Friday Mix Tape: Assorted New Tunes

This week’s mix tape serves up a smattering of some good tunes from a diverse group of 2009 releases. Alongside the advent of the iPod has come a testing mechanism for the durability of music. Even if you have 30 GBs, 80 GBs, or some other mammoth hard drive on your device, the thing always fills up. So, inevitably new albums that don’t make the cut after a few weeks are usually the first to go. Well, these are some that stuck around.

The mix kicks off with a tranquil, ambient song that has a great, slow-mounting build from Jounce off their latest, These Things, featuring a special guest in Tom Hamilton. Next up, we have a track from a great band out of the Ozarks that are getting a lot of acclaim, Ha Ha Tonka, with a song that manages to successfully reference both Dostoyevsky and “tying one on” in the same song. This is from their new one, Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South. From there, we head to the best tune off A.A. Bondy’s ominous freshy, When the Devil’s Loose, with a visceral image-laden narrative about a blood-thirsty vampire.

Moving on, we have a couple of familiar names in the Assembly of Dust and the New Riders of the Purple Sage with a pair of gems off their latest releases, Some Assembly Required and Where I Come From. Next comes one of the many standouts from the HT faves Van Ghost’s debut, Melodies for Lovers, with Wednesday. And last but not least, we have a favorite, For Beginners, off of M. Ward’s wildly popular Hold Time album.