This is the song where a six year old threatens to chop off your toes and work his way up to your brain.
The Books are a New York based duo known for slicing and mixing spoken word pieces into rhythmic dance collages.
The track 'A Cold Freezin' Night' from their fourth album The Way Out isn't an obvious choice for a Tune of Terror. However there's something undeniably unsettling (played upon endlessly in the head-spinning video above) about the increasingly violent confrontation between a young brother and sister. And really, what's more terrifying than children? I wouldn't mess with these kids. They'd chop my hair off!
Terrifyingly toe-tapping! Right!? Am I right? Guys?
Well anyway. Happy Halloween everyone. Throughout today we will be putting up some totally holiday appropriate songs for your freaky pleasure, starting with little known rockabilly roarer 'She's My Witch' by Kip Tyler. Kip was a fixture of the Los Angeles rockabilly scene, commanding a dedicated cult following for his manic live performances and wild man attitude often incorporating bongos ( I ask you- what wild man is complete without bongos?).
'She's My Witch' was the B side to his 1958 single 'Rumble Rock,' both tunes particularly notable for the contributions of veteran sax player Jim Horn (largely known for his work with Duane Eddy). His blowsy lines are almost melting atop the icy guitar strums and echoing drum claps.
It's a song of woozy sex, witchcraft and drag races. What more could you ask for on Halloween?
UPDATE: Crikey that was quick. Apparently we don't love music as much as Warner Brothers love copyright protection and we now can't show the Kip Tyler video to you. We've replaced it with a Spotify link, hope you can still enjoy it.
This summer I had the pleasure of visiting Le Musée de la Poupée in Paris, a tucked away museum celebrating the history of dolls and puppets. There, alongside the unnerving glassy eyed stares and lavishly curated display dioramas, was a special exhibition dedicated entirely to the history of that penis-less wonder- Ken 'Barbie' Carson.
Hidden among the many evolutions, makeovers and career shifts Ken has gone through since his introduction in 1961 was his stint as a pop singer: Live Action Ken On Stage, including the packed in smash single 'A Little Bit of That Sky.'
So let's get this out of the way first: No, it's not very good. Surprised? Me neither. It's musical Wonderbread- assembly line fluff in the vein of Bobby Sherman or The Osmonds. From the pieced together rhythmic styles to the 'OOOH-WAAAAAHHH' backing vocals the song feels like a banal Frankenstein sewn together with 'choice' cuts of bland sixties pop. Dig those oh-so-fluttery flutes, the softshoe pianos, beebopping bass, the absolutefacemelter of a solo at 1:30. Ken himself sounds about as stiff and Colgate smiled as a singer based on a doll would sound (though not as authentically castrati as it should be). What's really awesome is how much of a hippie Ken proves himself to be, cheesing his way through lines like 'Life is the learning way / and there is a beautiful wizard in man.'
The song hasn't really stood the test of time, but then not many sixties branded animated bands have- with the possible exception of The Archies. In any event, it's a fascinating listen to hear what the folks at Mattel felt was a good cross section of popular music for young girls. I can't find any listings of who the session musicians were for the recording (rather unhelpfully the song is usually credited to either Ken or Mattel), so if any of you out there have some info on it's origins please drop us a line.
Otherwise enjoy what feels like a slightly too long three and half minutes of inspiring your inner wizard to desperately grasp a little inch of the sky, safe in the knowledge that after this single Ken never really dusted off the mic ever again.
Cibo Matto like writing songs about food. I could fill up many more volumes of ASAF focusing squarely on the howls and beats laid down by Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori. However 'Birthday Cake' is probably the angriest, and really that's what's important. Granted they're not angry at the birthday cake, but then it's hard to be mad at birthday cake.
The song is probably about a mother making a cake for her son on his thirtieth. It's also a violent recipe. But it's mainly about Shutting Up and Learning To Eat.
Here's where the musical proof that robots will destroy ALL OF US begins. A historic recording of the first singing computer performing Harry Dacre's 'Daisy Bell,' (which would in turn give us the most famous singing computer- the HAL 9000).
The piece was created at Bell Labs in 1961 using an IBM 704 (or 7094 depending on who you ask). The vocals were programmed by John Kelly - a Texan scientist, gunslinger and pilot, while the backing was arranged by Max Matthews - a trailblazer in the creation of computer music and sampling.
There's something haunting about the recording- it's easy to see why Kubrick took inspiration from the piece for 2001: A Space Odyssey. As a listening experience it's aurally anachronistic, simultaneously archaic and futuristic. It's the sound of a Victorian brain being kept alive by a Speak and Spell.
I present to you the first in what will be an ongoing series: Angry Songs About Food.
Today! A gentleman singing a song about cranberries and DAMMIT HE'S UPSET ABOUT THEM.
But let's be serious for a moment: In 1959 there was a deadly cranberry shortage. Cranberries from all over Oregon and Washington were covered in bad herbicide. Rats definitely died. People may have died. Thanksgiving exploded. Probably. Which of course lead to the creation of Cranberry Blues by Robert Williams and The Groovers!
I've spoken before of my fascination with Splatter Platter records; a pop evolution of the murder ballad that grew in prominence during the 1950s. These 'death discs' focused upon dangerous adolescence: teenagers caught up in a frenzy of rock'n'roll, drugs, hair, and (very often) cars. These songs would lament the death of a young person taken before their time- usually involving some sort of grizzly vehicular death.
The Splatter Platter du jour, and today's Best Song Ever, is 'Death Of An Angel' by Donald Woods and the Vel-Aires. Woods got his start as a doowop singer in Vernon Greene's group the Medallions (chiefly famous for their sexed up automobile hit 'Buick 59'). Woods then absconded with a few of the members of The Medallions to form Donald Woods and the Vel-Aires (sometimes also known as the Bel-Aires). If 'Buick 59' was doowop with a cheeky sleaze, 'Death Of An Angel' is doowop gone goth.
It opens like a beaten and broken 'I Put a Spell on You' before settling into it's jazzy funeral march rhythm. You can hear dust and cobwebs coating the sax lines, spare heartbeat drums pushing along a chorus of gently crooning pall-bearers. Donald Woods voice is the essence of late night smoke and mourning distilled into a soulful performance that never crosses to far into either histrionics or understatement.
As was common with teenage tragedy numbers, the song also contains a fair amount of theatre and drama. The background tears and wailing are both unnerving and funny. However it was this same gallows humor that so frightened audiences at the time of it's release. The song, with it's implicit overtones of death, broken hearts an suicide, was immediately banned from wider airplay. This was compounded by a conspiracy theory blossoming out of the record's B-Side, 'The Man From Utopia,' involving an alien that killed the protagonists girlfriend in the A-Side. The truth of the matter is debatable, but the vinyl was already soaked with too much blood once the rumor started and the record was immediately destined for obscurity.
New Orleans jazz/rock/funk (or, as I am now officially calling it, jonk) fusion meets hip-hop meets brass band. It will blow your mind while blowing it's horns.
From the Corner to the Block is the title track from New Orleans based fusion group Galalctic's (originally named Galactic Prophylactic) fifth album. The track features fellow New Orleans natives Juvenile and The Soul Rebels Brass Band- though it's the latter presence that really elevates it to such heights. It's a funked up car crash of time lines, genres, and a sousaphone.
'Why Don't You Smile' is an early piece of sixties garage drone from a pre-Velvets Lou Reed and John Cale (along with Terry Phillips and Jerry Vance). It was the heavy (and frankly far superior) B side to the bopping single 'Don't Put All Your Eggs In One Basket,' released under the band name The All Night Workers. While Reed and Cale's performing on the record is debated Cale did revisit the song solo later on in his career, but there's something undeniably special about the original article.
From it's Northern Soul vocals to it's droning psych-blues backing, the song slowly inhales before blowing viscous technicolor fumes down your ears. The record was cut towards the end of Reed's tenure as a staff writer for Pickwick Records. The session band consisted of a myriad of rising sixties musicians including Lloyd Baskin (of Seatrain), Mike Esposito (Blue Magoos) and the rumored involvement of Peter Stampfel (The Holy Modal Rounders).
It's a fascinating look at the experimental drone rock sound Reed and Cale were concurrently developing with The Velvet Underground and a powerful piece of classic garage in it's own right.
Today we wish a very Happy Birthday to Hank Williams (he of 'Hey Good Lookin' fame)!
We wish him a Happy Birthday with bullwhips! Birthday bullwhips! Rhythmic Birthday bullwhips! All to be found in today's Best Song Ever, a cover of Hank's famous hit 'Ramblin Man,' by Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan.
One night, Eilert Pilarm was visited by the ghost of Elvis. The King told him someone had to carry on his legacy- and that person was Eilert. So on went spangly jumpsuits. On went a pair of thick glasses. And on went Eilert Pilarm.
Known as the Swedish Elvis, Pilarm travels the country playing cover shows attended by his devoted cult audience where he belts out avuncular Presley covers including today's Best Song Ever 'Jailhouse Rock.'
Elvis impersonators are a dime a dozen, there are veritable clone armies standing ready to take over Graceland in a flurry of lip curls, hair wax and fatal hip thrusts. However it's this ubiquity of the Elvis impersonator stereotype that marks Pilarm out- he doesn't try to be Elvis, nor does he really want to be Elvis. Eilert is simply Eilert, a former lumberjack turned janitor who moonlights as Swedish Elvis in late night rock clubs.
You'll love Eilert because he's not trying to be something he's not. He's simply feeling the transcendent joy of engaging with his favorite music, much like you or me when we belt our favorite songs in the shower or walking down the street.
Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American visual and sound artist known for intentionally damaging vinyl records in order to create multi-layered sound collages. He is an argued early pioneer of turntablism and is closely linked with noise music.
Marclay claims he doesn't look for specific records when creating his works- he simply buys random vinyls from pawn and charity shops and manipulates them. At times he has even taken pieces of different records and joined them together to get rapidly changing and endlessly distorted sounds.
Today's Best Song Ever, 'Phonodrum' can be found on his compilation Records 1981-1989. Marclay reportedly created the unique sound in the number "by dragging a guitar string attached to the stylus across wooded records and wooden discs studded with nails." The sound is about as nuts as you'd expect from that origin.
It's like a building falling at hyperspeed into your ears over and over again as your brain rips down a conveyor belt while being assaulted by robots. Out of the screeches, bumps a squeals comes a sudden urgent and insistent rhythm. It's damaged punk evolving into a dance routine made of twisted metal and broken wood.
Now, some creditors came calling at a clearing in the hills,
And asked to see a statement that would justify her bills.
When they viewed her liabilities, the atmosphere was tense,
But when she showed her assets, her assets were immense!
It's time to enjoy a twee and titillating Tuesday with 'Nellie, The Nudist Queen' from 1933 by Stuart Ross and John Sargent.
It's hard to find much info about the record beyond the names of the songwriters. Described as a comedy duet with piano, in many ways the song is a prototype for the skewed pop that Spike Jones began producing a few years later.
If anyone out there has any info on Ross and Sargent drop us a line! Maybe they were nudists! I hope so! The world needs to know!
Short one today. And I hope you like drums. Because what you're getting is drums. I like drums.
Global Drum Project was a briefly formed supergroup consisting of four percussionists: tabla player Zakir Hussain, talking drum expert Sikiru Adepoju, Latin Jazz drummer Giovanni Hidalgo and former drummer for The Grateful Dead, Mickey Hart.
They released a single self titled collaborative album in 2007, with many tracks consisting only of percussion. By taking advantage of the unique timbre of each percussive instrument they have created a melody out of nothing but scrapes, slams and bangs (the same principle can be seen in the wildly successful West End show Stomp or in the playing style of Bongo Joe whom we featured on this site a few months ago).
Today's Best Song Ever is 'Dances With Woods,' a dizzying tumble through drums that sound like tree branch cracks, leaves caught in an up draft, and the slamming of your heart as you race from a predatory percussive poltergeist.
Dutch composers Dick Raaymakers and Tom Dissevelt are and were pioneers of electronic music and taped effects under the name Electrosoniks. In 1957 they released Song of the Second Moon, a composition built upon unusual audio samples and early synth sounds. The song was one of the first it's kind and stands as an example of early forrays into the field of electronica.
It's also fairly bonkers, but in the most lovably unnerving way.
The intro sounds like the opening of Voodoo Child shoved forcefully through a rotary phone. It has everything from distorted ghostly whistles to the death burbles of clavi-keyboards and the crushed whispers of industrial machinery. The song jumps styles several times over the course of it's three minutes- but always remains consistent in it's tone and presentation. The overall effect is that of a classical record collection being pounded into rubber electricity.
Garage A Trois are an instrumental band featuring saxophone, vibraphone, synth organs and heavy, heavy drums. That sentence alone should immediately tell you how awesome they are, but if you need further convincing here's 'Shooting Breaks,' a track from their fourth studio album Always Be Happy, But Stay Evil released earlier this year- and today's Best Song Ever.
'Shooting Breaks' is the sound of an endlessly surreal panic attack. Great tongues of synth and organ curl down at you from the sky. Drums burst through the ground in the shape of hearts caught in voodoo cardiac arrest. Vibraphones (already the total melding of paranoia and joy into one sound) clink and crack through the roar in a constant game of aural peekaboo.
It's wild as hell, and just when you think you're getting to grips with it you reach the 2:20 mark and things get funky and terrifying in equal measure, like fifty foot elephants doing a can-can across your brain.
Preston Epps is an American drummer and percussionist chiefly known for his use of the bongos. In 1959 he released the utterly unique (for the time) hybrid of surf-rockabilly and head-spinning bongo beats known as Bongo Rock- today's Best Song Ever.
Bongo Rock kicked off a resurgence of interest in bongo flavoured pop music, with Epps himself crafting many follow up singles (such as Bongo Rocket, Bootlace Bongo, and the aptly named Bongo Bongo Bongo). The original (later covered in 1973 by The Incredible Bongo Band) still remains the best example of the form- punk slashes of surf guitar duking it out with the spine shimmying bongo lines.
Clocking in at a little over two minutes, the song remains as danceable and toe tapping as it did fifty years ago. The bongos can't help but remind me of the old Hanna-Barbara cartoon sound effect of characters running away, but this only adds to the song's charm. I love imagining a rebel-without-a-cause version of Yogi Bear running from a squadron of motorcycle bound Ranger Smiths.
A few years ago I saw viking metal band Turisas open for DragonForce at what was once the Astoria. Midway through a set filled with nordic costumes, battle cries and uncomfortable amounts of sweatgrease, their electric violin player stepped up to the microphone. He assessed the audience carefully, eyes tight behind costumepaint and spot lights. Slowly he leaned forward into the mic and screamed, 'FUCK THE GUITAR.' He pulled a screeching note on his violin, allowing the tension to build. He leaned in again, a wolfish grin dancing on his face, 'FUCK. THE. GUITAR.' Another wild scream from the violin. Then raising his arms out to all of us in the pit, he cried with the strength of all of our voices: 'FUCK THE GUITAR!' Then he raised his violin high and ripped out a histrionic solo that sounded... just like a guitar.
It was an oddly deflating moment. Sure maybe the sound was a little more fluid, but there was no denying how little there was to differentiate the sound of a speed metal guitar solo and speed metal violin solo. It resolutely refused to take advantage of the sound of the instrument, pushing it as hard as it could to be what it wasn't. While the rest of the set has faded from memory, I still remember how completely gypped I felt- both for myself and for the instrument. That was the violin's moment to rock out, and instead it got to play karaoke to Power Metal's Greatest Hits.
So it was with enormous pleasure that I stumbled across Dirty Three some years later.
Dirty Three are (as the name suggests) a three piece band consisting of Mick Turner on guitar, Jim White on drums, and Warren Ellis on violin. The band create an instrumental wall of sound akin to folk music falling out of a 50th floor window. It's by turns howling and spitting to achingly gentle and sombre- and pushed right out front of the sound is the violin.
This. This is what the violin should have sounded like that night with Turisas. With Ellis hammering the strings the instrument sounds entirely unhinged, flitting between bluesy reels to industrial squalls. It manages to hit the same raging and muscular postures of an electric guitar whilst maintaining an identity and sound entirely it's own.
Today's Best Song Ever is 'Better Go Home Now,' taken from Dirty Three's self-titled second album. The song is a pounding summoning of the muse, White's leaden snares thudding and chugging with Turner's thick rhythm. Screeching through the dense underbelly like a hot wire through brick are Ellis' violin solos- a waltzing, roaring, disintegrating sound equally human and chillingly alien. Here, finally, is a song that can truly live up to Turisas' challenging refrain: Fuck the Guitar.
Hal Willner is an American music producer and arranger chiefly known for his elaborate tribute albums to different artists and genres. In 1988 he assembled a who's-who of pop and rock musicians to record a collection of Disney covers and songs inspired by Disney films. The result was Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films.
Choosing a single track to represent the album is difficult. There's an enormous variety of styles and approaches to the music. Los Lobos give a shaking samba treatment to 'I Wanna Be Like You.' Suzanne Vega turns the titular 'Stay Awake' into a haunting lullaby mantra. Even Sun Ra puts in an appearance taking Dumbo's 'Pink Elephants On Parade' to it's natural skronking conclusion.
One of the more unusual arrangements on the album is Tom Waits' take on 'Heigh Ho (The Dwarf's Marching Song).' The skeleton of the original has been removed and grafted into a shambling homunculus of gurning saxophones and grinding metal. Far from casting a new light on the original; Tom instead drowns it in shadows.
Harry Nilsson famously refused to ever perform live. Despite being gifted with an acrobatic golden voice and an ear for picking, plucking and perfecting pop songs of many genres, he simply would not do it.
There's a fair amount of speculation as to why such a talented artist would refuse to go on the road. Some simply chalk it up to nerves, others ego. Nilsson himself described it as not wanting to have to be 'on' for an audience. He said it was the job of other musicians to tour- not his.
Out of this blanket refusal came the 1971 BBC special The Music Of Nilsson. The BBC offered Harry full control over the studio space while recording live solo renditions of a number of his songs, alongside a few doctored with effects (such as a triple tracked harmony piece shown as three Nilsson's singing at a piano or fake audience sound effects).
The performance is a virtuoso showcase of Harry's talents, as can be seen in today's Best Song Ever- the medley of Mr. Richland's Favorite Song and Nilsson's famous hit One.
In just a little over three and a half minutes Harry allows his piano to twirl and tangle city streets and nightclubs around your ears as he sets down the fall of a pop singer to a blues rag. When he nimbly glides into the chorus of One, it becomes the song sung by the ill fated protagonist. Finally, as he draws the tale to a close he finishes with one of the Best Scat Solos Ever, a perfect balance of flair and elegance.
Sadly this record of Nilsson's live abilities has yet to be released in any official format. Forunately the good folks over at For The Love Of Harry have collated streaming and downloadable versions of the video alongside mp3's of the whole set for free.
