When WXPN, our Philadelphia Echoes affiliate, asked me to submit my Top Ten Albums and songs list, Program Director Bruce Warren said “send us your top ten albums and songs (if you have songs).” I knew what he meant by that parenthetical on a couple of levels.
On Echoes, we usually don’t play songs, right? Instrumental pieces are usually called compositions. Songs are something you hear on pop radio and have singers. And even if they were songs, we don’t think of the music here in a “song” sort of way. They’re more like parts of albums, atmospheres, moods and sonic architecture.
But we do actually play songs on Echoes. In the last year, you’ve heard tunes by Goldfrapp, Alu, M83, All India Radio and many more. So I approached this list like my Top Ten CDs for 2008. I didn’t limit it to Echoes materiel only, but they’ve all been in heavy rotation on my iPod.
Topping my list is Alu, someone not well known outside the Echoesphere, but she should be. Her album, Lobotomy Sessions is the Never Forever (Kate Bush) of the 21st Century, and this song in particular, “Circus Cosmos,” haunted me for months with its refrain:
You are the photograph that I’ve never seen
You are my phantom, the fountain of dreams.
I’ve been living in a mortuary, my whole life long.
There’s more imagery in that one chorus than most musicians conjure for an entire CD and it’s delivered by Alu’s keening soprano with such aching and despair that I know there’s more behind this tune than Alu let on.
Digitonal’s “93 Years On” is equally haunting. A masterpiece of ambient chamber music, Andy Dobson’s tortured clarinet solo, reputedly performed in a drunken haze over a lost girlfriend, is a blistering, pained cry of luxurious anguish set in an electronic cocoon.
Beck has one of the non-Echoes pieces here. But “Chemtrails” has one of those Pachelbel-style hooks that could go on forever. He did a great version of it with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra at the Bowl in September that stayed in my head thereafter.
“The Legend of the Last of the Outlaw Truckers A.K.A. the Ballad Of Sheriff Shorty” by The Dandy Warhols is worthy of its over-long title. It’s a hyped-up mix of Country-Jitterbug-New Orleans Voodoo psychedelia. Courtney Taylor-Taylor rips it up in this hipster-talking ode to speed and trucking. I can’t get it out of my head. Check out this great video and it will be embedded in your head as well.
The electronica band Goldfrapp took a pastoral, nearly acoustic turn on their Seventh Tree album. I loved “Little Bird” for its wistful tone that ends in a psychedelic crescendo that reminded me of Magical Mystery era Beatles. Alison Goldfrapp’s voice is the kind you want to sleep with.
My youngest teenaged daughter, Grace hipped me to MGMT and “Time to Pretend.” It’s a tongue in cheek parody of the rock lifestyle with a surprisingly poignant undertone, delivered with driving synthesizers.
Lights Out Asia‘s “Radars Over the Ghosts of Chernobyl” is about as epic as they get, starting with Gothic chords and Latin voices that sound like an oblivion mass before slowly emerging into surging guitars, hell bound rhythms and Chris Schafer’s anguished vocal.
Mariee Sioux is a partly Native American singer who uses Native themes and imagery in her music. Her song “Buried in Teeth” is part children’s song and part lament with a fragile voice that breaks over her finger-style guitar playing with some nice Native flute by Gentle Thunder.
Another catch from my daughter is Gnarls Barkley. Every time she’d throw a mix CD in the car and I asked her what that track was, it would be something by this electro-soul duo. Their album, The Odd Couple is brilliant and “Surprise,” with its mix of chorus harmonies redolent of The Association coupled with surf grooves doesn’t stop.
Finally Sumner McKane’s “After the Fireworks we walked to the Rope Swing,” is the least song-like of anything here, but the epic, almost operatic electric orchestration always sends a buzz up my spine and the guitar solo is sublime.
You can see the list along with other host and staff picks at WXPN
or just go right here:
John Diliberto’s Top 10 SONGS
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The Echoes Blog 
Echo Location: Sumner McKane’s Ambient Americana
October 1, 2008Sumner McKane
It’s been several years now that guitarist Sumner McKane has been releasing albums of evocative soundscapes dipped in Americana as cinematic as a John Ford western and as nuanced as Andrew Wyeth painting. But this isn’t pastoral nostalgia. His landscapes are tinged in ambient atmospheres and pulled by an undertow of psychedelia that makes it some of the most unassumingly mind-bending music of the decade.
(You can hear an Audio Version of this Blog with Music)
Sumner McKane has played extensively in country bands, but while his music often has a country twang, you’d never mistake if for something out of Nashville.
On his latest album, What A Great Place to Be, Sumner plays everything, drums, bass, computer, but his main instrument is guitar. Although he has played in country bands, you can hear echoes of San Francisco psychedelic guitar and shades of Pink Floyd‘s David Gilmour in his playing.
Sumner McKane - What A Great Place to Be
Most of Sumner McKane’s What a Great Place to Be was birthed at the same time he brought his two daughters into the world. No doubt their presence impacted the serene nature of the album,
but Sumner’s music has always had a nostalgic quality. His CD covers are usually home snapshots and landscapes from Maine, and his titles harken back to his like “After the Fireworks We Walked to the Rope Swing.” That’s a long and unwieldy title, yet the music is anything but.
Sumner McKane’s new album is What A Great Place to Be and it makes you feel exactly that wherever you’re listening. It’s like the gentlest acid dream in a sun-drenched meadow and it’s our Echoes CD of the Month for October. I’ll feature it on Echoes this Monday, October 6th. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for new music.
(You can hear an Audio Version of this Blog with Music)
John Diliberto ((( Echoes )))
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Tags:Ambient, echoes, John Diliberto, Pink Floyd, Sumner McKane
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