Five Songs I'm Loving This Week

For the sheer sake of comfort, I'm attempting to do this post from the couch, using my laptop. I'm not complaining, but it takes me about three hours to complete a post and that's a lot of sitting in an uncomfortable chair. So, as an experiment, I broke out the old laptop. Now I don't t ype so well on l aptop computers, so the raw post will look somtghing like this. I'll go through and clean it up, which will add the to the time, but if it means I still have feeling in my butt at the end, it may be worth it.

Kate Walsh, "Talk Of The Town"

Lilting folk music from 20-year old British singer-songwriter Kate Walsh. This song uses just a guitar and a voice, but the result has a quiet resonance. Her voice grips each note, making the song intimate and personal. As much as I love thrashy songs (ex: all the other songs in this post), sometimes all I need for a song to mean a lot to me is pure emotion backed by sparse music and a powerful voice (okay, and maybe a little thrashiness).

Kate Walsh
Her Website and Myspace.

The Grates, "I Am Siam"

What an awesome song. It has a lot of energy and the melody has taken up residence in my brain forever--I've been singing it my head for a few days now. It's neat how "I am" rhymes with "Siam", too. For some reason I find the song very affirming, though I have no idea why. Maybe I just need to be affirmed. Anyways, according to their website, they found the perfect wife, so that's good news. I'm not sure if that's considered polygamy; they're a whole band, so it would probably be polygamy for the bride.


The Grates
Their site and their Myspace.

Stars Of Track And Field, "Movies of Antarctica".

I'm not sure if this about movies made about Antarctica or if Antarctica has a film industry (Does it? I'm not sure. Chilly-wood?) Anyways, this is a very good, very quintessential "indie" song. Lots of loud, kinda thrashy guitars, vocals that fly but never quite catch up to the wall of instruments. It kind of reminds me of the music I listened to in the 90s, but it stands up as its own song.


Their website and Myspace

Starsailor, "Keep Us Together"

I first heard Starsailor when they became pretty well-known over here with their album Love Is Here. Their song "Good Souls" is one of the songs that got me back into music. After an unfortunate time in the late 90's listening to only the local alternative station and then moving to my mom's house where culture dies on the doorstep, I'd gotten away from music. That song jump-started me back into myself. This song, "Keep Us Together", from their new album On The Outside, hasn't changed my life the way the first song I mentioned did, but then again I'm not on personality life-support like I was in 2002. I may not shout for it to played 3 minutes before I die, but it is a very good song from a very great band. The "oh oh"s remind me ALOT of Simple Minds, which in my mind is a good thing. My only real gripe: It's perfectly acceptable in my book to pick on the U.S.--we deserve it. Just don't focus on one state; we're all to blame.


Starsailor tries to find the special mushrooms
Starsailor's site and Myspace

Headlights, "T.V."

Kill Them With Kindness is the name of this band's album. Hee Hee. Sneaky--I like it! Now I'll really take it as a compliment if someone says "Oh, Lola's so nice". Female vocals speed along urgently with equally energetic guitars and keyboards (actually it sounds like a Xylophone). The song climbs up a wall of sound and thankfully never plateaus.


Their label website (and a great label it is), their website and their Myspace.

Thank you for reading. I'm going to go eat popcorn now and watch some dumbass Scifi movie (there's always some dumbass Scifi movie).