tremble clef

2010-01-24T20:37:00.022+08:00

100 FROM 2009 (OR THEREABOUTS)

1. Pet Shop Boys, "The Way It Used To Be"

2. Camera Obscura, "French Navy"

3. Saint Etienne, "Method Of Modern Love"

4. Röyksopp featuring Robyn, "The Girl And The Robot"

5. Bag Raiders, "Shooting Stars"

Despite withholding its chorus until the final minute, "Shooting Stars" nevertheless sounds incredibly hooky all the way through -- thanks to its looping synth riff, which is therefore, quite literally, the unsung hero of a track that needs to be considered as classic as "Music Sounds Better With You."

6. Medina, "Kun For Mig"

"The beeps fill my universe, music only for me": while Shannon trusted in the music to lure her man, here it's all over but the crying, and the music can only serve as a numbing drug for Medina, and to break our hearts in turn. Since I first heard this song, Medina has recorded an English version ("You and I"), but the wonderful thing about the original Danish track is how polyphonic that title is. Sometimes, when I do the aural equivalent of squint, I hear Medina singing, "comfort mine comfort mine"; at others, she is whispering, "compromise compromise"; always and in whatever form, the phrase never fails to be appropriate and evocative.

7. Marit Bergman featuring Titiyo, "300 Slow Days In A Row"

Marit and Titiyo have been in a lesbian relationship, for presumably a while, but they've drifted apart. Since they are duetting, they clearly both recognize this -- but since they aren't communicating, they don't, or can't, let each other know. PARADOX! [/Tracy Morgan voice] This came out as a single in 2008, but it didn't hit me till I heard it in the context of the album The Tear Collector; the steal from ABBA's "Happy New Year" is still undeniable, but that just ups the melancholia quotient.

8. Richard Hawley, "For Your Lover Give Some Time"

9. Cicada, "Love Don't Come"

Has a grammatical error in the title, but also laser sounds on the verses, and laser sounds always win.

10. Florence + the Machine, "Drumming Song"

11. Junior Boys, "Hazel"

12. George Michael, "December Song (I Dreamed Of Christmas)"

13. Pet Shop Boys, "King Of Rome"

While "Last night I lost a day" may be my favorite line, the pivotal one, in the logic of the song, is "Some day, you'll deign to phone me." Throughout the track, our narrator has only appeared to be imagining himself as the tragic King of Rome. Yet, in this moment, adopting the royal diction that is the verb "deign," it seems for a moment that he might actually be regal -- but, in exactly the same moment, he also finds the tables turned, since it is the addressee, and not himself, who must "deign" to phone.

14. Summerhill, "Parking Lane"

Hear it at http://www.myspace.com/summerhilldk, or at http://www.warnerchappell-promo.dk/summerhill/song01.swf

15. Mini Viva, "I Wish"

It might sometimes appear that I only have time for deceptively upbeat songs that sneak in some melancholia, but here's a track with something like the opposite tendency. In "I Wish," the relationship is clearly over ("I was one with you," we are immediately told), and all that's left is for Mini Viva to wish for its revival, and then to wish that wishing works ("If I wish that hard enough, would love come home again?"). Yet, thinking of the boy in question, our singer also can't help but allow a glimmer of joy to overcome her, and reduce her to more primal forms of speech: "He could be the one who touch the light inside my soul, oh oh oh oh!"

16. Chrisette Michele, "Blame It On Me"

The only reason to watch American Idol this year is to see if the auditioning masses, ever searching for that big soul ballad they can shriek out à la "If I Ain't Got You," cottons on to "Blame It On Me," or to see if the producers realize that this, which already has room for the big gospel choir to join in, singing and clapping, would be a perfect coronation song. (Wait. I think I mean that's a reason not to watch American Idol this year.)

17. Paloma Faith, "Smoke & Mirrors"

18. Tommy Sparks, "Miracle"

19. Bliss featuring Ane Brun, "Trust In Your Love"

20. Charlotte Hatherley, "White"

21. Tiësto featuring Sneaky Sound System, "I Will Be Here"

22. Patrick Wolf, "Damaris"

23. Frankmusik, "Done Done"

24. Little Boots, "Earthquake"

25. Alicia Keys, "Empire State Of Mind (Part II) Broken Down"

26. Donkeyboy, "Ambitions"

27. Alcazar, "Baby"

28. a-ha, "Foot Of The Mountain"

29. Gossip, "Heavy Cross (Fred Falke Remix)"

30. Marit Bergman, "Snow On The 10th Of May"

31. Anjulie, "Colombia"

32. Jonathan Johansson, "En Hand I Himlen"

33. Alexandra Burke featuring Flo Rida, "Bad Boys"

Artists love to protest when they are compared to other artists ("I'm an individual!") -- even though they will also sometimes deign to, say, curate a CD compilation of their musical influences. Certain music lovers likewise love to complain about music writers who compare one artist to another ("that's so lazy!") -- though they probably don't bat their eyelids when iTunes or Amazon "recommends" music to them. And, of course, every complainer ignores the possibility that this system of differences we call language, arguably, is inherently comparative. But there is at least one reason to be thankful for these knee-jerk reactions against comparisons: Alexandra Burke may or may not have selected "Bad Boys" for her debut single because she wanted to avoid being juxtaposed against a certain other X Factor winner. And if the desire not to be Boring McBoringson, Mk 2 resulted in this stomper, then, hurrah, music won!

34. The Saturdays, "Lose Control"

35. Wamdue Project, "Forgiveness (Eric Kupper Radio Mix)"

36. Relation, "Your Tiny Mind (Lifelike Remix)"

Possibly the only pop song in history addressed to the morons who believe in creationism.

37. Paloma Faith, "Stargazer"

38. Annie, "Anthonio (Fred Falke Remix)"

39. Bob Sinclar featuring Sugarhill Gang, "Lala Song"

40. Miranda! "Mentía"

Unless they sound more spikily electro -- as they did on "Don," the closest they've come to a crossover hit -- Miranda! continue to be under-noticed by pop-lovers outside of their native Argentina. "Mentía," which in an alternative universe is a big hit for Kelly Clarkson, is another reminder of why this is a pity.

41. Paloma Faith, "Upside Down"

42. Basement Jaxx, "Raindrops"

43. Frankmusik, "Better Off As 2"

44. Dan Black, "Alone"

45. Pet Shop Boys, "Pandemonium"

46. VV Brown, "Bottles"

47. Imogen Heap, "Half Life"

48. Ocelot, "Our Time (Treasure Fingers Remix)"

Surely, if this blog has taught you anything, it is that any line, if repeated often enough, starts to sound desperate and its singer, in denial or at best just trying to talk him- or herself into something? "We're gonna get drunk, and we're gonna get down. We're gonna take drugs, and we're gonna get fucked. And we're gonna do it all tonight, and we're gonna make it out alive." (Sometimes -- when you get remixed by the excellent Treasure Fingers, for instance -- such singers have a good time while in denial, though.)

49. Dan Black, "U + Me ="

50. Bliss featuring Boy George and Alexandra Hamnede, "American Heart"

51. Florence + the Machine, "Howl"

52. A Camp, "Stronger Than Jesus"

53. Sondre Lerche, "I Cannot Let You Go"

Although Sondre Lerche has always been open about his love of Prefab Sprout, that influence -- aside from when he covered "Nightingales," of course -- has never been very apparent to these ears, drowned out, perhaps, by Sondre's tendency to use heavier guitars than his heroes ever did. On this album track from Heartbeat Radio, however, the homage, specifically to "Appetite," is obvious, and makes me wish he threw legal caution to the wind more often.

54. La Roux, "Cover My Eyes"

55. Dragonette, "Easy"

56. Shirley Bassey, "Almost There"

57. Lily Allen, "I Could Say"

58. Montt Mardie featuring Hanna Lovisa, "Unknown Pleasures"

59. Kings of Convenience, "24-25"

60. Paolo Nutini, "Candy"

61. Lucky Soul, "Whoa Billy"

62. Erik Hassle, "Make It In Time"

63. Daniel Merriweather, "Impossible"

64. A Fine Frenzy, "Electric Twist"

Once I was kicked by a pony. It was not as fun as this.

65. Findlay Brown, "All That I Have"

66. The Postmarks, "My Lucky Charm"

Hear it at http://www.myspace.com/thepostmarks

67. CFCF, "The Explorers (Original Version)"

The original version of "The Explorers" first appeared in January on CFCF's EP, Panesian Nights; late in the year, he -- now BFF with its singer after the amazing remix job he did on her "Time To Let Go" (#24 on 2008's countdown, fact fans) -- roped in Sally Shapiro to provide vocals on the track. It's not much of a vocal -- Sally appears to be whispering random phrases...from another room, but that's more or less par for her course -- and, indeed, the original's driving synths are somewhat turned down to make room for her melody. Best, therefore, to stick to the clean lines of the instrumental, though, if you insist, you can also listen to the remix:

68. Montt Mardie, "Last Year In Marienbad"

69. Villa, "Agneta (Villa Edit)"

For everyone who ever dreamt, while lying on a beach in Ibiza or elsewhere, of hearing the Love Unlimited Orchestra backing up ABBA.

70. Nerina Pallot, "It Was Me"

Many songs on Nerina's album The Graduate seem to have been inspired by existing book or film titles, so I would like to imagine that this is a reply to Lily Allen's It's Not Me, It's You. (Though sonically, and in terms of its lyrical sentiment, it really makes the most sense to think of this piano ballad as Nerina's take on "Now At Last" by Blossom Dearie, probably by way of Feist.)

71. Girls Can't Catch, "Keep Your Head Up"

72. Chromeo, "I Can't Tell You Why"

This Eagles cover seems so effortless that it would be easy to see it as throwaway, but Chromeo's inspired decision to use a vocoder on the chorus -- which makes the titular declaration sound way more tortured than in the original -- reveals that there is, in fact, more effort here than first meets the ears.

73. Florence + the Machine, "Swimming"

74. Anjulie, "Some Dumb Whore"

As Little Boots learned, these days anyone with a mouse is all too ready to pretend to know everything about A&R. Though Ms. Hesketh is mostly right -- seriously, Internets, "Stuck On Repeat" was never, in any shape or form, going to make a good single -- it's also hard to look away when a record company so nakedly cannot figure out whether to position a singer as the next MIA/Santigold (hence, a more "streetwise" lead single "Boom" and a sleeve like this), or as the second sanitized coming of Amy Winehouse*, by way of Gabriella Cilmi (quick, we have just enough time to clean her up for the album cover!). Given how its title was changed, from the sampler's "Some Dumb Whore" to, on the actual release that was sold at your local Starbucks, "Some Dumb Girl" (even though the lyric remained intact), this song shows the strain -- even though, ironically, this is actually one of the prettiest, breeziest, jazziest number on the album.

*I hereby apologize for putting "Amy Winehouse" and "coming" in the same sentence.

75. Dan Black, "Ecstasy"

76. Daniel Merriweather, "Red"

77. Kings Of Convenience, "Mrs Cold"

78. Camera Obscura, "Honey In The Sun"

The common knock against My Maudlin Career is that its songs sound like rewrites of the tracks on Let's Get Out Of This Country, and indeed, "Honey In The Sun" is at moments just an uptempo version of "Country Mile." But isn't the world a better place with an uptempo version of "Country Mile"? (I'm willing to let Camera Obscura be the tweepop version of BWO, who openly render their songs in ballad and disco versions.)

79. Dragonette, "Pick Up The Phone (Richard X Remix)"

80. Summerhill, "Country Boy"

81. Erik Hassle, "First Time"

82. Tiësto featuring Tegan & Sara, "Feel It In My Bones"

"More like 'Feel It In My BONER,' amirite, ladies??!!"

83. Mandy Moore, "Everblue"

A cheap trick, perhaps, but the heavy beat perfectly conveys the heavy-heartedness of the song.

84. Brookville, "Break My Heart"

Hear it at http://www.myspace.com/brookville

Never knew that: sometime this past year, I learned that the Internet's "Tiredest. Construction. Ever." comes from The Simpsons -- which means that, without Matt Groening, I might have struggled to know how to represent the chorus of Brookville's song: "You. Will. Break. My heart." Of course, in this song, that construction isn't used for, well, cartoon effect. Here, the entire sad story of the song is in those pauses between each word (and, for me, part of the heartbreak comes from the fact that we can hear Dominique Durand, presumably, on backing vocals, which makes me yearn -- as solid as the Brookville album is -- for the return of Ivy.)

85. Late Night Alumni, "What's In A Name"

86. Madonna, "Celebration (Benny Benassi Edit)"

87. Mika, "Blame It On The Girls"

It's a bit strange that the internet wags who complain about Mika's creepy determination to constantly channel his inner prepubescent boy would never think to say the same thing about female pop stars who, say, appear in schoolgirl uniforms, but whatever: "Blame It On The Girls" is energetic and propulsive, and if it sounds like it's evoking one of Gwen Stefani's marching band numbers, then all the more appropriate.

88. Sad Brad Smith, "Help Yourself"

89. Groove Armada, "I Won't Kneel"

They should make T-shirts featuring the title of this song (which, on the verses, owes a debt to Bent's "Coming Back"), even though they obviously won't sell well in gay bars.

90. Olivia Ruiz with Lonely Drifter Karen, "When The Night Comes"

That Olivia Ruiz never sounded more French than on one of her few English songs is ironic, though I may have, like everyone else, lost all track of what that adjective really means.

91. Jonathan Johansson, "Efter Skimret, Efter Snön"

92. Prefab Sprout, "Let There Be Music"

93. Benjamin Biolay, "La Superbe"

One day Etienne Daho will record an album that picks up the string-drenched sound of Corps Et Armes; until then, we have this.

94. Melody Gardot, "If The Stars Were Mine (Orchestral Version)"

95. The Sound Of Arrows, "Into The Clouds"

96. Owl City, "If My Heart Was A House"

97. Fibes, Oh Fibes! "Love Child"

98. Anoraak, "Nightdrive With You (Fear Of Tigers Remix)"

99. Jade Ewen, "Punching Out"

Imagine if this had been Rihanna's comeback single. ("Too soon!")

100. Plastiscines, "Barcelona (Lifelike Mix)"

2008-12-29T11:30:00.008+08:00

2008: Actually a rather good year.

Here are sixty-something songs I enjoyed this year. Note to self: in the next three months, update this post with actual comments about some of these songs. (Perhaps.) Then, on or around March 23, post a new entry.

Updated Jan 26: Blurbs for #37 and #24.

60. An Honorary Slot Commemorating My Slowness on the Uptake

We'll save #60 for three songs that were released in 2007, but which I only heard this year.

Etienne Daho, "L'Invitation"

Koop, "Strange Love"

Hear it at Myspace

PNAU featuring Ladyhawke, "Embrace"

59. Jamie Lidell, "Green Light"

58. Martina Topley-Bird, "Poison"

Hear it at last.fm

57. Emiliana Torrini, "Birds"

56. I Am Kloot, "Ferris Wheels"

55. Delays, "No Contest"

54. Sharleen Spiteri, "Don't Keep Me Waiting"

53. Mareva Galanter featuring Rufus Wainwright, "Serge Et Jane"

Discover Mareva Galanter!

52. ABC, "Way Back When"

51. Whitest Boy Alive, "Golden Cage (Fred Falke Remix)"

50. Grovesnor, "Drive Your Car"

49. Maximilian Hecker, "Misery"

48. Pop Levi, "Love You Straight"

Discover Pop Levi!

47. Sam Taylor Wood, "I'm In Love With A German Film Star"

46. Will Young, "Let It Go"

45. Hercules & Love Affair featuring Antony, "Blind"

44. The Weepies, "How You Survived The War"

43. Kate Ryan, "L.I.L.Y."

42. The Black Kids, "I'm Making Eyes At You"

41. The Postmarks, "One Note Samba"

Hear it at last.fm

40. Feist, "I Feel It All (Escort Remix)"

Discover Feist!

39. Pet Shop Boys, "Transfer"

38. Little Jackie, "The World Should Revolve Around Me"

>

37. Jill Barber, "One More Time"

Hear it at last.fm

If it seemed like 2008 was the year when every female singer -- Duffy, Sharleen Spiteri, Imani Coppola (via Little Jackie), Veronica Maggio -- felt compelled, in the wake of Winehouse, to go back to the 60s, Jill Barber stayed a step ahead by taking an additional step back. On her fourth album, the Canadian singer modified her usual country-folk sound to more explicitly bring out the 50s big band, jazzy, smokey bar aura that had arguably always lurked in her compositions. The resulting album Chances wasn't uniformly great, but it closes with one hell of a song. The fact that we can probably construct, in our heads, the entire story just from knowing the title -- yes, in it Jill implores her lover to hold her, kiss her, thrill her one more time; presumably, we should also hear the underlying strains of Jill asking us to play the song just once more, the better to fend off the end of the affair -- does not detract from the lush swoonsomeness of the track. Though the strings obviously play a big part, "One More Time" is ultimately a duet between Jill's voice and the trumpet; while she refuses to run any of her words together ("Because. You. Are. Mine..."), the trumpet, as is its wont since at least "The Look of Love," makes it sound like one smooth, seamless glide through three-and-a-half minutes. It hardly matters which of them you give in to.

36. Ne-Yo, "Closer"

35. Ashlee Simpson, "Boys"

34. The Saturdays, "Chasing Lights"

33. Gabriella Cilmi, "Safer"

32. Sugababes, "Nothing's As Good As You"

31. Jay-Jay Johanson, "Liar"

30. Aeroplane featuring Kathy Diamond, "Whispers"

29. Hot Chip, "Ready For The Floor"

28. The Unbending Trees featuring Tracey Thorn, "Overture"

27. Morten Harket, "With You With Me"

26. Morgan Page featuring Tyler James, "Call My Name"

25. Friendly Fires featuring Au Revoir Simone, "Paris (Aeroplane Remix)"

24. Sally Shapiro, "Time To Let Go (CFCF Remix)"

Listen to it here

The best Madonna record of 2008, it has become needless to say, was not made by Madonna herself. (Although I was quite partial, for a couple of weeks in the summer at least, to "Beat Goes On." Because I am powerless in the face of a Donna Summerish "beep beep," especially if you make the red-blooded het male rapper do that part. In falsetto.) That honor instead goes to the CFCF remix of Sally Shapiro's "Time To Let Go." First appearing on a 12" release of "He Keeps Me Alive" -- on the side of the record that is appropriately titled "Longing" -- and then on the digital release of Remix Romance Volume 2, the track sees Canadian producer CFCF essentially grafting the rubbery bassline of "Borderline" onto Sally Shapiro's track. (Indeed, the original and the remix are exactly the same length.)

The transformation brought about by this simple move is...well, let's draw from the cliché well: the remix "allows the song to breathe." Whereas the original feels dank and claustrophobic -- its pounding Italo backing will always have a job soundtracking a "driving through the night, it's so exciting" scene -- the remix is full of wistful pauses, the better to give Sally time to, well, let go. Listen, for example, to the couplet: "You are so fine/And I'm thinking about you all the time." Because the beat doesn't vary or let up on the original, it sounds like we skip from the end of one line to the next, never really stopping to catch our collective breath. On the remix, the music emphasizes the three, four seconds between the lines; the word "fine" somehow lingers and reverberates, and yet seems more fragile as a result. In that melancholic gap, you can hear, if you listen hard enough, the story of the whole relationship.

23. Sneaky Sound System, "Kansas City"

22. Anna Ternheim, "What Have I Done"

21. Annie, "Bad Times"

20. Tahiti 80, "Come Around"

Discover Tahiti 80!

19. Blondfire, "Oxygen"

Hear it at last.fm

18. Veronica Maggio, "Måndagsbarn"

17. Tony Christie, "Only Ones Who Know"

16. Alesha Dixon, "I Don't Wanna Mess Around"

15. MGMT, "Kids"

14. Blank and Jones featuring Bernard Sumner, "Miracle Cure"

13. Junior Boys, "No Kinda Man"

12. Ladyhawke, "My Delirium"

11. Juvelen, "Summer-Spring"

Hear it at last.fm

10. Solange, "Sandcastle Disco"

9. Sonny J, "Cabaret Short Circuit"

8. Benjamin Diamond, "1000 Lives"

Hear it at Myspace

7. Estelle featuring Kanye West, "American Boy"

6. Ane Brun, "The Treehouse Song"

5. The Rosebuds, "In The Backyard"

4. Duffy, "Warwick Avenue"

Discover Duffy!

3. The Ting Tings, "That's Not My Name (Album Version)"

2. Marit Larsen, "If A Song Could Get Me You"

1. Girls Aloud, "The Loving Kind (Album Version)"

2007-11-21T21:28:00.000+08:00

Saint Etienne, "This Is Tomorrow" (2007)

"Hi. We're Saint Etienne. Sarah's written a song with Annie -- she toured with us a couple of years ago, you know. It's floaty and electronic, as you might expect, has a talky bit, and is the title track of our new film, This Is Tomorrow. We thought the best way to get this song out there is to press it as a limited edition 7 inch single, and then give away the 2000 copies with the Nov 2007 issue of The Illustrated Ape magazine. No, most of you will have never heard of that fine journal, nor have many ways to get a hold of it. What's your point? Mwah-hah-hah."

2007-11-15T23:45:00.000+08:00

Billie Ray Martin, "Your Loving Arms (Peak Hour Twirler Mix)" (1995)

Readers, do you love me? Yes? Well, talk is fucking cheap. Why hasn't anyone ripped these posters off from London tube walls and sent them to me?

Images stolen from petshopboys-forum.com; click on 'em to make 'em bigger.

These ads for HMV -- yes, the Pets did advertisments, but let's overlook that for now -- appeared in print in The Independent a month ago, and have subsequently been plastered all over Tube stations.

I want them. I need them. I would frame them and hang them, and possibly let them take me behind the middle school and get me pregnant. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET ME HAVE THEM.

It's not just that they feature Neil and Chris, and Billie Ray Martin, who I also adore. (Isn't it nice to see your idols love each other? In the October 2007 issue of FHM, Billie was asked about how it felt to be "name-checked" by Chris, and she said: "Yummy! It's wonderful! I knew 'Your Loving Arms' is his favourite song, but to soon see huge posters in tube stations and full pages in the biggest UK papers actually saying this is so exciting. Given the fact they are really my biggest inspiration, too, it's even more of an honour." Awwww.)

It's also that each of them has picked, as their "inspirations," songs and lyrics that really are amazing, not that we would expect anything less. Indeed, Billie's selection, "Paninaro," is actually my least favorite of the three songs picked. Neil's selection, "Goin' Back"? Only the most beautiful and poignant song about aging ever, and tears may or may not well up in my eyes each time Dusty sings, with hopeless resolve, the line, "And live my days instead of counting my years."

Even if it didn't remind me of a clubbier time in my life, "Your Loving Arms" is possibly my favorite song of the entire 90s. I don't need to tell you how desperate and melancholic it sounds: that first pulsating synth line (do-do-do-do), that second bleeping one (dee-dee-dee-dee-dee), that trancey beat. And while its lyric tends to be overlooked, Chris -- who has shown himself partial to seemingly simple lines that are emotionally devastating -- doesn't, and he picks exactly the right ones: "Sometimes the way that you act makes me wonder/What I am to you/And sometimes I can't stand the way that I'm acting/To be part of the things you do." Beautifully symmetrical -- the way you act, the way I act -- the lines perfectly conjure up all the sell-out occasions when we act like fools just to get in with someone we love.

You know and have, I hope, the original version of "Your Loving Arms." Here is my favorite of the numerous remixes: the awesomely-titled "Peak Hour Twirler Mix," courtesy of Junior Vasquez. He stays mostly faithful to the original -- the breakdown, during which we get a bunch of tribal beats that remind us that this was the era of The Goodmen's "Give It Up," may the only thing that strikes a casual listener as noticeably divergent -- but punches everything up just a wee bit. The beat is crisper, bigger, just a bit more urgent, and that bassline seems to quiver with even more heartbreak. The only problem with the song is that it ends.

Now get on scoring me those posters pronto.

2007-11-14T23:32:00.000+08:00

The Veronicas, "Revenge Is Sweeter (Than You Ever Were)" (2007)

There are only two songs I even vaguely like on the disappointing new album by The Veronicas. One is "Untouched," which will deservedly be the second single as well as, it would seem, an early fan favorite. Lyrically a kind of update of "Like A Virgin," the song is terrifically arranged: the urgent strings are at the forefront of what you'll hear, but they wouldn't work half as well if they were not juxtaposed against dementedly bouncy synths that are equal parts electroclash and happy hardcore, and those trashy, buzzsaw guitars.

Though less immediate, the other song worth repeated plays is "Revenge Is Sweeter (Than You Ever Were)." Its charms however come from a different place: namely, from the way it goes against much of the rest of the album, or, indeed, The Veronicas' entire sound. No, the song is not a startling big band number. The Origliasso twins traffic, of course, in teen angst, and most of the time they convey this by allowing their verses to build and build until things come to a head in the choruses, during which: be prepared to duck. On this album, unfortunately, it feels too much like we should also be prepared to turn down the volume or stick in the earplugs, because on Hook Me Up's choruses -- which tend to be not catchy enough, to boot -- the girls too often cross the line into shrieky bansheedom.

But not on "Revenge Is Sweeter": despite its title, which might make us expect extra spite and venom, the track begins almost as a ballad. On the pre-chorus, as synths arrive to join the chiming guitars, things predictably get more frenzied and shriller: "Are you even listening when I talk to you?/Do you even care what I'm going through?/Your eyes stare, and they're staring right through me/You're right there, but it's like you never knew me/Do you even know how much it hurts/That you gave up on me to be with her?" But then, quite unexpectedly, the tune deflates, trails off into the title line: "revenge is sweeter than you ever were." I love this downturn -- because, as I've suggested, it is a refreshing change from the way other Veronicas songs develop. But there's a bit more to it. When a Veronicas song turns up the volume and the intensity while going from verse to chorus, it acquires bravado; on "4Ever," for instance, the band is never surer that the night will last forever than during the "yeah yeah"s. In contrast, here on "Revenge Is Sweeter," Lisa and Jessica sound uncertain in the conclusion they supposedly reach; revenge might sweeter than he ever was, but the insight itself is bittersweet and offers considerably less consolation than we might expect. In that non-triumphant moment of ambivalence, the Veronicas for once sounds grown-up.

2007-11-13T23:55:00.000+08:00

BWO, "Stay With You Again" (2007)

The first time -- and to this day, one of the few times -- I heard about the game "Deprivation" was in 1991, when I read David Leavitt's "A Place I've Never Been." The tale features Celia and Nathan, characters who recur across several of Leavitt's stories: appearing first in "Dedicated" from Family Dancing, then popping up in the title story and "I See London, I See France" of A Place I've Never Been, before returning in Arkansas' "The Wooden Anniversary." (Apparently, a Dutch theater company once produced a play from these narratives.) Nathan, who is clearly a fictionalized version of Leavitt himself, is a gay man, and Celia his best fag hag; they were Will and Grace before Will and Grace.

"A Place I've Never Been" catches the two friends at a pivotal moment when they are beginning to drift apart -- or more precisely, when Celia starts to see that their codependence is not healthy. In the story, they go a party thrown by a college friend, who "invariably suggests [her guests] play Deprivation." "The way you play it is you sit in a big circle, and everyone is given ten pennies...You go around the circle, and each person announces something he or she has never done, or a place they've never been -- 'I've never been to Borneo' is a good example -- and then everyone who has been to Borneo is obliged to throw you a penny. Needless to say, especially in college, the game degenerates rather quickly to matters of sex and drugs."

As the story makes clear, "Deprivation" is not a game you necessarily want to win -- though there are witty ways to do so: one male player hilariously declares that "he's never had a vaginal orgasm," and gets considerable pennies from it. Victory, after all, suggests that you've never done anything, never gone anywhere. You win by being a loser. Furthermore, as we might expect of a story published in the early 90s, the specter of AIDS hangs over its characters, and Leavitt emphasizes how the "experiences" that "Deprivation" allows you to flaunt might also what kills you. Nathan, aware that his ex is HIV-positive, in particular has sunken into a state of self-pitying paranoia: an understandable reaction, though one that hurts Celia and finally allows her to see Nathan for the narcissist he can often be. "Do you realize," he informs Celia pathetically at the story's close, in the aftermath of the game, "I've never been in love? Never once in my life have I actually been in love?" And Celia tells us: "And he looked at me very earnestly, not knowing, not having the slightest idea, that once again he was counting me for nothing." "He looked away from me," she continues, "listening, I suppose, for that wind-chime peal as all the world's pennies flew his way." It's a lovely image, perfectly capturing the moment when Celia bears the brunt of Nathan's tendency to feel so sorry for himself that he reprehensibly discounts the things he has experienced in his life, the places he has been, the friend he has loved. Our romanticized attachment to deprivation blinds us to the ways we have been blessed.

There's a class of songs I think of when I remember "A Place I've Never Been," when I think of "Deprivation"; I have never been able to resist these songs. Their power come from the way their verses announce the things they have done, while their choruses pinpoint what they have not -- or vice-versa -- and it is from this tension that the songs derive their lyrical hook. Several examples spring to mind at the moment. One I've written about before: Charlene's "I've Never Been To Me," although, oddly enough, I did so at excruciating length and yet failed to mention how the song depends, for part of its poignancy, on the way the verses catalogue all the things Charlene has done (been to Georgia, and California), only to wipe them out with its plaintive announcement, in the chorus, of how what matters more is where she has not been (that would be "to me"). Another example is Kylie's "I Believe In You." Here, the trajectory is reversed, as we first get a litany of all the things Kylie does not has faith in: "I don't believe that magic is only in the mind/I don't believe I'd love somebody just to pass the time..." Because of all these negatives, the positive, when it arrives in the chorus, is tremendously moving: "But I, I, I believe in you."

I have no resistance to such songs -- even when they are cheesy, even when they don't strictly fit the pattern. Hence, I find myself stopped in my tracks even by "Stay With You Again," a BWO ballad (cheese: check!) in which the tension is not even spread between verse and chorus. After an opening synth passage that recalls Chic's "I Want Your Love," the song gives us some faintly nonsensical verses ("The night is full of torment and lives are torn to shreds/You want your correspondent with cameras infrared"?). But in its chorus I hear the conflict between having and not-having, between what-I've-done and what-I'd-rather-do, and all defenses fall away. "I have crossed a thousand rivers/I have walked the streets of gold," Martin sings. "I have been through hell and heaven/Where my soul was bought and sold/I have stormed the Himalayas/Blown the horn of Africa." (Even the juvenile sexual joke can't take me out of it.) But, Martin then tells us, none of this is important: "But as long I live, I long to see/I long to be, to stay with you again." Here are the things I've seen, these are the places I've been. What do they matter? There is, in the end, only one place I want to be.

2007-11-01T14:34:00.000+08:00

Bertine Zetlitz, "Ashamed" (2007)

Bertine's tremendous new song, "Ashamed" -- which you can hear at Herspace, and which may be on her forthcoming Best Of, and, God, I just blacked out for a second when I realized how amazing that collection will be -- seems to be about her ten-month old daughter Lill. The song's introduction, filled with chimes from a baby's mobile while a toddler giggles softly in the background, makes that clear.

Let's take a moment for that to sink in: Bertine is a new mother, has written a song about her new baby, and that song is called "Ashamed." This is why I have her perverse soul so much.

Here's how the lyric goes:

(Look at all these papercuts...)

Verse 1: How you gonna fall-fall-fall asleep at night/Knowing that you never taught her how to fight/Knowing she don't know how to clench her fists real tight/Knowing she'll be better off way out of sight

Verse 2: How you gonna make her feel her way around/Ninjas' how I'll do they hardly make a sound/How you're gonna teach her not to make a mess/Running can be hard in high heels and a dress

Chorus: And if I love you half as hard/I know that I will fall apart/Sometimes while I sleep/The company I keep/Makes me ashamed/And if I love you twice as much/You probably won't stay in touch/Sometimes when I dream/The images I see/Makes me ashamed

Verse 3: Telling her sometimes that tigers come at dawn/Teaching her to be the queen and not a pawn/Ripping off your heart to show her how it breaks/Swallowing your pride to show how bad it aches

Chorus

Bridge, twice: Look at all these papercuts/And all is in my heart/You know these papercuts/Mean we will never part/Among my favorite wounds are those that never heal/Among my favorite friends are those who never feel

Chorus

The lyric, which returns to the complexity of her pre-Italian Greyhound releases (the arresting might eight, with its feel/heal rhyme, is something of a callback to "Closer" from Beautiful So Far), concerns the difficulties of raising a child. (And, at several points, about the specific anxiety of raising a girl in our still-sexist world: "Running can be hard in high heels and a dress.") It speaks brilliantly -- though not without humor, if I'm hearing that "ninja" line right -- to the sense of inadequacy and helplessness parents often feel: how will we ever be able to protect her from what is essentially a cruel world? And protect her, not just from physical injury, but, even more impossibly, prepare her for emotional pain? How do we balance the need to equip her with survival tactics (sometimes you'll need to run, or stay "out of sight") with the need to not back down, to be a "queen and not a pawn"?

Strikingly, even though the song is about her baby, the verses appear to be addressed to Bertine's partner. While it may seem odd that Bertine is palming her worries off on, or passing her responsibilities onto, her partner ("what are you going to do about that mess, boyfriend?"), this isn't necessarily the case: if she's addressing her lover, it might just be her transparent way of managing her fears, pretending that it is his job rather than hers when the very fact that she's singing about it gives the game away. Indeed, perhaps she's not really addressing him at all with those second person pronouns, but simply herself. Her lips say "you," but her heart knows to hear "I."

The "you" of the chorus -- featuring Bertine's trademarked harmonies, breathtakingly double-tracked -- gets even more complicated. Here, it feels unlikely that Bertine is talking about or to herself with the "you"s. It's slightly more possible that she is talking (or continuing to talk) to her lover, although that serves to shift the song -- from being about her child, to being about her lover -- a bit too much, and too disconcertingly. Is the chorus then sung to her daughter? The first half proclaims a love that is almost painful and unbearable: I love you so much that it's emotionally impossible for me to love you less; if I did, I would "fall apart." But the second half of the chorus turns a bit darker: "And if I love you twice you as much/You probably won't stay in touch." We could simply see that as Bertine's warning to herself to not be an overbearing mother, but it's also considerably more. It makes the song deeply and wonderfully paranoid, and in its own way even rather anti-procreation: I love you, but I already know you will abandon me eventually. It takes a special mother to confess to her newborn daughter that she already fears losing her, although both that fear, and her ability to express it, speaks volumes about the depths of Bertine's feelings; in its perverse, twisted way, "Ashamed" is the ultimate declaration of maternal love.

In other news: it's been a bittersweet week. The Red Sox win, but Stylus (and its Singles Jukebox) close. I'm proud to have been a part of the last, and glad to have had the chance to contribute one final essay to it.

2007-10-25T18:01:00.000+08:00

Lucy London, "My Name Is Lucy (Original 12" Mix)" (2007)

It's not clear -- not immediately clear, or even ultimately clear -- that this track should be considered a "robots in love," or, to borrow the title of an EP by Future Bible Heroes, a "lonely robot" song. "My Name Is Lucy" is a sparse, minimal, even monotonous electronic track: a steady beat, slightly skittering, adorned only by a chiming three-note synthesizer riff and another more ominous, bassier synth line. Over this, we get a woman telling us about herself: her name is Lucy, she is 20 years old and from Chelsea, London, seemingly bisexual, and she dances to Pete Tong though she doesn't understand his music.

"My Name Is Lucy" might therefore be taking aim at a certain kind of clubby attitude. There are, for example, several jokes in the lyric. "I don't take Class A drugs," Lucy tells us. Beat. "Is cocaine Class A?" In this light, it would be kindred to electroclash tracks -- say, anything sung by Miss Kittin, or Pay TV's "Trendy Discotheque" -- that ape but supposedly also mock zombie club-goers. Or perhaps the track simply pokes fun at hipsterism, a genre that somehow seems especially popular with Myspace bands (see, for instance No Bra and their NSFW video for "Munchausen." Really).

But the longer "My Name Is Lucy" goes on, the more it morphs away from those kinds of songs, towards being a tale of a lonely girl robot. That's that automaton vocal and intonation, for one -- not so much vocoderized as it is spoken-and-spelt. And there is the rather unnerving confession of loneliness, even if it is broken up by a joke: "I'm on Myspace, Messenger, Skype, Facebook, Small World and Second Life [ah-ha!]/But nobody writes to me/Only some people write to enlarge my penis/I do not have a penis/I wish I did." And there is the repetition -- of these facts over and over, as if in desperation. And at the 4:30 mark: "I'm single." A long pause, so that the proclamation can sink in not as a come-hither invitation, but as yet another profession of solitude. Then, again: "My name is Lucy."

2007-10-24T19:02:00.000+08:00

Belanova, "Baila Mi Corazón"/"Por Esta Vez" (2007)

Though Belanova is three albums into their career, I've only recently gotten clued in to their existence. This makes me a bit sad. For one thing, I wish I had seen the promo picture to the left when I was picking out paint colors for my apartment.

The band is very popular in their native Mexico, where they've had several number one singles, and their last two albums have likewise hit the top of the charts. They are purveyors of fine electropop that leans to the bouncy, frothy side: Argentina's Miranda!, the other group with a good Spanish electropop album this year, sounds hard compared to Belanova. Accordingly, the band's music feels quite rooted in the 80s, a decade the band embraces without too much irony. At least not musically: unlike, say, Pleasure, whose songs are often melodically tongue-in-cheek, or even Chromeo, Belanova's music is unabashedly poppy.

If there is any camp or kitsch in Belanova, it comes in the band's very colorful, slightly cartoonish aesthetic. I mean, look at the video for the first single off of Fantasía Pop, which is for "Baila Mi Corazón" ("My Heart Dances," I think?):

The band is literally two-dimensional in that clip. And I think we might be able to interest Lily Allen in some of the cute dresses Denisse Guerrero is wearing -- the pink tissue one, perhaps -- while Carrie Bradshaw might enjoy the candy-striper-top-over-red-hot-pants number.

The song itself is nicely catchy: the verses are backed by a bouncy Kylie-worthy synthpop rhythm, which gives way to a crunchy guitar for the chorus that several Denisses joyously sing along to. A well-deserved Mexican número uno. Over the course of an album, Denisse's voice sometimes grates: she hits her high notes, but a bit shrilly, so album tracks like "One, Two, Three, Go!" and "Bye Bye" are skippable. But when she stays in her range, she is an infectious vocalist. "Baila Mi Corazón" might even be taunting those who have noticed her vocal danger zone. The middle eight, at the 2:40 mark, with its "aw-aw-AAAAWWW!!!" sees her heading towards screechiness, but thankfully not getting there. (She does something similar on "Aún," another lovely song on which she sort of wails the title word.) But I'm making it sound like I enjoy Belanova and Denisse's singing because she constantly skirts the edge of vocal disaster. Not the case, heh. When she sings a more mid-tempo bittersweet track like "Por Esta Vez" ("For This Time"?), the pleasures of Belanova are simple, straightforward.

2007-10-23T18:56:00.000+08:00

Deborah Harry, "Two Times Blue (Nickel & Dime Mix)" (2007)

I only played Necessary Evil three, four times when it was released last month. Because, duh, it's not a very good record, though I like the single "Two Times Blue" quite a bit. But it was also a difficult album to sit through for another reason. No longer able to hit the high notes, Debbie's voice pierces my heart even when it reaches the low ones -- or when it starts a song, as is the case with "Two Times Blue," in a disconcertingly low register that she wouldn't have chosen twenty years ago. Those notes only remind me of what could be. I sometimes tell myself that a voice can be richer, more flavorful as it gets coarser, whether due to bad habits (smoking? whiskey?) or "simply" age. I do this with Sarah Cracknell's, for example, and there I am still capable of being comforted by my own falsehoods. But, at other times -- most times with Debbie -- I wince and mourn.

Years ago I yanked a mini-cassette out of an answering machine. There was one message on it, from this man. He had an especially distinctive way of saying hello when I picked up the phone, which I would recognize to this day had I but chance: hey-ay?!, stretched out into multiple syllables, a drawl of sorts, as if he was delightedly surprised to speak with me even though it would be he who called. I liked this man, he liked me too, but not enough perhaps, etc: you know the story. After one fight, and three dozen attempts at "being friends," too many, I knew I needed to make a clean break, or as clean as I could bear. So that last message he left me went unanswered, though not to say unheeded. And yet to this day, somewhere in my apartment is that tape, waiting to be replayed, as if it hasn't already been countless times in my head; and, so, I know what it's like, you see, to try but fail to hold on to a voice.

2007-10-22T22:40:00.000+08:00

Freemasons feat. Bailey Tzuke, "Uninvited" (2007)

Surprise! The remixing team du jour has not turned "Uninvited" into a furious filter or handbag house anthem. Rather, with the help of Judie "Stay With Me Till Dawn" Tzuke's daughter, Freemasons reminds us -- and it was easy to forget, given the way the original version built to that overwrought ending that even Iron Butterfly would deem "a bit much" -- that the best part of Alanis's song is the spooky piano riff that kicks it off. By fashioning from that riff a haunted house track that you can almost imagine Faithless (in their heyday) or even The Knife doing, Freemasons takes a step towards demonstrating that it's not a one-trick pony.

2007-10-12T14:13:00.000+08:00

Mutya Buena, "Fast Car" (2007)

Over the past week, The Singles Jukebox has been reviewing, track-by-track, the Radio 1 Established 1967 compilation (starting here). It's a spotty album, but the writing by the reviewers (excepting one pathetic bloke) is often insightful and vivid even when the material doesn't deserve it.

Mutya Buena's version of "Fast Car" doesn't fare especially well, receiving an average score of five. The reviewers generally agree that the song seems to have lost something: Joseph McCombs finds it less poignant, and John Cunningham feels like it now lacks urgency and "character." Even Kevin Elliott, who is most sanguine about the track, likes it because it's brighter and more hopeful, or, to put it another way, because it shook off the original's haunting depression -- which is to say that he essentially likes it for the same reasons that the others don't.

It makes perfect sense to compare Mutya's take with Tracy Chapman's original, of course, and I think Elliott is right to do so on the question of "hope." But I am much harder-pressed to say if Mutya's version is more or less hopeful, because it strikes me as having a deeply ambivalent relation to it.

Mutya has made some clear changes to the song. She re-plays the acoustic guitar riff using synths, but a lot of the changes are in the service of shortening the track (Tracy's version is almost five minutes, while Mutya boils it down to just a bit over three). She omits several verses: an early one about "working at the convenience store," and a subsequent verse that again mentions a job at a checkout (and dreaming about moving "out of the shelter"). In Tracy's version, the repeated references to the store is another marker of how defeated the narrator is: she may start the song as a young girl and end up married to the driver of the fast car, but through it all she heartbreakingly hasn't been able to make any progress work-wise. Mutya ditches this trope, but at least she preserves the start and end points of the story -- girl dreams of escape, girl marries man and has kids, man is no good, girl tells him to take his fast car and go -- and thus still conveys the sad dead-end of the narrative.

But perhaps the change that most strikes the casual listener is the way the song no longer bursts into its chorus. That amazing chorus has always functioned, for the song, as the locus of hope; for all the trials and tribulations the narrator goes through, she has a moment of freedom and exhilaration when she is in that fast car. Or rather, "had." Because, significantly, the moment is only ever a memory: she's never in the car during the song, but merely recalling being so. (Indeed, it's not even clear if they still "got" the car.) "So remember when we were driving, driving in your car/The speed so fast, felt like I was drunk/City lights lay out before us, and your arm felt nice wrapped round my shoulder." Even though the chorus lapses, for a moment, into an ambiguous present tense ("city lights lay out before us"), it's still a chorus about the time when they "were" driving. Considered strictly, "Fast Car" therefore never gives us escape or catharsis: the moment has already come and gone, and all we have is a memory of it, which of course only makes us sadder.

In Tracy's original version, it's easier, I think, to forget the retrospective nature of the chorus. The song hums and strums along for two entire minutes -- an eternity in pop music -- before we get the chorus. If those two minutes feel lulling or even boring for some listeners, all the better, because we can see it as conveying the tedium of our narrator's life. When we finally get the chorus, we get it with along with the first appearance of the drums, and the song springs to life. It's a dash of color, and we can almost feel the wind in our hair. Because of the instrumentation, even though the chorus is about remembering a drive in the fast car, the music makes us feel that we are speeding along right there and then, in that moment.

Mutya's version in contrast refuses to give us even this illusion of being there in the fast car. Her chorus never erupts. The entirety of her version is bleakly drumless. Aside from the change in melody, the only things that mark off her chorus as a chorus is the more prominent organ line, and the way Mutya's vocals on the word "I, I..." are more emphasized -- they sound a bit more disembodied -- perhaps by some sort of overdubbing. It even sounds to me like Mutya corrects Tracy's one use of the past tense: she swallows the end of the verb somewhat, but sounds like she sings "city lights laid out before us." Unlike Tracy's chorus, then, Mutya's never truly positions itself as an escape, and in that sense the song feels more hopeless.

But the story is not as simple as that, and certainly doesn't end there. If Mutya refuses to deceive us into believing we are in that car, her chorus paradoxically feels more present in another way. Tracy actually initiates her chorus with the word "so": "So remember we were driving..." Mutya changes that to a pronoun: "I remember we were driving..." Tracy's chorus is therefore a command or request, albeit a desperate one: please try to remember, because only that offers us hope and solace. Mutya's chorus in comparison is less of an imperative, but an actual description of her act of remembering. While Mutya never lets us pretend that we are in that car, she at least lets us witness her in a moment of remembering a time when she was, and thus in a moment of hope and comfort. At least we know that Mutya still can hope; maybe Tracy is past that point, and reduced to simply trying to goad herself into remembering.

Neither song therefore has a straightforward relation to hope. Mutya's, in a sense, is more ambivalent: while she is more unrelenting in not allowing us to forget that being in that car is a thing of the past, it at least points us to the hope that memory can provide. (Unless you think that remembering is a kind of fixation and should not be an avenue to hope, but surely we're depressed enough by this post as it is.)

Perhaps this deep and beautiful ambivalence accounts for the two other alterations to the song I want to end by pointing out. Tracy ends all her choruses with this couplet: "And I, I had a feeling that I belonged/And I, I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone." Mutya stays faithful to this wording the first time she sings the chorus, but the second time, she changes "had" to "got." Is "got" in the present, or past tense? Is "having" a feeling better or worse than "getting" one? Which gives us more hope, more solace? Which is more real, more present? Which one has abandoned us less -- is it more likely that a feeling you once "had" will return, or one that you once (or now) "got"? I don't know. I also don't know which is better: in Tracy's version, she tells us (and her lover) that "You [We] gotta make a decision/ Leave tonight or live and die this way." Mutya doesn't even think that living is one of the options, because, both times in her song, she says: "We gotta make a decision/ Leave tonight or we can die this way." But then again, even in the original, "living and dying" this way was already a kind of death, so it's not clear if Mutya is being less hopeful, or simply more honest.

2007-10-05T18:32:00.000+08:00

Gabrielle, "Every Little Teardrop" (2007)

The new Gabrielle album, Always, is really quite great, and certainly her best produced. The first single from it is "Why," featuring Paul Smeller, and it stormed into the UK charts at #42.

This is absurd. There are thirteen tracks on the album; eight of them are better than "Why," and even after we discount those that may not work as lead singles (ballads, growers, etc), we still have approximately four or five that could have kicked off the marketing campaign less disastrously.

I suppose I can at least understand why my absolute favorite track wasn't picked as the first single. "Every Little Teardrop" is tremendous, featuring a beautifully emotional string arrangement that reinforces every word that Gabrielle sings in the chorus. But unfortunately, that arrangement is likely to remind listeners of Lenny Kravitz's "It Ain't Over Till It's Over" -- which would be fine, except that Mutya Buena sampled it not five months ago. I would imagine work on "Every Little Teardrop" started before "Real Girl" surfaced, so it's incredibly bad luck for Gabrielle that she kind of got scooped (by something inferior, no less).

Sigh. What a pity. The cover for a "Every Little Teardrop" single would even have designed itself:

Yes, the sleeve can also double as my TICKET TO HELL.

2007-10-04T17:29:00.000+08:00

Alison Moyet, "One More Time" (2007)

That Alison Moyet's new single can be described as "theatrical" should not surprise. Although she has only appeared in two productions, one of those occupied her in the time most directly preceding her new material: a play about two sisters called Smaller, costarring Dawn French. (Margaret Cho gushes about the play and its actresses here.) Alison in fact wrote three songs for the play -- "World Without End," "Home," "Smaller" -- and these will close out her forthcoming album, the aptly-titled The Turn.

The subtly amazing first single from that album, "One More Time," was therefore not composed for the play, but it nevertheless feels like it should be on stage, somewhere. The song isn't "theatrical" in the bad sense of the word: that is, it's not some overblown, melodramatic number that needs to be performed with jazz hands. But the song feels like it could be from a Pinter or Albee or O'Neill play about, say, marriage.

There are either two or three characters in "One More Time": it's hard to be sure because the lyric masterfully shifts between first and second person pronouns, but it's likely that our narrator is simply oscillating between being part of the scene and trying to detach herself from it. From this conflicted viewpoint, we get three moments that take place around one bedtime. In the first verse, she turns the light out, her eyes tired. In the next verse, presumably lying there in the dark, with her lover ostensibly next to her but also a world away, she can only think of the difficulties of the relationship. "If easy was on the cards/Then someone made it disappear/And he smiles/And even now you hate him/ Only now he wants you to/The liberties you take/For what he won't be giving you." Sadly, it's a situation that isn't alien: "That's what you do."

But the breathtaking chorus also tells us that it's a situation that our narrator is willing to put up with. The four lines of the chorus, simple but precise as a surgeon's knife, figure the relationship in transactional terms; love, it seems, is a tie of debts and credits. "If all that we make here is sorrow/And all that we get we just borrow/I'll still buy, so can we try/One more time?" For all that love costs, it still compels us. What else will we spend our currency on? The way Alison's voice lilts over the phrase "I'll still buy" is heart-stopping; hitting that first high note, and then two more monosyllabic ones, it expresses hope, resignation, despair, sadness, all at once. It makes it impossible to know if the song ultimately shows us a person who is masochistically in a relationship from which she derives little, or if she is right in being pragmatic about the compromises one must make to keep any relationship going.

But perhaps we find out, sort of. After two verses and choruses, the song seems to work its way to a conclusion; the strings swell and get more elaborate, and it seems like we will end at the 2:50 mark. But true to its title, the song comes back for one more go-round, and this time we are offered some hope. The light, for one, gets turned back on by him. "He turns the light on/Sits down where he watches you/Tells you he couldn't sleep/He had something to share with you." And instead of the impersonal "you" second pronoun that we got to conclude the first verse, this third verse admits: "That's what we do." If the unpleasant situation feels all too familiar, it is at least something that the two of them are in together.

Do they indeed share? (And if so, is it good stuff or bad?) Do they talk? Do they work things out? Did they (the song seems to know -- "he had something to share" -- but it's not telling us)? Perhaps. But that chorus, which I haven't been able to get out of my head, where it may stay as one of the most moving lyrics of the year, comes back around. "If all that we make here is sorrow/And all that we get we just borrow/I'll still buy, so can we try/One more time?/One...more...time."

2007-10-03T18:11:00.000+08:00

Christophe Willem, "Elu Produit De L'année"/"Double Je" (2007)

2006's edition of Nouvelle Star (aka the French Pop Idol) was won by Christophe Willem, a contestant who seems to have caught the public's fancy for two things. One, his voice: arrestingly high-pitched, ethereal, and yes, feminine. Two, his looks: in an early round, one of Nouvelle Star's judges infamously called Christophe "la tortue" (the turtle), and then tried to flip him over onto his back. (I may have made up that last part.)

The two things are intimately related, of course: by now it's a common trope in many singing shows to have a contestant whose looks supposedly don't match his or her voice. (Mine does, but if I ever join a competition, I'll be sure to find some way to manufacture such a discrepancy and thus a good hook. Dress up like a tattooed punk rocker, say, and then sing like a choir boy. Though this plan is slightly hampered by my inability to sing like a choir boy.) Of course, like many reality TV characters, Christophe is not the hideous deformed beast he's made out to be. He's just the TV version of ugly. His gangly physique is Olive Oylie, his glasses make him into something of an Erlend Øye, and his unshiny hair doesn't hide his fivehead, oi vey. But if someone holds him down and shaves off that thing on his face, you can already see that he's plain more than fugly. (I do feel bad about how nature shortchanged him, though, because his father is rather [silver-]foxy.)

I'm not sure I would have liked Christophe if I actually watched the show. Maybe Nouvelle Star just had assy theme nights that restricted his song choices, but Christophe apparently had a weakness for bad 70s disco cheese: he performed "Sunny," "Born To Be Alive," "I Am What I Am," "Staying Alive," and "My Heart Will Go On," for crissakes -- although, I have to say, he's not that camp. (His taste in chansons is better, I think: here he covers Michel Polnaref"s "Goodbye Marilou.")

Christophe's debut album, Inventaire, doesn't bear much relation to his Nouvelle Star performances. It's surprisingly sleek and contemporary-sounding, and credit for that may need to go to Zazie, whom I think produced parts or all of it. It's also quite a varied album. Shows like American Idol are actually quite paradoxical: the format asks its contestants to assume different styles and genres each week. But if the show thereby showcases faux-versatility -- "faux," because as many critics have noticed, there is very little consistency in whether contestants are praised or castigated for "stepping out of their boxes," and if I never hear that expression again it will be too soon -- such versatility never becomes a marketing point after the winner is crowned. (This is probably due to how segmented the American music market is, of course; as far as I know, the one album that tried to be 16 weeks of Idol on record stunk up the joint.) Seen from another angle, this confirms what many know: something like American Idol is first and foremost always about the show (which requires that weekly variety), and much less about positioning its contestants for any kind of career afterwards.

But I digress. Christophe's album is not "varied" in the sense that it jumps from bluegrass to country to, say, a rap number featuring Kevin Covais (seriously, Paris, wtf). But listen, for example, to how different its first two singles have been:

"Elu Produit De L'année" was a download-only single released back in March, and it's a tremendously toe-tapping neo-Motown stomper. It's a bit like Spice Girls' "Stop" with more violins and horns, which is a compliment of the highest order. And the groovy video features women dancing with lampshades and birdcages on their heads! (Not at the same time. That would just be silly.)

"Double Je" is the more official second single, and it's awesome in a totally different way. Reviewing it for the Jukebox, where the song is gratifyingly lodged in 2007's top ten, I compared "Double Je" to the French Italo disco classic "Voyage Voyage," which Pet Shop Boys fans will remember is the record they were trying to emulate with their Patsy Kensit version of "I'm Not Scared." It's a cool piece of thumping, bleeping electropop, and that video has new age people laying hands on Christophe, or something. I don't know.

Though it has its patchy moments, Inventaire has several other potential hits: lovely piano-led ballads (like "Chambre Avec Vue"), and even a pulsating English electropop number "Kiss The Bride" that may spearhead Christophe's attempt to break into Francophobic countries. But I feel like I almost don't need these other tracks, because ""Elu Produit De L'année" and "Double Je" may constitute the best one-two debut punch from any Idol winner ever, and that's practically enough for moi.

2007-10-02T18:23:00.000+08:00

Mêleé, "Built To Last" (2007)

Blue moons are well and fine, but an even rarer occurrence took place last week, right around, as it happened, the mid-Autumn festival. I absent-mindedly had MTV Asia on, and it INTRODUCED ME TO A NEW SONG: Mêleé's "Built To Last." Oh my God, how novel, someone should look into this marketing tool, etc..

The video is pretty ordinary, featuring as it does a rather literal interpretation of the album title (Devils and Angels), and some dubious fashion choices (lead singer Chris Cron, who might just be J'ason D'luv's third cousin, sports a waist coat that's totally on the wrong side of Seth Cohen).

But the song: what a song. It looks like it is or has been #1 in Japan, though the band is American. Specifically, from Orange County, so you know what that means: power-pop! It's been a nice year for the genre, what with a solid (if now trendy-to-diss) album from Fountains Of Wayne, and excellent tracks by Rooney, The Click Five (at a pinch, we might even include Orson).

While "When Did Your Heart Go Missing?" and "Strapped For Cash" have been leading the race for best power-pop single of '07, "Built To Last" is mounting a serious late challenge. That piano riff betrays how much Coldplay is an influence on the band, but the song is gloriously soaring instead of drippy. The same might be said of Cron's vocals. Strong throughout the track, he at points sounds uncannily like Roland Orzabal on the last Tears For Fears album (the underrated Everybody Loves A Happy Ending). On the chorus, that voice is ably supported by backing "ahh"s, and the sweetest of harmonies. But the vocals really get on a roll beginning with a middle eight using a modified version of the chorus melody ("Walking on the hills that night/With those fireworks and candlelight/You and I were made to get love right") which, after the chorus, return one more time with new words ("Cause you are the sun in my universe/Considered the best when we've felt the worst"). It's hard not to get carried away and shout along with the final few lines: most of all, most of all... LOVE. IT. The Japanese got it so right.

2007-10-01T18:25:00.000+08:00

Freezepop, "Thought Balloon" (2007)

In some ways, songs about being tongue-tied or struck dumb in front of a crush carry an extra burden to be articulate. The more the song can precisely and lovingly describe the condition, the more we understand how silly it is that our narrator, so bright and well-spoken within the song, can't muster up the words without.

Freezepop's gorgeous ballad about the affliction doesn't necessarily strive to be "articulate" per se, but it finds a point of focus that is wonderfully human and relatable: the cartoon figure of the thought balloon. It's "such a pretty thing/A white balloon on a string/It floats above my head/Filled with stuff I should have said." It is subject to a kind of gravity. "Thoughts can weigh me down/My balloon dips closer to the ground/I'm hoping that you catch my drift/Give my balloon a little lift."

Near the end of the song, our narrator resolves to speak her mind. "I've been quiet for too long/And I'm gonna take the dare/Find a way to let you know, la la la la/Time to let my secrets go, la la la la/I'll pull the words out of thin air." And so she decides to set the balloon free, a gesture that feels as sweet and wondrous as when Nena let go of hers, though this time round we're not even dealing with nuclear holocaust. (Not literally, anyway.) "I'll set it free, my thought balloon/And lead you here to me/And finally I'll have my say/And then my thought balloon can float away."

And yet the triumphant moment makes me sad. Maybe, in the course of the song's three-plus minutes, I'd grown accustomed to, and even fond of, that white balloon. Maybe it's because of the melancholic feel of the song, built as it is on a mellow, quivering synth line (that places it in the tradition of, say, "Rent"). Or maybe, having struggled for the past month with a sorta-friend, to whom I want to say so much and yet cannot, I find myself understanding that some balloons must by necessity always remain attached to us, and us to them.

2007-09-14T18:49:00.000+08:00

Benjamin Biolay, "Rendez-vous Qui Sait" (2007)

The lovely "Rendez-vous Qui Sait," a track from Trash Yéyé, the forthcoming album by the freshly-divorced Benjamin Biolay, makes me think of three or four other songs, and almost all the memories are pleasant.

It begins with a tinkling piano part that runs through the whole track; on the pre-chorus, the riff doesn't stop, but it does shift downwards a half-key. But if the song therefore sounds a bit like something Coldplay might produce, this specter is more than countered when the chorus rolls around and a beautiful trumpet comes in. The notes it plays are not quite from "Join Our Club," but there's a gorgeous whiff of Saint Etienne in the air. (It reminds me even more of The Cherry Orchard's "Roundabout," but no one will get that reference.) Since my mind is wandering anyway, and since Biolay often gets lined up next to his fellow countryman Etienne Daho, I'm also prompted by the trumpet to think about "La Baie" -- perhaps one of my favorite songs ever -- even though "Rendez-vous Qui Sait" is jauntier, less achingly sad than Daho's track. Not that "Rendez-Vous" is without its tinge of melancholy: on the chorus, Biolay begins to doubletrack his vocals. Everything comes together at that point -- the rueful voices, the lonely trumpet, the never-look-back piano, and even the synth hits that go plapt plapt plapt -- and, though it seems strange to say, the ghosts of all the other songs feel like they are simultaneously summoned and exorcized.

2007-09-13T15:28:00.000+08:00

W.I.T., "Just What I Needed" (2003)

In early October, Felix Da Housecat will release his third album, which makes this the perfect occasion to ask: oh my god, was it really only six or seven years ago when electroclash was all the rage? It feels like decades. All things considered, a good number of acts have survived that cultural moment when electroclash threatened to simply be a flavor of the month, if with diminished cachet (it's easy to forget, for instance that, with "Electrobix," Scissor Sisters was considered part of that scene).

W.I.T., on the other hand, never really got off the ground, which is a bit surprising given that they were the brainchild of electroclash's "founder," Larry Tee. The act is made up of three women: Melissa Burns, Christine Doza, and Mandy Coon. Melissa is the one with the Farrah do and blow-up doll mouth; Christine is the especially trannytastic one; and Mandy, according to the sleeve notes, doesn't actually sing on the record, although she would go on to provide some vocals for LCD Soundsystem (and handclaps on "Disco Infiltrator"!).

W.I.T. released one album whose title explains both the group's name as well as, one would assume, its ethos: Whatever It Takes. The Amazon marketplace has copies for a couple of bucks each, which is already more than what I found it for in a physical record store. The album is, um, worth that, certainly. It's a pretty fun record: the singing is never as sneery as Miss Kittin's, and the music leaned more towards synthpop than the harder sounds of some other electroclash acts.

My favorite track on the album is the band's superior cover of The Cars' "Just What I Needed." It's not as if the original wasn't already new wavy, but Larry Tee makes it even more so by jettisoning the chugging rhythm guitar and instead making the delicious synth riff the centerpiece of the song. Thus, after a bleepy intro, the girls asks, "Are you ready? Let's go!" And then the riff enters, making the most of its grand introduction. Furthermore, in both versions the riff is always played twice, but with a differing last note; in Ric Ocasek's original the first iteration ends with a "down" note before it comes back for a second go-round with an "up" one. W.I.T.'s version reverses that order, and the riff somehow sounds more ecstatic as a result. The only disappointing aspect of the remake lies in the way W.I.T. changed the couplet, "It's not the perfume that you wear/It's not the ribbons in your hair" to "It's not the clothing that you wear/It's not the perfume in your hair." I guess they did so because they would later name the song's addressee as a "boy," but it's not as if a man with perfume in his hair is any less queer than one with ribbons.

As a bonus, here's one more track from W.I.T. I enjoy: the album closer, "Inside Out." It's not a cover of the Odyssey song (Electribe 101 did that), but rather a Larry Tee original with spoken verses and a dreamy chorus (during which one of the girls almost sounds like she's singing, "I wet myself..." Fergalicious!).

2007-09-12T16:10:00.000+08:00

Coldcut, "Autumn Leaves" (1993)

Of course autumn brings
A sense of melancholy.
Though, here, no leaves fall.

2007-09-11T22:44:00.000+08:00

Club 8, "Jesus, Walk With Me" (2007)

The movie that terrified my friend and I when we saw it with a week or so ago was not a thriller, a horror flick, torture porn, or even some impossibly cute rom-com that filled the two of us with despair about ever finding someone to love. It was the documentary Jesus Camp.

For Jaz, the film turned out to be doubly traumatic; not only was she amazed by the level of fanaticism, denial, and hypocripsy on show in the flick, but some long repressed memory got awakened. " I haven't thought about this incident in ages, but I had this tuition teacher when I was a kid," she told me over post-movie coffee. "And one day, without telling my mom, she took me to church."

I asked her if she had to go through all the motions, like...I dunno, the eating of the wafer. Quite possibly I didn't even have my denominations right, but somehow it was the worst thing I could think of to have to mime, because doesn't swallowing the wafer when you didn't actually believe that it is the body of Christ lead to...some catastrophe? If not for you, then for the host? No? Or perhaps I was just thinking about wafers because we were having dessert with our coffee.

ANYWAY, Jaz claimed that it was long ago, and it was all a frightening blur. "But here's the thing I do remember," she said. "After the service the tutor gave me a bag of pamphlets. When I got home, I was really scared, and I didn't feel like I could tell my mom about any of it for some reason. And so I just shoved that entire backpack under my bed and tried to forget about it."

"It's probably still there," I said helpfully, "unless it's been consumed by the flames of Satan."

"Probably," she agreed. And then, as if it was either relevant or a logical end to the entire sordid tale, she added: "It was a Snoopy backpack."

The narrator of Club 8's "Jesus, Walk With Me" is nothing like the characters of Jesus Camp. Thank God. From 2001-3, Club 8 released three gorgeous albums in quick succession, but the Swedish band has been quiet since then (although Johan Angergård spent the past few years releasing music with The Legends and Acid House Kings). Their comeback album, The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming, features a couple of singles ("Heaven" and "Whatever You Want") that suggest that the band has been listening to their fellow countrymen ("Whatever You Want" also pays homage to "Being Boring," while other tracks steal licks and moments from Spector and Depeche Mode).

But the record begins with a beautiful acoustic ballad that's a compelling portrait of faith. Like our friends from Jesus Camp, the song's narrator does desire salvation and comfort: "If God made me, will Jesus save me?/Take me through the day?" But she also understands why she does. Without claiming that her kind of faith is typical of the very structure of faith per se, she pleads nakedly on the haunting chorus: "Fool me into believing/I don't care if you're deceiving me/I wouldn't want it any other way/Cause then I'd only stay the same." Her vocals are here doubletracked, as if she both comprehends the self-deceitful nature of her wants, but also needs to emphasize their urgency despite it all. And, in turn, who among us doesn't understand that very human desire to be protected? By God. By Jesus. By a lover. By a constructed image of something that we ask, beg to fool us. Even by Snoopy.

2007-09-10T20:06:00.000+08:00

Plastic Operator, "The Long Run" (2007)

"Tomorrow has hit me by surprise/Is it me, or did today just pass me by?" On "The Long Run," Pieter Van Dessel, who's one half of Plastic Operator, sings of how overwhelmed he feels by the speed of life. It's not anything especially drastic or even specific, but merely a sense that there's always more he could do: "I am aware of the jokes I should have said/I am conscious of the laughter I didn't get/And sometimes I promise to be good/But it all depends on swiftly swinging moods."

In the face of these problems, the song doesn't launch into any grand inspirational homily. The solution, contained in the chorus when it's not implied by the determined dee-dee-dee-dee keyboard riff, is very modest. "It should be alright in the long run," he says. "It should be alright if I'm holding on/It takes a while to get up when things let you down/True, but I've got time." There's not even the certainty of a "will," just the vague but still comforting sense that things, eventually, should be alright. If we think about it, it's not a totally convincing promise. Given that many todays are passing us by, how can we be certain that when we fall and/or things let us down, we will have the "time" to slowly get back up? We can't, of course. But we soldier on. We take shelter in the perspective afforded by the phrase "in the long run" -- the coping mechanism that is the phrase "in the long run" -- because if we don't, it becomes difficult to go on. As coping mechanisms go, it's a damn good one (except for those moments when the future terrifies rather than reassures us, that is).

"The Long Run" closes Plastic Operator's Different Places album, which is, on the whole, a pretty wonderful record. Like many people, I first heard of the band in 2004 when Fluxblog featured "Folder" (a fact that the band sort of recognizes in their official bio), and three years later the duo has put out a long player that is probably the second best old school synthpop album of the year -- thanks to tracks like "Peppermint," with its skittering breakbeat, or the understatedly moving "Home 0207," or the female-chant-over-a-Gorillaz-beat "Parasols" (although the song misses a great opportunity to end each title line with an echo of "asol, asol, asol"), or the infectious tale of a woman who is "Singing All The Time." (The best is not Dntel's, even if Jimmy Tamborello's other project has become the yardstick in recent years for great dinky-dink electropop with a melancholic mumbling male vocalist. It's this, if you must know.)

2007-09-06T19:57:00.000+08:00

Axe Riverboy, "Roundabout"/"Carry On" (2007)

Xavier Boyer, lead singer of the wonderful Tahiti 80, has released a solo album, Tutu To Tango. It's a bit more acoustic than his band's work: it lacks the beats of Fosbury, and even the swingin' pop hooks of the first two Tahiti 80 albums. But although the material is much more low-key, its charm emerges after repeated spins. The middle of the album boasts two particularly energetic numbers: the first single "Roundabout" (all faux-heavy metal guitar riffs and stuttering singing), and the cloppy, clappy "Carry On" (all clipped acoustic guitars and characteristic falsetto choruses).

The name he's chosen for the project is Axe Riverboy, which is simply an anagram of his. This is a marvellous idea. I hereby predict a trend:

1. In 2009, Girls Aloud will announce that they are "on temporary hiatus as a group." Nadine Coyle will assume the stage name Annoyed Lice, but sadly her album of big band ballads will fizzle and she will have to recoup her losses by starring in the doubly-inevitable shampoo commercial.

2. Tracey Thorn should have released Out Of The Woods under the moniker The Contrary.

3. New Order may or may not have already broken up. Our grumpy little Barney therefore may or may not re-emerge as a rapper called Unmerry Beans.

4. When The Ark disbands and Ola Salo goes it alone, he will do so as Alas, Loo!, but for some inexplicable reason he will fail to attract much of an audience, except when he plays big outdoor festivals.

5. Eight years from now, Sugababes 19.0 finally call it quits. Heidi has married an oil tycoon and long faded from view, while Keisha is on Big Brother. Amelle endures to the end, but her two final bandmates are such backstabbin' hos that Ms Berrabah decides to call her solo project Abel! Abel! Harmer! Speculation about which of the fourteen bitches she's worked with those three names refer to is beyond rife.

6. Brandon Flowers realizes that his true calling lies in gender illusion cabaret. Ladies and gentlemen, Brandon Flowers is Won-Bra Fondlers.

7. Saint Etienne never break up, but the boys are so busy with their film experiments that Sarah decide on a surprising new career as Her Rascal Clunk. If you guess that her new vocation is "stripping" or "porn," shame on you, but I would almost understand.

8. Róisín! Your solo career is still embryonic! (No one heard Ruby Blue, after all.) It's not too late to re-market your upcoming Overpowered album under a much more pronounceable, much less acutely accented non de plume. How about "In Your Shrimp"?

9. As sad as it is to contemplate, Pet Shop Boys eventually spin off into solo acts. Neil Tennant would be Neat Lent Inn, and the music would of course be austere. Austere Gregorian chants, that is. Chris, on the other hand, would release an album of indie rock under the name Cow Relish.

10. For his solo career, Bono adopts the name God. If you want to be the one to point out to him that, um, that's not an anagram, be my guest, because God WILL fucking strike you dead.

2007-09-04T18:18:00.000+08:00

Chromeo, "Bonafied Lovin' (Tough Guys)" (2007)

A bouncy electro number that, in a perfect world, would be #1 on every pop chart, "Bonafied Lovin'" sees Dave 1 trying to persuade some woman that she needs to dump her sweaty, insecure young buck of a boyfriend and take up with him, the older guy with "life experience" and "the right clothes and the right appearance," who can give her "bonafied lovin'." It's not clear why older lovin' is more "bona fide," unless there is some joke here about geriatric boners that I am too innocent to appreciate. "Never mind an SMS, what you need is a sweet caress," he hilariously sings, as if technology and TLC are mutually exclusive. You only need one hand to SMS, I've been told.

There's therefore little question that the lyric is faintly absurd -- a Boomkat review calls it "howlingly silly" -- but to take it as unintentionally funny would miss the point. Admittedly, I myself might have some years ago: I first heard of Chromeo via the Paper Faces (aka Jacques Lu Cont) remix of their "Needy Girl," so I filed them away as a humorless band that has more in common with glum techno acts rather than what they really are. I recently burned their Fancy Footwork album onto a 80 min CDR, alongside the equally brief Pleasure 2 album, and the two bands go perfectly together. (Indeed, it would have been way more appropriate for Lu Cont to have remixed "Needy Girl" under his Les Rythmes Digitales moniker.) And really, that 80s backing -- chock full of insanely catchy cartoon sound effects -- should make the tongue-in-cheek nature of the song abundantly clear. This, after all, is a song in which our narrator tries to seduce a woman by proclaiming his coolness, but the music that backs up his claim is totally "uncool" and "untough" 80s electro. He's just a big ol' dork, and that's why I love this track so.

2007-08-31T15:35:00.000+08:00

Jens Lekman, "A Postcard To Nina" (2007)

I'm not one for grand, sweeping pronouncements, but I will venture to say that of all the pop songs narrated from the hilarious perspective of a man who is conscripted into being a merkin for his lesbian friend, who brings him to a family dinner that can only be safely navigated if he correctly reads the degree to which her left eyebrow is raised, even as he has to suffer the bruising that comes from repeated kicks under the table as well as the interrogations of her sweet old father, all of which proves to be too much and finally drives him to touchingly advise her to just be true to her badass dyke self already, girl, Jens Lekman's "A Postcard To Nina" is the best.

2007-08-30T23:46:00.000+08:00

Popium, "Beautiful Thing" (2002)/"Perfectly Numb" (2002)

Today we're talking about Popium. You go first.

more at twiigs.com...

I'm in category 3 myself: as a Sox fan, I was of course obligated to watch Fever Pitch (aka The Perfect Catch). There's a lot of talk about the eternal suffering that comes with being a Sox fan, but no one warned me about having to watch Jimmy Fallon try to act. Thankfully, the film at least featured highlights of the 2004 season; also, in one scene, a lovely shimmering late night song played, the kind that the Tindersticks or Richard Hawley or Cousteau or Weeping Willows might have done. (For this, I imagine we have to thank the exquisite taste of the film's scorer: Craig Armstrong.)

The track, titled "Sooner Or Later," is instead by Popium, a five-man band from Bergen, Norway. The band has been around for a while, and have released four albums. A self-titled debut came out in 2001; this was followed by Permanently High in 2002, and Camp in 2004 (from which "Sooner Or Later" was culled). Last year saw the release of The Miniature Mile in Scandinavia (you can hear tracks from the record at the band's myspace). That looks to be getting a UK release next month, although three of the four albums are already available on US iTunes. And of course, Youtube proves useful as well, with a few videos for the band's singles. Including this one, for the ridiculously infectious "Beautiful Thing":

The song is a duet with fellow Bergen artist Christine Sandtorv, whom some of you may recognize as a member of Ephemera. It's cheerful 60s-inflected power-pop, and a lot of its charm comes from the absurd way both singers enunciate the word "beautiful" (or "beaudeeefall"). From the same album I also like the much subtler "Perfectly Numb." It's a slower track, though not as smoky as "Sooner Or Later." It reminds me a little of Lucky Soul's "My Darling Anything" or "Struck Dumb," and features castanets, which always make a track a winner in my book. With their name, the band is obviously setting me up to make references to how addictive their music is, but I'll just pretend that the word means something totally different in Norwegian and resist to the end. I'm nobody's ventriloquist's dummy!

2007-08-29T16:41:00.000+08:00

(We Are) Performance, "(In Your Own Words) Chernobyl" (2007)

Once, when I was just starting an academic program, I was asked to provide two favorite "literary quotations" to accompany my personal details for a mini-phonebook that would tell my classmates who I was. I opted for something from J.D. Salinger. No, it wasn't from Catcher In The Rye -- I may have been a snotty moron, but at least I wasn't too clichéd -- but plucked from Seymour: An Introduction:

Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: ( ( ( ( ) ) ) ).

Sort of funny, no? No? At least appropriate for a document that was meant to be introductory? No? Eh. Tough crowd.

Ah, the parenthesis. In my early years, when I labo(u)red under the remnants of British colonialism, I only knew you by the much less attractive name of "brackets," like you were some cheap workshop implement, no more than a vice. But in fact, you're such a classy, pretty punctuation mark -- and yet so brainy (you just missed out on being philosophical)! So coquettish! So curvaceous!

And yet, you are so often abused in pop music. Step forward, Jamiroquai: explain why you released a song with the idiotic title of "(Don't) Give Hate A Chance." Does it EVER make sense to place ONE word of a song title in the loving embrace of a pair of parenthesis? Like, what, Jay, you're really giving listeners the option of being able to shorten a title by a syllable? And how does it make sense to have the two alternate titles mean exactly the opposite of each other? "Folks, here's Jamiroquai with his new single, 'Give Hate A Chance'! No, wait...it's 'Don't Give Hate A Chance'! Or is it?! Oh, I'm so confused. Should I hate or should I not hate? I was considering some genocide before lunch, but now I'm not sure. This is too much. Let's go to traffic and weather instead."*

If you're going to use the parethesis, fucking use it. Witness: "Where The Streets Have No Name (I Can't Take My Eyes Off You)." That's more like it. Let it contain multitudes.

Two years ago, I heard a track called "Love Life," by a group called Performance. Perhaps realizing what an ungoogleable name that is, the Mancurian electrorock band returned this year with a full-length album and a new name. Well, a new name that offers you choices, at least. They are now called (We Are) Performance.

Genius! I added the group and their album to my iTunes when the program was still on Version 7.2. In that incarnation, iTunes showed you your artists beginning not with the "A"s, but with the numerically-named groups (in order: 1 Giant Leap, 2 Banks Of 4, 2Pac, 2Raumwohnung, 4 Strings, 4Hero, 10 cc...) -- but even before those, the punctuated bands. Like !!!. But then !!! totally got pwned: (We Are) Performance shot right to the top of my iTunes window. They've got their eye on the technological generation, I tell you. Of course, their album didn't stay intact on my iTunes for very long. (Live by technology, die by technology.) It's pretty good, but I already have Fischerspooner on my iPod. Still, I quite enjoy "(In Your Own Words) Chernobyl," and if the song is additionally awesome because it too uses parenthesis, hey, that's just a bonus. (Very) well-played, (We Are) Performance, (very) well-played indeed.

*Yes. I understand that Jamiroquai wanted their song title to look like "Give Peace A Chance." Still stupid.

2007-08-28T19:12:00.000+08:00

Sugababes, "About You Now" (2007)

Youtube is of course littered with bad video of bad singers singing their bad favorites badly, so it's a minor miracle to see something that isn't shit. Here, a woman nicknamed Giftofmelody performs an abbreviated version of the new Sugababes single, "About You Now," and the result is quite mesmerizing. It's entirely possible that I played the video on a loop a few evenings ago.

The charms of her rendition aren't mysterious. She sings the song as a ballad, backed only by a piano; consequently, its melancholy nature emerges more clearly. Her voice has the kind of tremulous fragility that lends itself perfectly to the rueful song, and even the way the top of her head remains a bit out of frame makes the whole thing extra endearing. But what I love most is the way Giftofmelody changes the structure of the song, for the better. Perhaps she only meant to reduce the song to a more bite-size morsel for impatient netizens, but whatever the reason, she gives us only a verse, pre-chorus, chorus, a second verse, pre-chorus, and then the middle eight -- and, in the process, the song goes from good to great.

There's already an emerging opinion on the interwebs that the middle eight is the best part of the song (whose lyric is here) -- the most melodically beautiful, perhaps. Indeed, because the Sugababes' version is (1) produced by Dr Luke, and (2) is very Dr Lukesque, the song's distractors have faulted it for reminding them too much of Kelly Clarkson, Pink, or The Veronicas. The similarities don't bother me that much, but even I can't help but wish that Xenomania had taken over the production. Given their proclivities, I can see them shuffling the parts and maybe ending "About You Now," as Giftofmelody did, with the middle eight.

But back in the non-fantasy world, we have this Youtube version to thank for underlining more emphatically the stroke of genius that is the middle eight. And its genius lies not just in its gorgeous melody, but because it contains two...I suppose we could loosely call them "mistakes," though they are hauntological mistakes that deepen the song for me.

The first "mistake" has to do with tenses. The opening lines of the middle eight go, "not a day passed me by, not a day passed me by/When I don't think about you," but the tenses in that couplet are all wrong. If the point of the song is that the narrator now knows that she loves him, and she thinks about him everyday (as the second line confirms), then it's strange that the days when she thinks about him have stopped passing her by. Of course, the "logical" reason for the slip is that the correct tense -- "not a day passes me by" -- won't scan, but the 'Babes could have gotten around the problem by simply singing "not a day passes by." If we therefore take the lines seriously, they instead suggest that she has now stopped thinking about him -- not because she no longer loves him, but because her pining can no longer have any effect.

Indeed, what the middle eight does is disrupt the time scheme of the song, which had hitherto seemed straightforward. They essentially raise the possibility that the song takes place at a moment in the "future." Prior to the middle eight, we understand the track to allude to two time periods. (1) In the first, our narrator is "dumb" and "wrong," because she didn't love him. (2) But she "now" knows how she feels about him, and this second time frame is supposedly the one of the song.

But the middle eight suddenly reveals that the "now" may not really be now, because the days of obsessively thinking about him are in the past. For a moment, whether intended or not, we are in a future moment when it's all over. He's gone. There's no happy ending. Not only can she not bring Time #1 back around, but even Time #2 -- which was at least a time of hope -- devastatingly turns out to be in the past.

Not that our narrator admits this hopelessness; indeed, what makes the song moving is the way she can't admit this. We fathom this in the second oddity of the middle eight, which has to do with a ghostly rhyme. The third line of the middle eight goes like this: "And there's no moving on/Cause I know you're the one." The rhyme, you'll notice, is not perfect; at best, "on" and "one" are half-rhymes. That would be unremarkable, if weren't for the fact that there is a much more obvious word that could have been used to rhyme with "on": "gone." "And there's no moving on/Though I know that you're gone," for example, would make more sense and scan perfectly. In fact, the first few times I heard the song, I think my mind supplied that much more natural rhyme, and in that sense it may not be too fanciful to say that the middle eight is haunted by the specter of a rhyme it can't admit.

Once she didn't love him. Then she knew how she felt about him. She tried to bring time back around, but he's gone. She spent days and days thinking about him. She still says that she does, except for the moments when a slipped tense, and an absent rhyme, reveal the fruitlessness of that gesture. And in everything that isn't said lies her heartbreak, and mine.

2007-08-25T20:25:00.000+08:00

Pet Shop Boys, "Integral (PSB Perfect Immaculate 7-Inch Mix)" (2007)

Despite the fact that it was a stripped-down, cube-free show, there were too many highlights to recount when the Pet Shop Boys played SingFest back on August 8. (Sprockets to me: "That was the best concert I've ever been to. Granted, I don't go to any, but still.")

But as far as favorite audience moments go, I had two indisputable ones. Both came courtesy of the group of men who stood to my left. They were excitable to the point of being hysterical, and verged on being rubbish gays, but they were obviously huge fans who could sing along to every single word of "The Sodom and Gomorrah Show." (A song that has, by the way, since I first wrote about it, gotten more enshrined in my mind as the peak of Fundamental, as an update of and worthy successor to "Being Boring.")

The first highlight these men provided came with the opening strains of "Suburbia," when they barked along with the doggie sound effects. BARKED ALONG. That's hardcore fandom, y'all.

The second highlight was more inadvertent. As Neil trotted out in his military regalia -- and, since it was so humid here, the backing vocalists (including my future husband Andy Love) meanwhile chose to be shirtless for this number, which, hallelujah -- the booming, problematically Big Brotherish notes of "Integral" started. One of the gays shrieked and seemed close to a conniption, or perhaps to actually going out of his everlovin' mind, but he had enough left in him to...raise his right hand skywards to the melody. For just a moment, the scene was unfortunately fascistic. But the heiling gesture couldn't sustain itself, because the proverbial limp wrist took over.

It was a perfect little moment. As much as Pet Shop Boys might flirt with fascist imagery, if only to illustrate and parody it, here was an assurance -- or, if you want, call it an illusion -- that homosexuality will always work, even accidentally, to undercut it. Maybe the relationship between gayness and fascism is one that, hopefully, will always be doomed to failure.

(But just in case, Neil and Chris have severely rearranged "Integral" -- for the upcoming Disco 4 compilation, although this is the 7-inch version that won't see a commercial release. In the terrific booklet for the Cubism DVD, Chris's complaint after a rehearsal is that "the dancers stand at the front in some of the uptempo songs...and commit the sin of 'grooving.' (He says the word as though it denotes an obviously ridiculous and reprehensible type of behaviour.) Because, he reasons, '"Integral" is meant to be an ode to fascism, isn't it?'" They'll find "grooving" to this new version much more difficult; it sounds less seductively fascistic, more unambiguously sinister and evil. In this day and age, you can never be too sure.)

2007-07-11T17:36:00.000+08:00

Stars, "Barricade" (2007)

I laugh hysterically each day on my way in to work, but only because of this sign outside the entrance to the parking lot (as usual, you can click on the picture to blow it up):

You would think that cartoon characters would be more careful. I adore everything about the sign -- if I were sixteen I would steal it for my bedroom -- from the colors (which have been carefully chosen to match The Official Color Scheme of the place I work at) to the constipated stoop of the gravely distressed figure. But I especially love the three stars, each a different size; they make the tableau so expressive! You can really feel the guy's pain.

The new Stars album (which was yesterday released digitally, several months before the physical release) is called In Our Bedroom After The War. As that title and a look at the tracklist -- say, "Take Me To The Riot" -- would suggest, the album boosts a number of loosely-related songs that center on love and war. (It's not quite a full-on concept album, although doing one would be a logical step for a band that seems determined, as I've previously lamented, to move more and more into blander indie-rock territory.) Love! War! Love is like war! War keeps us from love! These novel musings of course put the abum into instant competition with Spandau Ballet's Through The Barricades, so I hope you're ready to see Torquil and Gary Kemp bitch-fight each other using their scarves as weapons.

No, actually, In Our Bedroom does feature some gems when the band isn't intent on rocking out ("Window Bird" and "Bitches In Tokyo" both start fine, but then end with tragic guitar freak-outs), or vocally pulling...a Timberlake ("The Ghost Of Genova Heights")? Perhaps no surprise, then, that I'm most immediately smitten with the slower songs on the record: the epic title track is gorgeously melodramatic, while "Personal" (a shimmering duet between Amy and Torquil, playing people who try to meet through a personal ad) may be one of the most heartbreaking things they've done. "Barricade" is a simple piano ballad (it would fit easily on the Memphis albums); if In Our Bedroom became a musical, "Barricade" would be the plaintive song its lead character sings after his beloved gets taken away by the Nazis ("Meet me at the barricade/The love died but the hate can fade"). I hope those crazy war-torn, star-crossed lovers work it out! Or at least avoid getting bonked on the head by the barricade! ("Oh, how could anyone not love your cold, black heart?" -- Torquil.)

2007-07-10T22:08:00.000+08:00

Santessa, "Nowhere (Wamdue Diestra Radio Edit)" (2000)/ "Just When I Needed You (Joe Claussell Sacred Rhythm Dub)" (1999)

A couple of years ago, I found myself idly wondering, "Eh, what happened to Santessa?" And all the interwebs went, "Dooo dooo dooo, we dunno." And then, since my mind resets itself every few years, I asked the same question again just days ago, and this time found her on myspace. Ain't technology grand? As is, um, the passage of time that allows people to catch up to technology.

In 1999-2000, the English-Ghanaian singer Santessa released a handful of singles and an album (Delerium), much of which was produced by, and co-written with, Stuart Matthewman. Stuart is largely known for being Sade's long-time collaborator and a member of her band, and those of you with extra mind grapes may know that he's also a member of Sweetback (which makes Sadesque music during the periods when Ms. Adu is busy living her life, which is quite a lot of the time), and Cottonbelly (which produces many narcoleptic Balearic tracks that end up on all those Cafe Del Mar compilations).

Shockingly, therefore, Santessa's album didn't fall far from the Sade tree, although a second listen reveals that it's a bit dubbier, more trip-hoppy than the usual Sade songs. It didn't achieve much success, although Hed Kandi championed it quite a bit, licensing its tracks for a few of their compilations. But Delerium was itself released on a small label, Disco Volante, which seemed to have had only one other artist on its roster. I'm guessing that the label folded, and Santessa now appears to be playing jazz clubs in New York City while waiting for her next big break.

I wouldn't mind her getting another one, although if she made a second album I would want it to be for a company that can afford to hire ace remixers. For Santessa's tracks were almost always improved by being rejiggled; while Delerium was a pretty pleasing affair, the songs I most enjoy now, seven years later, are both reworked versions.

"Nowhere" was Santessa's fourth and final single; in its original incarnation, it was a ballad oozing with sensuality, but also a bit of lethargy. Chris Brann gave it a spankingly sunny remix, turning the track into a livelier samba-ish number that practically has sand between its toes. The Diestra radio edit (there's also a full length version) really should have been the single version.

The Wamdue remix did owe a little to the work of Joe Claussell -- to his "Spiritual Life Ibadan remixes," in particular; Brann's reworking of Santessa is not a million miles away from Claussell's equally festive reinvention of Beth Orton's "Central Reservation" from a year before, for example. Claussell himself had been roped in to remix Santessa's first single, "Just When I Need You." His "Sacred Rhythm Dub" is stunning: ten-and-a-half minutes of blissy goodness, with Santessa's voice (and synth washes) sweeping over your senses, you could swear, exactly as the waves must on a warm, beautiful beach. I guess I can't technically say that I prefer remixes to all of Santessa's originals -- and, if you want to hear an original, I strongly recommend downloading from her myspace page "Back Again," the chilly and haunting b-side to the "Eyes On You" single -- since I've never heard "Just When I Needed You" in its untinkered form (it oddly wasn't included on Delerium). But, unless epic beach house mixes are not your thing, I honestly can't imagine how it could be better than this Claussell treatment.

2007-07-09T17:08:00.000+08:00

The Click Five, "Long Way To Go" (2007)

A question, a confession: why do I find male backing vocals -- especially when they are racuously, shambolically, even fascistically shouted -- incredibly homoerotic? I don't necessarily mean that such tracks give me a huge fat boner, but listening to them always makes me suspect that the lead singer is gettin' it on with his troops, right there in the studio, bow-chicka-bow-wow.

Some songs seem aware of this, and even play to it. The apotheosis is Pet Shop Boys' "Go West," largely because the male choir clearly stands in for the men, described in the song, who have made that trek to what they imagined would be utopia. (Matters were not helped by the way Neil and Chris employed a burly Welsh choir, with each member dressed as a coalminer, to sing back-up at the 1994 Brit Awards. Which was held at Earl's Court.) Of course, since this is the Pet Shop Boys, the gesture ends up being less camp than oddly poignant -- or as poignant as it is camp -- because, in the final reckoning, the men sound like less like they are in an orgy, and more like they constitute the kind of loving, familial community that the song elegiacally figures as already destroyed by an epidemic.

The Click Five's "Long Way To Go" doesn't exactly court such gay interpretations. Well, maybe a little: the power pop song is addressed to some girl (I guess) who loves our narrator, but said narrator doesn't feel the same way. For, you know, whatever reason. "Why would you wanna be with me instead of other guys?/Or make me feel like something special?" he wonders, itching to hand her off to a better man. And so, for the chorus, he sings, "Even though I love you...," whereupon "other guys" join in to yell, "...I CAN'T HELP THINK ABOUT IF I'D BE BETTER WITHOUT YOU!!!" They are presumably speaking for him, rather than as an interested, involved third party. These mates are NOT AT ALL the reason our narrator can't bring himself to love this girl.

But, to me, it sure sounds that way sometimes, and by "sometimes" I mean "every single time I listen to the song." Remember that episode of Seinfeld which satirizes the way straight men irrationally and idiotically get turned on by catfights, because "men think if women are grabbing and clawing at each other, there's a chance they might somehow, you know...kiss"? I know I'm totally acting out the homosexual version -- "put a group of men between the antiseptic soundp(r)oof walls of a recording studio, and you're bound to get some hott man-on-man action!!!" -- but what can I tell ya? I am what I am.

2007-07-05T17:23:00.000+08:00

Hafdís Huld, "Happily Ever After" (2006)

Love at first sight, with all its cocky confidence, is boring. More interesting are the occasions when you meet someone, and share enough tentative moments to be able to glimpse something like a future together. Perhaps, perhaps not: it is in the uncertain space between that you can fantasize and dream of possibilities.

In this song, Hafdís Huld, the Icelandic waif who used to sing for Gus Gus, meets, beside the "angel fountain," a boy with a unique eye color ("a perfect blend of dark blue, and some kind of yellow"). But she also tells us: "They don't really match [his] shirt." She decides that she "like[s]" him: a measured but sweet assessment, one that resists the kind of headlong plunge into OMG-LUVU4EVA111 territory. Even her verdict on the way he smells ("like honey") is disarmingly moderate: "And I really like honey!/Not as much as vanilla, though." The gentle, acoustic track -- comparable to some of the work of Hello Saferide -- is therefore less twee than it first appears. Indeed, one final detail reminds us of how much the song, despite its dreamy chorus ("We could live happily ever after"), tempers its starry-eyeness with a kind of sordid realism. It's a line that, not coincidentally, provides Hafdís's album with its title. "Before you leave you write your number on a dirty paper cup/I walk home sunburnt in my face/Holding that paper cup next to my heart."

2007-07-03T23:31:00.000+08:00

Rooney, "Are You Afraid?" (2007)

Warning: This post may cause seizures in some people.

Although the Rooney comeback single "When Did Your Heart Go Missing?" (which you should immediately head to Hype Machine to get, if you haven't already) is tremendous -- irresistibly catchy Motown handclap pop, which Rolling Stone even compared to Culture Club -- it's not very representative of the rest of the album, whose influences lean more towards the heavier side of 60s rock (as its cover art already tells us).

But the album's next best song, "Are You Afraid?", after a heavy rock opening, features some keyboard vamping and very heavenly harmonies on its chorus, which makes the track totally ELO. There are certain clichéd expressions in music writing, but one that remains evocative for me, especially when I remind myself to think of it literally, is "kaleidoscopic harmonies." As a kid I loved watching those beads seemingly fall apart and pull together. The picture splits and reforms, and is unfailingly beautiful for that process. Now I am no longer with a childish... with a childhood toy, so I listen to something like "Are You Afraid?" instead.

2007-06-30T15:38:00.000+08:00

Sneaky Sound System, "Thin Disguise" (2006)

Does anyone know where I can get a horse's head? Please don't say "guillotine Celine Dion." Be serious. I have to go to a party in a few weeks' time, and there is a "theme," unfortunately. I am to be "dressed as a movie character," and Khartoum is as good a choice as any. (No, I don't want to spend US$87.)

Although the more acclaimed vocalist out of Australian electropop band Sneaky Sound System is Connie Mitchell, I find some of the album tracks featuring MC Double D just as charming, if more loopily so. The man raps like he's coming to us from the 80s -- specifically, like Indeep is still making records and he's their lost frontman. No matter what line comes out of D's mouth, it sounds like he's really saying, secretly in his head, "There's not a problem I can't fix/Cause I can do it, in the mix!" For this track, he tells some sort of inane story about seeing through someone's "thin disguise" (which he may or may not rhyme with "Californian wine" -- who can tell? Also: WTF?), rapping the verses over a thumping beat, and letting his voice get awesomely robotic for the chorus (i.e., his voice gets "disguised" right when he claims that he is seeing through ours. Do YOU see?). There's even a Nu Shooz shout-out in the middle eight. To paraphrase a line from the song, it's all "most undignified," but the whole block of cheese is just ridiculously exhilarating. Who needs dignity? I'm planning to arrive at a dinner party as a horse's head, for crissakes.

2007-06-27T23:18:00.000+08:00

Mandy Moore, "Gardenia" (2007)

"I'm the one who likes gardenia/I'm the one who likes to make love on the floor/I don't want to hang up the phone yet/It's been good, getting to know me more."

I don't have a favorite flower. I often think that I should pick one. Irises, perhaps, or calla lilies. I want to make myself over, into a neat and digestible package, one easily comprehended. "Brittle-Lemon enjoys long walks on the beach, and he loves orchids, as long as they are either white or purple. He finds the pink variety too common." If we build it, he will come; the least I can do is make it easier for him upon arrival. He will be quickly presented with my quirks, and he can confidentally tell the chocolatier my wants, the florist my desires. I must simplify myself.

Meanwhile, I've spent seven weeks listening to Mandy Moore's Wild Hope. Smitten with The Weepies, I expected to love the songs Mandy co-wrote with them -- and, indeed, "Extraordinary" and "Looking Forward To Looking Back" are album highlights. But it's the wrenching closing ballad, co-penned with Chantal Kreviazuk, that I have kept coming back to (even despite my queasy resistance to thinking about Mandy's favorite sexual position). "Gardenia" is largely uninterested in telling a straightforward story, but we can piece some of it together. It's clear, for starters, that Mandy, with her "wounded heart," is coming to us in the aftermath of a breakup. She now has to remind herself of the things that she liked, and has a chance to still like. The things that (used to) make up who she is or was (more/Moore). These have gotten buried, sacrificed during her relationship. "I've been seeing all my old friends in the city/Walking alone in Central Park/Doing all the things that I've neglected/Traded 'em all in to be in your arms." So: "I'm the one who likes gardenia." Remember?

Is this declaration, simultaneously confident and tentative, enough to re-form herself? To bring back the persons we used to be, do we simply have to summon ourselves back? The song is finally unsure, although it holds out hope. "Well, I hear my own voice, sounds so silly/Keep on telling my story all around/ Everything I lost seems so different/Well, this is how everybody gets found." Perhaps it is only by becoming estranged from ourselves that we can re-find ourselves, but the song is going to have to get back to us on that. And so I take it as a warning.

2007-06-26T14:09:00.000+08:00

Monrose, "Hot Summer" (2007)

Completely derivative (which is to say, totally now-sounding), "Hot Summer" is, as everybody and their grandmothers have pointed out, essentially Girls Aloud covering "Maneater." Monrose -- who were indeed, like the Aloud, assembled on Popstars: German and Germaner, though their name always makes me wanna go, "Monrose? More like Mon-stank, am I rite?!" -- are in fact cheekily self-aware about the derivation, including a line of lyric that goes, "I'm introduced to a hot producer/But I can tell he's just a stuck-up loser." Talk about biting the hand that...never actually fed you, but from which you, um, licked some crumbs. (Yeah, that metaphor got away from me.) As if that's not enough, the song had to craftily take a title that makes it near impossible for you not to slap it -- it would be perfectly positioned in front of Rihanna's "Breaking Dishes" -- onto your summer mixtape. So, so shameless.

2007-06-25T18:30:00.000+08:00

Simian Mobile Disco, "Hotdog" (2007)

For the past few years, my favorite Pride event has been the one with bitches on parade. "That hardly narrows it down," you say, but I am thinking of the actual dog show organized by Pets DC. They've been holding it for the past fourteen years: dads and moms bring their beloved pooches down to Dupont Circle and enter them in categories like "Most Mysterious Heritage," and "Best Vocal Performance," while the crowd oohs and aahs, and it always makes for a jolly afternoon, and all for a good cause.

When I've been in DC for the summer, I always made sure to amble down to the event with Tee and Heather (aka Downy, aka Skittles [don't ask]), as spectators. I'm not there this year, so of course it's the time Tee chose to finally enter Heather into, heee, the "Best Senior Dog" competition. (She's fourteen, you know. A Grande Dame.)

Her giant head has been blurred to protect her identity.
And she came in third!!! She's officially almost-almost the cutest Pet Of A Certain Age in the greater Washington area! Her dad was really proud -- and we're guessing that Heather was happy too, although it was hard to tell, because, at her moment of triumph, she was apparently more interested in sniffing the penis of the dog next to her on the winner's podium. But since this was a gay pride event, this only sent the crowd into a frenzy, because all the fags could relate.

We're now a little worried, though, because Heather has caught pageant fever. She's started only answering to "JonBenét." She's working on a Mount Rushmore headdress. As her militant uncle, I called her on the phone and lectured her, explaining how we could see the dog show as an analogue for the way the gay community can be so fascist about notions of beauty. But Heather countered by pointing out that, even if that was true, at least this competition wasn't ageist, and so she continues, in the aftermath of her victory, to walk around waving her paw like she's some imaginary Miss Universe contestant.

2007-06-21T22:29:00.000+08:00

Kit Chan (陈洁仪), "Disturb The Peace (傷了和气)" (1993)

I was always a sucker for songs in which our narrator meets some old friend who unwittingly asks after the narrator's lover, unaware that it's all over....But I don't want to talk about it. I've said enough already.

At the beginning of "Disturb The Peace," a heartbreakingly beautiful ballad sung to an acoustic guitar and brief stabs of pizzicato strings, our narrator is standing in line for movie tickets on a Sunday morning. But her heart is not in it, and her eyes red from crying; she thinks about "traveling" -- escaping, that is -- to "faraway places." She passes a café, and hears a song that fills her with melancholy. "June-like weather, December-ish emotions," she describes her mood succinctly. "The letter I wrote you long ago never did receive a response. Friends ask after you, and I pretend not to care."

What Kit Chan -- who, until her semi-retirement in 2004, was one of the more powerhouse singers in Chinese pop circles, and for my money the best star my fair land has produced -- tells those enquiring friends becomes the chorus of this song, and gives it its title. But "disturb the peace" is a rather inadequate translation of "傷了和气": while people might actually use the Chinese expression in real life, it's hard to imagine anyone saying, "the peace between us has been disrupted," when asked to explain the status of a relationship. But, then again, the Chinese phrase "傷了和气" is in its own way awkward, and in this sense a clunky English translation does convey how unnaturally our narrator is speaking and behaving. For someone saying ""傷了和气" comes across as trying to make light of the situation, but in terms that are excruciatingly polite, measured, deliberate. (Closer English equivalents: "Oh, we're just on a break right now"? "We thought we would give each other room to breathe for a while"? Sort of -- but more so.) The narrator tries to be breezy, but because the expression is so controlled, it gives the game away. This becomes even clearer in the rest of the chorus, which trafficks in plausible denial: "We're just temporarily apart. No big deal."

As the song progresses, the chorus is repeated: "I always say, 'The peace between us has been disturbed.' Your departure is not a kind of giving up. But my love is hoping for a new plot, a new ending." Noticeably, the curious friends hardly matter anymore: our narrator now addresses her ex-lover directly, as the (unconscious?) shift into the second person ("your departure") indicates. (Perhaps those nosy friends were never real, merely hypothetical people to whom the singer feels the need to prepare a response to.) And here, even an inability to understand Chinese matters little: the second chorus keeps the same basic melody as the first, but only the first lines are identical. As the second chorus continues, Kit's voice goes higher and higher, until it is -- not exactly hysterical, but at the point of breaking. It never does. But that high point coincides with the end of the line "your departure is not a kind of giving up," and so we wonder if she might be better off if she comes around to seeing that it just might be. A kind of giving up, that is.

2007-06-19T23:41:00.000+08:00

Sheena Easton, "Modern Girl" (1980)/"I Wouldn't Beg For Water" (1982)/"Almost Over You" (1983)

While I understood, in 1980, that "Modern Girl" was a song about a liberated woman, I'm not sure I got that it was specifically sexual liberation we were discussing. It's stupid, I know, that I didn't link the two. I mean, what other kind of "liberation" could a pop song be about? It's not like the narrative revolved around the freedom to vote. But this was 1980, and I was young -- a fetus, if you're counting, which you really shouldn't -- so I should be forgiven.

But listening to it now, it's amazing how wickedly sly the song is. Consider just the first verse: it begins by painting what looks like a domestic scene ("He wakes and says hello/Turns on the breakfast show/She fixes coffee while he takes a shower"), before alluding to a early morning fuck that unsettles that domesticity ("'Hey that was great,' he said/'Wish we could stay in bed/But I got to be at work in less than an hour'"), and then finally destroying any remaining illusions we may have that this couple is husband-and-wife, or even necessarily monogamous and steady. "She manages a smile as he walks out the door/She's a modern girl who's been though this movie before," and then we go into the exhilarating chorus: "She don't build her world 'round no single man/But she's getting by, doing what she can/She is free to be, what she wants to be/And all what she wants to be, is a modern girl."

The middle eight pulls a similar trick, but even more awesomely. "She's been dreaming 'bout it all day long/As soon as she gets home, it's him on the telephone": even if we've been paying attention to the rest of the song, these lines might still lead us to think that she's been dreaming about him, and that his phone call is thus her dream coming true. But...POW! "He asks her to dinner, she says I'm not free/Tonight I'm going to stay at home and watch my TV." As someone who is often tempted to stay home with my tube instead of going out and mating -- which is to say, as someone who is like everyone else, and don't you deny it -- I have to find the concluding lines of the middle eight simultaneously hilarious, righteous, and whine-inducing.

Over the weekend I revisited and rethought, not just "Modern Girl," but much of Sheena Easton's oeuvre. It was neither a strenuous nor an extensive rethinking: I simply dug up The World Of Sheena Easton: The Singles Collection to play (and play and play) -- it collects most, but not all of her singles -- and it's not like I'm now ready to overturn the critical consensus about her. The consensus goes roughly like this: Sheena was okay, but started sucking around 1985 (that year's singles: "Swear" and "Do It For Love"), or perhaps even a year prior, when her music hardened ("Devil In A Fast Car," "Strut") and she, at the hands of Prince, tried transforming into a sex kitten ("Sugar Walls"). In other words, conventional wisdom holds that only about half of the chronologically-arranged The World Of Sheena Easton is any good. And...that's true. If this were a vinyl record I would likely wear out Side A long before Side B.

Although: some of the tracks on "Side B" are at least interesting or revealing failures. For one thing, many of them catch Sheena (and her producers) in the desperate act of imitating contemporary trends, no doubt trying to find the right bandwagon for her after her initial persona (more on that in a moment) ran its course. "Devil In A Fast Car" signalled her turn to rockier guitars, and "Swear" (video) practically steals the licks from Michael Jackson's "Beat It." But that rockier sound does Sheena's voice -- which is always at its best when it can be pristine, crisp, and crystal clear, not fighting with rock arrangements, which pushes it towards "shrieky" -- no favors. Meanwhile, "Strut" (video) -- which I always forget is anti-, not pro-sex kittiness ("I won't be your baby doll") -- has a funk-lite beat that must have been inspired by the then-ascendency of Jam and Lewis, though in some ways it may be even ahead of the curve, since the songs it resembles the most -- Ready For The World's "Oh Sheila" (1985) and Cameo's "Word Up" (1986) -- were yet to come. Then, of course, there is "Sugar Walls" (video), which is truly horrifying. Quite aside from the risible lyric, which aims for "sexy" but lands on "gynaecological," the melody is just clunky. (But then again I find many of Prince's melodies clunky, and only his unique singing can sometimes make them work; the last track on the compilation, the ballad "Eternity" (video), is likewise a Prince composition, and it requires poor Sheena to wail and howl like a proto-Björk, which, honey, no. Just...no. I actually find Sheena's output in 85-86 (produced by Niles Rodgers, oddly) to be okay; she returns to poppier numbers (the Motown pastiche "Jimmy Mack" [video] the breezy "Do It For Love" [video]), though it's true that they mostly seem watered-down and unexciting compared to her early work.

But how frequently great is that early work? Sheena no doubt still get royalties for "Morning Train (Nine To Five)" (video); I've joked about my relation to that song before, but for me "Modern Girl" has been the more enduring track.

We remember, of course, that the order of release for these two singles were reversed in the UK and US: in the latter territory, Sheena made her debut with "Morning Train" and "Modern Girl" was single #2, but in the UK "Modern Girl" was released first -- whereupon it flopped, and then rereleased following the success of "Morning Train" (which was of course simply titled "Nine To Five" in the UK, since Dolly Parton's song wasn't as much of a competitor there). The two songs balance each other out perfectly as far as Sheena's persona was concerned, so perhaps it is appropriate that both have served to introduce her. While "Modern Girl" declares Sheena's independence from any man, "Morning Train" saw her, if not beholden to, than at least enamored with one. To some extent, that same balanced relationship exists between the other two upbeat songs in her run of initial singles: the well-known "Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)" (video), in which Sheena is clingy and distracted by a long distance lover, and the less-remembered "Machinery" (video), in which Sheena rails against being treated like a "piece of machinery." The latter is odd and spiky: Sheena sings in a hiccupy fashion, almost as if she was trying to channel David Byrne or Fred Schneider. If in the end "Machinery" is my least favorite moment from "Side A" of her greatest hits collection, it at least is entertainingly bizarre.

Finally: even if people acknowledge that Sheena's first ten or fifteen singles contained a number of gems, they tend not to pay much attention to the ballads, figuring them for treacly sap. They are, which is why I LOVE 'EM. For my money, very few of them are conventionally sappy -- there's almost always something about each that raises them above the ordinary. For crissakes, "You Could Have Been With Me" (video) begins with the weird line, "You're the seventh son of the seventh son," and, as it continues, does strange and intriguing things with pronouns (the "you" in the first verse seems to refer to her love, but the one in the second is a kind of self-address? I still can't work it out). Immensely Broadway, "When He Shines" is structured around a series of binaries, and the cover Barbra Streisand missed out on doing. And "I Wouldn't Beg For Water" I find bewitching: it keeps to Sheena's then-persona of being a modern girl, since it's largely about being proud and uncompromising: "I'm not the kind who deals behind the scenes/I won't sell my soul/I'll be nothing without some integrity." But the condition under which that pride is abandoned is thus powerful, and the condition, of course, is "you": "I wouldn't beg for water/I wouldn't beg for water/If my soul was on fire/But I'd get down on my knees for you."

Even "We've Got Tonight" (video), Sheena's seriously sappy duet with Kenny Rogers, appeals. Yes, really. I'm been trying without success to think of a song about a booty call that isn't jokey-sleazy, but instead nakedly emotional. The story starts out as a meeting between, let's face it, two losers at closing time ("both of us lonely"); they are absolutely realistic about what a fuck would mean ("We've got tonight/Who needs tomorrow?"), but the musical genre of the overwrought ballad duet tells us just how much a yearning for more runs underneath this assignation.

And "Almost Over You"? In 1983 I labored under the illusion that the chorus went, "Now I'm almost over you/I almost should be blue." I'm not sure I prefer the real line ("I almost shook these blues"), especially since it's ungrammatical. But even this doesn't stop me from practically bursting into tears each time I hear this track. I was always a sucker for songs in which our narrator meets some old friend who unwittingly asks after the narrator's lover, unaware that it's all over....But I don't want to talk about it. I've said enough already.

2007-06-15T17:30:00.000+08:00

Garbage, "Tell Me Where It Hurts (Orchestral Single Edit)" (2007)

I've always thought that the first three lines of "You Look So Fine" are, in many ways, the sharpest and most succinct encapsulation of the Garbage ethos. "You look so fine/I want to break your heart/And give you mine." Shirley wants to hurt you and love you at the same time. Indeed, she wants to hurt you the better to love you, even if loving you hurts her -- kills her, for what will she do without her own heart? -- in turn. (Not for nothing is there a fangirl video on YouTube of Buffy and Angel's tortured relationship set to the track.) Of course, to some extent this is simply a more accentuated version of an old archetype: Ms. Manson is the dominatrix who shows flashes of vulnerability, the vixen with the bruiseable heart of gold. But like all archetypes, it's one for a reason.

But the reverse is true as well. Because of Shirley's persona, even the most ostensibly loving of Garbage songs are invested with the threat of violence. On the new single, "Tell Me Where It Hurts," it's impossible for me not to hear the title, not just as a command, but one that may not be advantageous for us to answer. Tell me where it hurts...so that she will know, more precisely, where our weakest spot is? So that she can rub salt -- or something even worse -- in that wound? Tell me where it hurts, and I can hurt you more. None of those possibilities are necessarily "in" the song itself (since the rest of the chorus continues, "To hell with everybody else/All I care about is you and that's the truth/They don't love me, I can tell/But you do, so they can go to hell." As I said, a loving song). But they float around its edges, lurking, waiting for you to let your guard down. When you do, there's no telling what -- break your heart, take your heart, give her heart -- she will do.

2007-06-14T15:29:00.000+08:00

Dragonette, "Marvellous" (2007)

There are definitely more commercial, chart-ready cuts on Dragonette's Galore, but "Marvellous" takes the cake for sheer inventiveness. The song features some tabla-drive beats -- suggesting that Martina Bangs/Sorbara learned a trick or two from her gig with Basement Jaxx, though the group's best Bollywood pastiche remains buried on a b-side and a bonus disc -- that give way to a thumping electrorock rhythm, making this, even right off the sonic bat, an arrestingly hybrid closer for the album.

And then there's the matter of the song's structure. Although the track has all the constituent parts of a pop song -- verse, pre-chorus, chorus, middle eight -- it messes around just enough with their order to create a song that will seem, upon the first few listens, to be weirder and more unconventional than it really is. Like Sugababes's "Ace Reject," "Marvellous" teases us with, but withholds, its very first chorus. Thus, we get two verses, after which we cut to Martina going, "Um uh uh uh uh, um uh ah-ah!" But any expectation that the song will burst forth into a technicolor chorus here is defeated, as we go back to another verse. This time, though, the wait more than pays off -- even if we are foiled as to the exact moment when the chorus comes in. The third verse, after all, concludes with a verb that also doubles as the explosive first command of the chorus: "They say you're bad news, I don't care/I just can't...STOP! You're dangerous!" (This chorus then ends with the "um uh uh"s, meaning that we were earlier fooled if we had imagined that the line was about to introduce the hook.)

The second go-round for the song is nothing like the first. Rather than verse-verse-verse-chorus, we now get a verse ("damn, here I go again...") that leads right into an amazing pre-chorus...which turns out to be a duet. The male vocals -- perhaps taken from Dan Kurtz and treated -- now tell us, with a hilariously Bollywood affect, "I'm not cruel, I know a lot of girls like you..." Martina coquettishly interrupts to protest using a string of...double? triple negatives? "Not true not girls not just like me!" And back and forth they go -- "They're just like you!" "Not just like me!" "They're just like you, they're trouble too!" -- in a funny game of "I know I am, but what are you?" Next: a second chorus, followed by a middle eight that's more electronic than any other part of the song (and one that brilliantly uses the word "druthers" to boot). Then the all-too-brief Bollywood snippet returns, and we get one final chorus to take us out.

All of this within 2:48! It's taken me longer to describe the song (as if that's not always the case)! The succinct nature means that, even when the first chorus gets postponed on our asses, the track never drags by staying in the verses too long. I haven't even mentioned the old but still crowd-pleasing "can't stop my heart from thumping [BOOM BOOM!]" trick, or the extra points we simply must award for the very, very sly sexual joke in the first verse ("My eyes are bigger than my mouth, but maybe/I could learn to be your lady").

With their love of hip gyrations, Beyoncébeyoncé and Shakirashakira really should have picked this to duet on. Imagine the video! I get weak doing so. It would have made Showgirls and the one for "Beautiful Liar" (same thing, really) seem like Bergman. Wait -- what am I thinking? They would indeed have eschewed all subtlety, and hammered the Bollywood hook to death, so forget I said anything.

2007-06-13T23:51:00.000+08:00

Natasha Bedingfield, "Soulmate" (2007)

I have weak moments. Sometimes it's only a moment, like that night in the late 90s. Surrounded but alone in a gay bar, I suddenly felt the haze clear, and really heard what the DJ was spinning. And I thought, "Yes. YES. The way I feel IS sexual. It can't just be intellectual. My God." Later the haze redescended, and Amber's cheap song went back to being stupid, or at least no longer philosophically profound.

And sometimes, like now, it's a long moment. Three, four, six days. A week, two. Work is trying; everyone is dispirited. I refuse to be productive. On Sunday I listen to "Soulmate" to review it; I enjoy it and rate it well, but somehow draft a blurb that's mostly jokey. Meanwhile, friends talk to me, but talk through me. They carry on like nothing's wrong, and in many ways they are right. I write a long essay for the blog, but although the piece is clear in my head I can't seem to finish it, and what I write turns out meandering. On Monday I find myself unable to stop singing "Soulmate," and I revise the review, bumping up its score, adding phrases and lines to emphasize its merits. I still cough. My right eye, only the right, is irritated, bloodshot. I am restless, and find myself looking -- with my one good eye -- everywhere for him, a fact about which I am both defiant and ashamed. It's Wednesday, and by now I am fully obsessed with Natasha's song, and I consider taking up karaoke so that I can perform it. Nobody else agrees. My friend reads the review, and snarks thusly: "I'm just sort of surprised that it never struck her that one possible reason why she's alone is that she's an intolerable and smarmy Christian-family-values bitch." Good point. But who doesn't long for someone to hold, who knows how to love you without being told? I wait and wait for the moment to pass.

2007-06-07T18:06:00.000+08:00

Shout Out Louds, "Tonight I Have To Leave It (Kleerup Remix)" (2007)

In which Kleerup remixes a Cure track so that it sounds like the Pet Shop Boys, and 80s music lovers die en mass and ascend to heaven.

Sorta. The already-awesome original version of "Tonight I Have To Leave It" does evince other influences: like much of the garage-rock band's output (as well as that of Swedish compatriots like The Concretes, and The Legends before they went electro), there's definitely the specter of Spector on the record -- say, in the gorgeous string arrangement -- and perhaps a bit of New Order. But that guitar, and the singing, feels like absolute Cure.

For his remix, Kleerup bravely, or foolishly, removes that string arrangement. It's hard not to say "foolishly," because, while the original version ostensibly has a chorus ("So I heard it's no good to run/But it feels so much better now that it's done/And tonight I have to leave it"), it's the swelling strings that truly serve as the song's hook. But Kleerup compensates. Firstly, most obviously: he ramps up the beat, to the kind of hi-NRG Euro-gallop that isn't too far from the Pet Shop Boys defacto rhythm (we're just a few orchestral stabs away from "A Red Letter Day"). And then there are those cowbells: introducing the song and then receding in the original version, but for the remix assuming major importance. In some ways they take the place of the strings, and, combined with the beat, do nothing so much as remind me of "Always On My Mind." And for his final trick: Kleerup brings in a tremendous synth wash -- just briefly at the 2:05 mark, teasing us again at 2:50, and then, at 3:39, when we expect its final return, we instead get the gurgling synth line to take us all the way out of the song, and to soundtrack the heavenly ascent.

Bonus: Since it's practically Kleerup week here, perhaps you fancy hearing the man's much more middling remix of Roxette's "Reveal"?

2007-06-06T18:52:00.000+08:00

Crowded House, "You Are The Only One To Make Me Cry" (2007)

I keep a count of all the people I have, in the course of my work, made cry. I am up to seven and a half.

On an album full of depressed songs (the aptly-titled Time On Earth) -- but, then again, old age and the suicide of a band member will do that to you -- there may be none more downbeat than "You Are The Only One To Make Me Cry." Indeed, the song may be from the point of view of someone on the verge of leaving us: "But I have no illusions/Of where I am now/I'll let this wave take me/And draw me down." On the first chorus, the narrator seems incapable of even finishing a thought, and so the melody can only trail off anticlimatically: "You're the one to make me cry/You're the one to take me home/Of all the people in my life/The thoughts keep returning to you/But consciousness is fading fast..." In the song, the person who makes the narrator cry turns out to be the "only one" whom he hangs on for. That's a downer.

Neil Finn sings the song, which at moments sounds like -- has the same kind of resigned loveliness as -- "I Can't Make You Love Me," with a naked exhaustion that I haven't heard on any other Crowded House song. His voice is scratched and raspy, and on the chorus there are notes he doesn't hit. Needless to say, this only increases the power of the track, and his getting to the end of the song hence feels, disquietingly, like a triumph.

2007-06-05T18:14:00.000+08:00

Jessica Folcker, "Snowflakes" (2007)

Although the central question asked by Jessica Folcker in this spellbindingly addictive song isn't especially imaginative -- she'd like to know why snowflakes fall from the sky, but appear not to be curious about why they are, say, hexagonally symmetrical -- the production boasts more than enough imaginative flourishes to make up for it. Helmed by multiple Andreases (specifically, Andreas "With Every Heartbeat" Kleerup and Andreas Unge, the bassist and producer who's also in the world music band Calle Real), "Snowflakes" is full of little production tricks that may, if the chips fall right (i.e., if the indie kids pay attention), help turn the track into this year's crossover electropop number, a la "Chewing Gum" or "Be Mine."

Possessing a lilt in her voice that makes her sound remarkably like Kim Wilde at moments, Jessica never oversells the song. Her measured tones are a perfect fit for the subject matter, since the track supposedly recognizes the inevitable end of a relationship. But as the song goes on, the producers pile on the backing vocals. These initially do little more than repeat the main melodic lines on the choruses, but when we enter the final minute of the song, they take on more independent life: again and again, they start to sing the melody, but then seem unable to progress beyond the opening syllables, as if the strain of keeping it together has started to pull Jessica apart.

But, most of all, there is that taut 80s beat: urgent, but melancholically so, as if the drums are racing only in an attempt to outrun sadness. But listen also to how they strategically drop out at transitional points: when we first go from the verse to the pre-chorus, at 0:46, to allow Jessica to proclaim herself "like a fool without a clue"; between that pre-chorus and the chorus, at 1:01, so that she can ruefully say, "Now I only wish I never met you"; or, as the first chorus comes to an end at 1:15, at which point the drums don't drop out as much as they stutter and pound, three times ("I can't help but feel no sorrow -- BOOM BOOM BOOM! -- for you"), either for emphasis or simply with one last burst of unspoken grief that the lyric pretends that it can deny. But when the song runs through its second iteration, it cuts back those breaks in the drum pattern to one (only at the end of the chorus). The beat, in other words, gets more relentless as the song goes on, as if each sing-through gives Jessica the strength -- or, amounting to the same thing, the heartbroken resolve -- to, in the words of that other Kleerup song, not look back. Never stop to look back.

Bonus: the Credheadz remix, which tries to turn the track into a filterhouse stomper (quite successfully, but not without blunting some of its emotional impact).

2007-06-04T23:57:00.000+08:00

Beaumont, "Cross Country" (2000)

When Keith Girdler passed away about two weeks ago, the internet reaction was relatively muted. There were obituaries on Pitchfork and Idolator, and various blog mentions, sure. But in this age of what Richard Schickel, among others, called "false intimacy" -- when we imagine that we personally know celebrities though we've never met them, and are thus "deeply affected" by their deaths -- that counts as a deafening silence. (Compare: when Grant McLennan died in May 2006, it suddenly appeared that The Go-Betweens had all along been the secret favorite group of every mp3 blogger; Keith's death on the other hand didn't have a "Streets Of Your Town" to soundtrack it, I guess.) Of course, the few reactions that were registered still displayed what seemed like classic "false intimacy" symptoms: one blogger apparently "wept as [she] read the eulogy," which I suppose testifies either to how much Keith's music touched her; her fragile constitution; the prowess of the obituary writer; our culture of illusionary intimacy; or a combination of all of the above.

I'm not saying that I'm surprised by the silence, since Keith was a minor, or largely niche figure in music. Together with Paul Stewart, Keith was the nucleus of Blueboy, the English tweepop group on the cult (i.e., uncommercial) Sarah Records. Preceding Blueboy was Feverfew; succeeding it, Arabesque. I never knew those groups. But in 2000, I almost randomly bought an album, put out by the next incarnation of Paul Stewart and Keith Girdler, that I still love to this day: This Is...Beaumont.

The purchase wasn't entirely random: in the late 90s and early 00s, I went through a tweepop phase. There's a longer entry to be written about this, but for now, it would only be slightly reductionistic to say that the phase was largely sparked by Saint Etienne's Good Humor (1998) and The Cardigans' Life (1995) albums. I didn't know much about this Beaumont record (or group); I can't remember how I intuit that it contained the kind of swinging 60s music I was deeply digging. I imagine the album cover and packaging -- it might as well have come with a martini glass -- helped, or perhaps I persuaded Newbury Comics to test drive it for me. In any case, when I now think back on the 90s/00s, This Is...Beaumont is a record that I hold very dear in part for its general ability to encapsulate those five swinging years...

...but also more specifically, for: "Bacharach," with its faintly flamenco, or at least Spanish air. The gorgeous plucked-string opening of "Hey Barbara." The da-da-das of "Girlie." The funny line, "All my teachers told me/That girl and maths don't mix," from "Girl And Maths." The jaunty fairground rhythms of "Love Is...1968." The boy-girl vocal interplay -- Keith's dandyish voice, here as elsewhere, is a bit out of tune, but strangely endearing for that reason -- on "Aftershave," which on the chorus becomes mediated by a lovely guitar line. The way the opening chords of "His London" begins to move the last few tracks into darker, moodier territory. A mood that the closer, "Cross Country" -- all chiming guitars and melodramatic bombast that gets capped off by some tremendous backing female vocals, especially at its conclusion -- triumphantly carries to its logical conclusion. (You can get mp3s of "Hey Barbara" and "Girl And Maths" here, and you really should.)

Three years later, Beaumont released their second record, Tiara. I bought it with some excitement, but was disappointed by the short, eight-track album. It crossed the line into tinkly cocktail music, and was mostly instrumental; what singing there was was mostly by Cath Close, who had been a backing vocalist on the first album. 2005 brought No Time Like The Past, which suffered from very similar problems, although it did boast at least one lovely, intimate, almost-country number called "I've Tried." Again, Keith's voice was noticeably absent, and there wasn't much information on the interwebs about what was going on. I now know that Keith has been fighting cancer for the past few years, which no doubt accounts for why his contribution to the last two Beaumont albums has been limited to lyrics.

I can't therefore, in the end, speak of how Keith Girdler's entire oeuvre moved me. I caught only a glimpse of his music, let alone his life. But it was enough for me, and I hope for him, wherever he is. Thank you for This Is...Beaumont.

2007-05-31T18:46:00.000+08:00

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

2007-05-30T14:41:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-29T18:20:00.000+08:00

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.)

2007-05-28T20:13:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-18T14:40:00.000+08:00

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.)

2007-05-17T17:10:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-16T21:07:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-15T17:31:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-14T22:59:00.000+08:00

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.)

2007-05-12T13:45:00.000+08:00

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..."

2007-05-11T17:55:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-10T18:57:00.000+08:00

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.

2007-05-09T22:40:00.000+08:00

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."

2007-04-13T12:55:00.000+08:00

Vitamin C, "Vacation" (1999)

An old familiar face at work. I say hello, and ask if he's working on some one-off project. "No," he tells me, "I'm back full-time!" He was an IT tech for my office, up till a few years ago; then he left for the proverbial further studies, and now he's back.

When someone leaves your office, goes off and completes an entire degree, and then comes back to find you still here, you kind of feel like you need a vacation. And so I do. I'm off for a two week break. See you back here at the end of the month.

2007-04-11T16:49:00.000+08:00

Prefab Sprout, "Desire As (Acoustic Version)" (2007)

The new, seven-minute acoustic version of "Desire As" -- included on the bonus disc accompanying the remastered edition of Steve McQueen -- no longer begins with its most famous lines: "I've got six things on my mind/You're no longer one of them."

There is, instead, a two-minute long extended guitar passage. And then, Paddy tells us: "They were the best times, the harvest years/With jam to lace the bread/So goodness, goodness knows why you'd throw it to the birds/You mark the good things, play the heartstrings, play them one by one." Although he swallows it somewhat, a pronoun has been changed from the original (which went, "goodness knows why I'd throw it to the birds"), and the final line added. Paddy the spurner, from the original, is now the jilted.

When we get to the well-known lines, after that opening verse, they, kept in their original incarnation, therefore don't make complete sense. Shouldn't they, after all, now proclaim: "You've got six things on your mind/I'm no longer one of them"?

Or they now make a different kind of sense, perhaps. Maybe, like her, who threw their love "to the birds," he too has changed his mind. "Desire," as the chorus goes on to remind us, is "a sylph-figured creature who changes her mind." It affects every one of us; it is indeed independent of us, not so much exercised or experienced by us, as it is a figure who inhabits us. Or maybe he now says -- pretends -- that he too no longer thinks of her, as a kind of vengeance for the fact that she has left him. But who's to say that those lines ever made sense? I've got six things on my mind -- you're no longer one of them -- except when I sing about you? Can you really ever tell someone that you no longer think of them? Doesn't that utterance always disprove itself? Whether the new version of "Desire As" imagines that he who was rejected comes to also feel the whims of Desire, or whether it demonstrates that the only way we can cope with the incomprehensible workings of Desire is by pretending we can -- and both reactions perpetuate the cycle -- the song turns those lines away from being cruel dogma, and towards being filled with infinite mystery and unfathomableness.

2007-04-04T16:44:00.000+08:00

Rage, "Run To You (12" Version)" (1992)

OK: I have to design a pamphlet about jazz
I think the sax on the front doesn't work.

BL: but people are still having sax, etc

OK: do you know, I have a copy of that album?

BL: !!!!!!
the single might be understandable
but the album?

OK: yes, they made an album!
it was $2
AND!
came with a bonus disc
which was the single!

BL: how bonurrific
i may be able to best you
remember that euro cover of bryan adam's "run to you" by a group called rage?
i have the album!!!

OK: no.
was it awesome?

BL: it WAS quite awesome
all thundering synths, washing over you etc

OK: because "Run To You" is great anyway

BL: um, is it?
I'm not sure I have any sympathy for bryan "oh no, it's such a chore having to fuck two women" adams
"i love you, my madonna! but i can only do you, whore!"
i think it made the UK top 10

OK: i don't think it was a hit here

BL: i don't even know what nationality rage was
but they were part of that wave of ravey dance pop -- shamen, bizarre inc, utah saints -- that in the early 90s was, um, all the rage

OK: I stopped listening to pop for a period between 1992 and 1994

BL: i hope you didnt miss "cotton eyed joe"
your life would have been empty without it

2007-04-03T14:40:00.000+08:00

Rihanna featuring Jay-Z, "Umbrella" (2007)

The gushing about "S.O.S." completely flummoxed me, but there's much I love about the new Rihanna single. Such as:

1. the big drums, and especially the steam-engine "boom-ssst" on every downbeat;

2. the uplift going into each chorus, which is achieved the first time round by having the new wavy synth line enter, and the second time by having the guitar trash out some power chords right before the chorus;

3. the way it's a song about a friendship, instead of a romance, which is pretty unusual in the R&B/hip-hop context. In fact, it's quite touching the way the girls stick together, and should one of them get hurt by the cards the world deals, "together we'll mend your heart." Of course, it's entirely possible that "umbrella" is just some sort of street slang for vagina. Actually, that would be awesome, and I'm going to start using the word that way;

4. the hilariously catchy "umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh..." echo, which almost makes me think that the platonic friend being sung to is named Ella;

5. the fact that the production, by Chris "Tricky" Stewart, almost seems resigned to Rihanna's characteristic inability to hold a note, instead allowing her to spaz out and hit a bunch of different ones with every "eh" (here's a rough transcript of the way she sings that part: "eh EH eH ehhh EHHH!?! EhhHH!!!");

6. and even Jay-Z's rap is okay. It's become a kneejerk reaction in some pop circles to enjoy singles by R&B starlets but lament the guest raps. Sometimes the reaction, though usually not thought through, is justified; male rappers have a tendency to turn every song into an extended double entendre, sometimes by totally missing the point of the song. Jay-Z could have done just that (at least on this "clean version" of the single I have), but his rap is really just a kind of intro -- and, judging from the namecheck of Rihanna's album title (Good Girl Gone Bad), not just to the song but to the forthcoming record.

7. As I said, male guest rappers have a tendency to turn every song into an extended double entendre. Unlike me. Have I told you baby you're fiiiiine? Come stand under my rain-slicked, twirling flower of an umbrella, aw yeeeeah.

2007-04-02T19:12:00.000+08:00

Ultra Naté, "Automatic (Paul Jackson Version Excursion Mix)" (2007)

A friend and I once batted around the idea of making a mixed CD, to be called "Robots In Love," that would be filled with a certain kind of track. The template would be Daft Punk's "Something About You": electronic numbers, preferably with vocoders, that are also deeply, quiveringly emotional love songs. To some extent, the imagined title of the compilation doesn't do full justice to the kind of songs I, at least, was picturing. That title is simple, matter-of-fact: there are robots. And they are in love. Duh. But I was also partial to such songs because they often imply, if only in my mind -- one admittedly influenced by numerous sci-fi films, such as Blade Runner, that draw on this trope -- that love actually transforms the robots, makes them human. Paradoxically, the compilation title names something that doesn't exist. Robots in love would cease to be robots.

There's a good case to be made for including "Automatic" on the CD, whether in its original 1984 Pointer Sisters incarnation, or in the form of Ultra Naté's excellent remake. Sure, neither is particularly electro -- the bassline of the Pointers' version is rubbery, not quite reggae but a bit like Yarbrough & Peoples' "Don't Stop The Music," while Ultra's cover is a stompy house record, although the dark and dirty Paul Jackson remix has some great stuttering robotic bleeps and beats -- but they are sung by human vocoders: Ruth Pointer, of course, with her rumbly low voice, while Ultra digs into her lower register with great gusto.

Except that the song seems to play with the human/robot distinction in much more complex, not to say incoherent, ways. (I'm not sure I noticed this in 1984, but then again I had the excuse of being wee.) It's really not clear if, in "Automatic," love makes our narrator(s) more or less of a robot. That she is one at some point seems apparent: "I go from sadness, to exhilaration/Like a robot at your command." In this reading, she, a human, becomes an automaton when she's around him. But, wait: it seems that she was always a robot (even though, going by convention, this already makes no sense: if she was a robot, how did she fall in love?). "Your camera looks through me/With its X-ray vision/And all systems run aground/All I can manage to push from my lips/Is a stream of absurdities/Every word I intended to speak/Winds up locked in the circuitry." It would seem to be more the case, then, that she was a functioning robot before she met him; now, he makes her so nervous that she is still a robot, albeit a jittery, malfunctioning one.

And yet: the metaphor the song uses to describe this state of spastic robot-ness is...becoming "automatic." "No way to control it/It's totally automatic/Whenever you're around/I'm walking blindfolded/Completely automatic/All of my systems are down." So: she's an automaton...who is emotional enough to get nervous around a guy and fall in love...so nervous that her circuits shut down and she becomes...automatic? Does love simply double her sense of who she is?

Does. Not. Compute. (And therein lies, in all senses, the song's wonder.)

2007-03-30T16:29:00.000+08:00

Hilary Duff, "Never Stop"/"Outside Of You" (2007)

It took a while (at least in internet time) for me to get around to sampling the new Hilary Duff album, because...well, first of all, because it's Hilary "I Killed Joan Of Arcadia Dead" Duff. But a bigger reason had to do with the title of the record: Dignity.

If it's true, as Edward O. once remarked, that teenpop albums tend to be about identity, then we might add that around the second, third, or fourth albums, such teenpop stars tend to continue that narrative with a title or concept about growing up and possibly out of that original identity -- and towards, of course, some sort of "authentic" "maturity." In the 80s, Debbie Gibson came from Out Of The Blue to Electric Youth to Anything Is Possible to the allegedly more integrated Body, Mind, Soul; today JoJo has already accelerated from a self-titled debut to The High Road and promised/threatened that her third album won't be released until she's eighteen, so that her music can "grow." And while Ashlee Simpson (Autobiography; I Am Me), Amy Diamond (This Is Me Now; Still Me, Still Now), and Lindsay Lohan (Speak; A Little More Personal) seem a bit arrested, we can expect all their third albums to be called something like Me More Mature).

Given this naking/conceptual pattern, I initially rolled my eyes at Dignity: clearly, I thought, this was Hilary's clichéd Me More Mature salvo. It didn't help matters that, for the cover, Ms. Duff seems to be trying to look like Angelina Jolie...'s grandma.

As it turns out, although Dignity, as an album title, is still obviously meant as a kind of statement about Hilary's newfound whatever, the song that gives the record its title is nothing of the sort. It's rather a reasonably sassy number about a Jimmy Choo-wearing material girl who has no dignity, having lost it "in the Hollywood Hills." The fish-in-a-barrel thing to say about this "critique" is, of course, "um, kettle?", but at least the song, to my relief, isn't a dreary ballad about Hilary's tremendous Gandhi-like grace.

Once I got past that title, I discovered an electropop album that thankfully exhibits few signs of a tedious obsession with self, growth, maturity, dignity, blah blah blah fishcakes. (Indeed, the whole album only boasts one cringeworthy "self-empowerment" number -- "No Work, All Play," which wrongheadly insists that "you gotta know yourself to be yourself.") Now, it's not a great album. It's quite, quite enjoyable in parts, but for me Dignity isn't "an American version of Rachel Stevens' Come And Get It", 2007's best album thus far, or even destined to be this year's underappreciated electropop gem a la Holly Valance's State Of Mind, Dannii Minogue's Neon Nights, or Rachel's record. (There are a couple of what I would like to pretend are shout-outs to Rachel and Xenomania, though: on "Between You And Me," Hilary declares that her love is "not up for negotiation," and "Happy" has a twangy guitar line that reminds me a little of Frank's "I'm Not Shy.")

Because, leaving aside Hilary's singing, Dignity is simply not as good as those classic electropop records. The tunes aren't especially memorable, and the lyrics range from run-of-the-mill to insipid ("cause I see danger, danger, danger in your eyes!/There's danger in those eyes!"). The production is often competent but uninspired. For instance, "I Wish" contains a guitar riff that would be quite catchy if it weren't playing the same notes that Hilary herky-jerkily sings as the chorus. But it is, so the song, instead of agilely featuring a tune counterposed against, or underlined by, a muscular guitar riff, simply consists of two clunky instruments making the same point.

But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and there are at least two moments on the album where everything comes together. "Never Stop" has a new wavy synth line and boasts some exhilarating drumming (or an exhilarating drum pattern) -- it's this album's "Funny How," if you really want to continue the Rachel Stevens comparisons -- some of which seems intentionally dissonant, and often stops the song. To some extent, these drums are almost too aggressive for the lyric (about how Hilary will never stop loving us), but they are energetic and outstanding on a record that is oftentimes too staid, production-wise. Meanwhile, "Outside Of You" has the best pure pop melody of the album, one that compels Hilary to start singing with her usual lower register before kicking it up for the more ethereal pre-chorus ("See the funny thing is/You're just as useless as me") and chorus ("I'm outside of you/And I just can't get through"). The lyric -- essentially, "we are both lonely and useless, so what say you that we be so together?") in fact has a kind of wittiness missing from the other words for the album (it's the only song not cowritten by Hilary, so make of that what you will). True, Hilary's voice doesn't have enough personality to quite carry off the middle eight's "I look in the mirror, I see your future, you look good with me" line, and the producers shouldn't have made her sing it twice; but that's ultimately a minor weakness in what is a Rather Good Electropop Song.

2007-03-28T23:59:00.000+08:00

Lucky Soul, "Add Your Light To Mine, Baby" (2007)

Given the instanteously hooky nature of Lucky Soul's music -- the Spectorish, 60s girl group sound overstuffed with smudged lipstick and tear-stained mascara melodrama -- it seems only apt to do a real-time review of their The Great Unwanted album, doesn't it? Yes. Yes, it does. (Of course, the fact that quite a few songs surfaced in advance of the album -- as demos, singles, b-sides -- and are thus not being heard for the first time, takes away from the concept a little, but whatev.)

00:01 - Drumroll! (Literally.) Bluh bluh bluh BLUH BLUH!!! Oh, glorious horns. I've missed you since...the last record with glorious horns. Actually, they sound a little bit like Pet Shop Boys' "Saturday Night Forever."

00:13 - "Add your light to mine, baby, add your light to mine! Add your light to mine, and together we could shine!" I'm not quite sure why she says "could" instead of "will," but it adds a slight tentativeness to the song that makes it even more charming.

01:25 - I love the little breakdown: "dun dun DUN," then the "tock tock tock" bit. Wheee!

02:01 - Ooh, the music and vocals go up a half step, just to keep things interesting. Never noticed that before now. God, this is really their best song, and luckily getting a proper release as the next single. Dare we hope that it'll be this year's "Pull Shapes"?

02:27 - What an excellent title: "One Kiss Don't Make a Summer," which obviously plays off of that "one swallow..." proverb. Right? It does, doesn't it? Real time means NO TIME TO GOOGLE, PEOPLE. The bomb might go off at any second.

03:05 - Anyway, the heartbreaking lyrical conceit is that her friends tell her that she shouldn't fall for the guy too quickly, because it was just one kiss. Don't I know it.

05:03 - We get one of those parts where her vocals come in short, sharp bursts as the music punctuates those outbursts. Tres emotional.

06:15 - "What am I supposed to do? What am I suposed to do?" Awesome song, awesome end.

06:17 - Track three, "Struck Dumb," has appeared as the b-side of the "Ain't Never Been Cool" single, but it's far from a filler track on the album.

07:40 - Like the previous song, the slower, more sedate verses are counterposed against much more distraught choruses. This one's an especial gem: she sings, "I want you so bad that it hurts!" and the male backing vocalists go like this: "URGH URGH URGH!!!!" And she goes "dumb dumb dee do woah woah." Everybody's been struck dumb, you see.

09:07 - Oh, "Lips Are Unhappy"! We know this one too.

09: 43 - The title is such a great tin pan alley kind of phrase: "lips are unhappy without you." Clearly, it's a kind of coping mechanism: if I can detach and imagine that it's just my kissless lips that are unhappy, maybe I can pretend the rest of me is fine. (No luck. Turns out the rest of me is not doing too hot either.)

12: 20 - Everybody join in the marvellous outro! "Shake shake shimmy..." (Just chanted at first, then slowly building up into a more definite melody.)

12:44 - "My Darling, Anything." One to stagger drunkenly around an empty ballroom to.

13:42 - Man, great chord change, and I don't usually recognize those even when they bite me on my proverbial ass.

14:35 - The "surrender surrender" bit randomly reminds me of Bomb The Bass's "Don't Make Me Wait." Random, I told you.

15:00 - "You, got to remember/I've got a heart condition/Just listen closer/Every fourth beat [here the beat of course drops out] is missing/If it ain't missing then it skipskipskipskipskipskip..." And THEN horns come in, because this part wasn't nearly awesome enough. No, sorry, THIS song has the best outro.

15:53 - Oooh, first song that's new to me: "Get Outta Town!"

16:19 - This one is racuous, all growling bass. It's practically punk rock.

16:20 - Or at least the closest the band has come to being The Primitives.

16:21 - Do I like it? Maybe it's too shambolic for me. This one needs at least a second spin.

18:08 - "I'll kiss you once! Alright, I'll kiss you twice!" An Irresistible Bit.

19:00 - Okay, I'm won over. She does need to watch it with the slight shrieking, though. But there's cheering at the end, and I join in.

19:38 - Title track time. As good as when it first leaked, and notable for the locution "a life less boring." (I'm a sucker for Latinate syntax, what can I say.) Which means that I can use this to take a deep breath so that I don't pass out from all the excited hyperventilating.

23:20 - "We will not be ignored." I hope not.

23:28 - Twangy, reverby guitar chords open the next track, "Baby I'm Broke." They remind me of "Bang Bang," so my mind starts imagining Nancy Sinatra covering this one.

24:58 - We're in lighter-waving territory with this one, I think. The organ that rumbles underneath will do that to you.

27:43 - Dur-rum-BAM! Ah, the song the band wrote just for me: "My Brittle Heart."

28:23 - The backing vocals on this kill me all over again. "Honey honey," she cries, and the backing vocalists come in, all "aaaah aaahh!" and then even a few "shoop shoop"s. I'm so cheap.

28:56 - "I need you more, than a life raft needs the shore." I can't decide if that's a good or bad line. Fortunately the debate in my head gets cut short by the return of the "shoop shoop"s.

30:57 - "Ain't Never Been Cool"! You can't see me, but I'm totally doing the frug.

31:40 - Oh, you know what happened? My virginity grew back this past week.

31:42 - Just wanted to see if you're still paying attention.

34:01 - "The Towering Inferno" begins like she's channelling Gwen Stefani in one of her curtesy voice moments. Or maybe Cyndi Lauper.

34:05 - Man, Gwen owes a lot to Cyndi, doesn't she?

35:10 - This track is not working as well so far. The lyric is less in the moment, and as a result somehow more indulgent: "the towering inferno will one day consume me." Hmmm. Show, don't tell.

35:43: Yeah, she's crossing the line into shrieking here, although perhaps track 10 on such a unabashedly melodramatic album was always going to do so.

36:51 - Okay, we'll calling this The Weak Track.

36:55 - A lot of the songs do follow a certain trajectory: start off more mid-tempo, then rachet up the tempo and drama, trashes around very tunefully, and falls down a bit drunk. Just like me every Friday evening.

37:20 - "It's Yours." On which she tells us that everything we ever wanted, it's ours, and means it too. The rumbling organ returns, though the effect this time is more heartfelt than regretful.

41:10 - I'm definitely back to enjoying things again.

41:50 - Even slower and more placid, "The Last Song" comes along to close the album. We're down to strummy acoustic guitar and rumbling organ here. She sounds, if it's possible, even more weary and bruised than she did at the start of the album.

43:46 - Oooh, piano and slide guitar. To break what's left of my heart, presumably.

45:40 - "The penultimate beat of the drum/When the second to last part is strummed/And when all other words have already been heard/I'll sing the last song for you." Bless.

46:17 - Except we now get the obligatory few minutes of silence before the hidden track kicks in.

47:00 - While we wait, can I just tell you that we are finally getting the Barbara Walters Oscar special on TV this weekend, so all month long they've been torturing us with preview clips, and each time Baba Wawa leans in to Jay Z, bugs her eyes out, and says, "Do you find Beyoncé 'bootylicious'?!" a small part of me dies in the midst of the hysterical laughter.

48:18 - We go even gentler: a pretty acoustic lullably to really end things. A clock ticks away in the background, and a toy piano tinkles us to sleep. Sweet.

2007-03-26T19:25:00.000+08:00

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, "Got It Together Again" (1971)

V. EXCITING WEEKEND: I spent most of it trying to balance the checkbook for an account that I've neglected to keep close tabs on since, oh, December, and yet have spent lots out money out of.

My favorite example of mathematical incompetence occurs in the middle of "Got It Together Again," the track that closes Nancy's and Lee's 1971 vinyl album Did You Ever? Saint Etienne covered the song for Total Lee!, but sadly declined to recreate this classic spontaneous exchange:

Nancy: We're the oldest...
Lee: ...teenyboppers? In the world? 72?
Nancy: 72?! No, that's the next album!
Lee: No, if you add us together!
Nancy: Oh. How old are you?
Lee: I'll be four-two.
Nancy: 42? And I'm 30.
Lee: Right. That's 72, any way you add it up.

You'd think that Nancy, bless her soul, could have avoided having her blonde moment committed to record by paying attention to THE TITLE OF THE SONG SHE WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF SINGING.

2007-03-21T17:21:00.000+08:00

Brett Anderson, "Scorpio Rising" (2007)

Suede released some good records, but I'm afraid that as far as I'm concerned some of these were great despite Brett's singing. His voice didn't actively annoy me, but here is an artist's impression of how I tend to experience Suede songs:

And The Tears? Yeah.

However! I actually like Brett's first solo album quite a bit, voice and all. It helps tremendously that the record largely consists of beautifully-arranged orchestral ballads (many produced by Fred Ball), a setting that frees Brett's more mature singing from making me hungry for rosemary-rubbed lambchops. Brett Anderson has gotten very lukewarm reviews, but definitely rewards repeated listens. Yes, the anti-consumerism song is hilariously bad, but I'm finding "Love Is Dead," "Song For My Father," and "One Lazy Morning" all very good.

And there's also "Scorpio Rising," which goes something like this:

See? It's obviously quite good.

2007-03-20T19:28:00.000+08:00

Elliott Yamin, "Wait For You" (2007)

That the second runner-up of American Idol 5 snagged Stargate to write and produce his debut single is something of a coup -- seriously: well-played Elliott, well-played -- but it was always going to be the case that he gets a track that Stargate's other clients most likely passed on. (Just ask Katherine "Poor Man's JoJo" McPhee.)

And indeed, "Wait For You" sounds like one of the smooth, lite R&B ballads that Stargate has been knocking out for, in particular, Ne-Yo (or, if Ne-Yo should reject them, Joe). (For some reason, Stargate's work for female acts is more diverse -- aside from their mutual greatness, Beyoncé's "Ireplaceable" isn't much like Paula DeAnda's "Walk Away" -- but the reasons why this is so deserve a separate post. When I actually come up with a theory, that is.) Like "So Sick" and "Because Of You," "Wait For You" is built around a tinkly piano riff that may be hookier and more insistent than the actual chorus, and all these songs also have rhythm tracks that either mimick or actually utilize finger snaps and/or handclaps. Plus, not only does "Wait For You" therefore sound derivative of Ne-Yo singles, but its chorus is pretty much a direct steal of S Club 7's "Never Had A Dream Come True" (co-penned by Cathy Dennis, who may or may not be contacting her lawyer right about now).

And yet, despite these preemptive strikes, I'll be damned if Elliott doesn't totally sell his single. (Can I say "he sells it"? I'm trying hard not to slip into Idol judge-speak. It simultaneously amuses and irks me that while everyone [but especially bloggers] makes fun of Randy's or Paula's incomprehensible critiques, just as many slip into parrotting their fucking vocabulary -- sometimes "ironically" or with self-awareness, but I don't see how that excuses it.)

There is, for one thing, Elliott's voice, which retains all the nuance and passion it did on the show. He doesn't indulge in a lot of bells and whistles, concentrating instead on letting the melody tell him where to place his emphases. The tune of the chorus, for instance, asks Elliott to put almost equal amounts of stress on each word -- "Baby I will. Wait. For. You" -- as if he really, really needs for his lover to hear every syllable of every plea. At the 3:33 mark, Elliott varies the melody just a bit, shifting the emphasis to "baby I will wait for you" (as if resorting to a more direct address of his loved one), and hitting the first five words of "if you think I'm fine it just ain't true" more plaintively (as if her mis-impression hurts him more than anything else).

And it's not like he gets no help: second rate Stargate writing and production work is still very good. So, even though the lyric is clichéd, it still boasts a run-on line -- "Don't tell me I ran out of time/If it takes the rest of my life/Baby I will wait for you," where the middle line appears melodically to belong to the previous sentence, but turns out to semantically initiate the next -- that gets at the painful confusion of the song (and gives the less casual listener some mental work to do). Or listen to the way the piano riff and Elliott's promise to "wait for you" (both essentially cover the same notes) hardly ever begin at the same time, mostly depending on whether Elliott leaves out the "so" at the start of the phrase: either Elliott begins the phrase before the riff comes in ("So BUMP BUMP BUMP"), or the reverse is true ("BUMP baby I will wait for you"), thereby dramatizing the way Elliott's wait has been largely fruitless and the situation is out of sync. And most obviously, the cold finish -- the song ends in the middle of the line, "I'll be waiting..." -- effectively if somewhat unsubtly conveys the sense that Elliott is still waiting, and always will. Having always enjoyed Elliott on Idol, I am admittedly predisposed to like his single, but there's no shame in being won over by a personality in the pop game.

2007-03-19T22:07:00.000+08:00

Escort, "All That She Is" (2007)

"What's so great about her?" "Well, she is all that she is." "And what's his problem?" "He is not what she is."

Um...illuminating. This Escort track -- the superior b-side to their latest 12" "A Bright New Life" -- could not have a sillier and more insubstantial lyrical hook. And yet, the fact that its one line, about her being her but him not being her, is urgently whispered makes it not completely ridiculous. It's an old trick of disco records; somehow, the whispering makes it feel like the song is imparting some terrible! Scandalous! Gossip! Have you heard the latest? You know that he and she and they did it during the day when it and she and he went there to see her and them and us? So the gossip turns out to be nonsensical. What piece of gossip isn't?

Meanwhile, the rest of the track keeps up the atmosphere. The beat, as on previous Escort records, is largely old school boogie, although this one is augmented by two particularly distinctive synth lines. One -- played at different points by a synth and then by strings -- is bassier and ponderous (as if revealing some secret: dong dong DONG DONG!!), while the other is a more agile, fleet-footed arpeggio (that sounds like word is spreading faster and faster). In a sense the record owes as much to 80s sleaze as it does to boogie, but whatever its influences, it continues to boost Escort's reputation as purveyors of fine revivalist dance music.

2007-03-16T15:45:00.000+08:00

Marit Bergman, "Green Light" (2006)

I like but didn't love Marit Bergman's "No Party" from late last year -- although I did enjoy tremendously the video, because, hello, it had A DRUMMING WALRUS IN A RAINCOAT -- and thus never sought out the parent album. But the latest single from I Think I See A Rainbow, "Mama, I Remember You Now," a Spectorish tribute to Mama Cass, prompted me to belatedly seek out an album that got lost in the year end shuffle. Which is what singles should do. Wow. The record industry worked the way it's supposed to. Imagine that!

Of course, maybe it would have worked even better if this album track had been a single. (I don't think it's been a single; this weird computer-animated gay video is unofficial, I believe.) "Green Light" has the same retro 60s feel as "Mama": a big, joyful beat; some lovely horns on the chorus; "ooh ah ah ah!" backing vocals; a spoken bit that is pure girl group; and even that tockity-tock bongo drum sound (only in your left ear) that always reminds me of spy or exploitation movies from that era. Meanwhile, at certain points in the song Marit sounds like, I kid you not, Belinda Carlisle. Though Belinda, as far as I'm aware, never sang songs to a walrus (no jokes about all her vodka-and-coke weight, please).

2007-03-07T14:45:00.000+08:00

Fountains Of Wayne, "Someone To Love" (2007)

Fountains Of Wayne's new single features two protagonists: Seth Shapiro, a lawyer, and photo editor Beth McKenzie. With its usual precision and detail, the band sketches these lives: Seth listens to Coldplay and devours books about organized crime, while Beth watches The King of Queens on Thursday nights (not the first-run version, presumably, which has never been on Thursdays, but syndicated episodes). As the song title suggests, despite their otherwise full lives, both need "someone to love," an idea the song expresses less as a bullying imperative, and more as a hope for them, and us all: "When it's late, and it's hot/And a date with The Late Show is all that you've got/Don't give out, don't give up/One of these nights you might find someone to love."

Is that hope fulfilled or dashed at the end of the song, when our two characters cross paths? "Seth Shapiro is trying in vain/To hail a taxi in the morning, pouring rain/Beth McKenzie sees one just up ahead/She cuts in front of him and leaves him for dead." The track screeches to a halt for a second, before kicking into the chorus one more time. It's hard to tell if the song is therefore a four-minute musical version of every Hollywood romantic comedy ever, or a critique of them. (A typical ambiguity for the band, and one reason why critics can never tell if the Fountains are "ironic" or not, truly sympathizing with or mocking their characters -- but also the reason why I love them.) On the surface, Beth's theft of the cab seems to mean that she misses a chance to meet a man the song has set up as her possible partner. But by cutting away when it does, the song doesn't foreclose the possibility that Seth...what? Spiritedly goes up to the cab, bangs on the window, forces his way into the taxi despite Beth's squeaky protestations, and the two reluctantly share a ride uptown, squabbling all the way, whereupon they realize they are made for each other?

2007-03-06T23:39:00.000+08:00

The Rosebuds, "My Punishment For Fighting"/"Silja Line (On Settling For A Normal Life)" (2007)

In my musical world -- though, I would acknowledge, not in everyone's -- "epic" has a vexed, even paradoxical quality. If I had to be schematic, I would say that "epic dance/pop music" gives me thrills, but for "epic rock music" I have little to no use.

A lot of this bias has to do with my sense of how self-aware "epic music" is, and, specificially, how self-serving its aims are. When I think of instances of epic dance music -- the hi-NRG productions of the Pet Shop Boys, say, or Kylie's "Your Disco Needs You" -- they usually have their collective tongue, if not in, then not too far from, their cheek. That's probably not a good way to put it, because it slides too easier into the idea that epic dance-pop is "okay" because it is "ironic"; better to say that epic dance-pop lacks a kind of self-important earnestness that epic rock unfortunately possesses in spades. Indeed, epic dance-pop's aims usually have little to do with the artists themselves; it doesn't exist, for the most part, to demonstrate how magnificient its creators are. (Whereas much of epic rock...well, let's just mutter "U2" and not even mention all the other rock messiah wannabes.) If anything, creators of epic dance-pop seem to know that they risk coming off as silly, trivial, camp -- but if the track is glorious as a result and likely to be enjoyable for the listeners, they don't care. In this sense epic dance-pop doesn't have the self-serving nature that I find quite distasteful in epic rock. Because of this, I'm always wary of rock acts that -- usually around the second or third albums -- attempt to go "epic." It's usually a disaster...eh, Killers?

But then there is Night Of The Furies, the third album by The Rosebuds, the Raleigh band made up of Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp. It is likely to be the one that critics hail, if they pay attention to it, as taking a disproportionate leap forwards, perhaps even towards "epicness." And it's true enough. Although the band's two previous albums were already quite excellent -- 2003's Make Out, and 2005's Birds Make Good Neighbors, which featured one of my favorite songs from that year, the achingly beautiful "Blue Bird" (never heard it?! Rectify that immediately, please) -- there is something about Night Of The Furies that seems more ambitious in scope, less interested in simply being a collection, as its predecessors were, of pretty, jangly guitar pop songs.

One reason why the album is likely to be seen as a conscious leap forward is the way The Rosebuds have -- let's use a critical cliché for a moment, heh -- "expanded their sonic palette." The sound of the group is still rooted in lovely guitar pop, but they themselves have acknowledged that a couple of the tracks are almost discotastic, in the way that The Killers' "Bones" tried to be: the first single, "Get Up Get Out" (try Hype Machine if you want to hear it), and "Hang On To This Coat." (Apparently remixes of album tracks are already being prepared, by Dean and Britta and Mark Saunders.) No doubt this helps the newly "epic" band avoid the pitfalls of coming across as self-important: Night Of The Furies is as much as epic pop record as it is a rock one.

But the bigger reason to deem the record "epic" is due to the mythical theme that runs through its nine songs; as the album title suggests, the idea of the Furies -- the Roman deities that descend on Earth to punish and avenge -- run throughout the record. "In the day and night, better hold on tight to your loved ones," the lyric of "Cemetary Lawns," which begins with an exhilarating burst of drums, goes. "The rumor is the truth, the Furies are here upon us." According to press materials, it looks like the band re-imagined the night of a tropical hurricane as such a visitation, and as a result the record is made up of songs connected in the sense that they speak recurrently of guilt, conscience, turmoil, sacrifice, retribution.

There is in fact something very Southern Gothic about the record: in its thematic concerns, yes, but additionally because Ivan sings about them with a dextrous voice that, in its lower register, has the same kind of rumbly weight as Scott Walker's or Nick Cave's, but often also kicks into a higher pitch that is floaty and ethereal. (When he does both within the same song, as happens in the opener, "My Punishment For Fighting," the effect is mesmerizing: after each verse sketches out his troubles, the chorus sees his voice lift and sing, with almost a kind of spooky disembodiment, "I could never be/All you need me to/My punishment is living without you." The line has haunted me all weekend.)

But The Rosebuds don't present Ivan's voice as some kind of pompous soothsayer's, instead surrounding it with others -- not necessarily other people's (Kelly takes the lead on "I Better Run," but nowhere else), but with backing vocals that simultaneously rachet up the drama and deflate it. They heighten by punctuating and emphasizing, as dramatic backing vocals always do (just think of gospel backup). But on Night Of The Furies, these backing vocals also puncture any kind of pomposity, because they are incredibly hooky, almost in a kind of cheesy Eurodisco way -- or, in keeping with my characterization of the album as "Southern Gothic," the way backing vocals on, say, a Sisters Of Mercy record might. (Or at least what I remember of the one or two Sisters Of Mercy tracks I've heard.) This is an album filled with woahs, woos, ahs, and oohs. (Highlights: the "ah ah ah ah"s that start "My Punishment For Fighting" and thus the whole album; the way Ivan sings "Woah oh...WOO!" at the end of the chorus on "Cemetary Lawns"; the "Woah, oh! Woah, oh! Woah, oh oh oh woah!" from "You Better Run"; the four introductory bars of "whoo, whoo, whooo" that glide gloriously up and down the scale at the start of "Silence By The Lakeside"; the "ah, ah-ah-ah-haaaa"s from "Hold On To This Coat"...)

The marvellous track, "Silja Line (On Settling For A Normal Life)" -- whose nautical lyric The Decemberists would be envious of -- provides an especially good example of how these supporting voices do both: for most of the song, the backup vocals take the form of ghostly "ah, wooooooooo"s that rise up in between the verses. But later in the song, though, all ghosts are dispelled by the heartiness of the way Ivan is suddenly joined by what sounds like an entire male choir, going, "Oh oh oh! Let's all toast to the ones we love!" It would be a eyerollingly self-important moment, if not for the way the rest of song frames it as as much a guiltily poptastic moment as a "meaningful" one.

It's only the beginning of March, but there have been a ton of good -- or at least hotly anticipated (by me) -- albums ~~leaked~~ released so far: Tracey Thorn! Patrick Wolf! Jay-Jay Johanson! Pleasure! Weeping Willows! Mika! The Go Find! Feist! Fountains Of Wayne! (And in the wings: Lucky Soul! Sophie Ellis-Bextor!) It's too early to tell which of those, let alone which future release, will end up among my true favorites of the year. But at this point, I can say that Night Of The Furies has been one of two albums that has brought out the most obsessive behavior in me -- such as, playing it four times in a row without a break when I first got it. (Wanna guess which is the other, which is included in the list at the start of this paragraph?)

2007-03-02T17:30:00.000+08:00

The Go Find, "Adrenaline" (2007)

Things I Grudgingly Understand About The Go Find: why critics compare them to Styrofoam and Postal Service.

Well, the Belgium act -- just Dieter Sermeus for the first album, 2004's Miami, but now a full band for their excellent second album Stars On The Wall -- is often produced by their fellow countryman Styrofoam, and share the same label (Morr Music). And especially on the new album, Dieter, singing the same kind of electropop, does sound like Ben Gibbard (who himself sang on a Styrofoam track a few years back, so it's all connected). So compare away, unless you're talking to people who don't like Styrofoam and Postal Service.

Things I Do Not Understand About The Go Find, But Don't Really Care: why there is a Mel and Kim poster on the wall in this videoclip for "New Year," the lovely single from the album...

...but whatever the reason, it's awesome.

Things I Do Not Understand About The Go Find, But Upon Further Thought Kind Of Get It. Or Maybe Not: why my favorite song from the album -- although "New Year," "25 Years," "Ice Cold Ice," and even the brief opener "Beautiful Night" are jostling it -- is called "Adrenaline."

The word doesn't actually appear in the lyric, nor does that lyric ostensibly have much to do with adrenaline. What the lyric does have to do with...is unclear. Dieter asks the song's addressee: "If I should be on your trail, would you turn around, be a friend of mine? Cause if you’ve seen the truth, I’d be a fool not to follow you." But later in the second verse, he declares: "How can I trust you? Cause every time I do, there’s always another point of view. So tell me what to do." The chorus resolves nothing, even if it haunts with its constant refrain: "Cause you, are the only one, who could prove I’m wrong, who could prove I’m wrong." Does he want to be proven wrong, or right? Does he love this person? Does he hate and stalk her? Does the possibility that she might love him back constitute the only thing that could disprove his own idea that he is unloveable? Meanwhile, the deceptively simple musical backing starts off slow and brooding, swirls a litte more on the chorus, and always seem on the verge of breaking into a full gallop -- but never does, and yet the song is somehow more gorgeous for it. Maybe the title refers to the music? No?

2007-03-01T16:54:00.000+08:00

Sophie Ellis-Bextor, "Down With Love" (2007)

(Something a bit more poptastic today, I think, partly in honor of the word's recent entrance into the OED.)

Perhaps it was considered a bit too simple and straightforward of a pop song to warrant being included on Sophie Ellis-Bextor's forthcoming album, but that's the only reason I can think of why "Down With Love" has been relegated to being the b-side for "Catch You." (Although the way Sophie overlaps her own vocals, and sqwauks "down down down" in the outro, already lifts it above the ordinary.) Backed by big, brash drums and a kind of new wavy synthline -- thereby making the song sound a bit like the lovechild of Pet Shop Boys' "Flamboyant" and The Killers (the "doo-woo-woot woo-woot-woot" sound effect after each chorus especially recalls "Somebody Told Me") -- Sophie sings about being afflicted with a nasty case of this thing called love.

Stupidly, I'd never really thought about the expression before this song, despite its use in a movie that several people suggested I would like but never actually saw. I'd always assumed that the phrase was being used in, like, the street slang way: hey dude, I'm down with that! But in Sophie's song at least, it's "down" as in "being down with the flu," except that "when you're down with love, there ain't no cure at all." Why have I never realized this other meaning -- and thus the possible ambiguity, whereby being down with something is either simpatico, or its exact opposite, extremely isolating? Tee sometimes calls his dog "Downy," both because she's soft and fluffy, but also because she can be gloriously dumb, and I hereby join her in one of those categories.

2007-02-27T23:48:00.000+08:00

Charlie Rich, "San Francisco Is A Lonely Town" (1970)

For a while, I had stopped listening to mix albums. I blame this partly on the way the iPod has changed my (and countless other people's) listening habits: with the choice of selecting tracks left up to the shuffle function 30, 40, 50% of the time, it made less and less sense to upload continuous mixes to the iPod. I would, I tell myself, listen to such CDs on a good old stereo -- which would allow me to appreciate the way a good mix recontextualize certain tracks, for example -- but of course, there's never enough time. But another portion of the blame goes to the way dance music, arguably in a funk (and not the good kind), has become less and less interesting in recent years.

Of course, not all mix albums are filled with dance music, and, indeed, the first mix album in ages that I've been quite smitten with is Nouvelle Vague's Late Night Tales. You know the Late Night Tales (neé Another Late Night) series: artists or DJs curate a mix of "eclectic" music that say something about their influences, or is stuff they would play you should they bring you back home to their place after the clubs close, or something. (Not to be confused with the Back To Mine series, in which artists or DJs curate a mix of "eclectic" music that say something about their influences, or is stuff they would play you should they bring you back home to their place after the clubs close, or something.)

That Nouvelle Vague has come up with a good mix is mildly surprising. I like their two albums well enough, but it was hard to imagine that a mix from them wouldn't be as one-note as their oeuvre, let's face it, tends to be. On their Late Night Tales, there are a few predictable selections: most obviously, OS Mutantes' by now over-canonized "Baby," which contains the template for their Nouvelle's sound. But the rest of the mix is quite enchanting. Trip-hop numbers like Avril's "Urban Serenade" brush up against vaguely dark and depressive 80s tracks from the Pale Fountains, David Sylvian and This Mortal Coil, or chansons genuine (Isabelle Antena) and mock (Anja Garbarek). But most fetchingly, in between are dropped a bunch of countrypolitan or torch songs, all sung by vocalists who clearly love holding the microphones veryclose to their lips -- Glen Campbell singing "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," Shirley Horn doing a resigned "And I Love Him" (allowing the title phrase to climb instead of descend), Peggy Lee performing a halting "You're My Thrill." Which is to say: Julie London-style, and indeed, Ms. London turns up to close the set with a shiver-inducing "Lonely Girl."

And like all good compilations, this one introduces me to a lost song I've never heard before: Charlie Rich's "San Francisco Is A Lonely Town." Although Charlie is better known for his countrypolitan hits like "The Most Beautiful Girl," I think the only songs of his I'd previously encountered were, perversely, his bluesier numbers (possibly courtesy this late lamented blog). "San Francisco Is A Lonely Town" appears to be a cut from a 1970 album called The Fabulous Charlie Rich. A sort of "Midnight Train To Georgia" gone bad, the track follows a narrator and his girlfriend to San Francisco, a city she takes to but he finds unwelcoming. "Oh there were good times for a little while/But now her new friends say I cramp her style/I guess I'm only in the way now, and she don't need me hanging round": how true it rings, that two people can grow apart because of the different ways they adapt (or don't) to a new set of geographical circumstances. (It's not an accident that the tracklisting includes both this and Campbell's song about Phoenix.) The song ends with the narrator leaving -- the city, and his love with a bus ticket in case she wants to follow. He can only hope that she too will come to realize "San Francisco is a lonely town." While that, in isolation, sounds like a mean, even spiteful thing to wish on a lover, Charlie sings it with such emotion -- listen to the way his voice soars over the title line, one penultimate time at the 2:50 mark, with a mixture of rage and pain -- that it's impossible not to forgive him for hoping that she will suffer a little, if only because this and only this can bring them back together again.

2007-02-26T18:12:00.000+08:00

Sarah Shannon, "Hey Heartache"/"Along The Way" (2007)

Tell me her new (second) album is on Minty Fresh, that it contains songs no critic has ever described without using the tongue-twisting adjective "Bacharachesque," and you'll find me at least joining the line to check out Sarah Shannon. (It's at least a more persuasive angle than reminding me that Sarah used to be the lead singer of Velocity Girl, whose songs I have never intentionally listened to [though I'm sure they're perfectly nice], or even pointing out to me that she was the one who contributed the vocals to Styrofoam's 2005 reworking of Free Design's "I Found Love.")

A more difficult decision is choosing between "Hey Heartache" and "Along The Way." The former gives great piano: on the verses, it does that bump, bump-bump easy listening rhythm that I'm a total sucker for, before playing a short but sweet tinkly part to lead us into the chorus, where it becomes more vampy. But on the latter a fantastic trumpet blows: kickstarting the track, it at first just reinforces Sarah's points ("rise above it...bluh bluh bluh BLUH!"), but increasingly seems to acquire a mind of its own (during the chorus), and thereby gets rewarded with a solo that serves as both middle eight and a glorious outro. I guess I'll take both.

2007-02-22T23:55:00.000+08:00

Weeping Willows, "The Burden" (2007)

It was one of the first few nights he slept over, and he was being very cuddly. We were half-talking, half-sleeping, and then at some point he became self-conscious about how tight he was holding me. "I am, right?" he asked. "I've been told I do." Always going for the joke, I said yes, I could hardly breathe, but what's more erotic than asphyxiation? Although he detected my teasing tone, he nevertheless pressed me, in all seriousness, on whether I thought he was proving thus far to be, both literally and figuratively, too clingy.

"It's three in the morning," I said with a sudden, genuine laugh, "and you're asking me to assure you that you're not needy." I may have further razzed him by affecting a whiney voice with which I parodied, over and over again, his question -- "Am I too clingy?" "How about now?" "And now?" -- but the truth was that I liked his attentions, not to mention the body warmth. And in between laughing and mock-punching me, he, if anything, held me closer.

There's nothing quite like being in love to bring out your worst insecurities. On their new single, Weeping Willows -- the Swedish group which, for over ten years now, has been inconspicuously making the kind of twangy music with wounded vocals that always have people mumbling "Scott Walker," but with a pop sensibility that Richard Hawley or Tindersticks only occasionally muster -- ask one question over and over again: "Do you still love me?"

That plaintive question, or variants on it, come up at the end of every one of the four verses, and a couple of times at the end of each chorus. This is, of course, perilously close to too many times: for the listener, but even more for the lover addressed by the song. On the chorus, which escalates into a sudden rush of words, the desperate longing is even more pronounced as the lyric becomes a series of statements of need: "I need your loving words, for often longing makes a heart go soft/I'm worried that you might be lost/I need to feel the love you give me, and the warmth your body brings me/I need to see it in your eyes/That you still love me/Do you still love me?"

Do we know what makes the relationship so seemingly fragile? The narrator is nothing if not sensitive, keeping close enough tabs on things to be able to notice very quickly when something feels off: "I sat down by the solitary river/In the shadow of a weeping willow tree/It seems like you have changed in the past week/Do you still love me?" But if this sounds like a new relationship, it's not. "We've been together so long that I wonder/And my mind is being fueled by disbelief." The length of the love therefore provides no safety, no consolation -- indeed, the opposite is true. The longer they are together, the worse it seems. The song names, in its second verse, "jealousy" as the titular cross the relationship has to bear. "Jealousy is such a heavy burden/It sneaks into my soul and never sleeps/I've gotta hear you whisper it to me/That you still love me." But the song never sketches in the details of this jealousy, which therefore feels like a symptom more than a cause. What makes the relationship so tenuous? The bleaker answer is that it's fragile because it is a relationship. If there is a "burden" in the relationship, it's not jealousy, but the relationship, or love, itself.

As beautiful as it is, the song is therefore quite difficult to listen to -- not just because the neediness is so naked, or because this neediness, due as it is to the very nature of love, appears so insurmountable. What makes the song additionally tough to bear is our sense that the narrator knows all this, and yet cannot help himself. Each query -- "do you still love me?" -- is a query he knows he shouldn't pose, but he somehow can't quite help himself. You can almost see the chasm widen each time the question leaves his lips. What is moving about the song, ultimately, is the sense we get of the approaching crash. For when is neediness not ever a self-fulfilling prophecy? Isn't the lover who unrelentingly begs to be loved -- to be assured of love -- also the one who ends up without, having driven away the very thing he tries to hold on to?

Or so the story normally goes. But then again, sometimes, there are surprises. I for one thought I knew where things were going, but I was wrong, and to this day I don't fully understand why things changed the way they did.

2007-02-19T17:13:00.000+08:00

Joakim, "Lonely Hearts" (2007)

For a song ostensibly about solitude, "Lonely Hearts" is surprisingly exhilarating. Much of this is because, to my ears, the instrumentation comes together rather than falls apart in the course of the track. The record begins with a rough thudding drumbeat, in between which we hear a brief guitar line; while the effect is not exactly discordant, it's still feels strangely off-kilter and not terribly pleasant. But on the chorus, the drums are unified with faint handclaps, rounding off the beat, and the guitar gives away to a piano riff. That riff is equally limited in range -- we only ever get two notes at a time, but, because they always ascend, it feels like an uplift. The vocals, by Nicolas Ker, sound especially at the beginning like they could have come from a younger Dave Gahan, and perhaps the record is closest in spirit to early, lo-fi Depeche Mode. (Very early. Demo stages.)

2007-02-15T17:34:00.000+08:00

Anneli Drecker, "You Don't Have To Change"/"My Emily" (2005)

Anneli Drecker doesn't get a lot of attention, despite being (1) Norwegian, and (2) a woman (3) working in electropop. You would think that with that combination, she would get mentioned in the same breath as Bertine Zetlitz, Annie, or Margaret Berger, and be already flayed and pickled in Xolondon's basement.

But then again, at 37, she is a bit older than at least the latter two songstresses, having been around since 1985 as the lead singer of Bel Canto, Norway's Cocteau Twins. (Indeed, Anneli was a judge on the season of Norwegian Idol from which Margaret emerged; Anneli was the person who awarded Ms. Berger the wild card that allowed her to move on and eventually become runner-up. Which suggests, if nothing else, that Anneli has impeccable taste and won't ever find herself dismissing a contestant who would go on to become an Oscar-nominated supporting actress, Simon.) Moreover, although Bel Canto has been pretty inactive since the late 90s, Anneli has only released two solo albums -- Tundra in 2000, and Frolic in 2005. That's not quite enough to catapult her into any kind of international, or even blog, limelight. If Anneli is known or recognized lately, chances are that it would be for working with a-ha (on Lifelines' "Turn The Lights Down," or on tour), or more likely for her vocals on Röyksopp's "Sparks."

Which is a bit of a pity. I've never managed to get my hands on Tundra, but Frolic is an overlooked album that I still enjoy large stretches of. Its first single should have been a huge hit: produced by Röyksopp, "You Don't Have To Change" is an ethereal stomper in the vein of "Poor Leno," only with added whistling. Electro-ballad "My Emily" is in many ways even better, mostly because it sounds like what we stereotypically want our Norwegian female pop to sound like: icy and unbearably emotional at the same time. The song was originally meant for an aborted Morten Harket solo album, and thus written with his "voice in [Anneli's] head". While Morten and his ~~girlie~~ powerful pipes would have likely done the song justice, it feels more interesting in Anneli's hands if only because her relationship to "Emily" is necessarily less defined. The song is so absolutely beautiful that I can hardly stand it.

Also: Since Bertine has come up in today's, and indirectly in Tuesday's post, can I ask what's been going on in Camp Zetlitz? I know she's pregnant, which accounts for the lack of promotion for (and thus far, a third single from) My Italian Greyhound. (And yet, weirdly enough, I only recently noticed that you can buy a "clean version" of the album on the US iTunes store.) But what are these rumors I hear about the next single being a duet, with Thom "Who The" Hell, of "Islands In The Stream," which you can in fact hear at her myspace page? A cover that does not at all show off Bertine's higher register, and thus feels lifeless and plodding? Why not release your own rewrite of "Islands" (aka "Get What You Deserve") instead, Bert?

2007-02-14T15:29:00.000+08:00

The Beautiful South, "Valentine's Day Wank" (2001)

Although my high school reunion a few weeks ago was surprisingly non-traumatic, it did make me wonder about the fine line between reminiscences and odd, unhealthy fixations. Befitting the event, many of us sat around at dinner playing the "hey, remember the time...?" game. It was fun and much of it hilarious, even if some of these memories were beginning to have a stale air about them, having been drudged up on such previous, but smaller-scale, occasions. (The time, in the middle of history class, when D. shrieked her conviction that a bug flew into her ear, and a certain class smart-ass remarked that she only needed to wait for it to crawl out the other side; a complicated running joke about M.'s supposed ping-pong prowess; the class production of Hamlet featuring the most deadpan reaction to Ophelia's death ever...)

But when L.Y. started going on and on about the nickname she gave me in those days, I found myself a little bit impatient. Part of it is that the name seemed, even then, so unimaginative: "cynical." (Hell, can an adjective really be a nickname anyway?) A lot of it was that I never recognized myself in that term; even if "cynical" is taken to mean, as it now clichédly does, "deeply emotional underneath that brittle exterior," it still was a woefully inadequately label then. And, if possible, even less applicable now, ___ years later. But I guess in it L.Y. held a particular memory of the person she thought I was -- but I never thought, or never wanted to be, true -- and, on occasions like these, the former always wins out.

And then sometimes I think she may have a point.

2007-02-13T16:52:00.000+08:00

Pleasure featuring Brett Anderson, "Back To You" (2007)

In "Back To You," Fred Ball enlists Brett Anderson to sing of being enslaved to a woman. She flicks her mane, and clicks her fingers, and these things have the potential to draw him to her. Have drawn him to her before, over and over. But in the moment of the song, at least, he is free of her. And in this rare moment of liberation, he resolves: "And when the lands slides/And when the planets die/That's when I come back, when I come back to you/And when the sun cools/And when the stars fall/That's when I come back, come back to you."

The song uses Brett's -- take your pick -- whiny/yearning voice perfectly. It's not a triumphant song about finally being free, but a bitter, despairing one that notices that freedom but nevertheless craves its end. Craves destruction. Although Brett sings about nothing less than an apocalytic end of the world (when plants die, stars cool, stars fall), supposedly the only event that would convince him to go back to her, we can tell that such a doomsday scenario would not be completely unwelcomed. Indeed, it may even be a wish. "Back To You" is in this sense the bleakest but most heart-wrenching version of an old expression, with an added sentiment: See you in hell. Can hardly wait.