Oh No, I Know What This Is

Birds Fled From Me “The Resisted” – Rachel Williams recalls Fiona Apple at her most spare and wounded on this heartbroken ballad, but her voice skips Apple’s soulful inflections in favor of a more fragile reading that nods in the direction of early Cat Power without aping that singer’s affectations. Like Apple, her song and her vocal performance work precisely because she so thoroughly owns her emotions, and expresses the pain of her unrequited love not so much for the benefit of whomever it is she is addressing, but rather to understand and affirm her own experience. This is the sort of song that could shatter you to pieces if you heard it at the right moment, so beware if you happen to be in love with someone who does not love you in return. (Click here to buy it via the Birds Fled From Me MySpace page.)

Kate Nash “Pumpkin Soup” – For the first few weeks that I knew this song, I heard the final line of its bridge as “I hate that you don’t think I’m unkind,” which I find a bit more interesting and appealing than the actual lyric, which is more grammatically sensible but less emotionally complicated: “I hope that you don’t think I’m unkind.” It doesn’t really change my feeling about the music — I love the way every anxious moment of this tune sounds as though it is punctuated by a half dozen exclamation points, and the way she seems to relish her chance to play the drama queen — but my misheard version adds an extra bit of insecurity that isn’t quite as obvious as the rest of what she’s singing. I like the idea that she’s frustrated by the fact that this boy would think that she’s too sweet, even when she’s going out of her way to keep things purely physical and emotionally distant. He’s smitten, and she can’t even convince him that she’s capable of cruelty! The song doesn’t land far from that mark, but it could stand to be a little more twisty. (Click here to buy it from Amazon, but keep in mind a domestic version will be out in the US in January.)