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Top 10 Most Played Songs This Week
Smith Westerns – “All Die Young”
Smith Westerns sophomore album, Dye It Blonde, is fantastic, an enormous improvement on their first effort. This is evident in both the production, which has gone from lo-fi to crisp and warm, and in the songwriting, which is just incomparably better. Like a mix of T. Rex and late period Beatles, or early Beatles member solo projects, with a dash of Pulp thrown in for good measure. Very highly recommended. This is my favorite track. (PS- These guys are only 19 or 20 years old!)
John Lennon – “Oh Yoko!”
Admittedly, I’ve never given much of the Beatles members post-Beatles catalogs much attention until lately. This song, Imagine’s closer, is my favorite John track right now. Love or hate Yoko Ono, you’ve gotta admit that what they had was pretty special and this song (and the accompanying video here) seems to highlight that as well as any.
Curtis Mayfield – “Move On Up”
I saw a really great show by a Milwaukee band called Kings Go Forth last weekend. A lot of their songs reminded me of Curtis Mayfield, which prompted me to put his double-disc Anthology back on my iPod this week. I listened to the whole thing quite a bit, but I apparently clicked play on this one more than any of the others.
Smith Westerns – “End of the Night”
Another track from this Chicago band’s Dye It Blonde. Forget how you felt about their first album. Forget how you felt about their cocky, dismissive attitudes in interviews. And just give the music a chance. I played the hell out of this one all week at long and I don’t foresee that changing any time soon.
Wire – “Outdoor Miner”
A great track from Chairs Missing, possibly not the most groundbreaking Wire album, but tops in my book. Looking forward to hearing their new album and hoping that it sounds better than the cover art from the new Gang of Four album looks. (Yes, I did just go out of my way to criticize that artwork, despite it having nothing to do with this band or this song. It’s that bad. If you haven’t seen it, take a look and just try and argue with me. Better yet, in the comments post links to worse album art from the last year or two!)
Paul McCartney – “Dear Boy”
Another Beatles alum whose solo work I’ve paid very little attention to. My uncle turned me onto Ram not long ago and it’s done quite a bit to improve my image of McCartney. It’s easy to let his 80’s-90’s output cloud your image of his solo career. I’m wide open to other solo-Paul suggestions.
Slowdive – “Missing You”
I love the whole neo-shoegaze thing that’s going on right now! There are so many exciting bands bringing back this amazing sound that made quite the splash in the UK during the 90’s. None, however, are doing it quite as well as Slowdive, one of the originators and masters of this style.
Palace Brothers – “You Will Miss Me When I Burn”
Damn, this song is depressing. But, depressing as it may be, the line “When you have no one, no one can hurt you” is one of those lines that seems so obvious and matter of fact as to seem like a revelation when you hear Will Oldham sing it here. For better or worse, it’s a striking truism.
Wye Oak – “Warning”
Speaking of the new generation of shoegazers, here’s one of them. I saw this Baltimore two piece, that specializes in fluctuating between whispers and roars, open for Lou Barlow this Fall. My first thought was “Where’s the rest of the band?” They put on an impressive show if you ever get a chance to see them. I would suspect that they’ll soon be headlining some shows, if they are not already.
Elliott Smith – “A Fond Farewell”
And speaking of sad songs, this one appeared on From A Basement On the Hill, a release that arrived almost a year to the day after Smith took his own life. This song is a rather telling look at what Smith and many others who have battled drug addictions have gone through/are going through.
