I Ain’t Even Half Done

Eagles of Death Metal “The Ballad Of Queen Bee And Baby Duck” – This track would be fine enough as a dizzy, snakey rock tune, but the addition of spoken vocals from an adorable girl and some droll gentleman straight out of a mid-period Beatles song serve to boost the song’s levels of cuteness, quirk, and delirium. (Click here for the official Eagles of Death Metal site.)

Magik Markers “I Construct Dolls Like You In My Sleep” – About a year and a half ago, I first encounted Magik Markers as the opening act for a Sonic Youth show. This is what I had to say about them back then:

Magik Markers were the first of the two opening acts, and they were just unbelievably great. They played some high quality art-punk noise that sounded quite a bit like SY on Confusion Is Sex and Bad Moon Rising. The lead singer was intensely charismatic and loveable, and “shouted the poetic truths of high school journal keepers” like the singer from “Skip Tracer.”

My memories of that show are still very fond, and I’ve been hoping to find a Magik Markers song that comes even close to the brilliance of that performance ever since. It hasn’t happened yet, but this excerpt from their latest record will have to do. In fairness, it probably would be very hard to capture the band’s appeal with a recording since so much of what they do is based in the physical nature of their improvisation, and guitarist/vocalist Elisa Ambrogio’s raw charisma and nontraditional sex appeal. Even still, apparently refusing to record in a proper studio and releasing somewhat shoddy live documents that span about twenty minutes per side isn’t doing them many favors. These final minutes of a performance in Paris are scattershot, but there are a fair few moments of shambling brilliance that take me back to that one show in the summer of 2004. (Click here to buy it from Gulcher Records.)