POWER FAIL: What shall be the fate of On Shuffle?

Honestly, I’m surprised I didn’t meet my death by electrocution.

The mp3 player was one of the many casualties of the Friday evening monsoon (four-plus hours long!) at this weekend’s All Points West festival. And though its rain-clogged circuits have since been resurrected, the shuffle function was reset and all the music has been wiped from its memory.

This leaves me with  a quandry: once I reload, do I restart the shuffle-through-all-my-music project? Do I abandon this blog? Or do I press onward, reviewing whatever interesting tracks and transitions show up in my regular randomized listening, without the big listen-through-everything End Goal?

Pipe up, readers (all four of you). Advise me.

God damn the pedantic Welsh

Day 211, Song 3604

“Tempo House” by The Fall

Yeah, I’m not quite sure either.

When I heard it stepping off the subway this morning, it seemed to be some kind of ethnographic march-of-humankind treatise, told from a very arch sense of Londoner surperiority. “The Dutch are weeping, in four languages at least,” as one line goes. This read is probably because I’m still hopelessly mired in Guns, Germs and Steel.

But then there’s all this nihilism, this destructive glee; “Illness, pollution, should be encouraged and let loose.” Then there’s the points where I can’t for the life of me make out what Mark E. Smith is mumbling . Some lyrics are very sharp and staggered – the delivery style James Murphy ripped off in “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House.” But a lot of it is mumbled, slurred, and incoomprehensible.

One blog post I read in reading up on ”Tempo House” pointed out that the song ”will attempt to be deciphered by fans for the next 1,000 years.” This writer also makes an uncited claim that it’s supposed to be about crowds that look overly sullen. Faced with this kind of bombastic ambiguity, I can’t say I blame them. Great jam though.

LISTEN: “Tempo House” [buy Perverted by Language]

I’ll be gone

Day 208, Song 3560

“Take on Me” by a-Ha

On an inside-baseball note, this is the very first song in my mp3 library. When I arrange the artists alphabetically, that is; a-Ha comes first. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve accidentally bumped the play button, hit play all, and heard the first few measures of a sequenced synthesizer drum beat before hollering “NOOOOOOO” and lunging to turn it off.

Don’t really have anything against this song in itself. Just the many, many, so very many overdone tacky punk and indie re-renditions of it. Many of which are also in my library. Thanks, Cap’n Jazz, you know not what you hath wrought.

This time, of course, I listened past the first eight seconds. I may have only gotten this far once or twice before. Fun stuff from a Scandanavian pop invasion of a different era.

WATCH: “Take on Me” [buy Hunting High and Low]

What am I gonna do when I run out of shirts to fold?

Day 207, Song 3538 into Song 3539

“Hate it Here” by Wilco

“Hey Jude” by The Beatles

I have a vivid memory of this Wilco song. They played it on the All Songs Considered podcast about two years ago, when Sky Blue Sky had just come out. Host Bob Boilen drew a comparison to Paul McCartney’s late-era Beatles songs. Guess it’s an obvious paralell to make, but I hadn’t noticed till he pointed it out.

The telling thing is the up-and-down guitar riff that drives the chorus – it’s very Abbey Road. And later that week I was driving somewhere with my friend Peter with this album on the car stereo. I mentioned this to him. Peter, a Beatles nut, laughed hysterically with the first chorus, and with each successive chorus. This song has approximately 5,479,023 choruses. So every time I hear it, in the back of my head is Peter’s hearty belly-laugh, “OOOHHHHHHHHH ho ha ha ho ha ho, it sounds JUST LIKE Paul McCartney, ha ha ha ha ha.”

Of course, shuffle sends this songs and its accompanying memory into Paul’s definitive late-era Beatles moment. Surreal.

LISTEN: “Hate it Here” [buy Sky Blue Sky]

WATCH: “Hey Jude” [buy Hey Jude]

I want to mess up my sheets with you

Day 206, Song 3527

“100 Knives” by Mirah

When you’re young and wistfully, wholly, profoundly in love, everything is intensified. A disagreeable spat becomes a violent assault, and a quick make-up romp in the sheets heals all wounds. In the grander scheme of life and things, this isn’t reality, it’s aggrandizement offset by a fleeting distraction. But for that person, at that place and with that partner, it means everything.

Mirah captures that hurt and longing so breathtakingly well here – “100 Knives” comes from her debut You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This, and if you don’t already own it, you need to. Stop what you’re doing. Click the below link. Thank me later.

LISTEN: “100 Knives” [buy You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This]

If there were five more minutes of air

Day 202, Song 3516

“The End of the World” by Rob Dickinson

Speaking of appropriation, here’s a pretty jangly ditty where onetime Catherine Wheel frontman Rob Dickinson lifts a piece of the score from one of my newfound favorite films – Withnail and I – and places it in an earnest, over-the-top love song, the kind he does so well.

The funny thing about this is how well Dickinson owns the melody; while watching Withnail with Maureen earlier this year, I noticed a bit where the theme song peeked out from a pastoral countryside scene. “Hey, this is a Rob Dickinson song!” I said. “I mean, the other way around.”

LISTEN: “The End of the World” [buy Fresh Wine for the Horses]

He’s a liar and I’m not sure about you

Day 201, Song 3493

“There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis” by Kirsty MacColl

So this project, I’m finding, isn’t really the showoffy “hey everybody look at all this awesome music I like, aren’t I great?” thing – the standard blog route. It’s more the humbling and often embarrassing process of educating myself about the artists in my collection and their songs, often stuff I’m realizing for the first time, in a very public manner. (Hence my naming Joey O. to the official Fact Checkin’ Cuz of the On Shuffle blog.)

Today’s instance of this – like, isn’t Kirsty MacColl Irish and stuff? What’s this Lone Justice-ish C&W tune she’s belting out? Turns out “There’s a Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis” is one of her more popular tunes; way to be quick, John. Admit it, you only knew her for “Fairytale In New York.” Well, yes. That and the frequent namedroppings and the “Yeah, I should check her out someday.”

This song makes me more inclined to do so. Even if the American rootsy hoedown is appropriated as a novelty, jesting thing, damn if I’m not tapping my toes. Hearts are broken and Elvis is dead, but purdy harmonies and catchy tunes can soothe all wounds.

WATCH: “There’s a Guy Down At The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis” [buy Best of Kirsty MacColl]

Kick out the style, bring back The Jam

Day 200, Song 3444

“Sowing The Seeds of Love” by Tears for Fears

I love the idea of this as a Paul Weller dis song. But the lyric in question that would make it so – the subject line of this post – is buried in the middle of a bunch of pop-political ranting (“Politician Granny with your high ideals / have you no idea how the majority feels? / So without love and a promised land / we’re fools to the rules of a government plan.”).

So is it actually a Margaret Thatcher dis song? I think it’s more of an attempt – an imperfect one, but catchy nonetheless – to capture the zeitgeist of the UK during the turbulent, frustrated 1980s, a time when Britons were equally disgusted with Margaret Thatcher and the Style Council.

WATCH: “Sowing The Seeds of Love” [buy The Seeds of Love]

Didn’t know you’d think that I’d forget

Day 199, Song 3426

“Baby Blue” by San Francisco Seals

Have you ever tried Googling “San Francisco Seals”?

You’ll get several dozen hits for a baseball team, or Bay Area aquatic wildlife, before you find Barbara Manning’s excellent 90s rock band. (Abbreviating it to the common S.F. Seals helps only slightly.) I discovered this looking for an image to go with the post, and settled on a cool old-timey San Fransisco stadium, where one of the teams called the Seals played.

Cynics might say if Manning was fine with appropriating her band’s name from a more established brand, than her followers should be fine with said band miring in obscurity. I say more people need to hear them. Here’s their cover of a Badfinger song from the Nowhere album.

LISTEN: “Baby Blue” [buy Nowhere]

I saw a saviour come my way

 Day 198, Song 3403 into Song 3404

“Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” by Sufjan Stevens

“Machine Gun” by Portishead

A christmas song offseason; a let’s-gather-round-and-worship-the-child-Jesus thing. Sufjan really only needed to do one Christmas album…instead he’s on what now, five? Six? They’re so samey. But I kind of liked this pretty little track. And I also dug the followup from bango and roomy acoustic guitar and a praise-the-Lord vibe into a thumping athiestic drumbeat and Beth Gibbons referencing a saviour, but wondering where they actually got to. Subversive!

[buy Sufjan Stevens' Songs for Christmas]

WATCH: “Machine Gun” [buy Third]