Seven Songs...

It's Friday again(as I'm writing this), another week over. Another one of those up and down weeks full of good and bad and Brie and Salami sandwiches and music and thank Christ, sunshine. Lots of sunshine. I'm rocking a serious sandal/t shirt tan. I was in the park yesterday during my lunch break, eating a sandwich, listening to music, and saw two young topless deviants, known as chavs round these parts, drinking cider and wrestling by the hedges. It was a very homoerotic, violent Larry Clark meets George Michael meets Ken Loach type scene. Not my preferred choice of sunshine/sandwich/music/relaxing in the park entertainment. Around these parts the sunshine seems to bring the scum out like rain to worms.

Anyway, over the last week I listened to a lot of music, and particular songs stuck in my brain more than others, as particular songs have a habit of doing. Roughly seven, this time around. A song for each of the last seven days! If you wanted you could put all seven songs together in order, you know, fashion a playlist. You could give it a clever name and walk around your town picturing some fictional phantasmic week that was and never was. A week full of sandwiches and goblins and sunshine and deviants and beauty and disappointment and dogs and vampires.

We start the week at the beginning, with a cover of the Godfather Theme song by Jesus Acosta and the Professionals. A seriously heavy seriously soulful seriously dirty rendition of the iconic theme. With a killer distorted guitar riff and a organ line that sounds like it's coming from deep inside your brain. It's just the kind of late 60's/early 70's world music funk I love stumbling across. The song can be found on the wonderful compilation Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up, that I really couldn't recommend enough. Any volume of the Cult Cargo series is a gold mine worth owning, but Belize City especially.

Song two, Tuesdays song, is one minute of aggression from Los Angeles' volatile girl punk band Mika Miko. Now tragically disbanded. The song is End of Time from the band's Kill Rock Star's label debut C.Y.S.L.A.B.F. The girls in the band always claimed they were best appreciated live. Additionally they also make for great park walking music. If you were so inclined and had the appropriate headphones, ideally ear buds, you could do some tumbles in the grass. Maybe punch a tree. Or the air. Or a hippy.

Next is a sublime track from a soundtrack Mile Davis recorded for a French film called Ascenseur pour l'echafaud(Lift to the scoffold). The song is called L'Assassinat De Carala. I've never seen the film and in many ways am glad for that fact. The album is the very epitome of film noir. Of 50's jazz cool. And I prefer not having any associations with the film. I want to keep it as a soundtrack to my own life. The record is drenched in atmosphere. A beautiful, sinister, melancholy timeless soundtrack. It's serious, deeply affecting music, quite separate from the rest of Davis' output around this time in the late fifties to early sixties. It doesn't fit in with his earlier bebop material or his later Kind of Blue period or his ambitious and infinitely more challenging Electric material. I'm not sure how the album sits with serious Mile Davis fans, but it's one of my favourites. Simple, elegant and moving.

The next song came on my ipod when I was in Whitby with my wife. It immediately latched onto my feet and arms, making me move them in outlandish frantic weird movements. I started laughing, going oh yeah. Feel that. And other such ridiculous statements. I assumed it was something from the seventies. Something I'd managed to avoid somehow all my life. When I got home and turned on the computer, I found out the song was called Last Bongo In Brighton(Remix) by the very contemporary, very hip hop,very English DJ Format. From his debut album Music For The Mature B-Boy. Format specializes in big beats and 70's funk breaks and anyone who likes good hip hop will dig his music.

Tom Waits appears on my ipod frequently. Over the last seven days a song from his essential album Rain Dogs played several times. Rain Dogs is the middle album of a trilogy book ended by Swordfishtrombones and Frank's Wild Year's. Coincidentally it is also the first album I ever owned by Tom Waits. I bought it from the Goodwill store in Toronto, at Coxwell and Gerrard to be specific, when I was about seventeen. Vaguely familiar with Waits at the time I was sold on the intriguing album sleeve and subsequently confused, challenged, and amazed by the music on the vinyl record. I'd never heard music like it, and hadn't even been aware you could make music like that. It sounded like carnival music from a nightmare. The song Gun Street Girl appears towards the end of the record. One of the more straight forward acoustic numbers. I'd sort of forgotten about it till this week. It's a barnstormer. A fearsome piece of songwriting. That quite frankly leaves me stunned.

The hypothetical Saturday song in this fictional musical week, loosely based on my actual real life listening experiences over the past seven days comes courtesy of The Nazz. A band I got into over the last few years, they have a straight forward satisfying psych rock sound, and were formed by Todd Rungren. The song I listened to this week is called Crowded from the band's 1968 self titled record Nazz

Our final song, Sunday's song, the song for that wonderful day of rest belongs to Mr Johnny Cash. From his album Now, There Was a Song! released in 1960. The song is the rollicking I Feel Better All Over. It was actually penned by the gambler himself, Mr Kenny Rogers. A song tailor made for Sunday drives, or Sunday mornings dancing with your girl or Sunday afternoons drinking in the backyard. The music industry did it's best during the last seven or eight years to over saturate the market with Johnny Cash, and as such I had to take a step back for a short while. But his music will never die and Cash will always be in my heart, just as he should always be in yours.