Tag: American indie

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Tunes

Best tunes of 2020: #17 Ezra Furman “Every feeling”

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I recently wrapped up watching the final season of Sex Education on Netflix and almost immediately, I found myself wanting to start over and rewatch it from the beginning. To me, that’s a sign of a great show and when it happens with books, it’s the same – the feeling of missing the characters and their stories and their worlds.

I wasn’t immediately sure when I started watching the first season back in the fall of 2019. It felt a bit weird to be watching a show that explicitly detailed the sex lives of teenagers, even though I knew that all of the actors would be of the age of consent. It did a great job, though, playing with reality, making the stories not about their age or the place and time*, and more about the great characters and how they reacted to universal problems and situations related to love and relationships and yes, sex.

The show lasted four seasons of eight episodes a piece, which seems quite long for British television in my own limited experience. Each episode in each season was quite excellent and of course, I loved the music throughout, a pastiche of hip music from the 70s to the present, with many songs that I recognized and some that I didn’t. A quick google search explained that many of those excellent songs I didn’t recognize were supplied by American singer-songwriter Ezra Furman.

In late January 2020, about a week after season 2 appeared on Netlix, Furman released “Sex education original soundtrack”, which collected together all of her songs that appeared in the first two seasons of the show. Of course, I made sure to peruse it and then found myself perusing more of her work and it was then, that I realized that though some of the tracks were written for the show, many were songs that were repurposed from her previous recordings.

One of the tracks that Furman wrote new for the show appeared at the end of episode three of the first season. “Every feeling” fits the mood of scene perfectly: the wind-down of an emotionally draining day. At the time, the song wasn’t available anywhere and viewers  immediately started clamouring to find out where they could get a copy. It’s a short piece that focuses on Furman banging away at her acoustic guitar like it was cause of her hurt and depression and her drained voice shaking out all the f-bombs. Because sometimes that’s the only word that’ll do to get your message across.

“I’m gonna feel every feeling
And only love
Only love will remain”

It’s a track full of pain but it’s also damned uplifting.

*Though there were plenty of homages to John Hughes’ teen comedies of the eighties, the hints to past and present technologies and trends made it feel out of time completely.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2020 list, click here.

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Albums

Best albums of 2010: #2 Broken Bells “Broken Bells”

Broken Bells is a collaborative project between The Shins’ frontman James Mercer and über-producer/musician, Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse). I first came across Burton’s work care of his production efforts on the second Gorillaz long player, but I really stood up and took notice when he recorded an album with Cee Lo Green under the moniker Gnarls Barkley. Of course, I was already late to party at that point. Danger Mouse had already snagged the listening public’s attention a few years earlier with “The Grey album”, his infamous mashup of the obvious classic albums by Jay-Z and The Beatles. After the success of Gnarls Barkley, Burton was called in to produce albums by The Black Keys, Norah Jones, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, and Beck. For a while there, it seemed that everything he touched turned to gold, including this album with James Mercer as Broken Bells.

In the case of Mercer and his band The Shins, on the other hand, I picked up on them very early on, well before they received the plug by Natalie Portman’s character in the film, “Garden state”, though, I wasn’t so sure I agreed with her bold proclamation at the time. I never saw their music as life-changing but I definitely enjoyed it. Interestingly, I became a bigger fan of The Shins after listening to Broken Bells. It was as if his collaboration with Brian Burton opened my eyes to Mercer’s talents as a songwriter. Another golden win for Burton, I guess.

Indeed, I took to “Broken Bells” immediately, much like I did with The Postal Service’s 2003 classic, “Give up”, an album to which I’ve often compared this one. It bears the same mélange of organic and electronic sounds but where that album pushed boldly forward into futuristic space, “Broken Bells” felt more retro. Yes, there are nods towards science fiction but it isn’t the future we envision today, rather, it’s the present day that we imagined in the past. On many of the songs, Burton and Mercer seem to encapsulate the listener on a silver screen era rocket ship, jettison all of the technical laws of space travel since discovered, and return us to the romance of the thing.

This is the way of the entire album. It sounded like no other music being made in 2010, yet each song sounded instantly familiar, like you grew up listening to Broken Bells’ remixes of the music to which your parents’ parents listened. It is ten tracks of utter brilliance and yes, romance, employing all the cannons in their symphonic arsenal, reinventing the songs and their structures at a whim, a well-placed horn blast here and a shock of string flourish there, like the musical equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting that shouldn’t work but does. You listen to it and find your way to the end of the album, not knowing how you got there, not really knowing anything except that you want to restart it all over again.

In case you haven’t listened to the whole thing already, here are my three picks for you off the album worth listening to right now.

“The ghost inside”: We start things off four tracks in. “Just like a whiskey bottle, drained on the floor. She got no future, just a life to endure.” The heavy lyrical themes of isolation and haunted introspection are subverted by falsetto vocals, handclaps, humming bass lines, haunting melodic synths, it all sounds so dark and disco, you just need to add smoke machine and the words fade away.

“Vaporize”: Track two starts off sounding like it could be an early Shins track, all Mercer and acoustic strumming, until the vibrating organs and that dirty, hammer-down rhythm kicks in and the speakers low end blow out like beautiful confetti. The words, though, remain thoroughly Mercer. “What amounts to a dream anymore? A crude device, a veil on our eyes.” The ideas dance and dare, play upon depth and angle slyly within the melody, unique and happily hummable.

“The high road”: My very favourite song from 2010 starts with pixelated frequencies that melt into a sliding mellow groove complete with jiving handclaps and there’s that wicked singalong bridge that leads you out of the wilderness. “The high road is hard to find, a detour in your new life. Tell all of your friends goodbye.” This is the opening track on the album and does a great job setting the stage for the tracks to follow. I’ve written before that this is hipster funk for martians but I don’t think this precludes us mere mortals from getting on the bus.

Stay tuned for album #1. In the meantime, here are the previous albums in this list:

10. Diamond Rings “Special affections”
9. Bedouin Soundclash “Light the horizon”
8. LCD Soundsystem “This is happening”
7. The Drums “The Drums”
6. The New Pornographers “Together”
5. Stars “The five ghosts”
4. The Radio Dept. “Clinging to a scheme”
3. The National “High violet”

You can also check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2013: #25 Cayucas “A summer thing”

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Tomorrow is the last day of August. And although, technically, there’s still three more weeks left of the season, the passing from August into September always feels like summer is coming to an end. This is why the timing is perfect for this song to pop up and for me to share this very post. “A summer thing” by Cayucas was a great summer song back in 2013 but it could also be perfect for every summer since.

“The summer’s starting to drift away but you don’t want to let go.
Now you’re watching the rainfall by yourself from your bedroom window.
And I’ll be checking the mailbox for the postcards you said you’d send,
Telling me that you might stop by in the winter for the weekend.”

Zach Yudlin was originally making music by himself in the early 2010s under the moniker Oregon Bike Trails. By 2012, though, he had enlisted his twin brother Ben to the project, changing its name to Cayucas, and then, they signed to Secret Canadian Records. They’ve release four albums in all, the latter two were self-released but the only one I am really all that familiar with is the debut, 2013’s “Bigfoot”. It’s 9 tracks and just a smidge over 30 minutes of sunshine and surf and nostalgia for California, where of course, the brothers call home.

The real gem of the album is track four. “A summer thing” sounds unabashedly like The Beach Boys. Harmonies and yellow light filtered through a kaleidoscope and a music box playing “Sloop John B” on repeat. A bopping bass line and zipper-like guitars and ticky tacky drums. Even the most jaded of music fans or Beach Boys purists couldn’t hate this song. It’s faithful in its blue-eyed wonder and wistfully drenched in memories. It’s a song you just want to restart before it comes to an end because maybe, just maybe, it might delay that cold weather just a little bit longer.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2013 list, click here.