One of my favorite songs from last year, “Swim Club” features an acoustic guitar jaunt similar to “Send Me On My Way” by Rusted Root (that song in Matilda) with some nice production touches out of left field during the chorus. It’s a song for sunset drives in the summer, feeling the wind blow through your hair and enjoying life in the moment. A fantastic song. “Swim Club” is the second song off of The Cave Singers 2011 LP No Witch, an album that isn’t just limited to acoustic fingerpicking.
Sometimes, making it big really is a crapshoot. Whereas Foster The People had their incredibly famous and catchy “Pumped Up Kicks” wrapped in a melodic little package while the lyrics were somewhat…subversive (written by a down on his luck jingle-writer no less), Philadelphia’s Cheers Elephant writes some of the best melodies this side of indie psych-pop with equally loud personalities, and they’re pretty much unknown. So its even more to their credit that they doubled down and offered their latest LP Like Wind Blows Fire on Bandcamp for a name your own price kind of deal. While poor college folk (like me) might be happy to trade their email information for a chance at some free musical goods, it gives the consumer the option to pay what they feel the band deserves and end up giving more to the band (Bandcamp takes less of a percentage than iTunes) than your regular 9.99 on iTunes deal. For a taste, check out the charming and highly melodic “Peoples”, the album opener, which starts with some toe-tapping call and response before it takes off into the catchy hook stratosphere. I wanna groove indeed.
Check out their website and head on over to Bandcamp to grab Like Wind Blows Fire and be a good sport and buy their other albums too. You’ll be glad you did
LIYL: Foster The People, Free Energy, Bombay Bicycle Club
Today in wish-fulfillment, here’s the third song off of Islands most recent release A Sleep & A Forgetting “Never Go Solo” which pretty much (ironically) sounds like a Beatles reunion. With Lennonesque lyrics and piano lines and a McCartney styled melody, it’s one of my favorite songs of the year.
Grab the vinyl from their label ANTI-Records and find the digital version on iTunes
The story behind this song is the stuff of legends. It’s easy to forget that the story of John Lennon post-Beatles was not all just being a house-husband and loving Yoko. Some will remember that there was the infamous “Lost Weekend” which truthfully was more like two years, from 1973-75 where Lennon ran off with Yoko’s assistant to Los Angeles, hanging out with legendary boozing and reckless types like Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon, Phil Spector and David Bowie, and in the case of this song, Mick Jagger. There are two competing claims for the origin of this song; one has Lennon playing guitar and producing, the other has him just producing, but this legendary session has everyone from crack session drummer Jim Keltner to Al Kooper (organ extraordinaire who played with Bob Dylan among others), Jack Bruce of Cream on bass Harry Nilsson on backing vocals and Bobby Keys (who played almost every sax solo in the seventies) providing the horn break. The song material fits Jagger like a glove, a dirty blues euphemism. But the star of the show is John Lennon’s production, a greasy concoction of bass and punchy horns, that makes this track just so damn perfect. If there was anything that better defined the rock star lifestyle in the 70s in all its excessive glory, I’d be hard pressed to believe it.
The Art of the Mixtape 