July, 2012 - The World That's Coming

July 17, 2012July 17, 2012

366 Songs 192: Jubilee (Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around)

Easily my favorite track of the (rather impressive) new Bobby Womack album, “Jubilee” mixes an old-school spiritual vocal format with an especially inorganic backing – Part of me thought, at first, that this was definitely one of the Damon Albarn-produced tracks, because of the clear “cheap drum machine” aesthetic in the backing, but as we get the synth cymbals at the end, I’m not so sure – to create something that feels timeless and universal, bringing generations together with some kind of hymn to self-belief and humanity. Even if the structure of this was not so compelling, though, Womack’s voice would still stop me in my tracks. The man sounds incredible; this song does, too.

July 17, 2012July 17, 2012

366 Songs 191: The Real Thing

And here’s to reworking/detourning advertising jingles. DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist’s Product Placement is a really enjoyable album, fucking around with found material created to sell you things and turning it into something that’s as much commentary on that as it is music in its own right. From that, “The Real Thing” is likely my favorite track; it’s actually one of the more straightforward mash-ups on the album, just two different versions of “It’s The Real Thing,” the most famous one by the New Seekers and the genuinely amazing Ivor Raymonde Orchestra one from the early 1970s. For the most part, the Raymonde Orchestra version carries the whole thing, and you can understand why when you listen to the original:

Seriously, how great is that? Cheesy, yes, but just awesome. Listen to that drum break at 2:16!

For completeness, here’re the New Seekers:

That has a charm in itself, doesn’t it…? With those ingredients, how could any musical cake fail to be delicious? Much tastier than Coke, that’s for sure.

July 17, 2012July 17, 2012

Reading The Tea Leaves For Real

I’ve recently decided that I should look into reading tea leaves. This isn’t a joke, as much as a passing thought; I’ve been drinking loose-leaf tea for months, and always have leaves left at the bottom of the cup, so I figure maybe the fates are trying to tell me something that I’ve been missing out on all this time. The Internet tells me that it’s called “tasseography,” or even more excitingly “tasseomancy,” and that seems like something I would happily claim as a part-time career. “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I’m a writer, but on the side I dabble in tasseomancy.”

July 17, 2012July 17, 2012

366 Songs 190: The Number Song

For some reason, I remember this being the soundtrack of the year of my Masters degree, or at the least the end thereof. I’m not sure if history actually agrees with me on that; I suspect it may have been released after that year of weirdness and discomfort was over, but I don’t want to ruin things with reality by checking. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… was a frustrating album for me, in large part because it didn’t have the ADD kineticism and intensity of this song all the way through – Although part of me wonders how listenable an album it would’ve been if it had – but this remains the one DJ Shadow track that will forever justify his entire career for me. I adore this track, with its single-minded purpose to make you want to shake your butt and the off-kilter way it goes around making sure that happens.

Also spectacular: Cut Chemist’s remix, which adds more old-school R&B (especially those horns):

July 16, 2012July 16, 2012

366 Songs 189: Once Around The Block

There’s something so appealing about the way that this song sounds so dated in every way aside from the lead vocal: The multi-tracked guitars sound like something from the 1970s, and the backing vocals sound like a Swingle Singers recording that never got released, but they work so well together it’s all forgiven. Add Damon Gough’s warm, lackadaisical vocal over the top, and what you have left is a sweet, somewhat sloppy, song that sounds like something you can’t quite remember, which is pretty much its best selling point.

July 16, 2012July 16, 2012

366 Songs 187/188: I Was Wrong/You Were Right

These are, officially, two songs despite the fact that they’re obviously meant to be listened to together (Note that the first line of “You Were Right” starts “And you…” as the continuation of the last sentence from “I Was Wrong”). Damon Gough’s musical career has been filled with more than enough missteps and wrong turns than most, and the album that these songs come from (Have You Fed The Fish?) feels like it was the start of that tendency; even in these two songs – specifically “You Were Right,” which is the more substantial of the two – there’s a meandering quality and aimlessness to everything here, underneath the lush strings and excitement of the performance. The song is the musical equivalent of someone telling a story, adding “And then!” after every event, giving the thing a breathlessness and monotony that it doesn’t really deserve. Despite that, though, there’s a nice goodwill to this song, as with most Badly Drawn Boy songs. You want to like it, because it’s nice and you get the idea that Gough is a good guy, under everything.

(Worth pointing out: Gough lifted lines from this song and spun them out into a completely different song on the same album, which is either genius or a sign of creative exhaustion. That other song, “Tickets to What You Need” is also a lot of fun, another of the good songs from Have You Fed The Fish?:

How genuine, I wonder, were the repeated “What’s wrong with me?”s in this song, at the time…?)

July 16, 2012July 16, 2012

“Unnoticed – or at least Unheeded”

He saw quickly that the indifferent gaze of the Street View camera randomly recorded what he called (in one of the series resulting from this discovery) Unfortunate Events: altercations and accidents, pissings and pukings, fights and fatalities. The Street View cars usually go about their business unnoticed – or at least unheeded – but occasionally people respond to their all-seeing presence by giving them the finger (hence the title of another of Wolf’s series, FY). And so Wolf combed through mile after uneventful mile of boring footage in search of moments that might or might not prove decisive

– Geoff Dyer, writing about the Google Street View-excerpting work of artist Michael Wolf.

July 15, 2012July 15, 2012

366 Songs 186: I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City

If you’re thinking “This song sounds really familiar…” then that’s no accident; Harry Nilsson wrote and recorded it as something close to a rip-off of his cover version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin'”, pretty much. There was a particular reason why, of course: In the early ’70s, the makers of the movie Midnight Cowboy had, apparently, issued something resembling an open call for submissions for its theme song during its post-production phase to replace Nilsson’s version of “Everybody’s Talkin'” – used as musical stand-in during editing – for Academy Award purposes before final release. Hoping to land a lucrative deal with a song he’d actually written, Nilsson created this song to be an as-close-as-dammit contender. For whatever reason, it didn’t take – Also created for this reason, and also discarded, was Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” fact fans – and the moviemakers stuck with “Everybody’s Talkin'” for the final release. From my point of view, it was the wrong choice: I’ve always had this odd relationship with the song “Everybody’s Talkin'” – I’ve kind of liked it, but there’s always been something about it that never quite sat right with me. Thankfully, there’s this song to swoop in and save the day, providing everything I like about the Nilsson version but adding a melody and lyric that I appreciate more. I think it’s the wonderful fall during “Well, here I am Lord, knocking at your back door…” (I can’t hear that part without mentally singing along “bum bum bum BUM”).

July 15, 2012July 15, 2012

366 Songs 185: Your Reverie

I suspect that the phrase “lo fi” would/should be used in connection with Kelley Stoltz’ music; there’s something charmingly simple and shambolic about it, retro – that riff, for some reason, feels like it could be something from a Beatles song before the days of Rubber Soul – but there’s also a touch of early Elvis Costello in there, especially with the organ in the mix. Originality isn’t the buzzword here; that seems to be “earworm,” like so many of Stoltz’ songs. He’s more of a magpie than a creator, but his thievery is done in such a way that it feels disarming and worthy, in some way.