It’s been quite the high profile week for The-Dream. Not only did a wedding photo of the hit-making songwriter-producer and Christina Milian just surface, his Love vs. Money was also singled out in Time‘s picks for the top albums of the year. Hopefully this calms him down after his recent Grammy snub.

Dirty Projectors, a favorite of Solange Knowles, ranked pretty high on the list, as did Lilith Fair 2010 performer Miranda Lambert.

Lady Gaga just managed to scrape in at #10 with The Fame Monster, and the publication notes “there’s still a little too much filler for global domination to be a real goal. But the hits… are towering and undeniable.”

Hop below the jump to see the 10 albums that Time magazine felt were worth their salt in 2009.

TIME’S TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2009:

1. Brad Paisley, American Saturday Night
2. Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
3. Mastodon, Crack The Skye
4. Miranda Lambert, Revolution
5. Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
6. The-Dream, Love vs. Money
7. Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Pt. II
8. Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest
9. The Avett Brothers, I And Love And You
10. Lady Gaga, The Fame Monster

Our look at the closing lines of new music reviews continues with a roundup of reactions to the New Moon soundtrack, the indie-kid-pandering tie-in to the forthcoming Twilight sequel that arrives in stores and online today:


• ”All this aural audacity is perfectly positioned with the youthful target audience who have thus far consumed all things Twilight-related. Pasty vampires with great hair on the big screen now have a killer soundtrack to accompany their every bite.” [Ron Harris, AP]


• ”But though the contributors are mostly A-list alternative or indie-rockers — including Grizzly Bear, Death Cab for Cutie, Bon Iver and St. Vincent — the overall tone is a bit muted, considering this is supposed to be a fantasy soap-opera dripping with supernatural blood and lust. Only the Killers, with Brandon Flowers channeling Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy, bring a welcome dash of Gothic flamboyance. Much of the rest is mid-level and middle-brow, from respected artists who have done better work elsewhere.” [Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune]


• ”But does it really matter if the original songs on this soundtrack are up to scratch or not? Not really. New Moon is a cross-promotional marketing extravaganza. Film producers get a cool bunch of bands to spread the gospel of their flick to music fans, bands get an entry point into the teenage market. Everybody wins, right?” [Matt Schild, Aversion]


• ”Moon (due in stores Oct. 20) yields several happy revelations from its lower-marquee names: Nordic songstress Lykke Li’s nearly a cappella ‘Possibility’ is a lovely little Swedish snowflake, and jokey rockers OK Go achieve an impressive sort of Flaming Lips-y quirk-gravitas on the sprawling, cinematic ‘Shooting the Moon.’ Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s acoustic campfire lament ‘Done All Wrong’ segues seamlessly into the jaunty, Strokes-ian guitar fuzz of Hurricane Bells’ ‘Monsters.’ Think of New Moon as a sort of survey course in new-now-next rock: a mixtape with teeth.” [Leah Greenblatt, EW. Side note: The soundtrack, of course, gets an A, because where would EW be without its constant shilling for vampires these days? It would likely be even closer to the magazine scrap heap than it already is. I'm sure Greenblatt enjoyed the record, but it's really really hard not to call BS on this particular bit of grade-inflation---and even harder to not wonder if EW actually muffed it, since an A- would have surely fired up EW's all-important commenter traffic. (And wasn't Lykke Li "new-now-next" in 2008?)]

The soundtrack listing for New Moon, the latest installment in the fangirl-insanity-inducing Twilight series, has been released, and as previously insinuated, it is pretty indie-tastic, with the likes of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, Swedish enigma Lykke Li, the Jay-Z-beloved Grizzly Bear, and the one-two punch of Bon Iver and St. Vincent backing up Death Cab For Cutie’s lead single “Meet Me On The Equinox.” Muse is also contributing a remix of a song from their new album The Resistance, although Matt Bellamy sure sounds like he wanted to take the path of least, um, resistance when getting on the record: “He wants a rendition of that, but the only thing with the new film is they want the songs to be exclusive to the film. So he’s asking if I mind doing, or if we mind doing an alternative version of it.” Um, OK then! Full track listing after the jump.


Death Cab For Cutie, “Meet Me On The Equinox”



Band Of Skulls, “Friends”
Thom Yorke, “Hearing Damage”
Lykke Li, “Possibility”
The Killers, “A White Demon Love Song”
Anya Marina, “Satellite Heart”
Muse, “I Belong To You (New Moon)”
Bon Iver & St. Vincent, “Roslyn”
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, “Done All Wrong”
Hurricane Bells, “Monsters”
Sea Wolf, “The Violet Hour”
OK Go, “Shooting The Moon”
Grizzly Bear, “Slow Life”
Editors, “No Sound But The Wind”
Alexandre Desplat, “New Moon (The Meadow)”


Stephenie Meyer [Official site]

Yesterday, the harmonizing, indie-kid-beloved Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear played an outdoor show on its home borough’s waterfront, and at around 6 p.m. Twitter lit up with news from the show—not about the band’s performance, mind you, but about the appearance of Jay-Z and his lady Beyonce in the crowd, as documented by the above blurry cameraphone shot. Reactions included “!!!” and “OMG” and “Dammit!”, but honestly, why were people surprised? Five reasons why you all should have seen this coming after the jump.


1. Brooklyn pride. Borough President Marty Markowitz was there, too!


2. Solange. Jay’s indie-leaning sister-in-law is a known fan of Grizzly Bear, rhapsodizing about their music and documenting the hangs they share via Twitter. And guess what? She was there too.


3. Grizzly Bear are totally the new Coldplay, you guys. Maybe even bigger, since they’ve already snagged the desirable Michael McDonald endorsement. (Sorry, Chris!)


4. What better way to enjoy a splendid summer Sunday than a outing to the sweatiest part of the Brooklyn waterfront? Those of us who spent our afternoons on the couch watching Spaceballs because of an unidentified stomach ailment might be a little jealous, because it was so nice out. Blech.


5. Jay is still on a campaign to maximize the bloggability of The Blueprint 3. With 13 days to go until its release, the already-skittish Jay probably wanted to keep his name in the papers, or at least their online equivalent. Not only did his appearance work on that level, it sparked rumors that Jay actually performed with the band (he didn’t), which in turn got the always-coveted “megameme” tag from Hipster Runoff. Sure, said meme wasn’t entirely true, but when were facts important on the Internet, anyway?


Holy shit!!! [JillMenze@Twitpic]
[Special thanks to Jeff Rosenthal.]

I don’t know about you, but the dog days of August are making me long for some levity. And what better way to bring in some hilarity than to think about the late Boots Randolph’s delightful “Yakety Sax,” a.k.a. “that Benny Hill Show song,” a.k.a. the best way to make any YouTube clip hilarious? Noted “Yakety Sax” enthusiast Jess Harvell and I put together a pair of lists related to the song—namely, a top 10 countdown of artists who need to cover the song soon, and a counterpoint list of 10 artists who should never get within a 25-mile radius of its implied hilarity, for fear of ruining it for all time. The countdowns after the jump.


Feel free to listen to Randolph’s original track as you peruse the two lists:



The Ten Artists That Definitely Need To Cover “Yakety Sax” ASAP:
10. Slayer
9. Tom Waits
8. Rahzel
7. The User (but only if he uses dot-matrix printers)
6. Kronos Quartet
5. Wendy & Lisa
4. Mighty Mighty Bosstones
3. R. Kelly
2. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
1. “Weird Al” Yankovic


OK, so that last one? Something of a gimme. To counterbalance it:


The Ten Artists That Should Stay As Far Away From Boots Randolph’s Triumph As Possible:
10. Dave Matthews Band
9. Grizzly Bear
8. Creed
7. Cat Power
6. James Taylor
5. Baz Luhrmann
4. 4 Non Blondes
3. Mariah Carey
2. brokenCYDE
1. Phish


The countdown to someone digging up a moldy clip of Phish doing “Yakety Sax” starts now, I guess.





Yakety Sax [YouTube]
Mario Paint Composer – Yakety Sax [YouTube]

I haven’t reported much on the album charts lately, because, frankly, “another sucky week of sucky sales” isn’t really news, and really there needs to be a move toward a better way of gauging popular interest in music, if only because actually going out to buy an album is an experience that fewer and fewer people are even able to engage in, let along want to. But the news that Grizzly Bear’s much-hyped, long-ago-leaked Veckatimest had landed in the top 10 this week is notable, if only because of a note buried in this week’s Billboard story running down the mag’s top albums:

Indie rock band Grizzly Bear is having its best week ever as its third full-length studio set, “Veckatimest,” arrives at No. 8 with 33,000. That’s the first album to chart on the Billboard 200 for the Massachusetts band and it also gives the quartet its best sales week. 40% of its sales came from downloads while another 24% were shifted at independent and small chain stores.

So, 40% of its sales–roughly 13,000 of them–came from downloads… and conveniently, Veckatimest was a mere $3.99 at Amazon MP3 last week. Now, the Top Digital Albums chart doesn’t break out data by store, and as anyone who glances at the Internet knows, the album was given kudos in almost every quarter of the Internet that fancies itself a place where “important” music gets discussed. But given that similarly lauded bands have seen monetary resistance to their recorded efforts, isn’t Amazon’s low price point at least worth noting? Especially as people figure out how to finance records that, like Veckatimest, took a notable effort to put together, that probably won’t be on the ever-shrinking music-centric shelves at Wal-Mart (although hey, if it is, kudos to whatever distributor hooked that up), and that can’t be paid for by just simply “making it back on the road”?


Eminem Stays Atop Billboard 200; Grizzly Bear, Manson Debut Top 10 [Billboard]

Is it just me, or does the dollop of Best New Music stew that Pitchfork’s Paul Thompson ladled out to Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest today read less like a rave and more like a justification: “Sure, they seem kinda boring (and they def. need to quit it with the microphoblogging), but you should see them live! They try really hard! HARMONIES, OK!” It’s like Danny Gokey’s “A for effort” after The Scream, only with a Chinese Democracy reference in the opening paragraph and more references to being “fascinated.” Props to the guy in the MBV comments for calling the nine point oh score in that site’s predictatron game, btw. [Pitchfork]

Dear New York: Please get back to me six months after the promo cycle for Veckatimest has ended so you can test the staying power of your Grizzly Bear profile‘s subhed, which states that the foursome (whose new album comes out next week) is “everybody’s favorite New York band.”


Despite the harmony-happy dudes getting ink in both your magazine and The New Yorker this week, I am a wee bit skeptical of this bold (and boldfaced!) assertion. Why? A few reasons! First–and perhaps selfishly–they’re not mine. I count as somebody, right? Second–and perhaps more importantly–there’s an ever-growing world of people out there who don’t work in the media in New York City and who as a result would probably, when asked that question, give you an answer like “The Ramones” or “The Velvet Underground” before vaguely remembering that band they saw on Letterman that one time. Thirdly, you probably aren’t going to make many converts with a profile with details that result in it reading like the latest entry on a blog called Musicians White People Like.^* Just take the lede, which centers on a debate over the size of a quail (!) between a band member and a waitress in a Williamsburg (!!) restaurant that hasn’t opened to the public yet (!!!). And then go from there.


Anyway, now that I’m done with that, a question for the readers. I’d like to know, and I’m not judging: Who is your favorite New York City band? If it’s Grizzly Bear, that’s OK. But if it’s not, that’s OK too!


Grizzly Men [New York]


^* I won’t even get into the other problems this piece has, like way that the noun “soundscape” is used in the same paragraph as the sentence “The members of Grizzly Bear have never worried about seeming lame, which may be why people think they’re cool,” because then I would just start tearing tufts of my hair out. Too messy, you know?

Last night, Brooklyn indie-rockers Grizzly Bear had a little problem with the pipes in their Yellow House… they were leaking all over the place! Their album Veckatimest—which has a release date of May 26—hit the net in a glorious 128kbps rip, which is essentially the equivalent of a MySpace stream underwater. Twitter-happy Grizz dude Edward Droste let loose a hesitant (albeit since-BALEETED) statement on the leak, and his Twittering fans came to his aid… in the form of squealing, spoiled, entitled brats begging for more hand-outs!

To be fair, a good 95% of the tweets were very supportive, and the sort of thing every musician likes to hear: True fans who won’t listen to such low-quality piffle, a bevy of promises to buy the CD or vinyl (sometimes multiple times) when they are released in June, and lots of approving comments about the record itself.

But then it mostly devolved into people asking Droste himself to leak a better copy of his own album! Feed me, Seymour! Feed me all night long!

Here’s how not to tell the musicians you like how to run their business:

THE DISRESPECTFUL DEMAND MASKED AS CUTESY COMMENT

mgslol: @EdwardDroste While you can’t fix the ‘leak’ part, you CAN fix the ‘low quality’ part…

gxkaushik: @EdwardDroste Hey…maybe someone could release a better rip themselves…. I have pre-ordered Veckatimest, by the by.

THE BACKSEAT MUSIC INDUSTRY DRIVER

musicvideomusic: @EdwardDroste You might as well leak it in high quality then… :) you don’t want people’s 1st impressions of the album to be lossy do you?

tereutereu: @EdwardDroste Perhaps you should intentionally leak a high-quality version yourself?

onegoodthing: @EdwardDroste: can “you” speed up at least the electronic release to get the high quality out there or is that a logistical impossibility?

THE O RLY APPROACH

CarlosSP: @EdwardDroste Leak a higher quality rip yourself. People have been waiting on this really badly.

THE JUST PLAIN DICKISH

haukurSM: @EdwardDroste so leak a higher quality one already, huh?

coolingpie: @edwarddroste YO, where can I get the leak?!?

wingman251: @EdwardDroste BUT WHERE CAN I FIND IT?!

THE HAVING NO CLUE WHATSOEVER HOW TO DEAL WITH PEOPLE SO NOT EVEN BOTHERING TO PHRASE THINGS IN A WAY THAT ISN’T INSULTING

jheri: @EdwardDroste Link please?

EdwardDroste [Twitter]
Grizzly Bear [Official site]

The rise of the artist blog as official mouthpiece in 2008 may have been in part because record labels can’t afford to hire decent PR staff anymore, but hey, you take the good with the bad. And there was a lot of good to come out of artists hitting up Tumblr, MySpace, et al; these blogs were really effective at humanizing the vacuum presented by endless paparazzi shots and press releases, whether through “clarity posts,” in which artists put gossips on blast, or posts explaining what life is like when bands graduate to bigger tours, or just posts about how they liked shoes. After the jump, nine examples of why more artists should make a tour stop in Blogtown. Not only is the trip entertaining, its fruits give people like me great material!

9. Travis McCoy refers to an indier-than-thou fan as “soooooo Saddle Creek!” Because I have used this insult in my day-to-day life since it was first posted.

8. Tracey Thorn explains the concept of “slow recording.” Hey, it’s more witty than just saying “sorry the record’s taking forever.”

7. Grizzly Bear is forced to stand in front of the class and apologize for posting an Animal Collective song. Because what better way can future pirates be reminded that no one is safe from the overly polite wrath of the piracy-fighting company Web Sheriff?

6. John Mayer files a bug report. Mayer’s blog posts have been really effective at winning over those who couldn’t stand his song about running through the halls in high school and screaming at the top of his lungs. First, you’re thinking his observations on celebrity are kind of right-on; next, you’re allowing for the idea that he’s a pretty decent guitar player; finally, you’re buying “Daughters” from the iTunes Store during a particularly weepy late night in front of the computer.

5. Lily Allen offers up an artist’s rendering of Perez Hilton’s day-to-day life. I normally am loath to think that fat jokes are at all funny, but if anyone deserved to be mocked over his appearance, it’s the inexplicably popular, semi-literate gossip blogger known as Mario Lavandiera. (One’s own medicine, etc.) Allen has also been an expert deployer of the “clarity post”—for example, letting people know that flashing the paparazzi was a wardrobe malfunction, and not a way to stay in the press between records.

4. “Weird Al” Yankovic gets into the workings of his iTunes rush-release. After releasing “Whatever You Like” to iTunes—and watching iTunes screw up the launch—Al goes into whether or not he was happy (spoiler: he wasn’t) and whether he’d rush a song so that his parody coincided with the source material being at the top of the charts (spoiler: he would) I wish more artists would do this!

3. Courtney Love takes on Ryan Adams, bloggers, and the world. She’s been taking people on online since the pre-Firefox era, and she’s since run with her blogging, fusing style tips with rants in a way that Kanye West can only dream of. She’s also one of the few people to call out the weird class issues that often rear their head in gossip writing (“One thing that DOES enrage me is when urban sophisticates with great breeding and cynical cognition of life make FUN of being robbed blind”), and for that she at least deserves a hat-tip.

2. Pete Wentz cries foul about post facto product placement in Fall Out Boy’s “I Don’t Care” video. The post was removed shortly after it went up, but the controversy did result in “the Spaghetti Cat cut” of the clip.

1. Kanye on Bonnaroo. The ne plus ultra of how an artist should use his or her blog to get to his or her fans—and the media—directly. It has anger, it has passion, it has little bits of conspicuous consumption sprinkled within (hope he got a new MacBook Air!). It didn’t make the people who waited until the wee hours of the Bonnaroo morning for his set any less mad, but it sure got the message out more effectively than a tersely written statement that employed the phrase “regrets any inconvenience.”

80 ’08 (And Heartbreak)

As longtime readers well know, Idolator has an unrivaled commitment to what’s new in indie rock, which is why I’m here today discussing a two-year-old Grizzly Bear video. I don’t much care for the much-blogged-about band, although for much of 2006 I was convinced Yellow House was a grower and I needed to give it more time to let my appreciation of the album as a whole match that of just Ed Droste’s voice. (What else could explain all the acclaim?) But I adore the above video of the band’s a cappella performance of their single “Knife” on the streets of Paris, mainly because it strips “Knife” down and reveals that it’s in actuality a really great doo-wop song.

Why do good pop songwriters hide their hooks behind baroque instrumentation? This is something Fluxblogger and Idolator guestblogger Matthew Perpetua has asked numerous times in the past, largely about noisier bands who embrace a self-consciously lo-fi aesthetic (No Age, Times New Viking). But the question holds just as true for the hyper-orchestrated music of bands like Grizzly Bear.

I’m not speaking as a mere poptimist strawman–for three months this winter one of my most-played records was Sonny Sharrock’s Black Woman!–but I wonder why so many musicians needlessly decorate their songs in this way, and why indie rock kids who would never listen to doo-wop fall all over themselves praising Grizzly Bear.

Maybe indie rock kids just hate fun, which is the other element of the Blogotheque video that’s missing from the recorded version; on record, “Knife” treats itself like it’s the most important thing in the world. But the band’s impromptu performance is positively joyful, with the band members smiling and snapping their fingers in such a way that the song turns leisurely instead of plodding.

(A moment for a coda: I do not enjoy Zach Condon’s similarly stripped-down Blogotheque cover of “Knife,” because the last thing the song needs is showoffy vocal runs from a sometime songwriting talent who is at his best with a trumpet to his mouth.)

Grizzly Bear – The Knife [YouTube]

This will probably get me kicked out of whatever music-blogger clubs haven’t booted me already, but I haven’t really listened to Grizzly Bear that much. “Knife” was OK, but it suffered for me from reading so much about it before I actually heard it–it became one of those songs that sounded exactly the way every writer described it, which leeched away some of its charm. Which is why I’m glad I heard “While You Wait For The Others,” which the band debuted on last night’s Late Night With Conan O’Brien, right after it came out; loose-limbed and pretty, it’s one of those songs that will sound extra-lovely during late-summer nights on a lake. (I won’t say much more, so as not to spoil it for you.) [RedLasso via Catbirdseat]

MTV discovers weirdo art-rock bands playing smelly punk houses in Brooklyn, and since online news clips are what the kids now have instead of 120 Minutes, here’s hoping this still means the Dirty Projectors will sell a few more records. Also, estimated time until some jerky with a WordPress account declares every group profiled here “over”: Three hours. [MTV]

MTV discovers weirdo art-rock bands playing smelly punk houses in Brooklyn, and since online news clips are what the kids now have instead of 120 Minutes, here’s hoping this still means the Dirty Projectors will sell a few more records. Also, estimated time until some jerky with a WordPress account declares every group profiled here “over”: Three hours. [MTV]

Head honcho Ryan Schreiber returns to Pitchfork reviewing duties to pen a 1,390-word love letter to Grizzly Bear’s EP that’s sealed with a kiss–in the form of a “Best New Music” commendation, natch–but sadly, even though he writes that he’s not afraid of “looking like Grizzly Bear Fan #1″ in his 8.5-worthy review, he doesn’t offer the Internet the sloppiest kiss bestowed on the band today. (Next time you may want to use the word “phenomenal” more, big guy.) [Pitchfork]