Songs of the Week #18- Editors Pick
“What the fuck is this?”
SHENYAH:
“Tinnitus” -- I’m in You
With the very recent release of this Brooklyn based band’s 3rd full-length album, I discovered them. It only took one listen of their music for me to be completely hooked. There is something familiar about them, especially this single – perhaps it’s their name? This song has such a comforting balance of movement, melody, builds, solid instrumentation paired with just the right amount of synthetic sound. I mean, that violin and those vocals! Repeat!
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ROY:
"Young Lions" -- The Constantines
Sometimes I just need a driving, call-to-action anthem to get my blood going. I need a gravely voiced dude to tell me the world is mine for the taking. I need electric guitars as exclamation points. I need chugging bass and stuttering drums. I need a world-weary bastard imploring, "make your love too wild for words." Sometimes I just need a fucking ROCK song. Deal with it.
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JOHN:
"Stoned and Starving" -- Parquet Courts
Sometimes I want all the lush beauty of British sixties music infused with today's pavement induced melancholia, or something. Anyways, the guys in this band called Parquet Courts tear it up on the entire record. Not a bad song in the batch. "I was walking through Ridgewood Queens/ I was flipping through magazines/ I was so stoned and starving." Its music simply feels so right that the world melts away and all is momentarily good.
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STEPHEN:
"Collide With the Tide" -- Chin Up Chin Up
Whatever natural disasters you do not grow up with always seem terrible: I could never understand how people just lived through hurricanes or tornadoes year after year like they were nothing. But then I'd meet people not from the west coast and they'd feel the same way about earthquakes, as if every single one was shattering thirty story glass window panes in crystallized downpours of destruction, like they were all 9.5 on the Richter or something and gulfed freeway on-ramps. Like the bay bridge collapsed more than one measly time. Every time. Really though most earthquakes are like surfing, the ground maybe ripples for a minute and you kind of wobble your arms a bit and throw up a Shaka if you're really insensitive and then you just get back to living your normal sort of boring life that doesn't periodically shake everything up.
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CARRIE:
"Fingers Never Bleed" -- Yeasayer
Someone told me that, in order to write the album Fragrant World (which begins with the track "Fingers Never Bleed"), Yeasayer took a bunch drugs in the jungle and jammed... I have thought that was true until today when I tried to find this information online, and it appears they wrote the album, sober, in Brooklyn. When I first bought the record and played it I grimaced, "What the fuck is this?" There was something about the electric rhythms and effects that rubbed me over, like an abrasive towel, or a warm bath that someone just threw the hairdryer in. I put it away for at least six months. When I listened to it again, I beamed, "What is this glorious alien stepchild of indie pop that has been collecting dust on my shelf?" I have dunked under in that charged bathtub, and truly love the whole album, and every time I listen to it I think what a revelation art is, especially when you are on drugs, in the middle of a jungle.
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