Default - Django Django

I like songs that kick your brain a bit.

Django Django have been making waves with their self titled debut album released earlier this year. It's like listening to a disco ball smashing in slow motion against a stack of computers before the whole thing melts into technicolour paint. There's a vast mixture of influences and styles from song to song. As can happen when you throw EVERYTHING at the wall, some of the tracks can be a bit patchier in their success than others. But when they get it right- such as in today's Best Song Ever- hot damn.

'Default' was one of a pair of singles announcing Django Django before the album itself hit store shelves. It's got an insanely infectious chorus built out of chopped and glitched vocal samples imploring you to "click default" atop warhammer drums and crunching powerstrums. This is before the tiny electronic hums and warbles begin to dig their way through the sound like tiny digital caterpillars gorging themselves on thick layers of thumping drum'n'guitar. Then the disarmingly haunting layers of voices crying out in harmony roundhouse you in the ear drums and you fall out of your chair because Hot. Damn.

Bend Me, Shape Me - The Models

The opening thirty seconds of The Models 'Bend Me, Shape Me' (which should only ever be listened to through headphones- loudly) are the equivalent of drowning in a bath tub made of gelatin guitars while drums implode like bubbles. The song is so drenched in reverb and echo that it sounds more like a bacchanalian transmission from another dimension than a pop song.

'Bend Me, Shape Me' was initially a track by the group The Outsiders (though some claim The Models put their version out first), but only became a hit in 1967 when the so soporific-it-rivals-valium American Breed cover hit the airwaves.

There's not a great deal of information available amount The Models. They were part of the growing army of Sixties Garage girl groups and supposedly were made up of Vogue magazine models. The latter part is a little hard to verify but it's a striking image especially when placed against the sound of the song.

Unlike their contemporaries, such as The Shangri-Las, The Models didn't fully embrace pop. 'Bend Me, Shape Me,' with it's effects heavy production (courtesy of Tom Wilson) and stop'n'start rhythms is both hypnotically groovy and icily alienating. There's an edge of unease, like you're hearing music made by doppleganger Garage girls in a concrete bunker.

Clock on the Wall - Alva Snelling

You'll have to take my word for it, but the man in that video wants to blow your mind. I've looked and looked for any detailed explanation as to the identity of Alva Snelling (also known by his stage name Alva Starr). From the little I could find he appears to hail from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, didn't put out an enormous amount of material, and passed away in 1995.

His one hit (if you can call mainly known by obsessive record collectors a hit) is Clock On the Wall. The song is built on a metronomic ticking that slowly cracks away at your skull like a twitching ball peen hammer tapping an egg. Wire thin guitars begin pricking and burning away at your nerves as Alva spins his own brand of psychedelic surgery.

You've just had your mind blown by a man with an estate agent moustache.

The Electronic Insides of Dr. Krieg - The Riders of the Mark

The reason I love sixties garage so much is because it was a hotbed of experimental sounds and creativity. It's like a drip feed of one-off bands and projects pumping you full of mutant morphine to give you wonderfully weird hallucinations. Hallucinations like The Electronic Insides of Dr. Krieg:

Much like The Monocles from a few days ago, The Riders of the Mark appeared out of an LSD saturated haze and gave us one song before vanishing again. Armed with little more than a Lord of the Rings referencing name (naturally), Riders John Hill and Don Cochrane entered the studio in 1967 wanting to make a song similar to The Beatles track 'Tomorrow Never Knows.' Only, you know- with a whole lot more angry German machine men bathing in fire (naturally).

The song is a fascinating melding of reference points and genres. The lo-fi fuzz bass and thudding steam-powered drum line feels like a blue print for thrash punk. The backwards looping guitars and organs are firmly entrenched in mid-sixties psychedelia. Electronic squeals and blips slip and slide across the foundation, boring into you like an elastic power-drill. The automaton fever dream screams echo, burst and submerge beneath the waves of sound.

Wonderful. And apparently it's an anti-war song. In so far as songs about degree carrying fire robots can be an anti-war song.

Season of the Witch (Alternate Version) - Donovan

When Donovan put out his third album Sunshine Superman, the sound was largely a radical departure from what had come before. The finger picked folk ballads were still present, but they rested alongside swirling colourful giants of psychedelia and pop. Amongst these more rocking numbers was the song Season of the Witch. The song meditated on identity, the selling out of beatnik counter culture, paranoia and of course, Witches.

And it's good! That is it's good when you ignore Donovan's ridiculous Jeeves via David Bowie vocal performance. If you're happy living life at a six out of ten, then maybe you should just embrace this version.

But wait! Did you know Donovan recorded an alternate version of the song years later that's only appeared on a single UK-only greatest hits album? And that it's better in just about every way? You didn't? Well let's have a listen.

You can hear the shift from the opening notes. Gone are the semi-acoustic echoes, replaced with snaking whips of icy electric guitar. The drums (especially on those choruses) pound like a sorcery induced heart attack. The new backing vocals scream like a choir of witches. Donovan growls and pounces upon every word like a cat eviscerating an army of mice.

Older and wiser, Donovan brings a new confidence to this performance that destroys the original. Artists rarely re-record songs and make them better. One get's the feeling that Donovan knew the first time round was just the season of the crappy-decorative-Mum-bought-it-at-Asda-for-a-fiver-witch. This time, it would be the real Season of the Witch.

The Spider and The Fly - The Monocles

I just...

Okay. It's...

It's hard to explain. Or find any explanation. As far as I can tell, The Monocles were a garage rock band from Colorado who started out making clean cut pop, then they discovered drugs, then this happened.

It walks a very fine line between being insanely kitsch (which it is) and pretty unnerving. The echo drenched bass and drums feel like rubber bands slapping against the underside of your brain. The guitar is less played than punched, crackling with electricity and bark. The organ screams and rolls, building higher and higher before crashing down in on itself.

I don't even know where to begin describing the vocals. A bit like the Justice League narrator and Vincent Price were dropped in a blender. With a mouse. And a B movie actress.

It's not like it would ever be (or ever was) successful, but it doesn't matter. The fun the musicians were having is infectious, and it's definitely unique. It makes me wish we'd see more bizarre stuff like this today. If this doesn't open the door to psychedelic auto-tuned tornadoes of robots demolishing humanity with pop songs, then there is no justice in the world.

Ask The Unicorn - Ed Askew

In some ways Ed Askew's story is more interesting than his music.

A folk singer from the 1960's, Askew only put out one album, Ask The Unicorn, on the very hip and very underground ESP-Disk Records. Outside of this fact fairly little is known about the singer songwriter.

He played an instrument called the tiple, something like a ten string lute. Apparently the instrument was strung so tightly that it took incredible force to actually fret and hold a chord. Because of the exertion it took to play the instrument, Askew developed his idiosyncratic strained-singing style.

His next album Little Eyes wasn't released until 2003 despite being recorded shortly after Unicorn, and even then it was in incredibly limited vinyl pressings.

So what of the music? It sounds a bit like an acid fried Bob Dylan fell through a time-warp to Medieval times and is now making his living as a bard. The lyrics are appropriately psychedelic and folk tinged in equal measure. This is not bad by any stretch of the imagination.

However in many ways I have chosen today's song not because of it's excellence, but because of what it represents: An enigma of a musician who came out of the haze and then just as quickly vanished. Listened to as a record of this event, one can't help but become enraptured by the mystery.

Little Hands - Alexander 'Skip' Spence

Alexander 'Skip' Spence. One time drummer for Jefferson Airplane. Founder of Moby Grape. In 1968, while recording Grape's second album Wow, Spence suffered a violent breakdown which ultimately ended with a six month stay at Bellevue Hospital Center where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia (likely aggravated by ingesting copious amounts of LSD).

During his time at Bellevue, Spence was writing songs. Songs which sound familiarly unrecognisable, the aural equivalent of coming home to your house to find the furniture stacked in bizarre statues.

Spence left Bellevue and, purportedly in his pajamas, rode down to Nashville on a motorcycle and recorded the album Oar. Comprised of the songs he'd written during his hospitalization and performed entirely by himself, it's the albums opening track Little Hands which we are looking at today.

Little Hands is a shambling gem of psyche-folk. One of the first things to jump out about the song is it's unusual rhythm. Stuck somewhere in between a war march and sunshine, the drums and acoustic guitar work together to create a rich punctuation to Spence's lyrics; infectious despite never entirely settling into a groove. Atop these pulsations spikes of electric guitar chime and pounce across the weave of sounds.

The real star of this show however are Spence's multi-tracked vocals. Skydiving from ethereal highs to creaking lows, his voice breaks out across the track like streaks of light, but always manages to remain intimate.

Cousin Jane - The Troggs

Wild Thing. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. The Trogg's wrote it, you probably own it. Did you know they also wrote a haunting, lullaby ode to doing your cousin?

Cousin Jane, is as beguiling as a single gets. It softly whispers the simple story of kissing cousins into your ear as gentle music boxes wind away in the dark while ominous pianos and cellos stab at your conscience.

Found on The Troggs forgotten album Trogglodynamite, the song was penned by vocalist and rhythm guitarist Dave Wright and manager Larry Page. I like to think of it as the dark underbelly to Wild Thing's starry eyed enthusiasm. Cousin Jane is a song found in the reflection of broken bottles littering the floor of the after party. Gorgeous, fractured, and essential.

The Troggs – Cousin Jane