For Against >> I'm waiting for somebody who can tell me what I've lost

± ± For Against - "Paperwhites" ± ±

☩ (Independent Project Records, 1988; Words On Music, 2005) ☩

Here's just one of the most explosive, adrenaline-fueled songs ever, and it's by a U.S. band that in its own small way helped kick off the shoegaze revolution.  This song is off of their cult-classic sophomore LP December.  Fitting in with that month, Paperwhites are a type of flower that people buy around Christmas time to put on a windowsill.  They put out lots of stunningly-fragrant flowers, but most people discard the plants after flowering, hence their use as a metaphor in this song's lyrics.  The guitar sound is the epitome of "piercing"... I mean, lots of guitarists have done the "piercing" thing quite well (especially U2's The Edge ca. '80-83), but F.A. axeman Harry Dingman III just takes it over the top into dangerous territory with this song, almost to the point that it ought to come with a doctor's warning label.  To get this kind of sound, all you have to do is play a Strat or Strat-type guitar with the pickup switch set to the bridge pickup, and strum with a thick pick right down near the bridge.  But to make it sound as musical as this is difficult.  The awesome surf-rock guitar solo near the end is so unexpected, yet so perfect and just indisputably badass, with a feeling of careening desperation.  J Mascis and Dick Dale would be proud.  Oh yeah, the vocals are just brilliantly executed, right down to the gorgeous, Byrds-esque harmonizing in the chorus.  Yes, this band was from Nebraska.

...Nebraska.

L-R: Greg Hill (drums), Harry Dingman III (guitar), Jeffrey Runnings (vocals, bass); presumably
 studying the effects of sunlight on post-punk bands as well as on the growth rate of wheat

For Against have never, to my knowledge, played in Louisiana.  I think this mp3 is from the original 1988 CD pressing on IPR, not the '05 remastered reissue on Words On Music.  That reissue has different cover art for some reason, and tacks on videos of their awesome (and very Joy Division-y) earlier songs "Echelons" and "Autocrat".  Also recommended from this album is the thriling opening song "Sabres".  The fascinating thing to me is how, much like Sonic Youth, this band was able to evolve from an eerie, gothy plod to the high-octane sound of "Sabres" and "Paperwhites" in only a few years.  And that oxymoronic band name is just so cool.

1988 promo cassette w/ alternate sleeve art

Here is the 1987 video for the super-gothy n' haunting "Echelons":

(I think "Echelons" might've been influenced by Section 25's amazing "New Horizon".)

And here is the 1987 video for "Autocrat," in which the band members hilariously switch instruments at random throughout the video, and whose lyrics consist of just one line repeated over and over with differing vocal inflections:

For my own personal use, a summary of the first half of 2011:

Finally getting around to starting Blowtorch Baby
Finally eschewing AOL chatrooms for first time in 14 years

Saints humiliated in playoffs by Seahawks via unreal Marshawn Lynch TD run

Brutally cold winter, even colder than previous one

My basketball goal gets fixed & I play constantly, going through 5 or 6 cheapo b-balls

A/C finally gets fixed
Jasmine Revolution leads to Arab Spring throughout Middle East, but will democracy be hijacked by fundamentalist groups?
Japanese earthquake -> tsunami -> nuclear meltdowns

Buying lots of species of aloes, cacti & junipers

Circle Bar, R.I.P.?

Discovering the greatness of the Ross store chain

Mom tells me about her glaucoma diagnosis; future blindness imminent

Charlie Sheen, king of all douchebags

Kate is talkative, then is not

Loss of loquat tree, N.Z. tea tree & several citrus trees

Gregg Spyridion & Gil Scott-Heron, R.I.P.

Never-ending construction of mound for olive tree; at least 200 bags of topsoil so far

NFL lockout + potential NBA lockout
Almost killed on Easter Sunday by psycho muscle guy who spun his car around and almost landed in the ditch while chasing me down on River Rd.

Two months without a microwave
Two nearly-identical shows I follow (The Event & V) get cancelled; Fringe is surprisingly renewed
Rapid ascension of Derrick Rose to league MVP

Two-month drought + record heat wave, from mid-April to mid-June

Speeding ticket

Impressive new music club Siberia

Snowpocalypse -> Morganza Spillway opening -> much less flood damage than expected

Rise of Tumblr to near-ubiquity; Facebook levels off as gripes grow

Near-comical field of Republican Presidential contenders comes into focus

Mavericks win NBA title, set LeBron James empire back ~5 years

Anthony Weiner & Arnold Schwarzenegger infidelity fiascoes

Mangoes, Greek-style yogurt

Blowtorch Baby becomes slightly less fun to do when it becomes evident no one reads it; I briefly consider an all-Arcade-Fire,-all-the-time format to increase web traffic

Chilling prospect of another, even worse, economic depression
Realizing I need to refocus my energies back on palms rather than on all these other plants & trees

Gripping & bizarre Casey Anthony trial; mom Cindy perjures self re: chloroform Google searches

Best live music:

Tamaryn, Warpaint, Tarik Hassan group, White Hills, Des Ark, Pygmy Lush, Caspian, No Joy, Shamarr Allen & The Underdawgs, Lauryn Hill, Skate Night!, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Khris Royal group [3x], Twin Killers, School Of Seven Bells, Native, Lake, Nicholas Payton SeXXXtet, This Will Destroy You, The Nighty Nite, PVT [f.k.a. Pivot], Lovers

Non-best live music:

The Strokes (even lamer than anticipated), Wavvves (annoying / bad), Mystikal (corny), Low (predictable), AgesandAges (hokey / trying too hard to be retro), Cloudland Canyon (lame), Barnaby Bastille (annoying)

Occam's Razor-worthy art lesson found on the band CSS's blog

Planets with similar climates: The Sound - "Fire" (1981), Ride - "Drive Blind" (1989), Dinosaur Jr. - "Little Fury Things" (1987), The Comsat Angels - "My Mind's Eye (1992), The Veldt - "Soul In A Jar" (1994), Sonic Youth - "Hey Joni" (1988), U2 - "Like A Song..." (1982), The Joy Circuit - "The New Sunrise" (2004), Tracer - "Indigenous" (2002), Feverdream [Australia] - "Vortex" (1995), Gene Loves Jezebel - "Bruises" (1983).

Bark Psychosis >> You stand apart with the sinking sunlight

☵☵ Bark Psychosis - "The Loom" ☵☵

☰ (Caroline Records / Circa Records, 1993) ☰

From one Hex to another...

The term "post-rock" was literally coined to describe this album, specifically by Simon Reynolds of Mojo magazine in his review in the March '94 issue.  Yes, this is what post-rock originally denoted, and other bands that got the tag back then included Long Fin Killie, Seefeel, The Sea And Cake, and A.R. Kane, none of whom would remotely be considered post-rock by today's lowered standards.  Sometime in the early '00s, it began meaning strictly instrumental music that had lots of aggressive climaxes.  I think this song illustrates perfectly the difference between "real" post-rock and "fake" post-rock.  The twos band that, above all others, led to the exploding popularity of fake post-rock are Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky.  The introduction of metal-style guitar was the death knell of the genre, in my opinion*.  Check out the instrumentation on Hex: guitar, bass,  drums, vocals, piano, melodica, triangle, flute, trumpet, Hammond organ, djembe, violin, viola, cello, and some samples/programming.  Compare that to what most post-Mogwai post-rockers use: guitar, bass, drums. It was also very important in the early days to use dubby, hypnotic basslines, which lent gravity to the often amorphous or nebulous song structures.  Obviously, Bark Psychosis did not invent this style out of thin air; many critics have pointed out how indebted they are to Talk Talk's last two LPs, though Hex is way better than either of those, in my opinion.
*Ironically/amazingly, Bark Psychosis actually began as a teenage thrash metal band with a fondness for Napalm Death covers.  Maybe this is what allowed them to get the whole juvenile metal thing out of their systems at a young age.  For me, the metal thing pretty much ended on the day I bought Pantera's new album the day it came out (May 7, 1996), as I'd sadly also done with their previous album (March 22, 1994), and realized how lame it was compared to all the indie/underground stuff I that I was discovering at the time.  I'm not sure why it took me two bad Pantera albums in a row to come to this realization...

Wikipedia has an interesting section about the difficult recording of Hex here.

I bought this CD at Tower Records in New Orleans on a summer night in '04, and I remember having been surprised to even find it on the racks, since I'd heard it had gone out of print 5 or more years earlier.  I stuck "Big Shot" onto a Miles Davis mix CD for my sister the next spring, since there were a few spare minutes at the end that I had to fill in.  I got my second copy of this CD at a WTUL record fair in March '11, sold by a guy who was a DJ for them in the late '80s.  Now this is one ultra-cool station, a station that was my go-to source for innovative music from the mid-'90s to the mid-'00s, and it was voted college radio station of the year by the Gavin Report in 1996, so you'd think he'd recognize the inherent significance, scarcity, and flat-out greatness of this album, and that he'd therefore sell it for a decent sum, right?  It was in his two-for-a-dollar bin.  I'm telling all this because I originally had not planned on ever posting anything from this album, thinking it was so popular that most of the people who would venture over here had surely already heard it.  But I guess it's really one of those albums that many people have read about, but few have actually heard.

A pic of the album's official promo poster, which I swiped from eBay many years ago; the text is a quote
from Melody Maker's review: "We're not just talking alternative music, we're talking alternative medicine."

To read a long and illuminating interview with Bark Psychosis frontman Graham Sutton, go here.  It's taken from this thing called Audrie's Diary from 1994, which was a 7" record plus a square 7-by-7-inch zine.  I own it; unfortunately, the record itself doesn't have a B-Psy song on it.

Planets with similar climates: Talk Talk - "The Rainbow" (1988), A.R. Kane - "Green Hazed Daze" (1988), American Music Club - "In The Shadow Of The Valley" (1994), Auburn Lull - "Desert" (1999), The Comsat Angels - "Pictures" (1982), Jeff Buckley - "Dream Brother" (1993), Plexi - "Faith Is" (1995).

Hex >> When I feel bigger than life, I hold a mirror up to my breath

☿ Hex - "Mercury Towers" ☿

]]] (First Warning Records / Demon Records / Rykodisc Records, 1989) [[[

Since I don't know a lot about this band, and the members are very wry and articulate, I'll just give a little background info and then a bunch of quotes from them.  Steve Kilbey was the main singer/songwriter/bassist for Australian band The Church; Donnette Thayer was a guitarist/singer in Cali bands The Veil and Game Theory.  Somehow they hooked up and started a little minimalist-pop side project called Hex circa 1987.  They also may or may not have dated; Donnette in a 1998 interview:

"Here's the Starfish story I've been holding out.  After many such conversations, Steve wrote me a postcard saying that he hoped that I would soon be a star, or at least a starfish.  Thereafter, during that period of time, when I wrote to him, I would sign my name as Starfish.  Naturally, I was astonished to see that the title of the record was Starfish.  Steve covered himself though, so as not to get in trouble if these postcards popped up, by adding that vinyl note about droogs and 'The Starfish is [The Church's drummer Richard] Ploog.'  I've been a musician long enough to know that the Starfish very well could have also been Ploog.  But it was me first."

"Taken in a photo booth somewhere on the East coast of the U.S."

She said Steve "covered himself" with that excuse because he was then dating Karin Jansson, singer of Curious (Yellow).  Donnette is also an unabashed math nerd and overall Renaissance Woman and possible genius.  This song is from Hex's self-titled debut album.  I got it in the early '00s, I believe at the CD Warehouse on Veterans Blvd. in Metairie, which was going out of business.  I bought about 125 CDs from them in one day during this clearance sale, and about 75 on another day, all for an average of a dollar.  (You guys had literally like 40 copies of R.E.M.'s Monster clogging up your racks [all with the distinctive orange jewel tray, except for the one with a regular black jewel tray that my sister bought, for which I chided her], and you wonder why you went out of business?)  Few songs can put me in a more chilled-out mindframe than this one every single time.

The lite industrial drum beat is just jarring enough to propel the song without obstructing the delicate vocal and piano/synth parts.  The wanderlustful line "It's only an hour away from here" is very reminiscent of the line "And it's only a day away... We could leave tonight" in The Church's outstanding "Metropolis" from the following year:

The U.S. LP had this write-up on its inner sleeve:

"The music is rich and seductive, a bewitching mix of acoustic, electric and electronic instruments, capped with alluring lyrics.  Call it post-psychedelic rock 'n' roll, future-folk, melodic prose and poetry or musical moods for ultra-moderns, Hex is an indescribably enticing album that will enchant you."

From the press kit that came with promo copies of the LP:

"Hex is neither a group, nor an album, but rather the musical spirit that comes from the union of singer Donnette Thayer (formerly of Game Theory) and Steve Kilbey (bassist and principal singer and songwriter for The Church).

"It really started as an experiment," explains Thayer.  "I'd given Steve some tapes of me singing, and he liked them, so he suggested that we do a song together.  I thought it would just be a fun thing, but after the first song we did" -- "Silvermine," included on the album -- "the music started taking on a life of its own."

Kilbey's prolific songwriting often includes music that isn't intended for The Church.  "I've always wanted to do an album with a female singer, but never found the right one," he explains.  "Then I heard tapes of Donnette, and realized that she was the voice I'd been seeking."

During a break following The Church's Starfish tour, Kilbey and Thayer went into the studio to work on some musical ideas Kilbey had come up with while on the road.  "The music started out as sequences," recalls Donnette, "but soon it began developing its own personality, like some character from a book that gets up and starts walking around the room."  Working in various locations around New York City during the winter of 1988-89, the duo came up with ten songs that seemed to naturally coalesce into an album. 

Says Donnette, "It was strange how Steve and I found ourselves thinking the same. I could really trust the way he'd express what I'd been feeling."

That magic is indelibly impressed into the tracks that became Hex, creating a spell that even brought about a name for their collaboration.  "We were playing Scrabble one night, and HEX came up as a word, and there it was," says Kilbey.

Adds Donnette, "It was worth a lot of points, too.""

She talked further about this story in 1998:

"Ho!  You remember the Scrabble anecdote!  For our listeners who may have just tuned in, Hex came up in a Scrabble game that Steve and I were playing.  Steve had used an X and I placed an E in front of it.  He expected me to spell out SEX, but I spelled HEX instead.  I was hesitant to do this, because Steve uses every bit of inspiration that comes his way.  I was worried that this metal-rock word would haunt me.  It did.  Nothing against the word Hex, it’s a great word with an interesting history and many engaging and hidden connotations.  It just didn’t match the music.  Everybody knows that I play arena rock."

Since it has a languid sound with atmospheric synths and electronic drums, and of course female vocals, a lot of people consider this album to be a forerunner of trip-hop music, but I think that's too much of a stretch, though it definitely has a proto-"downtempo" vibe.  It is certainly quite an unexpected detour from the sounds of their previous bands.  Another great song from this LP is "Fire Island," followed closely by the erotic "Silvermine" and the rustic "Ethereal Message."  I was surprised to find out a year or two ago that there was a music video made for the latter (Kilbey does not appear in it for some reason), so here it is:

I could just watch that video all day long.  Not that it pertains to the music, but wow, Donnette was traffic-accident-causingly gorgeous, despite the Desperately Seeking Susan hair...  Remember, folks: A math geek.  The song "Diviner" from this album was used in the 2003 film Tarnation.  I've gotten most of this arcane info from here and here.  I was shocked to see Donnette say, somewhere on one of those pages, that Hex's first album went double platinum; maybe she meant in Aussie sales or was just joking altogether.  According to my research, double platinum in Australia means 140,000 copies sold, in a nation of around 20 million people.  Hmm.  Paging all math nerds...

Note: The ☿ symbol I used in the song title field is the glyph for Mercury.

Planets with similar climates: Area - "I'll Gather Flowers" (1988), Portishead - "Roads" (1994), Insides - "Skin Divers" (1993), Zero 7 - "In The Waiting Line" (2001), Over The Rhine - "Iron Curtain" (ca. 1990), Suzanne Vega - "Big Space" (1990).

The Cleaners From Venus >> Some of my dreams weren't really worth saving

⍟ The Cleaners From Venus - "Follow The Plough" ⍟

« (Man At The Off License [or RCA Records], 1986; Tangerine Records, 1993) «

The Cleaners From Venus were an '80s English jange-pop group, essentially the mastermind of a guy named Martin Newell, who is revered amongst circles of people who revere this type of music.  I'm not sure if this song is from their 1986 cassette-only album Living With Victoria Grey, or from their 1987 (recorded in '86) LP Going To England.  Maybe those versions are the same?  All I know is it's taken from their best-of compilation called Golden Cleaners, put out by Tangerine Records in 1993.  Man, it's just so beautiful and intense.  "I followed you like a seagull follows the plough" refers to the way seagulls flock behind plows [ploughs], shrimp boats, etc., looking for scraps of food that have been stirred up by the commotion.  One of the most bizarrely romantic things I've ever heard anyone say about someone else...  He just keeps hanging around a person due to force of habit, even though he knows it probably isn't going to lead him anywhere in the long run.  The line "Live in a world of violence and danger, finding myself a comparative stranger" is open to many interpretations, especially since he seems to be singing from the standpoint of himself as a child in that part of the song. "You are before me, you are behind me / It was predestined that you would find me" is another line that sends a chill up my spine for some reason.

The guitars chime along (using a picking technique called harmonics, used to spectacular effect in the second half of "How Soon Is Now?" by The Smiths) in an urgent manner as Newell's vocals swell with passion in the choruses, while a truly sick bassline provides the undertow.  The way he sings the "And I can't remember how..." line in a descending manner is just too cool for words.  I'll admit to not knowing much about this band, but I kind of don't want to investigate much further, since I can't imagine they have a better song than this one.  It's not surprising that a major label, RCA, snatched the Cleaners up immediately after hearing this song, but I think most of the band's music was too quirky to reach a larger audience.  Their lyrics also contain lots of references to obscure facets of British culture, most of which wind up going right over the heads of non-Brits like myself.  The Cleaners are apparently best known for their cult hit "Ilya Kuryakin Looked At Me".  It will never cease to amaze me how most bands are beloved for a song that is nowhere near their overall best song, but that's a whole 'nother topic.

L-R: Martin Newell & Giles Smith, ca. 1986

This will probably interest absolutely no one, but I like to always tell how I got into a song, so I was in a Goodwill thrift store in Houma, LA in summer '07 when I saw an LP by Gerry & The Pacemakers, which had a song called "Girl On A Swing."  I made a mental note to check out whether one of my favorite songs, "Girl On A Swing" by Lions & Ghosts (a song which presages the band Morphine's entire aesthetic), was a cover of that one.  So when I got home I typed in that song name on iTunes and lo and behold, found a song called "Girl On A Swing" by the preposterously-named Cleaners From Venus, on one of their (other) greatest-hits albums.  I clicked on the 30-second sample clip of "Follow The Plough," was immediately stunned, listened to it over and over, and eventually got an internet buddy to track down the mp3 and send it to me.  So there you have it.  All three "Girl On A Swing"s are different, for what it's worth...

Well, a few hours ago the Mavericks just won their first NBA title over the choke-a-riffic Heat, as I predicted in my post on May 8th, in what was definitely the most interesting NBA Finals I've seen.  Big ups to those old dudes, especially to Dirk for somehow managing to avoid the dreaded Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx.  Jason Terry is probably my favorite player in the NBA now.  The Mavs' run had lots of parallels to the Saints' Super Bowl season, and I've adopted them as my secondary basketball team, since the Hornets will never win one.  (Until tonight, only six teams had won the last 27 NBA titles.)  The grind of playing seven-game series means that fluke teams never make it through to the Finals, as often happens in one-and-done formats like the NFL, tennis, or March Madness.  And the current craze for assembling an expensive "Big Three" means that small-market teams simply have no way of being competitive, and must live off of other teams' scraps.

Planets with similar climates: The Smiths - "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" (1986), The Go-Betweens - "The House That Jack Kerouac Built" (1988), The Church - "Shadow Cabinet" (1984) & "Tantalized" (1986), The Sound - "Golden Soldiers" (1984), Tears For Fears - "Broken" (1985), Kitchens Of Distinction - "What Happens Now?" (1992).


Still chuckling at: The couple in front of me in the line to get into a show by This Will Destroy You on Friday night in Baton Rouge.  They were casually improvising some nonsensical stuff in a British accent, which I thought might be some lines from Monty Python.  A few hours later I ran into them at the merch table, so I asked them what they were talking about, and they told me they were imagining what Morrissey would say if he were making an order at a fast-food restaurant.  Also, upstairs next to the pool table, some guy next to me quoted one of my favorite Ahnuld lines: "Get to the choppa!"

Surprisingly, it was the first time I'd ever heard anyone quote this legendary line in the field.  (Though it was cancelled out by his clichéd request to opening band The Nighty Nite to "Play some Skynyrd," for which I almost threw him over the railing.)  So overall, it was a pretty entertaining night, though I hate driving home for an hour every time I go to shows there, especially since they always seem to end at around 2 AM.

Glide >> So close I trip and fall under your wheel

≈≈≈≈ Glide - "Water Falls"

(Medical Records, 1992) \\\\

In honor of the first rainfall here in over 2 months, I'm finally posting this song.  (Note: Do not confuse this Glide, from Australia, with the Glide from England that is the solo project of Echo & The Bunnymen's guitarist Will Sergeant.)  The volume and bass levels are mastered very low, so please play this very loudly...  I bought this CD totally on a whim at a thrift store a few summers ago, despite its lame title, Shuffle Off To Buffalo, which I later found out is a tap dancing reference, but, based on the EP's lyrical themes, presumably also references the breakdown of a relationship.  I vividly remember cranking this song up loudly after hearing the Cocteau Twins-esque wimpfest that opens this song, and then being walloped by the drums and guitars, and then hearing the huge chorus and wondering how this band was not world-famous.  I'd accuse Hum of ripping off their hit "Stars" from this song, except that they had probably never heard of this little shoegaze band from Australia.  Then again, who knows?  "Stars" is one of my favorite songs ever, and Hum were tremendously great when I saw them in '98, so I won't sit here and rip on them, but I had to at least float that theory.  Then again, the opening chords of "Water Falls" sound an awful lot like those in The Cure's giganto-hit "Just Like Heaven."  This EP is mastered pretty quietly, especially by today's "Loudness Wars" standards, so play it at maximum volume.  Oh yeah, the EP is utterly amazing, and it's one of the few things to which I've ever given 5 stars on rateyourmusic.com.

A few more songs from the Shuffle EP will be posted on this blog in the future, such as the devastating acoustic track "Worlds Away" which shows that some shoegaze bands can sound great even with the loud guitars stripped away.  "Water Falls" song also appears on Glide's 1997 EP/single compilation CD called Shrink Wrapped Real Thing.  According to Glide's website, they formed in 1991 and played live with Swervedriver, Ride, Lush, Morphine, Blur, Juliana Hatfield, Clouds, The Dambuilders, Luna, Live ("Her placenta... falls.... to the floor"), Longpigs, and many others.

I'm not sure if this is the lineup that played on this EP; William Arthur is second from right.

Singer William Arthur committed suicide in 1999, a few months after Adrian Borland of The Sound did the same thing.  I've read some of Arthur's tour diaries posted on some Glide fansite (I can no longer find the diaries or the site), and I have to say he comes off as a cocky, sexist prick, delivering bluntly withering critiques of the physiques of women who were so rude as to talk to him, and general criticisms of the U.S. and life on the road in general.  Which is the opposite of how I thought he would be, based on his existentially vulnerable and poetic lyrics.  Maybe they just caught him in a bad mood.  With what could politely be called an extremely limited singing voice, he was able to wrest some pretty impressive vocal stylings over the course of this EP, letting the edgy guitars and drums keep their place in the spotlight.  After this EP, the band drastically changed its sound to more of a Sunny Day Real Estate kind of thing, pretty much ditching its majestic shoegazeness for more of a gnarled post-grunge sound, which is not as pleasing to the ears without the soaring vocals of someone like, say, Jeremy Enigk.

Planets with similar climates: Hum - "Stars" (1995), Catherine Wheel - "Texture" (1992), Plexi - "Forest Ranger" (1996), Sunny Day Real Estate - "Seven" (1994), Bailter Space - "So La" (1997), The Cure - "Just Like Heaven" (1987).


Currently eating or drinking: Pillsbury Simply... Rustic French bread; Otria Greek Yogurt Veggie Dip; Mandarin oranges (from a can, embarrassingly, since my Mandarin orange tree hasn't made any fruit in the last 2 years).


Currently bewildered by: The existence of this 1983 video game: 

(Found via Can't Stop The Bleeding, a sports blog run by the head of Matador Records)

Update: A few days later, I found out on WIkipedia that this game is a recently-created spoof, but I bet ol' George would've been proud.

Adina Howard vs. Ride >> Ridin' dirty

(_Y_) Adina Howard vs. Ride - "FreakRide" (_Y_)

∑ (EastWest, 1994 vs. Creation / Sire, 1992; made by Go Home Productions, 2003) ∑

Yes, it's the most libidinous R&B guilty pleasure of its era (aside from maybe "Froggy Style" by Nuttin' Nyce), Adina Howards's "Freak Like Me", in a duel against a dubby, bass-heavy, Byrds-esque shoegaze classic, Ride's "Leave Them All Behind"...  It briefly created a new genre, Rhythm N' Shoes, but since no one in England knew how to dress to it, it fizzled out within a few hours.

I'd have to say this is my favorite "mashup" song ever, though I'm not exactly an expert on the whole scene.  I downloaded this somewhere during the mashup craze of mid 2003 to early 2004.  Once I had collected 5 or 6 mashups of OutKast's "Hey Ya!," I realized that the trend was quickly playing itself out, especially when people unimaginatively began mashing "Hey Ya!" with Usher's "Yeah!" and/or with Howard Dean's infamous "Yeah!" speech.  But I have to admit I wish it was still going on, because every once in a while you found a great one and had to pass it on to all your e-friends.  This one is by Go Home Productions, which was apparently one of the leading provocateurs of the mashup genre.  (The pic above is the original image created by GHP to go with the file.)  It was released in April 2003, according to his website.  After hearing this song, I actually felt one of those "Aha" moments, knowing that this mashup would probably never be topped, and that I could thus turn my attentions to other matters.  So it was kind of like a pièce de résistance moment, where I realized the highest mountain had been scaled and the only way to go from there was downhill.  I'll always wonder if Adina or members of Ride ever heard this song.  I like how Ride's backing vocals come in subtly near the end.  Well done, GHP.  We hardly knew ye...  We can't forgive ye for spawning charlatans like Girl Talk, though.

On the Go Home Productions site, Mark Vidler (a.k.a. GHP) says about this song: "Shoegazers. Don't get me started, I was there. I was part of it. Always knew this track would work. One of those where you don't have to re-pitch the vocal and there's enough meat in the backing track to make it punch. Created as a new track to play out at Bastard that month and was going to be part of the Remix Superchunk but some last minute tracks relegated it. April 2003."  My only gripe is that he missed the obvious correlation between the word "Behind" in the Ride song and the asset that Ms. Howard was so fond of showing off.  After she sings "Got a little freakiness inside," I would've plugged in Ride singing "Leave them all behind," or at least substituted "behind" for "inside" in her sentence.  Anyway, since this song doesn't appear to be available anywhere online, I will go ahead and call it a Blowtorch Baby exclusive.

Fun Game Time: Guess which song is naughtier based solely on its CD single's cover art!

a.) 

or

b.) ?

As you can imagine, this was definitely the easiest "clever post title" I've ever had to come up with. 

Planets with similar climates: N/A, but The Afghan Whigs' cover of Toni Braxton's "You're Makin' Me High" (1997) is close enough.

Currently feeling: A bit old, considering that Shaquille O'Neal retired today after 19 years in the NBA, and I got his autograph at LSU basketball camp in 1990, when he still had two years left to play at LSU.  I still have the issue of Sports Illustrated with him on the cover when he was at LSU.  People forget how skinny and athletic he used to be, before he piled on huge amounts of weight and became an uncoordinated refrigerator on the court, hurling up free throws as though they were anvils and bricking any shot outside of 5 feet.