Sylvie Vartan :: Ne T’en Vas Pas
Sylvie Vartan and the Yé-Yé Sisterhood make me blush. Everything they touch feels raw and new, or at least new again.
Though I’d like it if this recording were live from a dingy mod club in Paris, she’d already made the Big Time when this LP first hit the turntables. Hers is a story of discovery that feels impossible today; while working at a record store on the Champs-Élysées, she’s asked to fill in for a no-show singer at her brother’s studio. She dashes out of the shop, tossing something to the floor, never to return to the life of the unknown.
And I blush again. In fact, I can say the same for nearly every other artist and movement mentioned in Susan Sontag’s cultural hall of fame, Notes on Camp. Campy art makes me blush, at least a little. The prude exhibitionist, the morose goof, the sensible dandy: the moment of clarity in the midst of contradiction. Those yé-yé singers have got it, to be sure. Just as Godard chose Chantal Goya to embody “the children of Marx and Coca Cola” in Masculin Feminin, so do Sylvie and the others catch something of the tension of the time. Their camp sensibility creates a place of disregard for the old boundaries, a place where humor, austerity, sex and repression converge.
The needle hits the vinyl. Heads bob and hips shake in tandem. The organ plays a sax solo while the saxophone keeps time. Paris 1963, exactly as I imagine it.
Ne T’en Vas Pas
Sylvie Vartan (wikipedia)
(Note — Song originally by Mel Tormé in 1962, I believe!)
Elyse :: Houses
when i was living in columbus, i partied at the “cleveland house” everyday. actually we were a lot like an asshole frat house. we became the epitome of what we hated… dude in chicken suit, non stop chanting, blow-up doll on the wall, filling the interior stair with snow and sledding out the front door, blah blah blah, etc. this band i was in played a show at a party there once, filled with total debauchery. the entire floor was soaked because of the snow we had packed in the house. and i swear to god i saw a couple making-out and then she puked in a houseplant and they immediately went back to frenching.
when i left, i had a suitcase filled with guitar pedals. the suitcase was heavy and black with sharp metal trimmed edges. the guitar pedals made it even heavier. so yeah, i’m leaving the party with some friends and the stairs to the front porch are a solid block of ice. so i take a step down ever so gently placing my foot on the ice below about five feet from some parked cars. whoop! i slip on the ice feet in the air arms flailing like a jackass. in mid air, my suitcase swings in full circle like Pete Townshend’s power windmill all the way around from behind me to the front. my ass hits the ice below, my head hits the curb and my suitcase with all my pedals swings around and slams me in the nuts. i slide across the ice underneath a parked pickup truck and was laughing so hard i peed my pants.
yeah, so this song is for the upcoming spring. it sounds like the sun setting, wearing sunglasses and leather jackets with fringe. Elyse is canadian, which is why the crying, wailing guitar is played by the one and only Neil Young, and backed by the band soon to become Touch. she sings with pure feel and without precision, making it seem like the whole band is playing inside of a barn on a Sunday afternoon just rehearsing. she sings “I’ve got my ticket in my hand and I’m bound for the promised land” and goddamn she means it. not americana, but canadiana.
Houses
Elyse (label site)
More information (In Music We Trust site)
(Elyse’s self-titled debut was reissued in 2001 by Orange Twin, an elephant six non-profit to fund a small village of artists. the original vinyl does not have this song on it.)
Namelessnumberheadman :: Animal Kingdom
All namlessnumberheadman records are heartbreakingly good. They break my heart with their shameless beauty and grace and they further break my heart because they are one of my bands. You have a few yourself, I’m sure. The bands you love like old friends, the bands you press on friends and strangers and anyone who will listen, the bands you cannot for the life of you believe that people aren’t showering with the love and adulation that should rightfully be theirs. I lived in Kansas for years but never saw them play and I feel like such a chump because of it. I saw a bunch of other damn bands that namelessnumberheadman keeps getting inexplicably compared to by lazy damn people who characterize midwest music like Mark Leyner once did its freeways: corn corn Stuckey’s corn corn Stuckey’s. And God knows I saw many a deadly dull band while this one was writing and playing some of the most original and inspiring music around, a perfect form of electronica-flavored orchestral pop. What the hell was I thinking?
Speaking of regrets, few bands voice them better. Wires Reply is a record that aches, and Animal Kingdom, despite its tense rhythms and lovely rising choruses, still sounds exactly like mourning for something precious long gone. The arrangement and playing is impeccable, but Andew Sallee’s voice is my favorite instrument. It’s so light and pure, so expressive and yearning. I could listen to him sing anything, but I’m glad he sings this:
Spider legs, cicada wings, and pulsing wet worms
Fingernails and petrified leaves’ veins
Cull the settled, well-spent parts
Tape the box to slow further decay
That’s a whole life laid to rest in a couple of lines. Animal Kingdom, along with so much of the rest of namelessnumberheadman’s catalog, proves conclusively that is possible to be both spare and lush at once, and modest and ambitious — and to carefully wring the best out of such contradictions. Listen to the song, and please seek out and listen to the rest of what this band has created. (I had the hardest time picking just one song from this record to give you, and once you hear it you’ll sympathize.) Soon enough, you’ll be another voice in the wilderness begging everyone you know to just listen to this band, already.
Animal Kingdom
namelessnumberheadman (myspace)
Eddie Holman :: Four Walls
Is it even possible that this is the same guy who sang us Hey There, Lonely Girl in that famous (and, in my view, heinous) falsetto? Well, Four Walls is a different species of song.
I think I love this tune because Eddie’s got his heartbroken-but-still-strong balance down so superbly: he’s the perfect degree of desperate, but so damn confident about declaring that desperation. He’s begging, sure, but he’s not pathetic. The pleas come off as firmly as commands. I’ll put it this way: Eddie Holman is not ashamed to want his woman back.
And those cello grunts in the background? And that minor chorus with the major breakthrough? I’ve listened to this song so many times it’s ridiculous. It continues to do me right, just as I suspect Eddie Holman would.
Four Walls
Eddie Holman (homepage, note — autoplays music)
Elvis Costello & the Attractions :: Beyond Belief
No decent person admits to the lists of songs in their head, but some indecent people have them. My problem is, I only have four lists:
- Songs That, At Some Point, I Listened To, Compulsively
- Songs That Break My Heart
- Songs From the Car
- Jamz That Move My Ass
This is one of the first songs I literally could not stop listening to: Beyond Belief by Elvis Costello & the Attractions, from Imperial Bedroom, an album that should be studied for all eternity, owing to its mix of awesome transcendence, and horrible, horrible crap. Lots of songwriters try to make you feel things but Elvis Costello doesn’t care how you feel: he sings glossy words in a bottomlessly detached voice and suddenly you’re an American spy in Saigon trading sex for secrets, secrets for lies, with a rose in your filthy hair and money where your heart once was. Wait. I’ve said too much.
Beyond Belief
Elvis Costello (homepage)
Pulp :: Mis-Shapes
A message to those unfortunate not to have already caught Pulp-fever: roll up your sleeve, throw away your rabies vaccinations, and please allow me to bite you.
Marching though a triumphant musical arrangement and lyrics that amazingly rise to the occasion, Mis-Shapes virtually commands the listener to get a fist out and start pumping.
It’s okay to have a brain!
It’s okay to be a misfit!
Like Bowie said, “Oh no love, you’re not alone!”
Goosebumps form. My mouth foams. Occasionally, a weird moisture accumulates in my eyes. But it is the perfectly simple guitar solo at 2:30 that really kills me.
Brothers, sisters can’t you see?
Mis-Shapes
Pulp (PulpWiki site)
Jesu :: Conqueror
there are some things that i’ve just never been able to take sides on. but since there’s nothing quite as offensive as the fence sitter, my tastes have sought out—since as early as i can remember, really—that which lives in the margins. now don’t you worry there; this is no ode to obscurity (though maybe one to extremes). i don’t for a moment doubt that many of you rest your black metal epics nonchalantly next to twee sixties bubblegum romps and hallucinogenic teutonic dirges. but how often do you hear your musical worlds collide on one record, and so perfectly? friends, i’d like to introduce to you: Jesu.
it’s really quite simple. so much so in fact, that i almost can’t believe it wasn’t done before. sure we’ve had the LOUD and the *beautiful* before, but were Codeine or My Bloody Valentine ever quite so brutal? ah, to have been privy to this eureka moment! disciples of the heavy-slow and the fast-fast will surely genuflect at the name Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Napalm Death), but that needn’t put anyone else off. because who hasn’t before felt at once so radiant and yet, oppressed? music for the fiendish and forlorn. but for man or for monster? i think we are both.
Conqueror
Jesu (homepage)
Califone :: Quarter Horses (B-Slow)
Come when you come. Slow angels lose.
Some believe it most pure
as it approaches the condition
of music. The poem as some fledgling
wren struggling to take flight, its wings
blurring air, as if trying to shake free
from its own body, the weight
of which stands for meaning, to escape
the hard dirt and its thin wire
of horizon splitting sense from song,
earth from sky. And the bird wants
only sky, the kind of endlessness
in which a cry represents nothing,
or the only thing, and carries for miles.
I’ve always been skeptical. Always
the earnest one who loved the hushed
story of the wings—the panic, the urgency.
It makes a different kind of music,
as rare as the birdsong born of it.
And so what to make of my long love
for Tim Rutilli’s genius? I first heard
it as blues from the bottom of a bottle
of Robitussin. That guitar’s signature
twang and bent sustain. The words
refracted from the salons of Europe’s
early twentieth century. Such distances
from those first Red Red Meat LPs,
those postcards with the rumble
of Camaros, jaundiced grins.
Now music familiar only because
it haunts, and hints of another life,
a songbird assembled from spare feathers,
tape, hollow bones. A terrible likeness.
The eyes like oil stains. The voice lifts
into chorus. The throat strains.
The body somehow warm,
though it weighs almost nothing.
Quarter Horses (B-Slow)
Califone (homepage)
(note — a different version of this song originally appears in 1997 on Red Red Meat’s There’s a Star Above the Manger Tonight).
(Smog) :: Say Valley Maker
Maybe it’s because all my life I’ve been encouraged to imagine my wedding or my children or my first house. While I’m preoccupied with the start of a life, a well framed death-dream fascinates me, stings me with exotic beauty.
In our one life, we may have many resurrections. We all have felt former selves fade. Old situations become frozen, while we, newly mobile step out of them in fresh shined shoes to shake off the last bits of that skin. We can learn that perfection is not the path to love. And we can be triumphant, rascally corpses who ride atop frothy drum fills into a ferocious new day.
Say Valley Maker
(Smog) (myspace page)
Dr. Dog :: The Girl
I don’t know anything technical about music beyond what I learned in high school symphony band, but here goes my first effort writing about a song I like very much.
Dr. Dog is one of those bands I had to listen to a few times before I could even form an opinion about them. The Girl is the kind of song I didn’t even hear until about the third or fourth play. It’s steeped in what I’d like to call 80’s “dad pop”, easily getting lost amongst the folksy goodtime/bad-time 70’s throwback tracks that fill out the rest of We All Belong.
And so it begins with a jangly repetition of “one, two, one-two-three-four”, evoking those psychedelic Sesame Street number counting segments that feature rolling marbles and disco lights. What follows is gritty, dare I say… Don Henley gritty: the melody sways like a pendulum through lyrics like, “living dirty lies” and “break into the church to burglarize the father”. It sounds dangerous, almost sinister… until, by way of the chorus, the title “girl” in question appears and shines a light through the protagonist’s darkness. Usually a happy chorus plunked into what I think starts off as a perfectly good dirge pisses me off (i.e. every single hit by The Police), but this one’s chock-full of harmony and capped off by an awful yowl that brings you back down into the grime before things get too sugary.
After one of my favorite lines (“diggin’ up the dead and expecting them to dance, dance, dance”) leads into the second chorus, spare percussion and delicate piano tinkling gives way to a horn-like wail that jerks you into outer space. The guitar (and keyboard?) parts wrap around each other and slither into a sexy smooth riff that sounds like it belongs in a particularly dramatic episode of 21 Jump Street. It makes me want to slip on a jean jacket and step into the night with the seemingly hundreds of layered voices that enter and end the song with an anthemic march.
In conclusion, The Girl rules.
the Girl
Dr. Dog (homepage)