The opener of the wonderfully titled first album Every Time the Bell Rings an Angel Gets His Wings of the Swedish band. I am listening to the live mp3 from the Emmabodafestivalen 8/8/2002.

A song which renders me completely defenseless. It is like a soft stab into the heart. Maybe like shooting Heroine. Yes I think it is as intense. Like when someone tells me a secret he hasn't told anyone before. I am pure emotion afterwards. Touched to the bone. I literally melt. You must know that I am an iceberg. Always have been.

It starts very slowly and fragile with the tuning of the guitar and a piano. Speedwise this could be Low. The singer pronounces some words which are rather difficult to understand. After one minute the bass guitar enters and slows down the music even more. Long sustained tones. After another 30 seconds the song opens up into full blossom. The drums arrive. The guitars sound almost like pedal steel. A warm country feel. Wide open space. And there is almost a small crescendo like in Godspeed YBE tracks. At the end things get calmer again, the singer mumbles some more. The mood of the song is pretty close to the depressive tunefulness of Idaho.

Nick Hornby on Ryan Adams Oh My Sweet Carolina in McSweeney's (via TMFL):

And John Darnielle aka The Mountain Goats in his weekly article on Last Plane to Jakarta about the pure pop song Yesterday Once More by the Carpenters (mp3 and lyrics):

Low's In the Drugs is THEE grass song. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the title...

Elmar Brandt im Steuersong:

So richtig lustig find ich das jetzt nicht mehr, wenn unsere gewählten Volksvertreter die armen Satiriker jetzt auch noch arbeitslos machen...

The lyrics of this song by Laurie Anderson from 1979 still strike me as an amazing startling premonition of 9-11. Just have a look at the middle part:

I think we have reached the age of force, justice is gone already. But what does the last sentence mean? Is Mom = Mother Earth? Or is the end of force the end of the male dominance and the beginning of a new age of matriarchy? Or maybe it refers to the fact that after force, which in practice means war, most men are dead and only widows, old people and kids are left?

Whatever. Laurie Anderson who also made some of the most lucid comments on 9-11 just released a two CD album of her concerts at Town Hall, NYC Sept. 19-20 2001, a little more than a week after the attacks. It was the first time in twenty years she performed O Superman. The atmosphere was rather eery as she explains in an 11'30'' interview for Here and Now broadcast on NPR. You can listen to it here (via planing lakes). She regrets the lack of analysis of what really happened more than a year ago and talks about the song, New York, the current atmosphere there and her next project involving a gigantic violin in the Wintergarden. In between the questions and answers there are bits of songs of her.

Knives Out again I wrote about the Flaming Lips version of Knives Out by Radiohead they performed at Morning Becomes Eclectic a couple of days ago. I could not imagine that at least five other weblogs would take this up and comment on this cover. Fluxblog, Badgerminor, Stumblings in the Dark and Virulent Memes like the new version by the Lips. Only Clive from Somnolence who writes one of my favourite well thought out music weblogs doesn't appreciate it too much. He misses the pain in the Lips version, he finds that they at least partially missed the point but writes that it is still a good effort. When I first listened to the original on the radio, time seemed to stand still for the moment when I heard Yorke's voice joining in after that almost serene guitar theme. It was absolutely devastating. I didn't listen to the lyrics really. But his delivery moved me in a way only very few singers do. It moved me so much that it almost became unbearable after subsequent listens. I must agree that the Lips version is almost an entirely different song. It is another take on the song. Less grim and less despairing. But rather creative and innovative. They add some extra spices like piano, distorted guitars, epic synths, siren sounds and take away the monotony a little. I think great songs need great covers and great covers have to change the original. If they copied the original one to one they would miss the point much more. I guess I immediately liked the cover as it made me remember what a wonderful song Knives Out is, a modern classic if you want, and that there is more in the song than the original reveals. Or more precisely that it also works in an extrovert version. By the way I am not a fan of the Lips. I have got Soft Bulletin and when relistening to it recently I found that it is a bland empty record. Bombast pop with one or two appealing tunes but no depth. I have seen them live as well and they have a great show but it really was more gimmickry than anything else with these strange video projections and the enormous gong Wayne Coyne hit every minute or so.

Weissensee I have never been a fan of electronic music. Electronic music always seemed too mechanic too short-lived for me. I mean that I usually got bored very soon of it. There is something lifeless in most of electronic music. When I was in my teens there were these bands like Tangerine Dream or Kraftwerk or electronic hit producers like Jean-Michel Jarre around. Their music never did anything for me. I was more into prog (or is it artock?) like Genesis, some Pink Floyd or Eloy, a forgotten German band but that's another story... Recently I got a little more into new electronic music which is usually labeled IDM standing for intelligent dance music. That's a ridiculous term: what an arrogant assumption that normal dance music is stupid! It is even more misleading considering that to dance to e.g. Boards of Canada seems to me a rather unworldly idea. The starting point was an mp3 I downloaded from filepile I think called Everything You Do Is a Balloon by Boards of Canada. I wrote about it here in this blog, a gorgeous impressionistic ambientish instrumental with discrete beats and dreamy synthesizer soundscapes in the second part. I then bought Geogaddi, Boards of Canada's latest offering which couldn't live up to that song. Recently I got their first LP Music Has the Right to Children which has a nice flow but still some tracks I almost hate. It nevertheless is the best electronic album of the last ten years I know (I hardly know any though). I also bought Autechre's latest record Confield but I must admit that I never got past the first track. What I heard was like a dentist's drill and that was enough to put me off. I will certainly try to listen to this album one day but I am not yet ready for it. In any case Autechre seems to be one of the most important bands in the IDM genre. Therefore I listened to a couple of mp3s from them I had downloaded from the web. And I found that their music was exactly as I remembered electronic music: dull and soulless. But then I stumbled upon their version of Weissensee, a track from the first album of Neu (a Kraftwerk-offshoot who pioneered punk and techno). And I was totally blown away. Weißensee is a city in Thuringia (in the East of Germany) who used to be the capital of Thuringia and Hessen (the Bundesland where I live) long ago. They claim the oldest German Reinheitsgebot (beer purity law) dating from 1434. I am not even sure if this Weißensee inspired the song but this is a nice connotation anyway. Autechre's version is almost nine minutes long. It is one of the most hypnotic songs I have ever heard. The beats sound like African slow-motion drums announcing a war, tribal and dark. Extremely powerful. They are garnished with some scratching sounding like duck cackle, bird's chirping or the squeaking of rusty doors. The synthesizer layers add a floating spherical flair to the song. If you want to know what trance is listen to this. I can't refrain from dancing to the beats with my buttock in my fully mobile office chair at home when listening to the song on my computer. What a perfect marriage of ambient and refrained dance beats. There is a 30 second real audio snippet on this page. The original seems to be less successful according to the snippet here. I nevertheless ordered Neu's first album from 1972 to check the full version.

Resurrection The Flaming Lips did Knives Out (mp3 via elasticheart) at Morning Becomes Eclectic on Thursday (whole show in real audio). This brilliant bleak song had almost been killed for me by too much listening to it. Thom Yorke's mumbling detached sad voice is something I can only take in small doses. After a while it starts to annoy me. And Radiohead's original version of the song is too polished, too stream-lined for my taste. Though the guitars have an unbelievable fluid lightness about them which collides heavily with the grave singing. The Flaming Lips give the song a fresh touch. After the piano intro the drums join in and some nice squeaking distorted guitars which are all over the song. Wayne Coyne's voice which isn't too far from Yorke's fits well and is much more intelligible. He sings to us and not to himself like Yorke. What probably irritates me most about Yorke is the coldness of his voice which sounds like he is singing out of his his own grave. At the end the cover becomes a soundtrack to a film not yet directed. About the beauty of alienation or something like that. The spacey keyboards take over and repeat the musical theme of the song. The song finishes with guitar feedback sounding like slow sirens. Bliss in a post 911 world. By the way John Darnielle aka The Mountain Goats wrote some interesting stuff about Knives Out on his site Last Plane to Jakarta.

Julia My interpretation of the lyrics I posted three entries below. The song starts low-key with the singer on the left and the guitars on the right channel: "Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you Julia" is a rather mysterious opening line. The singer makes clear that he does not sing the song for the big audience but to reach one person, a woman called Julia. Everyone else trying to find meaning will be only half successful (I'll try nevertheless). But why and how can Julia be reached with words of which only half are meaningful? Something about this Julia is bizarre from the beginning on. After this introductory verse the two channels are melded (mixed) and the volume goes up. The following tune is a soothing lullaby. Simple, calm and extremely tender. Melancholic and wistful. A dreamy very intimate song. Julia has been calling the singer (how she did that is not explained) and he replies with a song of love. She is everywhere where he looks, in all three elements: water (oceanchild, seashell), earth or matter (moon, sand) and air (sky, cloud). In the middle of the song the serene melody is interrupted: "Her hair of floating sky is" and then higher "glimmering" and higher again "shimmering" the pitch going down again "in the sun". These lines indicate that Julia is ethereal and high up in the sky. In the next and the second last verse the singer wants Julia to touch him. But she is far away like the moon and the clouds. The descriptions "sleeping sand" and "silent cloud" make clear that Julia cannot speak and therefore cannot reply. The verse in between those two "When I cannot sing my heart. I can only speak my mind" points again into the direction that words are not so important but the singing and therefore the tune come from deep inside. P.S. Julia Lennon died in a car crash in 1958 when John Lennon was 17 years old. He wrote Julia for the Beatles White Album in 1968. P.P.S. With Yoko Ono who was eight years older than Lennon he had found a lover who also served as a mother ersatz and apparently participated in writing the lyrics to Julia.

Song lines This morning I listened to Giant from The The's third record Soul Mining. I didn't remember how good this song was. The percussion play peaking in the second half is absolutely addictive. African tribal rhythms plus synthie plus "iyeai-yeai-yeai-yea-aa". And Matt Johnson sings "How could anyone know me. When I don't even know myself?". That is logical but I immediately thought the reverse is true as well: How can I know myself when I haven't looked at me from the perspective of a stranger? In one of her few covers Joni Mitchell sings "How do you stop before it's too late" on Turbulent Indigo. I have to relate this to smoking, Joni's voice has gone down at least one octave in the last 15 years because of all those bloody cigarettes. I don't know if she has stopped now but I know I have to stop and I hope that it is not too late. At the moment I switch between one/two days on and off all the time. And the next day after a slip I usually waste the tobacco which is left. Ridiculous, no pathetic is the word. The best part of a cigarette is putting it out. That is like stopping smoking. A release. At least it gives me the feeling of how it would be to stop this bad habitude. In my twisted smoker's logic I restart smoking only to stop it again. And as I love to stop I have to smoke again to stop again. A vicious circle.