July 31, 2004
Your New Favorite Song.
It's the end of July, which means it's the unofficial end of Covers Month here. (But given the fact that I was gone almost half the time, it's a miracle I managed to post anything at all.)
Too bad -- I would have loved to have had more time to pull out some more cover songs, familiar and unfamiliar, from my boxes of burned mix CDs around here: Radiohead doing "Nobody Does It Better," Elvis Costello doing "Poplife," Prince doing "A Case of You," Richard Thompson doing "Psycho Killer," Lisa Loeb singing "Keep On Loving You," Natalie Merchant singing "Space Oddity," and so on.
So I end this month with a non-cover, made "famous," I guess, because it was covered by R.E.M. and buried, uncredited, as a hidden track at the end of their best album, Lifes Rich Pageant -- and was associated closely enough with R.E.M. so that non-diehard fans yelled "Sellout!" when it appeared in an IBM ad.
I know very little about The Clique (I just couldn't be bothered to look them up on the atrocious revamp that is AMG), but I like their sound: bubblegum-era rhythms, the constipated vocals (at least until you get to the bridge, sung in unison), with a garagey, ramshackle feel to the instruments. "Superman," in any case, is a nice precursor to the Police's stalker anthem "Every Breath You Take."
Next: the month of August has no official title to its theme, except that it's something along the lines of "Why aren't you listening to these people?" "You," of course, is the tricky part here, since I have no idea who downloads the mp3s -- jaded indie vets who own every Deerhoof EP, maybe.
Hear it. (3.6 mb)
Posted by the wily filipino at July 31, 2004 09:34 PM