Flunk, "See You" (2007)

It's a public holiday here, so it's the perfect time for the first ever Tremble Clef Interactive Write Your Own Blog Entry Day! Start at 1, and then plot your own narrative arc! It's all up to you!!

1. The Norwegian trip-hop act Flunk first came to prominence in 2002 with their debut single, a cover of New Order's "Blue Monday." (Proceed to 2A or 2B.)

2A. The cover was your typical "let's recast New Order as a slowed-down acoustic number" track, indistinguishable from Frente!'s or Devine and Statton's versions of "Bizarre Love Triangle," or Moby's reworking of "Temptation." Meh. Next! (Proceed to 6.)

2B. That reading of "Blue Monday" was an intriguing one... (Proceed to 3A, 3B, or 3C.)

3A. ...in 2002. In the intervening years, Nouvelle Vague has worked the whole "let's cover synthpop tracks in a loungey style!" angle into the ground. (In fact, the've done both "Confusion" and "Blue Monday.") Do we need to hear another 80s track, from New Order or otherwise, redone in an acoustic, martini-swirling style? No. No, we do not. (Proceed to 6.)

3B. ...and made me want to hear more. I'm therefore glad that the band has included a cover of Depeche Mode's "See You" on their new long-player, Personal Stereo. (Proceed to 4.)

3C. ...and since the tactic brought Flunk some measure of success, it makes sense that they should return to it with a cover of Depeche Mode's "See You" on their new long-player, Personal Stereo. (Proceed to 4.)

4. "See You" sounds intentionally rough and a bit grimy, like it was recorded on the street. The opening notes are vaguely electronic, but the feel of the song is largely stripped down; Anja sings the tune slowly while a guitar weeps behind her. (Proceed to 5A, 5B or 5C.)

5A. The result is a bit disconcerting; all the jaunty, frivolous, light-hearted fun of the Depeche original has been stomped out in favor of a unnecesarily anguished reading. (Proceed to 6.)

5B. The song is much more plaintive as a result. If this isn't an especially essential reading of the song, it is at least a novel one. (Proceed to 6.)

5C. The song is much more plaintive as a result -- and additionally reminds us of the curious history of the track. The first single Depeche Mode released after Vince Clark left the group, "See You" found the band at a crossroads. Should they continue, with Martin Gore now handling writing duties, with the fluffy synthpop numbers, or go in a darker direction? Flunk's cover reminds us that, although as originally recorded "See You" seems to opt for the former approach, it is a song that could very well have been done in a way that immediately nudged Depeche down the latter path. (Proceed to 6.)

6. posted by (Your Name Here) at 6:46 PM | 0 comments

Marsheaux, "Dream Of A Disco" (2006)

When I was sixteen, I went to Thailand with some of my friends from school. It was after some big exam, and may have been the first time I travelled without my family. But one of those friends was Thai, so he confidently ferried us around, and we let him. I remember very little of the trip. We shopped in Bangkok. We went...somewhere cold, a fact I was not prepared for, via a bus filled only with Thai tourists, and with a guide who made jokes in Thai that my friend got tired of translating after a while. After which point he and the rest of the bus would snigger, while we could only stare out the window.

One moment I do remember with surprising clarity: the night we went to a club. We probably thought it was a daring thing to do: in a foreign country, without parental supervision. Of course it was completely uneventful. One of my friends was in fact so tired from travelling that he laid down on a couch, and unapologetically fell asleep -- there, in a discotheque, right in front of a humongous speaker, while strangers danced around him to the throbbing bass and his friends sat, surveying the crowd with something like boredom.

"I dream of a disco/We're dancing and dancing..." A recent "Song of the Day" on Popjustice, Marsheaux's "Dream Of A Disco" appears to have been constructed from residual pieces from otherwise long-forgotten tracks by A Flock Of Seagulls and Ultravox.

I myself have never fallen asleep in a disco. But I've dreamed of dancing forever with someone. And once a candidate warned me not to get my hopes up, because he was -- as The Magnetic Fields would say many years later -- unboyfriendable. "Oh, he just hasn't met the right person, i.e., me, before now," I thought, and so I started down a path that would end in heartbreak. Like my friend in that Thai disco, I therefore demonstrated that, often, we hear what we want to hear, and the rest we block out.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor, "China Heart" (2007)

Almost every song on Sophie Ellis-Bextor's Trip The Light Fantastic achieves a seamless marriage between lyrical subject matter on the one hand, and melody and arrangement on the other. "Catch You" -- which is essentially a rewrite of Blondie's "One Way Or Another" -- logically features aggressively crunchy guitars for its tale of stalking, while "New York City Lights" encourages us to run away with Sophie to a city that the song represents via a 70s disco beat. "Love Is Here" bathes its slightly banal Carpenterish sentiments in a 70s AM radio sound (no surprise that's one of two tracks cowritten with The Feeling's Dan Gillespie Sells). Meanwhile, the terrific Xenomania-produced "If You Go" has something akin to a schaffel rhythm that perfectly fits the story of indecision, one full of back-and-forth alternatives ("If you go, if you stay...").

The seamlessness of the fits between lyric and music is, in itself, neither a good nor bad thing, and I point it out only to indicate one of the ways track eleven, "China Heart," stands apart from the rest of the album. This tale of a cold, aloof girl whose heart is emotionally fragile, like porcelain ("My china heart, a work of art/So cold to those who play/I can easily break") is, of course, the perfect song for someone with Sophie's ice-queen persona. But the song is not some sort of frosty electro-ballad, which would have been the obvious way to go. Instead, the story is set to one of the most gloriously breakneck beats of the entire record, bathed in pulsating, quivering synthlines straight out of the Moroder playbook. Specifically the 80s chapter, in which Giorgio decides to maniacally speed up his arpeggios, as he did when producing Berlin, or when creating the backing track of "Love Kills" for Freddie Mercury to wail over.


Furthermore, "China Heart" includes the theremin effect. There are ten seconds of pulsations at the start, a drum crash, and then a distorted ghostly voice tells us, and I approximate, "eeeooh eeeooh eeeoooh." The backing banshees return for the chorus, where they rise up with ooohs and aaaahs while handclaps swirl around them. Added to the Moroder rhythms, "China Heart" becomes pure Gothic disco, and the effect is almost self-mocking: far from drowning in self-pity about her easily breakable organ, "China Heart" sees Sophie ironically-yet-sincerely presenting herself as a kind of freakshow. Welcome to the CIRCUS, ladies and gentlemen! STEEEP right up! Come SEE the bearded lady, the Elephant Man, and also She Who Has THE CHINA HEART!

(This better be a single, if only because I think I've just written the awesome video treatment.) (Also, this will give us an extended version of the song, with a longer middle eight where the drums go COMPLETELY MENTAL, like little fists beating on the inside of your head.)

Chungking, "Itch And Scratch" (2007)

These are just some of the thoughts that come uncontrollably to mind when listening to "Itch And Scratch," one of two tracks Richard X produced for Chungking:

1. What is Goldfrapp going to do for their next album? It's become clearer and clearer how Supernature has become one of the most "inspiring" records of recent years; although many of the bands who have been thus inspired have failed to take off, it still places a heavy and somewhat unfair burden on Ms. Alison and partner as they work on their follow-up. But those the breaks.

2. Eh, what's that, Chungking? You acknowledge that "there have been lots of comparisons" of you to Goldfrapp, but "what they do is very different to what [you're] doing"?

3. Reporter man, care to press the band on that point? No? You'd rather make a joke about the band's name sounding like "slang for vomiting," a fact that must surprise the 31,442,300 people who live there? Okay.

4. But seriously: yes, comparisons can be annoying and lazy, blah blah blah, bands do their own things, etc. But consider how Chungking sounded quite different on their first album (We Travel Fast, later repackaged as The Hungry Years) -- indeed, I mostly knew them through their various appearances on chillout compilations -- but have since gone on to essentially disown that early work (from the "biography" section of their website: "You may know Chungking -- Brighton-based, born and bred -- from their rather splendid and critically well-received album 'The Hungry Years' a couple of years back. But forget everything you thought you already knew"). In that light, it's a little hard not to feel like there is some bandwagon-jumping going on here.

5. Sure, "Itch And Scratch" is tremendously enjoyable. A beat like the one from Rachel Stevens's "Waiting Game," paired with subtle handclaps; a new wavy synth line pogoing all over the place during the chorus; Jessie Banks pitch-shifting like it's going out of fashion.

6. "It's the Itchy and Scratchy SHOOOOW!!!"

7. Having sat out the whole of last year, Richard X must be feeling a bit restless, so returning with a song by this title seems apt.

8. You have to wonder, though, if he feels a little like his productions increasingly have no natural home. I'm not saying that working with Chungking is slumming it, but, let's face it, it seems unlikely that the band will take the song to the top of the pops. Even less likely than Rachel Stevens or Annie, that is. Hmm. I hereby retract my point.

9. The other Richard X production, "Slow It Down," is an album filler, I'm afraid. It's effectively a rewriting of Chungking's own "Voodoo" (still their best song), which in turn was a bit of a tribute to Donna Summer's "Love To Love You Baby."

10. I say these things because I care.

Mr. Suitcase, "You Don't Smile Anymore" (2007)

Even though the new Mr. Suitcase single is, let's face it, essentially a rewrite of a song we know the band likes, it's still really, really terrific, melancholic electropop of the highest order.

Last we heard in any substantial way from Mr. Suitcase -- Stockholm musician (and former journalist) Billy Rimgard -- he had released an EP whose lead track was the promising "Ours Is A Time For Falling In Love". A clubby pop song tinged with philosophical remorse, "Ours Is A Time" however featured a vocal (from Örjan Lindbeck, from the now defunct Le Sport) that was its weakest aspect. Since then, Mr. Suitcase has been working more with Sanna Fischer, whose nuanced and coolly angelic voice better expresses the usually bittersweet lyrics.

One of Sanna's earlier appearance on a Mr. Suitcase track was on a cover of Everything But The Girl's "Lullaby of Clubland" (which you can download from the band's very generous website), and that's the track the new single owes quite a bit to: from the phat and round bounciness of its rubbery bassline, to the setting of its story in clubland, to the way both songs brilliantly utilize echoes (in the case of "Lullaby," we have Ben Watt's ghostly "no no oh oh oh" refrain). But if you're going to be influenced by a track, "Lullaby" is an amazing choice, and the resulting track is distinctive in its own way.

"You Don't Smile Anymore" is, in a sense, bookended by a question and the solution to that puzzle; but it is by no means an easy solution, and the song beautifully captures the heartbreak of having to arrive at it. The song begins with a vocoderized voice, forlornly asking: ""How did you get so far away?" Throughout the song, we hear that query, or variants of it ("How did we get here?" "How did I get here?") repeated over and over. The "here" refers to how the two lovers have grown apart; we don't have a clear sense of what she does, but the man she sings to seems to be a (Superpitcher-spinning) DJ, promoter or manager, who said he would "play [her] the next big thing." Alas, when she sees him at the DJ booth holding the hand of the very artist, she "knew right there...that everything had come to an end."

And so: "I'm letting you go." That line -- that painful solution -- does not, on paper, make for an especially hooky chorus, but it's nothing if not deeply haunting. On the original version of the song, it is echoed -- "I'm letting you go (let you go, let you go, let you go, let you go...)" -- variously by backing vocalists, the vocoders, or by Sanna herself. The effect is one of disbelief but, simultaneously, willed acceptance: with every echo, Sanna sounds like she can't quite bear to let go, even if each iteration steels and convinces her a little more. On the excellent Kopia remix of the song, the line continues to be echoed, but at several points, Sanna's last note is instead stretched and stretched: "I'm letting you goooooooooo..." The refusal to bite the end off that line might reflect an underlying hesitation to truly let go, but then again maybe it is best to permit "letting go" to happen gradually, for things to fade rather than end abruptly. Across the two versions, a simple line is therefore given a variety of inflections. Because, even when "letting go" is the painful, inevitable solution, there are still a number of ways -- perhaps not infinite, but it often feels like that -- to do so, and each brings with it a fresh hell.

(To download both the original and Kopia remix of "You Don't Smile Anymore," go to Mr. Suitcase's blog. And then head to Kitty Litter records, to pre-order the forthcoming Guidelines For An Emerging Century album.)

CocoRosie, "Animals" (2007)

It only seems fair to also tell you about some of the animals I met during my recent travels to Vietnam and Cambodia, oh my.

1. Elephants!

I rode an elephant, for the first time in my life. I'm sort of surprised by this; somehow I thought I would have done so before. After all, I don't have a driver's license, and you would think that an elephant ride would have presented itself as a legitimate way of getting around before this trip. Hmmm.

Anyway, I actually rode two elephants. The first one was at a hot springs/water theme park outside of Huế that was, delightfully, on just the right side of kitschily tacky. This elephant, accordingly, was purple and plastic.

The second was a real life pachyderm, and we named her Gertrude. I'm not sure why. We were on a nature reserve island, full of lovely pine trees, on Tuyen Lam lake in Dalat, and it seemed like a good idea to ride Gertrude to see it.

She was a bit grumpy about taking three people on her back, and for a moment all I could think about were stories of tourists getting trampled to death by overburdened elephants. In fact, about five minutes into the ride, the handler decided it was better for me to get off the carriage and sit directly on Gertrude's shoulders, the better to distribute the weight or something. (As seen on the left. Look, I'm bringing sexy back!)

I was very doubtful about this.

Throughout the ride, Gertrude kept flapping her ears and whacking my legs with them. Which I could have gotten used to, if the non-English speaking handler didn't also indicate that I needed to not touch her ears, since that's how he was steering her. "But I'm not touching her," I said, plaintively. "She's touching me." It was like suddenly I was a eight year old fighting with his pachyderm sister during a long family car ride.

2. Cat!

I didn't see that many cats in all, but there was an adorable one living at the floating village near Siem Reap. We were in our boat, and went past a pile of floating logs, and this cat was just lounging around on it. Typically for a cat, he was wearing his "contemptuously nonchalant" expression, like it was the most natural thing in the world to be living in a watery Cambodian village. Hee.

Despite the lack of felines during the trip, I came back with a renewed desire for a cat. Mostly because I'm thinking I could then call my new pet "Khmer." Khmer! C'mere! Ha ha ha HA HA OH DEAR.

3. Ducks!

On our way to that very same Cambodian floating village, our van was held up because there was a paddling of ducks that just had to cross the road at that point. Watching the brace was hilarious. The raft of them made crossing a road seem like the Most Dramatic Thing ever, which I guess is true if you are part of a huge flush of ducks. It was just such a darling team.

And now you know all the collective nouns for ducks. You're welcome.

4. Goats!

Well, we didn't actually meet these. Our guide wanted us to...although the goats were going to be in curried form. (Understanding that took a minute, though. "Curried what? Coats? Curried gourds? Oh.") Tee just could not. He was already traumatized by being at the seafood restaurant with the tanks of fish and shrimp and lobsters up front, which would have been fine if they didn't also have a cage full of bunnies.

5. Pig!

On a scenic but long drive, Tee caught a glimpse of what he thought was the cutest thing he had ever seen: a pig, in a pen, except that he had propped himself up on the front of the enclosure to watch the world go by, with his trotters halfway over the barrier.

I didn't actually see this one. Apparently the sight went by too fast for Tee to have time to point it out to me. "Are you sure," I asked dubiously, "that you weren't asleep and just dreamt of Wilbur?"

6. Dogs!

There were, of course, lots of cute ones. There was the pack, for instance, that lived on the fishing village near Nha Trang, who got all excited when we stepped aboard. One was in a hurry to greet the visitors, so bravely tried to get across to us by walking on a fishing net. It was fun watching his expression go from "Hey! New people!!!" to "Careful careful careful..." to "OH SHIT."

But there was no dog as adorably stupid as the canine we spotted at a stall in an incense-making village:


He was all smoopy and seemed like he wanted to come up to me to get patted. But he couldn't, because he was chained up...

Wait, he's not actually chained up. He had a chain on, yes. But the end of that chain wasn't actually attached to anything. But, hey, no one told him that.

Amerie, "Crazy Wonderful" (2007)

My second favorite line from Amerie's Because I Love It is from "Crazy Wonderful." The tune itself is pretty great, too. It probably ranks behind the singles/songs that everyone already knows and likes ("Take Control," "Gotta Work," "Losing U"), but the album is so often angsty and histrionic that it's nice when Amerie is in a more playful mood. Which she is on this tale about why it doesn't matter if her lipstick is sexy gloss, matt or frost, or ruby red or champagne pink, because it's going get rubbed off anyway. Thus, the sweetly girlish line: "I wanna kiss you all the time/That’s how I go through lipstick." Which: word. You should see my monthly expenditure on lip products.

My absolute favorite line? Many of the songs are, as I've mentioned, a little overwrought: partly because some of the album is invested, understandably, in recreating the dramatic sound of "1 Thing" (hence the shrieky "Hate 2 Love U"), and partly because Amerie seems to have a weakness for the hysterical ballad ("Somebody up there must love me, 'cause He gave me you." Sure. God's main concern is matchmaking). "When Loving U Was Easy" is in the latter mode, but during the middle eight, Amerie has a self-reflexive moment which I find hilarious. Accusing her lover of no longer loving her, and in turn making it hard for her to love him, Amerie and her backing vocalists get shriller and shriller. Then Amerie busts out with this line: "and I didn't mean to bring the choir to let you know YOU WERE WRONG!!!" Ha! I know I have the same problem: when I get combative with people, I don't just yell at them, but rally an entire choir behind me to help. But only accidentally, though. I can't help it if they follow me around and act all uber-supportive.

Ronderlin, "Reflected" (2003)/"Wake Up" (2007)

History: I first heard Ronderlin when I picked up Parasol's Sweet Sixteen Vol 6. This was the summer of 2003, I was back in Boston to visit, and one of my old haunts had the sampler for a buck or so. At my friend's house that evening, I listened on my CD player (this was before iPods) and immediately took to two acts: the French band Orwell, and Ronderlin. So the next day I traipsed to yet another favorite used record store, and, with my sense of recklessness and urgency exacerbated by being on vacation, found and bought both band's full lengths (this was before dowloading).

Hailing from Sweden, Ronderlin made sweet jangly guitar-pop that made them good fits for the Labrador/Hidden Agenda record labels. Their contribution to the sampler is also the highlight of their first album, Wave Another Day Goodbye (although the title track, "You Made Someone Want You," and "Summer Likes The Wind" are also worth seeking out, music fans).

"Reflected" is a shimmering piece of absolute pop goodness. I adore the plucked guitar chords that kick off the song, and the way its story sort of begins in media res ("We are all the same she said/But some die young and some get old"). Although there is an identifiable chorus ("Love is more than a word/Love is really beyond words"), the three parts of the song are equally dextrous and given similar weight, so that the whole composition sounds very organic and naturally flowing. The way the lyric mostly doesn't bother to rhyme its line endings only adds to this feeling. The track makes me giddily happy, even though it's a very realistic kind of love song: although our singer is in love, he (and his lover) both know that "there'll be days when we've grown old/And when our love is no longer for the two of us to hold." And indeed, by the end of the song, "death is here you know and soon it will be time," but its very arrival also attests to how their love has "last[ed] more than a day." Until then, "when days are bright and songs are heard...love is more than a word."

Four years on, the band has resurfaced with a new album, The Great Investigation, which I've been really enjoying. They seem to have lost a bassist -- they are now a quintet -- but gained a more electronic sound, a move that other Swedish bands have made (The Legends, for instance). This has led their press releases to claim, as the band's influences, New Order and Pet Shop Boys; I'm not entirely sure I hear the latter, but the opening synth notes of "Aside" (and thus the opening notes of the whole album) are very Other Two's "Tasty Fish," and the rest of the track's interplay between strummy guitars and new wavy synths does sound very Republic.

My favorite track from this second album is "Wake Up." I love the unmuscular, "empty" drum sound, and the grinding urk-eeek-urk synth sound, followed by a squealing guitar chord, is really hooky. Speaking of "Hooky," the strummed guitars that enter during the second verse, at the 1:27 mark, is a nice touch, and a middle eight freakout -- preceded by a quiet moment when the song is is simply sung with an organ backing -- likewise keeps things interesting. And there are even handclaps! Aceness, good sirs.

Bananarama, "Young At Heart" (1983)

"But all I wanted to do when I was old was to/Walk out the door."

When I was seventeen or eighteen, I startled my classmates during a literature lesson by apparently announcing, in the middle of what was probably a discussion of Philip Larkin, that I didn't expect to live beyond the age of thirty-two. I say "apparently," because I don't have that clear a memory of the event. But my classmates really, really do, and even at a recent reunion, a couple of people brought it up ("Hey! You're not dead!"). (Yes, I realize that makes me sound like I'm goddamn Pink.) It's not exactly that I've forgotten the occurrence; it's more that the (to me) casual statement made more of an impression on my friends, to the point where I feel like I mostly "know" the event through their recollections of it.

I don't doubt that what partially motivated the statement was typical teenage melodrama. Who among us hasn't, during our self-centered younger years, visualized our own funerals, for instance? But when it came to believing that I would die young, it was actually a feeling about which I was largely rational and staid. Indeed, I didn't feel especially dismayed about the possibility -- the conviction -- that I was going to be leaving early. It just kind of was. Nor did I particularly look for an explanation for why I felt that way, even if my friends pressed me to, or tried doing so for me. (One suggested that I had some sort of Christ complex, but she seemed to have been confused about the age at which Jesus died.)

Years later, when I got to college, I took several classes, coincidentally but aptly once again in literature, with a professor who had a theory -- would in fact go on to publish work -- about what he considers to be a prevalent feeling among many gay men that they are doomed. Tennyson's "In Memoriam," for example, configures homosexual desire as "just a phase" -- a configuration that not only has lasted into our time, but also, he argues, easily blurs into the notion that it is gay men themselves who are, like those phases, liable to pass (on). Gay men, our culture seems to imagine, are always already extinct. (In a later article, he goes on to meditate on how this complicates the work of mourning in the age of AIDS, and a subsequent book both broadens and narrows the argument, looking at Wilde's style of "managing desire.") I wouldn't say that I experienced an epiphany and my life and beliefs suddenly made perfect sense, but the idea certainly resonated. I did think about that announcement I made at eighteen, seventeen. And I thought about how I had been obsessed as a teen with Joe Orton.

I didn't die, as it turns out, at thirty-two. (Spoiler!) Nor at thirty-three, or thirty-five, or..."so on." I sometimes still think about how I wouldn't particularly mind if I left at a relatively young age. It's not like I have a death wish, or am suicidal. I guess my life is frequently ruttish enough that I -- I know, I know, stupidly -- feel like I should just exit stage left, not because I despair, but because I'm at a loss about...what to do next. As I said: stupid. Then I think about how ridiculous and meglomanical it is to imagine -- even if only for a moment, and even if the thought is post-faced by the qualifer "for me, at least" -- that there's nothing else worth accomplishing or doing. And I think about all the great people I know who did so much "late" in their lives. And I hold on to those thoughts. (While eating some birthday cake, or something.)

Marc Almond featuring Sarah Cracknell, "I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten" (2007)

Written by Clive Westlake, "I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten" is a song about how the experience of finally finding your soulmate is incredible, in both senses of the word: wonderful, but also, more literally, unbelieveable. "Never before have I been so sure," a pivotal line goes, "You're the someone I dreamed I would find." But if the singer is "sure" that she has found her beloved, she is simultaneously skeptical, even terrified about what she goes on to characterize as a "feeling so unreal/Somehow [she] can't believe it's true." The terror and disbelief arise because this man is the man of her dreams -- but that must also mean that he may be "only a dream," fleeting and unreal.

So: she closes her eyes and count to ten. When she opens them, he's still there. But the doubts seem to persist -- through another verse, and then another. Each is followed by a chorus in which she closes her eyes and counts, and counts, and counts... But to what end? If she opens her eyes and he's gone, he was a dream, though her life without him would then be a nightmare. If she opens her eyes to see him, then he is the man of her dreams -- and therefore always liable to disappear the next time she closes her eyes and counts to ten. That's why the song, which is hence perfectly posed between dream and nightmare, has always struck me as dark and gloomy. Perhaps it overstates the case a little, but that chorus is almost straight out of a slasher horror movie: I close my eyes, and count to ten, and when I open them maybe the monster will be gone. In a sense, there can be no real resolution, once she recognizes the Catch-22 situation she's in. She can only count, over and over, as the song fades out...

In the original 1968 version of the track, by Dusty Springfield -- which Neil Tennant once claimed was his favorite Dusty recording -- the point of the song is brought across by Dusty's voice, which clearly alternates between wonder and terror. When she shifts into the line, "it's the way you make me feel," for instance, you can hear how lovestruck she is, and, for a moment, wondrously happy. But as the song builds, through the refrain and towards its chorus, she sounds more and more palpably anxious. A 1983 recording by Tracey Ullman is surprisingly effective as well, although she opts to sound more uniformly tremulous and zombified throughout. Dusty's reading makes it sound like she is coming to a realization as the song progresses; Tracey's narration, in contrast, sounds retrospective, since she appears to have abandoned all hope right from the start. If this interpretation shows that Tracey is less of a versatile and fluid singer than Dusty (duh), it at least demonstrates that she is well and truly aware of the dark heart of the song.

The latest version of the song is a duet between Marc Almond and Saint Etienne's Sarah Cracknell. That the track has now been transformed into a duet on one level reduces its impact. While solo versions, such as Dusty's or Tracey's, allow us to remain unsure whether the singer is addressing a dream man or a dreamed-up lover, here we seem to have inconvertible evidence for the presence of two people in love. They're real, all right. Indeed, the newest version constitutes the chorus as more of a call-and-response, a plea for affirmation that is immediately affirmed. "I close my eyes and count to ten/And when I open them you're still here," Marc sings. And Sarah echoes the process, but also confirms Marc's exclamation by that very echo: "I close my eyes and count again/I can't believe it but you're still here." The Marc and Sarah show is, comparatively speaking, a much happier one. Only comparatively speaking, though: the song is so masterfully written then its despair shines through no matter what, and at least Marc and Sarah are wise enough to retain the elements of the classically sad arrangement: that spine-tingling opening piano, as if coming to us from some ghostly 1920s dancehall. The "dun-dun-DUN!" stabs that transition us between verses. The inexorable build-up towards the melodramatic chorus. And it even adds a few elements of its own: the frenzied string arrangement that takes us out of the song, not new, but more prolonged and foregrounded. And most of all, the haunted way Sarah whispers, in that same outro, with equal amounts of delight and fear: "you're still here, you're still here..."

Shirley Bassey, "The Living Tree (Stuart Crichton Mix)" (2007)/"Easy Thing To Do (Nightmares On Wax Mix)" (2001)

It's hard to improve, when it comes to describing Shirley Bassey's voice and demeanor, on the comment by a wag from the Popjustice message board, which memorably and hilarously describes her as "the vocal equivalent of being shot in the face at close range."

I myself quite enjoy being thus shot, sometimes. Her new single does the job with a saw-off shotgun: a cover of a song by Never The Bride (the oft-repeated story is here, for instance), the track is classic Bassey. Which is to say: over the top, with a defiant fuck-you lyric ("Picture this: when you wake up in the morning/And I kiss, your sorry ass/What would I miss?/There's nothing I can think of, as I leave"). I like the Stuart Crichton mix the best: it keeps the song under the 4-minute mark, speeds the tempo up a wee bit, and really punches up the James Bond/David Arnoldisms. Listen to the orchestral stabs at the end of the first verse, and the subsequent swell of the strings: if you don't throw your hands up in the air in a melodramatic vogue-like pose, you're a stronger man than I. Albeit less of a tranny.

And yet, weirdly enough, from the remix CD from 2001 that in many ways revitalized interest in Bassey, I find myself gravitating -- nowadays, but even when the CD was first released -- towards two songs that are pretty muted. The Nightmares On Wax mix of "Easy Thing To Do," and the Groove Armada mix of "Never Never Never" both find Bassey in a more melancholic mood. Although Bassey continues to overenunciate, charmingly, her words, there are no vocal acrobatics. That would be, you know, the easier thing to do, but Bassey instead hits the title phrase the softest of all. "And the easy thing to do, is love." It's a contrary vocal for a contrary sentiment.

Aberfeldy, "Love Is An Arrow" (2004)

We used three tour guides on our travels -- which, for the record, took us from Hanoi to Huế; then down to Danang and Hoi Ann for a day, and onwards to Nha Trang, followed by Dalat and then Ho Chi Minh City; after those ten days in Vietnam, we proceeded to Siem Reap for four, chiefly to see the temples of Angkor.

All of the guides were really excellent. The first was a young woman from Huế, which told us by the end of our time with her that we were jostling an old Norwegian couple for the prime position of her favorite tourists ever. And there's nothing I enjoy more than jostling Norwegians. The second was a very professional and polished man from Dalat, which isn't surprising given that he has worked in tourism for over ten years. A recurring joke on the trip was the fact that his company owned everything...which, we eventually realized, wasn't so much a "joke" as it was "truth," because his company was pretty much the state tourism authority, since the Vietnamese government had stakes everywhere, because, DUH, socialism. And then there was our Cambodian guide. Like the woman from Huế, he was awesome partly because he wasn't given to sugarcoating things. The two of them were perhaps contravening every rule of being a tour guide, because they would often relate some details of everyday life in Vietnam and Cambodia that, to be honest, would bum most people out -- at one point, for instance, the conversation somehow drifted to last year's tragic boating accident that killed a number of schoolchildren. But we were made of strong, stern stuff. And our Cambodian guide, sadly, did seem a bit anti-Vietnamese, which shattered the brief fantasy I entertained of having him marry the Huế guide. But that was just as well, because the person he will be marrying is ME, BECAUSE I WUV HIM.

To begin with, My Boyfriend had the most honeyed voice I've ever heard, as well as a great belly laugh. A few minutes after we met him, my friend Tee already pulled me aside to announce that he would like to take My Future Husband back to the hotel -- no, not like that -- so that "he can talk to us all night and lure us into a peaceful night's sleep" "Wouldn't you jump off a bridge if he asked you to?" Tee asked. "No kidding," I said, even as lactic acid ate away at my leg muscles. "Why do you think I've been climbing all those fucking steep temple steps?"

He also knew his way around a scarf. It wasn't a traditonal kroma he sported, but he ROCKED it. When we first met him, he wore it like he was a boy scout; over the few days we were with him, however, the scarf variously became (1) a belt, (2) a head scarf to protect against the relentless Cambodian sun, (3) an across-the-chest sling in which to carry our bottles of water, (4) a utility belt for the same water-carrying purpose, and (5) a sex sling, although that last one may have just been in my head, and gosh, did I say that out loud anyway?

But The Father Of My Babies really had me when he explained the bas relief sculptures on the walls of Angkor Watt. First of all, he pointed out, as all tour guides do, the aspara dancers that are a recurring motif. But less typically, he did so by actually imitating, for a moment, the famous aspara pose. Which goes something like this:

That's right. The Fire Of My Loins puckered his fingers ever so daintily into the classic pose, buckled one knee, and then kicked his other foot out. It was SUPER KAWAII!!! The Man Of My Dreams was not especially buff, and, indeed, was paunchy. But despite -- or because of that, the aspara imitation was oddly and hilariously graceful. I put that grace down to his having been a monk for two years. Ballet training has nothing on monkhood as far as I'm concerned.

And then, at another point, he was explaining something or other about some mythical archer on the walls. Well, I don't know; I was too busy staring into his eyes to actually be listening by this point. And again, there was some hott illustratin' goin' on. This time The Love Of My Life planted his back foot behind him, leant back, and mimed the act of shooting a bow and arrow. It was a bit like Sophie Ellis-Bextor at the 1:20 minute mark of her "Catch You" video, except there was no size zero woman to kill the mood dead. But I wouldn't be opposed to having Sophie Muller film him and me running around the streets of Cambodia while My Sweet Lover plays both cupid and love object.

Sigh. I WUV HIM. WUV WUV WUV. I know I will have to get rid of that pesky wife he has in Canada before anything happens, but whatever. There's no engine fast enough, my love's gonna catch him.

Rufus Wainwright, "Going To A Town" (2007)

In 1969, a young man living in Dayton, Ohio found himself heading to Vietnam. He had been drafted into the US Army. He was a conscientious objector, so had been trained to be a combat medic. His orders sent him to the 85th Evacuation Hospital in Phú Bài, which is just south of the city of Huế, Vietnam's former capital. American soldiers couldn't be posted much further north than that during the War. Huế, after all, was just south of the 17th Parallel, the military demarcation line that had split Vietnam into halves, and the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Tet Offensive.

A typical GI's tour of duty in Vietnam was twelve months. For some reason, he ended up stationed in Phú Bài for fifteen. During that time he had one chance to go on an R&R, which he did in Australia. All through the time-off, however, he couldn't wait to get back to Vietnam. And when the time finally came for him to leave the country, after more than a year of seeing first hand the toil of the war, he cried and cried.

I am not that young man; this is not my story. I am, however, lucky to be that man's friend. For that, and many other reasons besides, I can only recount the facts.

A few weeks ago, my friend and I went to Vietnam (and Cambodia) -- along with Reno Dakota, his fellow medic at the 85th with whom he has stayed good friends all these years, and Reno's wife, Buzzi. It's been over thirty years since they were there last, and it's overwhelming to think about all the blessed things that have happened since.

We went back to Huế. There was nothing left of the Hospital, which is not too surprising. It was only ever a bunch of hooches, pitched on a patch of land at the end of the landing strip at Phú Bài airport. We drove up and down Highway 1; our driver and guide touched us with the effort they put in to help, stopping each time they saw someone older and running up to them to ask if they remember the American hospital that was around there during the War.

Now there is a kind of storage bunker where the Hospital used to be, and our guide tells us that the Vietnam People's Army utilizes it to store petroleum. The entrance is marked by a couple of yellow walls, with a slogan painted in red. The guide tells me it says something like, "The Army and the People, Working Hand in Hand."


We get out of the van and walk around. Reno Dakota took photographs. My friend scooped up some dirt, which he will send to two other army buddies.

One night in Huế, I told my friend how unspeakably sad it made me to picture him first coming to Vietnam. "Nobody should have to go through what you went through," I said, though, like most words in the situation, they were woefully inadequate. "Better me," he replied, "than someone who couldn't handle it."