Various Artists - Natures Mortes - Still Lives (listen) More compilations should open with "Mr. Clarinet" by the Birthday Party. Not all of them; that would be tiresome. The song might become the new "Hallelujah" and no one wants that.
This little record is just the ticket. I wanted to hear some scurrying bleak new wavey things to brighten my afternoon - they work by absorbing darkness like cocky little sponges. E.g. the previously unmentioned (by practically everyone) Psychotik Tanks.
As a bonus, it has one of my favorite hum-around obscurities - Bauhaus covering John Cale's equally obscure "Rose Garden Funeral of Sores." Really, I have loved this wisp of a tune since high school, and sometimes sing it in the car by myself, and twenty years going, I still don't really know all the words. This poetic bit
Virgin Mary was tired
so tired
tired of listening to gossip
gossip and complaints
that came from next door
is more lyric than that bass line of a song can support.
I love how songs in this style and time are less played than they are suffered. The drums don't really fit the bass and neither fits the peculiar way the guitar player misplays his or her guitar and the singer is so unlovably unloveable against all of it. Candles snuffed, things choked back. Bats. Vague notions of Eastern Europe creeping into our hot Louisiana suburban teenage lives. Love this stuff in precisely this dose.
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