BONUS TRACK: !Aaah- ah yawa em ekat ot gnimoc er'yeht - Napoleon XIV

Simultaneously winning the awards for both Best and Most Obnoxious B-Side ever, this was the second side of They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa! when it was first released. If you couldn't tell, it's the entire A-Side played backwards. Couldn't resist sharing it.

They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa! - Napoleon XIV

Would you believe this was a Top 5 hit when it first came out?

Napoleon XIV is Jerry Samuels, a record producer and songwriter chiefly active throughout the 1960's. In 1966 Samuels was working as a recording engineer at Associated Recording Studios in New York. It was during this period, using both experimental techniques and technology, that he recorded They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!

Amongst these new techniques was a machine called the Variable Frequency Oscillator (or VFO) which allowed Samuel to create the sped up Chipmunk-esque vocal pitch changes with out actually changing the tempo of the song.

The track also features what's one of the first uses of a drum loop. Apparently the unnamed percussionist couldn't hold a beat for much longer than seven seconds. To get around this, Samuels took those seven seconds, chopped them up, and looped it into the backing track appearing in the final song. On top of this he added hand claps (he'd initially tried to convince the musicians to take off their trousers and slap their thighs, but no dice) and the creeping VFO effected klaxons which signal the choruses.

Finally Samuels recorded lyrics he'd written over nine months (apparently he couldn't decide if the song was actually good or just a sick joke). The song might be about a man who's lost his wife, or about a man who's lost his dog, but it's definitely about a man who's lost his mind.

The song's structure is fairly simple, but through it's repetition allows the listener to descend into ever increasing anxiety. Novelty song though it is, it perfectly captures the feeling of unpleasant thought spirals that everyone is held victim to at one point or another; and the slow, steady overtake of unease that this results in. It's the scratched record ticking away at the back of you skull.

Not bad for a song built on Chipmunk voices and tambourines.

Never Hit Your Grandma With A Shovel - Spike Jones

Spike Jones was an American bandleader and musician renowned for creating satirical, unusual and comedic pop songs from the 1940s through to the early 1960s. It's one of the early recordings we are looking at today, the absolute gem Never Hit Your Grandma With A Shovel.

The title is rather self explanatory as to the content of this little ditty. What's truly remarkable about the song is how well it's aged. Novelty numbers, especially older novelty numbers, are often products of their own time. Jones has managed to sidestep this problem with Grandma by playing it so completely straight.

The barbershop harmonies never wink to the listener that the song is anything less than sweet and heart felt pop. By the time the group is rolling their R's recommending a rock instead of a shovel you will be laughing, enraptured and thinking unwholesome thoughts about your Grandma. Really, what more can you ask of a pop song than that?

Hooray Hooray, The Woman Is Killing Me - Sonny Terry

I have written about this album at length elsewhere, but I think it's always a good time to spread the word of the washboard.

Sonny Terry, a blind blues harmonica player and singer, recorded an album of washboard band music (a clanking junkyard rhythm sound made of found objects such as pots, pans, brooms and of course washboards) in 1955 for the Folkways record label.

The percussion on these songs is incredible. Beats between beats between beats are layered together in intricately simplistic patterns which create a clattering metal safety net for Terry's leaping impassioned blues howls and yelps.

It's charming, raucous yet intimate, and utterly unique sounding. Makes you wonder (well- kind of) why the washboard has faded from popular music.

Thermopylae - Robert Graettinger and Stan Kenton

Note for the video above: Thermopylae is the first track performed. It ends around three minutes in. The rest is easily worth a listen if it catches your interest.

The work of Robert Graettinger is the 1940s/50s equivalent of industrial music. Only imagine a world where nobody had ever heard anything like industrial music before and would actively ostracize musicians who explored atonal territories.

Graettinger was a notorious loner, reed thin and deathly pale. When composing - which was always - he would lock himself away in his one room apartment for weeks on end. Sadly this fanatic devotion to his music (and sucking down more tobacco than a humidor) lead to his early death at 33.

Today's song is called Thermopylae, the first piece Graettinger composed for Stan Kenton, his employer and fellow musical maverick. The recording is of Kenton's band performing the piece in 1947.

This is big band jazz hyped up on amphetamines. Cyclonic and explosively violent crescendos of brass. Piano keys tinkle by on the very tips of their toes. Drums thud with a wooden intensity like fists slamming upon doors. Sleazy saxophones slime and shimmy before ripping apart the heart stopping tapestry of sounds, only to then drag the song off by it's hair in a whole other direction.

There's an undeniable urban edge to the entire composition, something which Graettinger explored further in his famous four part City of Glass suite. It's the sound of a late night city pulse.

Beatles Medley - Hank Handy

Continuing the Mashup Mood, today we have Hank Handy's Beatles Medley. The track takes segments from over forty separate Beatles songs and splices them together to create three and half minutes of kaleidoscopically splintered pop.

The whole experience feels like a giant Rube Golderberg machine. The disparate elements kick off one another in spiraling series of technicolor clockwork madness. The drum solo from The End cascades into helium speed vocal samples from Love Is All You Need just as Piggies harpischords begin stomping and chiming with Get Back's organs and blues licks. That describes twenty seconds. Nearly.

It picks and plucks song segments like a schizophrenic magpie but builds them all into a towering piece of sonic architecture, shortly before dropping said structure into an industrial strength blender.

Get it forever here.

Kill In Black - ViC

This mashup isn't peanutbutter and chocolate so much as it's caviar, pizza, sprinkles, mashed potatoes, and other food stuffs that really shouldn't ever be put together.

But remarkably, like a pizza-potato-caviar-sprinkle phoenix majestically rising from the ashes of a three car food pile up, the song soars on the buoyancy of it's own epic ridiculousness.



The first half is fun, mashing Tomoyasu Hotei's Battle Without Honor or Humanity with AC-DC's Back In Black. However it reaches a whole new crescendo at the halfway point when the Amelie soundtrack kicks in. Slightly bewildering, but most definitely genius.

You know you're curious. Blast it, then go have samurai battles in the streets of Paris while an elderly man screams at you.

Download the track at MashupTown.com

Banging In The Nails - The Tiger Lillies

I don't know what's going on in this video. But it seems appropriate.

The Tiger Lillies are a UK based cabaret punk trio. Their purported origins: Lead singer Martin Jaques fine tuned his unique falsetto in a room above a Soho brothel for much of his younger years. He then pulled together a pair of Adrians (Huge and Stout) on drums and stand up bass, unleashing The Tiger Lillies upon the world.

It's hard to think of a concise description for such an idiosyncratic and wide ranging group. Their music is a mixture of accordion-infused fair ground stomps, dead eyed waltzes and lots and lots of falsetto operatics by Jaques. However even this description can't begin to cover the costumes, the concepts, the songs not sung in falsetto, the songs with ukulele, the songs which aren't songs and more.

But nothing brings a crowd together - or summarizes this band - better than Banging In The Nails. When played live, drummer Adrian Huge will frequently whip out a pair of enormous plastic mallets and literally smash his drum kit to pieces.

It's joyful, jumping, and Jesus filled.

I probably should have saved this for Easter.

Fire and Brimstone - Link Wray

Link Wray is Rumble. He is the grandfather of distortion and the argued inventor of the power chord. He paved the road for more flavours of rock than you can name.

However by 1971 Wray had somewhat faded from relevance. His brand of hip shaking rock'n'roll was out of vogue. In a world of proto-prog, funk, soul and heavy metal, where was the place for this six string slinger?

The answer, it turned out, was going unplugged. Capitalizing on the burgeoning roots music culture, Wray retreated to his farm in Maryland to record eleven tracks of riotous country bound rock and folk. The marvelous if little known result was the self titled album Link Wray. The finest cut is easily Fire and Brimstone, today's Best Song Ever.

The songs kicks open the doors with manic twangs of slide guitar, booming and bopping bass, cooling washes of wah-heavy electric. Then the boot stomps on hard wood floors start pumping through. Rocks get shaken inside of tin cans. Finally, rising above it all, are Wray's impassioned screams backed by a chorus of rock and roll angels.

This is the apocalypse burning it's way through the undergrowth and tearing out of the woods. It's roaring. It's rollicking. It's Fire and Brimstone, and it's been out of your life for too long.

That's The Way It's Meant To Be - The Features

Feedback klaxons and tommy gun hand claps. Manic drum grenades and screaming for your life. This is a call to the war of love. That's The Way It's Meant To Be.

Clocking in at little over two minutes this gem by Tennessee based rockers The Features bloodies your nose while french kissing you. It's one part organ fried pyschedelia, a smattering of teeth breaking punk ferocity and all hurricane. It's the violence of a kiss.

The fact this band isn't topping charts is an atrocity. Get the album. Or get the album that's coming out next month. No, get all the albums. Unless you hate love. Maybe then I'll understand.

Lovin' You - Minnie Riperton

People like to make fun of Lovin' You. These days it's mainly known as a super cheesy love song with a really high note during it. This is both unfair and missing what is likely the best story of the songs creation.

First of all, it's not just a high note. It's a whistle register note, the highest vocal range a human can reach. It's the kind of note you will never even come close to mimicking and is the reason everyone sounds dumb when they sing this song: no one else can hit those highs like Minnie. The purity of these descending trills tends to get lost when people think back on the song, but every time you hear it you can't help but shake your head in admiration.

Secondly, and I feel most importantly, the song was not originally written as a love song- or rather, it was a different kind of love song. Minnie first began singing the melody as a lullaby to help her daughter Maya (now a successful performer in her own right) fall asleep. While the lines have been changed in the final iteration to have a more specifically adult context, it's easy to see how a good deal of the lyrics could just as easily be from a mother to her child. I personally find the song infinitely more interesting and beautiful from this perspective.

Maya herself was in the studio when Minnie was recording the vocals for the track. In the final thirty seconds of the song, Minnie began to sing to her daughter, repeating her name to the melody. While it remains on the album this touching reminder of the song's history was axed by concerned producers for the single release, on some reports fearing listeners would confuse the name with a Mayan chant. An unfortunate choice and one which has relegated these origins to obscure footnote status.

Linus and Lucy - Vince Guaraldi Trio

Vince Guaraldi was a jazz trio band leader active from the late 50s to the early 70s. He is chiefly remembered for composing the music to the Peanuts television specials and movies; and for Linus and Lucy in particular.

It's an achingly simple piece of jazzy blues. Driving bass piano notes samba with brushes and maracas, bursts of drums thunder with chiming piano licks, all backed by that hear-it-once-and-you-never-forget-it melody.

The reason Linus and Lucy so perfectly encapsulates the spirit of Peanuts is because it hits just the right pitch of naivety and world weariness. Peanuts has remained perennially popular because of the universal chord struck by taking children and giving their concerns an adult perspective.

With this in mind, Guaraldi has composed a piece of music that wouldn't feel out of place soundtracking a bustling metropolis or a kid scraping their knee. It's the drudge of dragging a sledge up hill and the wide-eyed-ye-Gods-I'm-Alive heart pounding affirmation of the world as you thunder back down the ice.

Mowgli - The Historian Himself

Click Here To Listen To Mowgli

The Historian Himself (a.k.a. Brian Engh) is awesome. This dinosaur enthused artist/musician/monsterologist has given the world an entire concept album of prehistoric themed hip-hop FOR FREE. Called Earth Beasts Awaken, it's seventeen tracks of dinosaur groove. Get it from his site. Now.

Our personal favorite slice of the album is a little track called Mowgli.

Mowgli is a chilling piece of music. With winding organs and echoing plucked strings (sampled from animated short Slim Pickings) the song wrenches out the spine of Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli and sews it into a hypnotically terrifying allegory of the unstoppable force of nature.

The lyrics are equal parts measured scientific terminology and the fever dream ranting of a paleontologist caught in the apocalypse. Anyone who can pull off the word 'chromatophoric' and not only make it sound cool but kind of scary as well deserves a medal.

It's great, it's unusual, it's dinosaurs. You have no excuse.

Here's that download link again.

The Historian Himself Main Site

Slim Pickings directed by Anthony Lucas, music composed by Chris Copping.

The Other Side - Tiny Tim

Tiny Tim's reputation precedes the hell out of him: 'He's the dude who sings with that annoying voice, right?' or 'The ukulele guy?' or 'That gross guy with the face and the hair?'

Yes. Tiny Tim often sang in falsetto. Yes. Tiny Tim played the majority of his music upon the Ukulele. Yes. Tiny Tim was unusual looking to say the least. The fact that this man with grease paint on his face was for a brief period one of, if not the, biggest pop star in The United States was a truly incredible feat.

However when you listen to his first album, God Bless Tiny Tim, it all becomes a bit clearer. Tiny's consummate performance is given a grandiose psychedelic pop paint job by producer Richard Perry (who would go on to produce artists such as Harry Nilsson). Recorded in 1968 with the majority of it's numbers written between 1901-and the late 1920s, Tiny's debut still sounds piercingly fresh today largely due to how bizarre it was in the first place, and is well worth your time to seek out.

The track we are looking at today is The Other Side, one of the few numbers written contemporaneously with the album by a man named Bill Dorsey (a man who we will discuss a bit further another day).

The Other Side is a whirlwind of a song. First there's cryptic tone poetry about the Earth having drowned in a watery apocalypse accompanied by staccato bass plucks. But then! Urgent, slightly discordant pianos and synths build up the pacing as Tiny begins to tense and menace. But then! The booming orchestra-gone-drinking-song punch line of a chorus kicks in as the song joyously announces 'The Ice Caps Are Melting! Oh-ho-ho-ho! All the world is drowning!'

The whole song (and album) has an incredible sense of theatre about it. It's gripping, dramatic, and camp as hell. These are widescreen technicolor marvels for the ear.

And he barely sings in a falsetto.

Island Song - Ashley Eriksson

Ashley Eriksson's Island Song is probably best known as the tune that plays during the credits of the animated children's show Adventure Time. With it's simple, heartwarmingly melancholy mood and folky stylings, it's the perfect counterpoint to the manic energy of the show itself.

It easily stands on it's own. The perfect soundtrack to your own adventures, be they in life, love, or attacking an Ice King. Island Song is the essence of a best friend distilled into one sun dappled and charming package.

Ashley Eriksson Myspace

Ashley Eriksson Blog

Lost Woods Dubstep Remix - Ephixa

This year marks The Legend of Zelda's 25th Anniversary, so in honor of this auspicious occasion I order you to rock out to Ephixa's incredible dubstep remixes of a few iconic Zelda tracks.

My personal favourite is The Lost Woods Theme, which sounds like a demented clockwork shop getting bombarded by laser cannons. It's incredible, and if you're playing it right your windows should explode from the pure intensity of it.

Somebody please make The Legend of Zelda: Link's Weekend Bender and use these songs as the soundtrack. I will pay infinity money gratitude. Thank you.

Ephixa - Zelda Step Remixes

Who Are Parents - The Shaggs

Any song by The Shaggs requires a bit of explanation. The Shaggs were a three piece out of Fremont, New Hampshire comprised of sisters Helen, Dorothy and Betty Wiggin. The band, hotly tipped for fame by their grandmother, were managed (in some reports rather forcefully and always eccentrically) by their father Austin. He booked them regular gigs at school halls and community theatres, and even pushed them into recording their one and only album Philosophy of the World, from which the above is taken.

Now as you may have noticed if you've begun listening to the track, The Shaggs are not a fantastically gifted band musically. Rhythms wander, guitars jangle discordantly, and the singing can't quite decide on a key. There are wonderfully serendipitous moments of harmony appearing out of the mix, but overall things lack polish to put it generously. However what The Shaggs lack in musical training they more than make up for in unselfconscious sincerity. There's an innocence and a genuine belief in the music they're putting out which cuts to the heart far quicker than lush harmonies or rich orchestration ever could.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than the song Who Are Parents. The song is a sweet n' slow piece of sixties pop reminding kids that, in the end, your parents are going to love you no matter what. Is it a little trite? Sure. Yet no other band has even tried to approach this message, and one suspects that if they did they wouldn't pull it off with anywhere near as much heart. Simple, sweet and it'll have you thinking fondly for your folks. Not something I expect to write about a rock song, but thoroughly glad that I am able to.

Little Hands - Alexander 'Skip' Spence

Alexander 'Skip' Spence. One time drummer for Jefferson Airplane. Founder of Moby Grape. In 1968, while recording Grape's second album Wow, Spence suffered a violent breakdown which ultimately ended with a six month stay at Bellevue Hospital Center where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia (likely aggravated by ingesting copious amounts of LSD).

During his time at Bellevue, Spence was writing songs. Songs which sound familiarly unrecognisable, the aural equivalent of coming home to your house to find the furniture stacked in bizarre statues.

Spence left Bellevue and, purportedly in his pajamas, rode down to Nashville on a motorcycle and recorded the album Oar. Comprised of the songs he'd written during his hospitalization and performed entirely by himself, it's the albums opening track Little Hands which we are looking at today.

Little Hands is a shambling gem of psyche-folk. One of the first things to jump out about the song is it's unusual rhythm. Stuck somewhere in between a war march and sunshine, the drums and acoustic guitar work together to create a rich punctuation to Spence's lyrics; infectious despite never entirely settling into a groove. Atop these pulsations spikes of electric guitar chime and pounce across the weave of sounds.

The real star of this show however are Spence's multi-tracked vocals. Skydiving from ethereal highs to creaking lows, his voice breaks out across the track like streaks of light, but always manages to remain intimate.

Council Flat Blues - Eagulls

Take this and listen to it loudly:

Bet you didn't realize that mere moments after pressing play you were about to drown in a thunderous tsunami of everything that makes rock awesome. Bruised guitar melodies ache and weave inside walls of distortion. Drums fall from the sky like Satan's own meteor shower. Muddy rumbling bass oozes out across you before hardening into a diamond edge. And those throat shredding vocals barely treading the line between impassioned rage and balls out screaming.

This is Council Flat Blues, the debut single of Eagulls- the art school rockers leveling Leeds with one mighty hammer of the guitar. An album is coming. You should get it.

I see you eyeing up the video again, a guilty sweat breaking out. It's going to be okay, this is simply the sound of rock finding its testicles again. It loses them from time to time. It just takes a stroke of brutal awesome like this song and a band like Eagulls to sew them back on with barbed wire and nothing but whisky for anesthetic.

Fuck. Yes.

Eagulls – Council Flat Blues

Canadee-I-O - Nic Jones

It's hard to find a sadder story in folk music than that of Nic Jones. Widely regarded as one of the finest folk guitarists in existence with a percussive finger picking style wholly unique, his seminal album Penguin Eggs consistently tops critics polls to this day. While driving home from a gig in early 1982 Jones was in a car accident which forever robbed him of his ability to play anything like the style he had developed, and largely his ability with the instrument overall.

Some years later Bob Dylan recorded a performance of the folk ballad Canadee-I-O, which bore a remarkable similarity in it's arrangement to the version composed by Jones. Despite this, he gave him no songwriting credit. Even when called out on the fact, Dylan responded that he saw no similarity between the two versions.

Now, in the expansive grey area that is ownership over folk songs, many of which have existed for hundreds of years, it can be difficult to ascertain where the music originates. This has always been a difficulty in folk. But damn it, Dylan's version DOES sound like Jones' one. Even if Dylan felt they were different, he's a multi millionaire and Nic Jones is likely to never play again. He should have shown some kind of musical camaraderie and given Jones the credit and (in doing so) the royalties he deserves.

So thus we have Canadee-I-O. The track can be found on the aforementioned Penguin Eggs, and it perfectly encapsulates all of the best aspects of Nic Jones. His guitar playing is phenomenal, twirling, jangling and sliding around your ears to the point you almost have to question how so many melodies can be carried by one guitar. By equal turns percussive and gentle, it's genuinely unlike any acoustic guitar playing you will have heard before but, as with the best folk songs, feels gently worn and familiar.

Cutting through the vines of guitar string is Jones tenor voice, piercing and simple. Any excess and it would fight the guitar, they strike a perfect balance of call and response. The lyric tells the story of a young woman following her love to sea, and the adventure that befalls her there.

Of course, despite her happy ending, the true story in this song can only end in tragedy. Nic Jones will never be able to give us more music like this. Fortunately his wife, a dedicated fan of his music when they met, has been putting out the call to reissue the music he has recorded and for fans to send any bootlegs they own of his concerts to be released as albums to keep his music alive.

For now though, enjoy Canadee-I-O and share a thought for Nic Jones, one of the most unique and talented guitarists to grace the instrument.

Nic Jones – Canadee-I-O

Have I The Right - The Honeycombs

Have I The Right comes courtesy of 1964 one hit wonders The Honeycombs, chiefly known for being the first successful rock group with a female drummer (they have now mutated into two groups of the same name, both containing original members and neither as good) though really the song belongs just as much to legendarily troubled producer Joe Meek.

Meek is primarily known for producing the famous hit Telstar and for employing a variety of unorthodox (for the time) methods to gain new sounds. For my money, Have I the Right takes Telstar and proceeds to stomp on its neck- over and over again.

Which is appropriate really. The reason Have I The Right's rhythm pounds so righteously is because Meek had the whole band stamp on the wooden floor of the studio recorded by five separate microphones, topped off with a sixth one being directly smashed with a tambourine. The resultant booms are organic, brutal and joyous all at once, instantly elevating the track above its similar sounding contemporaries.

The Honeycombs – Have I The Right

Cousin Jane - The Troggs

Wild Thing. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. The Trogg's wrote it, you probably own it. Did you know they also wrote a haunting, lullaby ode to doing your cousin?

Cousin Jane, is as beguiling as a single gets. It softly whispers the simple story of kissing cousins into your ear as gentle music boxes wind away in the dark while ominous pianos and cellos stab at your conscience.

Found on The Troggs forgotten album Trogglodynamite, the song was penned by vocalist and rhythm guitarist Dave Wright and manager Larry Page. I like to think of it as the dark underbelly to Wild Thing's starry eyed enthusiasm. Cousin Jane is a song found in the reflection of broken bottles littering the floor of the after party. Gorgeous, fractured, and essential.

The Troggs – Cousin Jane

You're Goin' Miss Your Candyman - Terry Callier

Terry Callier has had a tough time.

Despite several critically acclaimed albums recorded throughout the late 60s and early 70s he failed to catch on commercially and finally decided to stop touring. He went back to his desk job at a local university and settled into a comfortable nine to five, his musical past for all intents and purposes a secret identity he'd left behind.

Then he was rediscovered.

Slowly he was coaxed out of hiding and back onto the road. Some moderate success followed. People were buying his albums. They were attending his shows.

Then he got fired.

When the University he'd been working at discovered his 'secret identity' they threw him out the door. The exact circumstances remain somewhat shrouded, only cryptically referred to by Callier himself in interview.

If I had to guess a reason from the sound of his music, it was for fear he'd sex the pants off of every college aged girl in a 50 mile radius. You're Goin' Miss Your Candyman is a track off of Callier's breakthrough album The Color of Love, and mother-god-damn is it a good song.

Essentially Callier's take on Midnight Rider, the track is both a musical magpie and time machine of genre and style over it's seven and a half minutes. Folk picked guitars gently caress you through the doors, shimmying bongos slap you on the back, and then one of the slinkiest and sexiest funk basslines ever put to wax spikes your drink while pushing you out to the dance floor.

Callier's voice is equal parts silk sheeted soul singer and blues wolf on the prowl. By the time the string section is duking it out with Motown horns in one of the biggest bar brawls you've ever seen, he drags you into his private back room for a quiet moment alone, before letting the whole thing roar back up again into a long hot finish.

The song can be found in two flavors: the original album mix (which is great) or a version slightly remastered by The Cinematic Orchestra for their Late Night Tales mix album. The answer to choosing between the two? Easy. Get The Cinematic Orchestra's version first, and when you realize you HAVE to hear more of this man, get The Color of Love in it's entirety. Let's give the candyman we never knew we were missing the love he deserved way back when, just a little late coming.

EDIT: If the video above has trouble loading, here's the song as trimmed by The Cinematic Orchestra.

Terry Callier – You're Goin' Miss Your Candyman

Tristan - Failotron

Let's pretend for a moment that a Gameboy could feel heartbreak.

If so, this is what it would sound like:

Digital veins pulsing with harmonic electronic heartbeats. Optimism crystalized in a perfect sequence of microchips and waves. Welcome to Tristan, one of the most achingly gorgeous pieces of chiptune I've ever encountered.

Chiptune, in brief, is music that uses the sound boards of old video game consoles (think Nintendo, SNES and Gameboy) to create new compositions. This particular track comes from Hungarian artist Failotron, real name Áron Birtalan.

The track is a masterclass in simplicity. Much of chiptune feels overwrought, the musicians a little too enthused by the superhuman speeds which they can push the melody and instrumentation towards. Tristan however is content to allow the listener some breathing space, and is all the more emotionally resonant for it.

The melody is carried by glittering bell tones which sing out like golden flashes of lightning over a thunderous rubbery baseline. Brushed highhats and thumping snares rush through the song like water. It's a rain shower of digital love, by turns retro and thoroughly modern. You need this song in your life.

Androids may dream of electric sheep, but video games dream of crushes and high school love letters. I know which one I'd rather be with.

Tristan | 8bc - Online Chiptune Media Sharing

Failotron

Crazy Hazy Kisses - Flat Duo Jets

So before we do anything watch this and of course, make it loud:

Hooooooooly shit, right? That little slice of blues doesn't just rattle your ribcage, it stomps on your bones till there's nothing left but dust, and then sets the remains on fire just to make sure.

The two dark haired banshees in that video are Dexter Romweber (guitar and vocals) and Chris 'Crow' Smith (drums), better known as Flat Duo Jets. The blues duo, sadly long since disbanded, rocked the doors off of their hometown of Carrboro, North Carolina and the rest of the States through most of the 80s into the late 90s before going their separate ways.

In what should be counted as a crime against humanity, Crazy Hazy Kisses never appeared on any of the Flat Duo Jets records, it's sole appearance being in obscure music documentary Athens, G.A. (and later in Davis Guggenheim's It Might Get Loud). But what an appearance it is.

Dexter Romweber attacks his weathered Dan Electro with the fury of a hurricane; primal screams tearing out of him with such spine chilling power you can feel flecks of lung and bone battering your ear drums. Crow's drums, woefully under-mixed in that bootleg clip, still pack a wallop of boiling rills, rolls and spills. It's the kind of number that makes you want to dance, fuck and kill; preferably all at once.

Getting ahold of the track can be a bit tricky, but a bit of You Tube audio grabbing wizardry will get this gem into your hot little hands.

However you can. Get it. Now. And if anyone ever tells you that 50s style rock has no balls, play them this track, so it can kick them squarely in their own.