Oh boy, finally a real bomb of a song. There’s something about the Gainsbourg approach, even beyond his French-lover persona, that makes his music irresistible. This one starts out with a kind of jungly-rhythm, then the female chorus pops in with the wordless singing, le-le-le-le-le-le and so on.
I think what it is about Gainsbourg is his willingness to submit to a relatively narrow dynamic range, especially in the difference between the verse and the chorus. It creates a sense of tension in the song, that matches up with the clippity-cloppity beat and the crazy jungle sounds. I’m waiting for the song to explode into something that Sly and the Family Stone would do, and it never does. Fantastic.
This sounds exactly like Forro in the Dark for the first half-minute. It must be the accordion and the lilting rhythm. Once they start singing, however, you can tell the difference. Forro in the Dark sing in Portuguese, not Spanish like this one, and these guys are also much less dynamic than Forro. They are kind of whispering along the verse.
It actually sounds like the song from Triplets of Belleville, but then in the descansa it changes around and sounds more traditionally Latin American. I’ll call it so-so. Lyrics are bland, also. Maybe better to hear it performed live in a dance club.
I think someone sent me this one. Britt sings the first chorus in his trademark Spoon way. The guy has a pretty recognizable voice for someone who sings without a noticeable accent: that is to say that he has a phrasing that you can pick up when you hear him singing.
‘The Way We Get By’ is built on a piano riff and some other instruments accompanying the keyboard. It could be a Ben Folds song if it didn’t have the inimitable vocals. The lyrics don’t really transport me, and it seems as if it needs a video or a string section for me really to get into it.
I have no idea what this song is or what it’s doing on my music player.
The opening intro, with phone-pad tones chirping out the melody, seems jarringly bright compared with the opening verse and the soft vocals. This one plus the Bola Johnson could make a nice mini-set of garçons fragiles en anglais, although Bola wasn’t singing in English.
Aha! It’s a cover of the Cher chestnut. “Do you believe…in life after love?”
Jonathan’s snap judgment: So-so. The dialpad-tone accompaniment comes across as gimmicky, but then so does covering a Cher song without belting it like the karaoke veteran inside you.
If I can fill you in on this song while I wait here at the airterminal…
It’s a dub-style dance tune, where the drummer sounds toward the end of every measure as if he’s just nodded off to sleep for a quick sixteenth beat. Bola sings the verses lightly with the bass playing in front of the trap drums, and a little bit of rhythm guitar and a little bit of lead guitar.
On the choruses, Bola has a pretty forceful voice, and you can tell that he learned from the James Brown school of funk. While the trumpet plays, you can imagine him vogueing from side to side.
My love, every time I hear this song I feel like waking up. Perhaps it comes on instead of your seven alarm clocks, and as I rise to make stor jente caffe, big-girl espresso coffee for your rising-from-sleep needs, the chorus thrums in my ears and the cats circle my ankles, jostling for attention or tunafish, I don’t know which.
If ‘Yo Odeconer’ wasn’t on your Valentine’s mixtape, it should have been: its groove and sultry harmonies validate M’bilia Bel’s vocal acumen, despite all the ultra-cheesy zouk-Antillais records that she has made.
At the barbershop yesterday, the satellite-television video channel aired a pleasing mix of songs while I was waiting for my mop-chop, including Talking Heads, “BurningDown The House”; Brazilian Girls, “GoodTime”; and Little Jackie, “TheWorld Should Revolve Around Me.” I recognized the first and last ones, and “Good Time,” which I acquired over the summer, seemed sort of familiar, but I didn’t know any of the four or five other songs that the TV played.
The troubling thing about this unprompted experiment is that the vein of music that stretches from Talking Heads to Imani Coppola is one of my favorites: call it multiculti urban dance funk or something like that. You may blame my New York City childhood for this longstanding interest. So how is it that more than half the songs played in the set, all of which I liked, I didn’t even recognize?
Either there are hundreds of new records in this vein that come out every year, where I only get the chance to listen to a more or less randomly selected dozen; or the songs that were played on this channel were popular somewhere else than in New York City, although they all (especially the videos) consciously show off their New York influences; or I’ve been slacking and there are lots of new good records out there that I would have stumbled upon if I hadn’t been down here at the Secret City for so long.
Talking Heads:
Brazilian Girls: the video is there, but “not available in your country.” Hmm. What country is this? How does Youtube know? When I log on to google, the page comes up in Ukrainian; does it think I’m in Ukraine, then?
Little Jackie:
I fixed another rear-wheel flat this afternoon. This one was a good-sized tear right by the valve, forcing the issue of whether to patch the tube or to replace it. So I duped my buddy Tom into helping me with the chain tension by first listening to him tell me about his Ancient Order of Hibernians chapter and then telling him about this cylinder recording of Edward Meeker singing ‘The A.O.H’s. [sic] of theU.S.A.’ from 1915.
It was a little tricky because the new tube had a shorter valve stem than the punctured tube, and its business end was just peeking out of the tube, not far enough to attach the pump. So I remembered a trick I’d used before and pulled out the Schraeder adapter, which was able to screw onto the end of the valve and allow me to fill the tube with air anyway.
The funny thing is that I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering if there was some kind of bad mojo that had caused my flat. I keep having to remind myself, “There’s plenty of air in the tube. I could hit a shard of glass or a staple any time. I had enough air in there for a week, so it’s not like there was some kind of slow leak. It’s a tear in the tube and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
I love this one for how the interplay between the section players and the soloists is so sharply defined. It’s like a tour of a really fantastic house, where in each room there’s a new tableau-vivant on display, telling a different part of the story.
Starting with the drummer’s endless invention, it’s as if each chorus has a different dynamic construction, the three-way tug of war between Brown’s guitar, his voice, and the horn section ends up over a different spot each time. The drum and organ modulate the proceedings and guide the listener through. It’s as if the arranger went through all the great tricks of instrumentation and section play, and used them all in this one song.
