Jens Lekman– Tram #7 To Heaven, [When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog]

I know this comes a little late after my review of Lekman’s album, but more people need to hear this song. It’s the little things that elevate Lekman above most of his peers (I love the way he sings “Fifteen heart attacks / Later” here, for example), but unlike some of the subtler songs on When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog this one demanded my attention. This was, mind you, partly because I’d kind of tuned out the song after the first minute, and so when it finally collapses upwards into a wintry blast of strings and some harp my awareness was rather forcibly redirected to the music. You won’t get the same surprise, of course, but this is still a thing of utter exquisiteness, and the first time in ages that I’ve heard something that sounds like lo fidelity was a genuine aesthetic choice.

[visit Jens Lekman’s website here, buy When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog here, read Ian’s Stylus review here]

REM– Electron Blue, [Around The Sun]

I admit to being the guy who actually likes some latter-day REM. Both New Adventures In Hi Fi and Up are great, although I’ll admit both Reveal and this record are pretty weak. But “Electron Blue” is both good and strangely depressing. If you’d played it for an REM fan back in the Murmur days (or hell, even in the Monster ones) they absolutely wouldn’t believe you that this was the same band. It’s atmospheric as all get out, driven by a repetitive piano figure, softly burbling beats and miles of becalmed ambience. But, as Josh Love correctly pointed out in his on-point review (I think all we disagree about is the worth of this song), what makes it work is the ache in Michael Stipe’s voice. REM may have become a pretty lackluster band, but he’s still an awfully great vocalist. The lyrics here are basically gibberish, but Stipe’s phrasing is brilliant. The way he sings “You / You know how to run” may be almost parodically Stipe-ish, but it works nonetheless. What could easily have been boring becomes stately.

[visit REM’s website here, buy Around the Sun here, read Josh Love’s Stylus review here]

Radiohead– Morning Bell/Amnesiac, [Amnesiac]

Oddly enough, Alfred Soto and I dislike Amnesiac for completely different reasons. I like the band, I think their sense of humour and etc. get overlooked at times (and rightly so, since they’re pretty hard to notice unless you posit their existence and work backwards from there, but I do think they have one), but the album still leaves me cold. I think his metaphor comparing the album to an aloof object of affection is pretty apposite. Still, no matter how much I like most of the album as individual songs, the collective impact of the album is pretty much lost on me. I don’t like listening to the whole thing at once. I don’t think it’s impenetrable, just poorly sequenced.

Still, even Alfred admits there’s a few moments of beauty, and of those I’d like to highlight the reworking of Kid A’s “Morning Bell”. Where the original was perhaps a bit too sleek for its own good (as on much of Kid A, Thom Yorke sounds trapped inside the music), “Morning Bell/Amnesiac” is exquisitely crushed. Even the softly chiming backdrop sounds more human, and Yorke responds by singing the same words as before, only with sadness rather than angst. I’m glad both versions were released, they seem like necessary opposites to me, but this version is maybe the only example on Amnesiac where the music presents a less than forbidding front; even the gorgeous “Pyramid Song” is too chilly to touch.

[visit Radiohead’s website here, buy Amesiac here, read Alfred Soto’s On Second Thought feature here]