Boston has good music taste... most of the time

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Decent recent finds: Am I in a good mood or did I stumble across El Dorado?

Remember that Simpsons episode where Homer scalds his mouth and his tastebuds become hypersensitive so everything is excruciatingly tasty for him? I think I burnt my eardrums.

There are certain moments in life when everything just feels new to me. And it brings with it a fair amount of surprise and an ounce of relief. Not unlike a much-needed fresh breath of air or waking up from a hyperrealist nightmare. As of now, for reasons I cannot explain, I can almost hear colours and reach out and grab atmosphere in between my fingers. 

This can happen after going through a harrowing experience (first-world harrowing experience, not applicable to actual harrowing experiences) or after having swam in intense joy for a continuous period. So when I go through a five-day depressive episode and then twitter off to the middle of a mountain for four days and listen to top-tier live music, my brain has trouble readjusting. The lower you go, the higher the rebound will be. *lies face-up on the rings of Saturn spinning like a record*.

In just two days I seem to have fallen in love on Spotify close to fifteen times and the euphoria isn't fading away, which makes me wonder if I have actually struck gold and should make an El Dorado playlist. 

So help a temporarily judgeless couple of ears. 

1. Broadcast - Barney Bones

I don't even remember what I was doing. I don't even remember where I found it. It came to me and stayed, sort of like when a stray cat appears on your doorstep. Congratulations, you are now owned by a cat. I am owned by Barney Bones' Broadcast every day of the month now. Returning to the concept of the rings of Saturn, if I could hear what a perfect circle sounds like, it would be this song. There are so many elements and they're undulating in and out like they've been doing that for all of eternity. 

The song is part of his new EP ESCAPISM which I listened to back to back in full delirious starvation mode trying to find more songs like this on it. It's a decent EP and he has a couple of catchy collaborations with Channel Tres and Duckwrth which are also worth a couple of listens. Please do listen to his remixed version of DRAMA's Tighten It Up. A little early 2000s disco vibe that is what anybody could ask for. 

2. 100 Degrees - Quinn Oulton, Reuben James, Linden Jay

UK angel-voiced Reuben James has basically decided not to give me a moment's peace. He recently released the album Champagne Kisses with CARRTOONS which already earned him a podium spot in my July with the precious Time Will Tell. But he's not satisfied and has to go and release this... I don't even have words for what this is. It could just be the piano and I would've been hooked, but the voices and those sweet ways of altering them exactly how I like it. It really is just me asking these three guys if I can get my heroin shaken not stirred.

The piano sounds like something out of the last century and lets itself be carried by the lo-fi beats that are so present in our day and age and by God do those two decades work a treat together.

3. wake up - _tillus

You have no idea how strongly I feel about this song. I don't even understand why. For some reason, the track seems to connect past and future bringing out moments from my life and joins them like an infinite pointed star. And at the same time the beat grounds me to the earth beneath my feet and brings me down to this precise instant. It's trance-like and under no circumstance want to be woken up from it. I need it banging from my tonsils and reverberating down to my sternum and into every single nerve under my skin forever. For two days now it has been itching behind my ear and won't stop. But then again, I might be delusional so who knows? 

I knew _tillus, from a couple of collaborations with DJ upper class but they weren't anything like this. Some of them were even slow lo-fi, full of the white noise some people use to fall asleep. As a result of finding wake up I decided, again in full ravenous mentally unstable creature mode, to explore everything he has ever put out. I found Augustiner Hell (the Trance Edit) with herr ulrich which also sent me spiraling into another galaxy. It's harder stuff, not for the faint of heart. And I found another one of my romantic interests in this euphoric state of mind: Dabei, _tillus in collaboration with German rappers Joeii and Kuba. I am aware that this one is not as good but German soft rap is my weakness, so for me it is. 

4. Be Thankful For What You've Got - Orgone

The best soul songs manage to take your heart in the most gentle embrace. That's exactly what Be Thankful For What You Got does. And if you're not sure, just wait until minute 5:00 and listen to that trumpet sing to us, like trying to play beside a sleeping baby's crib. It's a song for summer and it's a song for resting the spirit for a little while. I am 100% certain that I'm not delusional about this one. 

It's an excellent cover version of the original 1974 track by William DeVaughn. I first knew the song through the outrageously fun remix by David Todd which embues it with a completely different meaning simply through his rework of the beat. 

This version clearly wants to transmit the same message as DeVaughn and croons to us that you should be thankful even if you're not a gangsta. I want to go beyond and say that some of the Cadillacs are fools' gold anyway. 

The Angelino band Orgone, is obviously influenced by 60s and 70s funk and soul and have also done covers of famous tracks Do Your Think (Isaac Hayes, 1971) and I Get Lifted (KC and the Sunshine Band, 1975). 

Soul music was born to be covered. 

5. Hammer - Alice Phoebe Lou

How am I meant not to fall in love when this girlie popped out a no-skip album (Shelter) that might leave me in a beauty-induced coma and send me into the middle of next week?

This song in particular has a lot of those folky touches that she's been using in her music lately and they form a very specific image in my head. 

The image is a canvas of a bar beside an empty dark road in the heart of the night. On the other side I can see a wheat field and a massive full moon is painting it silver. In a corner of the painting, there are two lonely coyotes nesting and one's head is on top of the hind legs of the other.  The coyote is almost smiling in its sleep and its lip is curled under one of its fangs. I can see muddy paws and white fur in the underbelly. Alice Phoebe Lou's voice is the breeze on the blades of faint grass.

I can also see inside the bar and it's made of dark wood. It has wooden panels, and wooden chairs and wooden tables. It has a flickering red neon sign on one of the windows that calls out to beer lovers like a siren's song. Behind the bar there is nobody serving drinks and the lights seem to fade out, except for one yellow spotlight falling on a man. He is in his early 60s and has white hair that escapes the sides of a baseball cap. He has a bushy mustache but a two-day-old gray beard, all under a round nose that lets out soft snores and two pairs of eyelids too tired to open. He has one of those stomachs that you only get if you visit a bar every day for a few hours and reddish skin with tiny broken  purple veins that proves the point. He is sitting on one of the stools beside the bar and Alice Phoebe Lou's voice is the bubbles floating up to the brim of his beer glass. 

If the song were to go on for another three minutes I imagine I would be able to see what happens in the parking lot behind the bar. It's a powerful thing that music can evoke such detail. 

I think she's gold.