Item the first: it seems abundantly clear that fish is not immune to the charms of this. And by fish, I mean fish. And by I mean fish, I mean fish and also maybe myself.
Item the second: she is rocking a blue, zardoesque number that cannot but charm Sir Jen.
It is a window roller-upper no doubt, but it is also a lonely car robot, wherein I do the robot to the song by myself in the car.
This is the first in a series. The series will document songs that I didn’t care much about until I saw the song performed live, after which the song totally blew my mind. I won’t give away the others just yet, but the first is Modern Art, by Art Brut.
Let me first explain that if you’ve never seen Art Brut live, consider yourself deprived. I’m no aficionado, but I’ve seen somewhere between 100 and 150 live shows, and never have I seen a band that delivered a performance more fun than Art Brut. They recently played a five night residency in Chicago, and I was lucky enough to catch them twice at Schuba’s, a venue that holds less than 200 people. My only regret is that I didn’t buy the five night pass. They were that good. Fortunately I’ll be on vacation in L.A. next week, and I’ll be catching them yet again at Spaceland in Silverlake.
Modern Art, off of their first LP Bang, Bang, Rock and Roll was not a stand out track for me, until I saw them last Monday. Eddie Argos, master storyteller, walks into the crowd, back and forth, putting a tremendous strain on the guy manning the microphone cord. But he wants us all to really understand how much he loves the blues of David Hockney (I do too) and the pieces of Matisse. It’s a head banging, crowd rocking four minutes.
Their latest album Art Brut vs. Satan is something I simply can’t stop listening to. Don’t let the spoken word lyrics get you down. Yes, that is his real singing voice, it’s not irony, it’s not rock and roll. They’re just talking….to the kids. The musicality is fantastic and fun. In fact, I think F.U. and N. are the three best letters that describe Art Brut.
Pandora birthed this effortless Spoon guitar triumphalism it’s so easy everything is perfect we are Spoon suck it talentless audience were are awesome Spoon who are you you are sad yeah I am but Spoon doesn’t even break a sweat it is so easy hey want to be pals really yeah wow you we be pals with me yeah we are Spoon we love everyone doesn’t everyone?
WARNING: Fan video.
NOTE: They won me over with the ol’ glass of milk gambit. Plus Spoon.
Sactown bar band power poppers. Pandora popped this one out a couple of times, and I was first struck by a little bit of Wrens-y “Surprise Honeycomb” guitar weaving through, but then the boy/girl double tracking popped in and the woo-ooh-oohs and I just thought it was quality Spring-time pop. It builds toward the end. For some unclear reason I am reminded of Imperial Teen. Also, I am intrigued by the mystery of why Mr. Michael seems so guilty.
I have entered a productive relationship with Pandora internet radio wherein songs I’ve never heard are played, and then I look on Emusic (not Emu-sic) and find they have the song. This is unpaid product placement at its finest. This is hazy bedroom psych at a very wonderful level. It just hits you with a very standard chord progression, the standard chord progression of almost uniformly awesome songs. This is the song of a lost mixtape presented to you by a friend of exceptional taste, the friends we all wish we are to other people the friends we strive to be. Therefore, I pass this to you.
So you’re doing ads that try to get people to work in a munitions factory and suddenly you realize that what you’re doing will create a bombed out landscape full of flying lute thingies (plus the odd car, also flying).
But hidden in the ruins are Canadians playing really cool Middle Eastern influenced drone music. So crooning to a bomb doesn’t seem so bad. And did I mention flying lute thingies (they’re ouds)? They rotate too!
If only there were a way of getting the music without bombing stuff. Oh well.
Note: This is less than a third of the album version of the track. For anyone with a remotely compatible aesthetic, the extended instrumental bit is amazing stuff. The P-fork review for the album is about right.
A certain propulsive urgency. I like especially that it doesn’t feel overdone. Kind of like melodic retro-post punk. I wonder if the case can be made to have a certain amount of faith and get the entire album. This is a pretty good live version (the album version is on their 2006 LP Anti-Anti). This track was brought to my attention by Pandora.
1:02 in hits like a girl group My Bloody Valentine crossover. Maybe a little more Slowdive-y. Can’t say I love the album, but this song is so wonderful. We loved this track when it brightened our day in the P-Fork top 100 tracks of 2008, but the album showed up on eMusic and I loved it all over again.
I’m not gonna lie. I’m not much of a Nick Cave fan. I’ve got nothing against him personally. He actually seems like a pretty cool guy, but for whatever reason, I’ve just never found most of his stuff very appealing (I should note that I do like Grant Lee Phillips’ cover of City of Refuge that appeared on his Nineteeneighties album, which sounds much different than Nick Cave’s original). I don’t believe I own anything by him.
But about 10-12 years ago, a friend of mine made a mix tape for a bunch of people. It actually had some really good stuff on it (Soul Coughing, the Seahorses, Eric Matthews, Texas…), but this song stood out as probably my favorite song on the tape. Someone apparently made a video for it and stuck it on Youtube. I really like the Xyolophone line and the little groove it supplies.
This is from their latest, Chemical Chords. There’s an argument that Stereolab aren’t really treading any new ground, but I don’t really have a problem with that. On a full listen, this sounds kind of like a best of Stereolab, but with all new songs. I think this one sounds like Dots and Loops era Stereolab.
There used to be a restaurant in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago called Mod that had really strange tables and chairs. Trendy, with pretty good food, but the furniture looked like it came from one of those pictures from the sixties that purported to show what lounge furniture would look like in the ’90s and beyond. I’m not sure if I’m conveying the aesthetic properly, but that’s what Stereolab mostly sounds like to me. Like the Jetsons without the spaceships and robots. Loungy pop music that would have sounded futuristic 45 years ago, but doesn’t really belong to this era.
Regardless, this one has a very infectious groove to it, and listening to it makes me happy.
I didn’t remember ever hearing “Morning Dew” before I heard it on the radio (DJ actually played the vinyl) the other day. Apparently everyone on Earth has covered this song at some point. Hilariously, Lee Hazelwood and Eisterzende Neubauten are on that list, the only list they likely share among their vast and disparate catalogs. I guess the version most people might know would be the Grateful Dead.
Anyhow, the Lulu version from 1968 (second of two songs here) has awesome marimba, horns and ultra-scuzz 60’s bass, and her voice is quality.
We’ve loved Heartless Bastards for quite a bit, but ZRM gives us their newest, out very soon I think. Check it out at his place.
Interestingly the band is an entirely new lineup, save the lead singer, after the breakup of a long-term relationship within the band.
Somehow this seemed like a song 3B inmates ought to be aware of. In fact, just about any song which includes the line “Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?” probably falls in that category.
These guys had a fair amount of P-fork buzz around their first album, and they’ve got endorsements from such luminaries as Gruff Rhys [Super Furry Animals]. I downloaded the first album a while ago, fell in love with “Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats”, but took my time getting into the rest of the first album Hold On Now, Youngster. Well, I’m now into it. I really like the upbeat tempo of everything, and I like the juxtaposition of the softly accented female vocals (Aleksandra Campesinos!) and the harder accent of the male vocals (Tom Campesinos!). And yeah, they’re the type of band where everyone changes their last name so that it’s the same as the band.
They may get a little too sugary after a while, but they have some really good stuff, and they strike as the type of band that will be really good live. I’ll find out when they come to Chicago in February. I get the impression they’re the type of band that PP will pan.
Also, what is it about Wales that makes them produce an inordinate number of good bands relative to the size of the country? The Alarm, Super Furry Animals, Catatonia, Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics when they didn’t suck…
I’m not sure why this song resonates so much with me. I wonder if its placement in a variety of films has imprinted it on my consciousness. I think it is in Babe, Pig in the City, one of my litmus test films. Polarizing does not begin to describe it. GC is excluded from this litmus test because she is basically allergic to talking animals. I was just on YouTube reading comments from people acting like they were scarred for life by Babe, Pig in the City. I suggest that these people are also likely to embrace juvenile philosophies such as Objectivism or Notgetitism. To those people, I dedicate this song, which somehow seems so defiant and strong that it comes across as a polite yet firm “f*** you.”
Mashups may be declared novelties and refuge of degenerate DJ scoundrels. Fi on that when they are as seamless and perfect as the below. Perhaps the most remixed/mashed up track of all time, “Get Ur Freak On” seemed to get stronger and more powerful with each remix. I never really liked the original until the fact that it could be mashed with anything made me realize its nefarious control over all things.
We return once again to a seeming early nineties mixtape mainstay, the MLDs. We already visited with “Out of Hand” from these guys. I saw on the internets that this song was used for the outro of the Gilmore Girls series finale. That is pretty quality- going with a song you love and grew up with as opposed to some autotuned piece of disposable crap that someone paid to defile your show. Even if shows/movies go for the low hanging fruit of exquisitely chosen and perfect music (Hi, Wes Anderson!) I’m still a sucker for the emotional and easy wallow. I’m easy that way.
Saw lots of people “Yes on 8″ demonstrating today. Disappointing. I dedicate this song to them. GC is much more familiar with the original, which she calls the “burping song” based on the sample/hook. I always am dumbfounded by her claims because I never know what song she is talking about. Lo and behold we heard this cover on the radio this very day. So to all the “Yes on 8′ers” with their deep, dark predilections and their bigoted world views, ride your ponies.
Deerhunter has at least one track on every release that worms its way immediately into my grey matter. Usually relating to some sort of repeated, advancing refrain. Some noisy bits with a chimey, insistent trudge throught the indie snow. This is from their latest, Microcastle, out just this week. I got it at eMusic, who I am convinced keeps moving up the date of my downloads evaporating each month. I think the album is decent, but this is the track that stood out to me.
I only put it under “shoegaze” because I think the feeling is of that genre if not the aesthetic.
They really screwed the marketing of this album. This was right about when “alternative” was just turning into penis rock only like everything usually does. So long ago. Came across an unlabeled mp3 on the ol’ computer and it was this track from an old mix CD. A stunner.
This is the ITV Chart Show from July 1995, Belly gets the last three minutes.
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