Archive for December, 2009
This Christmas, things fall apart
posted by Drew | Tuesday, December 22, 2009 | 09:04:16 pm
Along with Wham’s “Last Christmas,” this sludgy, Don Was-produced sad-fest stands as one of the few Christmas songs I can stomach on repeat listens. While George Michael attempts to rise above holiday doldrums by giving his heart to someone special, Cristina, Ze Records' preeminent misfit princess, deadpans her way through them with brutal reality:
They’d killed a tree of ninety-seven years,
And smothered it in lights and silver tears.
They all got wrecked, they laughed too loud,
I started to feel queasy in the crowd,
I grabbed a cab back to my flat,
And wept a bit,
And fed the cat.
Merry Christmas, dammit.
[via Rooms With Brittle Views]
Mixing David Joseph
posted by Drew | Saturday, December 12, 2009 | 09:04:27 amOn the Jools Holland hosted show The Tube, UK DJ Greg Wilson shows off his wheels of steel, complete with tape effects (!), with a bit of simple mixing of David Joseph’s “You Can’t Hide (Your Love From Me).”
Joseph’s classic single hails from his boogie-drenched album The Joys of Life:
David Joseph - The Joys of Life (1983)
01. No Time to Waste
02. Joys of Life
03. Guiding Star
04. Baby Won’t You Take My Love
05. You Can’t Hide (Your Love From Me)
06. Dreaming
07. Be a Star
08. I’m so in Love
09. Do You Feel My Love Now Baby
10. Discover (Bonus)
11. You Can’t Hide (Your Love From Me) (Extended)
[album via Edufunky]
BBC Four’s Synth Britannia
posted by Drew | Thursday, December 10, 2009 | 10:55:27 pmBroadcast on BBC Four this past October, Synth Britannia gives a decent, straightforward overview of the emergence of synthesizers in popular British music in the late 70s/early 80s. Time has been rather kind to most of the musicians interviewed, including Phil Oakey, John Foxx, Gary Numan, Andrew McCluskey, Martin Gore, Vince Clarke, etc, and most seem like pretty ok guys who very much believed in the direction they were taking music. Nobody interviewed, however, seemed to be able to pronounce “Moog” correctly … but I digress.
Worth a watch if you’ve ever gotten all dreamy eyed while thinking about the Mute Records catalog, or, alternately, if you’re into peeking at sexy close ups of Fairlight CMIs and B roll of London streets.
Synth Britannia - 90 minutes:
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9
A little Lennox via ½ of the Freundschaft
posted by Drew | Wednesday, December 9, 2009 | 09:28:43 pmThough sadly only represented via blurry surrogate in this video, Annie Lennox’s backing vocals on “Darling Don’t Leave Me” still, unsurprisingly, manage to outshine the robotic sprechgesang of Robert Görl, the former drummer of Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft. From Görl’s 1984 solo album, Night Full of Tension.