Sirenexiv Cola II

"Sneaky Like a Fiery Fox"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Sometimes a volume II consists of all the songs that just wouldn’t fit on volume I.  But sometimes it’s just that certain artists were so good that they had multiple candidates, and I was working very hard to restrain myself from including them all.  That latter case sums up Sirenexiv Cola pretty well: there’s yet another brilliant opener from KT Tunstall—”(Still a) Weirdo,” in fact, includes the brilliant line “Optimisitc, but never quite elegant,” which came very close to being our volume title—and the promised inclusion of alt-radio favorite “Polyester Bridge” by Liz Phair.  The Sundays and the Katydids are back; the former provide the gorgeous “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” another alt-radio favorite and quite possibly my introduction to the London band; the latter give us a slightly less folky take than last volume with “Don’t Think Twice.” And, speaking of folky, you know I had more from folks like Feist and Regina Spektor and the inimitable Tori Amos.  For Feist, the album that immediately precedes the one with her breakout hit “1234” (which was featured last volume) is Let It Die, which features her first charted single, “Mushaboom.” It’s a sweet pop gem which sweeps us into the middle stretch of this volume.  As for the Russian-born NYC-raised Spektor, “Fidelity” was her first song to chart in the US, and features some beautiful musical hijinx, such as pairing pizzicato string work with some glottal stops and stretching the word “heart” into a dozen or more syllables; it’s pretty breathtaking.  And, while I still maintain that Tori Amos’ debut Little Earthquakes is the most brilliant album of her career, “Caught a Lite Sneeze” is probably the first of her singles that I really enjoyed after that initial infatuation.  It’s somehow both dreamy and poppy, ethereal but with a strong beat.  Definitely a classic.

But that’s not the extent of our returning artists—in fact, it’s perhaps only as I’m writing this blog post that I realize how much throughline there really is in terms of the vocalists.  Bella Ruse is back with “Hold Me Close,” a spare acoustic anti-folk ballad that develops into a dreampop synth wash; its’s somehow hopeful and melancholy all at once.  We hear once again from Beth Quist; the swooping vocals of “Goodbye” show off why she’s part of Bobby McFerrin’s “Voicestra.” There’s another Meaghan Smith tune, “Poor,” which shows off her ability to start out slow and build to something beautiful.  And, on the harder side of this mix, I once again come back to Swedish powerpop star Lykke Li, with “Dance, Dance, Dance,” and P!nk, with “Stupid Girls.” The former was never a hit, but it is off Li’s first, best album (Youth Novels), and it showcases her ability to blend a lot of different instruments and styles into a coherent whole.  The latter was a fairly big hit for P!nk (#13 in the US; #4 in the UK) and contains a lot of typically smart lyrics such as “What happened to the dream of a girl president? She’s dancing in the video next to 50 Cent” and laments “where oh where have the smart people gone?” And it still manages to be a banger, of course.

Still, we must have new blood to keep a mix fresh.  One of the things I realized when putting together volume II was that I had failed to include the incomparable Suzanne Vega.  And, while normally my go-to Vega album is 99.9F°, there’s also much to be said for her follow-up Nine Objects of Desire.  And I just felt like “No Cheap Thrill,” a little more upbeat than most of her œuvre, worked best as our penultimate track.  It’s got that slinky vibe that I featured on Slithy Toves I (speficially, “Caramel”), but a bit more of a pop vibe, with catchy lyrics that compare a relationship to playing poker.

It also felt a little weird that I hadn’t included anything off Fur and Gold.  The brilliant debut of British vocalist Bat for Lashes has provided tracks for Porchwell Firetime I, Slithy Toves I, Darkling Embrace I, and Wisty Mysteria II, but this mix was really tailor-made for her.  “The Wizard” was her first single and, though it didn’t chart, it’s really a great, dreamy track that works quite well here.  I also thought to return to the smokier voice of Chrissy Amphlett and Divinyls; “Heart Telegraph” really lets Amphlett’s pipes shine, and I think it transcends the mid-80s new wave that it also indelibly evokes.  (Last we saw Ampheltt—on Totally Different Head I—I noted that she died fairly young.  Since then, I’ve actually passed her age at the time she died, so it hits even harder for me now.)

Of course, I’ve also just plain discovered some new bands since I started this mix.  A former coworker of mine introduced me to a bunch of new music, from his favorite obscure subgenre (Italo-disco) to just stuff he knew because he was much younger than I.  And sometimes he would have tenuous personal connections to a band: I believe he knew the Dum Dum Girls (who are indeed from our native LA) because an ex-girlfriend was close friends with one of the members.  Or something like that.  But he threw up one of their songs onto our big screen that we used to play “push songs” and I was mightily impressed.  “Caught in One” is my pick for their first appearance here: while they can often be a bit shoegaze-y, this tune is more jangle-pop, with Dee Dee’s powerful vocals singing about the loss of her mother (“Death is on the telephone / I lie and say she isn’t home”).  It’s a great tune.

Another major discovery was Lucius, whose Wildewoman was nearly as exciting a discovery as Tiger Suit, which is what arguably kicked off this mix in the first place.  This indie pop four-piece from Brooklyn features two harmonic female vocalists.  Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig are not related, but they tend to dress alike and wear their hair in similar styles, so you could be forgiven for thinking they were sisters.  The title track off this amazing album is a bit of a revelation; Wolfe and Laessig do that thing they do so well where they alternative between harmonizing and singing in a round-like style, and it includes great lyrics such as our volume title, as well as the chorus:

She’s gonna find another way back home,
It’s written in her blood; oh, it’s written in her bones.
Yeah, she’s ripping out the pages in your book.
...
Yeah, she’ll only be bound by the things she chooses.

Sublime.

Sirenexiv Cola II
[ Sneaky Like a Fiery Fox ]

“(Still a) Weirdo” by KT Tunstall, off Tiger Suit
“Stupid Girls” by P!nk, off I'm Not Dead
“Caught a Lite Sneeze” by Tori Amos, off Boys for Pele
“The Wizard” by Bat for Lashes, off Fur and Gold
“Dance, Dance, Dance” by Lykke Li, off Youth Novels
“Goodbye” by Beth Quist, off Lucidity
“Mushaboom” by Feist, off Let It Die
“Poor” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“You and Me” by Sara Watkins, off Sun Midnight Sun
“Hold Me Close” by Bella Ruse, off Bella Ruse [EP]
“Wildewoman” by Lucius, off Wildewoman
“Fidelity” by Regina Spektor, off Begin to Hope
“I Say Nothing” by Voice of the Beehive, off Let It Bee
“Caught in One” by Dum Dum Girls, off Only in Dreams
“The Gold Medal” by the Donnas, off Gold Medal
“Here's Where the Story Ends” by the Sundays, off Reading, Writing and Arithmetic
“Polyester Bride” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Don't Think Twice” by Katydids, off Shangri-La
“No Cheap Thrill” by Suzanne Vega, off Nine Objects of Desire
“Heart Telegraph” by Divinyls, off What a Life

Total:  20 tracks,  74:45

There’s nothing too surprising here, though there are a few obscure tracks.  Voice of the Beehive was a group comprised of two sisters from California who formed a band in London that included a couple former members of Madness.  Let It Bee is fairly typical for the late 80s, though it does include a few quite clever songs such as “There’s a Barbarian in the Back of My Car” and “Sorrow Floats” (the problem with trying to drown your sorrows, of course).  But I’ve always had a soft spot for “I Say Nothing,” their second single but first to chart (in the UK and Australia only, although they reissued it the following year and it made it to #11 on the US alternative charts), which contains the brilliant line “That’s why I drink: so I’ll be who they think I am.” It’s a bit of 80s-style poppiness that’s hard not to like.

Now, the Donnas might be a little surprising: they’re typically hard rockers in the same vein as the Runaways or Sleater-Kinney, so you might them more suited for something like Distaff Attitude (and I’ve no doubt we’ll see them there eventually).  But in their calmer moments (which still aren’t all that calm), they put out some tunes that work well here.  One of which is “The Gold Medal,” which is a surprisingly non-aggressive song about leaving someone who can’t appreciate you.  Brett Anderson (a.k.a. Donna A) has the perfect, apathetic vocal take on this song, and it’s kind of perfect coming off the Dum Dum Girls and setting up the Sundays for the quieter back third.

And that just leaves me with perhaps the most unlikely artist of all—or at least unlikely that I would own an album of hers.  I first heard Sara Watkins on A Prairie Home Companion, and at first I was convinced that she was way too country for me ... I mean, she started off playing fiddle for a “progressive bluegrass” band, of all things!  But there’s just something about her voice, and I do appreciate a fiddle, especially when it’s not particularly country-fied.  Now, her album Sun Midnight Sun does contain a few tracks which are entirely too country to be tolerated, but many—and in particular “You and Me”—are just gorgeous alt-country tunes.  Powered primarily by what I suspect is a mandolin, with perhaps a few touches of steel guitar and surprisingly little (if any) actual fiddle, “You and Me” is too perfectly apt for this mix for me to ignore it just for the sin of appearing on an album with a few other songs I can’t particularly appreciate.  So here it sits, and I’m pretty happy with my decision.

Next time ... well, Hallowe’en is coming up.  Maybe we’ll find some tunes that would work well for that.

⇐ Sirenexiv Cola I

Sirenexiv Cola III ⇒