Saudade - Love and Rockets

Saudade is a Portuguese word which means (approximately) nostalgic longing. This definition does sort of kill the romance behind the term, but it's hard to describe in English. It's not just nostalgia. It can be longing for a loved one or place. It can be the melancholy accompanying the realization that you will never know everything the world has to offer. It looks back at what has been and forward at what may never be. And that pretty much sums up the mood (and is the title) of today's Best Song Ever: Saudade by Love and Rockets.

Love and Rockets (named after the Hernandez brothers comic series) are better known for their heavy and gothic music. Their first album Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven however (from which this song was taken) explored more psychedelic territories and soundscapes. Saudade, appropriately, closed the album.

There is something quietly final, even apocalyptic, about the song- like the empty ruins of a city. Drenched in echo, acoustic guitars gently jangle debris across the streets. Far off in the distance drum girders crack and tumble off the rusted skeleton of skyscrapers. Liquid bass pours down through the cracks and crevices into parched dirt. Heart strings push and pull against distorted electric squalls and murmurs before quietly dying into the ghostly call of a radio broadcast.

Beatles Medley - Hank Handy

Continuing the Mashup Mood, today we have Hank Handy's Beatles Medley. The track takes segments from over forty separate Beatles songs and splices them together to create three and half minutes of kaleidoscopically splintered pop.

The whole experience feels like a giant Rube Golderberg machine. The disparate elements kick off one another in spiraling series of technicolor clockwork madness. The drum solo from The End cascades into helium speed vocal samples from Love Is All You Need just as Piggies harpischords begin stomping and chiming with Get Back's organs and blues licks. That describes twenty seconds. Nearly.

It picks and plucks song segments like a schizophrenic magpie but builds them all into a towering piece of sonic architecture, shortly before dropping said structure into an industrial strength blender.

Get it forever here.

That's The Way It's Meant To Be - The Features

Feedback klaxons and tommy gun hand claps. Manic drum grenades and screaming for your life. This is a call to the war of love. That's The Way It's Meant To Be.

Clocking in at little over two minutes this gem by Tennessee based rockers The Features bloodies your nose while french kissing you. It's one part organ fried pyschedelia, a smattering of teeth breaking punk ferocity and all hurricane. It's the violence of a kiss.

The fact this band isn't topping charts is an atrocity. Get the album. Or get the album that's coming out next month. No, get all the albums. Unless you hate love. Maybe then I'll understand.

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