Mixtape 257 • Can’t Be Still
Get your fix of tremendous pop electricity out of the illuminati hotties outlet.
Get your fix of tremendous pop electricity out of the illuminati hotties outlet.
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.
Some of us are lucky. Some of us get to sit in a comfortable broadcasting studio and play Orville Peck, while others are hacking their way through a couple of gloomstalkers with nothing but the barely-magical weaponry a fifth-level figher can afford.
It’s a bitterly cold night, though the thermometer is not the lowest it’s been this winter. Warming things up is King Tuff, whose twisted bedroom psychedelia is heating up my house in the manner of an unexpected early spring. It’s a strong start for an extended set of sounds simultaneously catchy and powerful. Technical note: The Mixtape sounds best when recorded on TDK SA90 cassettes. Do not attempt to do this on Maxell XLIIs.
I used to get a couple of dozen packages containing CDs each day, but these days receiving even one is something that happens once in a blue moon, a rare treat. It’s even more special when it contains a couple of releases from Sex Clark Five, one of my personal favorites. They sound like blurting out that thing you told yourself you weren’t going to say but felt good to say.
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.
Tonight started out with an hour of the sickest music around, which is to say songs about illness, medication, and other health-related issues. The following two hours were the usual incomprehensible mixture of genres and bad attitudes.
Juliana Hatfield is once again in the middle of an unstoppable creative streak, now mixing her needle-sharp pop sensibilities with some truly out-there production.
It’s the triumphant return of Pom Poko and their shattered-and-reassembled attacks of aggression and affection, like the sonic equivalent of staying inside the sauna for as long as you can, then running out to roll around in the snow.
Out of all the ways there were to get into Zugdidi — they could have taken the ekranoplan, for example — the agency had chosen the bus. This exasperated the developer to no end. Their gear sat somewhere in the guts of the green behemoth, guarded by six different hardware and software protocols, but it still felt queasy to be so far removed from it. The meteorologist peered across the botanical garden to the Dadiani palaces. Somewhere in there, a nondescript yogurt stand would have a small radio playing Konnakkol techno. They were to purchase two cones and overpay. Instructions would follow.