Songs of the Week #9- Editors Pick
“this tape played while I was carjacked”
SHENYAH:
“I Dreamed I Dream” -- Sonic Youth
This album will eternally fuck with me, I still love it though. This is from their first self-titled Sonic Youth album recorded in 1982. The album lends a much more primitive and basement sound than their later albums. Many years after its release, this tape played while I was carjacked in Detroit. A woman with a gun to my head, spouting bible verses. A woman I gave dollars to earlier that night so she could make it to her dying mother in the hospital, a woman who really just needed a fix. This is one of the songs that I particularly remember. In transit to her crack dealer, I managed to escape. I jumped from behind the wheel of the moving car and ran without looking back, waiting for a bullet to pass through me. Luckily my work heels had rubber soles, luckily my instincts knew to just keep running. All I could hear was the wind hard against my face, my heavy breathing and this song imprinted from moments before. “Fucking youth, Working youth...Working youth...All the money's gone.” I believe this song kept me calm and saved my sanity during such a fucked up experience.
+ + +
MATTY:
"Clash the Truth" -- Beach Fossils
There's a certain sound that I hear sometimes in music, one that reminds me of a lot of Brit-pop from the early 90's. The reference points recall chorus-y, melodic guitar lines that tend to repeat small phrases over and over. I hear it all in this song from Beach Fossils, and I loved it right away. The cognitive maps in my brain for music function something like this: I've got thousands of single phrases from thousands of songs in my brain. When I hear a new piece of music, often a set of notes will sound familiar, and though it can take a while to figure out what set of notes is echoing a similar set of notes from another song (often completely of a different era or genre or both), I usually figure it out after a while. This one was tough. The opening notes of the song were completely evoking another song's intro, and I could not for the life of me figure it out. And then I did. Listen to the Beach Fossils first, and then switch over to "Pretty Vacant" by the Sex Pistols. While not the same exact phrase, the similarity in mood and style is there (whether the reference is intended or not), and it's lovely.
+ + +
CARRIE:
"You Came to Me" -- Beach House
This song sort of creeps me out. I love the eerie quality of the piano and the vagueness of the lyrics. It puts me in an odd place, and I think that it's a special experience when art can take you to something new. And the funny thing is that the first time I listened to it in 2008, it was familiar, like I had heard it in my childhood. The last verse and music towards the end really produce a dreamscape and a feeling of floating outside of the body, and the lyrics become jibberish, and that seems absolutely perfect, really.
+ + +
ROY:
"Life in a Glass House" -- Radiohead
On an album otherwise dominated by electronic sounds, this song emerges at the end like an analog rebirth -- all horns and stunted, jazzy rhythm, Thom Yorke singing opaque lyrics that still manage to hint at the themes of the previous ten songs, and that clarinet losing its fucking mind. As a closer for Amnesiac, it's perfect, but it also stands well on its own as a strange little tune.
+ + +
JOHN:
"Mama's Gonna Give You Love" -- Emily Wells
Emily Wells cast a spell with her sultry, playful, mature voice, teasingly erotic in all of its spectacular intonations. I can put this song on repeat and pleasure myself for hours. Is there much more you want from a singer or her song? Besides company?
+ + +