I always like a good lyrics video. This one, for Cover Girl, from Crack Crack Heart Attack by Wood Shampoo, gets points for interesting font choices and incorporation of outside quotes. And I learned something watching it, which is that apparently both Steven Tyler and Dolly Parton have come out with memorable lines about how it’s expensive to look cheap.
This Is Not A Game, from Black Traffic, by Skunk Anansie; I found this one while looking for something else, and it has haunted me ever since.
It’s a three-day weekend in America, which for me means trying really hard not to become accidentally nocturnal.
If you, too, often find yourself on the wrong side of 3AM, here is Dead Professional, aka John Harouff (The Cinnamon Band, The Union of Man and a Woman, Man Forever) with a song you can groove to while you’re up: Downtown at Sundown.
Enjoy your weekend, everyone.
Here is Lindi Ortega with a scorcher of a . . . well it isn’t a murder ballad, I guess, but that’s the vein in springs from. Plot twist, though: this time it isn’t a girl who’s dead.
Murder of Crows is from her last record, Cigarettes & Truckstops, but she has a new one coming soon: Tin Star, on October 8th.
And now, because bands remixing their own work in dramatic ways is always fascinating to me, here is Skunk Anansie, with a stripped down and revamped version of Hedonism, from their new (and first ever) live album/DVD, An Acoustic Skunk Anansie – Live in London, set to be released in September 2013.
The arrangement is not that dramatically different from the original, but the switch to acoustic does give Skin room to fill the empty spaces with her magnificent voice.
Hat tip to the Tincanman from Tincanland for bringing The Cat Empire, and Hello to my attention. The Cat Empire are Australian and their music either spans genres (jazz, hip-hop, reggae, funk, and more) or fits neatly into the one marked “improv party music.”
In any case, it is super fun to listen to. I like to cue this one up first thing in the morning, so I start the day with a little spring in my step.
http://youtu.be/NrEvwO1F7Cw
Oh yeah, doubling down on Adam Ant today. Here is in one of his earliest incarnations, with Adam & the Ants and Stand and Deliver, or, one of the videos that started it all.
Time to raise a glass to NTSIB patron saint, Mr. Joe Strummer a.k.a. Woody Mellor a.k.a. John Mellor, who would have been 61 years old today.
Joe had a nervous energy that never let him settle in one place, one role, one style, one identity for too long, as outlined in a new article from The Atlantic website Joe Strummer and Punk Self-Reinvention. When Joe passed away in 2002, he was in the midst of yet another renaissance with his young group of lads, the Mescaleros. Below is an artifact from that time, a full Mescaleros show filmed at the Roseland Ballroom in New York in 1999.
Mary Bichner is a classical composer from Boston with the twin special powers of perfect pitch and synasthesia, which in practice means she can sing beautifully and she sees colors when music is playing. She is also a big fan of Sailor Moon. In the video below, she combines all three of those things to delightful effect.
Throw Stones is inspired by Galaxia’s challenge at the end of Season 5 – there is a full, spoilery explanation here – but you don’t have to know anything about Sailor Moon to appreciate this delicately lovely tune.
Also interesting: the colors used in the video reflect Bichner’s synasthetic visions of both Galaxia and August, the month of the song’s release.
I listen to Recover by CHVRCHES nearly every day. It never gets old. In fact it usually feels like I’ve been in steady communion with the tune for years, not just weeks or months; like it’s a place I have always boomeranged back to, when I wanted peace or solace or four minutes of uncomplicated happiness.
The video echoes this sense of mysterious peace, in the sense that there is something deeply comforting, to me, about watching a city (spaceship? ship-city?) be brought to life.
