The first time I heard this song was at a listening station in at a Border’s store. I’d never heard of Allison Moorer (or of her and her sister Shelby Lynne’s startling family background) before then, and being that her music was stocked in the country section, I didn’t really think I’d like her all that much, but the Borders blurb suggested this track from her sophomore album The Hardest Part and so I gave it a listen. And for the next couple of weeks, I kept going back to that Borders just to stand like a dork at that listening station with those gigantic headphones on and listen to it again and again. It was love. I eventually broke down and bought the CD (and all her subsequent CDs – although I got skeptical when she started doing duets with Kid Rock) – after all, they had to change out those listening stations eventually. But ten years later, I can still get lost in all of this song’s epic weepy glory. And I love how she’s taken what’s essentially an archetypal Nashville tearjerker and given it just a hint of Sgt. Peppers-by-way-of-Jon-Brion atmosphere. I’d never actually seen the video until I went looking for it today, and found lots of 70s country rock facial hair and lots and lots of Las Vegas sequins in the middle of the desert.
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First Listen (and Free Download): The Thermals “I Don’t Believe You”
Portland indie-rockers The Thermals are known for writing nerdy, two-and-half-minute punk songs with an off-handedly topical point of view. You could call their most recent albums concept records, but that’s just a fancy way of saying they’ve been relatively thematically coherent. Last year’s, Now We Can See dealt with morality, mortality and science while their 2006 record The Blood, The Body, The Machine was a more narrative affair on the intersection of organized religion, governmental authority and personal agency.The group, led by singer-songwriter Hutch Harris, is getting ready to issue their fifth album next month. The album’s called Personal Life, and this time around, their focus is on love and relationships, the things that make relationships great, and the things that destroy them. It’s a direction hinted by the song “Separate” (issued earlier this year as one side of a split single with the Cribs), although lyrics like “separate I’m amazed I ever gave away all I held so dear” are ambiguous enough that they could just as easily be a pointed repudiation of political bipartisanship as they might be the post-break-up musings of a freshly single free-thinker.
“I Don’t Believe You” is the lead single from Personal Life, and it’s an immediately lovable bit of candidly dismissive, singalong power-pop, even if it can’t match last year’s “Now We Can See” in either recklessly energetic dorkery or googly-eyed catchiness. Click below to hear the song for yourself. In addition to releasing the song as a good old-fashioned 45 (with a download card that includes two bonus videos), the band’s label Kill Rock Stars is currently offering the song for free download at their site. (Thank you Kill Rock Stars. You’re awesome.)
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The Tuesday Morning Awesome: Spectrum “How You Satisfy Me” (1991)
In one of the more spectacular acts of musical nuclear fission, the two personalities at the core of the seminal shoegazing outfit known as Spacemen 3 split from the group in the early 90s, with singer-guitarist Jason Pierce forming the band Spiritualized, the better to document his adventures in amateur pharmacology through ambient garage rock, gospel choirs and all manner of decadent-pretending-at-profound bombast – hitting pay dirt when the title track of his monumental 1998 album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space was licensed for a Gap commercial.
Meanwhile, keyboardist-guitarist-singer Sonic Boom, forming a band called Spectrum (named for Boom’s 1990 solo album) delved deeper into hallucinogenic meditations on, like, existence and stuff, drifting further and further away from song structure into studio-assisted mantra and chant. Listening to Spectrum’s records can be like walking into a hall of mirrors, the vocals drowning in echoes of their own echoes, the backing music more perceived or hinted at than actually heard. That said, the band debuted in 1991 with one supremely catchy, radiation-dappled pop song that manages to balance the band’s trance-y aesthetic – tidal washes of echo and distortion, single-chord structure, melodic repetition and harmonic drone – with the sweet simplicity of a teenage love note. From the album Soul Kiss (Glide Divine), here’s Spectrum’s “How You Satisfy Me”.
