NAILED Songs of the Week #27
“We keep tearing down and building up”
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Shenyah Webb, Arts Editor of NAILED:
"Animal" -- Moon Duo
The sounds coming out of Moon Duo bring me back to the textures of what I have heard referred to as "doom and dance pop." You know the late 70s to mid 80s sound, influenced by the minimalist Krautrock genre -- Tones on Tail, Joy Division, Suicide. With the revival of analog synthesizers, it's no surprise that this sound would make its way back to today, and I am loving it! I find comfort in the repetitive riffs, psychedelic vocal influences, the poppy beats. Although their sound feels familiar, they collide many past genres into one and accomplish it so seamlessly. Check out Moon Duo's newest album Shadow of the Sun, just released in March of 2015 -- an amazing addition to any collection.
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Guest Editor, Adam Strong, Contributor at Noisehole:
"Depreston" -- Courtney Barnett
The song starts off simple. The pluck of an electric guitar; a spare, clean voice: “You said we should look out further,” Courtney Barnett sings. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt us.” The drums and bass kick in. Barnett’s voice is earnest, but there’s a mystery behind what’s being played. Then it hits me – the song is not so much about what’s being said, as it is about what’s not being said, about what’s in the house in Preston when we get there that makes it Depreston, or the “collection of those canisters for coffee tea and flour and a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam.” The lyrics bring up ghosts, things that came before.
And that’s when the sweet spot hits, this cool waterfall of a guitar pedal. It’s a tone I haven’t heard before, tweaked at just the right pitch. Then there’s the guitar solo, a sweet to go with the sad of years gone by. “If you've got a spare half a million. You could knock it down, and start rebuilding,” Barnett sings. And this chorus repeats, because that’s what happens: the old get trudged up by the new. Dig deep enough, and you can replace the lives of those who came before us with new ones, and this goes on and on forever. We keep tearing down and building up. Barnett gives us a telling detail here and there to construct a story around, mostly the unknown pieces of other people’s lives. It’s enough for a book, and it’s more than enough for a song.
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Kirsten Larson, Contributing Editor and Social Media Maven of NAILED:
“Beirut” -- Ibrahim Maalouf
The talented Ibrahim Maalouf was born in Beirut, but his family was forced to flee to Paris because of the Lebanese Civil War. Diasporas was his first album.
He composed this song on a 3-hour walk through bombed-out Beirut, trying to imagine what it would look like rebuilt; he was only 12 years old. He saw bodies being pulled out of rubble, got scared, and put "Stairway to Heaven" on his headphones. That was the influence for this haunting song.
Like most of his music, “Beirut” is a combination of jazz, rock, plus strains of Arabic influence. It’s a simple song, intimate, so close to his breath that you can hear sounds from his parting lips. There is a change at 8:00 when he opens up the full range of his horn, and adds a Zeppelin-like guitar riff. But it’s the extended notes that speak of grief to me. One sustained breath note after another, full of sadness and longing. Grief is the tax we pay for love. So there’s that in there too, love for Beirut.
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Matty Byloos, Publisher and Contributing Editor of NAILED:
"At Night in Dreams" -- White Denim
There's a moment in the film Buffalo 66 where Vincent Gallo's character walks into a strip bar and the whole world slows down as "Heart of the Sunrise" by the band YES queues up. Of course, it's mostly just an excuse for director Vincent Gallo to allow his audience more time with Vincent Gallo the actor's face, but it's the magic of the song, with the whole world slowed down, that ends up stealing the scene. Somewhere in that potent black magic moment, "At Night in Dreams" by White Denim is also born, a slightly evil, definitely muscular, half-glam half-prog, guitar-bluesy demonchild that takes on about nine different faces before you get to the end of its 4 minutes and 10 seconds of power.
With video game soundtrack insistence, we're thrust into a tempo that reeks of late night meth trips to the 24-hour Home Depot, looking for the world's most powerful tile grout cleaner, because there is much work to be done. Then the vocals come in, and I hear the Bay City Rollers, maybe a softer side of Kiss, and some newer bands who do some of the things that White Denim does with their music, but certainly not all of them, because this is one helluva range-y band. "At Night In Dreams" is a love song, to be sure, but it eschews the trite for a more modern version, which of course means, everything's made to break. "Sometimes it seems as if we could build a love to free us from pain / I know you think that it's easy to change but it's a symptom of age."
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Carrie Seitzinger, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of NAILED:
"Sad 2" -- Frankie Cosmos
This week I've been enjoying the Planet Earth series . . . until it gets to the parts when the animals die. A young elephant mistakenly wandering away from the pack, doomed to suffer thirst and die alone. I'm not even a vegetarian and I can barely sit through it when, after a rushing chase, the wolf snaps its teeth over the young caribou. Through watching the rawness of nature, I learned that I have a ton more respect for animals that brave the wild Wild than those bred for food, or maybe even companionship. Still, I infantilize my cats and will not easily accept their deaths, just as Frankie Cosmos laments the fatality of her dog, a passing that she cannot grasp. At least Frankie Cosmos can make light ("i just want my dog back / is that so much to ask?") of our feelings and attachments to these animals over the melancholy guitar and vocals. Kind of like making a joke in the middle of a long, hard cry. It's still pretty sad.
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