Mixtape 258 • Finger In Your Eye
Looks like YACHT is back and gesticulating wildly about.
Looks like YACHT is back and gesticulating wildly about.
It’s time for the return of Version Control, the occasional gathering of music as interpreted by someone other than the artists that wrote the song or made it famous. You know, covers. After the notorious Cover Drought of 2023, we have a full episode of covers ranging from the obscure to the revolutionary.
Magic is in the air, so we are starting most appropriately with Boom Pam and their take on Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra,” herein entitled “Alakazam.” It only got more magical from there with new music from Nick Cave, Fake Fruit, and Los Bitchos, all of whom are presently on desktop rotation. Next week: a special Fund Drive show.
It was a day of jet-setting, starting in the dark hours of morning, and it wasn’t going to be over until the studio light went off. To keep up the energy levels, we presented a double-header of a special, first an hour of The Famous Polka, featuring songs titled after real (mostly) people, and following that two hours of Balkan Fever, with music that was far from exclusively Balkan but all fed into that manic two-step non-stop feeling.
The voice of your conscience is a very close match to the one you hear coming from Grandaddy.
As it happens, if yours truly has a Valentine’s gig, it’ll be followed by one on Pi Day. Except on leap years. But the point here is that I thought about doing a show themed on circles, spheres, and other such expressions of the number and decided against it, but keep your ears peeled for some future incarnation of a “Round and Round” playlist. Instead, tonight we kick things off with the sort-of eponymous track from The Nude Party’s latest release, and wrap things up with about 30 seconds of Railroad Jerk, because technical difficulties.
For quite some time, Mommyheads have delivered the sort of complex pop and lyrical insight that fills in the cracks and gaps in your musical thinking with new ideas and sounds.
Pom Pom Squad began as songwriter Mia Berrin's solo operation but now employs four full-time experts in musical munitions and lethal lyrical techniques
Uwe Schmidt has had an extensive career, recording under many names as electronic musicians do, but it's his work as Señor Coconut (and now as Atom™), where he deconstructs familiar songs into something Kraftwerk would play if hired to play a quinceañera, that brings me this very particular weird glee.
If you are of a certain age and exposure to the MTV, you would think that people in Tijuana eat barbecued iguana, but that was just Stan Ridgway and Wall of Voodoo reaching for a cheap rhyme. Polvo takes the song's nervous energy and turns it up a few notches.