TOM FRANCIS
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Muxed Feelings

Muxtape has provided my working soundtrack almost exclusively the last week or so. It’s a Super-Simple Service that lets you upload twelve songs, lets anyone listen to them, and ‘favourite’ them. I only just discovered the latter. I was highly enjoying this tape and thinking to myself “I love that this whole site is so laser-focused on what it does, but I do wish there was a way to bookmark the ones you like. Oh, there it is.”

After a long quest to get Seedling’s The Upshot in MP3 format (alas, no OGGs on Mux), mine is complete. Here’s what’s on it and why:

Cat Power – Willie
There’s a lot of classy, soulful, plonking ballads to pick from on The Greatest, but this one just seems to make everything okay. Something about its expansive confidence and nonchalant pace.

Mates of State – Goods (All In Your Head)
This was just written for late summer sunsets, turning from giddily exciting to wistful and almost sad with no audible seam.

Seedling – The Upshot
There’s something beautifully emphatic about the cut-down arrangement of this, the forcefully plucked strings behind her resigned voice. Disastrously, the band split years ago, and they’re obscure enough that they don’t even have a Wikipedia page. My only consolation is that I got to hug them all at their final gig.

New Pornographers – Chump Change
By rights I should have gone with The Laws Have Changed, but I think I over-listened to it. Skimming through my shortlist, the opening bars of Chump Change just elicit a smile like no other track.

Architecture In Helsinki – Debbie
Clever, rhythmic, curling and bizarre. It says something for the propulsive blithering of the chorus that I can tell you, without checking, that it goes, “Hey there, hey there, let me down down, Debbie down, Debbie Debbie Debbie down down Debbie down, Debbie down, Debbie Debbie down down down down.”

Decemberists – The Legionnaire’s Lament
This is the one track of theirs I can listen to endlessly without ever tiring of its neat lyricism and heartfelt botch of authenticity. Any song whose narrator’s camel is in disrepair gets extra credit.

Sparks – Dick Around
Manic, preposterous, majestic rock opera epic, without even the slightest wink or nod to the absurdity of penning such a thing with ‘dick’ in the title.

M̼m РGreen Grass of Tunnel
I don’t think there’s another track during which you could scientifically measure the increase in my body temperature as it starts. It’s warm and enveloping in a way a sound alone surely cannot be.

Low – Canada
The slowcore king and queen of sinister are actually at their most impressive when they veer into other moods and sounds. Canada isn’t exactly upbeat, but it rocks extraordinarily.

Delgados – Favours
Booming, crashing and beautiful. The churning chorus reaches such an exhaustingly elevated pitch and holds it for so long that you finish half-wanting to gasp for breath on Emma Pollock’s behalf.

Ben Folds – Rockin’ The Suburbs
Quite apart from being ridiculous fun, it’s time I acknowledged the genius who unwittingly wrote the ‘About’ section of James for me. As musically worthwhile satire goes, I don’t think any other song so utterly annihilates this many hateful songwriters with its first two lines.

M83 – Lower Your Eyelids To Die With The Sun
You’ll know if you’re going to hate this in the first thirty seconds – and the chance that you will is the reason it’s at the end. But if you don’t, everything you do for the next nine minutes of your life will be unaccountably profound. This is normal.

There’s also MuxFind, which lets you search for Muxtapes featuring music ‘similar to’ a band or song you search for. Since there are a lot of Muxtapes, that tends to mean you find the song you’re looking for. And can play it free. Clearly there’s a legal explosive ticking away beneath this, but for now it remains an awesome way to find lovingly compiled collections of stuff you’ve never heard but which bears a spiritual connection to what you’ve searched for. It’s a much stronger and more effective form of recommendation than automated social aggregation like Last.fm or comparitive content analysis like Pandora.