I wasn’t really considering a Top 10 Week when I posted yesterday’s Talking Heads list (and I may not do it every day), but I stumbled across this this collection of Criterion Top 10 lists from various luminaries. Among the more interesting are:
Apropos nothing but a stray comment, here’s my ten favorite Talking Heads songs:
Road to Nowhere: Great road music, compulsively listenable, with dark, disturbing lyrical overtones. “There’s a city in my mind/Come along and take that ride/And it’s all right/Baby it’s all right”
Dream Operator: Perhaps their most simple, beautiful, wistful song. “Let go of your life/Grab on to my hand/Here in the clouds/Where we’ll understand.” (The glass harmonica version off the Sounds From True Stories soundtrack is pretty wonderful as well.)
Burning Down the House (live version): I prefer the hard-charging, straight ahead version off Stop Making Sense, but it’s very close, as the spooky, echoey album version has much to recommend it as well. “People on their way to work said, ‘Baby what did you expect?’/Gonna burst into flame, go ahead.”
Heaven (live version): By contrast, the live version of this song is far better than the studio version. Their other wistful, beautiful song (though with far more ironic lyrics). “Heaven/Heaven is a place/A place where nothing/Nothing ever happens.”
The Overload: Dark, heavy and foreboding, with a slow, inescapable baseline and lyrics that bring to mind W. B. Yates’ “The Second Coming.” A song (to my mind) about the end of all things. Compare and contrast with Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel.” “A terrible signal…”
Life During Wartime (live version): Another burner. I wonder if combatants in any of the various conflicts going on around the world play this between firefights. “This ain’t no party/This ain’t no disco/This ain’t no foolin around…”
City of Dreams: Talking Heads at their most twangy. I wonder if disc jockeys at country stations ever slip this into the rotation. “We live in the city of dreams/We ride on this highway of fire/If we wake, and find it gone/Please remember this our favorite song.” (“City of Steel,” off the the Sounds From True Stories soundtrack, is even twangier.)
Memories Can’t Wait: A long, deep drink of neurotic paranoia from inside a damaged mind unable to control its thoughts or direction. “Don’t look so disappointed/It isn’t what you hoped for, is it?”
Hey Now: A pure dose of Zydeco-tinged, childlike goofiness. “Buy me a/rubber ball.”
Nothing But Flowers: Byrne’s paean to modern American society, while tweaking radical environmentalists. “I dream of cherry pies, candy bars and chocolate chip cookies!”
Honorable mention: Once in a Lifetime, Nothing But Flowers, Electric Guitar, Psycho Killer (live version), Walk It Down
And this is just the Talking Heads; favorite David Byrne songs would be a separate list.
UK’s Engineer’s deftly tread the boarders of Shoegaze, Dream Pop, and Psychedelia on “Clean Colored Wire.”
Ulrich Schnauss (who seems to be to shoegaze keyboard what Tony Levin is to progressive rock bass) is also part of the current incarnation of the band.
If they were from Australia rather than Sweden, I would think that A Swarm of the Sun was A Beautiful Machine reborn, so close is the very heavy shoegaze sound.
Since The Wailing of the Gaulish Dead just arrived in the mail, I thought I would do a post on all four of the Avram Davidson chapbooks put out by The Nutmeg Point District Mail/Avram Davidson Society:
Davidson, Avram. The Beasts of the Elysian Fields by Conrad Amber. The Nutmeg Point District Mail, 2001. First edition chapbook, Fine. Though there were 70 numbered copies, this one is labeled “review copy.” (There were also evidently 10 presentation hardbacks, which I’ve not seen.)
Davidson, Avram. El Vilvoy de las Islas. #7 of 25 numbered copies hand bound in quarter green linen with paper-covered boards, a Fine copy, with errata slip bound in and this copy signed by Don Webb at his introduction. Bought for $35 when they were offered to subscribers of The New York Review of Science Fiction (unless I’m confusing it with Michael Swanwick’s Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, which was also bound by Henry Wessells and offered through NYRSF).
Davidson, Avram. The Last Wizard. The Avram Davidson Society, 1999. First edition chapbook original, #125 of 125 numbered copies, a Fine copy. (There was also a second printing.)
Davidson, Avram. The Wailing of the Gaulish Dead The Nutmeg Point District Mail, 2013. Perfect-bound chapbook first edition, one of 200 copies in heavy cardstock with self-wrapper flaps and errata sheet pasted inside, a Fine copy. More Adventures in Unhistory. I’ll have some to sell in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog.
