Is it dead enough yet? It is still enough yet?“Will it replicate inside our bodies now?” That’s the question at the center of a new song from the British quintet called Fanfarlo, and every time I hear that line, it makes me want to go back and listen to the verses to try to discern just exactly what “it” is. And I still haven’t quite got it.
Fanfarlo’s debut album Reservoir was one of the more charming records of the last couple of years – a collection of lyrical indie-folk songs, delivered in Simon Balthazar’s lilting troubadour tenor over all manner of acoustic strings, horns, piano and percussion, roughly splitting the difference between (the band) James’s most bombastic moments and the The Decemberists’ most modest, with a loving nod to the singer-songwriter pop of the 70s. Not only are they an effortlessly charismatic live act, they’ve also put out some great videos, as evidenced by last year’s Twilight Zone-ish “Fire Escape”.
Following some extensive touring behind that first record, the band retreated to a “remote slate quarrying town in Northern Wales” to record its follow-up, and are previewing the album with a video (and free mp3 download) of “Replicate”. The song is a surreal and suspenseful compendium of unanswered questions, sung over tense strings, diabolically playful little organ doodles and haunted house woodblock percussion. Its verses feel like an update on a Bernard Herrmann film score, and after asking one last time – Will it replicate inside our bodies now? – the song comes to an abrupt end without reaching any kind of catharsis or resolution. Just: over.
#40#40: “THE HIGH ROAD” by BROKEN BELLS.
“The dawn to end all nights. That’s all we hoped it was…” For whatever reason, that line always gives me a shiver. I’m not even sure I know what it means, but it sounds amazing, doesn’t it? The video’s pretty amazing too… a sort of dream-walking odyssey perfectly tuned to the song’s dark, mysterious atmosphere.
#39#39: “WRITTEN IN REVERSE” by SPOON.
I’ve had a love/indifference thing going with Spoon for about the last 10 years. It’s been about 90% indifference and 10% love. But when it’s love, it’s really really big love. For example: this song. I love singing along with this song. I love the primal disregard of pitch. I love yelling at drivers in my rear view mirror at clogged intersections: “I’m not standing here! No, I’m! Not standing here!”
#38#38 (TIE): “PARACHUTE” by CHERYL COLE / “PARACHUTE” by INGRID MICHAELSON.
Formerly of the British girl-group Girls Aloud, Cheryl Cole released her debut solo album late last year. This dramatic take on a track Ingrid Michaelson wrote (but didn’t record) became a hit in the UK earlier this year.
#38And then Ingrid put out her own version of the song. Sorta like Michael Bolton did with that Laura Branigan song in the 80s. Only not disgusting. “How am I supposed to live without you…” Oh my gawd. We should have known Michael Bolton would be nothing but trouble when we saw his writing credit on that Laura Branigan 45. What were we thinking?
#37#37. “WHITE NIGHT” by THE POSTELLES.
Not that I wish the band ill, but this is one of those debut singles that comes so close to pop perfection that you (almost) know they will only disappoint you in the future. I (almost) want them to be a one-hit-wonder, because I know they’d be awesome at that. This song also features my favorite call-and-response moment of the year. Oh, and I think you can probably still download this for free directly from the Postelles.
#36#36: “I’M A PILOT” by FANFARLO.
I imagine Fanfarlo is what Arcade Fire would sound like if Arcade Fire were as obsessed with Tigermilk as they are with The River. They write songs that sound simultaneously huge and modest – sweeping and, at the same time, specific. Also, even though albums are sort of on the wane these days and so such things are becoming less relevant, “I’m a Pilot” is a great album opener in the tradition of great album openers.
#35#35: “O.N.E.” by YEASAYER.
What I like most about this video is that the dancing is exactly what I would like to believe I look like when I’m dancing to this in my basement and nobody can see. What I like second most is that the fictional musical instruments the band plays in the video look exactly like what I imagine the real musical instruments would look like based on the sounds they make. What I like least about this song is that it will be forever linked in my brain as the song I was listening to when someone rear-ended my brand new car two weeks after I’d bought it. Urgh.
#34#34: “A MORE PERFECT UNION” by TITUS ANDRONICUS.
I would like to believe that this is the stuff of Chris Christie’s nightmares. A little bit of Bruce Springsteen. A little Billy Bragg. A little Bright Eyes, a little Replacements, a little Thin Lizzy. A little Abraham Lincoln, a little William Lloyd Garrison. And a great big joyful noise. This video edits the song down significantly from its 7 minute album version. That version is well worth hearing, but you get the gist of it here.
#33#33: “DANCE FLOOR” by THE APPLES IN STEREO.
Probably the most adorably unpretty band in the world right now (and yes, I do have a small crush on Robert Schneider – I mean, come on, who wouldn’t?), The Apples in stereo take us on a journey through space, time, analog synth technology and aging hipster fashion. Elijah Wood isn’t just making a cameo here. He has his own record label, and The Apples in Stereo were the first band he signed to it.
#32#32: “WE, MYSELF, AND I” by SHAD.
Of Rwandan descent, born in Kenya, straight outta London, Ontario comes Mr. Shadrach Kabango (just call him Shad), who financed his first album with money he won the old fashioned way – at a radio station talent contest. On his first two albums, Shad delivers rhymes that go from goofy to poignant over old school R&B samples, but this song, from his latest record TSOL is a stormy, confrontational rocker. And the award for the Best Use of the Word “Yes” in Song goes to…
#31#31: “MY BEST THEORY” by JIMMY EAT WORLD.
This band generally releases new albums about three years apart, and those long intervals give us time to forget why they were ever a big deal. And then the new album comes, with a single like this – all sweat-drenched urgency – and you remember: Oh yeah, they’re just a great band. As far as the video goes, well who knows what’s going on there, and the lyrics are vague enough to be either profound or banal. It doesn’t matter though. Whatever it’s all supposed to be about, that part where you “feel the air rush out!” sounds exactly like what it’s saying.
I don’t do much on Sundays. So says my better half. Actually, I do a lot of laundry on Sundays, which involves a lot of waiting. Which involves a little bit of reading, a little bit of napping, a little bit of bumming around on the internet, and a lot of just sitting around listening to music. Needless to say, Sunday afternoon is, like, the greatest thing ever as far as I’m concerned. So here I am sharing a little bit of the Paul Lorentz Sunday Afternoon experience with you, Dear Sonic Clash Readers, with a weekly (hopefully) mix of seven songs I just happen to be listening to. This is not me just shuffling up my iPod and puking up the results (although that’s always fun!), but, I hope, a semi-free-associative weekly musical adventure. I call it a buffet because Sunday brunch buffets rock and the best ones have a little bit of everything. And though I, of course, have certain favorite artists and genres and musical eras that I tend to gravitate towards a little more heavily, with this playlist, I hope to achieve NPR’s Bob Boilen’s stated (but mostly flagrantly flouted) goal of at least considering all songs. (Dear Bob Boilen, I hate you. But I’ll never unsubscribe from your podcast. Can I be a guest on it sometime? Love, Paul.)
Okay, so that out of the way… This week, I picked up the latest CD by Willie Nelson, who just turned 77 two weeks ago (Happy Birthday, Willie!). Despite his age, Willie remains one of the most prolific artists still alive, putting out two or three new studio albums each year, and collaborating on music with basically everyone. (All Collaborators Considered!) There’s a reason there’s no game called Six Degrees of Willie Nelson: you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone anywhere with more than two or three degrees of separation from him. Though Willie Nelson is still active as a songwriter, the last few years have found him performing a necessary musicological service – reviving and interpreting songs of the early-to-mid 20th Century for 21st Century listeners. He recorded an album of standards in a Dixieland style with Wynton Marsalis, and last year, teamed up with Asleep at the Wheel for a tribute to the classic western swing bands of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
His latest album, produced by T-Bone Burnett, is called, simply, Country Music, and features reverent, yet relevant, takes on fifteen songs, most of which predate the Eisenhower Administration. (Eisenhower was a President. That was before the Beatles.) Songs like Al Dexter’s massive 1943 hit “Pistol Packin’ Mama” (which, in Willie’s current interpretation, sounds like a “tribute” to Sarah Palin), and Merle Travis’s grim miner’s ballad “Dark as a Dungeon”, which, given recent events, really needs to be heard in 2010. Here’s Willie in a live performance from March, doing one of the “newest” songs on this collection. It’s also the one song on the album he wrote. Nelson’s most recent albums have been dealing pretty frankly with mortality, and I loved that he included one of his own earliest songs on this collection. It dates back to the end of the musical era he’s covering, and like the rest of the songs here, Nelson delivers the song with a knowing sense of how “endangered” these songs are at a time when our collective sense of history (and specifically music history) seems to be getting shallower.
One of my favorite tracks on Country Music is the album-closing “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”, a fire-and-brimstone blues given a chillingly spare, alone-on-my-death-bed arrangement. Most folks my age know the song better from Led Zeppelin’s Presence album, but the song is actually much older, dating back (at least) to a recording, circa 1927, by Blind Willie Johnson. The precise origins of the song are unknown, but then a song like this probably has no precise origin – it may very well be a generation or two older than Johnson’s recording.
Here’s another song I first experienced via a contemporary cover version. In 1987, the white-boy soul band Breakfast Club, who earned pop music history footnote status when one of the band’s early members (Madonna Ciccone) became a really big star, scored a really big hit with a song called “Right On Track”. Not for lack of trying, Breakfast Club was never really able to follow that song up and their self-titled debut album became their swan song. But one of the group’s last gasps was the song “Expressway To Your Heart”. I loved it – mainly for it’s big stairstepping bass groove. Later on, I worked in a pizza kitchen where we listened to the oldies station all day, and that’s where I heard the awesome Gamble & Huff-produced original by the Soul Survivors. Last night, I was out running an errand and the song came on the radio. The traffic sound effects, that insistent bassline, the urgency of the vocals – “too crowded! too crowded!” The whole thing makes the idea of being stuck in summer traffic sound really awesome.
Incidentally, the Soul Survivors’ “Expressway” was their first big hit, charting almost exactly 20 years (exactly 19 and a half) ahead of “Right On Track”, and after several failed attempts to follow the song up, the Soul Survivors split up and are today regarded as one of the great one hit wonders of the 60s. Brothers Chuck and Richie Ingui reconvened the band in the early 70s and still perform under the Soul Survivors name. To my knowledge though, “Right On Track” is not part of their setlist.
Like “Expressway to Your Heart”, Edwin Starr‘s 1969 single “25 Miles” is a great driving song – despite the “I’ve got to walk on” lyrics. It’s one of those songs where the backing music is so incredibly hot that it’s pretty much impossible for any vocal performance to really top it. Only Edwin Starr’s performance did. And as this clip from much later on demonstrates, Starr (who died in 2003 at the age of 61) never lost the vocal ferocity he brought to songs like this and his biggest hit “War” in the late 60s and early 70s.
Both Edwin Starr and the Soul Survivors were all about getting back to their baby as fast as their cars (or feet) could take them. Last week, the 20-year-old Haitian-American pop singer-songwriter-Kara-DioGuardi-protege Jason Derulo premiered the video for “Ridin’ Solo”, the third single from his self-titled debut, following his number one debut single “Whatcha Say” and “In My Head”, which hit the Top 10 earlier this year. The song was initially based on a sample of the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony”, although the sample couldn’t be cleared (probably because “Bittersweet Symphony” – whose video famously followed singer Richard Ashcroft as he “walked on” – was itself based on an uncleared sample and landed The Verve is all sorts of expensive legal hot water when it became their biggest hit). You can still hear a bit of that familiar chord progression in the finished project sans sample – Derulo and his songwriting-producing partner J.R. Rotem have demonstrated a knack for musical pick-pocketing – in Derulo’s celebration of freshly emancipated playboyhood.
Finally, we travel from the clubs to the junkyard with the British indie pop group Fanfarlo. Earlier this year, the band found themselves a graveyard full of former modes of transportation now resting in peace. These included an airplane, which inspired this adorable acoustic guitar-xylophone-and-bowed-saw rendition of “I’m a Pilot”, the gorgeous opening track of their 2009 debut album Reservoir. Enjoy!
