Almost ten years into the twenty-first century, I decided it’s ok to start thinking of best-of’s for this decade. First up for consideration are musical collaborations. These things are usually boring marketing ploys (Everyone + Sinatra), unnecessary strokes to enormous egos and table scraps for their fans (Plant + Krauss), or cute compilations put out by famous (or famously?) beautiful people (She + Him). I’ll be fair and say that some such efforts produce good tunes or have value simply because they’re weird pairings. Sticking Ol’ Blue Eyes in a sound booth with Bono, for example, is hilarious! But more interesting are collaborations that achieve something beyond kitsch and storied meetings.
To narrow this down a bit and because I’m an indie rock fan, I’m focusing on smaller-label collaborations in which two or more musicians who have other main projects came together for a one-off recording project. So I’m excluding supergroup-type bands like, say, Wolf Parade or Broken Social Scene, who continue to put out material. A few examples that came close but didn’t make the top three are Calexico + Iron and Wine, The Postal Service, and Animal Collective + Vashti Bunyan (a CLOSE number four). You get the idea.
Below are my choices for the top three collaborations to date of the twenty first century, plus streaming selections from all three:
Top three plus streams after the jump.
Third Man Records
Nashville resident Jack White recently gave a physical address to Third Man Records, the imprint on which he releases all his music. He designed the building in downtown Nashville to include a recording studio, a vinyl shop, a darkroom, and a stage. And his newest band, The Dead Weather, featuring the vocal stylings of Allison Mosshart from The Kills, The Raconteurs’ Jack Lawrence on bass, Queens of the Stone Age’s Dean Fertita on guitars, and White on drums, will be releasing their debut on the label in June. They recently hosted a listening party at the studio for family and friends at which the guests were given a 45 of the band’s first single. (You can stream those two songs–one is a Gary Numan cover–on the band’s site and buy them on itunes.)
White claims the label may be interested in recording and expediently pressing vinyl for good local bands.
We all found out this week that one of the bastions of independent music, Touch and Go Records, is changing drastically. While it’s not closing shop entirely, it is reorganizing and cutting jobs. Thanks to the murderous economy, the historic and important indie label will no longer distribute and manufacture releases for other, as-important labels like Merge, Drag City and Jade Tree. (Stereogum has a list of other labels affected plus the official press release from TAG owner Corey Rusk.) And that sucks.
Touch and Go will, however, continue to act as a record label.
Most everything’s been said about how the album is dead or dying and what putting out “records” will look like in the future, so rather than wax on all that, we’ll just say this: we like the trend of releasing records only in vinyl and digital formats. Buy the vinyl and get a free download, or skip the vinyl and simply download the album. Pleases the snobs like us who want the vinyl sound quality, the pretty, tangible album art, but also portability, and it also satisfies little Jimmy Next Generation who only needs mp3s, singles and Adderall.
Rusk summed it up sadly but sweetly: “It is the end of a grand chapter in Touch and Go’s history, but we also know that good things can come from new beginnings.”