Thingy “O.B.1″
Queens of the Stone Age “These Aren’t The Droids You’re Looking For”

Cinema Week! on Paper Covers Rock! Continues!

The weekend before, the little lady’s cable channels were playing all six Star Wars movies on a loop. (Although we only like to acknowledge the first three.) Leading up to this semi-non-event, there was some blog coverage at places like Sterogum, thanks to the totally awful ads that set selected scenes from the movies to a sappy Coldplay song. Each lyric was matched to an “appropriate” image, in a mercilessly literal-minded display of crapitude.

Now I grew up on Star Wars. Even if the memory grows foggy with my advanced years, the first three movies are like mother’s milk. Or planted deeper still–as I reclined on the little lady’s couch, it felt like every whined utterance of “Where could he be?”, every ominous head-turn from Vader, every space buckaroo “Yahoo!” had already been written into the strands of my DNA.

Now you see why I take this pop culture stuff so seriously, ridiculous as it may be? I’m not even a real Star Wars nerd–I hold no merch.

Anyhow, because of the love, and because Paper Covers Rock seeks most of all to help, I wanted to suggest a couple other musical options next time the pay services create a weekend marked by six-hour nostalgia trips.

Thingy, just another project from San Diego musical omnipresence Rob Crow, went real pretty with “O.B.1,” one clever borderline-novelty among many on 2000’s To The Innocent. Basically, Leia’s holographic plea is set into a sweetly harmonized roundelay. It’s that much stranger, and funnier, that Crow & Co. invested their joke with so much wispy, whispery beauty.

The song’s gentle, almost delicate feel brings to mind the work of a certain doe-eyed indie popster with a geographic fixation–it’d be hard to believe that Thingy wasn’t some sort of an influence.

Shifting gears to something a bit more amplified, on “These Aren’t The Droids You’re Looking For,” desert rockers Queens of the Stone Age jam out a Jedi mind trick instrumental–Is it over? Oh. Where are those guitars coming from? This is the rock I’m looking for. “Droids” comes from an obscure 1998 split EP with, um, Beaver, and I’m not sure exactly how I got ahold of it.

I really miss the weirdness of QOTSA on their early releases, before they brought back grunge and made a name for themselves on radio. G-d bless, really, success is a good thing and people’s muses change, but I at least wish someone else had picked up the weird slightly out/epic metal/biker rock/punk/motorik style they cultivated early on. No one plays leads like Josh Homme anymore–not even Josh Homme.

If you thought I was gonna draw some sort of connection to Gerorge L. there–I’m not.

To The Innocent at ArtistDirect. (and at iTunes.)
You can find that QOTSA/Beaver disc on Amazon, but it’ll cost ya.