Red, White, Blue

Here I am, at home still. On holiday, not self-isolating although it comes to much the same thing. Turns out I did have an extra week off after all. Whether that will extend under current conditions remains to be seen but nominally I will be back to work on Sunday, since the new holiday regime takes start and finish dates excruciatingly literally.

Being at home means blogging but as the conversation went over at Paeroka's place, sometimes our gaming patterns sell us short on ideas for things to write about. Well, not really, because I can bang out a thousand words on pretty much anything. But even I wouldn't always want to read them.

So, let's have another round of Musical Death Match! It amuses me and that's mainly what I'm here for, after all. Don't know about the rest of you...

I let slip in the last episode the existence of certain hot-button themes and tropes guaranteed to get my attention in song titles or the names of bands. There are quite a lot of them. I don't propose to offer a list. Well, not today.

The ones I mentioned, all present in Baterya Fox's Tracy's Blue Cigarettes (playing in the background as I type this) were girls' names, colors and drugs. Let's go for... colors! In fact, let's go for Red, White and Blue.

Not for any patriotic reasons, god forbid, but in honor of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy, none of which I have ever actually seen but all of which, at one time, I meant to watch and then, predictably, never did. Guess I'll have time soon enough if the lockdown happens...

Fortunately, there are more than enough of all three hues to make for a fair contest. Blue, as you might guess, has the most. Even if I excise all those using "blues" rather than "blue", the tally comes out like this: eight for Team Red, five for Team White and a whopping thirteen for Team Blue.

Doesn't matter! This contest isn't going be won by force of numbers. It's all about the feels. Ding! Ding! Round One! Except, wait a minute... this being our first three-way death match, I haven't really thought ahead on how the framing might work. D'oh! I guess we'd better take each competitor as they come.

No fewer than four of the red entries come from Girl In Red so we'll lead with her. I found her by way of a collaboration with Beabadoobee. The two bedroom pop phenomena joined forces on a peaen to the novel that introduced me to one of my favorite authors of the last ten years, Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park. 

I already embedded that one above, out of competition. Girl In Red's solo entry is 4am. I love the desperate surge of it, the way the lyric captures those wolf hour terrors. I also love the way the video compresses Warhol's five hours of Sleep into less than two minutes.

White's first riposte could hardly be in greater contrast: a heavy metal trio covering Paul McCartney and Wings' Jet. This is not the kind of thing I normally spend time on but I've always had a soft spot for post-Beatles McCartney (well, until the '90s) in general and the Band on the Run album in particular plus I'm big on covers that do something different with the source material. The White Swan certainly do that.

Representing Blue today we have Look Blue, Go Purple with Cactus Cat, one of the most New Zealand tunes you could ever hope to hear. They missed the cut in the Cats vs Dogs match but here they are, flying their colors (well, one of them) in finest Flying Nun style.

And the winner is... Girl In Red! Authenticity isn't entirely out of fashion, not quite yet. Round Two!

Swaggering into the ring with their inimitable indie-diy-tweerock Canadian cool, it's Cub with Flaming Red Bobsled. Cub were one of the early discoveries I made when I began trawling YouTube, back in my Jeffrey Lewis/Kimya Dawson antifolk days. Cub themselves have nothing to do with the antifolk movement, don't play anything like it and predate it by at least a decade. But, hey, personal history is personal.

Facing off against the Cub trio for White we have Tiny Magnetic Pets with Girl In A White Dress. Okay, I should say right up front, this is not a fair contest. I started this post with a mention of tropes that get my attention and this one has half a dozen of them! Size descriptors, science terms, pets, girls, color and items of clothing. Wouldn't matter if the song was no good, of course, but it's great. And it's also new, for once, recorded in late 2019. Bonus points!

What can Blue bring to the floor? Well, oddly, despite having the most in the locker, the choices aren't great. Several of the best ones I've used in previous posts so they're out. Let's have... Oh, I know... Mazzy Star doing Blue Flower on Jools Holland's show.

Mazzy Star are kind of the motherlode for this kind of slowed down fuzzpop. There's some kind of line of descent from the Velvet Underground via Cowboy Junkies but the Hope Sandoval fronted outfit would surely get their name in bold in any rock family tree.

And the winner of round two? Mazzy Star just shade it for Team Blue with Hope's lack of affect and that borrowed V.U. riff.

Third and final round! Will Red or Blue land a knockout punch or will White sneak in for a split decision and a three way tie? Let's find out...

Up now for Team Red we have the magnificently-named Care Bears On Fire with a cover of Red Lights, a tune originally performed by long-forgotten NY powerpoppers, The Marbles. Here's the original, which really isn't very good at all  - so thin... and that guitar solo! I love the glam inflection of the Care Bears version and that tempo change mid-number just kills in a way that's wholly absent in The Marbles lack of attack. Okay, maybe it can't quite stand with the Care Bears seminal Barbie, Eat A Sandwich, but what can?

Follow that, if you can, Team White. And guess what? It's another cover! Only this time it's a cover of a classic, not some mouldering oldie out of the bargain bin of time. It takes nerve to take on Grace Slick's bravura crowd-pleaser, White Rabbit, especially if you plan on doing it while playing the congas but Elephant Revival pretty much get away with it. Or do they?

Just one more to go. Could it be another classic cover? Maybe Aly Cabral Tindig's brittle rendition of the Velvet's Pale Blue Eyes, heartbreakingly performed before an uncaring coffee house crowd that never once stops gabbing? Probably not.

No, but it is another cover. A strange one. The enigmatically named Banfile, about whom I know just about as little as it's possible for one human being to know about another, gives one of Lloyd Cole's lesser tunes the deeply mannered New Romantic treatment. There aren't an awful lot of Cole covers around but the few there are tend to be heartfelt, like this.

The judges are conferring and...yes! It's a win for Care Bears On Fire as I'm sure everyone could see coming. Which means the contest overall goes to Team Red!

Thanks for coming. Please take your litter with you and drop it in the bins provided on your way out. Til next time!

Foxes And Tigers And Lions - Oh Yeah.

It's throwdown time! Foxes and Wolves vs Lions and Tigers! I said I'd do it so I'm doing it! And no-one can stop me! Bring it on!

Our opening bout features a new contender I just discovered last night. Technically that's breaking the rules. This was supposed to be a grudge match between songs already lodged in my Music folder but hey, it's there now, alright?

I ran into Baterya Fox on a link trail that started with 90s one hit wonder White Town, last seen lurking somewhere in a bedroom in the North of England, and ended in Farroupilha, a small town in  Brazil's Serra Gaúcha. I love the Internet.

I was caught by the enigmatic title, Tracy's Blue Cigarettes, which embodies three of my favorite song title tropes - a girl's name, a color and a drug. It's wonderfully ramshackle, the wavering vocal, the reckless time changes, the opaque second-language lyrics. I just love it - and that guitar player!

It's youth versus experience as France's well-regarded and highly accomplished retro-punks Sugar and Tiger bring their gallic inflection to this Ramonesesque seasonal chugger. Everything I've heard by them sounds pretty much exactly like this. If it ain't broke...

And the winner is... Baterya Fox! It means Fox Battery, by the way. I think it's a brand name, not some brutal Brazilian blood sport. At least I hope so...

Next up and while we're on the subject of youth versus experience, here's a song that's called just that. Youth, I mean. And you can't get more Fox then Foxes. This alfresco acoustic take from a wintery Brooklyn rooftop beats the studio version all hands up for my money, let alone the 26m view Adventure Club remix, although I like both of those well enough, too.

Stepping up as the voice of experience we have the professionally jaded Tiger - and you can't get more tiger than that, either, unless you go for the plural like Foxes did. There was a band called The Tigers who were big in Japan in the sixties, not all that surprising since they were Japanese. YouTube is oddly unforthcoming with footage of them and what there is I don't like much so we won't be having them today.

Tiger felt like Britpop also-rans back in the mid-90s but they sound a lot better than that now. They've aged extremely well.  I bought a couple of CD singles by them at the time but I never saw them live . I bet they were a handful.

And the winner is... Tiger! One apiece. Bring on the Lions. And the Wolves.

Finding rock bands and songs with some version of wolf in them is like finding seashells on a beach. There's just something about wolves that fits the rockstar self image. Sidestepping the obvious, here comes The Real Tuesday Weld with Me & Mr. Wolf. I think this is electro swing but don't quote me.

Lions seem far less popular with rockers than wolves. I guess all that lying around and letting the women do all the work cuts a bit too close to home. I'm not sure whatever it is that Eugene McGuiness is doing counts as "rock" anyway. Art rock, possibly. This one is called, very simply, Lion.

I found Mr McGuinness via his reverb-heavy cover of Lana del Rey's Blue Jeans. He's a moody so-and-so, that's for sure.

And the winner is... Eugene! He shades it for the dressing-up box superheroines and managing to play the wolf card in his lion song in whose lyric he makes the unconvincing claim that he was "raised by wild wolves". As opposed to being raised by those forlorn, caged wolves in the final, heartbreaking scene from Withnail and I, presumably. Oops, spoiler. Soz.

Felines take the lead. Here's the decider. Only, at this point the Lions options are starting to look a little thin. I have seven lion-related items in my folder but five of them are by Fee Lion. Since one of the others is a very embarassing piece of 1980s Italian electrodisco by P. Lion and the other's a bland, Beatlesesque piece of noughties whimsy by Paper Lions that I mostly downloaded because you don't often see a band on pogo sticks, I guess Fee Lion it has to be.

Team Wolf still have some heavy hitters on the bench. There's a cover of Charlie XCX's Boys by Wolf Alice which would wipe the floor with pretty much anything if only for that understated motif from The Cure's Boys Don't Cry the keyboard player has going on... until they kind of spoil it by blowing the whole thing wide open with a full chorus.

I could have gone with the extreme guitar pop of Wolf Girl or the legendary James King and the Lone Wolves, who recorded what was once regarded by certain people of my acquaintance as one of the best rock singles of all time, The Angels Know, but who can resist the sorely underrated Patrick Wolf, here performing possibly his best-known number, The Magic Position.

Okay, that wasn't really fair, was it? Come on, seriously, what chance did poor Fee Lion have? But the decision stands. Patrick wins and it's a tie! We'll have to go for a decider.

Here come the tigers, back with a swagger. They know they still have plenty in the locker. FFS, they haven't even brought out Tiger Trap yet. And they're not going to. Instead of the sweetest post-Shop Assistants lo-fi guitar mayhem ever recorded we're going somewhere very different: Emily Jane White's bleak, scattered Wild Tigers I Have Known.

And up against Emily it's Nottingham's You Want Fox, described by their hometown paper as "a female Royal Blood" but don't let that put you off. At first glance their overcharged, glam-inflected stomp might not seem a fit match for Emily Jane White's doom-laden piano but if there's anything bleaker than their "he's not worth it"/northern fun fair in the rain video I don't want to see it.

And the winner? Tough call. Y'know what? I can't choose. Let's call it a draw.

And I really enjoyed putting that together. I like the format and it's fun to write. There might be more of these. There will be more of these. (And the picture at the top is from Foxy Feline by The Pink Slips, who had to be removed from competition for not knowing which side they were on).