Mixtape 149 • Strawberry Sunset
When your arrangements are razor-sharp, your moods mercurial and psychedelic, and your melodies constantly off-kilter, you’re probably a Dutch band like Certain Animals.
When your arrangements are razor-sharp, your moods mercurial and psychedelic, and your melodies constantly off-kilter, you’re probably a Dutch band like Certain Animals.
It’s been 45 years since Chrissie Hynde initially hit her stride with the Pretenders, and she hasn’t slowed down for anybody since.
They had wandered through the town, having left the aquabus in one of the drainage ponds at the I-70 interchange. It had been a dusty drive, and the vehicle certainly could use the soaking. As they wandered through the town’s enormous collection of objects, they felt lilliputian. The dentist rattled the bag of tiles suggestively as they walked past the sign for the World’s Largest Rocking Chair. The typesetter did not hesitate to point out that at 678 inches, it was the tallest chair of any kind in the United States. It was a habit that was both tiresome and instructive. And it never got in the way of a quick game of mahjong.
Following a proud tradition of weird Australian pop, The Stroppies give us the sort of incisive harmonic jangle the world needs right now.
There is no shortage of consuming urgency to the sound of this UK trio called simply Shopping.
The pediatrician scrambled on hands and knees after the rubber ball. It deflected off the base of the Monument to Fuel Tanker, his imperturbable brass cheer completely unaffected by the collision. The interlocutor looked around surreptitiously. Their aim was to provide some normalcy to the fact that two people were hanging out near one of the lowest-ranked attractions in Grodno while the sophisticated electronics built into their footwear communicated with the satellite and sorted out the problem with the statue. But maybe this game of jacks had not been the best idea for cover.
If a mermaid learned to play surf guitar, she could give Olivia Jean some exciting competition, at least for a little while.
They had been shot at. They had avoided countless booby traps. They had been served tiny delicate cups of the most aromatic and poisonous espresso. All of these events were framed as interrupted cribbage games. Maybe they played too much. The phlebotomist ruminated on this as they locked up their two-wheel drive all-terrain motorbikes across the street from Kirov Park. The Transnistrian passports had been excruciatingly expensive, but the ergonomist insisted it was justified, for complicated political reasons. The pieces rattled against the cribbage board and the very dangerous little notebook in the messenger bag as they strolled through the trail, looking for a man holding two empty water bottles.
The topologist carefully unfolded the graph depicting prime number frequencies. Across the scrub, the baker was returning from the Unimog, having concluded the search, and from the looks of their empty hands, unsuccessfully. They must have left it in the cab back in Calabar. Wonderful. Together, they considered the placement of the carved stone monoliths before them, their geometric arrangement random to the average visitor, but a clear reflection of order to the ancient people of Alok Ikom, and apparently, also related to the graph before them, with cataclysmic mathematical consequences.
Tjinder Singh’s easygoing voice and melodies, and penchant for carefree sunny grooves sits well at the center of this multicultural stew, where flute accents weave in and out of the loops.