Also, I finally got around to setting up a poll, so please let me know which of these you liked.
Dennis Linde –
Dennis Linde’s big claims to fame are the hits he wrote at the beginning and end of his career (“Burning Love” for Elvis and “Goodbye Earl” for the Dixie Chicks, respectively), but he had a long and healthy career as a Nashville songwriter for a good three decades (also writing “Bubba Shot the Jukebox,” which was one of my dad’s favourite songs during his country-listening days and a couple songs of Grease 2). He recorded a few albums of his own material in the early 70’s. This one is the lead-off track from his second or third album (from what I can tell, his second album never actually came out), and pretty clearly deserves to have been a hit single. Linde’s version did nothing, chart-wise, nor did subsequent covers by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band or Manfred Mann, but it’s a great song and Linde’s version has some pretty odd production touches (like the overall noisiness toward the end that sort of sounds like a sledgehammer on metal) that distance it from a lot of the 70’s singer-songwriter stuff.
3 Teens Kill 4 –
You know, this probably shouldn’t even be in this list, but, since the two songs are joined together, it makes it into the H’s. “Hut” isn’t great – minimal synth new wave with lots of spoken word and yelping noises. It’s all right, but nothing special. “Bean Song,” which starts at around 4:20, is fantastic. It’s sort of like a proto-!!! song – funky basslines, drums, repeated chants of absurd phrases interspersed with lovely sung versions of the absurd phrases. Highly recommended.
Happy Supply –
Happy Supply were apparently a very short lived Chicago indie pop group. I’ve spent quite a while trying to pin down who they sound like, and it just now clicked that the vocals are reminding me quite a bit of Sissy Bar. I was never the biggest Sissy Bar fan, but this song is excellent. And it’s about being committed, so hard to go wrong.
Farquahr –
I don’t know what happened to my musical taste last month. Usually I have a very low tolerance for a lot of the 70’s classic rock sound, but, between Dennis Linde and this, it seems to be reverberating with me right now. It’s very odd. Anyway, this is very classic rock-sounding – somewhere between CCR and Ocean. I only half-noted it the first time I heard it then, to my surprise, it ended up running through my head at around 3 in the morning on some sleepless night (though, of course, I didn’t know the lyrics, so it kept drifting into the theme song from Supervan). I went back and listened to it a few more times and now I’m pretty into it, classic rock associations be damned.
Hanky and Panky –
Hanky and Panky and Panky may have leapfrogged ahead of the competition in the “twee-est band in existence” race. Every song is sung in the same wimpy falsetto that makes identifying the gender of the singers completely impossible. The lyrics are kind of hard to make out but I’m about 90% sure the chorus of this song starts with the line “You are my hero/You are my cat.” I’m not sure if that beats the Smittens’ “I love my mom so much/I give my little pony a perfect haircut/every time” chorus, but it’s up there. Really, what sells this song, for me, is the shouted “hurray” in the chorus. I have spent weeks yelling “hurray” in the wimpiest possible voice thanks to this song.
Salon Music –
I don’t have a lot of other 80’s Japanese new wave bands to compare this to, but I feel safe in saying this is possibly the best Japanese new wave song ever recorded. I am, obviously, biased in that this band is trying pretty hard to sound like Sparks. Given how great Sparks are, I’m not why there weren’t/aren’t more bands who go for that sound (other than, obviously, Queen). Anyway, great song that (as far as I can tell) is mostly about trying to pick up French girls. The weird field recording stuff at the end was apparently the gimmick of the comp this came from – each track has some Walkman-recorded street noise, since this was the supposed to be the sounds of the street or somesuch.
The Pipkins –
All right. You all know the Pipkins. Even if you don’t think you do, you do (or at the 2:30 mark here). “Gimme Dat Ding” is odd, but “Here Come De Kins” is orders of magnitude stranger. While the first had the weird Wolfman Jack bit as an intro, this is pretty much just a growled proto-rap number. There are strange “jokes” inserted between the “verses” but they’re obtuse and dramatically unfunny, but mostly it’s just the Wolfman Jack voice and the falsetto shrieking alternating. It’s very odd, but worth listening to at least once. I imagine it would be quite good for clearing out a room, if you ever have need of such a thing…
The script’s done. It’s certainly not good, but it’s done. 101 pages. Written in 5 days. Not nearly as much fun as last year. Having a bedridden spouse for half the month and a massive work project for a third of the month certainly made things more difficult, as did my mid-month decision to dump my first script (which I still want to write, but I don’t have the plot quite down). I’ll probably take some time to clean up this script before I post it, but I will post it at some point, should any one want to read such a thing….