7 Songs

[janradder]

So I'm back from my trip and now that I'm back it's officially summer but before I left snurri tagged me to write a list of seven songs I'm into now that have been shaping my spring.  On my trip I thought about what songs I might list and I realized that, oddly, I don't ever really associate songs with spring.  I have no idea why.  I could easily list off winter, summer and fall songs but when it comes to spring I get nuthin' but then I don't often think of spring anyway for whatever that means.  These however, are the songs that I spent most of this past spring listening to:

1) "Luka" -- Lemonheads.
Evan Dando has the most beautiful voice I have heard.  I have no idea what it is about it, but I get chills when I hear that laid back baritone rolling out from the speakers.  It really doesn't matter what he's singing because I'll listen to it just to hear that voice, though he's got the ear for pop hooks (one of my true weaknesses -- I always fall for them, whether I want to or not).  This one is, of course, a Suzanne Vega cover off of Lick and if I even hear a few seconds of it I can't help but hum and whistle that song for the rest of the day (and for days after).

2) "Bold As Love" -- Jimi Hendrix Experience.
I posted about the album this comes off of earlier.  "Bold As Love" is the last song on the LP and each time I hear it I feel like I can not only hear and the guitar but feel and see it washing out over me, that big guitar sound floating out in a bright, brilliant red, shifting colors, folding over onto itself, spreading outward through infinity.  When I hear it, all I can do is close my eyes and listen in pure aural bliss.

3) "The Wizard" -- Black Sabbath.
This spring it seemed like wherever I went I was hearing Black Sabbath.  Yeah, I like "Paranoid."  I like "Iron Man."  "War Pigs" is a great song.  But for my money, I'll take Black Sabbath's eponymous LP any day, when Ozzy was Ossie.  "The Wizard" is the second song on the first side and opens with a lone harmonica droning out it's three note progression, followed by the full band kicking in.  I love the drums on this song and the interplay between them and the harmonica and guitar, the excessive fills between riffs, the build ups between each of Ozzy's lines in the chorus.  Them and that heavy bass guitar just really make the song.

4) "Crazy" -- Pylon.
I'd heard the R. E. M. cover on Dead Letter Office and I read the blurb from Peter Buck about how when he heard Pylon's first record he'd wished that R. E. M.'s first LP sounded like it.  That's apparent from the opening from this early single -- the sound that R. E. M. would use as their later blueprint.  The bass, particularly, sounds so much like Mike Mills' that you might think you were listening to R. E. M. until the vocals kick in and it's not Michael Stipe that you hear but a woman's voice.  I'd heard their first LP and had a hard time getting into it but this, their second 7 inch really lets you know what Peter Buck was talking about.  It really is unlike anything else being played at the time -- edgy, yet not really hard; melodic, but not quite singable.

5) "Poptones" -- Public Image, Ltd.
I spent a lot  of the spring listening to the first two PiL albums, probably more than anything else.  Before John Lydon became a parody of himself and after the mainstream-sold-as-subversive crap of the Sex Pistols, he was making some truly original music.  If you haven't heard it, give it a try.  "Poptones," unlike most of the songs on PiL's second LP (Metal Box in the UK and, with a slightly different track order, Second Edition in the US), this one is guitar rather than bass driven (though the bass is pushed quite to the front.  The song pretty much just repeats the same riff over and over again, the guitar (an aluminum Veleno) playing these circular patterns, picking out the notes of chords, while Lydon caterwauls about a day in the country -- "Praise picnicking in the British countryside!"

6) "Lights Out"  -- Angry Samoans.
A co-worker years ago told me that this was the perfect skanking song.  It is -- fast, heavy on the floor tom, two vocalists trading off lyrics, and short (maybe a minute and a half or so?).  Seriously, it makes you just want to get up and start flailing around the room, arms and legs pumping, just looking for bodies to slam against.  On top of that, it's the only song I know about poking your eyes out simply for the sake of following a fad.

7) "I Felt Like a Gringo" -- Minutemen.
I love the opening line of this song -- "Tons of white-boy guilt, that's my problem."  It describes a Minutemen trip to Mexico on the 4th of July, a trip that also inspired the d. boon penned song, "Corona."  It has a great frenetic guitar riff -- a kind of riff that makes you want to get up and dance -- over a bouncing bass line and an off-beat hi-hat/snare rhythm that almost sounds like it should be out of place in a song about clashing cultures and American arrogance.  I don't have this on vinyl.  It comes from a tape I made of Buzz or Howl years ago and I pull it out about once a year.  It's another song that tends to get stuck in my head when I hear it.   The econo guitar solo at the end is killer.

Comments

[silk-noir.livejournal.com]

I am intrigued.
Nice to have you back, by the way.

[janradder.livejournal.com]

Thanks.