Put Yourself Down, You Don’t Need Me

Dani Siciliano “Why Can’t I Make You High?” – Mixing sultry vocals, a minimal arrangement, and a strange country/folk-by-way-of-Prince-circa-“Kiss” aesthetic, “Why Can’t I Make You High?” is not far off from KT Tunstall’s excellent hit single “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” (aka that kinda awesome song Katherine McPhee did a few times on American Idol), but there’s a certain slight bitterness to the flavor of this track that I prefer. The chorus is closer to the ground than Tunstall’s composition, and sounds almost like an attempt to find the spot exactly between the hooks of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” (Click here for Dani Siciliano’s MySpace page.)

Elsewhere: For the love of God, hurry up and get Casey Dienel’s live-in-session cover of Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair” while you still can – Daytrotter is placing a 1000 download limit on that track. The rest of the session is great too, but there’s no limit on those songs.

This is what I had to say about her version when I saw her play it live a few months ago:

As you can see above, Dienel actually did play a Pavement cover, and it kinda kills me that I can’t share a recording of it with you right now because it’s definitely the best non-instrumental cover of a Pavement song that I’ve ever heard. In some ways, it’s rather similar to that Mark Ronson cover of “Just” – it makes no attempt to ape Malkmus’ miles and miles of style, and simply aims to emphasize the timeless qualities of the song by putting it in the context of a genre that the original was referencing, however indirectly or sideways.