Niina | girlpants

Amazing cover (mid-90s edition)

K so lately I’ve been loving the song “Your Woman” by White Town. The song­writer, Jyoti Mishra, said of the tune: “I was trying to write a pop song that had more than one per­spec­tive. Although it’s written in the first person the char­acter behind that view­point isn’t nec­es­sarily what the casual lis­tener would expect.” The gender ambi­guity is one obvious dis­cus­sion point; so is the some­what broken nar­ra­tive. Anyhow, this song has been coming up for me lately. Other pretty big hits that I now really love from the 90s that I didn’t love at the time and/or that are increas­ingly rel­e­vant now in terms of interest or influence:

But here’s a great cover of the song that inspired this brief but (I hope) sweet post. It’s by Finnish band Cats on Fire. Here’s to wishing that you like it as much as I do. 

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I’m sure there are some other songs from that era that have come up, lately, as the 90s are in style again (side note: why??), but I’m going to cap it off at that.

Links of Interest (not lynx of interest; this is not a bobcat watching club, THIS IS GIRLPANTS)

News­flash: Unless you live in Port­land or some other pos­sibly myth­ical “cool” and “rainy” place, right now it’s hot and summer. So let’s listen to music and also read about it instead of going to Coney Island and staring at weir­does (or busting open a fire hydrant and dousing our body parts in it/making our chil­dren run through it/giving our gypsy cabs a free car­wash with it, as denizens of Bush­wick, Brooklyn are wont to do. Believe me, I’ve called 311 more than once already to come shut down aban­doned, gushing hydrants. Old Man Niina isn’t a water waster). (That’s not me in the pic­ture, either.)

But I digress. Below are some links that effec­tively update us on a por­tion of the fas­ci­nating matter that is music in the summer. 

  • John Darnielle per­forms 2009’s The Life of the World to Come in its entirety, and you can view the video at Pitch­fork if you act quick-like etc.
  • If you live in New York, you should plan to attend North­side Fes­tival. This year’s tremen­dous lineup includes Wavves, Au Revoir Simone, Titus Andron­icus, Liars, and about 928347 times more.
  • Everyone ever has already done an “antic­i­pated summer releases” list, so I’m not gonna rehash. But heyo, Arcade Fire! They’ve put up the track listing for their highly antic­i­pated new album Sub­urbs, and with this track listing have sur­faced also some tracks for lis­tening. Below is a radio rip of “Ready to Start,” gor­geous and slow-building. You can also listen to “Month of May” here.
    Arcade Fire — “Ready to Start” 
     
  • Indie Rock Café has a good post on recent summer releases that are easy to miss in the uproar over heavy hit­ters. Per­sonal high­light for me is the Lou Barlow song “Loser­core,” but the post also covers Cary Ann Hearst, Apollo, the Vita Ruins, and Com­mu­nist Daughter.
  • Also, you should know that you can stream the Lou Barlow EP = Sen­tridoh III at Merge’s web­site. “Gravitate/One Machine” is so good. It’s hot out­side plus a thou­sand humidity today and this song is making me want to box someone.
  • And finally. Does anyone inspire as much crit lately as Lady Gaga? I know this might be old news (and the pub­li­ca­tion title may be a tad hyper­bolic) but I follow this all-Gaga journal with fas­ci­na­tion; some recent pieces posted dis­cuss hys­teria, com­modity fem­i­nism, the Gaga/Illuminati con­nec­tion, and Gaga as Kate Bush response. (Another topic of note might be Gaga as George Bush response, but that’s not an article I’m going to write this summer.)

Jeff Mangum, the Chris Knox Benefit

This is a shorty post, but I wanted to bring your atten­tion to this video — last week, loads of bril­liant musical acts got together for the pur­poses of fundraising for Chris Knox. Overall, it seemed that Jeff Mangum of Neu­tral Milk Hotel was the draw of the evening, but the fundraiser itself was a huge suc­cess. Now, I know that this video is some­what awful, but the audio is decent, and on it you can hear how beau­ti­fully excited the audi­ence was — holding back an elec­tric hum for what seemed like the entire time. It was the sweetest audi­ence I’ve seen in a long time.

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Along with the opener, “Oh Comely,” Mangum played “A Baby for Pree,” “In the Aero­plane Over the Sea,” “Two-Headed Boy Part II,” and “Engine,” then qui­etly exited — along with 30% of the audience.

iggy pop, janelle monae and more: girlpants gets opinionated

It is with interest that I’ve been fol­lowing this weird week (month) of bizarre endorse­ments – does it not seem like everyone is shilling for someone these days? Some are artistic col­lab­o­ra­tions, some are out-of-genre forays, some are fundraisers, and some are straight-up curious wtf moments (like when Bob Dylan teamed up with Victoria’s Secret). Here are a few of my favorites genre mixups and lat­eral pop cul­ture moves of the past week.

  • Iggy Pop and the Stooges played Ray-Ban’s rere­lease party for the Avi­ator glasses. More on this here. While I’m sure it was cool to see Iggy Pop per­form live, I can’t help but cringe when Google pre­dicts that I’m going to type in “Iggy Pop Raw Power” and I have to dis­ap­point it by typing in “Iggy Pop Ray Ban” instead. Yes, this is about me, girlpants.
  • Beck, Vam­pire Weekend and others are on the sound­track for the new Twi­light ven­ture. The savvily indie track listing was revealed on MySpace (who uses MySpace still?) and you can see it here. Obvi­ously this means that Vam­pire Weekend will now and for­ever become a mall goth band, moody and dark save their col­orful, col­orful hair.
  • Janelle Monae and Of Mon­tréal, together at last. By col­lab­o­rating, they’ve cre­ated what my iTunes had already tried to create by rapidly shuf­fling back and forth between the Idlewild sound­track and Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? back in 2006 (seri­ously this was a problem). Luckily the song itself is way more rocking; listen to it here at Some Kind of Awe­some. It’s actu­ally pretty Of Montréal-heavy for being on Janelle Monae’s upcoming album, The ArchAn­droid (with its Baduesque cover), out on May 18th.
  • Nina Persson of the Cardi­gans and A Camp has teamed up with Swedish designer HOPE to reveal a limited-edition col­lec­tion that will become avail­able in August. I think this is lovely because I have always been a bit of a Nina Persson fan, and because A Camp is really good (watch the ABBA-parodying video here for proof), and because at the release party, the fashion col­lec­tion was inge­niously paired with avant-garde snacks, etching HOPE for­ever into my brain by cre­ating a food memory.
  • Richard McGraw, whom we’ve dis­cussed here on Girl­pants before, has released the mp3 of his reworking of Leonard Cohen’s punch-in-the-eye classic “Chelsea Hotel #2”. It is not a cover, but a re-imagining of the emo­tional crux of the song into some­thing set in McGraw’s home­town of New­burgh, NY. Listen to “Balmville Motel” here.
     

More Love, Less Paranoia—New Amerykah Part 2: Return of the Ankh

Well, it’s been sev­eral weeks since this album came out to mostly pos­i­tive or even glowing reac­tions. So in the place of focusing on the already well-covered arc of New Amerykah Pt. II, I will don my Girl­pants Track Glasses™ – recently recov­ered from Jason’s dan­gerous clutches (I had to crawl through a really long tunnel to get them, which I hate, and which really flared up my mildew allergy, thanks) – and narrow in on a couple of songs in order to better illuminate.

Turn Me Away (Get Munny)” is the album’s blithe six-minute per­sis­tence pas­tiche: the “can’t turn me away” refrain is the hook, and along with the wah bass, it comes from the 1980 Sylvia Striplin jam. Their voices may be sim­i­larly golden, but Badu’s remake is way less wistful, lyri­cally focusing on the mate­rials of love’s clichés: “Can’t lie to you honey. I / just want your money”, and “I’ll cook like your mother” and “I’ll do what I gotta”. The song’s nar­rator may be a lover, but she’s not a fool. She is aware that swag is sexy – which is the reason the mul­tiple nods to Noto­rious B.I.G and the obvious blip from Junior M.A.F.I.A’s Striplin-sampling hit “Get Money” work so well. The result is a lay­ered, smooth, sexy song that feels all new despite its retro roots.

Imme­di­ately fol­lowing that –and sep­a­rated only by a bit of dia­logue about phoning “that other bass player” – is “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long,” the afore­men­tioned song’s fra­ternal mood twin. Nei­ther is the evil twin, exactly: the Baby in the song seems to be on his way some­where, and the pro­tag­o­nist gets that it’s hustle– (and there­fore money-) related, but acknowl­edges she will miss him. The songs are strik­ingly sim­ilar, and, along with the video single “Window Seat,” are the album’s most acces­sible song-wise, sprawling less lat­er­ally than the rest of the album.

Erykah Badu — “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long”

These two songs mark the cen­tral part of the album – which is lyri­cally and son­i­cally its most emblem­atic. Beyond this, the song struc­ture changes, the songs lengthen (“Love” at six min­utes) and lessen (“You Loving Me (Ses­sion)”, at one minute), but never fail to hover around the theme: love is kind of fucked up, but mostly pretty, but it’ll dis­il­lu­sion you, but you prob­ably still can’t stay away because it’s chem­i­cally pro­grammed within you.

And as in the con­tro­ver­sial video for “Window Seat” (avail­able on her web­site) in which Badu sto­ically strips naked in one long shot, this album is per­sonal and bare. But unlike the video’s end, in which the nude pro­tag­o­nist is quickly and anti­cli­mac­ti­cally assas­si­nated by an invis­ible threat, New Amerykah Pt. II keeps sending out gor­geous ten­drils, never coming to a clear stop. The last track, “Out My Mind, Just In Time,” goes on for ten min­utes; as such a long piece, it pur­pose­fully morphs in struc­ture many times. This means that the last track is effec­tively a long hallway of peeks into the rooms of ear­lier songs in the sequence: idling med­i­ta­tions on the walls we build with our refusals to abandon iden­tity as an “under­cover over-lover.” Some reviewers have called this album scat­tered for the grandiose treat­ment it gives its most cen­tral theme. But this is a love album, and as such, it doesn’t really end. Instead, Badu gives us a some­what melan­choly but still Edenic outro: a pass through the back door, a final piano jingle like a wave of the fin­gers, unthreat­ening and subtle.
 

Amanda Palmer reacts to justice (as to everything) with exuberant Twittering

Yes­terday, Amanda Palmer (of the Dresden Dolls and also of a kind of bril­liant solo album and recent col­lab­o­ra­tion with Jason Webley called Evelyn Evelyn) led an aggres­sive, Mel-Gibsoned Twitter cam­paign to make a big announce­ment: after sev­eral years of imbroglio with the less than sup­portive Road Runner Records, she has finally been dropped from the label. (I totally called the news when she posted the Gibson photo, though who’s taking score?)

To cel­e­brate the occa­sion, Palmer released “The Truth,” a free down­load, fea­turing Jason Webley on guitar and Sam Kulik on trom­bone. The song is a story-of-everything-ever, in Amanda’s endearing kind of way; most of all, though, it cel­e­brates freedom. You know you like freedom. And no matter what anyone says, I am not over this lady – she can keep over­sharing, making clumsy com­ments and posting her trade­mark near-nudes willy nilly around the internet. It’s just a pic­ture of a girl get­ting Twitterer.

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The above is off Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and it is one of my favorites, as it cel­e­brates one of my favorite kinds of humor. Have a good Thursday and try to be as awe­some, please.

Chris Knox benefit show, Jeff Mangum, Yo La Tengo etc

Last year, New Zealand musi­cian Chris Knox (of Tall Dwarfs fame) suf­fered a series of debil­i­tating strokes. You have doubt­less heard about the ben­efit album, which fea­tures an wide cat­a­logue of artists like Will Oldham, Jay Reatard, and Girl­pants favorites the Moun­tain Goats, all cov­ering songs from Knox’s impres­sive back cat­a­logue. When Pitch­fork announced there would be a ben­efit show on May 6th at Manhattan’s strangest-named venue (Le) Poisson Rouge, it included one par­tic­u­larly thrilling bit of news. The elu­sive Jeff Mangum will do an acoustic set along­side Yo La Tengo, The Clean, Por­tastatic, Kyp Malone, John Mulaney, Claudia Gonson, Dimmer, and Sharon Van Etten to help ben­efit his friend Knox.

Mangum’s pub­li­cist com­mented that the show did not signal the begin­ning of a come­back, but was rather a move to aid an old friend in a time of crisis. No matter what the reason is, though, Mangum’s pres­ence on the bill no doubt but fueled the furious phil­an­thropy that sold the show out in twenty min­utes flat on Kick­starter (I know this because I too was there, obses­sively refreshing the page, to bring Ghast­ly­pants the scoop) (and to buy myself a ticket) (yes I am going) (OMG). At last glance, the show brought in over forty grand, all of which will go to ben­efit Knox and help him in his recovery. To ensure this, the orga­nizers are taking a firm stance against scalpers, electing to revoke ticket priv­i­leges from those who attempt pub­licly to sell their slots.

Finn Family — “It’s Love”

The track above is off the com­pi­la­tion. Even though it has nothing to do with most of what I said above, I am posting it because it made me smile. You can (and should) buy the album here. And, although the show is sold out now, you can still track the dona­tions and con­tribute here at Kick­starter.

Drunk Girls by LCD Soundsystem: Another Song about Girls

The new, emi­nently holler­able track “Drunk Girls,” LCD Soundsystem feels kinda retro to me — not vin­tage, but def­i­nitely a throw­back to 90s Brit pop. The yells around the chorus con­sist of just “drunk girls” and “drunk boys”, and to be honest, to me it not unpleas­antly recalls some­thing like a mashup of “Park­life” and “Girls & Boys,” both by the awe­some awe­some Blur. Observe:

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I think, though, that LCD Soundsystem are hit­ting on an inter­esting and time­less song­writing phe­nom­enon: “Drunk Girls” adds to the already for­mi­dable ret­inue of songs about girls who do stuff. There­fore, in order to appro­pri­ately com­mem­o­rate this, I shall pro­vide for you a list: Ten Songs About Girls As A Group Entity (with some hon­or­able men­tions). (These are all youtube links.)


  • Blur, “Girls & Boys”. Obvi­ously, I had to put this song on the list. Here is where you can listen to it. Don’t worry, it’s cool again. Also, this song is its own hon­or­able mention.
  • The Queers, “Punk Rock Girls”. Cel­e­brating the (Chuck) tai­lored image of the icon­i­cally rough-round-the-edges girl that you want to take out but you can’t ‘cause she would prob­ably drink you under the table. The Queers bring it home here. (Hon­or­able men­tion: “Punk Rock Girl,” Dead Milkmen.)
  • Beastie Boys, “Girls”. This song falls into the cat­e­gory of Sexist Jam About Par­tying And Girls. It is bril­liant, shouty, and hor­ribly incor­rect, and cel­e­brates the girls who might or might not pick up after gross frat­boys. It is an 80s gem and we could not have a Songs About Girls list without it. Period. (Hon­or­able men­tion: “Cal­i­fornia Girls,” David Lee Roth.)
  • David Bowie, “China Girl.” This one epit­o­mizes the Song About Girls From Places: even though this girl is sin­gular, she’s really a list of cul­tural cliches. Still, we believe Bowie when he says “shhhhh.” (Hon­or­able men­tion: “Amer­ican Girl,” Tom Petty.)
  • Queen, “Fat Bottom Girls.” Songs like this one fall into the cat­e­gory of Cel­e­brating Girls With Imper­fec­tions, i.e. pos­sibly the awe­somest cat­e­gory. My room­mate pointed out that this song also could be the begin­ning of its own list – sweeping gen­er­al­iza­tions about girls written by gay men. Pos­sible future list coming?
  • Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” This cat­e­gory is the com­panion piece to Beastie Boys’ “Girls” — the Cel­e­bra­tory Jam about Girls Par­tying. Cyndi Lauper is the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of this cat­e­gory, still, to this day — as you can read from this hilar­i­ously irrev­erent inter­view. (Hon­or­able men­tion: “Jumpin Jumpin,” Destiny’s Child.)
  • Bikini Kill, “Rebel Girl.” Although this song is a mil­i­tantly drummed cel­e­bra­tion of one girl crushing on one neigh­bor­hood queen type, it’s really about every girl crushing on every awe­some badass girl ever, and so it qual­i­fies as the (Girl Envious of) Awe­some Megacrush Girls cat­e­gory. (Hon­or­able men­tion: “Cherry Bomb,” the Run­aways.)
  • The Smiths, “Some Girls are Bigger than Others.” This song demon­strates Morrissey’s ability to make mean­ing­less com­par­isons, and marks his easy fiefdom over the kingdom of Semi­goth Blasé Obser­va­tions About Girls. Often these songs come dance­able; they don’t really reach any con­clu­sion by the end and leave the lis­tener feeling some­what like s/he has just fin­ished reading a repres­sive Vic­to­rian novel. I guess not in the bad way. (Hon­or­able men­tion: “West End Girls,” Pet Shop Boys.)
  • Duran Duran, “Girls on Film.” Another song about genre girls (see #9 and #6), this song makes itself note­worthy because it Observes Girls From Afar, rather than giving a tribute to the fan girls or a slightly con­de­scending descrip­tion of exotics. (Hon­or­able men­tion: “Amer­ican Girls,” Weezer.)
  • Major Lazer, “Keep It Goin Louder”. This one is the most common in the world of songs about girls: Girls As Acces­sory. The note that the girls are present “six chicks deep” totally con­tra­dicts the semi-intimacy of “girl I wanna party with you” because it doesn’t really matter – they’re all fly and we all hella want to party with them. (Hon­or­able men­tion: “Girls Girls Girls,” Jay-Z.)

Kate Miller-Heidke, Joe’s Pub 3-15-2010

On Monday, March 15th 2010, I found myself in the inti­mate front lobby of New York venue Joe’s Pub (4th Avenue between 7th and 8th Street, New York), standing around awk­wardly bumping into patrons on the top tier of the jazz club-y space with my media jug­ger­naut BFF Rohin. He did his best to remain cool and aloof as we waited; I did my best to bump into everyone and spill snacks from my bag onto the floor (gen­er­ally in public, I’m like a soccer mom only without the kids). But even­tu­ally we over­flowed into some seats. Joe’s Pub is meant for an audi­ence of a cer­tain size; any­thing beyond that, and things get uncom­fort­able, but for Brisbane-based singer-songwriter Kate Miller-Heidke’s US opener it was almost cer­tainly the per­fect venue. Tuesday marked the begin­ning of Miller-Heidke’s Amer­ican tour, and the day before, her album Curi­ouser was also released here.

Joe’s Pub is part dinner the­atre, part dark night­club, part music venue, and (unlike most New York venues), they like to keep things on the clock. There was no opening act, and Kate got onstage promptly at 7:30 with her gui­tarist (and, mixing busi­ness and plea­sure, her hus­band) Kier Nut­tall. Awash with the gor­geous lighting of the venue and clearly stoked about the recep­tive crowd, the pair opened with “Pol­i­tics in Space.” This song is agree­ably per­cus­sive and funny and a great opener. Listen here:

Kate Miller-Heidke — “Pol­i­tics in Space”

It is true that Miller-Heidke is quirky and deserves the com­par­isons to famous alien pop lady weirdos (cheap com­par­isons I’ll save for other blogs, really). But she also has her own pecu­liar­i­ties: her voice changes pitch and octave in unpre­dictable and inter­esting ways, and she’s really used to using it as an instru­ment (like on her single “Can’t Shake It”). She also gets down­right gritty some­times, banging fever­ishly on the piano keys and roaring like a demon, or unleashing oper­atic notes as her tam­bourine breaks on her hip. These moments are when I like Miller-Heidke best (but everyone who knows me knows that I have always been one for Vegas-lounge-queen-grade melo­drama). This is why it sur­prised me when­ever she show­cased one of her more tra­di­tion­ally written songs – pre­dictably pro­gressing piano bal­lads with emo­tional lyrics, lovely but some­what too Lilith Fair (songs like “Caught in the Crowd” and the platinum-going “Last Day On Earth”, both tidy and nice but not for me).

But I don’t want to quibble. The set was clever, well played, inter­esting, and great fun to listen to. Miller-Heidke’s stage banter (some­thing that I usu­ally cringe about *cough* TORIAMOS *cough*) is absolutely endearing and won’t pander to anyone, including the audi­ence or the venue – at one point she stopped and pro­claimed that she had never before played any­where that smelled of “such pun­gent fish,” refer­ring to the food a patron in front was enjoying. And we got to hear her excel­lent Britney Spears cover, com­plete with the afore­men­tioned opera flour­ishes. Really, if you like music with per­son­ality (and clearly you do or you wouldn’t be here at Griz­zly­pants), and you are lucky enough to be in one of the towns Miller-Heidke and Nut­tall will be hit­ting on their tour, you should go hear out their rather incom­pa­rable pop brand.

Finally, for some top­ical humor (as opposed to the “trop­ical humor” of the malaria-related prac­tical joke Mike tried to play on the office after one of his Africa jaunts), hear out this little ditty:

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Roisin Murphy’s Lobster Dishes

Some­times, the Acme Cake Company-scented winds are blowing just right near Girlpants’s Bush­wick offices; on those days, it is pos­sible to spot the mul­ti­col­ored scarves of media mogul Rohin Guha bil­lowing down the avenue as he arrives bearing sweet, sweet Ritter Sport Butter Bis­cuit and pop tid­ings almost equally as sugary.

Recently, Rohin showed up to draw me out of my end­less loop of old Radio­head videos with some infor­ma­tive tid­bits regarding a rather fan­tastic video. Now, I know the world is all about Beyogaga’s “Tele­phone” today, but if you read below you’ll find video com­men­tary straight from the lady that pulled off head­gear and eye-puncturingly awe­some cos­tumes long before the days of Gaga: one Róisín Murphy, buttery-voiced singer for­merly of Moloko and now solo. “Movie Star” is a pas­tiche of pop ref­er­ences in its own right; you may well rec­og­nize some Cyndi Lauper and some Twisted Sister, but most of all there is the per­va­sive (per­ver­sive) touch of John Waters. This snippet should clarify:


Rohin Guha: Tell me about the “Movie Star” video and its John Waters influ­ence.
Róisín Murphy: It’s a scene I remember so vividly from being a teenager and seeing that scene with Divine being raped by the lob­ster. It stayed with me all that time. It reared its head again. I also know so many crazy people in London who could play these parts. Really through the music, I got to know these people. I just thought it would be great fun. 99% of my videos just have me in them, so I get bored of that.

RG: Was it dif­fi­cult trying to recreate the Lobstora-Divine scene?
RM: We didn’t get a good lobster—that’s a fact right there. When the lob­ster turned up, I was a bit dis­ap­pointed. It was like padded. A padded, leather lob­ster. Appar­ently John Waters didn’t want a lob­ster. He wanted a mon­ster or some­thing else. They couldn’t get the mon­ster, and they could only get this lob­ster from the seafood restau­rant. He was making do with lob­ster. I’ll tell you what: We couldn’t get a lob­ster like that even when we wanted one.


See? You don’t need to watch the orig­inal Clash of the Titans to see mon­strous sea things. Just check Róisín’s video:

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Then, do a bit of YouTubin’ down the river of dreams that is the Internet for the clip of Divine and the dirtbag crus­tacean from Waters’s Mul­tiple Maniacs. You won’t regret it, I promise.*

Then, finally, for good mea­sure, this awe­some song, which has nothing to do with either topic but which does show­case Ms. Murphy’s pipes on her recent col­lab­o­ra­tion with pro­duc­tion duo Crookers:

Crookers feat. Róisín Murphy — “Royal T”

* It is pos­sible you will regret it a little, but then we cannot be friends.