My iTunes Top 25 Most Played Tracks

I don't really scrobble things on last.fm right now, so I thought this list might shed some light on the songs that bring up the happiness quota daily here at Post-Indie HQ.

1. The Agents - Ikkunaprinsessa - This is my song equivalent for Godiva truffles. It's in Finnish, so unless my demographic has changed significantly, you won't understand it. Fear not, there are translations floating around the internet and they're worth checking out. For one, the singer says that he doesn't mind the girl's tiny cleavage. How often do you hear that mentioned in songs? Also, she dumps him and he takes heartbreak with a little smirk and a whole lotta sweetness.

2. Anjulie - Love Songs (Bimbo Jones Remix) - She falls for the cheesy things in life, cries at sad movies, likes pretty people, and is showered with pink champagne. Until she meets someone. Then she looks back knowing she changed her perspective on life for the time being. Then again, she's fickle. Electrolove.

3. Anita Lane - Home Is Where the Hatred Is - Self explanatory, no? Great melody, great vocals, good to hear after a fight before the anger subsides.

4. Brigitte Bardot - Moi je joue - If you don't know her rules, she'll make you weep. But if you play along you'll fail to regret it. Probably because you'll be too full of joie de vivre.

5. The Gadsdens - The Sailor Song - I featured it on the blog recently, no extra comment needed.

6. Jordan Martin - The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was - If there's ever a movie made for my life, this will be on the soundtrack during any scene set in 12th grade. Well, either this or Cigarettes and Sedatives from Flu Music, which is not on this list because I accidentally deleted it from iTunes.

7. Wanda Jackson - Tunnel of Love - Ever seen me wearing a Stetson hat and second-skin blue jeans? If not, play this to me during dress-up on a bender.

8. Boris Vian - J'suis snob - Just hear it out, laugh, and admit you fit at least one the criteria Vian lists. I have the black nails, the stomach ulcer, the Swedish film playlist, the Camembert and the desire to be buried in Dior. Et toi?

9. Steve Isles - Ruskies - If you drink real vodka, drink it to this. It sounds like a hundred songs my Russian great-grandmother played for me on an old patephone back in the day.

10. Antonín Dvořák - Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém - From Rusalka. Flawless.

11. Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart - Another song that reminds me of childhood. Eastern Europe in the '90s wasn't that bad, was it? I made an education of it.

12. Lou Reed - The Gun - An end-of-the-bender tune to end all.

13. Dawn Davis - And So Does He

and

14. Dawn Davis - My Private Affair - This woman only has some 400 plays on last-fm and no bio information. I only know that she was a singer sometime in the late 1920s and that we would be great friends if she was still alive.

15. Black Strobe - I'm A Man - I'm not, I just stomp to this. And dance to it. And then there was that one time...

16. Bat for Lashes - Daniel - And when the fires came / The smell of cinders and rain / Perfumed almost everything / We laughed and laughed and laughed.

17. Brigitte Bardot - Bubble Gum - Silly little number for silly little me.

18. Diablo Swing Orchestra - Heroines - Colourful, so beautiful, with fever eyes closed and so free / Those were my heroines. Amen.

19. Peter Doherty - New Love Grows on Trees - Are you still talking to those dead film stars like you used to? And are you still thinking of all those pretty rhymes and perfect crimes like you used to? And if you're still alive when you're twenty five shall I kill like you asked me to? I remember every single thing you said to me.

20. The Black Keys - When the Lights Go Out - What a way to live, back of the class, end of the line, always last. You know what the sun's all about when the lights go out.

21. St. Vincent - Your Lips Are Red - My hands are black inside this downtown taxi cab. This city's red from riding us into the ground. This city's black from all the ashes in downtown. Your lips are red, my face is red from reading your red lips. This isn't chaos, this is a whirlwind.

22. Bauhaus - Of Lillies and Remains - A thousand parties full of black-clad people with plastic Ray Bans have nothing on walking into town listening to this. Also, this song makes me pleasantly claustrophobic.

23. Beirut - Elephant Gun - If I was young, I'd flee this town, I'd bury my dreams underground. We drink tonight. We drink to die. Any Beirut song reminds me of my hometown. Not sure that's a good thing.

24. Kim Fowley - The Trip - Classic stoner song. Purple clouds? Faceless crowds? Silver cats? Let's climb some mountains, everyone is such a good nighttime motto.

25. The Venus in Furs - The Whole Shebang - For all those perfect mornings after.

Interview: Says She's Ms. Blatt

I'm so behind on publishing things that I won't even try to justify getting this online in December when I interviewed Lottie back in May. Without further ado...

Tina: What's the exact release date for the debut?

Lottie: June 15! That is when (we hope) it goes to college radio and explodes. If not we hope maybe one or two people will pick it up and dig it!

Tina: How would you describe the band and the debut album?

Lottie: It is hard to describe the music that you create! I mean, when you spend time on music and you put so much into it, it becomes part of you, so it is as if I was describing myself....
Here is how a promoter recently described us: "Pounding keys and drums with edgy, dramatic vocals deliver a dark vaudevillian pop experience."

T: When did you start the project?

L: I had been writing songs and playing the piano for years on my own. I was ready to record and get my music out there last summer (2008). I contacted my old friend Bret Puchir (an amazing guitarist) who immediately agreed to help me produce and record my first album. We began working right away, and luckily we made an amazing team. The album was recorded from July 2008-January 2009. Bret played drums on the record and he basically just fell into being my drummer and we became a duo. Our first practice was in mid January and our first show was May 6!

T: What artists do you enjoy listening to?

L: I love all types of music. I am currently listening to Heartless Bastards and Richard Swift. I love Benjy Ferree and Tim Fite. I also love Beirut!

T: Any local bands you would like to recommend?

L: I would definitely recommend Miracle of Birth. It's this amazing drummer name Jade who plays solo to his own tracks. He is a sick drummer, sick. He is also in the Villians, a really great Thrash, Hardcore band....

--

For more of Lottie and the band, check out their MySpace. Don't you love it when a band describes itself as Pop/Visual/Black Metal and turn out to be really awesome?

Piano Magic - "Disaffected"

“Anything can happen in life — especially nothing, mainly nothing. Once you know that, you’re fine. Work’s overrated and it will kill you. Finish nothing you start and start nothing you think you’ll continue. And to this model I’ve kept: I surface at 3 in the clothes that I slept in, and though I’m drowning in debt, I’m richer through all the things I’m rejecting. And in a rare, certain light, I have a strange charm — I think you’d like me. And the rain brings me out, the rain makes me happy.”

This Immortal Coil - The Dark Age of Love

Now you’ve absorbed it into your system, now that you’ve allowed it to be true, now that you’ve neutralized it, made it safe, made it yours, now that you’ve been photographed, recorded, what are you gonna do? Is it so unsafe where you are? Is it really more real? is it more real? And the people who perceive it, repeat it, distort it, improve it, update it, slightly change it, and these people believe it and write it all up and is it more real? Is it so awful to be seen to feel and fail? The ink is still wet – in this case, the medium is not. Is it really so unsafe that you can’t let go? What are you going to do if they don’t believe you? – “Red Queen”

(Yes, this is another post about writing, and no, I still can’t write fiction anymore.) The lyrics made me think of the difference between my medium and music; what I write I describe as pinned to paper, exorcised. I don’t have to hear it and I don’t have to let people write a take on it with their view perverting the original exorcism. It’s not random and it’s private even though it’s released for others to see, but one shudders to think of it spoken by me. Worse, sung. I don’t have to deal with being judged for it as obviously. Is music a way to make it safe, like writing, or a means to make it permanent? I hope it’s worth it, this hanging on to things beautifully. And I hope that not being believed really does convince them that it wasn’t true, and that this makes it safer.

I came across the song I quoted on “The Dark Age of Love”, a tribute project from the likes of Yann Tiersen and Yael Naim working under the moniker This Immortal Coil. I wasn’t a fan of Coil before this and I prefer these versions to the originals. That being said and musings aside, enjoy.

Video: The Gadsdens - "The Sailor Song"

Slightly cheesy song, I know, but compelling and addictive (I think the singer has a slight lisp, how rare is that in this biz?). Quote:

I was your sailor, your demon, your lover, your overbearing
Best friend hoping for some attention
I never really had it in me, did I, did I?

Sea-sense

There’s a sea-sense about some people, I think. Suspect. Notice sometimes, mostly while drinking or drunk on reading and suddenly looking up with an empty head to feel the tide pulling.

I smell brine when I’m angry and taste salt when I’m sad. When I’m worried I feel nothing at all, or rather everything real and immediate, which is worse.

When I was younger (it’s already infuriating to think of it in these terms, am I an adult for this?) I used to love to sit in the sand and read perhaps one of Rilke’s Elegies and listen to some classical music. Then, in that void, vibrations - which for us now are rapture and solace and help an so on. I was very pretentious, I guess, to make up for being young. Now I think I’d just sit in the sand. I used to write to fill the page. Now I write for the spaces. Maybe that’s why I don’t write here as often.

Picture this: a girl who used to live for music sits with a laptop in silence and doesn’t dare disturb the peace with typing. And the sea-pulse quickens and she bites on a knuckle and smells the faintest trace of brine. But over that there’s still floor wax and cherry Chapstick and wine.

I avoid music, but when it starts to chafe I listen to Crystallized from The XX on repeat. It’s steady-steady-steady-soft chaos and so, so good.

Video: Royksopp ft. Fever Ray - "This Must Be It"

September, Part 1

Picture this: a girl in an Abercrombie sweater and skinny jeans, barefoot on a balcony in the pouring rain. The iPod headphones are blaring out "Do You Want To See The World" from The Kooks. She's dancing to warm up and to shake off some wine she shouldn't have had. And yes, she does want to see the world, and she has, and it's September on the outskirts of Bucharest and she could have been anywhere in the world she wanted tonight. And she remembers all the other times she listened to this song in her teens, on buses and in classrooms and clubs, and she's mouthing the words with a smile. Happiness is easy.

Beck - Record Club (videos)

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico "Run Run Run"

Run Run Run - cover by Beck and Thorunn Magnusdottir

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico "Venus In Furs" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

If you haven't heard yet, Beck has a rather awesome project called Record Club in which he covers the iconic Velvets & Nico album. The videos are trippy remixes of recording sessions and they sound good (as far as covers go, and covers of fanatically-played songs at that), so hurry along to Record Club to look around at some coolness.

Video: Bowerbirds: "In Our Talons"