Baby It's Cold Outside

“Strange Enough,” N.A.S.A. (featuring Wu-Tang, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, & Karen O.)— Combine vintage Wu Tang, the insistency of a tight contemporary club mix, and an impenetrably angsty Karen O. (batting champion in my Top Ten, apparently) chorus, and what you got is some wicked hot jam whose nostalgia (“Rumpelstiltskin,” indeed) feels more than earned next to what else passed for hiphop in ’09. With your now obligatory weed references, it’s just about keepin’ on keepin’ on in a very strange world. BTW, when did underground become code for pothead or am I forgetting (ha ha) it always meant that?!

“Gardeninginginging,” Knight School— Reportedly off an album called The Poor and Needy Need to Party, one of those kind of titles that make you wonder how nobody ever thought of it before, and of which I’m not sure really exists beyond the blogosphere. I first heard this tune on a mix tape given to me this last year but it could have come from Olympia or Eugene or Athens or Charlotte anytime over the last twenty-five years—timeless lo-fi jangle pop distilled into a two-chord hum-a-long of yearning harmonies and self-deprecating humor. Not that I’m at all clear as to what it’s about: being “sick and tired” and calling “oly-oly-oxen-free” to “old friends” in a “crowded universe," all of which sounds to me humble and funny. Maybe it’s about going home, too; doing some gardening, with ringing guitars as accompaniment. If the voluntary simplicity movement doesn’t already have a theme song they could do worse than this disarmingly bittersweet number, for sure.