Living For The Sunshine Girls
“Living For The Sunshine Girls” is a mixtape I made last year for Jadey. The idea was a mix full of Beach Boys soundalikes from the 1960s. I also have a Dylan 1960s soundalikes mix if anyone’s interested.
My favourites on this one are the tunes by the Tradewinds, Don & The Goodtimes, and the Tuneful Trolley. It is not the only Beach Boys soundalike mix I’ve made for Jadey (Sagittarius, Harmony Grass, Billy Nichols, First Class, etc are on the other one). The Tony Rivers and the Castaways is a Beach Boys cover, yes, but it’s that rare Beach Boys cover that actually has bigger harmonies than the original. You should be able to download it from the mediafire link above. Enjoy!
Tracklist:
1. Third Rail - “Run Run Run”
2. The Tradewinds - “New York’s A Lonely Town”
3. Don & The Goodtimes - “I Could Be So Good”
4. The Turtles - “Surfer Dan”
5. Tony Rivers & The Castaways - “Girl Don’t Tell Me”
6. The Yellow Balloon - “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love”
7. The Tokens - “Wonder Things”
8. The Parade - “Sunshine Girls”
9. The Arbors - “With You Girl”
10. The McCoys - “Runaway”
11. The Tuneful Trolley - “Sunny Days”
12. The Flower Pot Men - “Let’s Go To San Francisco”
13. The Sunrays - “I Live For The Sun”
Bang Pop - Free Energy (Stuck On Nothing, 2010)
I like Free Energy. Power pop that’s trying to be popular! They’re not a complicated band, and they don’t try to be. I’d be surprised if any of the songs on Stuck On Nothing have more than four chords. It’s big and dumb, and deliberately so. The singing has the nonchalance of Julian Casablancas, the guitars and the songs have a sort of Weezer-y mix between power pop and the kind of cartoon hair metal that Chuck Klosterman likes so much in Fargo Rock City.
But I do have reservations about Fre Energy. On record, they sound overly pinned to a click track or something, that they were struggling too much in the studio to get the takes with the least mistakes, rather than the one that feels the best. They seemed to be better live, judging by the rapturous blog posts I read from people who went to SXSW. But on record, there’s a little too much studiedness, and not enough energy. A little less studied and it’d be appealing bubblegum, a little more energy or loud guitars/drums and it’d rock satisfyingly. There’s little on the record that’s out of balance - I think I’d like it better if, for example, there were guitars that were too loud, songs played too fast, vocals a little too hoarse. But it’s often a bit characterless for this reason.
The song on the album that has the most energy and the most attitude - and thus the one that works the best is “Bang Pop”. The song could not be dumber and simpler. It has one chord progression for the entire song, and that chord progression is the simplest and oldest in pop, the same as “La Bamba” or (almost) “Louie Louie”. The lyrics are standard boy-girl fluff - he was “super messed up” until he got a crush. In a way, I wish I could write a song this simple, and I admire that Free Energy are capable of it. I am not capable of such simplicity in my songs, for better or worse.
I was quite surprised to see the video for “Bang Pop” on the Australian Sunday morning music video show Video Hits the other day. It’s worlds colliding kind of stuff - what’s a bloggy hype band doing on after T-Pain? But then, like T-Pain, it’s not exactly brain surgery. Maybe it actually could be a hit? The video seems like some odd mashup of Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher” and Glee - all bright colours and high school misfits rebelling against injust authority. As such it’s quite appropriate to the song.
To digress back to my complaints about their sound, it occurs to me that Free Energy are probably getting attention because of, not in spite of, this balancedness/lack of energy. Much louder and messier and they’d probably be considered too close to a Weezer clone for anyone to notice them. It’s the odd thinness of their sound that makes them stand out enough to get some hype. Though I think the mood at the moment is that messy and loud is in - I mean, I’m quite happy to not hear another indie band making washed out pastel beach music right now, I want some heart and primalness - and if others are like me, this is why Sleigh Bells are making waves (their achievement lies in their figuring out a new and unique way to be loud and obnoxious sounding). Maybe Free Energy’s second album will push more in that direction, and maybe it will be more successful as a result. Or maybe they’re just this year’s Kara’s Flowers.
John Grant (with Midlake) - I Wanna Go To Marz (free legal download, Queen Of Denmark, 2010)
The most interesting thing on Queen of Denmark, by far, is John Grant’s perspective on the world. Sure, Midlake are the backing band, and they acquit themselves beautifully (it’s a gorgeous sounding album). But it’s rare for a lyricist to have something distinctively new and interesting to say about the world; Grant, I think, actually has created something new under the sun.
He seems to have a very real pain, anger, and cynicism; he said in a recent Guardian interview that he was estranged and never reconciled from religious parents who disapproved of his lifestyle, that he has descended into seedy drug fueled gay sex too often, and he still seems bitter about the lack of success of his former band. However, the tortured, neurotic primal scream lyrics you’d expect are mostly absent.
Grant, instead, largely uses surrealist imagery or odd, seemingly disconnected thoughts. On ‘Sigourney Weaver’, for example, he bothers to spends several lines of a chorus commenting on how terrible Winona Ryder’s accent is in the movie ‘Interview With A Vampire’. It doesn’t feel quirky at all, though. This is partly because of how sombre the music is and partly because of how coldly angry he often sounds. And the darkness can’t help but break through the lyrics, though he seems to not want to dwell on it.
But the more surreal and silly the lyrics, the more the sound of his music seems sombre. He often comes across as Rufus Wainwright covering The Carpenters’ Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft’ after having overdosed on Elliott Smith (and you can tell that Midlake recorded their backing tracks at the same time as The Courage Of Others, which is similarly sombre). Of course, the songs with the most blatantly straightforward attacking, cynical, angry lyrics - “Silver Platter” and “Jesus Hates Faggots” - are positively jaunty. “Silver Platter” even has a bit of the English musical hall about it.
And Grant is plainly an excellent, technically proficient singer-songwriter. He knows how to spice up a chord progression, he knows how to make a melody sing, he knows how to fit together words and melody, and he knows how to use his voice (which sort of resembles Rufus Wainwright’s) to get across a sentiment despite surrealist imagery. So what could come off as total nonsensical incongruity instead completely works. He’s deliberately tried to contrast the music and the lyrics here, and it’s all the more affecting because of it.
‘Marz’ describes a surreal fantasy world Grant would love to go to, involving amongst others, ‘black and white big apple Henry Ford’s sweetheart maple tea’; in Marz, ‘you’ll get your heart’s desire, I will meet you under the lights’. So far so delightful and surreal. But as we listen to these lyrics, the sound of the music is so sombre, restrained and tasteful - flutes and strings, mixed with tasteful piano arpeggio, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, and reverby guitar right out of “Wicked Game” - that the Marz fantasy sounds positively unhealthy, a dangerous fantasy that should not be followed. It feels like a cautionary tale, and it feels ridiculous and terribly devastatingly sad at once. It’s also worth pointing out that the deeply creepy video clip for the song (embedded above) starts with a depiction of a suicide, and that the ‘heaven’ the suicide goes to (Marz, presumably) also feels creepy and disturbing.
In a way, “I Wanna Go To Marz” reminds me a little of Mercury Rev’s Deserters Songs, and the way that Deserters Songs hid lyrics of despair, frustration and depression under giddy Disney orchestration. Grant uses a different configuration of musical elements to get his point across, but it’s a similar species of animal, and well, I loved Deserters Songs when I first heard it, and still do.
(by the way, the Queen of Denmark album cover is horrible and whoever chose it should be be shot)
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Sia - “You’ve Changed” (We Are Born, 2010)
There are plenty of musicians that you never end up paying attention to; there’s only so many hours in a day you can spend listening to music, and only so many bands or musicians you can give the kind of listen they might deserve. I’ve experienced enough of the Australian music scene to know that there are plenty of excellent, talented bands that never get an audience, let alone the kind of limited success of, say, the Gin Club or Richard In Your Mind (to pick two interesting Australian bands that are releasing albums at the moment). And this is mostly, I think, because there are only so many bands you can listen to.
And for whatever reason, it comes in waves. For a while, people can’t get enough of a certain sound. Eventually, it becomes part of the landscape, not even noticeable (I was amazed when Wolfmother got big and got lots of criticism for being derivative of Sabbath and Zeppelin, but nobody seemed to notice how much they sounded like the White Stripes). Finally, it seems out of fashion and people move on.
The CD store at UQ, where I started teaching this year, has an excellent collection of 90s Australian alternative music; I’ve bought a few CDs of bands like Deadstar, Pollyanna, which I liked at the time but never got around to buying. When I listen to these CDs I’m often surprised by how much heavier the guitars are on the CD compared to my memory of how they sounded. That post-Nirvana distorted guitar was de rigueur back then, but listening to ‘Don’t Let It Get You Down’ by Deadstar now, the guitars get in the way of the song, sound a little tacked on. But that just means my memory has been influenced by all the stuff that happened since that scene came and went, that my expectations of how music usually goes have changed.
You could see artists in the 90s wrestling with what to do now that the grunge boom. The Posies sound much darker and louder on 1996’s Amazing Disgrace than on their earlier material, Faith No More’s 1995 King For A Day downplayed their funk metal in favour of hard rock and guitar distortion (Roddy Bottum’s keyboards were very much downplayed on the album). Even someone like Kylie Minogue experimented with sounds from alternative music at the time, working with the Manic Street Preachers.
Nowadays, in contrast, it is the synthy 80s sound that artists are wrestling with. OK Go’s recent album sounded less like Weezer and more like Prince. Rogue Wave originally seemed a bit like labelmates The Shins, but now they synth it up. Muse’s last album had a heavy dose of 80s synth action. (And of course the 80s themselves are littered with the wreckage of artists from the 60s and 70s trying to update their sound.)
Often my immediate reaction to that kind of radical change is “sellout!” - the band didn’t really mean it when they were doing things that I used to love that they no longer do. But I came to quite like OK Go’s most recent album, for example; it’s not really a sellout, just not what I wanted to hear at first. I just came to hear other things in it that I did want to hear. And I mostly can’t blame bands for wanting to move to different sounds, or even for wanting their music to be ‘relevant’ - music is communication, and as long as you have something to say, I don’t really see what’s wrong with trying to say it to a lot of people.
Anyway, onto Sia: I knew she existed a few years back. I’d see CDs in record stores, and I knew enough of triphop and chillout music to have heard Zero 7 and know she sung for them. But I hadn’t really heard anything of hers, hadn’t really paid attention, til I started to see ‘You’ve Changed’ on the weekend morning music shows. It both stood out in that Video Hits context (especially with its video full of uncomfortably awkward looking teens wearing clothing that could have been cool 15-20 years ago) and fit in. And ‘You’ve Changed’ doesn’t sound like the triphop/chillout stuff I was expecting. Instead, you hear 80s rhythms and sounds very prominently. Is the rest of her work good? Bad? Indifferent? I don’t know. I gather it sounds different. But I’m not a long-time fan angry at the change; for all intents and purposes, the way it is just is.
I’ve made a big deal about how the song sounds 80s, but that’s doing it a little bit of a disservice. I’m more interested in how Sia wrestles with the general climate in pop music than in the 80s-ness. In fact, The most interesting thing to me about the song is how seamlessly it integrates elements from several different decades of music. Her vocal sounds like Winehouse crossed with Newsom, and modern indie pop’s love for glockenspiels in reflected in the glockenspiel intro. You suspect she’s heard a little MGMT. But the melody sort of echoes Des’ree’s “Life” (from the early 90s) and of course the disco beat and the synth sounds echo the 80s.
She sings in the chorus that ‘you’ve changed/ for the better’, but the song doesn’t sound like it. It feels too uneasy and nervy for that, as if she isn’t quite prepared to believe that the slick unreliable charmer depicted in the verses actually has changed. I actually can’t help hearing the wrestling with the synthy 80s sounds in the lyrics to the song, as if the song is *about* her struggle to find something of herself in music she’d previously dismissed, as if the song is about the changing ways we react to music as the years pass and our memories get progressively more rose coloured.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
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The Young Veins - “Take A Vacation!” (Take A Vacation!, 2010)
I have a severe sweet tooth for music that apes 1960s pop; it’s the music of my childhood, brought up as I was by a mother who was 14 at the height of Beatlemania. The Young Veins share this sweet tooth too. In the sense that power pop is basically music that sounds like the Beatles in 1965-66, the Young Veins are power pop. And they wouldn’t look out of place or inferior on a compilation of the Beatlesque, next to the Red Button, the Redwalls, the Rutles, Locksley, Utopia, et al.
“Take A Vacation!” comes off as upbeat 1964-65 era Beatles - the tempo and the melodies and those forceful double-tracked vocals that remind you a little of John Lennon. But it has an eerie underbelly that reminds me of the Zombies; there’s a certain chord here and there that feels harsher than you’d expect, and there’s that Vox Continental organ burbling around, harmonising with chiming guitars. And there’s those odd stop-start rhythms the Zombies did sometimes.
“Leave the past out to pasture, and take the days as they come,” the lead singer sings in the B-section. I actually only discovered that the Young Veins are ex-Panic At The Disco dudes when I googled the band writing this post, and I don’t really know the story of Panic at the Disco. Perhaps the lyrics refer to the singer’s dissatisfaction with the rock and roll lifestyle he must have lived, perhaps not. Regardless, it’s catchy, and doesn’t sound like pastiche for pastiche’s sake; I hear actual emotion there.
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The Silver Seas - “The Best Things In Life” (Chateau Revenge, 2010)
The Silver Seas’ last album, High Society, was exquisitely tuneful, like a more melodically interesting Josh Rouse - which is no surprise, because Daniel Tashian, the singer-songwriter of The Silver Seas had a fair bit to do with Rouse’s Nashville album. Tashian has a similar voice to Rouse, in some ways, and a similar 1970s fixation, but he has a wider range of influences.
“The Best Things In Life”, though (and Chateau Revenge, generally), has a certain laid-back disco funk - that sort-of-chicken-scratch guitar, synthy strings, an indie pop inflected Motownesque beat that’s almost but not quite disco. It’s not a million miles from yacht rock, but neither is it a million miles from more recent Belle & Sebastian. And there’s enough instrumental hooks to tide you over until the melody sinks under your skin. This is smart pop.
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lazy susan
—easy targets
Lazy Susan - Easy Targets (Places That Made Us, 2010)
As of 2007 or so, I’ve been playing keyboards in an independent Sydney band called Lazy Susan. We have an album coming out in June called Places That Made Us. We’re putting one track from the album up at a time every week on the Myspace. The first one is this: “Easy Targets”.
There are two songwriters in Lazy Susan, Paul Andrews and Pete Wilson. Pete songs tend to be lyrically more cynical and straightforward, Paul songs tend to be more melodic and metaphorical. Pete is the lead guitarist, but I think having a keyboard player in the band inspired him to write songs on the piano, and “Easy Targets” is one of them. Pete claims that this song is about cryptic crossword lovers, which is the type of thing he would claim. Also, Glenn Thompson who played drums in Custard and the latter-day Go-Betweens plays on this one.
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Dr Dog - Stranger (Shame, Shame, 2010)
I’m sure I heard some talk that Shame, Shame (their first album on Epitaph Records) was going to be all hi-fi and studio-recorded. But as the catchiest bit of the song goes: “I do believe that there’s no more tricks up my sleeve”. ”Stranger” still sounds like Dr Dog - same mix of the 3 B’s (Band, Beatles, Beach Boys), more or less a similar production sound. And it’s a nice, laidback song that sounds just fine to me.
The opening lyric in the song is “20 years of schooling”. I couldn’t help expecting the line to end “and they put you on the day shift”, which it didn’t. Which satisfied me somewhat. And then I wondered, “was the opening line meant to deliberately evoke Subterranean Homesick Blues?” I think I ended up with 22 years of schooling in the end, and I still don’t know the answer to this kind of question. Presumably it must be blowing in the wind.
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Eddy Current Suppression Ring - Anxiety (2010, Rush To Relax)
Quite frankly, I am slightly confused about a world where Eddy Current Suppression Ring CDs debut in the Australian top 20 album charts. Which, events indicate, is the world we live in. “Anxiety” sounds for all the world like niche music to me, made for that seemingly small group of people who long for music with the sound of authentic 1970s punk. Because “Anxiety” could basically be the Buzzcocks. Like an “Orgasm Addict”, “Anxiety” has an intriguingly tossed-off feel about it, as if the band knows that all it needs to make a song successful is the right attitude and sound.
But never mind the Buzzcocks; Eddy Current’s appeal obviously extends outside of that niche. Listening to it, you can’t help but be struck by the way that Brendan Suppression pronounces the word “anxiety”, which begins every line in the verses: it sounds more like “zaddy!” He’s too anxious to enunciate properly - instead, he can only utter a strangled cry. And perhaps this is what elevates them from their niche; ECSR not only accurately ape the sound and tone of the Buzzcocks and their ilk, but can also make that sound and tone mean something on their own terms.
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Gold Motel - Don’t Send The Searchlights (Gold Motel EP, 2010) (via)
This is cute female-fronted indie pop, with a good dose of 60s girl group music - think the Lucky Soul or Camera Obscura. Greta Morgan, the singer, is really quite good; she has a plaintiveness and clarity in her voice that reminds me of Inara George or Clare And The Reasons (or Morrissey, I suspect).
If you like that kind of thing (and I do) you’re almost certainly going to like this, because this is very well constructed; everything is in its right place, and the song is substantive and catchy, with a big chorus. There’s a certain McCartneyness to the big leap in the melody in the chorus between “good” and “bye” which would be obvious if the song had a Wings-style production. Lyrically, it’s functional, rather than the complex feelings expressed in Camera Obscura songs. But that’s okay; the lyrics suit the tone of the song, and Morgan has the kind of voice that can flesh out functional lyrics, invest them with meaning.
