Here is the track list for Here Come the Warm Jets: 26 Absolutions, Vol. 2, completed by Jay Thompson on June 1, 2010.
Side A:
Brian Eno, Here Come the Warm Jets (4:05)
The Atlas Sound (ft. Noah Lennox), Walkabout (3:59)
Grandaddy, Everything Beautiful Is Far Away (5:14)
The Vaselines, Lovecraft (5:38)
Pixies, All Over the World (5:27)
Roxy Music, Editions of You (3:51)
My Bloody Valentine, Glider (3:10)
Prince, Paisley Park (4:42)
Fennesz, Made In Hong Kong (4:20)
Voice of the Seven Woods, Solitary Breathing (3:10)
Michael Jackson, I Can’t Help It (4:31)
Bat For Lashes, Siren Song (4:58)
Depeche Mode, Shake the Disease (4:50)
Side B
The Microphones, Choir from “The Sun” (1:51)
Yo La Tengo, Tom Courtenay (3:30)
The Mint Chicks, Crush (4:15)
Pictureplane, Goth Star (3:19)
David Bowie, Cracked Actor (3:02)
Thee Oh Sees, Hey Buddy (3:07)
Caribou, Odessa (5:16)
Best Coast, Make You Mine (1:46)
Anthony “Shake” Shakir, Frictional Beat No. 5 (3:23)
High Places, Namer (4:03)
Clues, You Have My Eyes Now (4:11)
Tune-Yards, Fiya (5:29)
Chris Knox, Lapse (2:33)
Friends I love this mixtape so much that I’m not really sure how to write about it at the moment when I’m writing about it. It’s not the only one of these six Absolutions from Jay that I feel that way about, but it’s the first one I have to contend with. Here’s the epigraph to Robert Hass’ collection, Praise:
We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
“I think I shall praise it.”
And for some reason that makes me think of a deeply forgettable movie from the late 1990s that for some reason I haven’t forgotten, called “10 Things I Hate About You.” So here are two lists about Here Come the Warm Jets by Jay Thompson:
3 Things About Here Come the Warm Jets That Are Really About Me
It is an exploration of the relationship between distortion, disruption, and pop songcraft that builds little pockets of exposition over three or four songs at a time, or so I believe.
It has a rhythm to its whole shape. Oftentimes on a mixtape, what stands out are the best songs. Those songs become part of a personal canon of great songs, loosely attached to the original mixtape, and take on a life of their own in the listener/recipient’s life. That seems to be the point most of the time. But other mixtapes, the ones I consider to be the best mixtapes, build a world within themselves — an argument, a feeling, a rhythm. This one does all three I think, but what I notice most is the rhythm it develops of recognition between a song element in one song and a song element, slightly tweaked, in the next and the next and so on, until a landing spot briefly develops, a regrouping, before the carrying on. The mix listens to itself like a good poem listens to itself.
Distortion is distortion, disruption is disruption, and then there are the things that happen in songs like those by Atlas Sound, Fennesz and Depeche Mode that aren’t really either but are a kind of joyous darkening or modulation of sound. I don’t have a word for them. But all of those things in music — distortion, disruption, joyous darkening modulation — make a kind of spiritual erotics of sound that is the closest I ever get to spirituality. I think this mixtape is devoted to that sound.
Eleven Things I Love Within Here Come the Warm Jets by Jay Thompson:
The buried vocals as “Here Comes the Warm Jets” reaches its final stages. Hiding something presumably important is a tactic perfected by Cocteau Twins and Lost In Translation but it’s been around awhile.
The loudness and sharpness of the songs by The Vaselines, Roxy Music, and David Bowie.
The bursts of static and wobbly keyboards in “Everything Beautiful Is Far Away,” a song that successfully imagines the human cave life of the future.
The softness and languidness of “Hey Buddy” by a band I never think of for its softness and languidness.
The “woo,” followed by a nearly-distorted baritone saxophone riff, near the end of “Editions of You.”
The way the squelchy, delirious-by-the-end repeating instrumental lines in “Glider” and the darkening agitation of “Made In Hong Kong” bracket the psychedelia of Prince’s “Paisley Park” and accentuate the sexual melancholy of that song with their before and after.
The brilliant clarity of the first lyric of “Tom Courtenay” emerging from a big crunch of guitars.
How Jay pretends that somehow the smooth, pristinely produced Michael Jackson song belongs on this mix, an unstable element within a coherent argument.
Whatever those bizarre instruments and sounds are that make an unfriendly bed for Merrill Garbus’ tender vocals on “Fiya”
How “Goth Star” chops up and unsmooths its smooth distorted surface as it goes.
The little looping wavery line in the background of “Crush.”
Gladly accepting additions to this list. What a brilliant mixtape to have spent fourteen years with.
Sunday Mixtape #5