The Lights On The Ceiling Don’t Know

Sophie Rimheden (featuring Kajsa Grytt) “It’s Your Head” – Riding a gentle, bouncing beat and bassline, the vocals ponder the head and the heart, with the feelings and thoughts mixing together so that it’s hard to tell them apart, literally or musically. It’s never quite as ecstatic as I would like it to be, but the coolness of the vocals speak to a rational cautiousness that feels a little too familiar to me lately. (Click here to buy it via Sophie Rimheden’s official site.)

Young People “Dark Rainbow” – When I made mix tapes all of the time, I was always very anal retentive about making sure that my sides had perfect endings. This was not just about song selection — it was about craft and absolutely refusing to just let a track cut off because the tape ran out a few seconds before the song finished. I remember several occasions of eyeballing the leftover tape and sitting anxiously through my final song, hoping that it would fit just so and I could move on to the next thing. If things went wrong, it was time to backtrack and re-edit – songs that came previously in the sequence had to be deleted and shorter songs had to be added, etc. This song reminds me quite a bit of all that not just in how it’s a rather good ending song (more for a side a than a side b, but whatever), but in that it sounds like it’s about to end for most of its duration. It feels as though it could lose its grip and fall off the side of the planet at any moment, and it’s doing everything that it can to stay as calm as possible. (Click here for Too Pure’s Young People mini-site.)