Tag: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 1/11/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: ever stopped to wonder about the baby and its umbilical? Or about who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle, by any chance? You’re in luck. I don’t have the answers, but Andy Partridge might.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/11/26

“The Ballad of Mr. Steak” – Kishi Bashi

I talked about Kishi Bashi and “Angeline” last week, but I failed to say what really snagged me about part of why I dove back into his music. Say what you want about the man, but Kishi Bashi is ardently committed to joyous whimsy. (see also: “Philosophize In It! Chemicalize With It!”, also from Lighght, and “Unicorns Die When You Leave”). It would’ve been inappropriate to talk about said joyous whimsy when talking about the very serious subject matter of Omoiyari, so I’ve made it separate. Buckle in, because I doubt that you’ll ever hear another song with the same staggering amount of steak/beef/cow related puns in your life. (Okay, maybe other than this. The point still stands.)

What stands out to me about “The Ballad of Mr. Steak” (and Kishi Bashi) is that yes, the lyrics are as goofy as all get-out, but it never feels like a joke song. This was never just a throwaway song for a bit—he puts the exact same amount of compositional effort and prowess into writing about heartbreak that he does into a song about eating some really, really good steak: “Did fate mistake us for a pair of star crossed lovers?/The savory ending wasn’t drowned in salt and pepper/And as we danced together, I cried a funny smile/As I felt you awake in the heat of feast/Now you’re gone forever now inside myself, here we go!” The synth riff starting at 1:03 never fails to jumpstart me into excitement, along with Bashi’s acrobatic violin playing—a staple of almost all of his songs, but it never gets old. And there’s just wordplay as far as the eye can see: “Grade A” sounds so much like “great, eh” that it almost seems normal. (It could also apply to “mistake” and “mis-steak.”) It’s just such a delightful song, one of my favorites of his as of late. Mr. Steak, you were Grade A!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Screw it, just analyze this meme in whatever English major way you so choose: I give up. This one’s stumped me. Maybe I’m the bad guy for not knowing any books that are even tangentially related to beef, steak, or cows. Do what you will with this.

“Flower of Blood” – Big Thief

In their glowing review of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, Pitchfork suggests that this album is Big Thief’s The White Album. Comparing anything to The White Album is a bold move, but this one doesn’t feel without merit to me. They’re both long albums, expansive in their subject matter and exploratory in their sound. I’d say The White Album is more cohesive than Dragon, but I don’t come to the former looking for crisp cohesion. I come looking for songs that are, by all accounts, kind of all over the place, but unified by the shared talent of The Beatles. Both albums ask “hey, what if we tried this?” and commit to whatever ideas the others dish up.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is less successful than The Beatles, but that’s because…this is The Beatles we’re talking about, for God’s sake. Hardly anybody’s going to measure up. But it’s such an adventurous album, even if the many, many forks in the road that Adrianne Lenker and co. explore aren’t always successful. By and large they are, but I just can’t get on board with the twangy forays into country (see: “Red Moon,” “Blue Lightning”), especially since the album closes out with one of them. Everything else, though? They’re bouncing off the walls in the best way possible, verging from slow, wailing sorrow to ecstatic romance and everything else that fits (or doesn’t fit) in between. There’s nothing that Big Thief won’t try, and that’s what made this album so fun to listen to—at a certain point, I gave up on trying to predict what would come next.

For instance: “Flower of Blood” is the closest I’ve heard Big Thief come to trying their hand at shoegaze. A lot of the sonic palette of the album is hazy and dreamy, but it feels like they tried to write a Slowdive song from memory, and then adorned it with clanging percussion and industrial whines. What starts out as one of their ordinarily folksy love songs ends with a clatter of reverbed squeals and creaks, all of the instruments blending together, like a spaceship cobbled together from bits of mossy stone and rusty scrap metal. (A lot of the songs on this album evoke scrap metal, honestly. It’s a vibe.) In a way, it’s a capsule of what Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is in a single song: where you begin is never where you end.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Strange Bedfellows – Ariel Slamet Ries – “Give me some time on Earth to know you/Help me unearth the map and show you/Thinking of her, thinking of him, want to?”

“Season Cycle” – XTC

Quirky whimsy with airtight composition seems to be the partial theme of this week, because we’re crashing headfirst right into it. Not just anybody can rhyme “um-bil-ical” and “cycle” and make it work, but dammit, Andy Partridge makes it sound like the words were always meant to rhyme in the first place. Lyrically, the man can do it all. Among the many, many squabbles that Partridge had with Todd Rundgren (who produced Skylarking), one of them was that Rundgren thought this rhyme was stupid. Not taking a dig at the guy, but really…how does it feel to be that wrong, Todd?

The loose concept behind Skylarking was experiencing an entire lifetime in the span of a day, weaving in imagery of nature and themes about seasons and weather along with this lifespan. In terms of the track listing, “Season Cycle” comes right in the middle, and just before the record “grows up”—most of the other songs afterwards are about religion (see: “Dear God”), marriage, and death. But in stark contrast, this song is a whimsical, pastoral bundle of curiosity. The lyrics are sunny ponderings about how the world works. Partridge’s character admits confusion, but appears cheery all the way as he wonders about why the weather is the way it is, and of course “about the baby and its um-bil-ical/Who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle?” XTC have always been straight-up sixties, but I always associate them more with bands like The Monkees, but Partridge said this song was inspired in particular by The Beach Boys. Before I knew that, my shuffle gave me the glorious transition of “Season Cycle” back to back with “God Only Knows,” and it makes even more sense than it did before. Yet even with the sun-bleached, Brian Wilson-esque quality of the whole composition, it’s nothing but Andy Partridge; as world-weary he got early on in his career, they could never beat the whimsy and curiosity about the inner workings of the world out of him.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Letter to the Luminous Deep – Sylvie Cathrall – “Darling, don’t you ever sit and ponder/About the building of the hills a yonder?/Where we’re going in this verdant spiral/Who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle?”

“Epitaph for My Heart” – The Magnetic Fields

I seriously don’t know how Stephin Merritt does it. It’s artists like him and Jeff Tweedy that absolutely baffle me: Jeff Tweedy in the sheer frequency of his records with his various bands and projects, and Merritt with the amount of consistently incredible songs that he can pack into an album. In this case, this is yet another fantastic track from 69 Love Songs—over three hours’ worth of Merritt’s stellar songwriting. The song’s intro is proof of how talented of a songwriter he is; against plunking keys, he puts the warning label from an electric keyboard to music, which turns itself into a miniature metaphor for a heart so busted and battered that it needs a qualified professional to put back together. The melancholy pop song that he launches into after is nothing but classic Magnetic Fields. Who else could casually include “anon” in a song that doesn’t sound purposefully antiquated? Then again, “on and on anon” sounds an awful lot like “on and on and on,” so that’s probably the only way. (Merritt switches it up into “on and dawn and dawn” later too. Layers, people!) Very clever nonetheless—whether it’s upfront or sneaky, Stephin Merritt is practically a songwriting magician with infinite tricks up his sleeve.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

So Lucky – Nicola Griffith – “And life goes on and dawn and dawn/And death goes on, world without end/And you’re not my friend…”

“Here Be Monsters” – Ed Harcourt

I pride myself on being a fairly punctual person, so this is a bit embarrassing for me, but once again, like most of the rules I’ve imposed on myself, it’s completely arbitrary. I wanted to write about “Here Be Monsters” three years ago, but it went on the wayside for whatever reason (read: it didn’t match the color palette du jour). Another recommendation from my amazing older brother, it soundtracked a hefty part of the second semester of my freshman year of college, perfect for the late winter chill. Now it’s mid-winter in 2026, I’m nearly finished with my degree, and the weather is once again ripe for dreary songs about religious bigotry.

“Here Be Monsters” sounds cloaked in fog from the get-go—it’s a very wintry song, and it’s fitting for the subject matter. Amid the hollow strums of an acoustic guitar, wobbly whistling, and high-pitched backing vocals fit for one of Danny Elfman’s scores, Harcourt examines the hypocrisy of a certain kind of Christian, the kind that claims to follow Christ’s teachings of compassion and forgiveness, but in reality uses their faith to ostracize and isolate anybody who deviates. I’m sticking to book pairings for these posts, but I can’t help but think of the new Knives Out film, Wake Up Dead Man, and its examination of this kind of hypocritical Christianity and the mental repercussions of the people who are unwittingly caught in the crossfire. The offhand, distanced delivery of much of the lyrics are the embodiment of the “turn the other cheek” line—even in the face of tragedy, it doesn’t matter, because they didn’t follow the teachings of the Bible (or, at least, their often misinformed interpretations of it). With every disaffected repetition of “such a shame,” Harcourt brings to life the façade of compassion that these people often put on, caring on the surface, but harshly judgmental in private. Cloaked in echoes and mist, “Here Be Monsters” is a frigid song, both in lyricism and in instrumentation.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Extasia – Claire Legrand – religious fanaticism and creeping dread.

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 12/28/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: the last Sunday Songs of 2025 (good riddance), featuring one more song from Bad Sisters, early college memories, and Liz Fraser getting her money’s worth out of the letter ‘S.’

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 12/28/25

“Hate It Here” – Wilco

You know me—I’m a sucker for songs that are sweet, sincere, a little too sappy on occasion. I love a good ballad here and there. But there is a hair-thin line between being sincere and wholesome and being overly earnest and corny in a way that sounds disingenuous the minute you step an inch beyond that line. Being genuine doesn’t mean squinting more than usual when you sing into the mic and switching your guitar from electric to acoustic—unless the feeling’s there, it’s not going to sound sincere. So it’s always an acrobatic feat to make a song that’s earnest and sincere but doesn’t sound fake. Sometimes you have to be a bit of a cornball to get it across, but sometimes, being a cornball is better than thinking that you’re automatically moving people to tears by singing slightly louder.

I wouldn’t say that of Jeff Tweedy though, even if Sky Blue Sky’s legacy is that it’s the origin of the term “dad rock,” a kind of Frankenstein’s monster from Pitchfork writer Rob Mitchum, who now regrets what he created. Tweedy’s just a uniquely sincere kind of poet, no matter the lens he uses. “Hate It Here” is a long time coming on Sunday Songs ever since I discovered it this summer, after it became a setlist staple for Wilco on their most recent tour. The best way to describe it is that it’s wholesome without saccharine—Jeff Tweedy just misses his wife when she’s not there!! He’s lonely!! He loves his wife!! It’s this in song form:

It veers towards the sappy, but it’s delivered with the kind of longing you only get from a happy, stable marriage and a genuine affection—it can’t come across as anything other than wholesome. And like the house that Tweedy’s idly pacing around, there are all manner of quirky musical furnishings—this isn’t in the studio version, but on tour, when Tweedy sings “I’ll check the phone,” Mikael Jorgensen does this little riff on the keyboard that sounds like a phone ringing. And let me tell you, it instantly made me go “OH MY GOD!! HE DID THE THING!! THE PHONE!! THE PHONE IS RINGING!!” It just goes to show the ounces of care that Wilco puts into every song, no matter if it’s about the depths of addiction, existential crises…or missing the wife. Because every song deserves the same love.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers – …Ashby and Pei. Just saying.

“Cold Was the Ground” – The Limiñanas

I promise this’ll be the last of the music I’ve swiped from Bad Sisters for the foreseeable future. I can’t help it! Whoever was in charge of the music direction should’ve gotten a raise, both for the sheer volume of great songs included, but for the subtle focus on women, be it Melanie or Wet Leg, Nancy Sinatra or Bikini Kill.

If not for the fact that “Cold Was the Ground” plays in-scene while the Garvey sisters are listening to the radio, I fully would’ve thought that it was part of PJ Harvey’s score—those resonant, plucked strings at the beginning sound almost identical to the musical motifs she scattered throughout the series. It’s a song so perfect for the show’s atmosphere that the characters practically break the fourth wall and recognize it themselves—it plays on the radio while they’re disposing of a body, and they insist that Eva switch to another radio station and play something less blatantly topical. “Cold Was the Ground” is a sparse but cinematic song. If Fargo goes on for another season, this would fit perfectly in it; it has that same feel of an unsettling, Depression-era Americana standard, despite the Limiñanas being French. With Marie Limiñana’s breathy vocals, a husky whisper through the mist, you feel a kind of old-fashioned dread, evocative of a campfire story that you’re trying to pretend didn’t scare you, but becomes realer the more you look out into the dark night.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls – Cherie Dimaline – “I was dreaming a note/In the cemetery/Shadows in my heart/And sadly/I still hear you cry…”

“Pre War Tension” (feat. Marta) – Lonely Guest

I just want to talk about the visual for the song here, because…why are we just zooming in on random parts of Joe Talbot’s face? Why is 1/3rd of this video just the camera slowly getting closer and closer to his hairline, and then zipping back down to his chin? I mean, zooming in on Marta’s eyes and smile during the “Saw it in your eyes/Sense it in your smile” line is a nice touch, but…everything else? Why does Joe Talbot’s picture look like a mugshot?? Why is Tricky’s picture so grainy compared to everybody else’s? No wonder those photos are so tiny on the Lonely Guest album cover…

Anyways. Lonely Guest is essentially just Tricky, but back in 2021, it was a collaborative side project under another name. I’ve only listened to a handful of songs from it, but it captures the modern incarnation of what Tricky’s music has bottled for me: agitation. He thrives on mining dread, anxiety, and all manner of creeping, looming feelings—Maxinquaye is a masterclass in taking that feeling and ballooning it up 10 times its normal size. Though “Pre War Tension” doesn’t musically give that feel—it’s more of a simple instrumental as far as Tricky goes—its guests do. Joe Talbot was the perfect mouthpiece for these lyrics, making the first verse sound like a less aggressive IDLES track; the opening lyrics (“There’s a Macy’s parade-sized pink elephant/In the room that renders me unintelligent”) sound straight off of Ultra Mono. But ultimately, it is still Tricky, and his signature rasp, spoken in an atonal whisper, articulates that tension of wanting to hunker down somewhere cold as the world around you slowly spirals towards ruination. Even Marta’s voice, the most even-keeled balance between Talbot and Tricky, has a kind of resignation to it despite its softness.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Junker Seven – Olive J. Kelley – “Life devours/Then it sours/You wanna go/But you really can’t stay/Your trouble and strife…”

“Aloysius” – Cocteau Twins

I doubt this is an applicable situation for anybody, but if you ever need to explain the definition of “sibilant” to someone (1. making or characterized by a hissing sound or 2. [of a speech sound] sounded with a hissing effect, for example s, sh), just use this song. This song was brought to you by the letter ‘S’: silly, saliva, sashimi, should’ve. Of course, I write down about half of those words without complete certainty that they’re in the lyrics, but either way, it’s a very sibilant song, silky and ethereal like the fabric draped over Treasure’s album cover. Due to that emphasis on ‘S,’ “Aloysius” is one of the more indecipherable Cocteau Twins songs for me—as used to their relative gibberish as I am, all of them blend together like watercolors with that consonant repetition. Frazer makes ‘S’ not even sound like a consonant anymore, with the airy treatment it gets, along with all of the vowels strung along with it. That’s the real talent of Frazer for me: words are malleable things in her hands, elevated beyond words and into strings of pearls.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Courtney Crumrin, vol. 1: The Night Things – Ted Naifeh – iykyk.

“Simulation Swarm” – Big Thief

I’ve manage to only double-dip on Sunday Songs sparingly through the years, but I’ve fallen for it again. To be fair, this one appeared before I was even writing about these and maybe 20 people saw them on my Instagram story, so we can pretend that this isn’t a repeat.

“Simulation Swarm” is so distinctly 2022 for me, and yes, I know, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You came out that year, but it’s a very specific part of 2022 for me. I remember listening to it while facing the lawn surrounding my freshman dorm in college, the sunlight on the fresh grass, the fear shaky in my legs as my headphones snaked over the worn strap on my purse. I was impressionable to my brother’s music taste then, and I still am now, but he and his girlfriend were guiding me through my first wobbly steps into college (god, THANK YOU GUYS), leaving Big Thief songs like crumbs along the way. I probably heard it at one of the coffee shops on campus too, but either way, if the local coffee shop run by college students isn’t playing Big Thief, what’s the point?

Cobbled together from a series of Lenker’s experiences—hospitalization, a childhood spent in a cult, and her separation from her brother—”Simulation Swarm” is so bursting with yearning that’s it’s difficult to pin down exactly how I feel about it on any given day. I’ve leaned towards an eagerness to escape myself, but it’s a tender little mood ring that burns a bit when you leave it on your finger for too long. Lenker’s lyrics are so poetic and surreal in nature that I can’t help but imagine a fantastical undercurrent to it; my heart always snags on the “last human teachers” bit, maybe just from the sci-fi image that it conjures up. Sure, the verse about “building an energy shield” in the backyard feels very much like kids playing pretend, but I can’t help but thinking of children on a faraway planet, scraping enough money together to make their energy shield out of scrap metal and hijack a spaceship and fly it far, far away, as far as they can get. That emotion, positive or negative, feels to me like the yearning for freedom—like the empty horses, it yearns to break free, and in the chorus, you get the feeling that something’s finally snapped, broken loose, and broken its chains: “I’d fly to you tomorrow/I’m not fighting in this war/I wanna drop my arms and take your arms/And walk you to the shore.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Hero for WondLa (The Search for WondLa, #2) – Tony DiTerlizzi – “I remember building an energy shield/In your room, like a temple/Swallows in the windless field/Very thin, with your mother/Tall as a pale green tree…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Uncategorized

Sunday Songs: 4/23/23

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

I may be slightly sick, but I did not lose my lack of coherence, so today, I give you a very famous banana, Wall-E, and the only band that can make a Black Sabbath song sound dainty. Have fun trying to bring it all together. I certainly did.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 4/23/23

“Heavy Bend” – Big Thief

With full sincerity, I mean this in the absolute nicest way possible: the beginning of this song sounds like an Apple ringtone. An Apple ringtone, but the kind that has no business being as much of a banger as it is. Like the Piano one. Did any of that make any sense? I need a Taskmaster-style choreography to this one now. Would this give Noel Fielding shrew vibes?

My Big Thief/Adrianne Lenker conversion has begun, thanks to my brother and his girlfriend, and every day I’m inching closer to listening to Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. But this song is unique—everything, from the echo of Adrianne Lenker’s sighing into the microphone to the hypnotic, harp-like strums that feel like the auditory answer to dew-covered spiderwebs in the early morning. That hypnotic quality reminds me a lot of “Bicycle,” another song that I raved about a few months ago, that shares the quality of feeling enchantingly impressionistic, like a painting imbued with motion. And as much of a cliche as this is, “Heavy Bend”‘s biggest crime is being too short. Some songs work as short and snappy (see “We’ve Got a File on You,” “Pam Berry,” “A Little Bit of Soap,” etc.), but this song feels like it’s begging for a key change, a bridge, just something to propel it beyond a minute and 36 seconds. On the other hand, that makes it tantalizingly easy to play on repeat. If you play it enough times on loop, you can just pretend that it’s longer. Denial is the first stage of grief.

“All Tomorrow’s Parties” – The Velvet Underground & Nico

nothing like cackling at niche jokes alone in your dorm, amirite?

I’ve finally got around to listening to another classic album—one that I’d heard about half of beforehand anyway, but still enjoyed, for all of its legend, discomfort, and strange beauty. A classic story of a disaster and a sales flop becoming a tried-and-true classic, every song feels like its own world—a very seedy, eerie, and hazy world, but a world all the same. I doubt anybody will ever describe Nico’s voice better than the journalist Richard Goldstein, who described it as “something like a cello getting up in the morning.” I wouldn’t automatically put it on my top 10, but it’s clear that its lasting legacy isn’t without reason.

“All Tomorrow’s Parties” is one of the songs that was relatively new to me, and it quickly became my favorite of the album. There are so many layers to it, more than the peelable, bruised, Andy Warhol banana on the album cover. It chugs along like a great machine, elephantine in its size, slow in its looming progress. Nico’s distinct voice, thick, resonant and cavernous, plows it along, drawing a long shadow over the music. Each piano chord seems to plod along, even with how rapid each chord is. It almost feels like a dirge in the way it seems to crawl, certainly for the fate of said “poor girl” that the song describes. Unlike “Heavy Bend,” this song is the perfect length—the typical 3 minutes doesn’t give it enough time to loom over the listener, but just over six minutes gives it all the time in the world.

“I/0” – Peter Gabriel

“gay rights” – Peter Gabriel 2023

Oof, another beautiful one…I’m just glad this one is easier to swallow than “Playing for Time,” but it’s just as powerful.

Peter Gabriel’s had his fair share of movie involvement, from writing various film soundtracks to providing the tearjerking end-credits song “Down to Earth” for Pixar’s Wall-E. So it’s not surprising how easily he can slip into that cinematic smoothness with such ease. Certainly helps that the Soweto Gospel Choir, the same choir that performed with him on “Down to Earth,” provided backing vocals for “I/O” as well. Even though every song from the forthcoming i/o (stop trying to capitalize the i STOP TRYING TO CAPITALIZE THE i) has been paired with a visual so far, this one is practically begging for its own Pixar movie, or even just some animated music video. You can feel every bit of nature creeping through this song, from every creature mentioned in the lyrics to running water and green hills.

was this another gateway to sci-fi for baby Madeline? probably.

If we’re keeping with the Pixar theme, that would be two Pixar movies that he would hypothetically contribute to with a deeply environmentalist message. I’ve never been a die-hard Disney or Pixar fan, but Wall-E is special to me in so many ways—it was one of the first movies that I ever saw in theaters as a kid, and 15 years later (Jesus, I feel old), it reflects on humanity’s disconnect from nature, and the dangers of thinking that we’re the masters of everything that we can grab at. The scene where Wall-E reaches up to touch the stars still fills me with incredible awe. But, as with everything, we didn’t listen, and now we’re in the landscape where a handful of corporations are responsible for polluting a large part of our planet. And that is why we’ve become disconnected: as soon as we forget that we’re as much a part of the Earth as every other plant, animal, and other entity, we think that we can get away with all of this. And that’s what Wall-E tried to tell us in 2008, and it’s what “I/O” is telling us now: “So we think we live apart/because we’ve got two legs, a brain and a heart/we all belong to everything/to the octopus suckers and the buzzard’s wing.” Here and now, I’m glad that at least one other old white guy besides David Attenborough recognizes this. Happy belated Earth Day.

“Step On Me” – The Cardigans

I can’t pull the “I LiKEd tHiS sOnG bEFoRe IT wAS a tIKtOk sONG” card because I technically didn’t know this song in particular, but with David Bowie as my witness, I can swear that I did grow up listening to The Cardigans in the car quite a bit. I’ve had the luck of having very few songs I know become “tiktok songs,” but I’ve found that it’s no use griping over it and insisting that “[you] liked it before it was cool.” People are just going to assume that you got a song from some popular place, and that is the case sometimes, as much of a pretentious hipster I am. I vehemently despise tiktok’s obsession with speeding up every song that gets popular (WHY), but either way, it led me back to The Cardigans and to First Band on the Moon, and I’m happy with that—and happy that everybody else seems to be enjoying it.

(Does anybody know if this song was attached to a certain trend? I know that it’s vaguely trending, but I’m not sure how or why—I’ve just seen it with a few unrelated art videos…)

“Step On Me” is one of many lovely bites of pop on First Band on the Moon, and one of the best—certainly my favorite track on the album. Nina Persson casually just created the national anthem for people-pleasers with this one—a song about dodging your own needs, letting people walk (sorry, step) all over you: “go on and step on me,” even as the object of the song stands on her left foot and breaks it. With a crunching, muted intro that continues to punctuate the end of every chorus, everything about this song is proof that The Cardigans. got the recipe for a good pop song down to a science back in the 90’s—Nina Persson’s deceptively delicate, ringing voice, no shortage of hooks and catchy lyrics, and radio friendliness without over-simplicity. Every time the scratchy, muted intro comes on shuffle, I can’t help but drop everything and turn up the volume. Like I said—The Cardigans had pop music down to a science. No wonder they’re trending again. If you can make a Black Sabbath cover sound dainty (MULTIPLE TIMES), you can pretty much do anything.

“New York City Cops” – The Strokes

Like Jack White, Julian Casablancas is just one of those musicians who I really want to hate, but then I hear songs like this that are just so undeniably catchy that I just can’t hate him all the way. That being said, the thought of him still makes me want to roll my eyes all the way back in my head, mainly because of flashbacks of him taking over Sirius XMU and saying something along the lines of “now, this next song is from a 60’s punk band from Peru…oh, you don’t know them?” I really wish I was kidding.

Even though the beginning feels a little manufactured to me (the staged-feeling quality of Casablancas screaming, then going back on it: “ahahaha………didn’t mean that at all 🫦”…oh, please), the rest of the song is a masterfully tight piece of post-punk (oh, post-punk revival…okay, fine). It’s delightfully uptight—it all feels boxed in a cramped room, but it takes the confines of that room runs with it, never once loses momentum after the first drumbeat. The rough edges of Casablancas’ voice contrast perfectly with each scratchy guitar chord, a constant buffet of sound that never loses its sandpapery texture. I mean that as a compliment—it’s not a grating sandpaper, but more of the hard-edge, punk sandpaper that makes The Strokes sound the way they do. And although this song was subject to some abysmally bad timing in the U.S. (the song was initially removed from the U.S. release because the album was released so close to 9/11—the chorus of “New York City cops/but they ain’t too smart” was, understandably, a massive no-no so close to such a tragedy, even if it was completely unintentional), I’m glad “New York City Cops” ended up seeing the light of day a significant amount of time after the fact.

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!