Author page: Jamie Stoike

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8 Songs to Play at a Halloween Party That You Might Not Have Thought Of

October 30, 2013

My fellow staff writer Lucas Kunsman recently wrote a very good list of songs that are hauntingly beautiful. A few of my favorites — “Oh Comely” and “Kasimir Pulaski Day” — made the list. But it got me curious: what are 8 songs that are actually appropriate for a Halloween party? Now, these aren’t all Halloween songs, I know, and a lot of them aren’t really that dark or scary; I didn’t want to give you a list filled with horror-film scores and industrial metal. I also didn’t want to give you a list of songs like “Monster Mash” and “Thriller”, so I tried to pick songs you haven’t thought of.

So here are a few songs that are vaguely sinister and festive, but still fun enough to justify playing at a party. No one wants to hear the theme from Psycho while they’re sipping a beer and trying to hit on the girl in the inappropriately revealing costume.

Pluck All Your Silly Strings: Neutral Milk Hotel, in Chattanooga, TN (10/19/13)

October 20, 2013
Neutral Milk Hotel in 1998. From left to right: Jeff Mangum, Scott Spillane, Julian Koster, Jeremy Barnes.

 

This is covert stuff. I’ve been waiting in line for 45 minutes to attend a show for which their are no real tickets — it’s all electronic, so as to prevent reselling and scalping. Now, the throng of diehards here to see a band that died 15 years ago, is herded into single-file lines. Women’s bags are checked. Men are given full-body pat downs. We’re all warned several times: no cameras, no video recorders, no audio recorders, no cell phone videos or pictures. I wouldn’t be surprised if I have to file for Level 3 Security Clearance. People talk in hushed tones. What is inside Track 29, in Chattanooga, isn’t meant to get out. Inside is an experience, ephemeral, to be stored in one’s mind and not one’s computer. It’s like the nineties. Entering this venue is entering a time machine. This is not surprising, considering that the band we’re all here to see famously sang “I wish’d I could save her in some sort of time machine.” Everyone thought Neutral Milk Hotel was dead; perhaps they were saved in that very same time machine.

Under-appreciated Albums: “The Hazards of Love”, by the Decemberists

October 2, 2013

A few weeks ago the National played at the Ryman, and fellow staff writer Nick Kline and I happened to meet up there. We talked about music, favorite bands, past concerts, and then we hit upon The Decemberists — we’d both seen them live, on their 2009 A Short Fazed Hovel tour, where they played the entirety of their recent album The Hazards of Love. Nick mentioned as an aside that HoL his least favorite Decemberists album, and conversation moved on.

Perhaps this (and, admittedly, a bad case of writer’s block) is what motivated me to write this. While I don’t necessarily know why it’s Nick’s least favorite, nor do I even know if he likes or dislikes it, the general opinion developed since The Hazards of Love‘s release is that’s it’s overwrought, weird, has too many guest vocals, is too repetitive, and too metal. By the time of the release of The Decemberists’ next effort, the superb The King is Dead in 2011, frontman Colin Meloy admitted “Even I’m starting to believe it, like, ‘I guess The Hazards of Love did kind of suck, didn’t it?'”.  By 2013, it’s largely been swept under the rug, left hiding under the skirt of the bigger and strong releases in their six-album catalog. Yet, I can’t help but love this album. 

Arcade Fire – Reflektor

September 18, 2013

Day late and a dollar short, perhaps: this song came out eight whole days ago. In today’s hyper-consumptive, Facebook-addicted generation where one week becomes one month and a year compresses into a day, where we watch our lives unfold on our phones’ camera app, it’s easy for the present to slip through our fingers. Eight days is a long time. Don’t you know that one of my old high school friends has made 21 new posts since “Reflektor” released? Don’t you know that twenty-one important, life-changing things happened to them in that span of 8 days? I read it, too, all of it.

Yet, a year from now, they won’t remember what it was all about. And I won’t remember it, either. They’re someone that I knew once, but not anymore.

We live now in an embattled state, where social media and self-absorption has blurred and obscured the line between friend and stranger. This is the world that Arcade Fire’s new single, “Reflektor”, inhabits, questions, and condemns.

A Modest Proposal in Defense of the EP

September 5, 2013

I’m a Modest Mouse fan–more or less old news, for those who know me–and my recent fixation has been a revolving cycle of classic Modest Mouse songs: “Night on the Sun,” “Here It Comes,” “King Rat,” “All Night Diner”. Except these aren’t classics. In fact, they’re relatively forgotten because none of them is featured on a single LP. Nor is the National’s excellent “Sin-Eaters,”, nor Interpol’s darkly seductive “Specialist,” nor The Decemberists’ 18-minute epic “The Tain.” These are songs that too few people have, because they were relegated to the lowly EP.

In an era in which music is increasingly consumed by either buying single tracks on iTunes or shelling out $25 for an album on vinyl, the half-length EP is often forgotten.

It shouldn’t be.

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