Alberta & The Dead Eyes – So Cool
Similar artists: Fleetwood Mac, Amy Winehouse, The Stooges
Genre: Blues, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock
Hearing a great pop song is a simple pleasure. It’s equally as pleasant to watch a highly attractive person walk by, to drive an expensive sports car, or to visit an exotic location for the first time. All of these things toy with our expectations. All of them promise marvelous things that we haven’t experienced before. And most of these things, if fully experienced, leave us unsatisfied.
Pop songs can’t afford that last part of the deal. Not only that, but they only have a slim window of a couple of minutes in which to get listeners to experience that sort of magic. Not only that, but by the time the two minutes are up, audiences must feel like there’s still something missing in their lives and will want to play the song again.
Alberta & The Dead Eyes’ “So Cool” could be a sultry love song, or it could just as well be a tune about the difficult-to-explain allure of rock n’ roll. At the heart of it lies a groove that resembles the steps of a reptile crawling out of the Sun and into the shade. It’s a song meant to play on listeners’ instincts. And, if Alberta & The Dead Eyes have done their job well, you may feel inclined to play the song back as soon as it’s ended.
Miss Lonely – Frankenstein Valentine
Similar artists: Pixies, The Breeders, The Velvet Underground, Sleater-Kinney
Genre: Lo-fi Rock, Indie Rock, Garage Rock
Damn, you would’ve thought those rockstar haircuts would’ve peaked back in the 1980s. And, you would naturally assume that clothes wouldn’t get sillier or more colorful than those worn by the original MTV pop stars. But your assumption would be dead wrong. In fact, had you wagered any money on this, you would’ve lost it all.
Fashion is more important than ever when it comes to selling music. And the performers have turned the pop presentation into a complex art form. That’s all fine and entertaining, sure. But where are the bizarre musicians, the weirdos, the people who can’t adapt to the real world and need to write songs about instead? That’s who I am expecting to deliver the really important songs.
Miss Lonely’s “Frankenstein Valentine” may remind you of the first time that you heard Pixies (preferably one of the songs sung by Kim Deal). It’s similarly strange and easy on the ears. It somehow feels odd that someone would write a poem about matters of the heart quite in this way. And it seems even weirder that the poem would then become a pop song. But it did, and it’s a great listening experience.
