Carousel Rogues – Pete Gets Happy
For all the effort needed to build up rock musicians into folk heroes, the music industry sure tends to forget a lot of its most talented practitioners at the time when they’re creating their most compelling work.
It takes a kind of golden ear to start a good power-pop band and something even more special to become one of the all-time greats. Of these, nobody quite managed to synthesize the sound of 60s melodies in a form quite as pure as Fountains of Wayne’s Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger. The music industry, for the most part, honoured their one hit and not much more. Others, however, remain in awe at the shared musical gift of this group.
Carousel Rogues have been clearly listening to a lot of Fountains of Wayne. Their desire to make their own version of this beautiful sound wouldn’t mean much had the Carousel’s group members not acquired the sophisticated knowledge required to pull this off.
Pete Gets Happy is a humorous, quirky, excellently sung, and orchestrated tune that brings to mind the sunniest of melodies from power-pop’s heavyweights.
Sarah King – Not Worth the Whisky
People insist on calling rock “the devil’s music”. Well, even the devil loses some of his cool as time marches on. No longer seen as a forced to be reckoned with or guarded against, rock is about as present in the mainstream consciousness as a veteran actor showing up for a cameo in a Marvel movie. And, when rock gets nasty, it gets cancelled.
The blues hasn’t quite been in the public eye as much since mop-topped Brits insisted on robbing the three Kings of their riffs. However, the blues have always had an advantage in carving out an image of sitting in bed with the scoundrel who shall not be named.
The original blues standards are filled with imagery about hellhounds, selling souls at the crossroads, poisoned whiskey. Sarah King dials into that frequency for the murder-ballad of Not Worth the Whisky. Slow-paced and expertly crafted, the tune is just waiting to be plucked for a major television drama, the one place where the devil has remained as in vogue as always.
