Pearl Future (i cannot stop listening to this song)

Pearl Future – Shop Song
Pearl Future – Shop Song

So I'm not sure why I know this song. I think it was Popjustice's song of the day a few weeks ago… apparently Pearl Future is one of the millions of pop singers who are trying to make it through Myspace, and they usually sing over generic pop songs made by a low-rate producer trying to create a marketable gimmick. Pearl Future has 15,000 Myspace friends, and I have no idea if that's good or bad, but she doesn't have a Wikipedia entry and it's impossible to find much info on her, so I'll assume her career hasn't really "taken off" yet.

The point is, I WANT IT TO. This is the first song I'm just gonna get 10000% behind, I'm gonna gush about it until it's a Top 40 hit. I think this is actually my favorite song of the year so far. It's so good, and it'll never be popular because it's a song about shopping and we're in a fucking depression. They're apparently angling it for a summer release, so I'm thinking there's a small chance this song was commissioned by Obama to help people do the right thing with their stimulus money. Also, this is like one of two places you can actually download this song in its entirety. Listen to it. Love it. I'm going to hype it up as much as all the movie blogs hyped up Slumdog and I am going to win this song an Oscar.

"Shop Song" by Pearl Future, ordered from best parts to worst parts:
1. Organ!!
2. Percussion! thump-CLAP thump-CLAP. Absolutely perfect.
3. Pearl's singing/vocals. She's really fantastic.
4. The dinkly little synth popping around in the back.
5. The lyrical content of the song.
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252. The lyrical content of the song.
253. It's pitch-perfect timing. EVERYONE IS GOING TO HATE YOU


BONUS REDEPRESSION MUSIC
Stone Road – Fuck the Re-Depression
[via captain is dead]

Reposting dis

Blogger keeps kicking my butt about this entry, so I'm reposting it without the Veronicas song. I guess if you wanna hear it, just turn on your radio, or search hypey, or search youtube (don't search youtube), or search imeem, or any of the millions of other places you can hear it for free.
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So, every year around Christmastime, I go on a binge and read as many "best songs of the year" lists as I can. Honestly, this is where the majority of my musical discoveries come from in a given year. It's like waiting for Oscar season, right? Because of this, I find a lot of songs that I would've included in my own list, had I heard them a long time ago. Here are some of those songs.

Also, yes, we will spend the rest of 2k9 discussing the best songs of 2k8. 2k9 songs will come in 2k10.


The Veronicas – Untouched
mp3

It's kind of creepy that The Veronicas seem to be exclusively marketed to tweens as a teen band, even though they're like 24 and this song is about fucking.

It's SO GOOD THOUGH

Ignore the verses. Most of the verses. "I go ooh-ooh you go ah-ah" might perhaps be the nadir of Australian civilization… but, admittedly, I love the moments in which both the girls harmonize the speak-singing and use full syllables, almost too quickly for the beat.

The point though, is that guitar. That beautiful, slimy guitar in the chorus, which barely even sounds like a guitar and I'm not sure if it's actually changing chords or what. What a strangely ballsy move for a song like this. You can tell it's a song that's trying to pop-ify the Evanescence sound for a "wider" market, but with that guitar juxtaposed with the Veronicas' vocals, it ends up being much heavier than anything any nu-metal band can ever write ever.

The vocals are the second-greatest thing about this, particularly when Veronica #1 joins Veronica #2 in the repetition of the chorus, and her voice piques up into a yelp during "right NOW" and "someHOW." And then there's the Young Turks synth and the gump-ass grimy synth and whatever more synth that I just haven't heard yet. And then there's the strings. And a million other things that make this song so unbelievably worth it if you have it in you to get past that first verse.


The Mae Shi – Run to Your Grave
The Mae Shi – Run to Your Grave

The Mae Shi is an "experimental punk" band according to Wikipedia, and I'll use that definition because I like them too much to call them indie. "Noise" fits too, even though they aren't really noise. They wrote a "religious album" called HLLLYH which is pretty much the most typical name you can expect for a religious album by an LA noise band.

I actually spent a tediously long time trying to figure out what "religious album" meant. Is it gospel or anti-religion or is it just about religion? Which begs the question of religion's place in the alternative world, whether the idea of a god is accepted or rejected in that environment. The lyrics here are, on the surface, extreme gospel. But it's the fact that The Mae Shi have been so warmly accepted by the hipster/alt community that made me wonder if the band is generally interpreted as being ironic. And every review would pretty much begin and end with "religious album about religion."

But I guess that's just it. The quality of these lyrics, what makes them so damn intriguing is the fact that it's ambiguous, that it seems to be simultaneously wary and celebratory, praising the great and despairing over the bad.

This song confronts death with the most serious of tenors, and the whole thing is sung with such gleeful choir sensibilities. The vocalizations of the verses have such consistency, and the weight of the lyrics is never really expressed. To someone who tends to gloss over lyrical content, this song probably just sounds really, really happy.

And emotion is a simple test to the synapse
Don't let it fool you into thinking that you got brains
The more you feel the more you will take with you
So cut the flesh and let your blood flow to the drain

It's all in the delivery. This song is happy, it is celebrating these ideas because goddamn, you just can't deny such a genuine glee. But instead of irony, it's painted with an undertone of fear and uncertainty. And it's one of the most emotionally-engaging songs I've heard this year.

This song also has many instruments; in this entry I will

EXCLUSIVE GRAMMYS COVERAGE