I can’t escape this feeling that somewhere out there there is a band or a person writing and playing music right now that is so fucking good that if I could just find it, if I could just hear one song, it would stay with me for life.
It’s a problem with me. I look out over the cityscape sometimes or I look at pictures of sleepy suburbs or big skyscrapers or even log cabins in the woods, totally isolated and termite-ridden.
I look at those pictures and I wonder if someone somewhere inside one of those buildings or houses or on one of those streets is playing a song that could change my life.
So I dig and dig and dig. I try to find new bands or old bands with new albums and I try to listen to it all and my reward for this obsessive digging is, ironically, a diminishing appreciation and enjoyment of music.
You start to hear the same things a lot. The same chord structures, the same vocal melodies and borrowed sentiments. It’s so bad that in some instances I’ll get an album, listen to 30 seconds of the first track and know, just fucking know, that I will never listen to that album again.
I mean I give it a go because the best albums are the ones you hate at first and then, five listens later you fucking love, but by and large the music I listen to bores the living shit out of me.
The other thing that happens is that the more you listen, the stranger your tastes become to the point where music that melts your face off just gets a confused look out of the people you play it for or they straight up turn it off.
So now that I’ve got that disclaimer out the way, I’m going to throw two songs out there for you kind folks and see what happens (probably nothing).
The first one is off the new Warpaint album (self-titled) that was released in January.
I fucking love what this band is doing. They are a great example of how women are killing it when it comes to creating original and inspiring music at the moment and you can take that to the fucking bank.
This track is called “Biggyâ€:
There’s a place out there, it has tents and a log cabin and a gigantic fire pit and it’s surrounded by mountain peaks and forests and it’s called Orange Kloof Tented Camp.
That song reminds me of that place like I’m standing right there again in the midst of the total chaos I created, watching my degenerate friends stagger reeling drunk around the place, falling into the fire, spilling things and smashing glasses, laughing, all the time laughing.
Then there’s this one from Timber Timbre called “This Low Commotion†off their new album Hot Dreams.
Love that fucking song, holy shit. Makes me want to get in a big black Cadillac, drive out into the boiling desert heat and keep driving until there is nothing but road and sky and dust… and quiet…
So yeah. That’s the shit that speaks to me at the moment, right deep down.
Good times.
-ST
