play myself some music

So the latest issue of Magnet finally arrived - it seemed like people were talking about it, and the Robyn Hitchcock cover, for about a month before it showed up - and the CD accompanying the issue features two tracks with the most annoying vocals I've heard for quite some time. First up on the CD is Kimberlee (who has a truly horrible website as well)...and you know those proverbial scenes in operas wherein the heroine is singing full-throatedly away, even though she's been stabbed, shot, or otherwise near-fatally injured? Kimberlee sounds like the singer from an R&B opera who's just been strangled...only the producers went for realism, and asked her to sound as if she had in fact just been strangled.

Elsewhere on the CD (which also features a nice vocal performance from Robert Smith with Junkie XL, a track by Whirlaway called "Strangeplanes" which should be called "Stuck Inside an Effects Box with the Gazing at My Shoes Blues Again," and my faves the Wrens) we're subjected to an eccentric performance by the singer of a group confusingly named The Clouds - confusingly, because just a month or so back, antipopper posted a couple tracks by '90s Sydney band The Clouds. And I remember rather liking them, so when I heard this batch of Clouds, whose singer seems to be emulating Daniel Smith of Danielson Famile, but without the charm or control, I was confused... Come up with your own name, dammit!

(Note to my early morning readers: I do not in fact know of any operas in which illicit narcotics vocalize. I do, however, know that I can't spell early in the morning.)