“Giant Peach” by Wolf Alice has been stuck in my head for the last couple of days. They were recommended to me on the YouTubes with a different song, so I fell into their catalog and found a bunch of tracks I really like. This one has a great beat, excellent guitars, and some fantastic double-tracked vocals.
The other one that’s been on repeat in my head is “Moaning Lisa Smile”:
There are some elements to both of these tracks that remind me of shoegaze from the late 80’s, which is, I suppose, why I like them so much.
OK, Pitchfork released a “250 Best Songs of the 1990’s” list; as with many of these lists I have concerns. The top five songs are:
5. Missy Elliott: “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”
4. Liz Phair: “Fuck and Run”
3. Aaliyah: “Are You That Somebody?”
2. Björk: “Hyperballad”
1. Mariah Carey: “Fantasy (Remix)” [ft. Ol’ Dirty Bastard]
Missy Elliot: sure. The Liz Phair track is absolutely a top five, for what it says and what it meant for women in the early 1990’s. I don’t know much about Aaliyah; the song is OK, I guess. There are better Björk tracks to choose from—”Human Behaviour” and “Army of Me”, for starters. And then there’s Mariah Carey.
In a note describing how the list was put together, Pitchfork’s editor explains their reasons:
…because our understanding of it changes the more we learn; because there is still a thrill in discovering something we didn’t know about (or quite get) before; because taste evolves and grows, enriched by the passing of time.
Their previous list, from 2010, ranked the top five as
5. Wu-Tang Clan “Protect Ya Neck”
4. Radiohead “Paranoid Android”
3. Dr. Dre [ft. Snoop Doggy Dogg] “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang”
2. Pulp “Common People”
1. Pavement “Gold Soundz”
Five bands featuring posturing males either bragging or complaining; not a woman in sight. So yeah, I support re-examining these lists, and putting them through new lenses; I just don’t think I would have put Mariah Carey/ODB at the top here. Especially as the original version of Fantasy is better anyway.
I’m playing this one on repeat not only because I love the chord progression and melody structure, but because I’m also trying to wipe Fleetwood Mac’s “Everyone” out of my head after hearing it eighty times on Sunday afternoon watching football. This is “Brushed” by Quicksand, a band that scraped the ground floor of fame in the 90’s before breaking up; I’ve mentioned them before here but they put a new album out last year that I really dig. This song builds and builds but right where you think there should be a soaring chorus to release that tension, it fades back and ends abruptly.
Here’s a quiet, gripping song called Nothing to See by a woman named Miya Folick:
This is a fantastic melody paired with some devastating lyrics, and it’s on repeat in my brain. She’s got some other really good tracks available on Spotify—Bad Thing is another standout.
Wow! The Smithereens are releasing a “lost” album from 1993, when they were between labels and had some time to record. This comes chronologically after the 1-2-3 punch of Especially For You, Green Thoughts, and 11, three albums that were on heavy rotation for me in college.
This is a song called Maria También, by a band named Khruangbin, from Houston. I heard about them a couple of years ago and use them for background grooves when I’m working on projects; I heard this tune in Austin while waiting for coffee and it’s stuck in my head ever since. This is just a monster jam.
I read a retrospective review of an an odd album called Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots on Friday that got the song Fight Test stuck in my head. It was a strange album 20 years ago and it still sounds like nothing else out there today, but the melody here is catchy and the lyrics are really quite perfect.
My good friend Matt sent me a text asking if I’d been to a Soul Coughing show at Bohagers with him back in ’97, and I said, Yes! I was there! They were throwing board games out into the audience! Turns out there’s a recording of the show on the Internet Archive. It’s not recorded through the board, but the sound is good enough. Bohager’s is long gone now; it got razed and developed into a parking garage about five years after that show. And, here’s the inspiration for the name of this website.
This week’s Earworm is a track by Sleigh Bells called SWEET75. The album track is good but this live version is about ten times better:
It’s an interesting song. The drum breaks are odd in their placement and construction, but the hook is solid and they work it hard. I dove into their back catalog and can’t say I enjoyed most of it—there’s a lot of noise rock and overprocessed elements I can’t get into, but a track from their previous album also caught my ear:
This is an even stranger construction; the chorus has nothing to do with the verse other than the key it’s in, but they hang it together really well. And damn, that woman can sing.
I’ve had this tune stuck in my head since I heard it last week:
I really dig the distance between the verse melody and the chorus melody; it’s a beautiful, unusual song. Soccer Mommy is one of a group of women artists I seem to be diving into further these days.