Mixtape 257 • Can’t Be Still
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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.
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.
Leyla McCalla’s music opens up a portal into a universe of previously impossible musical geometries.
The Jesus Lizard are back, like a delicious headache you thought was gone but is now raging.
I’ve been noticing a dry spell on covers making it onto the show, but that was busted tonight with an inordinate (and quite varied) set of songs, starting with Robyn Hitchcock’s take on the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park.” He’s got an album of mostly covers, specifically from the year 1967, on the way, and this single is blazing the way. Also covered tonight: David Bowie, Dire Straits, Duke Ellington, Daniel Johnston, and the Bar-Kays.
It was a night for mazzy music, starting with a startlingly woozy track from Maya Hawke and following up with entries from many other exemplary female vocalists with a unique sense of melody and delivery. Also, it’s now light when I leave for the radio station, and midnight when I return, which adds a sense of interdimensional time travel to the broadcasting ritual, I’m going to enjoy that for a few more shows before it’s back to operating under the cover of darkness.
A special collection of songs about humans and their interactions with water.
Mimi Parker, vocalist and drummer and half of the Minnesota band Low, passed away a couple of weeks ago while I was traveling. It’s a shocking loss and an abrupt end to a musical career that was still unfolding; the band’s last two albums, coming at the tail end of a discography that spans decades, showed a blossoming new direction for an act that was famed for their quiet and glacial approach. We open the show with Low’s rendition of a Bee Gees classic in tribute.