Posts tagged Piano Vines

Our look at the 50 songs that were Houston music to us in 2008 wraps up today, as does voting in for the Sammies (at noon).  Be sure to swing by our party Saturday night at Big Star to get the inside scoop on all our winners, and to sit and sip to the souds of all the songs on our list.  Thanks for reading.

Underwater Staggie – The Mathletes
We’re the Mathletes and We’re From Houston so How About That Vol. 1 (All Star Power Up Records)
From their disc of covers of H-Town compatriots, this re-imagining of the Hearts of Animals original mines the furthest reaches of HOA’s occasional delicate shoegaze tendencies. Beginning in a reverberating warm lake of fuzzy guitar delay and harmonics, it suddenly quick shifts into a slide-acoustic and tippity top drumming that hews more closely to the spirit, if not the sound, of the original. Again, for all the goof in their collected recordings, it’s sometimes easy to wonder if the Matletes intend to be taken seriously or if it’s another Guilloteenesque example of one original sin joke playing itself out over a rather extended period. But to hear Joe Mathlete cry out “you stop singing, shush shush shuhs, I’ll stop stop singing” we know that his heart is as invested in those words as if he was the animal that wrote them and that’s a beautiful thing.

Weak at Heart – The Sour Notes
The Meat of the Fruit (self released)
This song makes us think of summer of senior year, with a class ring still on your finger and a stupid jacket on your back, uniwttingly falling in love late at night in chain diners and fast food resturants under flourescent lights too bright and diffuse to catch the glimmer in an overlooked beau’s eyes until it’s much to late. Before your lungs were blackened and your liver curdled and heart greyed with bad decisions, you were in a place where the world sounded like this, where aquas and pastel pinks were sincere and most of your major decisions involved deciding which t-shirt to wear. Only art can take us back to places like this. Thank God for it.

Westward – Buxton
A Family Light (Mia Kat)
This whole romp sounds like the entirety of Buxton is riding on the back of a bucking bronco that’s fleeing the ghosts of Eddy Arnold and Marty Robbins, who are both giving chase because they think these city kids have figured out how to bottle lightning and the new sound of the Old West in a sarsaparilla flavored elixir. Never has a song about ditching friends and family been so much fun, and then suddenly they round a corner and Charlie Daniels is there shouting THEY’VE STOLEN THE SECRET TO WHIPS USE OF THE FIDDLE! GET EM BOYS!

Who We Are! – Powerhouse
Yeah! (Self Released)
If there was never a time in your life when you knew which of your shoes were better for dancing than the others and part of your Saturday pre-party ritual included swapping out ties with your boys and strutting around the house you were all getting reading at as a gang listening to your favorite jams and feeling like the most insider outsiders in the whole world and then hitting the club and raising your outstretched hand to heaven at the climax of your favorite song and not giving a fuck and dancing with your boys instead of girls cause who needs them, then you should probably try listening to this song a lot and if it doesn’t give you that kind of a feeling then we wouldn’t worry about it because you’re likely already dead and so you should practice your harp.

503 – Flowers to Hide
Down the Stairs (Self Released)
After what seems like forever (and lord knows how many lineup changes, brief hiatuses, and aborted attempts in the studio) Flowers to Hide finally put out a record this year that captures the primal vision of who they are. No mater how good the live acoustics, they’ve never been able to get across the nuanced swirling of their guitar assault as effectively and beautifully as they do on this and all the other tracks on 503. On the stage, it often is just loud, here in beautiful headphoned comfort, available in your pocket whenever you need it, it comes across as intended – layer after delicious, devilish layer.

SPECIAL INELIGIBLE BONUS TRACKS
OK. So, we like to break the rules, and one of them we are breaking this year is including a few tracks that didn’t really meet our requirements to get on the countdown, either because they previously appeared on recordings covered in our countdown or never made the jump to a physical artifact. We’re also going to take this opportunity to stop writing because we’re just chock out of ways to be endlessly self referrential about our past and kinda need to go out and have some new stuff happen to us so we can have memories to mine for next year.

A Day in the Life of Walter Price – Piano Vines
Unreleased

Asteroid B-16 – Tod the Fox
Unreleased

Doctor Doctor – Young Mammals
Young Mammals (Self Released)

Underwater Staggie – Hearts of Animals
Hearts of Animals 7″ (Dull Knife)

All My Love – Kidd The Great
Unreleased
OK OK one more. One night we caught a cab from our place to Walter’s to check out a Golden Axe show and we got to talking with the cabbie about music and he revealed to us that he was an MC himself. So he popped a cd in the deck and we started seriously feeling this song, and we kinda recognized the sample but couldn’t really place it and weren’t terrible worried because after all the beats were sticky and his flow was good and then suddenly he (on the track, not behind the wheel), put the punctuation on a verse with the lyric “and thats all of my love” and then suddenly Robert Plant cried out “All of My Love” and we lost our freaking minds cause it was so good. So yeah, the only way to hear this track is to catch a ride in his cab (it’s not even on his MySpace) and ask to hear it and did we mention that his business card also outlines the fact that he offers voice lessons, studio time and that if you want to book him for a show he needs at least one hour notice. No joke.