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.

Spoon “The Book I Write”
Wreckless Eric “Whole Wide World”
Stranger Than Fiction soundtrack at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

This is a little different.

I want to talk about a movie, Stranger Than Fiction, I saw over the weekend, which is my favorite film this year. I think you should see it too, although maybe this post is more for people who’ve already seen the movie and can tell me how they felt about it.

I’m gonna start with the music and sorta ramble from there.

There will be very, very spoily spoilers that give everything away and will make you sad if yr the kind of person who doesn’t want to know that Vader is Luke’s father before going to see Empire or that the butler did it, etc.

On both counts consider yrselves forewarned.

(more…)

The Secret Stars “Your Life To Live”

In the hope of sending you off to yr weekend in a mood full of both hope and wist(?), here’s some bedroom-recording whispers from the Secret Stars, the now-defunct Boston boy-girl duo interlinked with more rocking concerns like Karate and Ted Leo/Pharmacists.

“Your Life To Live,” off their 1996 self-titled tape, floats along on a sweet love vibe, intimating the dazed infatuation of what sounds to me like the early days of a relationship. Geoff Farina breathes out velvety but emotive lead vocals over smudged acoustic strums and subtle bass accompaniment from Jodi Buonanno.

Even for all the wonder, there’s an edge of anxiety, a sense of capturing a feeling that could fade or a good thing that could slip from yr grasp. The chorus projects the object of affection later possibly on the movie screen rather than in the next seat in the theater, mediated in the future where she’s immediate now. I’m also not sure what to make of a song title that’s more at home as part of a kiss-off rather than a lovestruck paean.

But of course everywhere else, the song overflows with her presence.

This might fall somewhere into the region that’s oft-derided as “twee”–and OK, this tune is totally cute. I was gonna argue that there’s something ballsy in the heart-on-sleeve quality, the torn-valentine earnestness, the subcult hat-tips. But when I think it over the claim feels kinda anachronistic.

I’m fumbling around here, but the sunny yet autumnal feel, and all of the above signifiers, sort of mark this as a document of something we’ve lost in the Interweb age, just dawning at that time. I’m in love with the modern world, but, hey, y’all know I’m also prone to nostalgia.

I could never figure out the handshake–I was more of a spectator and solitary fan–but there was still a sense of inclusiveness for the excluded. Enlisting, through dedication to one or another aesthetic, in a community of outsiders. Shrimper cassettes as membership badge to a secret club. Believe it or not, there was a time when some folks could still say “alternative” without snickering or “indie” without pausing to pick apart that shorthand for all its emptiness and inconsistencies. (The death of that naivete isn’t all bad.)

(There’s a whole other critique we could dive into–way off-track–about buying into an identity, etc., but it’s totally unfair to throw the weight of an entire era, or really of an evergreen pop culture conundrum, on the unassuming heads of TSS and their small-scope song of crushed-out joy.)

Maybe what I’m saying is that the Secret Stars were letting you into their world with these songs about their lives and their friends. There’s some presumption that it would resonate, that yr concerns were in some ways like theirs, yr group of friends like theirs. On second thought that sounds like, I dunno, blogging or vlogging or YouTubing or…

So maybe let’s just talk about a young man, singing in amazement at the gift he’s been given, the perfect girl.

TSS at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

Jon Brion “CITGO Sign” (Demo)

Today, off of a widely-traveled set of bootlegs from the early 90s, we have a demo of “CITGO Sign,” my favorite composition by L.A. pop producer, film-score composer and musical polyglot Jon Brion. I’ve heard this one live probably half a dozen times in the old days, when I used to hit his Friday night gig at Largo–OK, I was the one shouting out the request–and I hope you can hear the magic of this tune beneath the iffy sound quality.

The word “favorite” above is really a way of shoehorning this into the subjective and staying under control. Thing is, I’m convinced that this is objectively the best song the guy’s written, and maybe the best he ever will write.

Given that this is pop music, so totally ephemeral and even maybe insignificant, I’ve always winced at the phrase “criminally overlooked” used to describe some band or cute little ditty. But! I think it’s criminal that this song has never seen it to official release.

The opening 12-string lick shows up and sets the mood, but the song doesn’t fuck around too long before kicking in with some vocals. The verse melody is just the right kind of sing-song catchy. The chorus implies Rock before kicking into something swirling and dramatic. The bridge ups the ante and the outro gets epic for exactly 40 seconds, fadeout inclusive, not a second too short or too long for perfect pop.

Aside from its many formal/structural virtues, “CITGO Sign” nails me every goddamn time because it’s concerned with new love, and hits its mark in describing or suggesting every piece of it: hesitation, relief, awkwardness, comfort, especially open-hearted wonder, the whole gamut. There’s the right mixture of light and dark even–the despondence of the lonely at the start, the tinge of doubt in the final mini-verse…

Maybe the coup de grace is the Brilliant Use of the Mundane. How do you make a gas station romantic? Well, this is how the human brain, and heart, works. Cues, symbols and tokens without any inherent value of their own are imbued with an entire universe of emotion–just because That’s Where It Happened. Brion would cover this theme on the title track to 2001’s Meaningless, his only(!) proper solo album to date. But whereas that tune, not shabby I’d say, was an essay on the topic, “CITGO Sign” is a work of genius with the message wrapped inside, not painted across the face of it, and thus superior.

And with my orientation toward nostalgia, fake and otherwise, this touches my olde East Coasting heart. Yeah, I’ve never held hands with anyone by a CITGO sign. But there was a CITGO station not 15 minutes from my childhood home in Western Mass, and you don’t see many of those in my adopted L.A. home. Knowing that Brion grew up in Connecticut, within an hour of my old haunts, and cut his teeth in the Boston music scene, well, the affinity’s there.

Jon Brion music at iTunes.

Tahiti 80 “Big Day”
Phoenix “On Fire”
The Push Kings “Sunday On The West Side”

I went through a little angst about whether to post about Tahiti 80.

The group was brought to my attention by a couple publicist-type folks, and up till now what I write about has been decided pretty much by whim. The apt introduction to the band: “I know you don’t necessarily do new music, but I’ve snooped around your blog a bit and I think you might like them.”

And I indeed like what I’ve heard.

So: it’s my blog, and to coin a phrase, “I don’t care. I do what I want.”

For me Tahiti 80 fits in the context of other recent skinny indie kids reviving an amalgamated AM Gold/yacht rock/disco crossover style–dudes with a residual affection for George Michael, Hall & Oates and Bread (it can’t be just me, right?) making smooth sounds for the now times.

Exhibit A–”Big Day.”

This sounds a bit like the Bee Gees during the recently-mentioned days of white suits, but Tahiti 80 is really scratching the same itch for me that Justin Timberlake, or Q and Not U on Power, or the Scissors Sisters scratch. I’ve already confessed my weakness for music carrying affirmations, and while “the big day waiting for you” in this tune is a come-on, it also feels like perfect waking-up music as I try to shake off the daybreak grog.

So their record Fosbury dropped stateside yesterday. Apparently they’re also touring the U.S.–with a bear suit. (Don’t tell Kanye. He’s been kinda touchy lately.)

Tahiti 80 are from Freedom, so the mind trips to Phoenix, other Francofunky purveyors of Amalgamated Smooth^tm. “On Fire,” off their 2000 debut United (which also gave us Copollatastic hunk of mellow yearning “Too Young”), attains the almost perfect lulling groove, promises “it’s gonna be alright” over and over while organ and clavinet choogle along.

On the one hand, I think there’s sort of a sly undercurrent of real turmoil here, the implication of a medicated zombie of a b/f who perhaps deserves to ultimately lose the gurl. I mean, after all the lovey-dovey, how can he say, “baby left me for another/don’t you know it’s gonna be alright”?

On the other hand, I invite you to imagine this as the story of lovers falling to pieces during the 1968 Paris student riots (an event that the Phoenix crew would have to be too young to remember) or during the 2005 Paris riots (the future at the time this recording was made, if that doesn’t blow yr mind).

If we go a little further back, to 1998, we get the sexy Moore Garety bros, of the Connecticut Moore Garetys (their daddy’s rich and their momma’s good-looking, legend has), leading the Push Kings through “Sunday On The West Side,” one gem among an unbelievable trove of Amalgamated Smooth^tm to be found on Far Places.

It’s really a cute, almost Romeo & Juliet stylee tale of a suburban boy limited to weekend bus-trip sojourns to romance his city girl. There’s even a precious tinge of “parents just don’t understand” on the breakdown starting at 2:28.

The production on this one is minorly ridiculous and wonderful–the song as song has sunk enough into my consciousness that I have to remind myself to notice the flute, the wikka-wikka record scratches, the vibes.

Beneath this wash, just for a moment, we get to feel teenaged again, but with none of the grief.

Fosbury at ArtistDirect. (and at iTunes.)
United at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
Far Places at Gemm.