First of May by Jonathan Coulton, because it is that time of year again!
(Though maybe not in New York, where it has been pouring with rain for two days straight. Perhaps when the ground dries out a bit!)
This is less about the song (though it is good) or the video (though it is also good) than it is to tell all of you that the Pet Shop Boys put out a new record, called Electric, in 2013, and are in the process of touring on it.
I caught the last show of the most recent leg here in New York. I didn’t take any pictures because we were on the second balcony at T5 and all I could really see was the parts of the lazer show and some bright lights amid the smoke machine fog.
I could hear them just fine, though, and they sounded great.
But better than just hearing them was being part of the dance parties that broke out during Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) and It’s a Sin, and sing-shouting along to West End Girls with strangers while realizing it’s one of those songs written on all of our bones.
On the whole, it was a fabulous evening.
![Pet Shop Boys - Axis [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/IDCU17wXktY/0.jpg)
Blue Smoke, due out May 20, 2014, is Dolly Parton‘s 42nd studio album.
Sit back and let that sink in, y’all.
It’s vintage Dolly Parton, in the sense that it might not break any new ground, sonically, but yet contains multitudes. No matter which Dolly Parton you like – sassy, sexy, silly, sweet, or bent on saving you – there is something here for you.
My Favorites: Unlikely Angel and From Here to the Moon and Back (with Willie Nelson)
On the other side of the I Will Always Love You coin is this song about a love that arrives late and unexpectedly, after all hope had been thought lost. The chorus has wormed it’s way into my brain and refused to leave. I suspect it will become the go-to wedding song for people who never expected to be able to be married either at all or ever again.
From Here To the Moon and Back, which she shares with Willie Nelson (and originally appeared on To All The Girls . . . (2013), wherein he sang duets with some of the finest ladies in country music today) is probably also destined to be a popular wedding song. This is partially because if you wanted to, you could recite the lyrics as vows with only a little bit of tweaking, and partially because they sound so beautiful together. A little weathered, a little worn; their years are in their voices now, but that doesn’t dim the shine. I realize some of you just can’t think of Willie Nelson as anything other than a sweet old man, but there was a time when he was a handsome blue-eyed menace with a rebel glint in his eye – arguably that time was this morning – and this song summons that man back.
Unexpected Covers: Don’t Think Twice (Bob Dylan) and Lay Your Hands On Me (Bon Jovi)
It is my suspicion that one thing Miss Dolly loves is causing people to pull out their music listening devices and mutter “Is that . . . is she . . . what the hell?” On Backwoods Barbie (2008), she dragged You Drive Me Crazy by the Fine Young Cannibals out of mothballs, added some fiddle and country swing, and it was glorious. This time around her choices and the results are a little more uneven.
Don’t Think Twice actually works pretty well; she retains the snappy kiss-off spirit while infusing it with country soul and a wry weariness that gives it all new life.
Lay Your Hands On Me, on the other hand, has been – very minorly – rewritten and made into a praise song. Your feelings about this will depend entirely on how attached you are to the decidedly sexier original. I myself experience a mixture of déjà vu (Bon Jovi was subverting a common religious theme, after all) and cognitive dissonance (for me, the double subversion leads to Very Sexy Jesus, which, no) every time it comes on and so I tend to skip it.
Weepers: You Can’t Make Old Friends (with Kenny Rogers) and Miss You, Miss Me
You Can’t Make Old Friends originally appeared on Rogers’ 2013 album of the same name. In it, they contemplate their own mortality and the end of their lifetime of friendship and duets. It is unbearably sad and as much as I love them individually and together I refuse to let it get much of a toehold in my reality. As far as I’m concerned they’ll be alive and well and singing Islands in the Stream forever.
That said, here is the video. Grab the tissues, you’ll need them:
![Kenny Rogers - You Can't Make Old Friends (duet with Dolly Parton) [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/chBNBzE35EI/0.jpg)
Miss You, Miss Me is basically a coda to Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E from POV of the child in the middle and I have nothing nice to say about it.
Get’em Girl: Blue Smoke and Lover du Jour
The songs where Dolly Parton tells some man to shove it are my very favorite Dolly Parton songs.
In Blue Smoke she’s delivering the kiss-off from the first train out of town; here’s the lyric video:
And on Lover Du Jour she tells him she won’t be his trifle, in French, no less. Somewhat mangled-for-the-sake-of-a-rhyme French, admittedly, but the sentiment is strong even if the execution is wobbly.
Traditional Tunes (all departments): Banks of the Ohio, If I Had Wings, Home, Try
Banks of the Ohio is a traditional tune in the standard sense of the phrase: it’s a murder ballad about a young man who kills the woman who rejects his proposal, written in the late ’20s. Miss Dolly’s voice shines like a mountain diamond, and she really sells the story. (Also, true confession, I’ve listened to it several times now and each time her back up singer comes in I think Who is that, I know that voice so either it’s a vocal doppleganger OR a famous voice flying under the radar.)
If I Had Wings, on the other hand, is a new song, but sounds like it’s a hundred years old. It is mostly about regret and making the best of bad decisions when what you’d rather do is run away from the mess you made.
Home is traditional in the same way Chattahoochie by Alan Jackson is traditional, in the sense that they are both celebrations of rural Southern life that play out on ageless pastoral vistas.
And then, finally, Try, which is a traditional Dolly Parton song-as-pep-talk tune. Best deployed on that day you drop your coffee on your last clean work shirt and leave your lunch at home and need a little bit of friendly encouragement.
Finally, not only is she still releasing records, she’s still taking her show on the road. Tour starts in May in Oklahoma and then jumps overseas.
Cry, from Imaginary Enemy by The Used: Because Bert McCracken writes the best break-up songs and then performs them looking like he just left a pint of Haagen-Daz melting in his Blanket Nest of Pain.
Also because I am seeing them tonight, along with Taking Back Sunday, Sleepwave and tonightalive., and it’s the last real pit I’ll be in for a while. If not forever.
The Gentlemen Thieves are: Ken Taylor (Vocals/Guitar), David Huzyk (Guitar/Vocals), Dylan Ramstead (Bass/Vocals) and Thomas Lesnick (Drums) and they are from Toronto, Canada.
This is the video for Don’t Worry, from their upcoming record Uncertainties and it is a one-take home movie lyric video. What it lacks in polish it makes up for in creativity and weird basement-dwelling aliens who seem to be having a rave. NB: Persons with delicate sensibilities, brace yourselves/glance away for a second when the camera starts to move away from the bathroom sink.
This week’s Friday Night Jam is Twigs, by Oldtwig, a beatmaker, composer, and landscape architect (!) from Paris. It is from Through Hills, which is his first record.
It’s a mellow, soothing number, and the video is a visual celebration of spring triumphing over winter.
I picked it to share today because a) it’s lovely, b) I feel like this week, not even to mention this winter, has been hard for everyone and we could all use a reminder that the trees will grow new branches and flowers will bloom again some day and c) the combination of animation and live action, especially Rachel Brooker‘s joyful, encouraging dancing, is both surprising and awesome.
Oldtwig – Twigs from Phonosaurus on Vimeo.
It is not every day you see a music video which successfully makes pointed, sly commentary on what constitutes a “sexy” (or, arguably, “shocking”) video and the gross and ridiculous ways women’s bodies are used in music videos by utilizing a potpourri of visual touchstones that encompass Titanic, Star Wars, Ghost and the videos for George Michael’s Faith, Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines and Jennifer Lopez’s I Luh Ya Papi. And those are just the super obvious ones that I caught in the two times I watched it.
But FAIRCHILD, from the Gold Coast, Australia, have pulled it off. Plus the song at the heart of it all, Burning Feet, from the EP of the same name, is a charming pop confection.
http://youtu.be/XDXhKGIS3-w
Here are some of their upcoming shows, if you’d like to go and appreciate them in person:
April 12th – Metricon Stadium, Gold Coast (Gold Coast Suns AFL Match)
April 26th – The Loft, Gold Coast (Oneway Street Unofficial AFTER Party)
May 6th – Baltic Avenue, Toronto (Canadian Music Week)
May 10th – Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto (Canadian Music Week)
May 12th – Cake Shop, New York
May 14th – Rendezvous, Seattle
May 16th – Silverlake Lounge, Los Angeles
Hard Rock Cafe, Singapore – May 22nd
This video, for I Am Dust from Splinter (Songs from a Broken Mind) by Gary Numan, was made using a Tachyons + video glitch synth in combination with a HI-8 camera and a CRT television to simulate grainy VHS-style images, and no computer post-production was used.
(VHS: those tapes we all used back in the pre-DVD pre-DVR dark ages, when the enjoyment of a significant chunk of popular entertainment depended on the continued strength and resiliance of fickle, degenerating magnetic tape and VCRs we had to set by hand and then hope no-one changed the channel while we were out. We also had to fix mangled cassettes with our pens and carry our CIRCUS magazines home from Tower Records uphill both ways in the snow.)
Anyway. It’s a good song, grimy and aggressive and shimmering with industrial menace.
Kurt Cobain has been dead 20 years.
My feelings about this are quite similar to how I felt when I received the news of his passing, which was stunned disbelief, followed by great sadness.
I was 19, and in college. It was a beautiful spring day. That’s what stands out, in my memory: the dew on the bright green grass, the chill in the air despite the warmth of the sun, the silence of a campus just waking up from winter.
People are still hearing Nirvana for the first time every day. But they are not hearing it quite as we did, the actual first time, when everything else on the radio sounded like Mötley Crüe.
Smells Like Teen Spirit is the song that got so popular Nirvana (or at least Kurt Cobain) found it embarrassing; that kind of success was, of course, the exact opposite of what they intended to do.
But if I had to come up with one song that encapsulated the feeling of leaving high school, leaving suburbia, trying to figure out what living in the (bigger) world meant, it’s this one. Even now, even 20 years on, it’s exhilarating listening to him launch into the chorus.
Today in country covers of rock songs: Rebirth of the Cool by the Afghan Whigs as re-imagined by The Emperors of Wyoming (Phil Davis: lead vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, Pete Anderson: bass, 12 string guitar, guitars, vocals, Butch Vig: drums, electric guitars, keyboards, vocals and FL Anderson: lead Guitar, pedal steel, lap steel, accordion, banjo).
They give it that classic high-lonesome sound:
And this is what they sound like left to their own devices:
