Fred Astaire, as you know, made a name for himself singing and dancing alongside Ginger Rogers in charming old musical pictures for Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer. What made these films special were not as much Fred or Ginger themselves, but the people behind the music–namely George and Ira Gershwin. This album collects the most memorable songs from those movies (most of them from Shall We Dance, which is my personal favorite), and removes Ginger’s parts out (sadly). I own it because of the track They Can’t Take That Away From Me, which is my favorite song from a musical ever.
Author: Nathaniel FitzGerald
Record #175: Frank Sinatra – The World We Knew (1967)
Frank Sinatra’s legend is owed to two halves of his persona. First, you have the voice, and the knowhow to use it in collaboration with the greatest arrangers of his time. Few will argue that Frank is not the best at what he does (and those who will do so because of overexposure). When his voice crescendoes over the swung rock bass line in The World We Knew, or climbs up to the next mode of the melody as the string sections searches for sure footing in Born Free, it does things that no contemporary or copycat ever could achieve. His voice is smooth as velvet, and his taste in collaborators is unmatched.
Record #174: Animal Collective – Sung Tongs (2004)
For a while, I held the assumption that everything Animal Collective did before Strawberry Jam was impenetrably avant garde, stomping along like some pagan ritual that had more to do with hollering through synth noises than making anything concerned with the traditional definition of music, let alone pop music. Then, it came to my attention that they had at one point made an acoustic album, and curiosity bade me to seek it out.
Record #173: Frank Sinatra – Strangers in the Night (1966)
Once upon a time, I was a counselor at a youth camp. Having grown up staying in the same dorms I was now working in, I knew that the counselors usually had some non-traditional methods of waking up the teenaged campers. Having brought a portable record player, I decided it’d be a good idea to use Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night as an alarm clock.
I was wrong. It was the BEST IDEA.
Record #172: Can – Future Days (1973)
If the 1s and 0s used to encode written text on the internet were limited resources, then those specifically allocated for writing about Can (the rock face of krautrock) would be in short supply.
Record #171: Fleetwood Mac – Rumours (1977)
Today, Rumours celebrates its thirty-sixth anniversary. And in those thirty-six years, it has been played and overplayed. Only in most cases, “overplayed” has a negative connotation.
Record #170: Fleetwood Mac – Fleetwood Mac, or, The White Album (1975)
It’s so strange to think that by the time the Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks era of Fleetwood Mac began, the group had already recorded nine albums. Fleetwood Mac had always been a sort of amorphous collective that placed little importance on the lead singer in question, which isn’t surprising, considering the group’s very name was derived from the members of the rhythm section.
But here, with the addition of Buckingham and Nicks, the power of the frontmen begin to match the chops of the musicians that had always played masterfully behind (or despite) them. Continue reading
Record #169: Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (2011)
The question to any perfect debut is “Where can we go from here?”
Their self-titled full-length was as close to flawless as a record could get—it’s golden harmonies and Seattle-bluegrass instrumentation combined to form a record that was truly timeless, sounding traditional and contemporary at once.
And so when they returned to the studio to record what would undoubtedly be one of the most anticipated records of the year, they decided (wisely) to expand rather than progress. Continue reading
Record #168: Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (2008)
I remember the first time I ever heard White Winter Hymnal. Someone had posted the creeping, stop motion video online, and I was spellbound. I gobbled up everything of Fleet Foxes I could–the record, radio performances, their Judee Still cover on Black Cab Sessions, everything. When I returned to college that fall, I spread White Winter Hymnal like gospel (along with Bon Iver, who broke through that same summer). Their mix of Beach Boy harmonies and mountain folk filtered through Seattle sensibilities was at once fresh and familiar. Just how familiar was revealed to me when my roommate responded to the album with “that was Fleet Foxes? I thought you were listening to James Taylor.”
Record #167: Fleet Foxes – Sun Giant (2007)
The phrase “arrived with their sound fully formed” gets thrown around so much that if music critique had their own annual list of banned phrases, it would surely appear in multiple editions. But when confronting Sun Giant, the debut EP by Seattle indie folk giants Fleet Foxes, there’s little else to say.