In My Young Life

Hot Chip “Take Care” – The thing that I enjoy most about Hot Chip’s album Coming On Strong is how its best songs subvert very relaxing chords and progressions with incongruous emotional content. For example, “Bad Luck” (which I posted here a few months ago) seethes with bitterness and contempt even though it’s one of the calmest, smoothest songs of the year, and “Take Care”‘s laid back cod-reggae arrangement is at odds with the dejected, forlorn tone of the vocals and lyrics, making it sound almost like an inverted version of Scritti Politti’s “The Sweetest Girl.” It’s a nice trick, and Hot Chip pulls it off very well – rather than it simply being a gimmick, the tension adds greater emotional depth to the recordings. (Click here to buy it from Moshi Moshi Records.)

Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy “Kiss Me” – For my money, no musical genre captures the heady, effervescent rush of young love better than 80s synth pop. In addition to the colorful, cheerful tones of the music itself, it seems to me that a majority of the artists working in the genre at the time were uncommonly willing to fully surrender to the euphoria of love without fear of sounding hackneyed or ridiculous. This Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy single, which was a hit in the UK circa 1985, is a fine example of lovey-dovey snyth pop at its most exhilarating. Duffy sings lyrics which are alternately silly and corny with total conviction and commitment, enough so that the feeling is somewhat contagious. I get the sense that Duffy and his contemporaries were fully aware of how trite their lyrical/emotional content could be, but I don’t think that they cared very much about that. On one level, they were just writing in the tradition of several decades of pop music, but on another, it seems that part of their project was to convincingly communicate something both sublime and universal. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)