We Dive Into Devotion

Marit Larsen “The Sinking Game” – On a record that overflows with heart and grace, “The Sinking Game” sneaks in toward the end and steals the show. It’s not tremendously obvious, but amidst ten other songs with hooks that put to shame virtually everyone else in pop music in 2006, this is the number that sticks in my head through the day and the one that I find playing in my head some mornings, whether I had heard it recently or not. It’s not a song about passively falling in love so much as actively jumping down into it, and it sounds just as terrifying and exhilirating as it ought to be, especially as the start to every chorus feels like an emotional swan dive. It’s not for nothing that the instrumental bridge evokes the sensation of gliding on moonlit air! (Click here to buy it via the official Marit Larsen site.)

Scritti Politti “After Six” – Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside is British pop’s switcheroo king, a songwriter who seems to derive endless pleasure from subverting the expectations of his audience with extremely meta tunes that smuggle ironic reversals and sharp critical theory into what would otherwise come across as some of the most innocuous music available anywhere. The man is fascinated by black music — mainly gospel, soul, and rap — but he can’t help but sound like one of the whitest men on the planet, especially when his sweet cooing voice and crisp production aesthetic sounds like the perfect aural expression of freshly laundered hotel bed sheets spread out on an infinite horizon. “After Six” is a variation on one of Gartside’s favorite tricks — the atheistic gospel tune — but there’s something more to this one, even if in comparison to its predecessors it is rather simple and brief. As in the past, he finds great beauty and pleasure in the expression of faith, but just can’t find it within himself, and so he haggles with no one in particular over what he can and can’t get behind. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)