Today is for a couple “growers” – songs that took me awhile to really start enjoying, but which really started to love once I gave them time.
I’m Going to Kill Myself – The You
I listened to this song once or twice a few weeks ago, thought it was pleasant but it didn’t blow me away. Then it popped up on shuffle a few days later and I decided it was really pretty good. A few more listens and I was hooked. The You are produced by Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Josh Ritter, Iron and Wine), and you can certainly sense the similarities, though this is certainly no Modest Mouse clone. This song is catchy, but in the delightfully loose, open-sounding sort of way that keeps it from getting old. Their album For The Masses will be out soon, and once I get a copy of it, I’ll probably post about them again. For now, there are some other songs on myspace or their page on Pure Tone Music.
I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor – Arctic Monkeys
“Oh, that’s not obvious enough Rob. How about the Beatles? Or fucking… fucking Beethoven? Side one, Track one of the Fifth Symphony… How can someone with no interest in music own a record store?”
Yes, yes, I know that everyone in the entire world has now heard the frozen primates, and blogging about them is approximately as cool as wearing Hammer-pants, but it fits the theme. Along with the rest of you, I first heard this song a long LONG time ago, but it was only in the past month or two that I really gave their album the listen that it deserves. And while it’s clearly not one of the 10 best albums of all-time, and probably not even one of the 10 best albums of 2006, it is a rollicking good time.
So, for those of you who still haven’t heard them, or those of you who wrote them off quickly because of the hype, I’d recommend giving this song another listen and then picking up a copy of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not for yourself.
In other news, if you haven’t gone to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, you are a luckier person than me. I saw it last night and it made my soul hurt. Two and a half hours of nothing interesting happening, cliche after cliche, ridiculous “action” scenes that seem to go on forever without anything actually happening, cardboard characters, plot holes you could drive the Spruce Goose through, and a series of “plot twists” that made me wish ANY of them would simply result in the movie ending. And don’t even get me started about the crew of the Flying Dutchmen.
It wasn’t the worst movie ever, and did have some of the fun (and Johnny Depp, of course) that made the first one so good. If it had just been shorter, or if it felt like the plot twists existed for a purpose, instead of just to prolong the movie, I probably would have even enjoyed it. But sadly, it was not to be.