Let’s do another one of these.

1. Choose three songs you think everyone should know. These should probably be songs that most people here don’t already know (you be the judge). They don’t have to be your favorites, and they don’t have to be the Best Songs Ever. They just need to be songs you think more people should know.
2. Find YouTube vids or MySpace links or something for the songs – so that other people can hear them too! (important!)
3. In as many or as few words as you want, tell us why you think we should know these songs.

Since I run the joint, I get to go first.

1. Stereolab - Ping Pong, from "Mars Audiac Quintet". 1994.(sorry for the ad - YouTube's ad-free copy of this has disappeared)

This is my favorite Stereolab song, but I think it's also a good example of what Stereolab was all about. You've got the slick, retro-futuristic lounge sounds ("Space Age Batchelor Pad Music" was the name of an early EP), the heavily French-accented (or actually in French, sometimes) lead vocals, lyrics that sound like they could have come from a graduate course in leftist political theory - and it's all super-catchy. Here are (most of) the lyrics:

it’s alright right ‘cos the historical pattern has shown
how the economical cycle tends to revolve in a round of decades
three stages stand out in a loop
a slump and war then peel back to square one
and back for more

bigger slump and bigger wars and a smaller recovery
huger slump and greater wars and a shallower recovery

you see the recovery always comes ’round again
there’s nothing to worry for things will look after themselves
it’s alright recovery always comes ’round again
there’s nothing to worry if things can only get better

there’s only millions that lose their jobs and homes and sometimes accents
there’s only millions that die in their bloody wars, it’s alright

it’s only their lives and the lives of their next of kin that they are losing
(repeat, mostly)

I happen to love those lyrics, and hardly a week goes by that I don't find myself singing them in my head, in response to some news story.

2. Robyn Hitchcock - Glass Hotel. From "Storefront Hitchcock". 1998.

To me, it's the perfect version of the perfect acoustic Robyn Hitchcock song. His lyrics here are typically surreal, whimsical and clever: there's a story in them but there are just enough pieces missing that it's difficult to know what's really going on. It's rather opaque, which is ironic since you'd expect everything in a glass hotel to be rather clear. But this is fun-house glass, I suppose. There are free-floating, disassociated images: people are there, but not there at all; a geranium comes out of a telephone; someone is laughing; someone is crying. Everything seems; he's not quite sure. It seems like a dream.

Whether he's describing an actual dream, a pure fantasy world, or if the words are an allegory for something that happened in his real life, we can't really know from the words, of course. And I don't really want to know. I like it as surrealist fiction.

I love Hitchcock's acoustic playing, I much prefer it to his electric playing in fact. And this is my favorite example. The song is mostly based around a seventh-fret B chord, but with the two high strings left open to act as drone strings. Hitchcock uses drones often, but usually in solos. Here, they ring out through (nearly) the whole song, high above the rest of the notes; they remind me of wind chimes. Glass wind chimes, I suppose.

3. Pavement - Gold Soundz. From "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain". 1994.

It's from Pavement's most-accessible album. They turned down the random bursts of noise, sanded-off some of the rough edges, brought the melodies up-front and focused on the hooks. If you don't know Pavement, this is the album to start with. But it was still too weird for MTV or commercial radio.

Like Hitchcock, Stephen Malkmus writes lyrics that are often difficult to follow literally. Sometimes you just have to go along for the ride and enjoy the scenery as it flies by. His lyrics are free-associations of images, words, random rhymes, winks at the listener (last line from the first verse: "and they're coming to the chorus now!"). He leaves a lot of room for interpretation. But, also like Hitchcock, Malkmus has the ability to wring emotion out of words that only barely make sense together.

This my favorite Pavement song. It's one of his more direct. It's about... well, I'm not exactly sure. It seems to be a note to a woman, offering advice and encouragement ("It has a nice ring when you laugh / At the low life opinions", "Believe in what you wanna do"), while asking her to not tell anyone that they met ("keep my advent to your self", "I keep your address to myself cause we need secrets", "keep my address to myself because it's secret"). And it's not sure if all the advice is for her: "Is it a crisis or a boring change / When its central, so essential" seems like it could be for both. But it doesn't matter. If he wanted us to know, he would've been more explicit.

And whatever the first two verses are talking about, it's the last verse that gets me:

So drunk in the August sun
And you're the kind of girl I like
Because you're empty and I'm empty
And you can never quarantine the past
Did you remember in December
That I won't eat you when I'm gone
And if I go there, I won't stay there
Because I'm sitting here too long
I've been sitting here too long
And I've been wasted
Advocating that word for the last word
Last words come up, aw, you've got to waste

I don't know if it's the words or if it's how he sings them, but those first six lines hit me, every time I hear them: a rush of bitter-sweet. It's a weird reaction, I know, to a song I don't even understand. But that's why I like it. Fifteen years later, I still get it. I'm afraid to dig any farther - I don't want to ruin it.

So what about you? Which three songs should I, and the other ones of readers here, listen to ?

Let's do another one of these.

1. Choose three songs you think everyone should know. These should probably be songs that most people here don’t already know (you be the judge). They don’t have to be your favorites, and they don’t have to be the Best Songs Ever. They just need to be songs you think more people should know.
2. Find YouTube vids or MySpace links or something for the songs - so that other people can hear them too! (important!)
3. In as many or as few words as you want, tell us why you think we should know these songs.

Here are my three:

1. Marah - The Closer
The first Marah review I ever read (and all of them since) said that they were the "last rock and roll band". I thought that was typical hyperbolic rock critic nonsense - like how U2 or Oasis were supposed to be the next Beatles, how Nirvana single-handedly saved rock, etc.. But, you know what? In a way, it's actually true. If you take "rock and roll" to mean the kind of loose, raw and raucous grit that 70's bands like the Rolling Stones, The Faces, or Bruce Springsteen, and later The Replacements, worked in, then yeah it's true: Marah may just be the only band still making that kind of music - and doing it well (also, all Marah reviews must mention those bands). They've got the Stones' swagger, the Faces' reckless abandon and Springsteen's underdog-worship. And even better (IMO), they've got that sorta- sad-sloppy-silly semi-apathy that made the Replacements charming - they aren't Rock Gods from days past, they're a really good bar band that's working hard but having a tough time making it big. If I was synesthetic, Marah would smell like beer. And just to be clear: they aren't pre-packaged, arena-ready, retro-novelty douchebags. They sound like a really good band who un-self-consciously plays a style of rock that few other bands are doing these days (Wilco gets close though). And that's probably why they're still relatively unknown: that sound is a bit anachronistic, and describing it as Stones + Springsteen makes it sound even less interesting: "Classic rock? No thanks." And yet, every time there's a party at my house, I slip this song into the mix and people inevitably walk up and ask me "Hey, who's this?" So, here's the first song from their "If You Didn't Laugh, You'd Cry" record (which you should own), "The Closer":

Here's that same song, live.

Word is they have one of the best live shows around.

2. Sea And Cake - The Biz
On the other hand, nobody would ever describe The Sea And Cake as "raucous" or as having any kind of swagger whatsoever. The Sea And Cake are something else entirely: cool, cerebral, jazz-tinged.

It's often difficult to figure out what Sam Prekop is singing, and maybe even harder to figure out what he's singing about - his lyrics are abstract and disjointed, flashes of images and bits of conversation without context:

I may try to stay misunderstood
And it's working

I really have no idea what this song is about, though that doesn't bother me. I'm perfectly happy hearing vocals as just another instrument, and if I want a song to mean something, I can always make up something.

Sam's vocal stylin's aside, what I really like about what these guys do is that, for being so cool and detached on the surface, there is a lot of stuff going on underneath. Prekop's rhythm guitar fascinates me. I have no idea what he's doing - his chords are always strange and the melodies unusual - but I love hearing it. He's got a very distinct style: a bit of tropicalia, some jazz, a whole lot of something else that I can't label. John McEntire's drumming is energetic, complex, and full of surprisingly-placed accents, nearly a lead instrument at times. In this song, the other guitar (Archer Prewitt) plays tight with the vocal melody; but on other songs, he's up front with a counterpoint melody or sailing over top of it all with an eBow or a long sustaining distortion pedal - the icing on the cake in a way (sorry, I couldn't help it). It's not a lead guitar as in "solo over the 3rd repeat of the verse section", it's more about adding details on top of the structure everyone else has put together. It's the kind of guitar player I've always tried to be, when I've been in bands. The bass isn't very prominent in the mix of this song (and probably gone for good after YouTube has compressed everything) - but like Prewitt's guitar, he typically alternates between counterpoint and following the vocals.

Anyway, listen for yourself. Here's the first, and title-, track from "The Biz".

FYI, the video for this is the cover of the album, rammed through some effects I wrote using ISEffects (which I also wrote). I had big plans for it, but the tedium of tweaking the effects to make them interesting just wore me down - that thing took 45 minutes to render. Even the scaled-down 15-second version I was using for testing took two or three minutes to render. Gack.

3. Matt Pond PA - Sunlight
I have no idea why these guys aren't more popular. Seriously. If I could write one song as good as their worst, I'd consider it the high point of my life. Their songs are absolutely full of hooks and wonderful melodies, the lyrics are smart, Mr. Pond has a great radio-friendly voice, it's all well-produced and recorded, etc.. Then again, other similar bands (Elliot Smith, Toad The Wet Sprocket) have lingered in relative obscurity, too. Maybe the market for smart pop-rock is smaller than I think it should be.

See for yourself:

What about you? Which songs do you think we should know?

Let's try something new, eh?

Here's an assignment:

1. Choose three songs you think everyone should know. These should probably be songs that most people here don't already know (you be the judge). They don't have to be your favorites, and they don't have to be the Best Songs Ever. They just need to be songs you think more people should know.
2. Find YouTube vids or MySpace links or something for the songs - so that other people can hear them too! (important!)
3. In as many or as few words as you want, tell us why you think we should know these songs.

I'll kick it off with my three.

Warning: I've had a lot of caffeine, and I'm home sick, so I might ramble a bit...

1. Elliot Smith - Waltz #2
   
   The tune is the most persistent earworm I've ever encountered. It can stick in my head for, literally, weeks while I repeat all those wonderful lines over and over. I think it's his best song, and I do think it's one of the Best Songs Ever, so I'm always amazed to learn that people don't know any Elliot Smith, let alone this perfect little gem.

   First verse:

   First the mic then a half cigarette
   Singing "Cathy's Clown"
   That's the man she's married to now
   That's the girl that he takes around town
   She appears composed, so she is, I suppose
   Who can really tell
   She shows no emotion at all
   Stares into space like a dead china doll

   I'm never gonna know you now
   but I'm gonna love you anyhow

   The Everly Brothers' "Cathy's Clown" is about a man whose girl is so untrue that people are talking about him, calling him "Cathy's Clown"; and he's sick of it. And here's Elliot Smith singing about singing that song in reference to what could be an old flame of his own (though it could be fictional, I don't know his biography). Indeed, he may even be a Cathy's Clown, singing about singing "Cathy's Clown". I love recursion.

   Second verse:

   Now she's done and they're calling someone
   Such a familiar name
   I'm so glad that my memory's remote
   'cause I'm doing just fine hour to hour, note to note
   Here it is the revenge to the tune
   You're no good
   You're no good, you're no good, you're no good
   Can't you tell that it's well understood

   "The revenge to the tune...". So sweet. And, the way he sings those "you're no good"s, I can't help but hear a reference to another classic song: "You're no good" (obviously).

   The bridge:

   I'm here today and expected to stay
   On and on and on
   I'm tired, I'm tired

   Now that my ears are tuned to references to other songs, that "on and on" feels to me like a shout out to another song about a man who's been jilted: Stephen Bishop's "On and On":

   Poor ol' Jimmy
   Sits alone in the moonlight
   Saw his woman kiss another man
   So he takes a ladder
   Steals the stars from the sky
   Puts on Sinatra and starts to cry

   On and on
   He just keeps on trying
   And he smiles when he feels like crying
   On and on, on and on, on and on

   Maybe, maybe not. But it works if it is.

   Smith finishes up with:

   Looking out on the substitute scene
   Still going strong
   XO, mom
   It's OK, it's alright, nothing's wrong
   Tell Mr. Man with impossible plans to just
   Leave me alone
   In the place where I make no mistakes
   In the place where I have what it takes

   Those last four lines are the mission statement for slackers and underachievers everywhere, and I've loved them since I first heard them. Yet as with so many of Smith's lyrics, they seem especially poignant in light of his suicide - it seems like a little more than simple fear of screwing up.

   What a fucking drag!

   And that was far longer than I wanted to go on this.

2. Let's switch gears and listen to the Scud Mountain Boys, "In A Ditch":
   
   (i had to make this video, since there's almost nothing from these guys on the net)

   Yeah, that was a drag, too, sorry. The Scud Mountain Boys are all broken up now, and they never really made much of an impact when they were together in the mid 90s. But they did put out this one album ("Massachusetts"), and "In A Ditch" is the first song on it. The rest of the songs (except one) keep the same slow, sad, country vibe, so any of them would've worked here since all I really want to say about it is that if you like Wilco or the Cowboy Junkies or Uncle Tupelo or Son Volt, these guys might be worth checking out too.

3. Ok, really changing gears this time.

   The Faces, "Ooh La La"
   
   I would have never heard this song if it wasn't for the Rushmore soundtrack (which is simply full of really great songs - as befits one of my favorite movies). It's a such a happy, catchy, sing-along song, I can't help but smile when I hear it. It sounds nothing like any of the other Faces songs I've heard, though, and that's a bit of a let down since I like this one so much better. Ron Wood sang this one, after Rod Stewart and Ronnie Lane both decided the song wasn't good enough for them. Thankfully he had a voice back then!

So, what do you got? What songs should we know, and why ?