The Wednesday Shuffle

Back to Wednesdays, and it feels so right. (Anything rather than go outdoors in this weather...)

1.  "The Bad Thing" / Arctic Monkeys
From Favourite Worst Nightmare (2007)
Are the Arctic Monkeys over?  I hope not. Here's what I wrote about this scrappy track a couple years ago when the album first came out...

2. "Isn't That the Thing To Do?" / Maria Muldaur
From Love Wants to Dance (2004)
Nice little palate cleanser, with Maria letting out her jazz side on this Gershwin standard.

3. "How Can I Sing Like a Girl?" / They Might Be Giants
From Factory Showroom (1996)
"I want to raise my freak flag / And never be alone" -- yes, it's another off-kilter nerd anthem from the Johns.  That nasal whine of John Linnell is perfect for this song.


4. "There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards" / Ian Dury and the Blockheads
From Reasons to Be Cheerful (1978)
Speaking of raising freak flags....here's my favorite Ian Dury tune ever (here's why). Which reminds me -- I've just got the new biopic Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll from Netflix -- must watch!

5. "Sleepwalker" / The Kinks
From Sleepwalker (1977)
Or, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Insomnia," by Ray Davies. Another freak flag raised!  This bouncy track IMHO isn't one of the Kinks' best -- odd it should be the title track of an album. But there are Kinks fans who love it, so what do I know?

6. "Money Talks" / The Kinks
From Preservation Act 2 (1974)
Now this is more my Kinks -- savage satire with histrionic flair.  Being deep into Keith Richards' Life at the moment, I realize what a pitch-perfect Stones impression this is.  I'm noticing the dirty slide guitar and lovin' it.

7. "New Slang" / The Shins
From Oh, Inverted World (2001)
Charming folk-pop jangle from James Mercer and Co., spiked with stream-of-consciousness absurdity.  Yes, I'll admit it, this song on the Garden State soundtrack was my back-door introduction to these indie darlings.  There is an art to a great soundtrack, though.  Must blog about that sometime... 

8.  "Don't Bug Me When I'm Working" / Little Village
From Little Village (1992)

Talk about dirty guitar -- Ry Cooder gets just plain nasty on this one. Oh, and Johnny Hiatt's snarling lead vocals, with Ry and Nick Lowe each insinuating a verse. ("I can't even work with my baby at night -- Lord have mercy!") Tell me again why Little Village didn't work out?

9. "Full Moon in My Soul" / Robyn Hitchcock
From Spooked (2004)
More folk-pop jangle, with Robyn out-absurding even the Shins -- "I'm out of here, I'm taking off / You can have my cigarettes and, mister, you can have my cough." The loungy rhythm of this number is simply too delicious, and dig that lazy slide guitar in the bridge. 

10. "This Is A Low" / Blur 
From Parklife (1994)
Mmm, what a lovely sonic haze enfolds this modern bit of BritPop psychedelia -- I sink right into it. My sentimental favorite Blur album.  Should have known Damon Albarn would be a Kinks fan... 

"Music Is My Radar" / Blur

For whatever reason, I missed out on this band the first time around (not that it was that long ago -- their first album came out in 1991). I only picked up on Blur recently, because of the Damon Albarn-Ray Davies mutual admiration link. Any Britpopster who so publicly admires Ray Davies is okay by me, and Ray actually seems to like him back. For me, that's a good enough reason to go buy someone's CDs.

I can see the Kinks influence in some Blur songs, like "Park Life" and "Girls & Boys," but "Music Is My Radar" is one of their later tracks, and a new and strange thing altogether. Yet I'm hooked on it, I must say, and maybe for the same reason that I was mesmerized by that Police track I wrote about yesterday. The melody is robotic, one line after another repeating the same drifting series of notes, although one pattern could be called a verse (where each line starts with the word "really") and another pattern I suppose is a chorus ("Aah, don't stop me now," repeated seven times). But it doesn't tell a story, it doesn't convey an emotion, it doesn't state an opinion -- it's simply a vehicle for the layered, percussive music. What matters is not where you are in the song, it's the tugging constant beat, and the dense tangle of synthesizer and guitars and drum clatter laid on top of it. And Damon Albarn's slurred singing, a sort of disaffected nonsense crooning that 's somehow perfect for this foray into electronica.

I always begin by trying to pay attention to the lyrics of this song, but I lose my way pretty quickly. I get distracted by odd details -- such as, why is a Brit like Albarn addressing us as "y'all," and who is this Tony Allen that he claims has got him dancing? (I looked that one up -- Tony Allen is a Nigerian drummer who's considered one of the founders of the jazz-soul-Yoruba hybrid Afrobeat -- who, by the way, plays with Albarn now in his new band The Good, The Bad, and the Queen. Hunh; you learn something new every day.)

Damon Albarn's odd pronunciation of several words only makes the lyrics harder to comprehend. The line "Really topping up my joy y'all" (?) I always hear as "Really Tommy John, yeah," as if these guys would have had any idea who Dodger pitcher Tommy John was. And the thing is, he might as well be saying "Tommy John," because nothing makes sense anyway.

It's like what you get when you sit next to someone on the bus who's grooving to his iPod, singing fragments of lines and vocally imitating the instruments, totally unaware that anybody else is listening (or watching). The good thing with this song is that you don't have to strain to pick up what's leaking out of his earbuds; you can go get lost in that intoxicating groove right along with him. And at least one line in this song comes through loud and clear -- "you really got me dancin', dancin' in my head now baby." Aah, don't stop me now, aah....

Audio clip: http://www.artistdirect.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+Search?select=Songs&searchtype=NormalSearch&start=1&searchstr=Music+Is+My+Radar