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:

Merry Christmas, dammit.

[via Rooms With Brittle Views]

Though 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.

Tired of looming over you deck of Oblique Strategies, thinking about how you totally got that Brian Eno name drop James Murphy laid out in the last issue of Spin magazine? Bored with postulating “what it must have been like” to hang with Bowie in Berlin? Disenchanted with the non-music revolution you hoped to start when you picked up that MicroKorg at Guitar Center?

Fret no more! You can now mix an ambient soundscape all by your lonesome at inbflat.net. Props to the girl with the DS-10 synthesizer (2nd column, 3rd row), but my money is on the dude with the e-bowed banjo (5th column, 2nd row).

[ thx to K.F. ]

Dope Classics @ Cafe St Ex
Thursday, September 10th
No cover, music @ 10:00

Pete & Co. of Fatback fame asked me to join them at this month’s Dope Classics. An honor indeed! I just broke the 32 year old seal on a Star Wars storybook/soundtrack LP I’ve been hoarding for a rainy day, SO GET YO MINDS READY FOR THAT SHIT.

In a rather unlikely pairing, H.R. Giger lensed this pair of videos (2nd after the jump) for tracks on Debbie Harry’s 1981 solo semi-flop, KooKoo.

While I somewhat dig the album’s production, by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, I mostly just want to find out where I can get my hands on one of those necronom/alien bodysuits she’s wearing in “Now I Know You Know”. If I had the bread, I could at least fork out for a Harkonnen chair, which was originally intended for use in the Dune movie, like the one Harry sits on at the end.

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A garish video accompanies delightful new and unexpected music from Mi and La’u, purveyors of sparsely orchestrated lullabies and creators of this unsung gem. Evidently, they’re also set to soundtrack this season’s Chanel ads.

Via Borne Recordings.

Tiny airplanes traverse director Hiraki Sawa’s London flat in the video for “Small Metal Gods,” the lead track from David Sylvian’s latest album, Manafon.

Due out September 14th, the album comes in both standard and deluxe editions.

The former Baby Spice jocks Sweet Charity and doles out an irresistibly swank number that glides & sashays all over your limbic system’s sweet spots.  Fated to be rediscovered by the next generation’s Stereolab.  From 2003’s Free Me.

Bonus Sweet Charity scene, directed and choreographed by the apparently weightless Bob Fosse, after the break:

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The cosmic folks over at Sunsetcorp dice up Fleetwood Mac’s “Only Over You,” from their 1982 album Mirage, into all sorts of awesome.

They give the same treatment to Chris De Burgh’s “Lady in Red,” featuring a giant, undulating, rainbow staircase thing reaching to the heights of the interstellar megalopolis I see every night in computer fueled fever dreams. Rad, man.

[Thx to Matt Hawkins at Fort 90]