Thursday, Jun. 18, 2009
Podpicks for June 18, 2009
Whoa there Nellie, in honor of Band of Horses’ gig tonight at House of Blues, we’ve lassoed the following equine-related tracks we recommend for downloading (legally of course) to your iPod or other personal media device.
“Cigarettes, Wedding Bands” by Band of Horses – BOH lead singer Ben Bridwell’s reverb-marinated voice is a freak of nature. His lyrics, on the other hand, seem second nature. “Cigarettes, Wedding Bands,” while something of a deep cut (find it on the band’s pared-down second release, “Cease to Begin”), still manages to convey the ennui of everyday (and everyman) as well as any track the group has ever recorded, “The Funeral” included: “The working man’s day/we just piss it away/Leave it out in the weather,” Bridwell sings, before referencing violence ripping through an old dogwood fence, drunk brothers, love letters left to rot, and “the dead folks in the clouds.” What’s it all mean? Who knows. But there’s no doubt it’s meaningful. “Why do we live so long?”, Bridwell asks, before the guitars answer his question: what the hell else are we doing?
“Tired Wings” by The Four Horsemen – “Nobody Said it Was Easy,” released in 1991, was more or less the last ride for The Four Horsemen. Between fights with producer Rick Rubin and label strife with Def American (now just “American Recordings”), singer Frank Starr’s drug use and subsequent arrests, their original drummer’s death from an overdose and the rise of grunge, the band barely had a chance at tapping into our collective musical consciousness. Which is a shame, really – the band’s blooze-soaked bar rock wasn’t a far cry (or any less authentic) than a lot of the half-ass hair-farming (on the face, this time) that passed for a lot of the so-called Seattle Sound. “Tired Wings” is a good place to start for the uninitiated: a big, hang-your-hat-on-it riff, some meaty, Brian Johnson-esque whelping, all tied up with just enough down-home funkiness to set it apart from the Candlebox crowd.
“Like A Hurricane” by Neil Young and Crazy Horse – Crazy Horse, Neil Young’s half-mad, bucking bronco of a backing band, manage the rare feat of being tight as hell while keeping things so loose you feel sure you’ll get thrown from the saddle any second now. People who know the band from backing Young on tracks like “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” and “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” might be surprised at the – dare we say it? – tender take on “Like a Hurricane,” a touching turn which finds the strangled-sounding Young comparing his love to the most destructive storm imaginable. Like a hurricane, however, Young notes that there’s a silver lining: in this case, a calm in her eyes. Un- or possibly-requited love songs don’t come any harder than this, and Young’s guitar solo toward the end of the track is worth the download by its lonesome.
“(Bring on the) Dancing Horses” by Echo and the Bunnymen – For a band that never managed to sell a whole lot of records stateside when it was in its prime, Ian McCulloch and company sure get a lot of shout-outs these days. Operating in the same early-’80s rock music vacuum that gave us R.E.M. and U2, Echo and the Bunnymen could do the jangly-guitars-meets-mumbly-vocalist thing as well as anyone, even if few folks outside of college radio DJs ever got to hear it. “(Bring on the) Dancing Horses,” then, was the exception, appearing on the “Pretty in Pink” soundtrack and helping yet another misplaced, outcast-prone group of geeks (of which we were a member) feel better about ourselves – or, at least, making us feel like the other folks, happy to jam Quarterflash, were missing out on something really cool. Which, it should be said, was often enough.
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