Things change. Or rather sometimes people change. Get blinded by lights or other unpredictable sources. Once upon a time things were cool with you and now they’re not. The inclination is always to blame yourself because you know, it’s obviously your f-ing fault. Say hello to Talkie who have a signature song for that very feeling. In “Boring Now”, they sound at various points like either a slacker version of the early Beach Boys or an anesthetized all male Ronettes. This thing manages to be both tongue in cheek and heart on sleeve and perfectly nails that losing feeling.
Weekly New Wonders Playlist !
This is singer-songwriter Valerie Carter (1953-2017). Her first 2 solo albums ( 1977’s “Just A Stone’s Throw” & 1978’s “Wild Child” respectively) were reissued together this week in collection form as “Ooh Child: The Columbia Years” & well, she was just amazing. Anyway, while you’re “Spotifying”, “I-Tuning” or “Padora-ing” this week, please take a minute & check it out because, holy lord, she had a transcendent, shockingly wonderful voice. The nearest she got to having a hit record was when her cover of the aforementioned “Ooh Child” played over the closing credits of the bonafide cult classic of suburban teen ennui from 1979 ( & one of the best movie’s EVER) “Over the Edge”. The original version is a classic but unbelievably hers CRUSHES IT, a genuinely insane achievement. And so check that out if you haven’t before as well as the tracks “Cowboy Angel”, & “Wild Child” because they are tear-jerkingly gorgeous. Speaking of tear-jerkingly gorgeous, it’s time to glorify the BEST NEW MUSIC that’s arisen over the past week which is to say welcome to the WEEKLY NEW WONDERS PLAYLIST. We hope you find your new favorite song(s) within it ! You can listen on Soundcloud or Spotify, links are below just for you.
Listen on Soundcloud:
Listen on Spotify:
Cry Club “Two Hearts”
While “Two Hearts” is a modern day sticky pop song, endlessly bouncing and criminally tuneful, it is also sweetly anchored to some pretty superior indie pop of yore, specifically the criminally underrated 90’s Britpop band Echobelly. Heather Riley’s vocal is both yearning and assertive, way out in front of everything else, wrapped in glorious swirling pop guitar and strikingly reminiscent of Sonya Aurora Madan’s from the aforementioned Echobelly. You’ll wanna squeeze this one close to your heart.
Weekly New Wonders Playlist
Not looking to darken the proceedings of presenting the latest WEEKLY NEW WONDERS PLAYLIST featuring the MOST wonderful new music we’ve met over the past week, but want to take a minute and pay tribute to someone no longer physically with us who’s absolutely worth remembering and knowing about right about now. His name was Jimmie Spheeris and he died 35 years ago this week in a motorcycle accident in Los Angeles. He was an absolutely amazing singer-songwriter who should’ve been better known. He looked every inch the 70’s troubadour, long haired, bearded, toting his acoustic guitar but there was something about his songs, full of summer breezes and insecurity, melodic and complex, that was utterly special which is to say jeezus damn, he was pretty amazing. Anyway, take a minute this week and spend some time with the handful of albums he blessed us with because they are all full of beauties and they’ll make you feel loved okay ? Now back to our regularly scheduled and beautiful new music…
Listen on Soundcloud:
Listen on Spotify:
It’s Gettin’ Dark in Here: Tim McGraw’s “Good Girls” (2009)
Waylon Jennings’ “Cedartown, Georgia” ( 1971) is both an amazing and horrifying song. In it, our grizzled hard workin’ protagonist describes his plan to murder his cheating wife in a most relaxed, tuneful, and matter of fact way. It’s so great and so f-ing wrong at the same time. It is absolutely as creepy and beautiful as Bobbie Gentry”s legendary “Ode to Billie Joe”. Country music has openly embraced and sung about terrible crime scenarios for decades, centuries, long before all the now beloved Dateline’s, Serial’s, My Favorite Murder’s and their brethren hit the video and audio airwaves. While the country music death march has slowed down considerably over the years, there have been some pretty cool assertive, feminist revenge party songs that have waved the murder flag pretty effectively in the 2000’s, Miranda Lambert’s “Gunpowder and Lead”, and Carrie Underwood’s “Two Black Cadillacs” to name a couple. Today though, want to exult a damn fine murder ballad with no “winners”. Tim McGraw is a beloved country superstar who, since his debut in 1993, has racked up countless piles of platinum and # 1 albums and singles. I’d take him over Blake Shelton, Luke Bryan or any of the other supposedly “hunky” doofus’s out there because he has some properly good songs and frankly, seems way cooler. With that in mind we’re going to go back in time so we can shine a light on his superior contribution to the irrational, jealous country murder ballad canon. In 2009 Tim released his tenth studio album, “Southern Voice” and nestled within it was a song called “Good Girls”. It was written by pedigreed country songwriters Chris Lindsey, Aimee Mayo ( who co-wrote Lonestar’s crossover megahit “Amazed”) and the Warren Brothers ( who co-wrote Dierks Bentley’s country # 1 “Feel That Fire”). While Tim is the narrator in the song, he is not an active participant in its storyline and is just there to tell the terrible tale . The story he relates is about 2 best girlfriends, Jesse and Jenny. Jesse calls Jenny to insist they hang out, drink some Boone’s farm wine and chase the moon right outta the sky. They hop in Jesse’s car and take off like a bottle rocket. Turns out Jesse has an ulterior motive which is to confront Jenny about messing around with Jesse’s man. It doesn’t go well. Next verse Tim offers up is about the news report the next day which tells of a car parked on the tracks and a train with no time to stop. The only witness to the whole event is “a Weeping Willow on a foggy hill” and as Tim is describing it all in detail, well, for all intents and purposes, he is the all-knowing, noble and empathetic tree ( being the only one privy to what happened in the car that preceded/resulted in the tragic ending)…which I very much like the idea of. It’s got an achingly earnest vocal, and is built on a foundation of crying guitar straight out of the wistful, dusty old Bob Seger ballad “Main Street” ( which is also awesome). Yeah,“Good Girls” sounds like a Dateline episode put to music but it’s also really f-ing good. And even with its glossy, not remotely gritty or raw production there’s still something oddly striking, sinister and retro about it. Something that brings to mind that dark old country tragedy tradition. Let it proudly hold its irrational, impulsive head up next to “Cedartown” forever.
“If I can’t have him neither one of us will”. You better believe it.
Hear it here:
And here’s Waylon’s beautiful and wrong “Cedartown, Georgia”:
Weekly New Wonders Playlist !
Normally I’d write a big intro to tout the wonderful new songs within the latest Weekly New Wonders Playlist ( and they are uniformly wonderful, swear) but I’m slightly spent from writing about this old Beatles book ( please check it out, it’s the entry after this one !)…and so all I’ll say is here are some fine pieces of new music and I hope you find your new, beautiful theme song within. Also here is a gratuitous photo of genius Francoise Hardy from back in the day just because. You can listen on Soundcloud or Spotify because we wanna make it easy. Go rock…
Soundcloud:
Spotify:
Whitelands “Paradise is a Person”
“Beseech” is a pretty regal and ancient word and as such is hard to get away with featuring in a pop song, but it fits kind of perfectly within “Paradise Is A Person”: this song is the embodiment of beseeching. It’s a gorgeous piece of heart on the sleeve shoegaze and is the perfect soundtrack for looking longingly across rooms in quiet desperation. It’s hiding from you shyly while hoping it’s made it’s desire perfectly clear and obvious. What a beauty.
Weekly New Wonders Playlist
Here we see Stevie Nicks in Fleetwood Mac’s 100% stone cold classic video for “Gypsy” smirking in a mind bending-ly fetching manner. The video is full of signature Stevie moments but this moment is # 1. It wins by the tiniest of margins over the part where she runs out of the nightclub into the rain in her giant boots and wails ” enough for me to love, enough to looovvvve“. Plus there is some classic Stevie-twirling™ which is basically the equivalent of God smiling on us all. If ever you are feeling rubbish about the universe, watching this romantic, silly, and perfect video will get you out of that head for at least 5 minutes. And of course the song itself is brilliant.
We haven’t posted a Weekly New Wonders Playlist for a couple of weeks ( absolutely disgraceful, I swear I’ll be more on top of this in the future). The end result of this is that the playlist you see before contains the BEST new music from the past few weeks as opposed to just last week. And so it is a bit larger than usual. But let’s look at it in a half full way: you can listen to it on a long journey and potentially not hear the same wonderful song twice. Here’s hoping at least one of these songs inspires you to dramatically run out of wherever you are in your enormous platform boots, into the rain and wail with everything you’ve got. And with that, please enjoy this overfed love monster.
*You can listen on Soundcloud OR Spotify but please note lists are slightly different as not all songs are available on both services ( just a few), so check out both if you are a completist and don’t want to miss anything !
P.S. Bruce Springsteen’s new album, “Western Stars”, was also released this week and is really good, completely worth spending time with so add that to your listening list too !
Listen on Soundcloud:
Listen on Spotify:
Kingsbury “In My Brain”
Okay so Madonna released a new album this week and it’s getting good reviews and she is a legend but dammit to hell I so miss POP Madonna cause she f-ing ruled. Thankfully something has come along to take you to that place that “Holiday”, “Angel”, and “Into the Groove” did, just in the nick of time, which is to say here comes Kingsbury with the best thing she’s ever done .”In My Brain ” marries New Order’s classic “Thieves Like Us” and pop Madonna, and is as absolute and widescreen as Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own”. It’s a lush, fat, beautiful pop song about the head and the heart battling it out over moving forward and booms from the bottom to the top. And so next time you need a cathartic dance alone moment, well, you know what to do.
That’s Their Pet Sounds: Tears for Fears “Seeds of Love”(1989)
Mission statement:
No matter who we are in this absurd, brief, and messy life we can all lay claim to a peak, a shining moment where we were the best we could be, where all the stars aligned and we freakin’ delivered the goods.
Welcome to “That’s Their Pet Sounds” our semi-regular feature where we endeavor to spotlight and celebrate a heretofore maybe uncool, often unjustifiably underrated, sometimes polarizing, not as acclaimed as they should be, or “what the hell?” artist’s grandest artistic achievement i.e. their greatest album.
*”That’s Their Pet Sounds”is named after the Beach Boys landmark 1966 LP which is universally regarded as one of the greatest albums ever made but yeah, you probably knew that.
And now please join us on a trip over the top…
Tears For Fears BEST ALBUM : Seeds of Love (1989)
Background: The general consensus is that Tears For Fears 1985 album Songs from the Big Chair is their magnum opus. That it is The One. It remains the duo’s best-selling album by far (multi-platinum) and is filled end to end with angsty, earnest, occasionally pretentious but seriously wonderful pop music. Over the past ten years or so, even the most hardened critics have had to come clean about its undeniable and considerable charms. It now appears on every single “Best Albums of the 80’s” list without fail. There it eternally sits in all it’s radio-friendly, big chorused glory, the existentially tortured, two-headed pop turtle amongst your Sonic Youths, Smiths and Public Enemies. Now while the deep cuts on this thing are pretty great ( yeah “The Working Hour”, I’m talking about you) if we’re being truthful, the heart clutching love people have for Big Chair is primarily related to its triumvirate of enormously popular and memorable megahit singles. Let’s rank them in order of wonderfulness:
1.“Head Over Heels” which consists of unrequited love, familial disappointment and a pretty glorious hook. Also, bonus points, its video takes place in a library, the architectural equivalent of a secret crush. We will likely be swooning along to this thing forever. 10/10.
2.“Everybody Wants To Rule the World”: The best 80’s pop song that was partially inspired by the Cold War, easily crushing its two chief high profile competitors in that category: “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Sting’s “Russians” the latter of which we’re not even going to discuss because I just freakin’ can’t. The chorus and intro get all the glory in “Everybody…” but the real heroes here, the heavy lifters and secret genius’s within it, are the sunshine strewn, singalong guitar solo, and the clever little vocal embellishment by Tears man Curt Smith immediately following it: “Say that you’ll nevernevernevernever need it”. Also remains pretty glorious.
3.“Shout”: And now the party is over. This bitter chant was a massive hit but okay, I’ve never liked it. Yes, it is undeniably memorable in that insidious, easy to sing along to the chorus way but it’s also an interminable dirge: it’s missing the unspeakably wonderful melodicism that is not only showcased in the two aforementioned tracks but in the album’s handsome deep cuts as well.
That aside, make no mistake, Big Chair is a very good record…but it isn’t Tears For Fears greatest artistic achievement.
No, to experience Tears for Fears at their maximum Tears for Fear-edness, behaving in the most Tears For Fears manner possible, we need to turn an ear to Big Chair’s spoiled and overfed younger sibling, 1989’s Seeds of Love. It’s full of over the top windswept melodicism and cryptic weirdness. Its scope and overall sound have an underlying unity, which is to say Seeds sounds like one big fat song as opposed to eight smaller ones. It comes across as a singular emotional vision. It’s bigger than Big Chair, way, way bigger.
Why it’s their Pet Sounds: Basically Seeds of Love is the Good Morning Burger in the form of an album. It is made entirely of musical carbohydrates. It is bloated, garish and grandiose. It is pompous and overwrought. It’s also Tears men Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith at their most adventurous and playful, more so then they had been up to that point and have ever been since. It is also positively brimming with estrogen. As in, five of the album’s eight songs were co-written by singer-pianist Nicky Holland. As in, Oleta Adams’s ridiculously soulful vocalizing is prominently featured on several key tracks including the behemoth “Woman in Chains”. As in, that very song is about toxic masculinity. Seeds is fueled by Girl Power.
This album had an extremely difficult birth, taking roughly three years and millions of dollars/pounds to complete to everyone’s satisfaction ( namely Roland and Curt). Those years saw key Tears stalwarts Ian Stanley ( keyboardist & co-writer) and Chris Hughes (producer & co-writer) both leave the fold due to that dusty old classic, creative differences, as well as the scrapping of all the initial album recordings that had been done by the legendary UK production team of Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. This ultimately led to the guys taking on the production themselves assisted by engineer David Bascombe. It was a bumpy road.
And, unsurprisingly, Roland and Curt themselves were starting to really get under each other’s skin, ultimately resulting in the latter’s quitting the band in 1991 after the tour in support of the album. This departure was followed by some genuine Mean Girls style retribution wherein both Roland and Curt released nasty songs describing each others shortcomings on their first solo releases after Seeds: “Fish Out of Water” where Roland talks shit about Curt (“the only thing you ever made was that tanned look on your face”), and “Sun King” where Curt talks shit about Roland (“boy you looked so bad”). Burn baby burn.
And so Seeds was born under duress.
As for the contents of the album itself, this is one of those cases where you can actually judge a book by its cover, which looks like a Sgt.Pepper album and a Metropolitan Museum of Art Calendar that have melted together in the sun i.e. it sounds exactly like it looks. It’s completely flooded with color, and there are no empty spaces. Tears had never exuded light-heartedness or humor prior to this album, and the subject matter in the Seeds songs hold to that standard. What you get are mostly despair songs as opposed to love songs…but the despair is about the state of the world, not another singular person. It’s full of fun stuff like political hypocrisy, inter-band hatred, and the impending apocalypse. Honestly, it’s kind of angry but it hasn’t given up, it desperately wants things to get better. It’s some Everest, epic and majestically beautiful pop music and even though it’s about that dry, dense real world stuff and not I love you baby, it’s still extraordinarily romantic.
“I Love a Sunflowuhhhhh”…
The Songs: This album is officially eight tracks long. When it was released back in 1989 that was it. Eight tracks. If you go to Spotify or iTunes now, you are presented with the expanded version which features four additional tracks, former b-sides and what not. Here’s the deal, while these bonus tracks are okay, they are not part of the original album release…and so you should ignore them. We’re excommunicating them from the listening experience here. With that in mind I’m now gonna get all Dark Side of the Moon on you: In order to really experience Seeds properly, the album needs to be listened to in sequence . It’s a suite, a body, all the songs feel connected and meld into each other…and, okay, you may want to sit down, I’m going to use the P word: it is a little bit Prog. But with a small p. This isn’t Yes or Rush, don’t get scared. This has soul, big fat soul. And as stated earlier, it’s also somewhat…excessive. This record is just excessive. Just like this piece you’re reading now. The average running time for each song is six freakin’ minutes. It is full and I do mean FULL of horns, strings and piles of backing vocals. The whole thing is as a slick as an oil filled rain puddle. There are no sharp edges in here. And oh yes, Phil Collins makes an appearance playing his GIANT GUEST DRUMS. I know, it sounds like the very definition of “Eighties “. But wait, it is also full of absolutely transcendent hooks. Like in every song. And though it doesn’t get talked about much when we talk about Tears, Roland Orzabel possesses one incredibly soulful whine of a voice (That’s a compliment I swear) and can swoop from the depths of the ocean to the most manic falsetto in mere milliseconds and sound pretty fantastic. And co/backing vocalist Oleta Adams’s stunning supporting voice pulls him so far up throughout the album and is so in sync with his, that half the time it’s impossible to tell where he ends and she begins. For years I confused who was singing what in certain songs, so similar in timbre were the two. And so, the songs…
“Woman in Chains”: The band first encountered Oleta Adams whilst she was performing in a hotel bar in Kansas City back in 1985 while they were on tour, and oh lord, if you’re going to unexpectedly discover a singer in a Kansas City bar, you couldn’t haven’t been more fortunate and blessed than to stumble upon freakin’ Oleta Adams, and her soaring, heavenly voice. “Woman” is one of the the album’s signature songs and is, in a nutshell, about man’s commitment to overtly masculine behavior and how heinous it is…but it is not a clinical presentation or scholarly dissertation, it is a total power ballad duet. Like freakin’ “Almost Paradise” by Ann Wilson and Mike Reno, the gigantic love blob from “Footloose” that put the O in Overwrought , only “Woman In…” is about ingrained misogyny, because you know, this is Tears For Fears we are talking about here. Widescreen and beautiful.
As mentioned earlier there was some serious band discord happening through Seeds birthing process. “Bad Man’s Song” is about that very thing. Roland is the real life Bad Man in question and describes a scene that took place on the bands Big Chair tour wherein he heard the band talking about what a tyrant/asshole he was through a hotel wall. The vocal interplay between he and Oleta A. is exceptional here, and this incredulous, but accepting acknowledgement of bad behavior has got soul, soul, soul.
“Sowing the Seeds of Love” was the first single released off the album and is, for all intents and purposes, The Beatles’s timeless pop chant “I Am the Walrus” with a chorus that sounds like sunshine replacing the original one that sounds like rain. It is bitter and fun at the same time, calling out Margaret Thatcher’s infamously cruel reign and using Paul Weller’s musical transition from The Jam (Where he was the rebellious mod man of the streets) to The Style Council (Where he was a complacent coffee bar soundtrack provider) as a metaphor to drive the point home. It’s also one of Roland Orzabal’s finest vocal performances, featuring all kinds of quirky note stretching and emotional word spitting. While we’re here I would like to state, politics aside, I think Style Council were better than the Jam. More tunes, more romance and yeah, I know you don’t agree and please leave me alone on this because I can’t help it.
“Advice For The Young at Heart”: “Everybody Wants to Rule’s” older, more mature sibling, “Advice” positively shimmers while emitting the sweetest light on the whole album, both airy, and wistful. It’s also the only song to feature a Curt Smith lead vocal (Uh oh).
The next four songs feel connected in sound and scope and are Seeds secret foundation. They are what makes this thing truly great. Starting with “Standing On The Corner Of The Third World”, the Tears version of a quiet/loud song. No, that does not mean it sounds like the Pixies (Thank God). It sneaks in delicately, then gets all in your face loud, with big horns, and assertive backing vocals…but it’s all kind of sad. It’s somewhat convoluted and cryptic lyrically but seems to be talking about hiding all your bad thoughts or things you don’t want to admit to or show and using the now dated term “third world” as a metaphor for that place you hide them because, big picture, it represents a place people try to deny and forget. At least that’s what I think it’s about. This lyrical interpretation thing is always a losing game. Which leads us into… the plush and windy “Swords and Knives” which starts at birth and walks headlong into death as embodied by…“Year Of The Knife”. Is this song about regret and denial ? Is it a deathbed scene between father and son? I have absolutely no idea. All I can tell you is it’s a gigantic heartbreak locomotive and features some pretty fabulous screeching (No, seriously) from Roland…once this ends we survey the countryside from the mountaintop as the closing ballad wafts in over the credits, that being…
“Famous Last Words”: Tears’ version of a love song. Which means it is about embracing one other in the face of a pending nuclear apocalypse wherein all that will be left is “insects and grass”, all the while “listening to the bands that made us cry” which while completely fatalistic is undeniably romantic .
In Conclusion: Despite its going platinum, this record remains a bit of a sleeper. You don’t hear it mentioned too often these days, if at all. Which is a pity because it’s the finest thing this band ever did ( high praise because they did some seriously fine things especially on their first two album releases). It’s cynical, anxious and confused by the world but is all hope and love at its core. And it still sounds as melodically magnificent as the day it was born. Oh Seeds, you’re so pretty when you’re angry. Don’t ever change.
Hear it here:
Or here:
PICKING UP ROCKS 