heavy fog

Birds & Batteries - Ocarina

I stumbled across this one when I was listening to Neighbor Radio on last.fm.  It sounds to me like some marriage of XTC with … I’m not sure what.  But I really like the song.  And I love how I discover random stuff like this on last.fm, Pandora, Tumblr, Hype Machine, etc. 

M83 - Graveyard Girl

Here’s an excerpt from a review by Kronski on MOG… 

“Graveyard Girl” comes next with an opening not unlike New Order’s “Ceremony”. With a strident drum sound giving way to the opening of one of the best melodies of the year, the guitars, synthesizers, and the bucolic vocals talk about high school and seems to control the plot, who told what to whom and how the are all connected by this “Graveyard Girl.”

“Graveyard Girl” is all told through the canvas of a really great Echo and the Bunnymen song smoked through an ethereal filter, the synthesizers overlapping into guitars, driving home the dreamy days and nights, when the sky seemed as tall and endless as the person you chose to sit next to until long after dark.
Then the narrative switches, and we hear this Graveyard Girl actually step out and reveal herself.

“I’m going to jump the walls and run… I won’t miss them… I’ll read poetry to the stars… waiting for someone to love me… I’m fifteen years old and already I feel like its already too late to live… don’t you?”

That moment in particular captures the cant wait to grow up, cant wait to get out of here feeling of adolescence, of loving everything too much until it hurts. It all makes for one of the best songs of the year, wrapped in my own memories of High School, the sounds all tumbled together, with the alienation of rejection in a disappointing prom night, barely graduating, the t-shirts and haircuts, promises and lies, all of my youth heavy and traumatic served up in delicate layers of froth and steam, electronics and breathy vocals.