The Versions – Wake Up
The magic of strange worlds is always just a dream away. If tock music can still teach us anything in the age of the ultra-real, it is that. In fact, maybe it’s vital that we learn. In a time when every piece of news gets instantly filtered to one of the devices that you use, on average, eight days a week, there’s a good reason for giving your mind a vacation.
The other important thing that rock music can teach us, as opposed to processed pop tunes, is that people can work together to create the sonic representation of these dream worlds. It takes about eight songwriters to produce a cheesy 3-minute single for Katy Perry. It takes four people playing together in a room, reading each other’s queue to create the large, expansive sound of The Versions and the few other rock bands that are still around.
On “Wake Up,” Chilean rock band The Versions seems almost shocked by the colossal potential of their sound. It’s all built from the ground up, from one simple riff that keeps coming back again and again like some distorted guitar mantra. That’s the thread that the four musicians use to guide them. “Wake Up” doesn’t sound processed. Indeed, it almost sounds as if it was played live. It is as if it could’ve only happened in that instant despite creating a portal to an imaginary world that will now be open forever.
Tom DiCillo – Shot of Blue
Unless you are lucky to live atop of a mountain out in Tierra del Fuego, or on some remote beach that nobody has turned into a Summer paradise for English hooligans, you see a lot of faces every day. In fact, you see so many faces, and so many advertisements, that you brain, smart as it is, has learned to turn off notifications. You don’t notice most of them anymore and that’s for the best.
But there are some characters worth keeping an eye on. It’s just because they might attempt to do something strange, like lift your wallet. It’s because their possess a certain restless energy that makes them more entertaining to watch than most things are thrown up by Netflix. Worse still for those prone to acts of jealousy, these people are usually as fascinating in just about any of their endevors.
Tom DeCillo is a vintage kind of character,a weirdo artist worth keeping an eye on, parth Mink DeVille, and part Keith Richard. He is best known for his involvement in movie pictures. But he’s known to bring the same kind of twitchy, restless energy to music making. “Shot of Blue” is classy, but not polite. It’s a song about the blues looking to crash you into dust. It’s well-written, nicely arranged, and just a bit lo-fi sounding to convince you that none of the devilish figures involved with commercial pop music have got their hands on this.
