Eagle eyed readers may have noticed this thread has gone from top 50 to the unlikely number of 52. This is because I'm making this up as I go along and all the information is too much for my narcotic stained memory. Expect the number to rise again if I remember more stuff I've missed but I'm digressing now . . .
49
High Places - From Stardust To Sentience
High Places
2008
High Places are a dream pop duo from Brooklyn whose self titled debut is one of those rare indie Lps that barely touches a guitar. Instead they employ found sounds, house hold objects and electronic snatches and samples. Vocalist Mary Pearson sings with a child like innocence, like she's eternally lost in the school playground getting high on e numbers. Their playful and trippy lyrics are like playground philosophies which involve talk of oceans, trees and space travel. This song seems to be about the smallness of all of us in contrast to time and gravity. Pearson sings, "Out in the desert your thoughts are as clear as the stars. You feel golden. You're billion year old carbon", in a dreamy half asleep slumber, and you get a sense of being at one with the universe. Well I do anyway. I don't know where the boing boing noises on the track, that bounce between your speakers, come into to all these deep revelations, but it works for me.
48
The Young Knives - Part Timer
Voices Of Animals and Men
2006
From the intro, where the band sound as though their having a fit, to the end, where Henry Dartnall screams "Part Time Part Time!" in hysterical falsetto, this is gloriously daft post - punk in the Futureheads vein. This ditty from the Oxford nerds is about procrastination and writers block, and it hits close to home. The bit at 1:28 (or 5:26 in the brilliant video) where the track stops and we hear a snippet of the band trying to piece together a song ("that bit we can fit in and then take out . . we do it again it'll sound stupid") always makes me laugh. And the line "Part time forever, under the weather" I admire and begrudgingly relate to.
|