Waving My Dick In the Wind - Ween

(Posting this now 'cos I'm tired and probably won't wind up doing it tomorrow. Yeah. Posting early. What are you gonna do.)

Anyway, ain't much to say about this. The title basically sums it up. It's on my Makes Me Dance Like A Crazy list and I heard it one time on Triple J at a pretty silly hour of the morning and stalked it like a sonofabitch and that night I did not sleep for cackling laughter / listening to this song / rocking out.

Their other music is pretty entertaining as well I guess. I don't know. I've been writing nonsense for a good swathe of the day and I haven't really had enough sleep in like one hell of a while so you are going to need to just listen to this and leave me alone.

Know Better Learn Faster - Thao & The Get Down Stay Down

Song! So pretty! Observe!
Soccer -> tired -> no texts!
Enjoy!

Where's Your Head At - Basement Jaxx

In keeping with my poorly-established tradition of short and sweet blog posts, unlike Lucy's epic textwall which will go down in history for its considerable length and multiple links (I have only one link), I thought I'd remind everyone about a pretty awesome tune that I overheard when I was standing outside the fence at 'Summadayze' (no, I didn't come up with the title, Thank You.) Protip: Don't buy tickets, just pack some chairs and a bottle or two and sit outside; you get the full experience, less the significant ticket price and having to rub shoulders along side the best of Adelaide social scene, all the while nursing the mandatory New Year's Day hangover.

Anyway, picture me, standing outside Summadayze, cursing the loudness (which was the same at my house). A remix of Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At" comes on the main DJ stage, and it almost totally made up for the sound-test of the subwoofers waking me up at half eight that day. I actually hadn't listened to it in full before, having just assumed it was a loop from some DJ disc of mixing material. Fun fact - I used 'Shazam' to get the artist (Basement Jaxx) while the DJ was 'mixing' the tune, expecting not to get any result. To my surprise, up pops "Where's Your Head At," complete with links to YouTube video and lyrics (somewhat unnecessary, I agree). Shazam is supposed to only be good for recordings, and not live performances, so I found it interesting that the DJ was doing so little mixing and pretty much just playing us (well, the people that bought tickets, whatever) some dance tunes, such that Shazam picked it up.

Anyway, listen to the two minutes of anxiety over the location of [his?] head. Also the music video isn't half-bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4hFwJm41h4

(Actually this is a better song! It features my two loves, Dominoes and Girls, and a favourite past time of mine, "falling!"

You'll find that these girls fall like Dominoes! THIS WAS ALWAYS HERE SHH)

El Capitan - Idlewild

I don't really have a textwall this week? There isn't a great deal to say about this song. It's lovely and it's sad and it's a little bit self-indulgent but that's true of most songs these days and ain't that the truth. I don't know a damn thing about the band other than I quite like the name and I think they're Scottish. Does it matter? I don't think it matters.

All I remember from the Wikipedia article I read about 'em a while back when I found this song is that their early sound has been described as reminiscent of "a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs", and among their influences is listed a band simply known as "Gang of Four". I fail to see what else is to be said.

Here. (I still can't make the embed thing do what it's meant to do. The aforementioned button ain't here. This is not my problem.)

Paper Planes - The Da Vincis

Well! It's my day yet again and today, I present The Da Vincis' cover of the M.I.A song, Paper Planes.
I don't really know anything about the band or the video clip or anything because I'm capped at the moment and watching the Tubez is impossible!
I would have to say that I enjoy this cover far more than the original song, mainly because I just dislike M.I.A in general. Probably something to do with all of her other songs being annoying poppy hip-hop rubbish. Especially that one with the gratuitous deliberately obvious T-Pain style use of auto-tune that seems to be some kind of requirement for all new music at the moment.
But yes, The Da Vincis have fixed all that is wrong with M.I.A and made a good song! Check it out!

Under the Pavement, The Beach - Deportees

OK! So I, unlike Oscar, have chosen to respect the sacred tradition of the music blog for *the first time in 2010*! It is very exciting.

After literally /tens of minutes/ of genius-ing it up on iTunes I discovered this band / song (which genius likened to Miss You by Adiam Dymott)

Deportees are a fairly standard pop slash soul band from SWEDEN of all places. Apparently they are quite popular over there but haven't really broken in to any non-swedish charts.
This song was originally released as a single in March last year (2009!) but has also been released on their newest album which shares its title and reached number thirteen in the Swedish charts.

Anyway uh, enjoy the song or I come to your house and drink all of your alcohol. Then what would you do?!

Die Moritat von Mackie Messer - Various

KiThis turned into like, a textwalltastic “musical adventure” rather than a single song recommendation. I’m sorry. If you want you can just listen to the last one I linked, that’s the best. ANYWAY.

If you aren’t ‘theatrically inclined’ or you haven’t ‘listened to music in the last sixty years’, you may not be aware of Mack the Knife. It has become some kind of schmaltzy jazz standard because it sounds bouncy and cheerful, even though it’s about a dude cruising around murdering the shit out of everyone in increasingly nasty ways. I feel this proves once and for all that nobody gives a damn about words. The lyrical dissonance is deliberate, and was an effect very much favoured by Bertholt Brecht (who wrote the Threepenny Opera, from which this song was taken) and as interesting as I find the stylistic/thematic/theatrical connotations, I suspect I am alone in this so will shut up.

This is the original, sung by Brecht, which rules, because he’s a damn legend and he can’t sing. Here’s Bobby Darin’s jazzy English version, variations on which basically every damn singer has done at some point, but this is among the better ones. (Fuck off Robbie Williams. Honestly.)

Anyway, it was a badass song about a murderer, sung quite cheerfully. Now everyone reckons it’s a boring old jazz standard, so a bunch of bands who think they’re cool and edgy have done ‘darker’ covers of it, which actually suit the lyrics way better than the original music did. So, uh, way to fuck up what Brecht was trying to do here, bands, whatever. A band called SLUT does Mackie Messer. I wanted to link you to Udo Lindenberg’s because it’s the same idea but more interesting than this, but it’s not on the tubes and this one is pretty okay as well I guess, if only because Wikipedia tells me the band “lived and recorded in a castle near Ingolstadt” for a year. German Indie Rock Bands: Cooler Than You. It’s in German so uh deal w/ it. If you want a translation it’s basically “THERE’S THIS GUY WRECKING EVERYONE’S SHIT OK” for half a dozen verses. The first few lines translate literally as “The shark has teeth, and he wears them, in his face”, and damned if English can be that cool.

I also feel compelled to link you to Nick Cave’s version, because a) he doesn’t bother making the first verse more English-appropriate, he just sings that idiom literally ‘cos it’s badass, b) he manages to be truer to the original than anyone else in both lyric & tone & atmosphere while still making it his own deal, and c) he’s just a delightful dude to watch, check his dancing/performance/general existence out.