Archive for the ‘Tunes’ Category

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She is not a poor version of Florence.

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Passion Pit – Sleepyhead (rmx. Starsmith, f/ Ellie Goulding)

[Our friend Luca writes for us this morning. We’re off being lazy busy.]

I’m in a phase in my life where I don’t make an effort for music. I rarely download or purchase albums anymore, and my only interaction with it is by the joys of the car radio. I can’t imagine not listening to the radio in the car.

The same can be said for breakfast. The energy involved in preparing and eating a flat meal like cereal is not a fair excuse to be woken up from. So when I made breakfast one morning and then listened to the same song for a disturbing amount of time all in the same day, I had to share it.

London-based producer Starsmith combines with Indie-pop sweetie Ellie Goulding to deliver a fresh rework of Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead”. It’s less energetic than the original, but more solacing. I hope it’s enjoyed; I dread the day I’ll get bored of it.

[Stop being so rude. Purchase Manners here.]

Posted on April 26, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

When does the nightshade kick in?

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The Whiskers – Ornithopters

They say that after his son died, old Earl sat alone in his two bedroom apartment night after night building a contraption, on account of he used to be quite the inventor in his youth, you know, but the bottle of moonshine he drank each night meant his stubby greasy fingers didn’t work right so he always screwed things on the wrong way and it took months before people realized it was some sort of crude jet pack and even then they weren’t sure what to make of it since it had wings and he fueled it with the same muck he poured down his throat but sure enough one night the neighbors heard a crash and policeman Warren found Earl’s crumpled, eerily still body with the jet pack attached still whirring and a huge dent on the ceiling and people said he forgot the roof was there maybe — so celestial was his vision — and that’s why he did it or maybe he knew it was there and that’s why he did it.

[Buy War of Currents, or download it for free until May 1, at which point it will cost your stingy ass $5.]

Posted on April 25, 2010 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

You can’t get rid of me yet

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I saw you this mornin'

Leonard Cohen & Sharon Robinson – In My Secret Life

Quiet little voices creep into my head and they begin chewing.

I wonder if he’s worth it.

What? Worth what?

It all.

He’ll make you happy, Bambi. He will. When you turn in bed and stick out your butt, no matter what mood, no matter what came before, he’ll fall in beside you and won’t stop holding till he wakes. Even then he’ll probably shimmy in closer.

When I look at him, I believe that, too. Yeah, I think…

One thing I can assure for the coming summer is the desire for a scorching sun to spray heat upon this earth, and – when it finally does – for me to profess, ‘I don’t like this. I’m not used to this,’ and for me to scurry in return to the cooling sensation of a walled space.

Just like that! Just like that he’ll change his mind. He will.

I was trying to move us along. Don’t worry. He won’t. He won’t change his mind. It’s set.

[Buy 10 New Songs.]

Posted on April 19, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Things could be different, but they’re not.

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Of Montreal – The Past Is A Grotesque Animal

Now that I live on my own, I stopped making my bed. Why bother? I’m just going to mess it up later that night anyways.

I dropped my toothbrush down the garbage disposal. The crunch snap made me cringe. But every day just serves to yellow the teeth I was trying to whiten. Why fight God?

All the quarters I save from skipping laundry go to parking meters. They fit so perfectly in the slot, and the reassuring numbers flash that me and my car are safe, at least for now.

The last thing I ate was some yellow curry from that Thai place a week ago. Sure, I feel weak, but eventually we all lose power, lose strength. Our bones snap easier, our flesh can’t heal itself anymore.

Staying alive is so much work. It takes a lifetime of effort.

[Buy Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? for a pretty miserly $7.]

Posted on April 17, 2010 - Tunes - 3 Comments » Share

And all the spilt milk, sex, and weight.

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Modest Mouse – Gravity Rides Everything

IT ALL WILL FALL, FALL RIGHT INTO PLACE.

Georgia and Happto, Georgia’s boyfriend, are sprawled across the sticky leather sofas at Karyn’s place. Karyn is leaning sharply against the kitchen bench-top, cupping her Earl Grey tea close to her face. She just likes the smell. Georgia and Karyn discuss marriage, while Happto, altogether uninterested, flicks through the magazines half-opened on the coffee-table.

GEORGIA: I don’t see the point.

KARYN: The point of what?

[Happto quietly turns the page of this month’s Cosmopolitan, feigning disinterest, but curious to know what it is that women are thinking on a monthly basis.]

GEORGIA: The point of marriage.

KARYN: What? Why?

GEORGIA: It seems stupid.

KARYN: How does it seem stupid? It seems fine. It seems good. It’s two people, and a certificate, and love, and a ring, and a ceremony, and lots of friends and family, and lots of applause, and lots of crying. It’s very emotional.

GEORGIA: That sounds stupid.

KARYN: It sounds beautiful.

[Happto’s eyebrows raise as he comes across the already-torn booklet midway through the magazine discussing “How To Please Your Man Without Having Sex”, with suggestive photos to boot. He worries that they’ve noticed, and quickly flicks to another section.]

HAPPTO: We should get going.

Lenka – Gravity Rides Everything (The Woodstock Sessions)

[Buy Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica.]
[Buy Lenka’s cover single of Gravity Rides Everything.]

Posted on April 15, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

“We have time-Warped with the best of them.”

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Jimmy London – Bridge Over Troubled Water

Today I flicked through a guestbook of an old – now closed – Irish restaurant based in Dublin, Ireland. The guestbook had the strong outward presence of a hardened cover and a fleshy inside of yellow and browning paper. There were names, there were dates, and some drawings – some random, shaded drawings. There was also a drawing of a beetle.

Names flew by without any recognition and then:

O R S O N – W E L L E S

Not spelt out in such a manner, you’ll surely understand, but the letters followed each other in the same rigid formation. I knew that name, didn’t I? Of course I did. Then more. Christopher Lee (the darkness), Ingrid Bergman (the sensation), and Alfred Hitchcock (the genius). I was flicking through sheets and page after page of worn paper that these people had once held, had once pressed their creative – and sometimes beautiful – hands against. These pages they had pushed ink upon. And then, of course, the drawing of a beetle.

To be specific, the drawing of a beetle wasn’t so much a drawing of a beetle as it was a drawing of a Beatle by a Beatle, understand? John Lennon had drawn an image of what looked like Paul McCartney with a right-handed bass guitar (I tut at you, Lennon) with small musical notes drifting in waves from his sketched mouth. Beside it, no note or autograph, but simply:

“The other the three
are saving up to
come here !

YEAH – 3

BSL

Flicking through these pages and slowly dragging my fingers over such a drawing almost felt as good as this song. Almost, but not quite.

[Buy A Little Love.]

Posted on April 14, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

I am a man; I am self-aware

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Vic Chesnutt – Flirted With You All My Life

On December 25, 2009, Vic Chesnutt killed himself. Left partially paralyzed from a car accident, he faced thousands of dollars of debt for hospital bills and other health-related fees. Knowing he could never pay it off as a musician, he overdosed on muscle relaxants on Christmas day.

The only time I saw Vic Chesnutt live, he told a hilarious, self-deprecating story about a complete stranger holding him up as he used a urinal in some bar. I think that works as an excellent analogy for a more ideal health-care system: those able to stand holding the crippled aloft as they piss.

I’ve been listening to this song a lot lately. I find it cathartic; it trivializes my problems. Here’s Chesnutt’s take in an interview with NPR less than a month before he killed himself:

CHESNUTT: Right. Well, this song is a love song. It’s a suicide’s breakup song with death. You know, I’ve attempted suicide three or four times. It didn’t take. And this is really a breakup song with death. You know, it’s talking about flirting with, you know, flirting – I had flirted with death my whole life, you know. Even as a young kid, I was sick and almost died a few times. And then suicide attempts – it’s a kind of – you know, it’s a breakup song.

NPR: Did you try to kill yourself even before the accident?

CHESNUTT: I did, yeah.

NPR: And after the accident?

CHESNUTT: I did, yeah.

David Bazan – Flirted With You All My Life (American Songwriter Sessions)

[Buy At The Cut, with Thee Silver Mt. Zion as the backing band.]
[Listen to Bazan’s American Songwriter Sessions.]

Posted on April 12, 2010 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

You can spend the night.

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Black Kids – Hurricane Jane (rmx. The Twelves)

[Buy the Ministry of Sound’s Chillout Sessions XI for this song. I can’t say for sure if it was ever released on a Black Kids or Twelves album, so if it was, let us know in the comments section. Thanks.]

(Credit for the illustration above goes to Mitch Blunt. I’ve been spending some time perusing through his website, and I like what I see.)

N.B. Yeah, I know: there’s no writing to go with this song. I wrote something, and then I didn’t like it. Then I listened to the song again and I thought, fuck it, I just want to dance. You guys write something.

Posted on April 11, 2010 - Tunes - 4 Comments » Share

I shall wait for love

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Frog Eyes – A Flower in a Glove

And you were always a botanist at heart, I think, stopping to smell the roses, literally, for as long as I knew you. Or pointing out lilacs or hyacinths or rhododendrons when we saw them in the park.

And you were always finding odd places to cram flowers into your third floor apartment. Hanging pots, a stove that didn’t work because instead it had rows of buds under a sunlamp, bookshelves devoted to a mess of bright, growing colors. My favorite was a single pink lotus in a blue glove, hanging by a nail outside the window. You would tenderly bring it back inside during rough weather.

And you were always bringing flowers to me at work. You’d show up with a silly grin and one hand inside your jacket. When the hand came out, so did your latest present. I kept them all, lined my cubicle with them, watered and cared for them as you would have. It didn’t seem to bother you to give them away, as long as you kept growing more.

And you were always talking about leaving, about going somewhere with more exotic species and more tracts of land to make into gardens. We – I – thought you were just talk. We thought you’d stay forever, in your third floor apartment with the flower in the glove hanging out the window.

And you were always saying sorry when you accepted the job. Always apologizing that it didn’t work out between us or telling me you’d come back in a few years. But you were always going to go.

And me, I will wait for your love; I shall wait for your love. I shall wait for love, here in this third floor apartment, meticulously watering the flowers.

[Pre-order the triumphant Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph for an instant mp3 download.]

Posted on April 10, 2010 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

Come on, somebody – say something!

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Alexandre Desplat – High-Speed French Train

Do songs and their emotive power enhance movie scenes? Or does that emotion you embrace – that punch pounding its very way through the eyes of the actor – infiltrate the song on future listens? Or is it possible that they come together to form the perfect balance, one of equal passion and charm and wit and thrill? This song, with all its dainty nooks and pure subtlety, will not answer any of the above. This song is simply yet another song to raise the thought of which came first.

Two foxes sit together in a room lit by weakened night lamps. They watch as a train glides in circles along a toy track; their burgeoning minds and tiring eyes captured. Those brief seconds, seconds void of jealousy and frustration and fear, are utopian. If you’re not moved then widen your eyes, stare a little harder, take it in, and allow it to soak. Every twist of colour splashed upon a sound canvas by an intoxicated and boisterous Vishnu, every loop of frail yet gallant noise intoned with senseless and joyous gravitas.

[Buy Fantastic Mr. Fox (Original Soundtrack).]

Posted on April 9, 2010 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

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