so it seems
Colin Newman’s “Round and Round”, the last track from his 1988 solo album It Seems, is a brilliant and maddeningly catchy exercise in looped anti-pop music. It’s especially impressive in the way that it flouts pop song conventions while sounding relentlessly poppy – the song is only Newman singing his elliptic, nonsensical lyrics over layered synths, with no percussion or rhythm section. It builds and builds, paying off in… nothing. It fades out and the album ends. It’s a completely typical move for Newman, who manages to combine both the most pop-oriented and most pranksterish tendencies of Wire (his most famous project) in a single person. And it’s a beautiful little song. I seem to be incapable of just letting it play through, rewinding it back to the beginning each time I hear it.