Jens Lekman :: Black Cab
I’m going to smile and I’m going to like it.
I am going to sit on your overstuffed couch in “West Town”. I am going to feign excitement for this party. I am going to pretend to enjoy the massacre of a margarita you made in your blender. I am going to stare your dog in the face, and manufacture interest in touching his soggy mange ridden skin, and sloppy nose.
Oh, and when your friend who you think will really “have chemistry” with me, even though the only thing we have in common is being homos, touches my shoulder and winks, I am going to NOT throw up in my mouth. I am going to pretend the American Eagle Outfitter visor he is wearing and his constant use of the word “fierce” is cute. I am going to pretend I can tuck my snobbery into me - the malignant fucking anger I have for forced fun - when I am inconsolable and foul - I will hide so no one will be uncomfortable while they dip another chip into the powdered hummus you are serving.
And I am going try not to ruin the party for my friends. I am going to try not to vibe the room out with my radioactive rage and obvious disdain for everything around me. I am going to try not to be a fucking dick.
Sometimes you can’t cheer yourself up. Jens Lekman gets that. Sometimes you just dread the world. And you know, it’s actually ok.
The lyrics and tone in Black Cab are a bit incongruous. While Jens’ almost lackluster vocal performance lines itself up in tandem with the seemingly up-beat tempo, there is some weird polarity going on. Yes, he says:
“Don’t want to look this dead, don’t want to feel this dread.”
BUT - there is this weird pardon he accrues for his darkness. Because of the almost ambivalence with the positive and the negative, you kind of just take the song at face value. All he really wants to do is go home.
And I am going to pretend I never feel this way.
Black Cab (6.7MB MP3)
Jens Lekman (homepage)
Pavement :: Gold Soundz
To: Stephen Malkmus and Pavement
From: David Perez
Re: Gold Soundz
Dear Stephen-
There is no reason I should like your band. There is no reason I should love this song.
Your songs are constantly on the border of collapse. Sometimes I feel like you’re playing on a tight rope. Sometimes I feel like you’re fucking with me.
And the noise…is unabashedly turbulent. So rocky, you have to negotiate with yourself whether you think it’s music. And it is. It is music. Maybe in its purest form.
The first thing that strikes me is that YOU DID THIS. You decided it was OK to be almost frustratingly vague in your lyrics. You decided it was ok to have a song like 5-4=Unity, weird and sundry in its style, almost a dim sum of idioms on the same record as Gold Soundz. Gold Soundz —sweet, and self-centered—almost abusive of its creators:
It has a nice ring when you laugh
At the low life opinions
And they’re coming to the chorus now…
Despite the nice brittle poetry in this sentence… the historical context is unavoidable. Your reputation as a difficult if not self-contained collaborator is evident, and almost vindicated by the acknowledgment. Then, you motherfucker/genius… you change the narrative:
So drunk in the august sun
And you’re the kind of girl I like
Because you’re empty and I’m empty
And you can never quarantine the past.
The song instantly becomes deceptively sentimental.
I have to have a long talk with myself. I have to ask some hard questions. Why do I love your band so much? Why do I love this song?
Maybe it’s because, somewhere in that quiet/selfish head of yours you trusted us, and didn’t assume how smart or willing we are to devour this music. You let us decide if music could exist in this weird collision.
Maybe one day we will run into each other in the supermarket. You’ll be buying yogurt for your kids, I will be buying limes or something. I’ll sputter awkwardly about seeing you at Pitchfork, and how I like Trigger Cut so much. You will probably feign modesty, and get awkward and want to leave. And you won’t know that I am grasping for a tomato. I’ll clench it in my hand, and decide in that moment whether I throw it at you, or just kiss you on the mouth.
Gold Soundz (3.7MB MP3)
Pavement (label site)
the Zombies :: This Will Be Our Year
Imagine a world where wild optimism is a kind of currency. A place where all the flawed parts of who you are can be memories, not unsolvable obstacles. That love is not a pursuit, but something you want to give to someone. Someone whose skin is inches from yours. Imagine the world is constant, and doesn’t serve you the unpalatable. Imagine, that by some sort of cosmic miracle, the words you need to articulate this love, optimism, and solace with the past flow out of your mouth in some perfect melody.
Well, you’d have this song.
It makes me think of three years ago. I had this playlist I made after my brother died. Grief—like indescribable… epic and disastrous… like nothing I had experienced had flooded my life. The mix started with This Year by Mountain Goats, and ended with This Will Be Our Year by the Zombies. The mix, and forgive the sentiment, would make it so I could go to my job that I hated and not indulge in the dark parts of me that were creeping in. The songs, especially This Will Be Our Year made it so I could shoulder a terrible kind of pain. A reminder that things change for the good just as fast as they change for the bad.
I think when a song can fill your life with a sense of motion, it has done you a great service. We spend a lot of time letting songs that take you into cavernous places stand in the way of the ones that make your life better. But very few songs do that successfully without getting silly and saccharine. I can think of maybe two: Under Pressure definitely. And maybe Wilco and Billy Bragg’s California Stars. But these things are guided by a very sentimental taste… mine.
The Zombies do something remarkable… which is just tell a pretty and simple story. You have to admire the simple matter of fact nature of the lyrics. Devoid of artifice, not tempted to dazzle with vocabulary, it’s just a sweet song…a sort of quiet thank you… to someone or something that led you through a tempest.
If I could thank Chris White for this song, I would.
This Will Be Our Year (3MB MP3)
the Zombies (wikipedia)
Galaxie 500 :: Ceremony
It’s dark territory trying to unpack the kernel of this song. Maybe it’s the weird tenor in Dean Wareham’s voice, or the calamity of the lyrics and drums colliding in strange simpatico. Or maybe because it feels like a farewell. The song is asking you to explore the morose portions of yourself, or at least acknowledge them.
When I stumbled upon Galaxie 500 it was like finding out you’re adopted, but in a good way. Like, things start to make sense. The weird fiction that you are living in finally has this ‘thing’ to make it all palatable. Finally, there is something that matches the tone of who you are.
Someone at the restaurant I worked at accidentally put On Fire in my CD case, and when I got home and put the mysterious album into my discman (it was the 90s) I felt as though someone had boiled my taste to an essence. As if something like that could be taken beyond my body, beyond the privacy of my head.
TRUE STORY: All the songs on that album are great. When Will You Come Home is so sad, desperate and honest, and is a perfect example of how Wareham’s voice straddles the line of being unbearable, but for some cosmic reason it works. The other covers Isn’t It A Pity and Victory Garden are equally as successful in re-imagining a tune. And Strange captures a mania sometimes inexpressible.
Bold and lyrical, surrender and regret, discovery and loss, Ceremony accrues an enormous amount of substance by the sparse yet loaded lyrics. It gets uncomplicated towards then end, less informative, more cryptic, embedded with a sense of failure. I like to listen to this song, and imagine a world where psychic musicians play a score created just for you…
Ceremony (8.2MB MP3)
Galaxie 500 (wikipedia)
(note — song originally written by Joy Division, first recorded by New Order)