Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights/Hounds of Love/The Big Sky

I would take out Kate Bush's garbage. I would sweep her floors. I would walk her Hounds of Love and tend to their droppings. In fact, I'm not quite sure why there aren't monuments erected in her honor spanning the four corners of the globe. She is a goddess in every sense of the word. She's an amazing singer, dancer (the Wuthering Heights dance is a bit out there, but check out the "Running up that Hill" video for some incredible dancing), performance artist, and of course she's head-explodingly beautiful. (I love being really annoying with useless adverbs on this blog. It's fun!)

It's impossible for me to choose a song to post here, so I put three that I think highlight some of her most appealing attributes. Some people get a little scared off by "Wuthering Heights." These people are deranged, for it is fabulous. She wrote the song when she was 18 (!), and it's just magical. My favorite part is the second verse when the strings come in in the background. Added to her vocals and the Bronte-inspired lyrics, it makes the song so melodramatic and perfect. This video also showcases her half-dancing, half-performance art skillz.

"Hounds of Love" shows how innovative her music was from a production standpoint. I love the off-kilter drums and the choppy violins. And of course her exquisite, melodramatic voice rising and falling with the "Doo doo doo doo doo!" vocals in the background. I'm sure Bjork was taking notes in her little pixie palace in Iceland.

"The Big Sky" is just a really fun song and video. Ms. Bush (I don't feel particularly worthy of referring to her as anything else) comes off a bit serious at times, but I get the feeling it's just due to the roles she's playing at the time. In this video she's just, ummm... taking the piss? I think that's what they refer to it as over there. It's also a great corny 80's video!



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MF Doom - Red and Gold

This doesn't even sound like a rap song. It starts all smooth-like, and you expect Patti LaBelle or Gladys Knight to start singing. All of a sudden Doom starts rapping, but his delivery is so smooth that it doesn't even sound out of place.

My favorite part is when that "dee dee dee dee dee dee dun dun dun dun dun" comes in and the female vocals sing "And the lights went down and hey!" Then the beat slows back down, and yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah.

MF Doom also has a great album as Madvillain, the creatively titled Madvillainy. Listen to "Curls" or "Money Folder" if you want a taste.

I wonder who Doom really is behind the mask. Maybe it's Eric Stoltz from that movie with Cher and Sam Elliott! Love that movie.

Kraftwerk - The Model

Note: Please disregard the Victoria's Secret fashion show in the beginning of this video (if it offends your sensibilities). This video has by far the best sound quality of the ones I found, so I had to use it. It also says "alternate version" because there's a version where the lyrics are in German.

If you've heard of this group, you know that they're pioneers of electro-pop, forefathers of electro-funk, trailblazers of electro-tweak, whatever. But what really matters are these freaking harmonies. Their music is just so beautiful, not many people have been able to replicate that side of the equation.

My Dad had their Tour de France album on cassette when I was a kid. I didn't hear it again from about the age of ten to twenty-two. When I first randomly heard it again, I almost fell over. The bullet beats that ended up in half the hip hop and techno songs out there were cool, but the synthesizer harmonies are what blew my mind.

"The Model" is just perfect. The beat is a little more basic than a lot of Kraftwerk songs, but the synths are just insane. There are a lot of vocalists and groups who can harmonize beautifully. The Mamas and the Papas, the Beach Boys, etc. Kraftwerk is up there with all of them.

Note: Killing me with the Frankenstein scene at the end. People need to be a little less artsy with some of these Youtube videos.

The xx - Islands

The first thing I noticed about this band is that they're really really young. They look somewhere between sixteen and nineteen. I watched a video of one of their performances, and it's painfully evident that at this point they have the stage presence of oak trees. But who cares! I'M SURE IT'S JUST A PHASE.

This album is a really great debut. There's a lot of white space in their sound, like Spoon with an added female vocalist. The songs are short, catchy, and have yet to get old despite repeated listens. The lyrics are a bit corny at times, but that's understandable. Go back and read your high school diary. Cringe city, amirite?

Thanks Dave for pointing this band out. Finding fun new bands can be challenging, like sifting through brackish water for nuggets of gold 150 years after the Gold Rush ended. The bands are out there. We must never give up hope. *sniffle*

Godspeed you Black Emperor! - Storm

I teach high school, and we're considering moving to block schedule. This essentially means that instead of having 50 minutes with a class, I'd have around an hour and a half. Some people say "How can you possibly keep a high school kid's attention for an hour and a half?!" The same way that Godspeed you Black Emperor keeps my attention for a 22 minute long song: by switching it up!

Since it's the day after Halloween, I figured I'd write about a scary song. Well, a song with a scary section. There are also some soft and luminous parts in this song. Godspeed you Black Emperor is an instrumental group from Montreal. The instruments consist of three guitars, two basses, French horn, violin, viola, cello, and percussion. Some of their songs have found-sound pieces inserted into them, including monologues by some very interesting characters. It all adds to the atmosphere of the music.

This whole song is great, but where it gets spine-tinglingly incredible is at 6:12 into the first youtube. It's after the first extended loud section, and everything gets very quiet and atmospheric. All of the instruments slowly come in, and the pulsing groundswell builds up to this insanely beautiful crescendo. Note: The youtube is sacrilegiously broken up in the middle of this crescendo, but just click on part two of the video, it's the top video that immediately shows up on the black screen.

THEN IT GETS FREAKY. 2:34 into the second video, the song suddenly gets trapped in this psychotic wind tunnel. It's like the part in the sci-fi movie where a hole gets blasted in the spaceship, everybody's getting sucked out, and the hero is desperately clinging to the edge of a wall. Inevitably some little kid presses a button to close the door and Connor Spacestrutter gets saved. But not in this song! At 4:22 Spacestrutter gets his comeuppance. Sounds to me like the stampede of a ghost army, but it's sounded like approximately twenty different things at various times I've listened to it. The rest of the song is basically the denouement, but it's interesting as well, with an intriguing found-sound recording and a plaintive piano outro.

What a song.