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Thursday, May 26, 2005
THE LEANOVER
Life Without Buildings
Any Other City
Tugboat Records : 2001
[Buy it]
THE LEANOVER (ACOUSTIC/LIVE)
Life Without Buildings
live at the 13th Note, Glasgow, 12/09/01
free download from http://www.lifewithoutbuildings.com/
HOPE THERE'S SOMEONE
Antony and the Johnsons
I am a Bird Now
Secretly Canadian : 2005
[Buy it]
THE MUSIC NEXT DOOR
The Lucksmiths
Warmer Corners
Matinee Records : 2005
[Buy it]
Just a quickie from me today, which we'll call: Songs that are perfect. One of the red-flaggest formulations in music criticism is "Words cannot describe _____." While we're all occasionally confronted with songs that stop language dead in its tracks, it seems fair to say that if you're getting paid to write about bands you like and want to be taken seriously, you might want to go ahead and give it a shot. While, as a critic, it would be poor form for me to say a song is "perfect" without plenty of supporting evidence (and probably not even then), when I blog I'm writing as a fan , and damn, it feels good to be able to make fanboyish, outrageous, unsupported claims without shoring them up a million ways from Tuesday. That's why I'm not going to take the time to try and locate the perfection of Life Without Buildings's "The Leanover" at some nexus of its exuberant word collage and soap-bubble guitar clouds; I'm not going to dwell upon exactly what makes the vocals on Antony and the Johnsons's "Hope There's Someone" seem to enter the body through the spinal cord rather than the ear canal; I'm not going speculate on how the perfect "ba-ba-ba-bas" at the end of The Lucksmiths's "The Music Next Door" retroactively idealize the rest of the song. I'm going to shove them into your hands with a quivering, almost frantic gaze, and say, "Dude, you gotta check this out." If you've never heard these, congratulations: One of them is your new favorite song.
*Thanks to Alex for the late-breaking live/acoustic version of "The Leanover", which he yoinked off of the Life Without Buildings website (there's also a live version of "New City" there, which was the B-side to "The Leanover" single). Hell. This is *my* new favorite song.
posted by Brian
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