I've never made a secret of my abundant, absolute and all-consuming love for Iggy Pop. If you're gonna call The Idiot number one and then Lust For Life number two, then 1979's New Values is the third part of a divine trilogy of albums, which -- appropriately -- rivals Bowie's Berlin trilogy in seminality; it's not until the fifth track Don't Look Down, however, that anything* verging on the timeless greatness** of those first two records is approached.

Iggy Pop - Don't Look Down (3.3 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

[*] That's not to in any way diminish the excellence of Tell Me A Story, Girls, I'm Bored and the title track; it's just that they're in a different league.

[**] Is it weird that there's no word which means "the good quality of the song-writing" in the same way that 'lyricism' somehow means "the good quality of the words of the song"? Or is this just Vocabulary FAIL.

Labels: heroes, music, two-sentences-one-tune

A song for Wednesday:

Pere Ubu - I Will Wait (2.47 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

... from Dub Housing (wikipedia).

edit
jeez, last night's effort was pretty lame huh. So, let's try again.

If you're interested in rock music; if you're interested in the fringes of rock music, where the madman hold court and the wild things are, then you really need look no further than Pere Ubu. Their late-70s "art-punk" albums capture the angst and chaos of their times -- and ours -- with both apocalyptic fervor and surprising humanity.

Some words about Pere Ubu: insular, fractured, volatile, bleak, whimsical, eerie, tense, anxious, paranoid, confrontational, harsh, gloomy, cerebral, detached, quirky, absurdist warble, rapturous, demented, self-destructing melodies, scattershot rhythms, industrial-strength dissonance, manic intensity, dark impenetrability

Labels: music, two-sentences-one-tune

When on a whim I picked up this 1969 single by The Arbors -- a little-known American pop-group from the 60s (wikipedia) -- singing The Letter, much more famously recorded by The Box Tops in 1967 -- who know knew what a colossally lysergic head-buzz-off stone classic it would turn out to be?

The Arbors - The Letter (5.26 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

OMFG... OMFG... OMFG... did you hear that?

Labels: music, two-sentences-one-tune