It being Monday
Turn on your i pods
And shuffle the first
Five describe these songs
To us.
- Cassandra Wilson - Last Train To Clarksville. As with many of her covers, the only trace of the original is in the lyrics. The music from the Monkees' original has been turned inside out. All traces of the Beatles have been blasted away, too: no more jangly guitar, no more harmonies. No more 60's British invasion sound. What's left is bluesy and funky and a bit eerie. Triple A Plus.
- Sunny Day Real Estate - Song About An Angel. The quintessential SDRE song: pretty and melodic, alternating with heavy. In retrospect, this really wasn't too different from what the far-more-mainstream Smashing Pumpkins were doing around that time (94); but, SDRE used a lot more grunge-y dissonance, some of that emo shouty background vocal thing, and a relatively raw and unfussy approach. Enigk's voice vocals are typically unintelligible here, but they do set the mood simply by tone. He's placid, sleepy in the quietest sections, then works his way up to screaming rage in the loud parts. Which, I guess, is how those things usually go. Interesting song structure here, tho. It's not verse-chorus-verse, rather it's a series of four or five increasingly-loud parts, then a single repeat. Great song, great album.
- Getz / Gilberto - Pra Machuchar Meu Coracao. To me, all the songs on this album which are not "Girl From Ipanema" are the same song - a laid-back bossa nova beat, Gilberto sings something in Portuguese, then Stan Getz does a lyrical sax solo. Pretty, relaxing, short, sweet.
- Sidney Bechet - Characteristic Blues. A puzzling one. It's built from sections in a handful of different styles, so I guess it's a suite; but compressed into 2:50, it's more like a sampler. It starts with a swinging clarinet solo over a slow blues groove, then after a minute, a singer shows up and does a couple verses of a blues call-and-response with the band (which sometimes, oddly, does its response in double-time), then a bit of yodeling. Finally, Bechet closes it out with a blazing clarinet solo over a much faster bit of music which seems unrelated to the anything that preceded it; during which, the songs ends in the middle of a bar with just a quick fade - as if they simply ran out of time. I wonder if this was a much longer song that they cut down to fit onto a record, and just couldn't get the timing right.
The internet tells me that Bechet played this at Buckingham Palace and that King George V. was impressed. It also tell me that Stravinsky's "Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo" was inspired by this tune.
- Sea And Cake - Aerial It's definitely not classic Sea And Cake, but it's not a terrible song. Has its moments.
Go.
That Pink Floyd thing you have at the top makes Chrome in Ubuntu flicker like a madman. Admittedly, my desktop is OLD and I have lots of graphics issues.
1. Blanket of Secrecy – Say You Will
Old 80’s new wave. The interesting thing here is that the band was largely anonymous at the time, living up to their name. Turned out it was a few producers with their knobs into everything in the 80’s from Elvis Costello to Flock of Seagulls. This sounds like a whole bunch of sullen, somewhat depressing, dark synth stuff I listened to back then. Nice little song though.
2. Bad Lieutenant – Head Into Tomorrow
This is the band formed in the wake of New Order’s dissolution by the singer, Bernard Sumner. He took with him the then current second guitarist from New Order and joined another guitarist. Guitar heavy, much more so than New Order, though New Order had some phenomenal guitar pop in their catalog. This is a nice acoustic number with one of the other guys on vocals. I like the guitar work here on a pretty decent song.
3. The Cure – Love Song
A decent song from one of my favorite albums by The Cure. I’m not even sure what to say about this that probably hasn’t been said before. Pre-nineties Cure is classic.
4. Roger Waters – Late Home Tonight Part 1
Way to stick with the theme today! This is a terrific song from Roger’s masterpiece, Amused to Death. I consider it one of the best Pink Floyd albums ever made, much better than the Gilmore era stuff (which wasn’t that bad actually but was missing some depth.) I like how this song goes into a dreamy spot with the strings and all sort of sarcastically happy.
5. New Order – Who’s Joe
Opening track of their final album, which I really liked, despite some of the reviews. I think when this came out, around my birthday, my wife got it for me and I played it for like a month straight, feeling very much like a teenager. If I ever learned to play the bass I would want to play it like Hook.
Have a good week, cleekorians. Off to listen to some Floyd!
That Pink Floyd thing you have at the top makes Chrome in Ubuntu flicker like a madman.
hmm.
looks OK in FF and IE.
It looks fine to me on the laptop in Win7 with FF 4. Here let me take a look at it in Ubuntu on my laptop…rebooting….looks good in Ubuntu with FF but not Chrome. The whole page flickers when the album covers change…but only some of them. Mesmerizing actually.
that’s really weird. the javascript i’m using there is only swapping the images in that one table. it’s not rewriting the whole document.
Could be just because it’s Floyd. You’re flashing back.
I alternate between loving javascript and hating it with a passion. I am working on a web-app for iPhones (which is actually the coolest project I’ve had for a while) and have just discovered jQTouch/jQuery – I have less than a week to put a prototype together and haven’t touched jQuery before so the air has been blue at my desk today while I figure out how to make it fly.
Oh and I see Limewire are being sued for $75 TRILLION. WTF?
Here comes the first music-related Cleek post of my 5th decade. iTunes be kind!
Vampire Weekend – A-Punk
This spunky, funky, punky little number is more infectious than the common cold. It just leaps out at you and the guitar riff worms it’s way into your brain. No idea what the lyrics mean but who cares? And the album itself, the self-titled Vampire Weekend, is just bonkers. Every track on it is totally nuts. A refreshingly different sound that perks me up every time.
Graham Coxon – Tell It Like It Is
I love this guy – he’s one of the best guitarists in the UK and his solo work offers a wealth of different styles. But it’s indie-punk tracks like this that I like the best. I love the *chunk* sound his Telecaster makes and his lyrics can be both quirky and personal. I saw him live in Oxford a few years ago and it was the loudest gig I’ve ever attended – I was seriously worried about my hearing 3 days later! Ironically he mentions ‘ringing in your ears’ in this song.
Radiohead – My Iron Lung
It’s a good 16 years since I first heard this song – written with the bitter-sweet success of ‘Creep’ in their minds, the lyrics talk about ‘this is our new song, just like our last one’. It features a riff I’ve often tried to emulate and is one of the highlights of The Bends. Grunge UK style. I’m pretty sure the video is from a gig they played at the London Astoria in May 1994 – look how wet behind the ears they all are! But they’d been playing together for years and boy does it show.
Arctic Monkeys – The View From The Afternoon
The first track from their debut ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’ and full of fire with lyrics about modern British life not heard since The Smiths (in my humble opinion.) Some people might struggle with the Sheffield accent I guess but it’s all about a night on the piss and drunken messages left on a girlfriend’s mobile phone.
“And she won’t be surprised and she won’t be shocked,
When she’s pressed the star after she’s pressed unlock,
And there’s verse and chapter sat in her inbox,
And all that it says is that you’ve drank a lot.”
Brilliant song, even better album.
Pulp – The Fear
Pulp were massive in 95/96 or so when the ‘Common People’ single was massive thanks to a last minute Glastonbury stint, Jarvis was waggling his bony arse at Michael Jackson and after 15 years trying they were famous. Their album ‘Different Class’ is in my top ten best albums ever. Jarvis’ lyrics and observations of England’s seedy underbelly put him up there with the best. Then there were lots of drugs, a band member left, the whole fame thing seemed to get a bit much and Jarvis got sick of the London parties and sycophants, his life piling up… So they released ‘This Is Hardcore’ in 1998 to mixed reviews – scaring people off with their dark lyrics of how the dream was over. This track sums it up … but still sounds like an absolute Pulp classic.
“This is our ‘Music from A Bachelors Den’ –
the sound of loneliness turned up to ten.
A horror soundtrack from a stagnant water-bed
And it sounds just like this.
This is the sound of someone losing the plot –
making out that they’re okay when they’re not.
You’re gonna like it,
but not a lot…
So now you know the words to our song,
pretty soon you’ll all be singing along.
When you’re sad, when you’re lonely
and it all turns out wrong.
When you’ve got the fear.
And when you’re no longer searching
for beauty or love –
just some kind of life
with the edges taken off.
When you can’t even define what it is that you’re frightened of
this song will be here.”
40. Pah. Piece of piss.
I should proof-read my posts before clicking ‘Submit’. This is what happens when I’m distracted by cats, pizza and small children.
That $75 trillion is hilariously absurd. Not sure there is that much cash in the whole world.
Pulp rules. The first two CD’s I bought in Norway with my then Norwegian girlfriend now wife were Pulp’s Different Class and Radiohead’s The Bends.
I saw on SlashDot, “The plaintiffs are suing for more money than the entire recording industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph.”
cats, pizza, and small children
Three great tastes that taste great together?
yum!