The best way to touch your heart is to make an ass of myself, so I do that by writing new posts on the blog every day where I obsess and nerd over beloved music for you!

“Kanske är Jag kär I Dig” is an indie pop/baroque pop track by Jens Lekman, a Swedish singer-songwriter from Gothenburg, Sweden. The title of the track roughly translates to “Maybe I’m In Love With You” in English and the track is an album track from Lekman’s second studio LP release, “Night Falls Over Kortedala”, which was released in September 2007. If you can recall back to my introduction post on the blog, you may remember that I comfortably placed Lekman as one of my top 5 (or so) favourite artists. He excels at writing music that consists of personal anecdotes. I’m not sure if they are true or not, but he makes me believe these stories, such as posing as his penpal’s Lesbian boyfriend for a meal with her parents, are true. He tells these stories with a lot of charm, intelligence, passion and wit. He’s a pretty interesting, yet very relatable and down-to-earth person, which really shines through in his songwriting. He’s relatively unknown other than his work in small indie circles in Sweden, although “Night Falls Over Kortedala” was a hit in Sweden, reaching #1 in the Swedish album charts. I was first introduced to Lekman by my friend in college and I’ve been hooked properly since I started my studies at University. I can tell you from personal experience that he’s very easy for newcomers to get into, so make sure you check him out. Anybody could benefit from having a little bit of Jens in their lives!

“Kanske är Jag Kär I Dig” is a track which unquestionably connects with the rest of the album’s themes of introversion, human emotion and cynicism. It tells a basic story of Lekman not being able to speak to the person he likes, as he rambles on about pointless things he saw on TV instead, which he admits with “This of course has nothing to do with anything/I just get so nervous when I’m talking to you”, It’s a common theme that connects with every young person on an intimate level. It feels like a great plot twist for anybody familiar with Lekman’s work and he matches this sense of lust and sensuality with a very poppy chorus that culminates in a breakdown of jazz trumpets and distorted sampling beats, which convey the feeling of a long day coming to finally an end as the night draws in and falls over Kortedala. This track has an excellent use of jazz-influenced melodies, which interplay with the honest lyricism, the guitar arrangements and the percussion instrumentation, such as the use of bell sections, to compose and structure a track that feels right at home with the avocado-mishaps and asthma inhalers found on the rest of the album. It’s a track that feels beautifully written and it’s a low-key standout from the album. Night Falls Over Kortedala is still genuinely one of the very few 10/10 records that I’ve ever heard. Most people have likened the sound to The Avalanches and The Magnetic Fields in the use of Lekman’s sampling. There isn’t a single dud on the album and every track sounds varied and eclectic to one another, although Lekman has structured the album to make it blend together to work as a continuous listen. He’s an absolutely remarkable songwriter and a criminally overlooked talent. I genuinely believe that if there’s one album you need to hear this year, it’s this one! WHAT ARE YOU DOING STILL SITTING HERE AND READING THIS? GO AND STREAM THE ALBUM RIGHT NOW!!!!

Thank you for reading this post! I’ll be back tomorrow with an in-depth look at a track from a fresh-off-the-scene rap/hip-hop artist who, in one of my previous posts, I referred to as my “rap obsession” of 2019! You’ll have to look back and try to figure out exactly who it is! If you liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every daily new post is up and like the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/

It’s my 21st birthday and I’m stuck in Littleport for it! So, I thought that I’d keep you entertained, as well as myself, by sharing a song with you which is very close to my heart, as it was the first song that I ever played on the radio when I first started out about 5 years ago in sixth-form college. This is a niche little indie rock track called “So Long” by Thieving Irons, which is a solo project from Nate Martinez, who used to be the lead guitarist for an American indie rock band called Pela, who disbanded in September 2009 due to personal injuries and creative difficulties. Martinez formed Thieving Irons, while William McCarthy and Eric Sanderson went on to form Augustines. “So Long” is a track from Martinez’s second full-length LP under the “Thieving Irons” moniker, “Behold! This Dreamer”, which garnered critical acclaim in it’s release, but little attention from the media outside of small Canadian indie circles.

The focal hot take in this track is the ghostly environment that it creates. Martinez croons “So long, reflections of yesterday” and “If we could walk on water, or bleed of honey/the crushing sound of the walls coming down” over a bed of catchy, if deliberately repetitious, guitar hooks and drum beat melodies. They sound wholly claustrophobic and they convey lyrical themes of self-freedom and reminiscence of old, while looking forward to the new. The underlayer itself sounds like a dream or a ghost, which is haunting the past of our narrator, while bringing in a new era of time and place. It sounds like a conscious daydream for our narrator, as he sings of reflection and discovery, under a sophisticated arrangement of strings and chords. It feels like an evocative progression of the narrator’s past, but he’s still not entirely certain whether the inevitable events of the future are the correct decisions for him. It is a very reassured track and it’s a relatively warm slice of indie pop/rock comfort food, although the lyrics tell a deeper story of a man struggling to console himself in the present due to anxiety from the past. Overall, this track still sounds absolutely fantastic and within the LP record, Martinez uses very intelligent composition to create a record that is timeless, lush and hazy, yet also formless in it’s purest strategy. A huge shout-out goes to Harrison Ling, my friend and former co-presenter, for introducing me to such an excellent artist! As he would say, it’s 2019 and it still bangs!

Thank you for reading this post and a huge thank you to those of you who have wished me a happy 21st birthday! I’ll be back tomorrow, as always, with a track from another staple of my early media and broadcasting career. It comes from an amazing Swedish songwriter who might regularly send “a postcard to Nina”! If you liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every daily new post is up and like the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/

I’m okay, but I’m not very sure about Annie… Regardless of that, I hope she’s as ready as you are for this week’s Scuzz Sundays post!

Alien Ant Farm’s cover version of Michael Jackson’s 1998 hit, “Smooth Criminal’ is yet another punk-rock classic that I can vividly remember from the Scuzz days of my own childhood. This was the band’s one and only hit, especially in the mainstream, reaching #3 in the UK Singles Chart upon it’s release in 2001. The video is particularly notable for being very freaky and amusing, as it features the group performing in a wrestling ring with a blonde teenager doing frivolous body popping moves in the background of the video. This cover track is the leading single from Alien Ant Farm’s 2001 album, “Anthology”, which was their debut LP release on DreamWorks, a major record label.

The lyrical content of Jackson’s version remained the same, but it’s adapted with a delivery from Dryden Mitchell, who gives it a raw and aggressive edge. It comes across as very goofy and it seems like the group may have been seeking attention by recording a hokey cover of a very famous pop anthem. The chords are heavy, as you’d expect from a punk version, but they seem to be lacking a fundamental substance to make them evolve on the original Jackson version. The overall sound is cheesy and dumb, but it elicits a certain sense of charm and humor. It’s still a track that feels like a real novelty though and not a piece of work that uses longer riffs to add to the original version in much of a meaningful way. It’s a little bit irritating to listen to in the scheme of 2019, as the vocals can feel a little bit grating and it only ever sounds like a parody of the pop genre. It made them big in the early years of the 00’s and it’s easy to see why, as it’s a cheeky slice of novelty fun, but as a work of art, it’s a pretty horrendous cover of a track that was already famous enough. The music video is still a very fun time, but the track is outdated and hasn’t aged well at all.

Thank you very much for reading this post! Tomorrow is actually my 21st birthday, so I’m going to be sharing a track with you that is very close to my heart, personally, because it is the first song that I ever played on the radio! If you liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every daily new post is up and like the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/

WORLD! My finger is on the button… That about does it…. Yes, that’s right! Today’s post is now published!

The Chemical Brothers are a very established household name. A duo who have been touring the UK and lighting up arena show dance-floors for 20 years! They’re on my must-see live list, as they always put on a spectacular lights show and they’ve had so many big hits over the years, so it would be a very fun experience which may not necessarily surprise you very much, but they’d give you exactly what you want! Although I’m not the biggest fan of everything they’ve ever produced, as I felt the mid-00’s LP’s dipped in quality as the duo retained a mainstream status and I felt they went through the motions a bit. That said, “No Geography”, their LP released in April, is a hell of a lot of fun and it’s definitely one of my favourite albums of the year so far. Go and check it out! Their better material is something very special indeed and I have a great amount of respect for both of them. I love how they’re not shy, they’re a pair of party animals!

“Star Guitar” is a single from their fourth studio LP, “Come With Us”, which was released in 2002. It reached #8 in the UK Singles Chart, so it was another hit for the duo, but it seems to have been forgotten in the echelons of time as one of the lesser-recognised singles, within the mainstream, from the iconic duo. It holds up very well as it has a much lighter sound to the tracks you’d expect from their established sound. I obviously wasn’t really around at the time but I have gathered through my research that the Big Beat sub-genre used to be seen as cheap and throwaway, just a little bit of dumb fun. However, this is a really nice little single that shows a different side to The Chemical Brothers. It’s pacing is clever, as it peacefully blends acoustic guitar samples from David Bowie’s iconic 1972 hit “Starman” (hence the title of the tune) with funk-inspired, glowing synth lines and a consistently ethereal bassline which maintains a breakneck pace from start to finish. The repeating vocal hooks: “You should feel what I feel/You should take what I take” add a crisp, disco-retro melody that never starts to feel tedious, even if it’s the only twelve lyrics being used, time after time, from the beginning to the end of the track. The overall theme is lush and it sounds like it has a very kinetic energy to it, without ever feeling disorienting. It’s a bit tight at 4 minutes long, so it tries to fuse a lot of different moods into the duration, but it expertly succeeds as a basis for a more ambient texture for the duo to explore more fully in subsequent releases. It has an overall psychedelic feel and it subverts the expectations of the duo from their previous work.

Thank you for reading this post! I’ll be back tomorrow with the second edition of our specially themed day, Scuzz Sundays! If you liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every daily new post is up and like the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/

As a little bird lights down on Henry Lee, you’re reading a brand new post from me!

Nick Cave isn’t really up there as one of my absolute favourites, but he’s an artist that I find truly fascinating! He’s creatively minded, his songwriting is candidly visceral and his influence on the alternative rock genres is doubtless. Cave, along with The Bad Seeds, have never been afraid to take risks and they’ve specialized in making records that sound a bit different to each other throughout the decades since the late 1980’s, but with cohesive qualities. There is also a film called “20,000 Days On Earth”, which blurs the lines of drama and documentary as Cave goes through a fictional day of his life, prior to and during the recording of Bad Seeds’ LP, “Push The Sky Away” from 2013. It’s definitely worth a watch if you can find it on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. He’s an absolutely fascinating gentleman and he’s one of the artists that I’d most like to interview. He’s an icon of the media, working as an author, a composer, a screenwriter, a filmmaker, a model and, probably most famously, as a rock musician. Cave recently made a guest appearance in Kylie Minogue’s Glastonbury set to perform their 95′ track “Where The Wild Roses Grow”, which was a nice moment that I enjoyed.

“Rings Of Saturn” is a track from Cave & The Bad Seeds’ latest LP, “Skeleton Tree”, a 2017 LP which was written during the very unfortunate passing of Cave’s son. It’s a record that deals with Cave’s loss and grief for the passing. This is a track that breaks new ground for Cave & The Bad Seeds, as a Synth line can be heard, which is intriguing as electronic instrumentation, to this point, is unexplored territory for the group. It’s an effect that’s very subtle, but it feels like a ray of light shining over the dark lyricism of the track. It dips into influences from the chill-wave genre as Cave’s melancholic vocals dust under the gaze of a synth-focused drum loop. Cave narrates: “This is the moment/This is where she is born to me” as he washes over the waves conjured up by the smooth electro-rock percussion and the soft low-tempo instrumentation created by the band, who sound prominent, but fade into the background. The lyrics convey a somber texture, but the style of the track is varied and the prominent layer of synth lines and drum beats feel like a glimmer of hope in a place of Cave’s mind that isn’t healthy, but he’s inevitably going to overcome the depression and the anxiety which is haunting him in this crucial time of his life. On the negative side of things, it probably isn’t a good entry point for those who are not very familiar with Cave, due to the complexity of the layers in the track, but it’s an overall solid effort, which has a succeeding beauty to it and it’s impressively laid-out.

Thank you for reading this post! I’ll be back tomorrow with an in-depth look at a niche single from a British Electronic dance duo who are one of the most commercially successful British dance acts of all-time, having recorded and produced 6 UK #1 Albums. If you liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every daily new post is up and like the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/

Step off the train… I’m writing new blog posts for you again!

I used to have this track on one of those chillout albums. You know, the ones you can’t buy in shops. “Missing” is a track from 1994 by Everything But The Girl, which is the brainchild of Tracey Thorn and Ben Platt, who met each other while studying their English course at The University Of Hull in 1982. It didn’t receive much commercial success when it was first released as a low-tempo indie pop track, but it was remixed and re-released by Todd Terry in 1995. It sky-rocketed the track to huge success in the mainstream, as it became a huge hit for the duo, hitting #3 in the UK Singles Chart. This remains the most famous version of the track and it paved the way for Thorn and Platt to become more interested in the use of electronic instrumentation for their subsequent singles and LP releases.

“Missing”, the Todd Terry remix, is a fairly up-tempo dance number that would feel right at home at Ibiza dance clubs equally with long journeys in a car. It tells the story of our narrator struggling to find a family friend or an ex-lover after a long period of time, possibly even their adolescence. This is because, obviously, we didn’t have social media in the 1990’s. It has a melancholic style to it, which is mainly down to the lyrics, as well as Thorn’s soft delivery on the vocals. “Could you be dead?/you always were two steps ahead” sells a lot of desperation and exhaustion for Thorn to find this person, as she begins to contemplate the worst. This search also plays on the imagination of our narrator, as “I look up at your house/and I can almost hear you shout/down to me/where I always used to be” is a line that reminds me of emotions where you can visually picture random situations and memories from your childhood. The dance beat is up-tempo and a little bit simplistic, but in a very good way, as it allows the enigmatic lyricism of the track to shine. It is a happy track on the surface, but there are darker elements being experimented with. It’s groovy and bouncy, yet it’s poetic. Overall, this is a track that I feel still sounds brilliantly composed and I can easily see why it’s still, and always shall be, regarded as a classic.

Thank you for reading this post! I’ll be back tomorrow with an in-depth look at a track from an Australian cultural icon who is also the subject of an award-winning documentary/drama film which was released in 2014! If you liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every daily new post is up and like the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/