Around the world in 151 minutes with Zach Condon. (Photo Couresty of lastfm.com)
Remember sitting through world history in high school, thumbing through your chalky, fat textbook, hundreds of maps and highlighted facts staring back at you dauntingly, demanding your recollection? Well, listening to Zach Condon’s musical force known as Beirut is kind of like the sonic equivalent of that, minus all the wars, plagues and the Brits plundering the shit out of pretty much everything.
Allow me to elaborate.
The instrumentation of Beirut is, simply put, quite genius. It hearkens back to classical music genres from around the world that have been traded in these days for poppy synths and crunchy guitar riffs.
It’s every indie boy’s wet dream: Standing in an elevator in your plaid shirt and slim-cut cardigan with the Smiths playing in your headphones. A cute, hipster girl with a blue dress and even bluer eyes steps in, smiles shyly. Then starts singing along.
Of course the scene’s in indie darling (500) Days of Summer, which was a very, very clever move on the filmmaker’s part. The 1986 anthem of wretchedly morbid love (“If a double-decker bus crashes into us / To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die”) slips easily into today’s indie love anthems, with the added indie brownie point of a slightly “vintage” time period.
Real Smiths fans may be incensed at the song’s relative popularity–it’s quite easily the most-covered Smiths song–but, as they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
With that in mind, revive your love for this classic ode with a few cover samples. The Lucksmiths’ is easy and breezy, The Divine Comedy’s channels some serious Magnetic Fields, which is grand, lugubrious and just a bit beautiful. And Erlend Oye’s house-dance cover adds a new twist to the idea of a light that never goes out–the lights on the dance floor, baby.
The Smiths – There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (download)
The Lucksmiths – There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (Smiths cover) (download)
The Divine Comedy – There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (Smiths cover) (download)
Influencing Fatboy Slim, The Crystal Method, Daft Punk and even Kasabian along the way, The Chemical Brothers have singlehandedly (actually doublehandedly) changed electronic music. Starting with Dig Your Own Hole, their last five albums have all reached number one on the UK album charts, and although many die hard fans might disagree, I think their 1999 album, Surrender, is the one most worth taking another look at.
Although most of their newer work is too repetitive and discordant for me, I got my hands on a copy of Surrender when both my musical intuition and I were in adolescence. I am unsure how I originally got the album, but I managed to lose the CD for a few years after being slightly obsessed with it. Luckily, I remembered the album again in high school, when the easiest way to get music was to rip CDs from the public library. My memory served me well, and “Music: Response,” “Under the Influence,” and “Let Forever Be” were once again regulars in my playlists.
Ok. This one may be a bit of a cop out, but hey, it’s a new decade.
Late-ninties band Ozma, released “Restart” on the last album before their 2004 break-up, Spending Time on the Borderline. Building a cult following for their keyboard-heavy nerd rock, Ozma cut an interesting figure in the alternative landscape opening for the likes of Weezer and Rilo Kiley by the early 2000s.
“Restart” represents the band’s first attempts to distance themselves from their fun power pop, in an exploration of deeper material. Yet, despite the seriousness of the lyrical content, the band reverts back to its video game tendencies as the lead singer longs for a real life reset button.
Who are Simon and Garfunkel? One guitar, one fro, two voices. They’re tossed around in reviews as “inspirations” for bands like Turin Brakes and Kings of Convenience. Sure, like Kings (and many others), they’re a mostly mellow duo known for intertwining vocal harmonies, ballads, and acoustic-poetic melodies. But to reduce them to an oldies-comparison for newcomers is a shame.
Sure, their music hearkens to an earlier time — to movies like The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman was much younger and just as short — and some of their peace ballads are definitely dated to the Vietnam era. But either for basic cultural knowledge or just to enjoy plain good music (and seriously excellent lyrics), familiarize yourself with these guys.
Their big hitters — “Sound of Silence,” “Homeward Bound,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water” — are famous for a reason. But a few lesser-known gems are worth a listen, especially if bands today are still emulating their sound.
“The Only Living Boy in New York”: Okay, hipsters will recognize this as the song that plays in Garden State when the main trio, dressed in trashbags to combat the pouring rain, are yelling into the abyss from atop a bulldozer. But when Art G-funkalicious croons, “I can gather all the news I need from the weather report / Hey, I’ve got nothing to do today but smile,” you just want to forget all your trivial worries and gather daisies for a while.
“Cecilia”: Just so that you can know what How I Met Your Mother is talking about when Marshall shows this graph.
“Bleecker Street”: Probably closest to the style you’d hear imitated today. Sweet, delicate, and worthwhile. “I saw a shadow / Touch a shadow’s hand / On Bleecker Street.”
“Mrs. Robinson”: Come on, it’s about a promiscuous MILF. Even Weezer covered it.
– Ellen
Simon and Garfunkel – The Only Living Boy in New York (download)
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