A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning: Dan Deacon’s “Trippy Green Skull” and “Snake Mistakes”, both from his much-lauded Spiderman of the Rings. Both songs are incredibly poppy, bright and electronic, with childish Dada lyrics, and both have unexpected catchy bits near the end that get lodged in your head and just will not come out. I’m about six months late to be bringing up Mr. Deacon and Spiderman, but the album is just as fresh, charming and mildly brain-damaged now as it was when it was first released. Jess Harvell (whom I was abusing here just last week) wrote a great, perceptive review of Spiderman of the Rings over on Pitchfork that I endorse wholeheartedly.

Deacon’s faux naïf act works, paradoxically, because he’s got a master’s degree in composition and takes a deeply serious approach to his very silly songs. The dude can put together a 3-minute pop song like nobody’s business, but his command over his (sometimes self-made and often very primitive) gear is impressive, and – especially on longer, more elaborate songs like “Wham City” and “Jimmy Jay Roche” – there are obvious influences from the classic minimalists – Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass – as well as an odd kinship with new wave schmooptronica acts like M83 and Ulrich Schnauss, even as his lyrics ramble a lot closer to Devendra Banhart’s childlike psychedelia or a particularly gentle version of Ween. I find the combination of minimalist restraint and sugar-addled weirdo pop super charming.

UPDATE: I have got to see this guy live.

Stuck in my head this morning: hey presto, more Wall of Voodoo! This time, it was “The Passenger”, which then shaded imperceptibly, in the way of amorphous post-dreaming music, into “Long Arm”, yet another Stan Ridgway ballad of sublimated resentment and alienation in the working class. And so concludes my dreamland tour through Wall of Voodoo’s debut EP.

Getting lunch at Whole Foods just now, I found myself singing along completely unconsciously to REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. It’s amazing and more than a little sad how much of my brain is devoted to retaining completely random lyrics.

(The name of this entry is an apocryphal reading of one of the more mumbly parts of the song, passed along from one generation of Knox College students to another. The further I get from my time at Knox, the more unlikely it seems that anyone in REM would remember it well enough to stick it in a song. It’s that kind of place. Google doesn’t find it very likely, either.)

From Wikipedia’s entry: “See also: Apocalypticism”

Stuck in my head this morning: Wall of Voodoo’s “Can’t Make Love”, which more or less speaks for itself:

Well, I can’t make love
To the girls in this city
‘Cause the girls
Say I abuse them
And I won’t go out
With girls because
Girls will fall in love with you
Everybody’s lonely, that’s true
Maybe it’s psychology
I don’t know, I gotta move someplace

I can’t make love
To the girls in this city
‘Cause the girls
Say I abuse them
And I won’t go out
With girls because
Girls will fall in love with you
Everybody’s lonely, that’s true

Maybe it’s psychology
I don’t know, I gotta move someplace
Where the girls are easy
And it makes me miss my lonely city
And the girls are so easy
And it makes me miss my lonely city
And it seems so easy
But I can’t say the words that are on my mind

I’m a nice guy but I don’t love you,
I just wanna sleep with you.
I’m a nice guy but I don’t love you,
I just wanna sleep with you.

Well, I can’t make love
To the boys in this city
‘Cause the boys
Say I abuse them
And I won’t go out
With boys because
Boys will fall in love with you
Everybody’s lonely, that’s true

Maybe it’s psychology
I don’t know, I gotta move someplace
Where the boys are easy
And it makes me miss my lonely city
And the girls are so easy
And it makes me miss my lonely city
And everybody’s so easy
But I can’t say the words that are on my mind

chorus

I’m a nice guy… (repeats until fade)

Stuck in my head this morning: Mordant Music’s “XII – On Cracked Hooves” from The Tower: VIII-XVIII, a song that somehow manages to remind me of Swans, “Small Time Shot Away”-era Massive Attack, and most of the good bits of mid-90s ambient techno. Mordant Music are really growing on me, to the point that I just went to Boomkat and bought the rest of their catalog as digital downloads. So far I am not disappointed. It’s all very different.

Stuck in my head this morning: “Psychic Squirt” by Severed Heads, from their recent album Under Gail Succubus, mostly because of the way it bastardizes the lyrics to a Carpenters song:

MVRemix: On the track, ‘Psychic Squirt’, you use lyrics from an older song. What was this all about?

Tom Ellard: It’s a bit of ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose’ by Burt Bacharach. Listen to the original by The Carpenters and then, look at the city now. See how it changed, like a mutant growth. The track sings about mutant growths. Everything around the world now seems to be a mutation that has grown too big like the props from ‘Lost In Space’. The world is over ripe.

I had a hell of a time figuring out which of the nearly innumerable Severed Heads releases the song was on, having only the lyrics to go on, and when I was trying to narrow it down, I realized that my blithe assumption that Severed Heads’ music has settled down in the band’s old age was tragically, deeply wrong. They’re still at least as weird as the Residents, they just seem more normal at first because they use more recognizable samples and slicker-sounding instruments.

Stuck in head this morning: Torche’s “Fire”, a two and a half minute buzzbomb of droning catchy pop melodies running on consonant bass-heavy stoner metal rails. The fact that the lyrics are apparently sung in some otherworldly foreign key (which they keep in harmony, despite being at least half a semitone sharp throughout the song) only adds to its wayward charm, although it makes it somewhat awkward to have stuck in your head. I keep trying to force the singing into tune, but my brain won’t let me.

This song, more than any other in Torche’s catalog, lays bare their debt to Jane’s Addiction, who I would describe as “long gone and lamented” if they – especially Perry Farrell and Dave Navarro – had not so badly overstayed their welcome. As it is, their inescapable sensi frat-boy hijinx keep me from forgetting how the jocks in the dorms used to play Ritual de lo Habitual every day, sure as morning wood.

Stuck in my head as I got up at the semi-buttcrack of dawn this morning to wing my way back to sweet, blessed, soggy civilization: “In the Jailhouse Now” by The Soggy Bottom Boys. You know, the song from O Brother, Where Art Thou. At least that’s better than yesterday, when I had “Union Maid” by Woody Guthrie stuck in my head after my girlfriend and I spent like an hour on the internet listening to ice cream truck theme songs. I can’t even explain.

Stuck in my head this morning, as instant karma: “Head On”, by the Jesus and Mary Chain, medleyfied with “On the Wall” (are they even different songs?). I keep hearing bits of the Pixies version mixed in. That’ll teach me for trash-talkin’!

Thanks, Jesse. I was sending around that video you were so obsessed with last night and now I have “Whoomp! There It Is” stuck in my head. Stupid Soulja Boy. Stupid Tag Team!