Roasting Chestnuts

Three recycled disks have given me rare pleasure these last few months. While their age will keep them off my "Best of…" list in another couple of months, they deserve a place in your rotation, too.

The Postal Service, Give Up (2003)

This gem, the only album recorded by Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard 's Postal Service project (with Jimmy Tamborello and, sigh, Jenny Lewis) turned ten this year, with a deluxe reissue to prove it.  You probably know its most memorable tune, "Such Great Heights," but not this gem, "Sleeping In."  My discovery: the whole disk is full of warmth despite the synth-y surface.  Drum machines never sounded so good.

Tom Rush, Blues, Songs and Ballads (1963)

This double album collected two releases from the start of Rush's career, (Blues, Songs & Ballads and Got a Mind to Ramble) before his versions of early Jackson Brown and Joni Mitchell songs showed what impeccable taste he had in the then-emerging generation of confessional singer-songwriters.  Here he displays his equally superb ear for the blues and ballads of the folk revival era -- a Harvard guy singing the songs of hobos.  Hard to find but worth the hunt.

Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic (1974)

Pretzel Logic is the pivot point for Steely Dan, where they give up being a rock band and turn into…well, whatever we call them.  Like Workingman's Dead and The Band, Pretzel Logic wove the disparate threads of American music into something new that seemed like it had been around forever. While the Dead and the Band looked back to country, bluegrass and Appalachian music, Becker and Fagan looked to jazz. But instead of a music class, they give us "Ricki Don't Lose That Number."

Exiles

Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit And Think and Sometimes I Just Sit

Way back in the pre-Cambrian period of alternative music (1993), Liz Phair surfaced out of nowhere with Exile in Guyville, a wonderful work of tunefulness, guitar noise, and tales of a love sought and lost in Guyville. Overly long?  Sure.  But it was full of orginality, wit and sharp observation.  What made it buzz-worthy, though, was the story that came with it: that this was Phair's reworking of the Stones' classic Exile on Main Street.  I heard slim evidence for this claim apart from the title. Tweny years later, your experience of this music is actually enhanced if you forget this little bit of misdirection.

Australian Courtney Barnett doesn't need such a ploy.  Sometimes I Sit and Think hails from the same musical neighborhood as Exile, but Barnett is traveling lighter. She's way less angry and, thanks perhaps to Phair, Carrie Brownstein, Kim Gordon and the generation of Riot Grrrls who came along since, she has nothing to prove as a guitar toting woman. She certainly needs no invented story and, as a gay woman, couldn't give a rat's ass about Guyville.  Phair is an obvious musical touchstone, but so are Neil Young, Beck and especially Jack White.  

"Sometimes..." opens with a quick stomp sung to an "Elevator Operator:"

"Depreston" is a sentimental, strummed winter's tale that almost makes you feel the low angled January sun. 

Barnett hits her angst-y stride with "Nobody Really Cares if You Don't Go to the Party," and its ultimate FOMO refrain: "I want to go out but I want to stay home."  

Sisters are doing it for themselves.  For real.