Music has a funny way of pulling at your heart, poking and prodding at the lumpy bumpy memory section in your grey matter.All the songs this week are a bit rockin, while still strangely mellow. Mostly made up of obscure-ish and dark 80s and 90s, it's night-driving music of the highest order. Imagine glinting evening sun as you drive along the Jersey Turnpike, hand out the window catching the breeze. You're sticky, and your lips are salty. By the time you get to the Manhattan Bridge heading into Brooklyn it's dark and the city is glinting, and the Twin Towers are still there because it's 1999.
Listen straight away in the player here:
To download the enhanced .m4a file complete with artwork and links right-click here: Friday Mixtape #16
You can also download the mp3 version by visting the sister site: http://loveactionmixtape.blogspot.com
Eh? Well, the clutch of songs I've chosen for this week are perhaps a bit gratuitous for me as they're nostalgic and romantic and passionate in a completely personal way. I accidentally came across a song or two which sent me straight into an emotional time warp of around 10 years - I can't explain it other than feeling like a piece of my heart I'd forgotten existed had fallen out into my clutching hands. I became desperate to re-visit those crazy, exciting feelings of discovery and first-time freedoms.
Perhaps I can illustrate in my clumsy way: I was 20, in film school, living in Brooklyn. It was a hot sticky summer, my then-boyfriend and I were obsessed with music, more specifically early Factory & Postcard Records and general post punk. All my friends and flatmates were obsessed with films and photography and music and art. We were all in bands with each other and recorded ourselves in the NYU recording studios as school projects, and played one-off gigs in tiny bars to an audience of three. We all worked on each others 16mm films. We drove to the Jersey Shore and shot super-8 films and got sun-burned and would go into decrepit "Package Stores" to buy beer because we weren't old enough to buy it legally despite our weird miniature adult minds and bodies. We lived in obscenely hot and sweaty apartments filled with cast-off furniture and milk crates, with walls covered in posters and postcards and books and records and VHS tapes. I had no interest in current music, I obsessively bought 80s vinyl or stole them from the WNYU radio station where I had my own weekly show... Myself and the boyfriend would frequent Dick's Bar on 2nd Ave in the hopes to look at Stephin Merritt. Those hot sweaty summers were awful and wonderful and amazing.
This playlist doesn't really quite capture it completely, but The Names song comes pretty close, as does the Magnetic Fields.
Included in the playlist this week is:
1. A Gentle Sound - The Railway Children
2. Fleeting Moments - Pocketbooks
3. Everyday Should Be A Holiday - The Dandy Warhols
4. Talking Words - Darker My Love
5. Peekaboo - Siouxsie & the Banshees
6. 1st Rhapsody for Knives, Forks & Spoons - The Central High School Cafeteria Band
7. Life By The Sea - The Names
8. Let's Make Some Plans - Close Lobsters
9. Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now - The Smiths
10. Absolutely Cuckoo - The Magnetic Fields
Down here you can buy most of the featured tracks... all but the Close Lobsters, who are possibly a bit obscure, but you can purchase the CD via Amazon Marketplace. Also, anyone who is a fan of vinyl, and the Smiths, they have re-issued a good number of their albums. If you live in Dublin I highly recommend heading down to Road Records to get your hands on these babies along with some other hidden gems that stacked among their shelves.
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