Van Morrison - Sweet Thing
Sweet thing is a rare sort of song in two ways. One, it is sweet to the point of gorgeousness without being even the slightest bit sickening, a result that such ambition often yields. Two, it is pretty much entirely improvised, which I would have known by ear except that some of the moves are so strange, yet well-suited to the song, that I figured it had to have been composed in advance.
Kate Bush - Hounds of Love
My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow
Man, do those people (or their engineer) know how to make things completely unintelligible and fantastic.
U2 - Surrender
There have always been streets in Manhattan that never quite emptied out, but even eleven or twelve years ago, blocks that were not completely desolate by about 2:30 AM were very much the exception. It was around this period of my young life that I became obsessed with the devastating beauty of empty night city streets, and Surrender, of all songs, perhaps conjured for me the greatest number of images and scenes set therein.
David Bowie - China Girl
Sure, the video sucks big and sucks hard, but the song is a classic for all time.
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Breaking the Girl
The Peppers never have the greatest lyrics, but the instrumental portion of Breaking the Girl adds a poignancy and depth of meaning that is suggested—but not achieved—lyrically.
Mew - Pink Monster
I first found out about Mew in 1999 on "Burly Bear", an offshoot of MTV that was aimed at college kids. The video for I Should Have Been a Tsin-Tsi (for you), which probably aired once and was truly bizarre in its obviously ironic Chinese exoticism, made me want to hear more. Unfortunately, search engines of the day returned very little information about the band—not even a means to buy a record. With Pink Monster, I have found Mew again.
The Cure - A Forest
Tom Waits - Hang on St. Christopher
El Perro Del Mar - Candy
Brian Eno - St. Elmo's Fire
Velvet Underground - The Black Angel's Death Song
The best songs of the Velvet Underground are those in which the sounds of John Cale and Lou Reed achieve a balance, neither too arty nor too simple and repetitive. And what is apparently a bicycle pump really drives it home. [Eds—compare this version from the Velvet Undergound and Nico album to the Norman Dolph acetate version from last week's Other Indicators OK mix.]
B-52s - Legal Tender
Men at Work - No Restrictions
The Mountain Goats - This Year
A Brief View of the Hudson - Someone Else's Street
A band you likely don't know, but certainly should. Hear more (and buy songs) here.
Jimi Hendrix - Burning of the Midnight Lamp
Dr. John - Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya
Just feels like being in a swamp at night with torches burning, and not for any reason that can be explained away as easily as the reverb settings or the psychoacoustic depth of the mix—although these things help.
Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
This somwhow manages to represent perfectly all that is great in 80's pop without sounding like any other piece of 80's pop that I can think of. Combine this with its apparently low production value, and its greatness is almost inexplicable, yet undeniable.
Before 50 Cent, there were the Beatles.
No comments:
Post a Comment