Top 10 Songs of 2013: #5 Telekinesis - Empathetic People

Telekinesis - “Empathetic People”

What do you know? A two-and-a-half-minute driving pop song[1]. Who would have guessed?

This one is all about the rhythm section. The bass and drums completely propel this song forward. I think what makes it such a winner for me is that once you’ve seen Telekinesis live is you can’t forget that those propulsive drums are being played by lead singer Michael Benjamin Lerner.

See?

You score points for difficulty on my list.

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1. This is the last two and a half minute pop song on the list. We’ve got more pop, but it’s 3 minutes plus. And we’ve got one sub–3 minute song left, but it is definitely, definitely not a pop song.

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Top 10 Songs of 2013: #6 Surfer Blood - Say Yes to Me

Surfer Blood - “Say Yes to Me”

2 and a half minutes of pure pop rock. Clearly, I’ve been beating the pop sound into the ground for the first half of the list (and I think there’s still one more …), but this might be as pure as it gets. This is a straight up pop rock song that could have come out at any point in the last four decades, musically and lyrically.

Setting aside what happened with Surfer Blood (which has not been easy for some folks, leading to this album’s lower profile), this is the sort of song Surfer Blood seem tailored to make. Shiny guitars, a nick kicking rhythm section, building a really well constructed pop song.

It certainly never hurts to bring in some harmonies, either.

Top 10 Songs of 2013: #7 Brass Beds - I'll Be There With Bells On

Brass Beds - “I’ll Be There With Bells On”

I’d never heard of Brass Beds before. This is another of the “popped up on some podcast and stuck in my brain” until it wore down my defenses. 2 minutes and 30 seconds of power poppy-ness. There are points where this sounds a bit like a lost Shins b-side from Oh, Inverted World, but with more fuzz.

And, come on, who doesn’t love a little falsetto?

Top 10 Songs of 2013: #8 Ra Ra Riot - Dance With Me

Ra Ra Riot - “Dance With Me”

You know, I didn’t like the new Ra Ra Riot album at first. I loved the string-infused pop sound from their first couple of albums, and I loved their live shows.

This album is so synth. The strings are down in the mix on most of the songs. It wasn’t what I expected.

And then, unexpectedly, it started catching on. It’s still super poppy, hooky music (and by now, you’ve probably noticed that trend in my picks). Like “Crazy”, this song is damn near all hook. It’s a ton of fun. You can almost hear the fun coming through your speakers. When you see the song live, it’s probably the bounciest thing you’ll ever see.

I think that why I ended up putting it on my list. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve heard it, it never feels tired. Every time it builds up to the chorus and you hear the little “ahhhhhh” in the background, it makes me smile. That gets you on the list.

(And, the fun poppy songs at this end of the list will offset some of the darker stuff you’re going to hear shortly …)

Top 10 Songs of 2013: #9 Au Revoir Simone - Crazy

Au Revoir Simone - “Crazy”

This is a grower. The first time I heard it, I think it was on a podcast (maybe KEXP?). It starts off so simple, with that little riff and drum beat. And then the song is just all hook. Seriously, it’s just all gorgeous hook. It’s a hook that you hear for the first time, and you’re singing along before the songs over. You hear it the first time, it hangs out in your brain. You go listen to it again, you think “hmm, this is pretty fun.” The tenth time? You realize you’ve lost and Au Revoir Simone have won.

I think that’s the power of pop music. “Crazy” is literally all hook. I didn’t count, but if there’s more than 10 lines of the song that aren’t the chorus, I’d be shocked. There’s something magical about being able to create a song like that. Everyone gets it, everyone’s welcome. You don’t need to decode the lyrics. It’s all sitting right there for you, making you feel like part of the cool kids.

(Especially when this ends up backing a commercial for Girls on HBO and you’re rocking out the lyrics and impressing all your friends.)

Top 10 Songs of 2013 #10: Sean Nelson - Kicking Me Out of the Band

Sean Nelson - “Kicking Me Out of the Band”

Singer, actor, writer, tweeter, frontman of (the currently on hiatus) Harvey Danger, Sean Nelson is a lot of things. He’s a supremely talented songwriter, bringing in rhyming and phrasing that you don’t typically hear on pop songs. He also brings to the table a tremendous gift of storytelling, and “Kicking Me Out of the Band” is a wonderful example, telling a sly story of a wasted youth in England, starting a band with his pal, getting bigger, getting into drugs, having the press proclaim you “the next big thing”, and eventually get kicked out of the band.

It’s very simple song, with a pretty, quiet intro, that flows into sort of a New Wavey-synth beat, with Nelson’s vocals sitting on top telling the story. And it’s such a smart, cutting story.

The NME said we were “quintessential
power pop meets rock meets folk
meets punk meets alt-country,
but with a healthy sense of metal”

Top 10 Favorite Songs of 2013 - Honorable Mention

Alright, I’m a couple of days late. I’ll catch up before the end of the year. I’m a day ahead of when I started last year, so I’ve got that going for me.

This is the seventh year of this list. If you care to take a look at the previous entries, you can here:

2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007

The rules are very simple:

• The song came out on an album in 2013
• I can only pick one song per artist

I occasionally, but rarely, break those rules.

This was an odd year for me, musically. With Spotify and iTunes Radio and satellite radio and whatever else-radio, I heard a lot of music. So much, in fact, that I did a really poor job of carving out what I liked. Unless something really caught my ear, or was from an artist I already liked, it usually ended up on a random playlist or starred on Spotify, hoping to see the light of day.

In putting together the list, I also seemingly fell into a couple of trends this year—as often seems to be the case—with many songs on this list falling into one or two categories.

Right out of the gates, you’ll note the first trend: female vocalists. The first female vocalist is featured in a group who’ve made my top 10 before, with their debut album.

Cults - “I Can Hardly Make You Mine”

This song is very Cults, but after a whole bunch of caffeine. Still sounding a bit lo-fi, “I Can Hardly Make You Mine” is a super shiny 60s pop song that does what a good song does: makes you want to listen to it again. Ask me again in a week, and this may have hit the top 10.

Sylvan Esso - “Hey Mami”

Until a few hours ago, this was in my top 10. It only slipped out because I realized how mesmerized I had been by hearing and seeing it live. Opening for Minor Alps, I had never heard of Sylvan Esso. Then two folks walk out, a woman with a mic and a guy behind a couple of Moogs. And then she starts singing, laying down the backing vocals, then breaking out into the chorus while slowly dancing. As the beat starts to pick up, she dances a bit more actively. In any other situation, this might come off forced or fake. It wasn’t. It was so genuine as to be incredibly infectious and quickly won the crowd over.

The woman is Amelia Meath, who has a tremendous voice, and it just doesn’t need much instrumentation behind it at all. But, I think the instrumentation might be just a bit too sparse to be a complete earworm. (Check out the beat on “Play It Right” which I think works better.)

Night Beds - “Ramona”

Here’s a very straight forward alt-country(ish) song lifted into the stratosphere by Winston Yellen’s phenomenal voice. In the hands (or voice … ) of almost any other band, this is just a catchy, but not overly noteworthy song. But in the last verse, when he breaks into his falsetto, the song just sort of takes on a new life.

Phoenix - “Entertainment”

This is such an incredibly great, poppy song. It easily slides into Phoenix’s pantheon of amazing pop songs (like “1901”, “Lisztomania”, and “Long Distance Call”). But it’s not a genre-shaking pop song. That’s a really high bar to set, but Phoenix set it for themselves. Seriously, both “1901” and “Lisztomania” were songs that completely redefined power/indie pop (and the album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is the album that launched a million remixes).

It’s a great song, in a band with a long history of great songs. And I think that’s why it doesn’t stand out as much.

"The Failed Techno-Libertarian Agenda" →

"The push toward Bitcoin comes largely from the libertarian portion of the technology community who believe that regulation stands in the way of both progress and profit. Unfortunately, this alarmingly magical thinking has little basis in economic reality. The gradual dismantling of much of the US and international financial regulatory safety net is now regarded as a major catalyst for the Great Recession. The ‘financial or political constraints’ many of the underbanked find themselves in are the result of unchecked predatory capitalism, not a symptom of a terminal lack of software."

(Via Alex Payne.)

While he does have a stake in the game, this entire post is a great takedown of the fundamentally flawed thinking that Bitcoin (or similarly “unfettered” currencies) will somehow solve the world’s financial and wealth inequity problems.

Instead, Bitcoin is simply another opportunity for the able to squeeze out more money for themselves, while the unable (due to resources, options, station in life) are left behind. Payne says it better than I can. Go read it.

Community. Season 5.

January 2nd. I’m ready for the smartest show on TV to be back.

When Caching Bites Back

We have an application on our site that was rewritten a few years back by a developer who is no longer with the company. He attempted to do some “smart” caching things to make it fast, but I think had a fundamental lack of understanding of how caching, or at least memcached works.

Memcached is a really nifty, stable, memory-based key-value store. The most common use for it is caching the results of expensive operations. Let’s say you have some data you pull from a database that doesn’t change frequently. You’d cache it in memcached for some period of time so that you don’t have to hit the database frequently.

A couple of things to note about memcached. Most folks run it on a number of boxes on the network, so you still have to go across the network to get the data. [1] Memcached also, by default, has a 1MB limit on the objects/data you store in it. [2] Store lots of stuff in it, keep it in smaller objects (that you don’t mind throwing across the network), and you’ll see a pretty nice performance boost.

Unless … someone decides to not cache little things. And instead caches a big thing.

We started to notice some degradation in performance over the past few months. It finally got bad enough that I had to take a look. It only took a little big of debugging to determine that the way the caching was implemented wasn’t helping us: it was actively hurting us. Rather than caching entries individually, it was loading up an entire set of the data and trying to cache a massive chunk of data. Which, since it was larger than the 1MB limit, would fail.

You’d end up with something like this:

• Hey, do I have this item in the cache?
• Nope, let’s generate the giant object so we can cache it
• Send it to the server to cache it
• Nope, it’s too big, can’t cache it
• Oh well, onto the next item … do I have it in the cache?

Turns out, this wasn’t just impacting performance. It was hammering our network.

The top of that graph is about 400Mb/s. The drop off is when we rolled out the change to fix the caching (to cache individual elements rather than the entire object0. It was, nearly instantaneously, a 250Mb/s drop in network traffic.

The lesson here? Know how to use your cache layer.

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1. You can run it locally. It’s super fast if you do. But, if you run it locally, you can’t share the data across servers. It all depends on your use case.

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2. That 1MB limit is changeable

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