132 bpm 1: Taken To The Front of The Line
Posted in This one’s good for the arc trainer, I find.
Of course, you realize this means war…
132 bpm 1: Taken To The Front of The Line
Had a Dream (Sleeping with the Enemy) (edit) – Roger Hodgson Life During Wartime – Talking Heads Hell’s Half-Acre – Robbie Robertson Street Fighting Man – The Rolling Stones Love Of Life – Swans House On Fire – Arkarna Cope – Gigolo Aunts Give The Po’ Man A Break – Fatboy Slim Children of the Revolution – T. Rex Dad’s Gonna Kill Me – Richard Thompson (cooldown) The True Wheel – Brian Eno
Notes:
I swear, I only have two Roger Hodgson mp3s—and this is the other one. That said, there’s a great joy that radiates off his music, solo and with Supertramp, even when the song is as grim as this one; the jaunty piano, the rubbery slides of the fretless, the high, pure vocals and the surprisingly scorching guitar work. If you can get past the ponderous intro and the frankly unhinged video, it’s a fantastic piece of power pop. (I edited about a minute 15 off the album track, shaving the intro down and excising the long bridge to approximate the radio/video mix.)
I first heard this Swans track on an ancient mixtape I got from my friend and sometime artistic collaborator Oscar Stern. I lost track of Oscar for a few years, and all trace of his excellent comic Wu Wei appears to have disappeared from the Web. However, I am amused to find him now fronting a band of his own. Rock on, Sweet William.
You know, say what you will about the Joel Schumacher Batman movies (go ahead; you wouldn’t be the first and it wouldn’t be the worst) but between them the two soundtrack albums had some pretty heavy hipster cred. Maybe not so much the U2 and the Seal, but honestly: PJ Harvey, Sunny Day Real Estate, the Flaming Lips, Nick Cave, REM, Soul Coughing, Underworld, the Pumpkins, Moloko, Massive Attack… and, uh, these guys.
Gigolo Aunts came out of Potsdam by way of Boston, and fell by the wayside when Nirvana broke. Neither particularly punk nor (Syd Barrett references notwithstanding), particularly psychedelic, this is just good old-fashioned Loud Guitar Pop; in the early 90s, The Kool Kidz thought it was “too pretty.”
Story of my life.
