Thursday, June 10, 2004
Wait... they don't love you like I love you
I'm back in Beverley, after a successful mission in Oxford. I discovered some new music while I was there, so I'll talk about 3 songs I'm really into at the moment, all of them with female lead singers.
The first is Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a NYC based band, and is sung by the lead singer, Karen O. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs sind kind of like what Portishead would have sounded like if they had gone post-punk/The Strokes/insane instead of trip-hop. Karen O usually spends most of a song going completely nuts, which is pretty awesome. Maps is different though. It's slow and thoughtful, and Karen spends most of the song repeating the same chorus "Wait... they don't love you like I love you.." She says it slowly and quietly at first, like she's saying it to the back of someone walking away, and then eventually she gets louder by the end, but it's still like her words are falling on deaf ears.
The second song is the most fucking punk/grunge song I've heard this year. The song is The Hunger by The Distillers. Brody Dalle is the harcore Australian alter ego to Karen O. This is a woman that can sing bass and would probably ow3n you in a fight, so don't run into her in an alley. The Hunger smacks a little of Nirvana, but Kurt could never pull off a scream like Brody could.
Death In Vegas doesn't really have a female frontman, but tends to do cds that take in talent from every direction, much like Massive Attack. Dirge is nothing complicated, but Richard Fearless takes the song from a dreamy female vocal soundscape into a wonderful trip-hop climax.
Anyway, that's what I'm listening to right now. What are you listening to?
