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  • The Daily Awesome: Radiohead “Let Down” (1997)

    After an artist has been as highly-regarded for as long as Radiohead has been, it’s easy to forget what was so exciting about that artist in the first place. After sneaking out from under future-one-hit-wonder status to usurp the title of World’s Greatest Living Rock Band from U2 in the mid-90s with their albums The Bends and OK Computer, Radiohead channeled their renown into crafting two of the strangest, most dissonant and experimental records to ever top the American pop charts – Kid A and Amnesiac.

    In the last decade, with the single ascendant (due to the advent of iTunes and easy piracy), Radiohead have almost single-handedly kept the album relevant as a form. Which is why it was sort of disheartening, if not entirely surprising, to hear Thom Yorke talk about the band moving away from recording albums after the release of 2007’s In Rainbows. 15 years after The Bends, it’s easy to take for granted that Radiohead have been the greatest album band of their time; but it’s even easier to forget that the band first got our attention by just writing some really good songs (“Creep” among them, to my thinking). Tonight, I was taking the long way home from work because I just got a new car – one that I can plug my iPod into! I had it playing on shuffle and when I heard the shimmering opening notes of “Let Down”, I didn’t even recognize it. It was like I was hearing the song – which I had in heavy rotation on my Walkman in the summer of ’97 – for the very first time. The way Yorke sings the verses in gradually expanding ellipses of melody; the way his voice maintains a flatness and distance even as the music behind him grows grander and more urgent; the layers of shimmer and twinkle, delicately plucked arpeggios and folky strumming chords backing up lyrical images of disappointed people “clinging to bottles”. I’m not sure how serious Thom Yorke was about Radiohead focusing entirely on singles – and Radiohead have always been a band that thrive when they’re defying expectations, even the ones they’ve helped to perpetuate – but if, in fact, they never release another album, I have every reason to suspect that they’ll become the Greatest Living Singles Band in the World. Songs like this are why.

  • The Daily Awesome 8/26/10: Shalamar “Dancing in the Sheets” (1984)

    Ever hear a song you’ve known for most of your life and realize that while you may have heard it a zillion times, sung along with it almost as many, you know the words, you even know the guitar solo enough to scat sing along with it while you wail on your air ax – you still have never really realized just how awesome, or, in fact, how dirrrrrrty it was until, say, you’re sitting at your desk on a Thursday morning trying to catch up on two days of e-mail, and it comes up on your iPod. That was my morning. This was the song.

    Though Shalamar, who started out as the studio creation of a Soul Train booking agent, were one of the few disco groups to weather the turn of the 80s, this Top 20 hit from 1984, featured on the soundtrack of Footloose, also marked the beginning of the group’s end. Singer Howard Hewett was the sole remaining original member of group by this time, and soon after, he too would follow former members Jody “Hasta La Vista, Baby” Watley and Jeffrey Daniel out the door to launch a solo career, leaving the group adrift for the rest of the decade before they finally broke up.

    The video finds Hewett dressing up in his favorite Zorro cape to visit the gayest not-gay-bar in the world where he finds keyboardist Delisa Davis holding up a wall and looking slutty. When he makes a move for her though, a table full of mustached mobsters gets all upset, some phony violence ensues – whoah, who’s that guy with the pecs? – but Hewett, Davis and guitarist Micki Free manage to escape unscathed when Free unleashes a guitar solo that entrances and, presumably, pacifies the totally gay un-gay bar’s patrons. The 80s were awesome.

  • The Daily Awesome 8/25/10: Hot Chocolate “Love Is Life” (1970)

    Five years before they scored their biggest U.S. hit with “You Sexy Thing”, the band Hot Chocolate, after a brief fling with the Beatles’ Apple label (which put out a 45 of the group’s cover of “Give Peace a Chance”) made their first trip up the British charts with this single “Love Is Life”, a song that marks the intersections between R&B and bubblegum, the Carribean and the spaghetti Western, with its dramatic arrangements of winds and strings over a calypso-inflected beat. Though it became a top 10 hit for the group, they would have trouble following it up; and in the meantime their songs were becoming bigger hits on the other side of the Atlantic – only for other artists. Stories hit #1 with their cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Brother Louie” and Canadian hard rockers April Wine hit the Top 40 with “You Could Have Been a Lady”. So inconsistent was their singles performance that it wouldn’t be until 1974 that they released their first full-length album Cicero Park. In the last couple of years, the British 7ts label has put out some really wonderful reissues of the band’s heyday records. The reissue of Cicero Park includes a second disc compiling their early singles starting with “Love Is Life” (sadly – no “Give Peace a Chance”).