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the rockandrollisphere Friday, December 9 2005
There are a few songs floating around out there in the rockandrollisphere that I know and love but either forget about in the long expanses of time between hearing them, or I can't make out enough of the songs' lyrics to be able to use Google to discover what they are. The song "Crank" by the Catherine Wheel fits into both categories. I hear it only rarely (once every three or four months) either on a broadcast radio station or on one of the several internet streams I listen to. Every time I do, I'm far away from the computer and can't read the song's name on my screen. I'm forced to try to remember a characteristic string of words. But what are the words? They're drowned out in the British shoegazer production values, which give emphasis to everything but the vocals. Even those are bathed in the murky warm waters of echoing guitar riffs. At first I thought the name of the song might actually be "Crash" and one of the lyrics might be "My ideal..." But no, as I learned today from seeing the song title in Winamp, the song is "Crank." This was all I needed to know to download it successfully using the Gnutella network. (Doing so constitutes fair use, by the way, since I was acting in the capacity of a music reviewer.) It's a great song, perhaps partly because the words could be anything at all and the guitars are so gloriously atmospheric. I'm a sucker for emo-ey pop in any form. To me, it's just a fatter, darker, more delicious form of late-60s psychedelica. Don't get me wrong, sometimes nothing suits my mood better than Justin Hayward singing "Lovely to See You Again." But "Crank" really does kick a whole lot more ass.
Another song that has my attention is "Wop A Din Din" by the Red House Painters. Unlike "Crank," the key to enjoying this song is the lyrics. There's a nice groove going with the melody, but once you realize the song is about a small non-human and what it's like to carry on a wordless, deeply emotional relationship therewith, it's difficult not to be touched. I actually cried the first time I paid attention to the words and heard these lines:
When she hears the phone
Then she knows I'm leaving home
She don't wanna be alone
And I know it's wrong
That I'm going away so long
And for her it's rough
I can't be with her enough
But I'll never give her enough
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