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Starting off slow means this video, which is of Lissie recording Little Lovin. The song pulls off the neat trick of sounding like something I’ve heard before, even on the first listen. I’m still not sure it isn’t a cover, but my cursory search revealed nothing. Cover or not, it’s good.

I’ll never be on KEXP, so who am I to talk, but “Mind Idea” has to be about the dumbest song title/opening lyric I’ve ever heard in the entirety of my life. I mean, I’ve listened to, and liked, some crap over the years. But I was unable to keep from laughing when The Current Song of the Day served up this track. He’s a little more mellow in the youtube video. If you hear the studio version it sounds like he’s thinking “I am the Sartre of indie rock” as he belts out “Mind IDEA!” The rest of his stuff stuff seems, you know, okay. But that opening lyric is like starting a first date by opening the door and earnestly telling a girl: “I’m a very deep guy. I don’t mean that ironically. I’m just really like, deep and existential n’shit.” Once you’ve gone there, it’s just not going to happen.

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I can’t say that I’m with them on that.

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I find myself wondering what a Dinosaur Jr. show looks like now, is there anyone under 25 there? Or is the early 90s a resurgent retro meme at this point? Didn’t we have to wait a few more years?

Aside from liking the graphics in this video, I’m a sucker for that old Super Nintendo era side scroller look, I’m testing out my ability to post. I’ve been getting connection loses for posts over 359 words, now I’m checking to see if under fifty will cause a problem.

Edit: It’s always the littlest spelling errors that make you look the dumbest.

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I’m not even sure I like it. There isn’t much of a payoff for me. I’ve always had a weird feeling with Animal Collective. I like bits of their songs, but sometimes they drag a little too much for me. Also sometimes they carry nonsense lyrics to a point I had not even considered possible. I can’t decide if I like that or not either. This song actually makes sense all the way through, but when he sings “I just want: four walls and adobe slabs, for my girls,” I crack up.

Edit: Also, I cannot help thinking of H.P. Lovecraft while watching this video.

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The future, now with violent centaurs.

This is, of course, old news.

Today’s song of the day got me thinking about one of the tiny sins of songwriting. I had thought of it as an 80s sin until I heard this song. The song is Evident Utensil by Chairlift, and it’s a generally solid song. I’d link a youtube video, but the studio version has been removed for terms of use violation, and that’s the version that I heard. It has background vocals in that weird half singing/half chanting way. Like Right Said Fred is doing the background vocals for this entire class of 80s songs, and Chairlift just said, “Hey, I’ve always liked Right Said Fred, let’s throw some business his way.” In this song, as in many others, its used to echo the lyrics directly.

Does anyone else notice this type of background? Does it drive everyone else nuts? I don’t know that I’d run out to buy Chairlift’s album, but the little background vocal didn’t do it for me, and kinda spoiled the whole song.

I found myself listening to Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen:

This in turn got me thinking of the Tori Amos cover of same. I hadn’t listened to Amos in a while, and so I checked it out on Youtube, and was surprised by how much she seemed to be mugging to the crowd as she played. I don’t recall interpreting it this way when I last saw her, which was years ago, and the video I was watching was from last year. Have I just grown up since last I saw her in concert? Quite possibly. I’ve never been sure just how much of the “shock” factor of her songs was a part of my fandom. I still like many of the songs, but I seem to have over listened to many of them, requiring my to step away for periods of time or risk having them get annoying. I was shocked when this happened to Jeff Buckley, who I had thought could never get stale. All of this and Rain Dogs never seems to suffer the same fate.

Also, a brief note bringing it back to Cohen. Looking at the Wikipedia entry on FBR, it appears to be getting more popular to cover it. I can’t say that’s what I would have expected. Roughly half of the covers appear to be post 2000.

As I was thinking about how the name of a song by Why? “these few presidents” would be a great one to be able to reference at certain times. That in turn got me thinking about the content of the song. I tend to pick up on different parts of his songs at different times, but this time I found myself thinking about the whole song, and how it was very similar in content to a Robert Browning poem, maybe most like “Porphyria’s Lover,” but Browning was hardly short of poems about murdering your significant other.