#37: CJ's Best Addictions

My favourite numbered post deserves my favourite songs that I haven't yet posted. So, have these: three songs that have some kind of importance to me and have been my biggest addictions evar. First things first: the song that is most played in my playlist.

Should NOT be confused with the alarmingly similarly-titled "Sunday (The Day Before My Birthday)". This one is more upbeat and fun to listen to than the mopey (but no less artistic) "Day Before My Birthday" and my god, does it sound brilliant just before sunset. I love the way the background noise wobbles at a slightly faster rate than the beat of the song. No idea why it's a good thing, but it is. First time I heard this song, I honestly thought it was a fake song, but one Shazam later and it's confirmed that it's Sunday from Moby's B-sides. It deserves to be an A-side. Seriously, Moby, get on it. Unrecognised brilliance, right here. Unrecognised brilliance that is in at least three of my five major playlists and is the most-played individual song in my library. Time to turn to some brilliance a little more recognised (though I suggest not watching the video unless you are decidedly NOT a bigot):

I post this video merely because it's the radio edit and gets the point across quickly, not because of the hot chicks (although no complaints about the hot chicks!). The song is one hell of a reminder of summer, and in particular summer of 2010-11 (when things were amazing and I bought Wii Sports Resort, which this song constantly reminds me of and vice versa). And hell, the video has hot chicks. And one hell of a message. Note the flag that one girl drapes around her at ~0'23". That, there, is the message. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people exist and aren't going to stop existing, so get used to them and start giving them the same rights that OTHER normal people can take for granted. Yes, I said OTHER normal people, because those people are normal people too. ...ahem. On that note, finally:

It MUST be the Ampére remix, otherwise it is Simply Not Good Enough. This song has managed to get me through a million and one nights in Melbourne and out. And it has infected my brain for just as long. The best bit, of course, is the bit from ~3'0" to ~4'50. (Wow, it lasts nearly two minutes?! Amazing! Thought it was longer!) I love it to bits and I will never lose sight of this song. In fact, I will never lose sight of any of these songs. Big house, tropical house and microhouse were never better than these three songs. And I have many many more addictions... soon to come. Have a break from my rambling.

#34: 2011 Wrap-Up

So, here we go with another end-of-the-year. I'll be honest, I don't like years ending. I don't like anything ending. But, hell, might as well make the best of it and have a bit of fun. So I'm posting my twenty favourite songs from 2011, with the following rules:

• The songs must have been imported into my library in 2011.
• The songs must not have been imported in any other form before 2011. Including remixes.
• The songs must have Gem Lines in them. (This does NOT mean I am awarding these songs Gem Line awards. Yet.)

See how un-strict I am? The songs need not be produced in 2011 either. Bizarrely, that does limit my library a bit. But, I've rustled up twenty songs, in no particular order:

• ANYTHING NEW - BIBIO
  Almost too catchy, but still with some very well-written lyrics. I enjoyed this song as soon as I heard it. That doesn't happen often.
  Gem Line: "I saw you dropped a note to self, I picked it up and it read 'I can't learn anything new'"
• EYES BE CLOSED - WASHED OUT
  I don't think there is anything to dislike about this song. Bordering on ambient, with a very epic (remember: "epic" means "heroic" in CJ-land) climax at about 3'33".
  Gem Line: "See the world clearly now"
• AMANÆMONESIA - CHAIRLIFT
  You are infinitely invited. I seem to be attracted to bizarre songs, and nothing can get more bizarre than the video of a woman looking like she's C'thulhu.
  Gem Line: "Mistaken for magic"
• STREET - JAMIE WOON
  Deliciously minimalistic. Also paints a perfect picture of a city street, specifically La Trobe Street (for me, that is). Or Bourke Street near Southern Cross Ln. Either way, beautiful song.
  Gem Line: "I'm wishing you were here with me, walking on a city street"
• FEATHER - LITTLE DRAGON
  A more recent find. I was attracted mostly by the key, and the lyric "you've got silver rays". Possibly the best-sung line of the song, because it stands out.
  Gem Line: "Will it ever float? Will it ever soar alone?"
• SUTPHIN BOULEVARD - BLOOD ORANGE
  I love blood oranges. And this song, though set (most likely) in New York City, belongs squarely in Melbourne. Don't ask me where.
  Gem Line: "Funny how it only seems to work at night"
• MIDNIGHT CITY - M83
  Again, a bizarre enough song to attract me immediately, and keep me absolutely hooked. Mostly because of the title. I love midnight and I love the city.
  Gem Line: "Looking at the mutating skyline"
• I WROTE THE BOOK - SIMIAN MOBILE DISCO & BETH DITTO
  Almost deliciously snarky song. I do like these kinds of songs, and especially any song where Simian Mobile Disco is involved.
  Gem Line: "Paradise is full of lies"
• SKY & SAND - PAUL KALKBRENNER
  Yep. An older song. Nope, I haven't seen Berlin Calling. I do intend to. It also resonates within me, for some reason.
  Gem Line: "In the night time, when the world is at its rest, you will find me in the place I know the best"
• FOREIGN LANGUAGE - FLIGHT FACILITIES ft. JESS HIGGS
  A pretty sweet follow-up to Crave You, and though nothing can beat the original I do like the direction Flight Facilities headed in this time. Disco for the win.
  Gem Line: "I can't let you go if you won't let me know"
• EMBODY - SEBASTIAN
  There's definitely something about me and bizarre or unintelligible songs. Hell, look how much of a Presets fan I am.
  Gem Line: OK, I can't tell, but it's a good enough song.
• A.I.M. FIRE! - ART VS. SCIENCE
  Much more my style of music than its predecessor, Parlez-Vous Francais?. Also takes a remix very well, as shown by the Immigrant remix.
  Gem Line: "I like a journey way into the night"
• ZIMBABWE - NEW NAVY
  A fun, boppy song that falls short of being catchy in the same way as We No Speak Americano was. Also embodies the ideals of every human being. Well, almost.
  Gem Line: "Leave the city for the open highway"
• AIN'T WAITING - TALIB KWELI ft. OUTASIGHT
  I still say this sits squarely in my collection, rather than standing out. The thing about hip hop is that it does fit in with mostly any other genre, apart from (say) classical.
  Gem Line: "I don't want to spend the night trying to figure out how to spend my time"
• TREEHOUSE - GOLD FIELDS
  Straight out of Victoria. Winning. I like its cheeky, playful nature as well as the niceness of the lyrics, as well as the fact that they are Victorian. ...OK, that was lame.
  Gem Line: "Do you know how far we are from the moon? Do you know how fast we are?"
• BOOM - LO-FI-FNK
  Another reasonably recent find. I like the fact that the band name starts with "lo-fi". Better than the pretentious wankery of "hi-fi" these days.
  Gem Line: "Those crazy summer nights"
• NEED YOU NOW - CUT COPY
  I am in love with the Architecture In Helsinki version. Absolutely in love. One of the best songs from Cut Copy, by a long shot.
  Gem Line: "Run for the last train, one of them will get you home"
• GABRIEL - JOE GODDARD ft. VALENTINA
  No idea whether this song is about an actual person or not, but that's irrelevant. Bizarre song, again, with some very different lyrical structure. Which is probably why I enjoy it.
  Gem Line: "He was stronger than I was, but it's strength you can't sustain"
• JONA VARK - GYPSY & THE CAT
  Not a huge obsession, but well worth a mention by a long way. Bordering on epic, and with some stirring words, along with an uncharacteristically nice remix by Tommy Trash.
  Gem Line: "She walks on the street, alone in the dark"
• AN ARGUMENT WITH MYSELF - JENS LEKMAN
  MELBOURNE. Well and truly iconically Melbourne, from the perspective of a Scandinavian. Love it to bits.
  Gem Line: "So rich on summer and so sweet"

Of course, this list doesn't include other jewels in my collection that I unfortunately had to cull, such as:

• Start Again - The Aston Shuffle ft. Lovers Electric
• The Call - Raized By Wolves ft. Tom Smith
• The Phoenix Alive - Monarchy
• Destroy Everything You Touch - Ladytron
• Hits Me Like A Rock - CSS
• Your Love - The Aston Shuffle
• The Island - Pendulum (parts 1 and 2)
• Look Inside (Izmabad rmx) - 4Hero ft. FACE
• Swoon (Boys Noize rmx) - The Chemical Brothers
• Niton [The Reason] - Eric Prydz

This list of 30 has been shortened from a list of 54, which has been shortened further from 214. Painfully hard, I can guarantee it. But, that's 2011 in CJ Curry's music collection. Have fun!

#32: Look Inside - 4Hero ft. FACE

Alright guys, I said I'd feature it last post. Here it is: 4Hero's deep house track Look Inside, in three flavours: original, Izmabad, and Nu:Tone.

Honest opinion: in comparison to the others, the Plain version is what it says on the box. A bit bland. But this wasn't the first version I heard. This was:

The Izmabad remix. And a hell of a win it was too. As I said last post, I blame Nando's Bundoora. I heard it, noted the lyrics "searching every pot of gold, running out of rainbows". And here is the result of an extensive Internet search afterwards:

So what is it about this liquid music that attracts me, again and again, like a motherfucking magnet? Apart from the fact that it's liquid music? I'd say the memories associated with the songs. Each and every one makes me think of summer (tick), Melbourne (tick), spicy chicken (tick) and being happy (HUGE TICK). Simply because I was happy in a Melbourne summer, eating spicy chicken when I first heard this. And kept hearing it all throughout summer '10-'11. Winning harder than Charlie Sheen (which isn't hard. But still).

I love Melbourne. I have an entire playlist, 150 songs long, devoted to it. I have also mixed two 1h20' sets based on thirty-nine songs from that playlist. I also love summer. Same deal, except no mixes and a playlist that is 100 songs long. The fact that both are miniscule compared to the size of my library (nearly 9,000 songs) is offset by the sheer amount of times I have played those songs. And hell, those playlists are totally incomplete. One thing's for sure: this song is in them all.

Finally, I mentioned the lyrics before: "searching every pot of gold, running out of rainbows". This gets a Gem Line award. Just like that. And I'm retroactively awarding one to Feather by Little Dragon, for the line "You are airborne, you've got silver rays". Enjoy.

#27: Trance

Time for something new, and time for something different. I'm going to jump into an area I haven't touched on much in this blog, and explore the world that is deep/progressive trance. First things first: the ultimate progressive trance anthem.

If you're interested, there's also a vocal version made by Miro here. I prefer the vocal version IMO but the original version also has massive amounts of charm, and so it should. This was a 1998 release, and while it didn't kickstart the progressive trance scene (which was some five years earlier) it sure as hell epitomised it. Why? The beat is hypnotic, if you listen to it in the right way. The bassline is hypnotic, if you listen to it in the right way. The vocals are delicious, no matter how you listen to them. Finally, the song has been mixed, remixed, re-released, covered, and practically everything else under the sun ever since it was released. The most famous cover was by Those Usual Suspects a few years back, and while I wasn't exactly a fan of it, I could tell fom that just how influential this song has been on the trance music circuit. It's good as background music because of its minimalistic approach, but because of the hypnotic beats, it's also good for house parties. I love it as a late-night listen, especially the Moonwatcher remix. I see it as a party-starter if you're sick to death of LMFAO and David Guetta, and I see it as a classic that will still be listened to in 2045. Also I totally love the video. To me it says the guy's life is flashing before his eyes, but also that stuff makes sense when it's backwards. Gah, listen to me waffling out philosophy like a beatnik.

From a prog-trance classic to a deep classic:

Someone (I think it was Ishkur) said that without deep house, house wouldn't exist. Or something along those lines. I'm going to say that without deep trance, there is nothing. This is the kind of music that should be listened to when you're trying to escape from the world because it just oozes emotion. Not necessarily bad emotion either. Solar Coaster reeks of beaches and sand and sun and a rollercoaster in the sun. OK, maybe not, but it always brings to my mind that semi-euphoric state where you're happy and almost in tears because of that happiness but not quite all the way to true euphoria. That feeling is absolutely delicious and I get it all the time thanks to sleep dep. That feeling where half the time you almost feel like jumping around yelling "neeeeeeeen" in a high-pitched voice for absolutely no reason, or you start laughing hysterically at absolutely nothing. I get that a lot. And Solar Coaster drips that exact feeling from its sweeping synths.

Two classics, now I'm going to show what has become of trance since the glory days of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Oh I love it. OH BOY do I love it. The compilation album that this came off is pretty damn sweet, too. Eight songs in a row in this style but all still different enough so that they're kickass in their own way, then they let loose with TAURINE. (See below.) Winter. In My Heart. Wait For Me. Venice Dawn. Solace. Swing 2 Harmony. No One On Earth. Out Of Asia. TAURINE. See? Again, the emotions contained in this song (coupled with the beautiful use of tension-and-release - see below) send a person who knows what they're doing to a state beyond euphoria (if you'll pardon the pun). Yes, I play this at the start of every winter. No, I have no shame in admitting this. The sweeping synths contribute to a sound saturation that isn't a cacophony. The sweeping strings help. Oh boy oh boy, get me a broom, I need to make some sweeping strings myself. Of course, trance isn't always sweeping strings, though they do help.

What have they done with my song? They've funktafied it! Alright, confession time, before now I never heard the original mix of Taurine but my God they're both amazing. I guess the Super8 remix makes it more hard-trance than the original while retaining the amazing progressiveness. Beautiful. It's not too bad condensed into three and a half minutes, either. I love how very little was changed but Super8 got rid of that really annoying audience-cheer bit that tries to make it sound like live music. Which is good. Because it failed. Miserably. Apart from that the song's brilliant and every time it comes onto my iPod I wet myself a little with anticipation of awesomeness because I know the tension-and-release bit is coming. This concept - foreign to most non-trance listeners is essentially just that: tension (building up a tune just after a breakdown) and release (a sound explosion just afterwards). Theme, breakdown, buildup, anthem. Good music producers should know exactly how to handle tension and release and good DJs should use it, instead of fucking us around with dubstep and LMFAO. Seriously. Those champagne showers are getting old and ridiculous.

Finally, my face when Taurine crops up somewhere.

#23: Forever (Live And Die) - Orchestral Manœuvres In The Dark

OMG, it's OMD! Yes, I spelled it "Manœuvres" and not "Maneuvers" because "maneuver" looks FUCKING WEIRD. Besides, I've been really pedantic about the œ and æ ligatures and accents in Latin-based languages. On that note:

What the hell is it about this song? I found it when I was watching reruns of Daria - with the music in it, for the most part - and I took a shining to it. I reckon I've worked out why - I guess it's because the song is all that was good about 1980s electronica. Which, of course, is the precursor to contemporary EDM. And I love it. For me, disco began in the 1980s and not the stupid seventies. Hell, music in the 1970s didn't exist.

My prejudices aside, this is a pretty nice song that has been very underrated of late. I have two 1980s electronica compilations, and while Orchestral Manœuvres In The Dark appears four times, this laidback melancholy beauty doesn't. Annoyance. It wasn't so underrated back in 1986 when it charted everywhere (OH FUCK I'M TALKING ABOUT CHARTS. HELP ME.) but I guess other songs have eclipsed it since. That said, I was kinda shocked to learn that they're still going in 2011. Shocked and surprised, but not disappointed. I do like these guys. And honestly, the only complaint I have about this song is the bit from ~3'33" to ~3'55". It doesn't fit with the rest of the song. I'm all for evolution and all but that's just a bit strange. And speaking of evolution, no, this doesn't evolve much but it does stop short of being cheesy muzak. It's easy on the eardrums for the whole thing and it plays on your sense of time. Oh, listen to me, waffling on about all that crap when I could just as easily be picking apart the fact that the lyrics are repetitive and boring. Reality is, they are, but it only feels like the song runs for about 3'30" so that's fine. It puts it above hiphop, where the same three words are repeated ad nauseum for five minutes: "MOTHERFUCKING BITCHES SHAKE DAT ASS". In every single song, by every single hiphop artist, five minutes of that crap. OK, I'm exaggerating but it certainly feels that way. And that's why I listen to OMD.

#7: Future Of The Future [Stay Gold] - Deep Dish ft. Tracey Thorn

I'm going to go a few years back. Wind your digital watch back to 1996/1998 (whichever you feel best with).

When HOUSE WAS HOUSE. This is probably one of the more magical songs to come out of that era, not least for its distinctive house beat and not the grungy bullshit that's being churned out these days - the pure deep house that people used to love. Yeah, that's right, you used to love this stuff. Even you chumps who satisfied with whatever the hell was being played on the radio, you loved this stuff. You lapped it up, just as you lapped up the Backstreet (or Backdoor) Boys. And now you've forgotten that love affair entirely and moved on to hiphop.

It's a song about moving on and not looking back. (Ironically, that's what I'm doing here.) This song, as I've said, epitomises everything that was good about house: a good four-to-the-floor beat accompanied by sweeping electronica and very little in the way of harsh computer beeps; mellow, deep lyrics and a mellow, deep voice to go with it (Tracey Thorn ♥); a quick breakdown followed by a stirring (and almost melancholy) build-up and release afterwards; the same hypnotic melody until the end, where it goes from one style to another so seamlessly. The song is almost like those really comfy jumpers your grandma used to knit you. The ones without seams. The ones that you have a look back at in twenty years time and remember how warm and comforting and amazing your childhood was before you got into this modern age of grungy electronica and paying bills.

What ya gonna do about me now?

#5: Summer In The Studio - Kinobe

Obi-Wan Kinobe?

This song got me through a reasonably traumatic experience in Yr 10 - six years ago. Yes, it's rap - DEAL WITH IT - but I needed that song at the time and I'm pretty sure I need a song to get me through Wednesday's wisdom teeth removal (on that note, no posts from me for at least a few days. Have another listen to Up Up Up if you want something to do. Either that, or get a life and visit the Wikipedias and the Googles instead). Probably won't be the same song.

It's rap. That's noticeable. In fact it's kinda freakin' obvious. It contains samples from an old song. That's noticeable too. Nicked the sounds from Summer In The City by The Lovin' Spoonful (a band name that proves sex sells - the band is named after the "spoonful" that a man can... every time he... anyway. Pearl Jam and 10cc are in the same vein). It does evoke images of summer - "blue skies", "kiddies with icecreams dripping off chins", "daddies scanning the skins", "sunsets". Didn't have to be "daddies" - coulda been "laddies" and it would have been accurate. Though I like the original I much prefer the version on the compilation I first heard it on - Chillout Sessions 3, where it fades out with the fade-in of We Are All Made Of Stars and a piano crescendo. Moving shit. Hey, uh, while I'm gone, can you do me a favour? I'm lazy and can't find stuff anyway, so I'd really like to know the lyrics to the song - specifically, the main lyrics. I'll lie here waiting until you do, so don't be strangers. Please.