Kid Cudi: “You Can Call Me Moon Man”
“You Can Call Me Moon Man,” Kanye protege Kid Cudi reveals that he’s not from the Midwest, as previously believed, but from the heavens. Specifically, the Moon. And what’s it like on the moon? Dark, apparently. Cudi spends most of “You Can Call Me Moon Man” dropping sobering boasts along the lines of “Shit is so damn sick/ No antibiotic could ever fucking stop it/ If you copped it, please O.D.” Other lines–”I make immortal songs for the mortals to cruise with,”– imply Cudi might be getting high on hot air.

Gang Gang Dance: “Live @ Southpaw, April 2008”
Just in case you forgot they were out there, Gang Gang Dance recently slipped a full live set into a podcast by Social Registry (the band’s US label). Because the concert was taped all the way back in ‘08 and is largely made up of tunes from the group’s last record, Saint Dymphna, so none of this is new, exactly. Then again, the way that the songs “First Communion” and “House Jam” are mashed up here with slurry jams, you might not recognize them right away, anyway.

Six Organs of Admittance: “The Ballad of Charley Harper”
In his paintings, Cincinnati-based artist Charley Harper sought to simplify nature–to create an ordered representation of a complex reality. There’s a good chance that Six Organs of Admittance’s “The Ballad of Charley Harper,” with its slowly cycling melodies, is an homage to that sensibility. Ben Chasny uses simple components–an acoustic guitar, some distortion, a single lyric–to suggest some larger and more elusive mystic truth.

Ganglians: “Lost Words”
Remember that scene in Animal House where John Belushi rips the guitar out of a hippie’s hands and smashes it to bits against the wall? “Lost Words,” by Sacramento’s Ganglians, might insight a similar style of blind rage, at least for the hot tempered. Gilded in reedy falsettos and cascading waves of autumnal guitar, this is, ostensibly, a song about going to the grocery store.

Black Meteoric Star: “Death Tunnel”
A name can go a long way in techno. Were this song composed under a more upbeat moniker and given a title with a little more sunshine, it could easily be misconstrued as party music. But this is “Death Tunel,” by Black Meteoric star, and as such, the track’s pulsing sequenced synths suggest something more sinister. This is music for vintage-sci-fi dystopia and the darkest old-school Nintendo games.

Gang Gang Dance: “First Communion (TV on The Radio Remix)”
Less of a remix than a grudge-match between Manhattan and Brooklyn’s two most widely discussed art-rock bands. But there are no winners or losers here, just judiciously programmed 909s. TV on The Radio hurls itself into one of the better songs from Gang Gang Dance’s Saint Dymphna, stripping off some of the original’s lush synthesizers and locking down the tempo to a steady, if jittery, pulse. It’s hard to call it an improvement, but it’s hardly a throwaway.

Jack Carneal is a Towson professor and resides with his family in Baltimore. He runs Yaala Yaala Records. This year he released a terrific album by renown Malian hunter’s musician Yoro Sidibe, who I was lucky enough to have interviewed. That album is one of my favorites of the year. Carneal digs it too.

Carneal took some time from turning in his students’ final grades for the semester and made up his own mini-list of top record discoveries:

1) Bonnie Prince Billy, Lie Down in the Light, Drag City Records

This one is easy for me. I first heard “Ohio River Boat Song” in 1992 or 91 before it had come out; Will sent a rough cassette to his big brother Ned, my bandmate at the time, and we listened to it in Ned’s car. I just don’t think anyone’s really able to get their heads around how influential Will has been over the nearly two decades since that first single. But one day everyone will recognize that he’s made better, more interesting records for an extraordinarily long period of time, with really no sleepwalkers, and his work will be noted by future human beings as high points of pre and post-millenial recorded music. This record is perfect.

2) Yoro Sidibe, s/t, Yaala Yaala Records

I first heard Yoro singing from a boombox in 1999, Bougouni, Mali. He was singing a song called ‘Dougouni Yala” which, as I understood it, is a song about bird hunting. Dougouni is some kind of pigeon while Yala, taken from the Arabic “to go”, mutated as it entered Bamanan in that wonderful way that language tends to mutate, becoming a word that, again as I understood it, means to ramble, wander, trek rather than simply ‘to go’. We borrowed the word and the idea, used a more official Bamanan spelling, for our label. I still get chills every single time I hear this music. Every time. Without fail.

3) Surasama, s/t, Drag City

I don’t know much about this one except that when I play it I am instantly relaxed. It was on my record player pretty much all summer: windows open, breezes, that sort of thing.

4) Gerry Mulligan, Jeru & Art Pepper Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section

I think everyone should listen to Gerry Mulligan. Being no jazzbo, I believe the West Coast jazz scene was less hard than NY, ergo the moniker ‘cool’ pinned on Chet Baker, et. al. (though if you’ve seen video of Dave Brubeck, particularly the incredible drummer Joe Morello, you begin to wonder about that adjective being applied to too many jazz musicians). While much bop can be frantic, skittering and nervewracking, much of the West Coast jazzers tried to mine steadier, calmer grooves; ‘Art Pepper Meets the Rhythmn Section’ is another great example.

5) Gang Gang Dance St Dymphna & Raw War

A lot of early GGD was interesting, said in that ironic way that infers some chin-rubbing element that may preclude actual goodness. Not their last two releases, the EP ‘Raw War’ and the full-length St Dymphna. There is something strange and moving about Raw War, a tribute to musician Nathan Maddox who was struck by lightning as he lay on a Manhattan rooftop; similarly, St Dymphna is moving for entirely different reasons, an almost perfect combination of improv inscrutability, hip-hop sensibility and a mysterious odd glittery pretzel and street- smelling kind of evocation of Manhattan that has a huge amount of power to wring many lost memories.