DERNIER INVENTAIRE AVANT FIN DU MONDE

If the world ends tonight, I wanna be listening to Dion when it happens.

Or I'll settle for Nick Cave.

SCHMINGO

I REMEMBER NILSSON

ALL NIGHT

THAT SUMMER FEELING

MOVING ME

So like I said, JULEE CRUISE hits me where I live, in my home, in my bedroon, where my wife sleeps, where my children come and play with their toys. FLOATING INTO THE NIGHT sounds like a marketing person from Warner Brothers scanned my brain, my heart, and my soul, to create an album tailor-made for my tastes. And o I wrote that every time I play it, when it's over I have to either play it again or sit in silence cos there is nothing else like it. For a while there I had forgotten that she actually has another album, and that it's just as good.

FLOATING INTO THE NIGHT

Some albums grab me in such a way that when they're over, I can only play them again cos there's no other like them.
But JULEE CRUISE's FLOATING INTO THE NIGHT moves me in such a way that when a side is over, I have to play it again before flipping it.

THAT SHIT NEVER GETS OLD

(no pun intended)

GREG MOTHERFUCKIN ASHLEY

I've never seen The Mirrors live, and that will forever be one of my big regrets.

STEVIE

PERUANO

It was in Greece of all places that I discovered this Peruvian tune.

FOR SCHOOL

Two cool, rare Neil Young sides.

A YOUNG TIM BLAKE

ELOVEE-EE

LATE SUMMER

RETURN TO HELL

My friend Romain TURZI turned me on to this song earlier today.

THE THREAD WILL BE TORN

It's been twenty years.

THERE AIN'T NO CURE

THE GLIMMER TWINS OF YACHT ROCK

WHO ARE YOU?

I DON'T WANNA DIE, I WANNA LIVE

WEEKEND FIND

A record I bought this weekend.

WHO LOVES THE SUN

After several days with GO KART MOZART's new album, I've decided on which new song is my favorite:

TEARS IN MY EYES

COMPLETE KEVIN ROWLAND OBSESSION

SALVATION

Jesus, ever since One Day was released, I've been revisiting the Dexys' catalogue (all three of them albums) and hardly any other record has been on my decks for weeks.

FROM DAWN TILL DUSK

KEY CHANGE TASTIC

IT'S A PARLIAFUNKADELICMENT THANG

THE GREATEST

I've always loved this record and never even got what's supposed to be wrong with it. Well, it was 1999, everything was supposed to be done "ironically", cynicism was seen as something cool, I guess no one had time for something so 100% serious.

THE CITY WITH A SMILE

So LAWRENCE is back with a new album, and at the same time, so is the other enfant terrible of Birmingham, KEVIN ROWLAND. In fact he reunited the DEXYS (sortof) and released their first album since Don't Stand Me Down. Now the musics sounds a lot like AL GREEN, but this voice is what I'd been missing. 

LAWRENCE IS BACK

GO-KART MOZART have a new album out!
I've found this video, I'm embedding it and naming it song of the year. Disclaimer: I haven't listened to it yet.

BOREDOM

One of the best French songs ever made?

Renaud - Mimi l'ennui Vidéo gotti57 sélectionnée dans Musique

HEARTBREAK

POW!

Two completely unrelated tracks, one of them is French and a classic.

LONELINESS

TEARDROPS

LUCKY!

Another weekend, another find.
This year apparently my luck is in Italian soundtracks. And I found one I'd been looking for since 1998, when I first saw this incredible Ettore Scola movie with an unforgettable score by Armando Trovaioli.

L'AMOUR ET LA MUSIQUE

"Aimer c'est donner... et les gens prennent."

IRRADIE

L'ITALIE

Springtime, that time of year when people empty their basement and sell LPs in the streets for a handful of Euros... Here's last weekend top finds:

DION

LOVE

I LOVE YOU PASSIONATELY

Several months ago, I rapped about CHASSOL's then forthcoming album, calling it my "most anticipated release of 2012". And now it's been with me for several weeks, and goddamn it, this fucker delivers! I've been listening to that album X-PIANOS pretty much non-stop.
When every song on an album is conceptual, and genuinely beautiful, and completely trippy, all at the same sweet time, well to me it's like Christmas and my birthday all at once.
Among a million other brilliant ideas, the album almost opens with a harmonization of poet GHERASIM LUCA's stuttering Passionnément. Here's the orginial: And now here's LA NEGACRA.

WEEKEND FIND

I found this 7" in a yard sale this weekend. Don't ask me no details about it, I can't find many.
The Internet tells me Leila Fateh, mostly known as Line Monty, is an Algerian Jew, and one of the divas of chaâbi. She's apparently extremely famous in North Africa, I for one had never heard of her, but obviously something that beautiful can't be unknown:

SUPER STUPID

No no, no no no no, no no no no, no no, there's no limit.

ALEX LIVES

My friend DJ SLO sent me an amazing link: a 1977 ALEX CHILTON live show. The funny thing is this show was uploaded, not by Chilton fans but by dBs fans, because part of his live band is made up of members of the dBs (if you have no idea who THE dB's are, check out THIS ONE SONG for starters.)
This set is sortof a dream come true. First of, it doesn't sound horrible by audience-recording standards. Then, it's from 1977, right in the period some call Alex Chilton's Lost Decade (I call it his prime). It features some BIG STAR tunes (including Look My Way and O My Soul!), and some then-unreleased tunes from the then-upcoming albums I love so much, Bach's Bottom and Flies.
Also, as always, it features some out-there choices of covers; remember that 1975 radio show during which Chilton covered Dolly Parton and the BONZO DOG BAND?
Well here, he covers COLIN BLUNSTONE (!) and THE MODERN LOVERS (!!)
Jesus, I miss Alex Chilton.
So there you have it: ALEX CHILTON AT NY's OCEAN CLUB, APRIL 19, 1977. Enjoy.

THE DOCTOR IS IN

I LOVE MY WIFE

UNDERSTAND -> FORGIVE

But don't forget.

GOODBYE GOODBYE GOODBYE

So one Monkee and one Charlot died today. THE MONKEES were, as everyone know, an unauthentic pop band, which didn't prevent them from cutting some amazing songs like PORPOISE SONG:

And few people know Michael Nesmith was, before the Monkees, already a recognized, talented songsmith (he wrote THE STONE PONEYS' Different Drum, 1967), and a friend of TIM BUCKLEY's

LES CHARLOTS were also a band known for their novelty appeal, with their own TV show (and a bunch of movies), but few people remember that they started out as LES PROBLEMES, dubbed as "The 1st authentic French Rhythm and Blues band" on their 1965 debut EP:
One year later, they'd back ANTOINE (dubbed as the French Dylan).
Commonknowledge has it that they stopped making music with any merit whatsoever after they changed their name from LES PROBLEMES to LES CHARLOTS, but this one song would be an exception to the rule:

YES HE CAN

JJ CALE trying to play reggae, and ending up sounding like MICHAEL KAROLI trying to play reggae, therefore effectively and uncharacteristically prefiguring CAN.

STARDUST MEMORIES

ANALOG WALLS

CYANN & BEN was one of the absolute bestest bands in France in the 2000's:
I was pretty sad when they split. The upside is, now as two different entites, CYANN and YETI LANE, they will release twice as much music.

HOUSTON

I will always love Dolly Parton.

FIRE ON THE BAYOU!

MEET ME BY THE OLD BRIDGE

COMEDY RELIEF

Another day gone by, another dozen of listens to OLD IDEAS.
And for some reason I woke up feeling bad about quoting a small fraction of his poem THE GENIUS out of context in my previous post. For LEONARD COHEN always includes a bit of humor in even his darkest works, and if you take it out something is missing, somehow the spirit is betrayed. So here it is in its entirety.

THE GENIUS

For you
I will be a ghetto jew
And dance
And put white stockings
On my twisted limbs
And poison wells
Across the town

For you
I will be an apostate jew
And tell the Spanish priest
Of the blood vow
In the Talmud
And where the bones
Of the child are hid

For you
I will be a banker jew
And bring to ruin
A proud old hunting king
And end his line

For you
I will be a Broadway jew
And cry in theatres
For my mother
And sell bargain goods
Beneath the counter

For you
I will be a doctor jew
And search
In all the garbage cans
For foreskins
To sew back again

For you
I will be a Dachau jew
And lie down in lime
With twisted limbs
And bloated pain
No mind can understand

THE DARKNESS

I've had this blog for a couple of years now but so far I have never felt compelled to comment on a recent release - or review a new album if you will. But today I bought OLD IDEAS, the new album by LEONARD COHEN.
I'm sure by now you've already read some reviews, complete with quotes maybe, like
"We find ourselves on different sides of a line that nobody drew" or
"I know you have to hate me, but could you hate me less?" or
"I'm old and mirrors don't lie" or
"I caught the darkness drinking from your cup, I said 'Is it contagious?', you said 'Just drink it up'".
In fact you've probably already heard the whole thing since it's been streaming for a week. I must say though that the vinyl sounds way better than the stream, including the atrocious guitar sound on The Darkness.

Cohen has been making synth albums for 28 years now - over half of his recording career. Out of eleven albums, only six were good old fashioned Leonard Cohen style (I'm using that term loosely, considering his voyage with Phil Spector).
And I'm not complaining. In fact I will argue that I'm Your Man and The Future stand up there with New Skin and Love and Hate.
But now he picked things up where he'd left them in 1979 with Recent Songs. I just wonder if the title "Old Ideas" refers to that sound he'd left behind, or to the words.

The album opens with Cohen describing himself as a "lazy bastard living in a suit". Which reminds me of a 1964 poem from FLOWERS FOR HITLER in which he desribed himself as "locked in a very expensive suit".
It closes with "Both of us say there are laws to obey". Also in FLOWERS FOR HITLER he wrote "These were not poplar trees and nuns you walked between. These were laws."
In PARASITES OF HEAVEN (1966), he wrote " I loved a hundred women, never told the same lie twice." This has nothing to do with the subject at hand, I just think it's a cool line.

Old Ideas then. The working title was THE DARKNESS, when the release was first announced several months ago. It would have been misleading - although that would have fit more than one or two of his previous works.
Now, it appears that something has healed inside this man who in 1961 wrote "For you I will be a Dachau Jew, and lie down in lime with twisted limbs, and bloated pain no mind can understand". (from THE SPICE-BOX OF EARTH)
In 1971: " Myself, I long for love and light, but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?" (SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE)
In 1988: "Everybody knows that the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost". (I'M YOUR MAN)
And in 1992: "When they said 'Repent', I wonder what they meant". (THE FUTURE)

I'm sure many will describe this new album using quotes from it, calling it an "anthem of forgiving", a "manual for living with defeat". But really this could apply to everything he's ever published or sung.

I LOVE YOUTUBE

Every once in a while I will type an artist's name on Youtube, just to listen to a song, and to my surprise, I find some actual footage.
Lately I've found NIVARNA's infamous 1989 show at la MJC d'Issy-les-Moulineaux (infamous in France cos everyone over thirty and living in Paris pretends he was there).
I've come across footage of EEK-A-MOUSE live in Jamaica in 1981, in his prime.
I have watched a (relatively) young and (obviousy) stoned LEONARD COHEN playing one of my favorite songs of his, Sing Another Song Boys, and these are the images of the recording, the actual recording that features on Songs of Love and Hate!
But I never thought that I'd ever see images of JIMMIE RODGERS though (he died in the early 1930s).
God I love Youtube. It is my favorite invention. Until someone finds a cure for cancer, this will remain the greatest achievement I will have witnessed in my lifetime.

ONLY THE LONELY KNOW THE WAY I FEEL

The more I listen to anything else in the world, the more I keep coming back to ROY ORBISON. There are lots of more obscure Roy songs that deserve to be posted (like THIS ONE, or THIS ONE, or THIS ONE - which happens to be a shining example of ), but there is only one BEST SONG EVER and that is CRYING.

TOO LATE TO STOP NOW

Shit.

MY FIRST VID

And my second.