Songs of the Week #21- Editors Pick
“like a funky monster of total love dominance”
CARRIE:
"Crockpot" – Slothrust
A Brooklyn band fronted by Leah Welbaum, whose album Of Course You Do releases February 18th, 2014. Pretty wholehearted Rock-n-Roll that reminds me a little of the Pixies, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Pavement. They do a good, almost satirical cover of The Beatles' "Happy Together." Catch their release show at the Brooklyn's Shea Stadium on February 21st if you can.
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REYNA:
“Space Travel Is Boring” – Sun Kil Moon
I used to be a mega-fan of Modest Mouse. I remember hearing a song on the college radio station KSPC, out of Claremont, California, in 1998, and falling into instant love. I hadn't heard anything quite like it. I worshiped, studied, and memorized anything they recorded up to The Moon and Antartica, before I fell off. The Sun Kil Moon album of Modest Mouse covers is one of the best things since Modest Mouse. Mark Kozelek lends a completely different mood to these songs. The sadness of the lyrics is realized through the way that they are drawn out, slowly, and allowed examination. This is one of the most drastically transformed (and theart-wrenching) covers on the Tiny Cities album.
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ROY:
"Something Is Pressing Against it From the Inside" – Long Legged Woman
It's hard to choose a representative song from Long Legged Woman's swan song album, Nobody Knows This is Nowhere. Three-and-a-half singers/songwriters and a handful of versions of chaos make it tough to pin down what exactly makes the album so great, but this song captures a lot of the threads. That clanky, driving verse with its off-key but somehow still catchy and borderline melodic singing trotting along to a sudden shift into a swaggering chorus with a swaying, nearly anthemic vocal. Then that horn-like guitar lead comes in and things start to get all Neutral-Milk-Hotel-huffing-paint.The whole thing is slightly out of tune and off, and only after a couple listens do you realize it's a GODDAMN POP SONG. Subversive.
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STEPHEN:
"Nightwater Girlfriend" – Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
The true beauty of hills is that you can stand at the top of one and feel like a king or duke or at least a really important guy of some type. I doubt you can really understand it if you're from a really flat place like the Midwest. Like if your largest hill is twenty feet or so of soft lumped earth, that shit ain't cutting. The true top of the hill feeling is like hundreds of fireworks exploding from the center of your body as the wind whips up your hair into something truly magical and your shadow looms over everything below like a funky monster of total love dominance. And of course once you feel all that, you just straight up roll down that shit like a boss. Like I just got this hill pregnant.
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JOHN:
"The Great Gig In The Sky" – The Flaming Lips & Peaches
I can pretty much do without ever really listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, but I'll be damned if the Flaming Lips didn't hit a home run with their full album cover of the seminal LP. The highlight for me is "The Great Gig in the Sky," sung by, surprisingly to me, Peaches. I will go to the mat for Peaches after hearing this rendition. I must admit I prefer it over the original. I love when an artist surpasses expectations in such an original, understated way. Props to the Lips for recognizing in Peaches what I didn't.
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