"I don't care if you don't want me, I'm yours" (Perfect song #3)

Normally when I mention the idea of "perfect songs" to people, songs that are as good as they can possibly be and that happens to be really good, today's is the one I use as an example.
Screamin' Jay Hawkins was, and let's not mince words here, absolutely and utterly insane. A Dionysian drunk, father of about 75 children (no one's quite sure of the number), the former middleweight boxing champion of Alaska, and the only man ballsy enough to record a blues album called Black Music For White People. He also knew a ton of cool people, having toured with Nick Cave and The Clash, befriended Tom Waits, and appeared in Jim Jarmusch's movie Mystery Train (The Mountain Goats also took their name from his song "Yellow Coat").

He was also, sadly, the definitive one-hit wonder. He recorded today's amazing song, "I Put A Spell On You," in 1956, enjoyed a brief burst of fame as the song topped the charts, and then spent the rest of his career regarded as a novelty act (shades of Warren Zevon and his equally Halloween-ready "Werewolves of London"). Most people probably can't even credit him as the original writer and performer of the song.

None of that, however, diminishes the fact that "I Put A Spell On You" is one of the greatest songs ever written. Hawkins, one of the most dynamic singers ever, is in full swing here- bellowing, roaring, crooning, pleading, an utterly demented figure of madness and menace. The band, Hawkins included, are all too drunk to stand, giving the music a loose, chaotic, and staggering feel. More so than any of the covers of it (even the murder-happy Nick Cave's), the original version of this song feels dangerous, staggering at you in an unlit apartment with rubbing alcohol on its breath and what you hope isn't a knife in its hand. It's a song that seems fundamentally wrong, barely hanging-together, and utterly weird. And it's genius.

So, if you've heard any of the more famous versions (I'm looking at you, Nina Simone fans), head over to She'll Grow Back and grab the original, along with a great collection of covers of it. Nick Cave's is brilliant (my second-favorite), Tim Curry's is oddly gentle, and Marilyn Manson's (don't you judge me!) is sadly neglected.

"They altercate in the mototrcade with the steely man in steely shades" (Perfect Songs #2)

Here we go again. Differing from the smooth, pretty melancholia of the last track, we're diving headlong into a pool of pure madness.Vancouver-based Frog Eyes make pretty much the weirdest music I've ever heard in my life. We're talking weeeeeeeeeeeeird. Carey Mercer sings like Robert Smith having a bad acid trip, and a speech disorder, and the music is a chaotic, apocalyptic swirl. It's Mercer's voice that really anchors the band, though- he can be pretty as hell sometimes, but he sounds more like a homeless doomsday prophet than anything else, twitching and shivering and yelping and howling. It can be scary, unsettling stuff, and I've been listening to their most recent album, Tears Of The Valedictorian, a whole bunch lately.

Not that all the stuff is great. When it doesn't work, it really doesn't work. And I thought that, when it came to Swan Lake (Mercer's project with The New Pornographers/Destroyer's Dan Bejar and Sunset Rubdown/Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug, who are geniuses in their own right), Mercer's contributions to the excellent album Beast Moans were the weakest. But "Bushels" is an absolutely amazing song, and that's what we're here to talk about

I've got no clue whatsoever what it's about. When Mercer wails that "he pulled the flies off of their wing to give the birch birch birch birch back its spring," I just shrug. But the song is a brilliant, sprawling, messy, cryptic epic. The guitars that tap, scuttle, brood, and meander throughout it, the occasional somber keyboardery (is that a word? I like it). And, of course, that ghostly, "ooooweeeee-ga-ga-ga-ga-toolaaaay"-ing wail.

So, if you want to just puzzle your brain, grab the song over here. Most of the other songs they recommend, especially the Hello Blue Roses and Swan Lake tracks, are also fantastic.

How I Would Hate To be A Bother (Perfect Songs #1)

Soooooooooo...

Decided to actually go for a recurring element on this thing, now. Not every post, certainly, but every once in a while, when I feel the urge to shout from the mountaintops that YES, it has HAPPENED, I have been reminded why people make music in the first place because THIS song, this one among the great huddled masses, is utterly perfect. Or at least nearly. Or at least really, really good.

Today's tune, a great one to kick off with, is Trembling Blue Stars' "Sometimes I Still Feel The Bruise."
Trembling Blue Stars aren't a band I have a lot of music by, actually. Just a couple songs. But they earn major credit from me for a handful of reasons:

1. John Darnielle is a fan, and has recorded his own wonderful version of today's song, and what Darnielle loves, be it rap, metal, country, indie-rock, or whatever, is generally a good indicator of quality. (The next Perfect Song may be one of his, or one he's recommended, since Last Plane to Jakarta is one of the best music blahgs on the net.
2. They have a great name. Not only great in its own right, it's taken from a line from The Story of O: "Her eyes were like stars, trembling blue stars."
3. They don't look like every other melancholy indie-pop band, and this counts for worlds and worlds of love.

So, today's song. It's unspeakably melancholy, one of the most painful songs of lost love I've ever heard. It's not one of passion, it's one of trying not to feel passionate, trying to not want someone back, feeling someone drift away and feeling glad it hurts less but still cringing when you remember them. It acknowledges the futility of still wanting that person, but admits that you're never getting them out of your head. Bobby Wratten's soft, pained voice, that guitar that sounds like it's sick and has the chills and has spent the last few days under a blanket watching it rain, that gentle, quivering organ in the back, Beth Arzy's almost-not-there harmony on the choruses, all of it works together musically to a degree of, well, perfection. This song is the best it can be (although, God bless 'im, Darnielle does wonderful things to his version). And, of course, the absolutely incredible lyrics:

"Now and then I stumble on
What I've misplaced but never lost
An ache I first felt long ago
Though you've appeared and disappeared
Throughout these past few years
I'd be surprised if you now showed

Making contact gets harder
As the silence grows longer
And why would you think of me
When you were not the one in love?
When you were not the dreamer?
When you were just the dream?"

Download (Courtesy of Lost In Your Inbox)
Listen to The Mountain Goats version over at NPR

Mr. Trilby, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love CHZO

Taking a break from the Russian sophistication of yesterday, I'm gonna tell you to download a computer game. Well, four, actually.

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw is best known over the internet for his bilious, hate-filled, cartoonish Zero Punctuation video game reviews over at The Escapist. If you haven't seen them, do so now, as they're absolutely freakin' hilarious. (Although anyone that references the infamous "baleesteecs" gag in Resident Evil 4 is okay by me.)

But his real accomplishment lies in making the best damn adventure games since Curse of Monkey Island. They're called the CHZO Mythos (or, sometimes, the John DeFoe Quadrilogy), they're over at his website, Fully Ramblomatic, and they rule.

Chronologically, there's 5 Days A Stranger, Trilby's Notes, 6 Days A Sacrifice, and 7 Days A Skeptic. But you don't want to play them chronologically, oh no. That wouldn't make a lick of sense, since Mr. Yahtzee is cool enough to mess with nonlinear storytelling. You wanna start with 5DAS, then 7DAS, then Trilby's Notes, then 6DAS.




The gameplay's a little rough for the first two, although by Trilby's Notes most of the puzzles seem intuitive enough that you'll rarely be frustrated. The graphics, as you can see above, aren't so hot, but we can forgive that. Where the games really shine are in the fact that they have better story and atmosphere than most major big-budget games, and they're free.

I don't wanna ruin much of the story, so let me give you a bulleted list.

• The Tall Man is one of the scariest malevolent bastards in videogame history, right up there with Pyramid Head from Silent Hill and The Bella Sisters in Resident Evil 4.
• Trilby is a fantastic protagonist and if you don't fall head over heels for him and cringe at various moments involving him and horrible things in 6DAS you have no soul.
• Yahtzee does an amazing job of bringing everything together and making the final game an incredible finale.
• The main villain of the first two games manages to both utterly horrifying and pitifully sympathetic. I'd pity him more if he wasn't stalking me about with a machete.
• The middle two games should be looked at as a lesson for anyone that wants to make a horror game- they're brilliantly scary and atmospheric, and keep you on your toes at all times. And the second one has some great little homages in it.
• Seriously, look at that. That is creepy. Yahtzee does a lot with simple graphics.

So anyway, that concludes my recommendation. If you've got any respect for independent gamemaking, go pick up the full series. Get through the kinda slow, not-as-scary first one, and then sit back and enjoy the rest.

"Art Destroys Silence."

Hello.

You most likely know me, as I doubt anyone on the internet stumbled onto this thing. But, in keeping with decorum, allow me to introduce myself. My name's Jasper, and (to continue with the train the previous sentence established), I'm a man of wealth and taste. Well, college-student-comfortable-poverty, but I make up for it with a big heaping of extra taste.

Now let's introduce this blog.

Where does the title come from? Well, if you read the text under it, it's a Russian phrase meaning, pretty much, "Let's go!" or "we are going!" It was what cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (memorialized in the awesome statue on the right) said upon liftoff of the tiny metal ball he orbited the earth in. You can hear that exciting liftoff and exclamation here.

And, because we're on the subject of Russian history, let's introduce this blog with a great bit of Russian music.

Dmitri Shostakovich, from whom the title of this post comes, was a nervous, sensitive man who lived in Russia from his birth in 1906 to his death in 1975, spending much of his youth and the entirety of his adult life surrounded by the Soviet government.

He was also a composer of some of the most beautiful music of the 20th century. His emotional power, his sympathy for human suffering, and his incredible devotion to his art- he would rather leave his work unpublished than edit it to satisfy the Party -earned him two official denunciations and occasional bans of his work. in 1948, after the second denunciation, he took to waiting in the landing of his building at night, so that, should the police finally come to arrest him, his family wouldn't have to watch.

Shostakovitch was an idealist, and beholden more to the people of Russia than to the state itself. During the siege of Leningrad, he remained in the city, delivering a radio broadcast, serving as a fire marshal, and writing the anthemic Symphony No. 7, which later became an international symbol of Russian resistance to the German military. After the war, when ordered to produce music based on traditional Russian folk songs, he produced a song cycle derived from Jewish folk poetry as a protest against Soviet Russia's anti-semitic campaigns.

However, both this sympathy for his fellow man and the sorrow that underlay his passion and wit are best expressed in the haunting Opus 110. When he was finally forced, in 1959, to join the Communist Party, Shostakovitch was crushed. According to his friends, he was contemplating suicide. From both this and the horrors of both the Soviet machine and World War II- it is often considered that the bombing of Dresden was also a major influence on Opus 110 -emerged this mournful, tragic string quartet. Dedicated "to the victims of fascism," a backwards stab at the oppressive Soviet state, it was quickly praised by officials as a fine example of Russian art.

So here it is. There may be more talking about other stuff later on, but enjoy this beautiful, beautiful version by the Emerson String Quartet.

(Apologies for using a limited-time download. I'm gonna try and find some good free hosting as soon as I can)