Liner Notes

This blog is inspired by an article i saw in The Onion once. The article is about a guy who makes a mix CD and then writes extensive liner notes for it. Being The Onion, they are of course making fun of this guy, but it made me think: if i knew this guy, i would totally read through all of this. That's a package that i'd eat up for sure.

So i've decided to compile some liner notes of my own for this year's PAC. I'm going to post another short blog immediately after this one, because i know that this isn't going to be everyone's proverbial cup of lard.

First, i'll explain the PAC itself. Trevor's Poor-Ass Christmas is a series of CDs that i've done every year since 2004. At first, it was just a collection of songs that i liked, but it's evolved to the point where i now spend the entire year compiling this damn thing. It's my way of taking all the music that i've been listening to incessantly over the year and exposing other people to it, hopefully so that they'll discover something that becomes as important to them as it is to me. Responses to the PAC have been mixed; most people like it, but not to any great extent. Then there are people like Jolly Green Giant, who has said that it's kind of a highlight to his year and he looks forward to the new compilation every Christmas.

This year, as i was working on the final mix, i realized that these CDs mean something more to me personally as a whole than the songs on their own do. Since i do them toward the end of the year (i try to have them available at my birthday party, mid-November), they're a pretty good snapshot of the kind of person that i was at that time of my life. Looking over previous collections, i've certainly changed a lot in the last seven years.

So here are my liner notes to Trevor's Poor-Ass Christmas 200X. My birthday party's this weekend, so nobody's actually seen the disc yet and few have glimpsed the track listing, so this will be your sneak peek. If you're into that sort of thing.

1. Them Crooked Vultures / Gunman
Them Crooked Vultures was pretty much the biggest news in rock music last year. Supergroups usually end up sucking, trading mostly on the names of the members and relying on that to sell records. This makes way for often lazy songwriting. Anyone remember Asia in the 80s? Their biggest hit took the guitar riff directly from their guitarist's other band's only hit. I am speaking of The Heat of the Moment, directly ripping off The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star. Listen close, you'll hear it. But i digress. Them Crooked Vultures, for those who don't know, is Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age/Kyuss, Dave Grohl of Nirvana/Foo Fighters, and John Paul Jones of fucking Led Zeppelin. There was no resting on the laurels here; Them Crooked Vultures debut album is one of the most amazing things i've heard in years. It delivered on, as Josh Homme promised, "riff like you've never heard before." It's truly something different and remarkable.

I remember their first show happening; it was an afterparty for last year's Lollapalooza, at Chicago's Metro, and the only way to get a ticket was to order it online, and already have a Lollapalooza ticket. But they didn't announce who was playing at the show; they just put up a web page that featured the logos of Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters, and one of the runes from Led Zeppelin IV. Much of the rest had to be pieced together through rumors and other such things. Motherfucker already had his Lollapalooza ticket, and he thought he knew what was going on at the Metro, so he got his computer at work all set up on that web site at least an hour before those tickets went on sale. Unfortunately, due to the shitty internet connection we have at work, he was unable to get into the online order form, and the show sold out in minutes. Motherfucker was pissed.

The Them Crooked Vultures album came out on November 17, just a little too late to be featured on the 2009 PAC. Gunman was the first song added to this year's PAC, and i thought it to still be a fitting opener to the disc.

2. PJ Harvey / Meet Ze Monsta
The first of two PJ Harvey tracks represented this year. I originally had three songs on it, but Amanda thought that was excessive. "You don't understand," i said. "For the first six months of the year, i was listening to almost nothing but PJ Harvey." And this was true. I went through a big PJ Harvey phase in 2008, just before we left for New Zealand, and in fact spent much of the night before we departed scouring the internet for a couple PJ bootlegs to take with. At the time, i came up with only one. This phase didn't last long after we got back, for some reason, but it did land Rid of Me on that year's PAC. This year, i've come into an astonishing windfall of PJ Harvey boots, including some of her very first shows in 1992 when she performed without a band in seedy bars across the UK. But anyway. Lots of PJ this year.

3. Droids Attack / The Great Wall of 'Gina
One of the best bands in Madison. I strongly recommend checking these guys out live. Their riffs are heavy as fuck and the atmosphere they create while playing just takes you to another place. I was at the CD release show for this in...March? April? It was amazing. I was actually invited to man a camera for the music video for this song, but unfortunately the shoot was the same weekend that i was in Minneapolis seeing...

4. Biffy Clyro / That Golden Rule
...which was not worth the drive. Sure, Biffy put on a great show, but it was only 25 minutes long! We had figured, they came all the way here from Scotland, the least we can do is drive to Minneapolis to see them. But we had been under the impression that they were second from headlining a three-band show. As it turned out, they were second to play out of four. There's a very interesting story about our experience at this show, but i think i'll make a whole blog of that someday soon. (UPDATE: link)

Anyway, the album this comes from, 2009's Only Revolutions, was not available in the United States at the time of this show (March? April?) for less than $35 for an import copy. So, even though it's probably still not worth it because of gas, i was happy to score a copy of the album at the show for $10. We saw them again in Chicago two days later, which was an even shorter set and a somewhat less energetic performance. Fucking Biffy. Come back to the States and headline, dammit!

Fun Fact: the aforementioned Josh Homme also appears on Only Revolutions, on the track immediately after this one.

5. The Distillers / I Am A Revenant
The Distillers, like Biffy Clyro, are a band that i discovered in New Zealand, even though they're an American band. This song ended up on the PAC this year because i was listening to it extensively while editing the new version of Kiwiland, Ho!, and i really like it. At first, i had wondered if Courtney Love had been in a punk band aside from Hole, but it turns out that this band's frontwoman is Brody Dalle, who is married to...Josh Homme.

6. 10 Minutes With My Dad / Heavy Metal Parking Lot
This song is what compelled me to feature a gigantic Explicit Lyrics logo on the disc's packaging this year. Holy shit, where do i start with 10 Minutes With My Dad? I'm not entirely sure how i came about this band, it was through multiple links off of one of the many music blogs i read. They had one of the band's two 2004 EPs up for download in its entirety, and the blog entry described debauchery beyond anything i've ever heard of before. The band consists of these two blonde bombshells, who tend to perform wearing as little as possible (ie, thongs and belts across their tits), have dildo fights on stage, and sing songs about fucking their dads. I left that tab open in Firefox for months before i actually downloaded the EP, as if staving it off in apprehension, but when i finally listened to it i was blown away. These girls have as much talent as they have T&A. This song is about rednecks. Being from a certain small hick town in Wisconsin, where the high school had to start forcing students to enroll in racial sensitivity classes, this song reminded me of more than a few people i used to know.

7. The Avalanches / Frontier Psychiatrist
This is a weird one. I spent a long time being unsure how it would fit into a compilation, since the beginning and end of the song are built to be put exactly where it sits on The Avalanches' album, Since I Left You, but completely by chance i paired it with Heavy Metal Parking Lot, and the two feel like they were made for each other.

This song is such a bizarre combination of sampled audio, symphony, hip-hop beats, and record scratches, i don't even know what to say about it. It's best just experienced.

I first discovered this song through my Pandora shuffle, and ordered it from the library. The disc proved quite popular, so i had quite a wait before it came. In the interim, i was in the video suite at MMI late one night working on something or another, and i heard this song suddenly blasted loudly from another suite. It was Dick, watching the music video, which is also pretty fucked up. Check it out.

8. Shiny Toy Guns / Le Disko
Finding something to appropriately segue to from Frontier Psychiatrist was no easy task, and i'm not entirely sure that i accomplished it anyway.

This is an infectious dance/punk song that i was introduced to through another MMI student, Jesse. He used it in one of his projects, and got it lodged in my head. I ordered this from the library, and once it came, listened to the album on repeat for a week or so. Then i just listened to this song on repeat for a while.

9. Metric / Gold Guns Girls
I'm convinced that this is one of the greatest songs recorded in the last five years. I've had a handful of friends recommend Metric to me over the years, but for one reason or another i just never remembered to go looking for them. Amanda and i were at Jimmy John's earlier this year, and Gold Guns Girls came on the radio. I was awestruck after less than a minute, and asked an employee if he knew what was playing. Since they play satellite radio, he went in back and checked for me. I waited for this CD to come through the library almost all damn year. In the meantime, i downloaded some Metric bootlegs and listened to them constantly throughout the year. My only regret is that i couldn't just put this song on the PAC 20 times and call it done.

10. Broken Bells / The High Road
Another sort of supergroup, Broken Bells consists of James Mercer from The Shins and Danger Mouse, a producer/musician who first rose to prominence a couple years ago when he started some big legal fiasco over mixing Jay-Z's Black Album into The Beatles' White Album and releasing it for free to the internet as The Grey Album. I first heard this song on the actual radio, on 105.5 Triple M, the radio station i'd later do my internship with. I bought this CD almost as soon as it was released, taking it home that day and listening to it on repeat as i passed out, possibly from food poisoning from a restaurant which was shut down by the FDA weeks later.

11. Ringside / Struggle
I found this band, like many bands on the last two PACs, through Pandora. It was probably through a Spoon mix, they have that kind of vibe to them. I got their album from the library and then later found it on the dollar shelf at Half Price Books; it's worth a couple listens, but for the most part, this infectious lead-off track is as far as you need to go into it. This is another song that i ended up leaving on repeat all night long a couple times. Sometimes, when i'm alone, i'll randomly shout things like, "I just want to move ahead! MOVE AHEAD! I just want to stay in bed! STAY IN BED! BUT IT'S A STRUGGLE!!!"

12. The Sounds / Riot
Also from Pandora. These guys, especially frontwoman Maja Ivarsson, are completely full of themselves. They've been quoted as saying that they set out with the intent of being better than The Beatles, and Maja aspires to be "the best female vocalist around...at least of this century." I find their egotism quaint, and after the first couple listens of their debut album, Living In America, i more or less dismissed it. But this song, Riot, popped up in my shuffle a few months later, and i got hooked into it. I tried listening to their albums again, thinking i'd missed something before (this happened to me with CKY, a band i dismissed at first which has since become one of my all-time favorites after Frenetic Amnesic shuffled randomly through my iPod), but to no avail. It's just this song. It's so goddamn good. I couldn't stop listening to it.

13. Tegan & Sara / Hell
I may have jumped the gun a little by putting this on here, but i don't regret it at all. You'd think, since in 2007 i declared Sleater-Kinney to be my favorite band and haven't yet backed down from that, that i'd have discovered Tegan & Sara much, much sooner. Same goes for Metric, really. But this came about first when i saw a girl on my bus wearing a Tegan & Sara shirt, and i said to myself, "Oh yeah, i've heard of them. Always meant to check them out. Maybe i will." So i ordered a few of their albums from the library that day, although after copying them into iTunes, i didn't really listen to them. A friend posted a link on Facebook some time later to a video of Tegan singing Wake Up Exhausted with The Alkaline Trio live, and i was like, whoa. I read through some of the forum comments on that video and there was a guy raving about a couple other Tegan & Sara songs, one of which was Hell. So i pulled up those couple of songs on iTunes and listened through them, and Hell grabbed me in the best possible way. I'm sure i'll be listening to Tegan & Sara a lot more closely next year, but for this year, sticking with Hell seemed to be the way to go. I enjoy this song quite a lot, so i'm expecting to enjoy the rest of their catalog quite a lot, too.

14. Lady Gaga / Just Dance (f/Colby Odonis)
Last year i remembered hearing about Lady Gaga, but straight-up pop music stays pretty far off my radar these days, so i never even considered giving her a chance. But then one week, two of my friends whose musical opinions i put a lot of stock into posted links on Facebook to two of her music videos (Poker Face and Bad Romance), so i thought maybe i ought to poke my head in and say hi. The videos astonished me. This is some serious avant-garde art shit here, and it's popular in the mainstream! What the fuck?! I watched the videos a couple of times over. While i lose a little respect for Lady Gaga for taking her clothes off so much, i recognize that that's pretty much the only reason her shit got popular. But now that it's there, it's paving the way for more art to get the attention it finally deserves. And the music's damn good, too. This remains my favorite Gaga song, but really, with Lady Gaga, it's less about the music and more about the attitude. I expect to see great things from her in the future.

15. Against Me! / Stop!
This was not my first choice for an Against Me! song this year, but From Her Lips to God's Ears didn't really seem very relevant in 2010. After that i considered Miami, but it didn't jive well with the rest of the comp, plus it's over four minutes long, so it got cut. But since i did listen to a lot of Against Me! this year, i knew they had to be represented. This song popped up on my Pandora shuffle one day, and i knew i had a winner.

16. O Pioneers!!! / Dead City Sound
These guys sound an awful lot like Against Me!, don't they? I'd heard a lot about them from Mitch Clem's various comics, since he was kind of obsessed with them and even ended up playing bass for them at a couple shows, but hadn't had the chance to listen to them. When i found that online record label Quote Unquote Records, whom i also discovered through Mitch Clem, was hosting their newest release Neon Creeps for free download, i jumped at the opportunity to snag it. As a whole, the album seems a little...emo...for my tastes, but fortunately i think the music itself makes up for the lack of depth in the lyrics. Plus we need a sad song here and there. I probably listen to way too much happy music these days.

17. Butter 08 / Mono Lisa
When Jason introduced me to Cibo Matto in 2007, it was another near-instant obsession for me. Butter 08 is a side project that Miho Hattori and Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto worked on between their two albums, which also included Sean Lennon and Russell Simins of The John Spencer Blues Explosion (not to be confused with Russell Simmons of Run-DMC, a totally different guy), both of whom would appear on the second and final Cibo Matto album, as well as producer Mike Mills (not to be confused with REM's Mike Mills, a totally different guy). This is a hard to find album, i still haven't tracked down a physical copy of it, but not for lack of trying. I downloaded Butter 08 in 2008, but for some reason they didn't appear on that PAC. They should have. I used the song Mono Lisa in a re-edit of a scene from the movie Hero which i did as a class project, a video that i'm quite proud of, and therefore Butter 08 finally becomes represented on the PAC. I need to get a hold of Miho and Yuka's other side projects/post-Cibo Matto projects, i think i'm in love with these girls, musically.

18. Monster Magnet / Blow 'Em Off
The first copy of PAC 200X that i burned had a different Monster Magnet song, Cage Around the Sun, on it. But i hadn't listened to the lyrics too closely when i first selected that track, and it turns out that it's a narrative, and his dog dies in the end. I decided that it was too much of a downer for Trevor's Christmas CD, so i replaced it with this one, straight off of the Kiwiland, Ho! soundtrack. Monster Magnet has been one of my absolute favorite bands since 1998, when i first heard Space Lord. 1995's Dopes to Infinity, which features Blow 'Em Off, and 1998's Powertrip are two of the finest rock records you will ever hear. Anyway, this year i was given quite a large number of bootlegs from Monster Magnet's earlier years, 1992-1996ish, and i thought it appropriate to include something from them of that era, even though it was live stuff i've been listening to. This is probably my favorite Magnet song, anyway. This one or See You In Hell.

19. Wax Audio / Thunder Busters
This one was a last-minute addition. I was on YouTube looking at something or another, and you know how YouTube is, you see something interesting in the sidebar and you just keep getting linked to video after video. Well, eventually i was linked to Thunder Busters, a mashup of AC/DC's Thunderstruck and Ray Parker Jr.'s Ghost Busters theme. Normally, mashups are not my thing, but this one made me laugh and laugh and laugh. I probably watched it five times in a row when i first found it, and more times later. Wax Audio has entire albums of mashups available for free download from their web site, so i grabbed them all. They're very good at what they do. I just had to include this.

20. Amy Winehouse / You Know I'm No Good
I kept hearing this song on Triple M, but every time i did, the DJ wouldn't tell me what it was before or after hearing it! I loved this song, not knowing what it was, for months, until finally, i got out of the car just after it ended and went inside and looked online at Triple M's list of last played songs. And there it was, Amy Winehouse, another artist i'd heard of through friends but not bothered to check out. I mean, as an avid fan of the Cheezburger network, i'd seen plenty of stuff like this and this, i figured i'd never need to. Boy, was i wrong. What an amazing singer. Too bad she'll probably be dead by next Christmas.

21. PJ Harvey / Down By the Water
I hear that when this song was released, some angry groups formed mobs and attacked PJ because they thought she had actually given birth down by a river and drowned her daughter. I feel kind of weird including two songs from the same album, but i think what i'm really telling you is that you should probably go buy To Bring You My Love right now.

22. Matt "Chainsaw" Chaney / Donuts, Go Nuts!
I think that this year's PAC could have easily been a disc entirely made out of video game music. I've been pretty firmly attached to my Xbox for much of the year, and there have been a number of games i've played with great soundtracks. Fortunately, i refrained, especially since the song from I Maed A Game with Zombies is like fifteen minutes long. But the Splosion Man soundtrack...man, that is something amazing. And i didn't even include any of the symphony-with-heavy-metal-guitars tracks that make up the bulk of the soundtrack, or in other words, the entire soundtrack except for the one song i did include. This little ukulele ditty about doughnuts is pretty surreal when it pops up in the game, and i thought it would make a great closer to this year's PAC. You can download the entire Splosion Man soundtrack for free from Splosion Man.com, under the "free stuff" section. Try the game out, if you're into side-scrolling puzzle/action games. You'll like it.

Cripes, i think that was a little longer than i'd intended. Anyway there it is, a track-by-track breakdown of this year's Poor-Ass Christmas Collection, which nobody will read, but it felt good to write it anyway.