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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: video

  • The Daily Awesome – January 5, 2011: The Vaselines “Sex with an X”

    The Vaselines’ ”Sex With an X”
    Scottish indie-popsters The Vaselines got their biggest break a couple years after they broke up, when Nirvana featured a cover of the group’s song “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam” in their classic MTV Unplugged set. Formed around singing-songwriting duo Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee, the Vaselines’ entire recorded output, summarized neatly in a 1992 compilation called The Way of the Vaselines, amounted to little more than a couple of EPs and a single full-length album called Dum Dum. Their songs – which boasted titles like “Oliver Twisted” and “Monsterpussy” – were as adorable as the Japanese ceramic figurines you might find in any given antique shop, and just as cracked as their glazes. (Sample lyric: “I’m gonna skin it and wear it as a hat, every day.”)

    Like the earliest episodes of South Park or Pee Wee Herman’s original stage act, The Vaselines’ music is delivered with rudimentary technical skill, a formal vocabulary geared towards kids (South Park’s goofy animation, Pee Wee Herman’s goofy costume and voice, The Vaselines repetitive, elementary singalong melodies), but with content deeply inappropriate for that audience. That’s absolutely the case with the group’s 2010 reunion single, even if the title track from their 20-years-after-the-fact sophomore album Sex With an X isn’t half as lyrically as naughty as its title would suggest. The first time I heard this – Feels so good, it must be bad for me – I thought, “Wow, these guys could be writing for Barney or The Wiggles.” Thankfully, Kelly & McKee use their powers for good and not evil, and they also deliver a great little video playing an indie rock duo who left indie rock to become sunbeams for Jesus (err – a nun and a priest), but ultimately return to their musical and spiritual roots. Amen to that.

  • First Look: Kylie Minogue “Better Than Today”

    Kylie Minogue ”Better Than Today”
    It’s a little slice of 1980s heaven: Back-up girls wearing hot pink wigs for shoulder pads! Back-up boys in Robert Palmer suits and Pac-Man helmets, wielding key-tars against a backdrop of Wham-ian block lettering and Atari 2600 level video game graphics of pixelated monsters gobbling up pellets. All the while, our heroine cockteases a small army of Marshall amps. Oops. Pardon me, I’m drooling. (The keytars, people, the keytars.) Did I mention the song’s pretty good too? It’s “Better Than Today”, the third single from Kylie Minogue‘s super-awesome Aphrodite album, which might’ve been a shoo-in for the best dance-pop record of the year, had Robyn not gone totally over-achiever on all our asses.

  • First Look: Pet Shop Boys “Together”

    Pet Shop Boys ”Together”
    The last couple of years have been great for the veteran synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys – lead singer Neil Tennant and everything-else-guy Chris Lowe. In 2009, 25 years into their career, they released Yes, one of their best (and happiest sounding) albums ever, and they followed it up with a very retro retrospective tour, documented in the live album and DVD Pandemonium released earlier this year. Now they’re getting set to put out a new greatest hits collection.

    The set’s called Ultimate and though the track-list leaves much to be desired, treading ground already well-documented in two previous compilations (1991’s essential Discography, and 2003’s massive PopArt), it does pick up one track each (definitely not enough) from their two most recent studio albums, and adds a new single, called “Together”. It’s a fine song, but hardly enough to justify buying another greatest hits CD. Chris and Neil largely cede the stage in the song’s video to two dueling gangs of dancers in a depressed looking workaday Russian (?) hamlet. It’s street toughs vs. a flock of ballerinas, who after an initial battle, teach each other their moves, hit the discos, and then put on a big show! Huzzah for Kinetic Young People! (The Pet Shop Boys make a couple of cameos, one at the beginning in costumes – Chris in his usual sunglasses, Neil with his usual big dog – and then again at the end looking on from the wings of the stage.)