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Category Archives: A Few of my Favourite Songs

These Are a Few of my Favourite Songs #4 (and Favourite Music Videos #1): Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Once in a Lifetime bursts into life with a cymbal crash and a bass slide, and then we’re off on its unique journey: twinkling keyboards, clicking hi-hats and toms in surprising places, and that famous two-note bass riff. In keeping with the simple progressions of the album’s other tracks, the song is built of just [...]

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These Are a Few of my Favourite Songs #3: Belle and Sebastian - Seeing Other People

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Belle and Sebastian nowadays make glossy chamber-pop records, but their previous albums are, I think, early examples of what has now developed fully into the twee, hand-stitched “indie” aesthetic, I’m sure influenced by Velvet Underground’s less completely perverse songs thirty years before (After Hours, Stephanie Says). The whole indie thing has become rather sickly and [...]

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These Are a Few of my Favourite Songs #2: Nico - These Days

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

There is a certain response some music evokes in me that I can only describe as relief. I cannot hear the opening bars of These Days without feeling this, as if a weight I wasn’t aware of has lifted from me suddenly. No guitar tone has ever sounded sweeter. Certainly no other piece of [...]

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These Are a Few of my Favourite Songs #1: Radiohead - Pyramid Song

Monday, April 27, 2009

Pyramid Song comes from Radiohead’s “experimental” Kid A/Amnesiac era, which for my money is still the most exciting period of what has turned out to be a very exciting career indeed. Pyramid Song is a dark, slow, heavy thing, like the shape of a whale moving beneath the waves. The rotating piano chords never quite [...]

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