Archive for June, 2005

When Fantasies Are Bad They Are Humiliating

Brian Eno “This” – Brian Eno is like the Mr. Spock of pop music. His voice can convey a sort of inhuman lucidity and aloofness, as though he’s found a way to separate his intellect from his emotions without sacrificing his soul. Given his inclination to create ambient music, it is not so surprising that he would go so long without recording his voice (the most recent Eno vocal track that I am aware of is “A Different Kind of Blue” from his Passengers album with U2 in 1995), but it’s certainly a welcome return. Several of the songs on his new record are clearly influenced by gospel music, but the passion and ardor essential to that genre is filtered through Eno’s aesthetics, resulting in something quite different. “This” retains the spirituality of gospel but shifts the scale of the sentiment from the conventional emphatic declaration of faith to a smaller, more personal epiphany. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

The Rogers Sisters “Les Fantaisies Sont Bien” – On their new single, the Rogers Sisters revisit a long lost pop tradition: translating a song into another language and rerecording it to meet the economic and cultural demands of another country. However, unless the band is massively popular in France and I just don’t know about it, it seems clear that this alternate take on “Fantasies Are Nice” was recorded entirely for artistic purposes rather than made to satisfy the demands of the French marketplace. It’s difficult to suss out just why they would choose to record this particular song au francais, but the result is very entertaining. The vocals seem brattier and more perverse, and the music somehow feels twice as spazzy without being noticeably different from the backing track on the original recording. (Click here to buy it from Troubleman United.)

Your Beautiful Body Filling Up With Water

Electric Six “Jimmy Carter” – At first, this song seemed like a silly joke, but the longer I live with it, the more it seems deadly serious. After the initial novelty of a grunge ballad filled with strange references to the Backstreet Boys, gory celebrity deaths, electric underwear, and former American presidents wears off, the emotional resonance kicks in. The refrain “this is who you are” carries the most dramatic weight; implying the tragic, undeniable notion that we are all shaped by our absurd culture of celebrities, politicians, inescapable surveillance, consumer novelties, and the constant vague threat of random violence and atomic annihilation. It’s essentially a song about powerlessness, and the realization that you owe so much of who you think you are to a collection of cultural factors that seem so stupid, random, and meaningless when considered in abstract terms. But this is who we are, and we can be made to feel weepy when the singer turns the catchphrase “Backstreet’s back, alright” into a mournful lament by placing it in the context of sentimental nostalgia because even if you never cared about the Backstreet Boys, it’s at least a reference point we can all understand. Sometimes that’s all you need to feel less alone. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Tom Scharpling & Jon Wurster “Timmy von Trimble” – This is a selection from the forthcoming Hippy Justice: The Best of the Best Show On WFMU Vol. 3, a collection of fairly recent radio call-in skits by Scharpling & Wurster chronicling what I consider to be an experimental period for the duo. The basic elements of their comedy remains the same – ie, good guy Tom struggles to remain civil while dealing with one of Jon’s selfish, deluded, opportunistic, and hateful characters – but some of the bits on this compilation find them trying out new ways of framing their comedy routines. On “Kid eBay,” moments of extreme absurdity punctuate an otherwise mundane conversation about rare collectables; “Old Skull” and “Rock n’ Roll Car Dealership” integrate real-life characters into the show’s elaborate mythology; and “Hippy Johnny” and “Timmy von Trimble” both start out with seemingly sympathetic characters who reveal themselves to be utterly despicable over the course of a phone call. The latter is quite possibly the most surreal bit to ever air on the program, starting out with an entirely unbelievable premise that is eventually trumped by the disturbing turn the conversation takes once we get to know little Timmy. (Please note that the sound quality on this mp3 is fairly low because I wanted to keep the file size small and manageable. The sound on the actual cd is much better than this.) (Click here for the official Scharpling & Wurster site and here for the Best Show On WFMU archives.)