
Low Tide Levee – Rules of the Game
Genre: Progressive Rock, Psychedelic Rock
People must surely care a lot about singing and poetry. If they didn’t, they would be as energized by the prospect of criticizing someone for singing or writing words in a way that doesn’t suit their standard. Who knew there were so many art lovers in the world?
In fact, they design whole television shows for it. These monstrosities tend to function both as vehicles for folks with wonderful karaoke abilities and as a way to mock those that can’t deliver vocal phrases like their favorite singers.
This all has an effect on the quality of record collections. With so much pressure to fit in, singers and songwriters opt for the easiest route. They opt to copy more famous musicians. That’s if they end up doing anything at all since so many get frightened off by the critics.
Low Tide Levee’s Rules of the Game is a marvelous creation, in part because it allows itself to break convention when it comes to singing and the lyrics being sung. It’s a childish love song. And it requires a good deal of musical knowledge to be put together this convincingly. It might not make it on one of those fancy shows, but that goes to shows just how terrible those are.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Do You Believe Her
Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Garage Rock
Some things are best appreciated in the absence or when less is revealed than could be. Rock n’ roll often works that way. The potential is usually much more important than the results. Those who really win aren’t the ones that score the winning point, but the ones that could have.
Danish duo The Raveonettes underground notoriety upon their first releases in the 1990s. They had a punk attitude and sound built upon the melodic but sonically dissonant sound of The Velvet Underground and Jesus and Mary Chain. They dressed cool and looked like they spent their spare time studying existentialism and Freen Nouvelle Vague.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre is a band cut from a similar cloth. Contemporaries have showered Anton Newcombe with affection and stories about the psych-rock band’s bohemian lifestyle pepper articles written about them.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre covering The Raveonettes’ Do You Believe Her is so fitting that one could easily mistake it for an early BJM composition. The performance is showered in Psychocandy-like feedback, pretty 60s melodies, and retro cool.
It can be found on the interesting tribute The Raveonettes record that also includes a cover by Dave Gahan and The Black Angels.