It’s right in the middle of the most busy part of the whole year for me, but I wanted to get out one quick post before it’s off to Dallas for a week. I’ve got a lot of stuff I want to write about when I get back (some interesting new bands, some old favorites I’ve wanted to write about for a long time, and a project where I rank every Beatles song from first to worst), and most of April with nothing to do, so there should be quite a lot then.
Until then, a couple quick things:
Orange – The Exchange
I know virtually nothing about this band, except that they’re from Minnesota, which is a pretty neat state. They’ve got a pretty nice indie guitar/piano combination going on. Maybe this is Death Cab if they were way more into Weezer, or mid 60s pop songs, or Journey, or Jimmy Eat World back before they became parodies of themselves, or something. I realize those things aren’t exactly the same as each other, but there’s a bit of all of them here. There’s some of the “la la la” background vocal thing going on, and I can’t really think of any way to describe this song except “warm.”
Anyways, they’ve got a page with a couple more songs availble for listening. All I’ve heard is what’s up there, but I’m sending away for a copy of the album. If it turns out to be as good as these songs, I will be very happy.
Wilmington – Doug Kwartler
This song has been pretty ubiquitous for me in the past couple weeks. I found it from Trees Lounge, who is doing a project I’ve always meant to do but never got around to: compiling good songs about each of the 50 states.
One of the stumbling blocks in that project for me was that I couldn’t even think of one good song about Delaware. The best I could come up with was the “Awareness Dale – raising awareness about Delaware” theme song thing from the old Conan shows. And when the only song about a state is a parody making fun of the fact that there’s really nothing interesting about the state…
But then I found about about this song which is a great little song about moving to Wilmington. It’s the song about Delaware that Springsteen would have written if he had ever gotten around to it.
I have not heard a single other song by Kwartler, but I’ve read a couple reviews which suggest the rest of his work is as good as this, so it’s high on the list of upcoming purchases.