with voices out of nowhere...

Once in a while, a song will come out of the blue, unheralded, and just blow me away. I mentioned, in 2004's year-end survey, that one of my favorite songs of the year appeared on a compilation of songs put out by folks on the Robyn Hitchcock mailing list. Usually, such vanity projects have maybe one good song on them, surrounded by a couple of okay ones, surrounded by a mass of terrifyingly bad tracks: this one's actually pretty good, with only one or two ear-torture devices. Then again, it also includes an appalling early and primitive track by the dreaded Monkey Typing Pool.

Anyway, here's Popsicle Thieves with "Touch You Natalie Jane." What I love about this is its arrangement, and the way seemingly every rhythm in the song sort of grows out of the rhythm of the name "Natalie Jane." (I also like that the band name is a goofily bad takeoff on Bicycle Thieves - which name the act also has recorded under - from the Italian film, of course.)

Back when I was reviewing CDs for Milk magazine, of course I received way too many CDs, most of which (using my scarily reliable "Is the cover art crap?" culling method) turned out to have little reason to exist. Every once in a while, though, an unprepossessing little CD ended up being more impressive than it looked. One of those was Robert Nix's It's a Complicated World, from 1998. The cover's nothing but a shot of some California burb (Pasadena maybe?) with Nix's name and the CD's title in very late-'90s distressed typography. The songs, though, despite being almost entirely recorded by Nix at home, with semi-cheesy rhythm programming, are cleverly arranged for all that, and Nix's voice has an almost John Cale-like quality that I like. The title track is probably my favorite.

Popsicle Thieves "Touch You Natalie Jane"
Robert Nix "It's a Complicated World"