Dukes of Stratosphear - Bike Ride to the Moon

The English band XTC are already rad when they’re playing with a straight face, not that a band that comes up with great lines like “She a laughing giggly whirlybird, / She got to be obscene to be obheard” is especially serious. But I just decided that what every great band really needs is to do an album under another name, with a half-hearted pretense that they’re not actually the same people, consisting of perfect pastiches of ’60s psychedelia. At least, that’s what XTC did, and it’s amazing, so I think everyone might as well do it, too. The Dukes of Stratosphear put out an EP called 25 O’Clock, after its perfect first track, and then an album called Psonic Psunspot, and then stuck them together in 1987 as Chips from the Chocolate Fireball, which is how you can get it now. Practically every song is a perfect imitation of its influences, but unlike the crappy parodies we all listened to in middle school, these songs are original themselves, instead of just renaming “My Sharona” “My Bologna.” ‘Cause face it, Pink Floyd is a good idea for a while, but after a while, they’re not worth the effort. What the world needs is psychedelic music made by people who are at least minimally in their own heads; enough to remember that most actual, authentic psychedelia is boring sober.

Heavenly - Shallow

A few kids at Oxford decided to start a band called Talulah Gosh, after hearing a compilation that came with NME magazine, called C86. They got good, and then broke up for whatever reasons, only to reform, after all getting first-class degrees, as more or less the same band, but now called Heavenly. Later, they would be called Marine Research, with a slightly different lineup. All three bands, though, and the members’ other projects, played twee pop - jankly guitars and sweet melodies, with desexed lyrics and haircuts. Heavenly was the best of the three, and the whole album that this song comes from, Heavenly vs. Satan, is great all the way through. Some of the songs are fast and happy on the surface, but they all have the same sadness as “Shallow,” somewhere. I especially like this song, partly because of the Beatles quote in the guitar solo, but mostly because of its peppy loneliness. It’s like Amelia Fletcher, the band leader and lyricist, is saying, “You hurt me and I miss you, and it makes me want to sing, sing, sing!“

I decided, more or less on a whim, that it would be fun to make an mp3 blog, so here we are. The last time I did any Internet music-type thing was Bollywood for the Skeptical, which was a mix CD with some explanation of Bollywood music, and that was fun; hopefully, this blog will give me a way to talk about music in a less structured way, or at any rate differently structured. I’ll be posting at least once a week, and probably more. Some songs might be new to me, and some won’t; some will be by well-known musicians, at least well-known to somebody, and maybe some won’t.

I’ll start off with three songs that, I hope, show more or less what I’m trying to get at.

Lata Mangeshkar - Yara Sili Sili
“Yara Sili Sili” comes from the 1990 Bollywood movie Lekin (However). I can’t find “yara” in my Hindi-English dictionary, but one site translates the title as “How Slowly the Tinders Smolder.” I haven’t seen the movie, but reportedly, Lata loved the music especially well. It’s understandable, too: she sang with her sister Asha Bhonsle on the soundtrack, which is unremarkable, since they’re both extremely prolific, and collaborated a lot when Asha was alive, but more unusually, their brother, Hridyanath, also wrote the music as well as sang. Also, Lata produced the movie. My iPod introduced this song to me on shuffle, while I was reading a great piece by Jonathan Lethem in a recent New Yorker. The piece had to do with music, like a lot of what Lethem writes, and for some reason, the combination of the song and the article, which was really about his mother’s death, really moved me. It might have had to do with being in the cathedral-like cages of the UC Berkeley microfilm room. Also, I think the song is pretty. You can get it on the Rough Guide to Lata Mangeshkar, which has some other good songs, too.

Billy’s Band - Оторвемся по-питерски (Atarvyomsya pa-piterski is my best match for his pronunciation)
As far as I can tell, this is Tom Waits, singing in Russian and backed by a klezmer band. I don’t really know anything about it, but a girl who lives in my co-op saw this band play in Russia. This is the title track of an EP with the same title; there are also two other versions of the same song, and two more songs.

Billy Childish and the Buff Medways - Troubled Mind
OK, here’s something in English, and another Billy. According to my friend John, and what the Internet has told me, this guy has more than a hundred albums with a lot of different bands. He’s English, and doesn’t consider himself a musician - he says he just likes to play music. I’m not sure I really buy the distinction. The song’s got a dirty groove and a cool jerk, like a more primitive, rockabilly-inflected version of The Strokes’ “Hard to Explain.” It’s an import (at least, in the US), but Steady the Buffs has this song.