NAILED Songs of the Week #47
“Some music is out to get you.”
Matty Byloos, Publisher and Contributing Editor of NAILED:
“Risto’s Riff” – Moonface and Siinai
Some music is out to get you. Some songs have a target on your back. There’s sniper in them. Virus. “Risto’s Riff” starts there, a thousand pencil marks on paper that ends with everything the color of graphite, more black than black. It’s a song that names its first born Relentless and unleashes it upon the world. The 80s are happening again in music, a rebirth. It shows up in the space around the lead vocal, the wash of reverb and how everything drives toward the same tiny point in the distance. This isn’t a world that’s been created, it’s a mode of transport that moves too fast to jump off.
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Carrie Seitzinger, Editor-in-Chief of NAILED:
“Spirit” – Love’n’Joy
This kaleidoscopic, chilled out rock hails from Ukraine. It suits the warm carelessness of summer. Put it on and it will jam along wherever your day takes you.
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Shenyah Webb, Arts Editor of NAILED:
“Get Out” – Frightened Rabbit
“Get Out” is a beautiful commentary on unrequited love. Although it stands across any context, as good songs do, this video really hit home with me. Like most teen-age girls, crushing on boys with my girlfriends was typical; I liked the feminine ones with the soft features. Deep down I wanted to be like the boys, I wanted the girls to like me. It was an ongoing struggle to make sense of my desires.
We would hold each other and whisper fantasies in bed about them, be messengers for each other, give advice like we had it. Perfectly normal. Sometimes the fantasies would lead to role-play. I liked this. A lot. We would kiss, hold each other, masturbate side by side. I eventually had sex with one of them. Just once.
They always wanted it to be secret. As age grew us apart, it became increasingly difficult to suggest playing “boyfriend-girlfriend” and I finally grew the courage to be with a boy. Like the girl who stole my heart, he had a widow’s peak. Like the girl who stole my heart, we traded clothes and kisses.
Frighten Rabbit’s 2016 release Painting of a Panic Attack is a solid album from start to finish. It’s straightforward and emotionally rich. Filled with lyrical mastery, it paints vivid tales of honest reflection; heartache, addiction, displacement, loss, love, recovery… A must listen for the human soul.
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Guest Editor: Brian S. Ellis, Poet and Author (most recently of Often Go Awry, 2015)
“Hermit” – Cloud Becomes Your Hand
CBYH has an engine in their sound, a furious movement. They charge fully, gleefully and a little dangerously, into their music. Their sound is different, but not for difference’s sake. I like to think that this music is normal, somewhere, that there is some place in the world where CBYH is the most boring top 40 music available. I carried a piano on LSD with the violin player in this band once.
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Check out Songs of the Week #46 for even more great music from the editors and contributors behind NAILED.