New Year's Resolutions - #1 Don't Join A Cult

So...

I said I wasn't going to do a music post for New Year because I couldn't find enough good ones. 

I lied.

New Year's Resolution - Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura are amazing, aren't they? They ooze sophistication. If I had to define "Music for Grown-Ups" (Something I'm never going to do, though I wouldn't mind being asked.) I'd go here first. Maybe Joni Mitchell, then here.

New Year's Resolution - Otis Redding and Carla Thomas

Okay, if we're talking grown-up music I guess that's where we're going. Sixties soul. Did it sound this adult back then? Not to actual adults, maybe. I seem to remember they were always going on about "Do you call that music?" Hah! Didn't know when they were well off! Anyway, don't look at me - I was nine years old when this came out.

New Year's Resovolution - Donovan

It always seemed like Donovan saw himself as some kind of advanced being sent here to explain feelings to the rest of us but no-one would ever have accused him of being a grown-up. Just look at that title if you need proof. I bet thirteen year-olds all across the south of England were hella impressed. This came out about three years after the Otis Redding so I would just about have been one of them but I wasn't quite there, yet. You'd have had to have given me another twelve months and I'd have been bang on it.

New Year's Resolution - Lil Tjay

Crashing back to the present or something aproximating it, here's Lil Tjay. Donovan might appreciate the sensitive piano intro but it's a hippy-free zone from there on in. There's autotune and then there's AUTOTUNE! He put out a Christmas number this year and it's even better. I'd have used it, if I'd found it sooner. Maybe next time, if we're spared.

 New Year's Resolution - DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ

Remember that Camera Obscura tune? Oh, come on! You must do. It was only, what, about ten minutes ago and that's if you actually listened to all the other songs, which I know you did not. Well anyway, here it is again, in a fantastic remix by DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. Is that the best name ever or is that the best name ever? I'm not giving you a choice. Doesn't sound so grown-up like that, either, does it? I guess that's the whole point.

 New Year's Resolution - Lootpack

Here's an odd thing. As I'm putting this post together, I'm flipping back and forth to YouTube, clipping the links and each time I do, I use the back button to refresh. I leave the same seed in the search field ("New Year's Resolution song") and every time I get different results. Is that meant to happen? This would be a whole other post if I'd done what I usually do, download all the songs first and work from there.

New Year's Resolution - The Limousines

I mean, c'mon, seriously? I'm not kidding here. There are way, way more songs coming up now than the first time I did it. What's going on? And there are some good ones, too! This is going to run long. Bloody Donovan wouldn't have made the cut if I'd known what was coming, that's for sure. (Okay, he probably would. I always find Donovan really funny for some reason, plus it's worth wading through all the hippydippy nonsense to get to that tabla solo.)

New Year's Resolutions - Meekakitty

Or something like that. It's a little confusing. 

At one point I was going to build the whole post around this one, until all that other stuff came up. Those other songs, I mean. First off, I don't even believe this one's called "New Year's Resolutions". That's just what the person who put it up has titled it. 

It's on a channel belonging to someone called xXFyesanXx, where it was posted eight years ago. It's a fragment of a copy of a cover of a song called "So Much" by Asiah Mehok. Here's the original.

It's lovely but the cover has it beat, possibly because of the arrangement but more likely because of the performance, which is by Tessa Violet aka Meekakitty... At least I think it is... Reading through the thread, it seems the full-length song used to be on her channel only now it isn't, for reasons unspecified. There are a couple of links in the comments that supposedly take you to that version but if they ever worked they don't now. I wish they did. I'd love to hear it all the way through.

I thought Tessa Violet was a new name to me but when I dig into it I think I've seen a couple of her videos before. Like this one, maybe? 

 Crush - Tessa Violet

I've seen quite a few videos set in supermarkets, though. I'm not sure. I feel like if I'd watched this I'd have it safely tucked away in my massive folder of YouTube downloads. (It's so big I've had to start a new one.) Anyway, with 90m views she's hardly obscure.

I've subbed her channel now, not really for the songs, good as they are, but for the videos, which are great. 

Told you!  I could jump from there to Titanic Sinclair to Poppy in some kind of six degrees deal but I'm not gonna. Okay, I am. I just did. 

I recently resubbed to Poppy's channel after a couple of years away. She seems to have gotten some of the metal out of her system and she's back to the kind of oddness I always liked.

Blow Away - Poppy

There's more than five minutes of that. It never does anything else. I've watched it twice already and it's playing in the background as I type this.

Begin the New Year as you mean to go on, eh? That's my resolution.

In The Days Of Perky Pat

I'd finished cropping some screenshots for a follow-up post to Wednesday's "Working With Fire And Steel". I was ready to write but it felt too quiet in the room. The ambient sound of passing cars. Occasional birdsong. Oppressive.

I opened YouTube. I have it configured always to open on my subscriptions. Most days it's a sea of yellow/turquoise banners from Elefant Records, occasionally interspersed with Ardwulf unboxing something or the latest burst of PR static from Poppy.

Ah, Poppy. I may be over Poppy, by the way, in case you were wondering. There was a time, not that long ago, when I seriously considered buying and wearing a pin so other members of the church of her poisoned mind could recognize me. Quite glad I didn't do that.

She's free of outside influence now, reportedly, taking things in the direction of her choice. Her new path leads her away from the glitched hyperreality of post-postmodernism towards the studded leather uplands of pop-metal. I think I'll pass.

Not Poppy, then. My gaze shifted to the latest drifting dream fix from my enablers at Elefant: La Bien Querida feat. Los Planetas with their new single Domingo Escarlata. (Do we say "single" any more? I doubt it).

Elefant Records runs out of Madrid, Spain. Many of their acts map the Spanish diaspora, although you might not realize it from that anglocenteric Wikipedia list. Now, my Spanish is not good. Tourist Spanish plus. I can read some, though. I studied Latin, the key to any romance language, and I know French. One romantic tongue is much like another, on the page. I at least know enough to translate "Scarlet Sunday".

And look, more of those tropes I love so much; a color and the one day of the week I favor so strongly I once wrote a song about it. I called it "Everything's Sunday" because I wished it was.  There's even a visual trigger in the thumbnail - red hair. I have a lot of triggers.

But I was not prepared for this:

Watch and wallow. That's pop perfection, that's what that is. I wrote a whole, elegaic paean of praise to its drifting, mesmeric beauty in the draft that was lost. Oh, did I not mention that? I wrote this post and then lost it right at the end. Don't you hate when that happens?

I don't think I'll try to recreate it. Just watch the damn movie, alright? And I do mean watch, not just listen. Because, glorious though the music is, it's the images that carry the weight. That drugdealer opening under the bleak bridge. The vials. And the blue. All that blue. Her fingers in the soft wool's warp. Oh my. Oh my. Continuará. I hope so. I really hope so.

And, look, the timeslips, the juddering. Books skittering on shelves. The telephone changing form. Isn't it the game I was playing and posting about just a few weeks back? Californium. Yes. Yes it is.

It's all pure Philip K Dick. Unless it's just me. I read a lot of Philip K Dick at an impressionable age. I was ahead of the curve, an early adopter. I see his influence everywhere, have done for decades. Now it's his vision we all see, coming clear around us.

If I don't see you again I won't understand
Because life showed me that you existed
And all hope I'll lose
My sky will cloud, the seas will dry up, alas!

If I don't see you again, if I don't see you again
For I want nothing, if I don't know what to do
If I don't see you again I'll never know
Everything you and I could have done

Because when you kissed me the sky would open
On the edge of a precipice wishing to jump with you
And when you touched me I would come back to life
And the world caught fire with the brush of your skin against mine

If I don't see you again I will die of grief
From black sorrow I die because I can't see you
If I don't see you again I'll never know
Everything you and I could have done

Because when you kissed me the sky would open
On the edge of a precipice wishing to jump with you
And when you touched me I would come back to life
And the world caught fire with the brush of your skin against mine 

How Kabiria Films or Ana Fernández-Villaverde herself, whoever took the lead, made the leap from these sad love song lyrics, rendered into English with surprising feel by Google Translate, to that saturated, entropic feverscape... well, it beats me. I'm just so glad they did.

Elefant Records, like me, have history with Philip K Dick, it seems. I already had another of their roster earmarked for a post I've been marinating on music inspired by the great man. But why sit on it? These aren't times to wait. Let's have it now.

There's no mystery hanging over the provenance of this one. La Monja Enana lifted the title wholesale from a Dick story first published in 1963. All they've changed is the language: Los Dias de Perky Pat.

There's a squelchier version I much prefer but it doesn't have a performance to give it visual heft. The real kicker, though, is the lyric.

A few years after the short story The Days of Perky Pat appeared in Amazing. Dick reworked the premise for one of his greatest novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In the lyrics, Ana Vaquero and Juan Alonso twist that narrative once again, to their own purpose.

I don't know what made me accept the transfer to Mars
A higher salary, an exciting destination
It was my great chance to get away from Earth
I wanted to start again, make a blur and a new account
And it is that in advertising everything was so beautiful
A natural paradise, how have I been so lingering?
The air doesn't smell the same, the sun shines without force
I can't take another day, I'm going to lose my mind
At night, in the neighborhood, none of this matters
Everything is solved by taking a dose of soma
And I can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal
I prefer to avoid, it's the days of Perky Pat
I'm not going to work anymore, I spend the day locked up
Next to Perky Pat, in a more human world
But I begin to suspect that nothing is what it seems
Everything around me trembles and fades
I don't care about the time, none of this matters anymore
Everything is solved by taking a little more soma
And I can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal
I prefer to avoid, it's the days of Perky Pat
And I no longer want to distinguish the real from the unreal
It's so much better like this, living with Perky Pat 

This is where I lose out, not speaking the language. Google does its best but falters. Worse, the tension between the bouyancy of the music and the desperation of the words is lost. Even so, though, eh? Even so... 

I won't point out the synergies and synchronicities between those lyrics and our current situation. Oh, I just did. I'm sorry about that.

Third, because good things always come in threes and bad things too, there's this, about which I can find nothing. The song has the same title and it sounds quite similar, really quite very similar, although I can't convince myself it's a cover.

The lyric is in English but I can't make it out. Comments on the thread are blocked and the band seem to have no internet presence whatsoever.

How very Philip K.

Oh, What Fun It Is!

Come on, everyone! 


You all know the words.



Sing along with Poppy!

In the interests of full disclosure: I am not in a cult led by Poppy.