POTW Spring Mixtape Tracklist:
Download Link: http://www.mediafire.com/?mzkya34m90go4bf
1. Dorothy Ashby – “Canto de Osana” (Dan Love)
2. 2Pac – “It ain’t Easy” (Abe Beame)
3. Ernie K. Doe – “Here Come the Girls” (Matt Shea)
4. Blurry Drones – “A Prayer for Elliot Spitzer” (Douglas Martin)
5. Bob Marley & the Wailers -“Selassie in the Chapel” (Thomas Odumade)
6. Money Mark – “Pinto’s New Car” (Nate Patrin)
7. Laura Veirs – “July Flame” (Aaron Matthews)
8. Portastatic – “I Wanna Know Girls” (AM)
9. The Black Seeds – “One By One” (Zilla)
10. Of Montreal – “Faberge Falls for Shugie” (Sach O)
11. Ikonika – “Look (Final Boss Stage)” (Sach 0)
12. Black Moth Super Rainbow – “Forever Heavy” (Jeff Weiss)
Like we always do about this time. Music for the springtime. Scarves and mitts, played out like Kwame and polka dots. Each one of these tracks sounds vernal. Sadly, our own Son Raw couldn’t find a way to mix “Springtime for Hitler” with 2pac, so we had to stay remotely sensible. That omission aside, we hope you’ll find the mix an ideal companion as the days grow longer and the skirts grow shorter. –AM
1. Dorothy Ashby – “Canto de Osana” (Dan Love)
The harp may not be the instrument that immediately jumps to mind when considering the visceral drive of jazz music, but Dorothy Ashby proved that it could be as much of a bebop instrument as the muted trumpet. Taken from her album Dorothy’s Harp of 1969, ‘Canto de Ossanha’ is an example of how deftly she could also fuse elements from other genres into her particular jazz aesthetic, and its latin momentum serves as the perfect aperitif to the season. Chin chin.
2. 2Pac – “It ain’t Easy” (Abe Beame)
In New York, Spring is a slow thaw. Warm weather returns in measured bites. Slowly, you remember how many beautiful women live in this city, what charcoal smells like, how refreshing it can be sleeping with the window open. But more often then not it’s fucked up. A two month long cold drizzle, the smell of manure as frozen turf turns to mud, getting fooled by a warm afternoon and getting caught out in Manhattan under-dressed on a wind chilled evening. That’s why for me, Tupac’s low key standout rant off his best album is a perfect Spring anthem.
Pac is lively, bouncing all over an effervescent beat, but his message is one of guarded optimism. He recounts hardship after hardship and grim foreboding, but does so in a manner that suggests appreciation — for his problems, for the past that made him the person he is, for the comrades in arms he leans on for support. He gives himself a moment to take inventory and finds he can do nothing but shake his head and be thankful for it all, the good and the bad in our too short lives.
For me the song works off the page, it’s a call back to the world. Getting back in touch, getting back on my grind, getting my mind right on the verge of another Summer.
3. Ernie K-Doe – “Here Come the Girls” (Matt Shea)
I’ll let you in on a secret. There is no spring in Brisbane. We’re bloom deficient. The cold desert winds blow until early September, when summer finally flickers like a fluorescent bulb before coming on strong in the middle of the month. It means you get little time to catch the blossoms and hedge the bushes. Instead, spring simply means a superhero like shedding of clothes and donning of wide-brimmed hats. Suddenly there are ladies everywhere, cardigans left behind in favour of something a little more unbuttoned. It’s pretty awesome, and if Ernie K-Doe were still alive he’d probably lose his mind. Every year this track gets an instinctive resurrection, whether it be on the drop of a needle or a drag to a playlist. K-Doe knew how the world ticked, and in these three minutes of shuffling, brass laced gold, encapsulates what all men feel when they encounter the fairer sex on the first day of spring.
4. Blurry Drones – “A Prayer for Eliot Spitzer” (Douglas Martin)
For last year’s Winter Mixtape, I contributed a beat predictably entitled “Winter Weather,” originally intended to be the first taste of an instrumental record I was going to title Legit Punks. Somewhere along the way, Zilla Rocca and I started to work on the next 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers record in earnest, and I decided to scrap Legit Punks for now and not save all the good beats for myself. “A Prayer for Eliot Spitzer” was one of the few beats I decided not to give to him, as it doesn’t particularly fit the Shadowboxer template. Particularly because of its springiness.
Eliot Spitzer resigned from his post as Governor of New York on March 12, 2008, as a result of his much-publicized affair with a high-end call girl. That day, my eyes were mostly fixed on CNN, but out of the corner of my right one, I could see the cherry blossoms sprouting alluring pink pedals outside of my apartment’s living room window. As Spitzer ruefully announced his resignation, the prettiness blooming outside of my window provided a stark contrast to the ugly scandal unfolding before my eyes. For a minute, I thought about the concept of yielding to temptation and all of the consequences that could come from it. A married man spending almost $80,000 on prostitutes is a pretty drastic way to yield to temptation, but for a split-second, I empathized with Spitzer.
The next year, singer/songwriter Mirah put out a record called (A)Spera, but I hardly ever made it past the first track. It was almost springtime again, and “Generosity,” with its bright strings and sprightly vocals intertwining with the birds singing on my patio. There were single words and batches of words that instantly made me think of the moment where Spitzer publicly admitted that he had submitted to temptation. I sprung to the computer, chopped those words and sounds up, added drums, and listened to the playback. I’m not much of a praying man, but there was something very human in the way Eliot Spitzer stood in front of those cameras and microphones, solemnly taking penance for his actions. There’s a weird sort of clearing the slate when this happens, a weird sort of emotional Spring Cleaning.
5. Bob Marley & the Wailers – “Selassie in the Chapel” (Thomas Odumade)
A friend of mine recently pointed out to me that Edmonton really only has two seasons: winter and “not-winter.” It stuck with me because it’s a perfect observation — winter haunts this city, pervasive enough that it makes sense to define the turn of the seasons by its presence or lack thereof. By contrast, I’ve never felt that Spring had much of a presence, with temperatures typically remaining low enough to give the impression of winter fading straight into the tragically short summer. For me, while it masquerades as a bonafide season, Spring is more a theoretical placeholder marking the transition between toques and t-shirts. Basically, blink and you’ll miss it.
All this is a roundabout way of saying that if there is a feeling I associate most with Spring, it would be subtlety bordering on the barely-perceptible. Also I will use every opportunity I can to complain about the weather. Bob Marley & The Wailers’ “Selassie Is the Chapel” has the lightness and glow that I associate with Spring, but also a cold, lonesome sound that tempers the warmth. The Wailers take a solemn, and rather staid, gospel ballad, and give it a playfulness and muted intensity that’s absent from the original. The guitar hiccups and a traditional Rastafari beat lazily winds its way to the surface of the track. This song is like days getting longer and ice melting at a slow crawl. And like sunlight reflected off a snow-covered field, blurring your vision, filling everything with white.
6. Money Mark – “Pinto’s New Car” (Nate Patrin)
For something like half the country, spring is when things actually start looking like they do on TV and feeling like how the rest of America is actually supposed to feel. This is why living in the upper Midwest or New England during what has been a double-motherfucker deluxe of a winter has given a bit more weight to music that evokes places like the American Southwest, directly or otherwise. Mark Nishita’s pretty damn L.A., at least when it comes to associations with the Beastie Boys’ early ’90s West Coast phase, so maybe that’s why “Pinto’s New Car” sounds better now than it did three months ago. There’s nothing specific I can really point to, other than an undercurrent of Latin soul that feels vaguely like the 70-degree Cali atmosphere Mark’s Keyboard Repair was created in — even if the keyboard riffs and conga/woodblock percussion on this track just as easily evoke the vintage boogaloo and Latin jazz of ’60s Spanish Harlem. It could be the title — what other time of year feels best to break in a new car, cruising around with the windows down all weekend so by the time summer rolls around it’ll really feel like it’s yours? Or maybe it’s something about that organ tone — light, airy, warm — that actually feels like the first time the mercury breaches 60 in five months.
7. Laura Veirs – “July Flame” (Aaron Matthews)
The title throws you off, but there’s something about the stark, chilly clarity of Veirs’ riff on “July Flame”. The guitar cuts through your senses like the first glimpse of sun after weeks of grey. It’s that green blade peaking out of sidewalks stained with monochrome snow. The initial starkness of “July Flame” thaws as it rolls forward, as Veirs’ solitary coo and strum are joined by bright synths, campfire backing vocals and flutes. Summer is on its way, but for now 3 degree weather and the promise of warmer days will do.
8. Portastatic – “I Wanna Know Girls”
“I Wanna Know Girls” reminds me of the first day of spring. The muscular guitar chimes like Roger McGuinn jamming with the Boss. Mac McCaughan’s earnest yelp serenades everything wonderful about women. “I Wanna Know Girls” is shambling ardour that only gets louder and more insistent, as the mistakes and resentments of the last season melt away. McCaughan acknowledges he’s been “pushed off his share of rocks” but he still loves what he can learn from women. And you too can step out the house with a newfound wisdom and optimism. That first day when you can look at your parka hanging on the rack with relief? “I Wanna Know Girls” was made for this occasion. Reach for your dusty varsity and get on your way.
9. The Black Seeds – “One By One” (Zilla)
I’ve never lost ten pounds in an anti-contamination suit, shuttling inside a dusty RV over a four day span out in the desert, cooking containers of blue crystal, ducking the law, rival dealers, and family check-in calls with a dropout drug dealer half my age. But if I ever find myself in that situation,”One By One” by The Black Seeds, a funk/afrobeat band from New Zeland that Bret MacKenzie of Flight of the Conchords once played with, is the first song on playlist ‘Cookin’ Jamz’. “One By One” by might’ve caught your ear during the brilliant episode “Four Days Out” from the second season of television’s best show Breaking Bad. Naturally, the story of a cancer-ridden Arizonian high school teacher moving weight like Oprah’s trainer in a claustraphobic heat box needed more Kiwi riddims. The greatness of both “One By One” and the scene in Breaking Bad from which its used is apparent: this weightless, breezy, dub hopper can make even the most hellaciously agonizing drug operation seem whimsical and sunny. It reduces crystal meth production to a dance lesson.
–Zilla Rocca
10. Of Montreal – “Faberge Falls for Shugie” (Sach)
I have to admit that my half-hearted effort to embrace Montreal’s indie scene circa 2005-08 feels like a bit of a waste in retrospect but I offer no appologies for my Kevin Barnes stanery: the man writes a dope pop song. “Faberge Falls for Shugie” is one of those songs that reminds me that there’s always light after the darkness: coming off a particularly depressing and brutal stretch on Hissing Fauna , it sound tracked the spring of ‘07 which followed a particularly nasty winter that involved a failed film project and the end of my undergraduate degree. Personal memories aside though, “Faberge Falls” is all about that electric piano: those chords are so warm and funky that you can’t help but think of melting snow and the fact that for the next 6 months you won’t have to even begin to think about winter.
11. Ikonika – Look (Final Boss Stage)
Likewise, this Ikonika song brings me back to last Spring and my well-intentioned but ill-advised attempt at jogging. Contact, Love, Want, Have (along with releases by Guido and Starkey) soundtracked my daily dose of physical movement and I felt a strong source of pride at getting to this penultimate track without collapsing somewhere in between my house and the west side of town. Sonically, it’s warm but with blasts of ice-cold synths, mirroring the first half of spring in the frigid wasteland I call home but it’s also propulsive and energized and never fails to remind me of that last spring before I hit home.
–Sach O
12. Black Moth Super Rainbow – Forever Heavy (Jeff Weiss)
You measure spring by the light, not the weather. It rained today and it’s snowing in the East. You can’t trust this season. It will seduce you and sell you for weed money. Maybe I should have picked a Too Short song. Instead, it’s Black Moth Super Rainbow, out of black lung Pittsburgh. Vocoder pop, the color of melted popsicles. Drums gritty and sweet as crushed Trix. You remember when you were young(er) and the calendar cracked open. March was the gateway to Slip-N-Slide season, Spring Break, Easter Egg colors and green before you called it cream.
Tobacco, head larvae, sings like a sunshine nightmare, vox converted into code, repeating the refrain, “Chewing on bubble gum/laughing in the field.” The song splits its lip at the one minute mark, an understated “whooo,” and the blood starts flowing. The keyboard cranks, your legs have lift, and it’s springtime. Opening day happens once a year. Darkness doesn’t settle up until 7:30. But keep your umbrellas close by.
