7 posts tagged “pop”

How's Monday treating you? Mine presented me with 5:30am dogshit cleanup and a dead car battery. Then there was work...so here's a song about that.

You know Elvis Costello, right? Sort-of-but-not-really punkish icon of British rock/pop, revived the chunky Buddy Holly glasses look basically single handedly (and anyone who mentions Rivers Cuomo here gets bitch-slapped, OK?), thumbed his nose at SNL and their parent corporation on live television, produced the first Specials album, worked with everyone from Burt Bacharach to No Doubt...what hasn't he done?

So yeah, the debut track from his first album has one of the best masturbatory euphemisms I've ever heard ("Now that your picture's in the paper / Being rhythmically admired..."), and it should be mandatory listening every Monday morning.

This is a shitty radio rip of the new Björk single, "Earth Intruders", from her forthcoming album, Volta. Sounds very Post-ish to me, with forceful vocals and plenty of synth riffs (the production on this track is by Timbaland, oddly enough). I can't wait to hear it in it's full glory, when the single is released this week.

Rock Opera gets a bad rap. There's certainly some bad examples of the genre out there, but the truly great moments make up for all the cruft, in my opinion. If Genesis and Andrew Lloyd Webber are the price I have to pay to hear "A Quick One While He's Away" and "Bohemian Rhapsody", I think I can live with that.

The Fiery Furnaces may not exactly write rock operas, but many of their expansive, attention-deficit disordered tracks certainly borrow their traits. This is probably the closest they come to an outright entry into the genre, with an 8 minute opus with lyrics seemingly about small town high school gossip and drama. The stream of conciousness narrative turns are almost as bewildering as some of the hairpin tempo changes in the music. As frustrating and obtuse as this band can sometimes be, they manage to knock it out of the park on this one. It's a concept album condensed to a single song.

A surefire runner-up in the "bands with misleading names" competition, John Yoko is the side project of Valerie Trebeljahr (of Lali Puna) and Markus Acher (also of Lali Puna, as well as the Notwist and the Tied & Tickled Trio). So far, the duo have only released one seven inch, containing two stripped-down cover songs.

This track is a rather faithful take on a track from the Magnetic Fields magnum opus 69 Love Songs, "Papa Was A Rodeo." They've taken the tears-in-the-beer country ballad feeling of the original and dressed it up with some low-budget drum machine and organ sounds. The flipside of the record has a similarly lo-fi version of "The Morning Paper," by Bill Callahan (AKA Smog). The record is back in print now, after a brief period as a rarity. This particular rip is not exactly perfect, as there are a few skips (most notably in the second verse, eliminating a whole line of lyric), but it's difficult to find a good rip of this release. I may just have to make my own someday!

Oddly enough, when I was choosing this song, I had iTunes on shuffle, and when it was through playing, the next song was "Oh Yoko!" by John Lennon. Creepy. Between this and the recent power outage fiasco, I'm starting to think there's something weird going on...

The Sacramento three-piece Electro Group practically redefines the term "power trio" in live performance. Their completely fuzz-damaged take on indie pop features buzzsaw basslines, guitars that sound like several appliances malfunctioning at once, crash cymbals that wash over the entire mess, and vocals that barely peek out from behind the cacophony. Yet, somehow, they make it all sound pretty and, dare I say, catchy as well.

"Line of Sight" comes from their debut home-recorded full length, A New Pacifica, which was released by Sacramento-based Omnibus records in 2001. The band went on to release a couple of singles and a follow-up EP in recent years, but they seem to have disappeared into the wilds of Central California at some point.

Omnibus Records was home to several amazing bands for a while there, and had a hand in getting a few of today's prominent indie bands started. Mates of State released their first few 7" singles, as well as their debut album, My Solo Project, on Omnibus, and the band Flake Music also made their home there before turning into The Shins. There will be more songs from lesser known Omnibus bands posted here soon...

How about some long-lost Beck demos today? Sounds good to me.

"Untitled" is one of two songs released under the name Mr. Hansen on a split 7" inch with J Church and The Phantom Pregnancies in 1995. The sounds quality is low, even by the standards of other early Beck material like Stereopathetic Soul Manure. In other words, be prepared for lots of tape hiss. But what shines through the analog fog is the outline of a great, tightly wound pop song that, with some re-recording and a little TLC, would probably be right at home on any recent Beck release.

(Originally found at the ill-ec-tro-nic, which I recommend highly. If you like this track, check the link. The other song from this 7" might still be available for download there.)