The Spell That I've Been Under

I'm having a day off today... and yet, still writing.

This, even, with a dead laptop. I've hijacked mom's computer for this brief musing, though I'll use this to assure you my entries will come, as the Voidoids once said of love, -in spurts.

I dug out a mix I'd made about a month ago to spur myself into a summer mood. Track 18 came on and it took me 25-seconds or so to remember what it was--delighted, eventually, was I, to realize it was a Detroit band: Computer Perfection.



Computer Perfection - All I Know and All I Really Need to Know by DC/Milo

While I drove around seeking fresh fruit and iced-coffee, the song drew it's smooth dreamy grooves throughout my grey-bland ovoid Chevy, inciting a strange and tranquil energy in me. Somehow, albeit likely aided by the delicate pouring of a summer sunrise, made the setting of my sublime cruise, (downtown Royal Oak), seem agreeable.

Simple sequenced beats set a steady shimmy, a bass merely shuffles along with you as synthesizers occasionally gurgle and trill between a reverberant coo like a relaxed, meditative heartbeat. The guitar, lightly fuzzed, cycles through three descending notes under the intertwining male/female vocals that swirl like a lullaby.

Can you forgive the spell that I've been under? (...that I'm under?)
~

My morning drive continues... Track 19 is "Summer Moon" by the Raveonettes, from their latest, Raven in the Grave and, if I can pat myself on the back in terms of track list arrangement, it's the perfect chaser to Computer Perfection's entry. It sustains the dreamy/haunting rounding waltz, similarly fuzzed and similarly mesmeric, and achieving a nostalgic 60's pop flavor beautifully twisted by flares of surrealist space rock.

Plus, it gets me misty when it sings about "this perfect thing is dying..."

I haven't meant to be maudlin - but I'm not about to let myself go cold in this age of the Internet. I'm not about to not let my feelings out, especially when they get roused by the splendor of a song, or a piece of music.

I'm enveloped, almost in a vice, of incorrigible wonder... to where music goes, where music writing goes, in an age of complete connection, persistent plugged-in-ness.

'Tis time I evolve, I presume. Even the Pope is using an iPad these days. But it seems as though we need to be in a state of preparedness not to adapt to the current thing, (doesn't Twitter seem quaint now?), but whatever the next mode, manner, medium of telecommunoCraziness might be... Jesus, I've just merely forgotten the mild transcendence you can find in going on extended drives-- -with music. I just wanna preserve that...
~

Already in a state of dangerous pondering, Track 20 comes on: The Fleet Foxes' "Helplessness Blues"

I'm not any died in the wool fan of this band. I wasn't on the bus when their first album came out and I suppose I always peered at them with a bit of trepidation. But this song may have sluiced the kool-aid down my throat.

Even so, the rest of the album hasn't really sufficiently stirred me yet, at least not to the extent of this song



Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues by subpop
-the title track of the much ballyhooed 2nd LP from the Seattle Americana art rockers.

It just felt good to remember the evocative power of music. To feel like you're drifting away on a melody, or to have that "own personal soundtrack" feeling transmogrify the live scenery around you as you travel, as you sit, as you think, as you breath... as you groove.

Anyway-- with a broken laptop that leaves me potentially updating only sporadically, this is a fine enough sign off for now...

"...after some thinking I'd say I'd rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.... but I don't, I don't, know what that will be...
I'll get back to you some day.... soon, you will see...."
~

Other things catching my eye:
One of my favorite online music magazines (if that counts for anything), The Quietus, ranks it's 50 favorite albums of 2011, so far. You can find out about Death Grips - Alexander Tucker and hopefully visit and revisit PJ Harvey's Let England Shake (their # 1 choice). ---Though I definitely wouldn't put some of their choices (Wild Beasts? Cold Cave?) necessarily as high...not to get bloggy on you.

While you're here, how about some kind of digital fist pump for this quote:
"The great truth facing the U.S. is not that we lack solutions to our problems but that our political system seems unable to do anything..."

**Coming from author Fareed Zakaria's Time column - "It's all Greek to U.S."

**Pitchfork, meanwhile, posted a column regarding how the internet can stunt listener growth... ...interesting: Learn as a Listener, via The Out Door
~
~~

KING CLAUDIUS: And can you, by no drift of circumstance get from him why he puts on this confusion, grating so harshly all his days of quiet, with turbulent and dangerous lunacy?

ROSENCRANTZ: He does confess he feels himself distracted; but from what cause he will by no means speak.

GUILDENSTERN: Nor do we find him forward to be sounded, but, with a crafty madness, keeps aloof, when we would bring him on to some confession of his true state.

~

"I wish thoughts would come in music"
-Beachwood Sparks