Songs That Might Otherwise Pass You By

Songs That Might Otherwise Pass You By

The Puppini Sisters, "Walk Like an Egyptian" (No mp3 available)



I may be a little behind on this band wagon. I usually don't take my musical cues from TV shows, but when I heard this on Monday night's Chuck, I just went all sorts of gaga. It's an inspired cover of an already inspired song. Anyhoos, I'm obviously not the first to discover them. I found several blog articles on them, complete with expired links. NPR has a fantastic performance/interview for streaming. (You know, I subscribe to that podcast, but I'm obviously more behind on listening to them than I thought.)

Anyhoos, part deux: I rarely feature a song if I don't have an mp3 available, but once in awhile I do go so completely gaga over a song, I'm willing to get it out there any way I can. I can't believe I haven't heard of this band before today. I'll be embarrassed if I find out that everyone else freakin' has. Then I'll be mad that no one introduced me to this before. The Puppini Sisters take a style of music that is very much tied to a specific era (the 40's) and use it to completely reinvent some of my favorite modern songs. Even my mom'll love this band--she'll love it 'cause they sound like the old timey music. I love it 'cause they freaking do an awesome cover of The Smiths' "Panic"! "Wuthering Heights"!

Website
Myspace
Youtube performance of the song (I didn't use this at the top of the post because the audio quality is not great)
The Puppini Sisters at Amazon.com


This is style, folks. Observe and learn.


Ra Ra Riot, "Can You Tell" (The song is labeled incorrectly. It's labeled as "Dying is Fine", but after a few minutes of confusion on my part, and a little help from Amazon.com, I figured out which song it actually is. Now hopefully they won't correct it and make this post look absolutely silly).

It's that time again. Time to mine the hundreds of free mp3s on South By Southwest's website. See the musical note by the artists' names? That means there's a free mp3 for offer. I don't always like every one of them; in fact, out of the dozen or so I listened to yesterday, I only found one that I wanted to feature. Such is the nature of this beast, though. I'll spend hours listening to various genres of music, only to find one or two that really strike me.

I've posted songs by this band a few times (their version of "Suspended in Gaffa" is a great Kate Bush cover--like the Puppini Sisters' version of "Wuthering Heights", Ra Ra Riot make the song their own--they don't try to do their best Kate Bush impersonation). They have this mixture of ska and post-punk sound--like a calmer, gentler, less hostile Everclear. They compliment the ska-ness of the melody with cello--like wrapping a bit of wrought iron around a fence; it's not there for structural purposes, but damn, it sure is pretty. This song sure is damn pretty--it's sentimental (as most love songs are), but not sappy. Bittersweet might be more the word for it.

Website
Myspace


Everyone but that one dude on the right agrees: it's a bird, and not Superman