Let’s do another speed round. One of the pleasures of this
column is that it forces me to bear down on songs I kind of like, often
making me like them more. That’s been the case with a handful of recent
album tracks, in order of preference: “Cruel Woman,” by Shawn Lee
featuring Fanny Franklin (Ubiquity), some laid-back Daptone-esque
funk featuring the instant-classic line, “Don’t mess with me/I’ll chop
you down like a tree”; Afrobutt’s “The Taste (Round &
Brown)” (Electric Minds), a London house producer’s blippy,
rough-and-ready late-disco homage; Ben Klock’s “In a While” (Ostgut Ton), a moment of dubby grace from a Berliner normally given
over to the sterner and more overwhelming; Bell Orchestre’s
“Water/Light/Shifts” (Arts & Crafts), the moment on the
Montreal ensemble’s newest that floats most beguilingly; 2000 and
One’s “State of House” (100% Pure), which features obvious
club-music signifiers such as “Baby, baby,” and “No man in the world,”
repeated almost randomly over a pumping, minimal track featuring an
ultrasimple keyboard riff that sounds like it’s nodding off and waking
itself up over and over again.

Some album tracks just jump out at you, though, which is about the
only thing the following two songs have in common. The-Dream’s
“Kelly’s 12 Play” (Def Jam) is a lubricious ode to having sex to
your favorite album (“She was like, ‘Thank you, Dream’/And I was like,
‘No, thank you, Kels'”) over a drum machine filtered à la
Apollonia 6’s “Sex Shooter,” only (blessings be) way, way better. The
Brit five-piece known there as Brakes, and here as
BrakesBrakesBrakes, didn’t write “Ancient Mysteries” (Rough Trade)—Charles Douglas’s original was released five years
ago—but they approach it with such infectious jumpiness that I
can’t play it once without playing it twice (its length, 1:57, also
helps).

I’m not a big South by Southwest guy—only went once, when
someone else paid for it—but its annual MP3 torrent (2009 was the
third) is mighty generous, and so is New York writer Paul Ford for
writing six-word reviews of all 1,302 tracks, each graded one to five
stars, for the Morning News website. Of Ford’s 2009-issued five-star
selections, the ones I loved most were (also) very different: the woozy
sludge of “Husky,” by San Francisco’s Prizehog, and
Futomomo Satisfaction’s “Goro Goro Nyang,” the work of eight
Japanese musicians, three of whom are women who play trombones and wear
bikinis.