that line instead of the original. It improves the song 250%

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

ladybands:

The Gossip - Standing in the Way of Control (Le Tigre Remix)

All this talk re: the hypothetical Ladyact Hottest 100 has shown YYYs and Le Tigre are the two artists everyone agrees are kind of awesome. And they are! Even if Kathleen Hanna (Le Tigre member and Highly Important figure of the Riot Grrrl movement) is totally sidelined by Kurt Cobain so she’s just some girl who kind of inspired only the most recognisable teen angst anthem ever.

I’m a total dork for not realising this remix existed when it first came out, but now you get to dork out with me this time round. Le Tigre doing The Gossip! DO NO WRONG. And it goes some way to soothing the rage I feel whenever mainstream radio outlets, picking up on ‘Heavy Cross’, refer to Beth Ditto as ‘this chick who’s eaten one burger too many.’ I’m sorry, what? Can you be any more condescending?

…I just deleted a paragraph of inarticulate ragenoise; suffice to say, I am rageful. I am rageful about a lot of things, but not Beth Ditto, or Le Tigre.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

laundromat:

Sufjan Stevens - Chicago (Live @ KCRW)

This version is quieter, sweeter, sadder than the ones on Illinois. I like it best.

Not really a Sufjan fan, but wow, this nails it.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Emmy the Great - First Love

Now the thought of you is burnt on my body from the first time you did rewind that line from Hallelujah (The original Leonard Cohen version)

Better known as one of the anti-folk artists littering the British scene, I wasn’t too keen on Emmy the Great’s recent album (also called First Love), but it’s really grown on me lately. Anyone who references Leonard Cohen and pens song titled ‘We Almost Had A Baby’ is all right in my books.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The Middle East - The Darkest Side

One of those underrated Australian bands slowly gaining traction. Comparisons to Thom Yorke and Arcade Fire! Threats of disbandment, but pulling together and now touring the country!

Says one blog:

“this six-piece knows how to craft music as rich and deep as any a band I’ve recently heard. It’s the type of sound you should hear from a band with many members - thoughtful, billowing, orchestrated and moving. The band originates from Queensland but have a sound that is lonely, as if it came from the very voids of the seemingly endless Australian outback.”

Oh lovely, lovely, lovely.

New playlist!

DON’T CALL ME BORING, IT’S JUST ‘CAUSE I LIKE YOU: songs from a lovestruck youth

Dappled Cities - Holy Chord
The Lucksmiths - Sunlight In A Jar
Pony Up! - The Truth About Cats and Dogs (Is That They Die)
The Spinto Band - Oh Mandy
Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken
Basia Bulat - Before I Knew
Art Brut - Good Weekend
Hefner - Hello Kitten
Voxtrot - The Start of Something
Special Needs - Blue Skies
The Libertines - What Katie Did
Giant Drag - God Only Knows
Pikelet - They Call It Love? … Wow
Benoit Pioulard - Moth Wings

54mb — DOWNLOAD HERE

When it came to adolescent romance I did myself no favours re: the objects of my affection. I fancied straight girls and gay boys, and the one time I seriously liked a girl who swung my way she’d just gotten over a crush on me that I, with my great powers of observation, completely failed to notice. It’s no surprise that the songs I loved back then are schizophrenic in nature, swinging from dizzying hyper-articulation to the depths of incoherence. Here they are in playlist format, sugar-coated in nostalgia and leaping from one end of the romantic spectrum to another but, somehow, maintaining an internal sense of consistency. Enjoy!

(The above paragraph seems like I overthought this mix but I haven’t really, it’s just a collection of songs that I really liked in my final year of high school and now, in my final year of university, are a source of great comfort when I’m up at 3am working on wanky writing projects and missing my ladyfriend.
Also: years later I pinpointed the week in which the girl and my respective crushes overlapped each other and neither of us acted on it. Sweaty-palmed anxiety! The spike in last.fm play counts of Luxembourg, Hefner and The Lucksmiths show how I channelled my awkwardness into listening to bands that have since or are in the process of breaking up. You read into the analogy there.)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The Weakerthans - Sounds Familiar.

We emerged from youth all wide-eyed like the rest. Shedding skin faster than skin can grow, and armed with hammers, feathers, blunt knives: words, to meet and to define and to… but you must know the same games that we played in dirt, in dusty school yards has found a higher pitch and broader scale than we feared possible, and someone must be picked last, and one must bruise and one must fail. And that still twitching bird was so deceived by a window, so we eulogized fondly, we dug deep and threw its elegant plumage and frantic black eyes in a hole, and rushed out to kill something new, so we could bury that too.

The first chapters of lives almost made us give up altogether. Pushed towards tired forms of self immolation that seemed so original. I must, we must never stop watching the sky with our hands in our pockets, stop peering in windows when we know doors are shut. Stop yelling small stories and bad jokes and sorrows, and my voice will scratch to yell many more, but before I spill the things I mean to hide away, or gouge my eyes with platitudes of sentiment, I’ll drown the urge for permanence and certainty; crouch down and scrawl my name with yours in wet cement.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Florence and the Machine - Hospital Beds (Cold War Kids cover)

No lie, I think this song was made for her to sing.