Category Archives: the smiths

But I just wanna love you dear

Posted on by
Reply

If you fall asleep down by the water
Baby I’ll carry you all the way home

OK. You can sing that to me all day and all night and I will swoon and smile and love you forever.

Because it’s just that simple.

“That’s why we love the 1950s. It was the beginning of basic pop music. They did it from scratch and pulled these amazing, timeless melodies out of thin air.”

The Drums is your new favorite feelgood postpunk summer music. Because summer is over and you hate to see things go. Floridans Jonathon Ecklund and Jacob Graham started this band just over a year ago, self recorded and produced around fifteen songs while living in central Florida and “with big dreams and a batch of songs they believed in” spent the beginning of 2009 saving money to move to New York City. Add a bassist and a drummer, and now they sound a little something like this:

Download The Drums – Let’s Go Surfing

Down, down baby
Down by the roller coaster
Sweet sweet baby
I’ll never let you go

Yes! Take me down by the roller coaster! I will follow you anywhere when you sing to me like that!

“Let’s Go Surfing” is the digital single released by the band prior to the recording of the Summertime EP. The boys say they are influenced by The Smiths and The Wake. Even though The Drums claim that some of their music is about being “alone forever”, really I don’t get any sort of alienation and desperation from this music like the feelings that The Smiths helped us cultivate in the 80’s. Then again, naming your band “The Drums” is about the most plainjane name (a la The Smiths) you could come up with during this the tale end of the ought-ten decade where google searches for anything but the most unique of names will gather far too many results.

Just try it! See what you find. If you want to get any information or buy their stuff you’ll have to go to wearethedrums.com or their myspace page.

The Drums make me happy even when they’re trying to be sad. My very favorite song is “Down By The Water.” About their music, they say: “We only write about two feelings: one is the first day of summer when you and all of your friends are standing on the edge of a cliff watching the sun set and being overcome with all of your hopes and dreams at once. The other is when you’re walking alone in the rain and realize you will be alone forever.”

Visit their sites to get a hold of this music. In the meantime, check out some other feelgood or feelshitty music…Your choice.

And while you’re there buy me this:

Even if death were good

Posted on by
1

If you have all of the information..
And you can’t make a decision in 60 seconds….
Then perhaps you do not deserve to reap the benefits that such a decision might bring.

Call it self-help gobbledygook, or more Robbins-style success training… But this advice has been around for almost a century. Andrew Carnegie once said “those who are slow to make up their minds are also slow in carrying out their decisions.”

Well if you can’t decide
Your move you either weep or moan
You waste a year to mull this through

[Ra Ra Riot – Ghost Under Rocks]

Meet Ra Ra Riot. Did you hear the cello? The violin? How is it that I can be a sucker for both the double bass pedal and the stringed instruments? I’m a sucker for ska, too, so what does that tell you. (Absolutely nothing.) As I mentioned in my last post, I am reading Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself To Live in which the author visits the places and ponders the legacy of the deaths of well-known, and some not-so-well-known rock artists. So I found it odd to discover that in the short couple of years that the sextet Ra Ra Riot has been together, they’ve already lost their original drummer to an accidental drowning after playing a show and then attending a house party in Providence, RI last summer. Prior to that show, they wrapped up a 6-week tour with inALLcaps faves The Little Ones. And in December of 2008, they toured the east coast with So Many Dynamos. That would have been a nice show to see.

Listening to Ra Ra Riot is really soothing to me. It sometimes takes me back to The Smiths, and by the end of the album The Rhumb Line I could swear they are as upbeat as Motion City Soundtrack. Like Morrissey they do often mumble their lyrics, so nailing down what it is they’re saying is tough – and as more and more 12-year-olds access the internet, the lyrics websites are plummeting in credibility by the hour. Unlike Morrissey, these guys are American as Apple Pie and don’t sound like they hail from Syracuse, New York. But what they’ve got going on ranges from deep to flighty and it makes me very happy. Soothed. I love it. Try another sample.

[Ra Ra Riot – Dying Is Fine]

In stark contrast to The All American Rejects, I am glad the youth of today has a band like Ra Ra Riot. You have to get this album.

I get nervous every time you speak.