Return*…Come Back to Me…
Oct 27th, 2009 by Donagh
While listening to this track from the excellent Dirty Projectors’ 2009 album Bitte Orca today….
I was reminded of this ‘77 stunna…
And while listening to this recently released piece of Andy Weatherall produced electro-drizzle
I was reminded of this blindin’ slice of scuzzytronica…
Which brings me finally to Wanda Jackson singing Funnel of Love.
No particular reason for putting this up, except that while looking for the name of a Fall song to use as the title of this post I found out that The Fall have covered it in recent enough shows. According to Wikipedia it’s speculated that it will appear in their forthcoming album (with the working title, Our Future, Your Clutter) due to be released in 2010 (longtime fans will know that such speculation is foolish).
I didn’t find the song title I was looking for, so the one used above will have to do.
Great post. The Dirty Projectors album is a good, if not great record. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it is about it that keeps it from being great until I saw them in Whelan’s last month. And then it hit me: ‘Cannibal Resource’, ‘Temecula Sunrise’, ‘Stillness is a Move’ and a couple of other tracks aside, they can be just too smart with their arrangements for their own good. When they hit their stride and stay there, what a sound. But when they descend into all these annoying little deviations, they just bend your patience until it snaps. Which is why ‘Marquee Moon’ is a much better song than ‘Useful Chamber’ - without being overly straight-up it has some semblance of shape without wanting to be ridiculously contrived, as Dirty Projectors seem to want to do.
No harm in writing straight-up melodies every once in a while.
Thanks Kevin, for pointing out what has been nagging at me since I started listening to the album properly a couple of weeks back. They’re just far too precious, a lot of time. Far too eager to break up the melody line, giving a song all sorts of angles that aren’t really needed. Useful Chamber sounds like two songs stuck together. That said, I still like it alot.
Therein lies the dilemma. Useful Chamber remains a great track, proving that when the disruption works, it sounds great. But when it doesn’t, it sounds, as you say, ‘precious’.
For more conventional, but also very good music, you can download Timber Timbre’s debut album for free, until Saturday:
http://www.timbertimbre.com
Echoes of Fleet Foxes, with a more gothic than country vibe. Good halloween listening.