Song by song, as posted at The Record Room (
http://s3.excoboard.com/therecordroom) but shared here, too, because, well, I don't know. Whatever. But yeah. A list of songs I like, and some blabbing about them.
Stanley Brinks & the Wave Pictures, "Orange Juice"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOIHV8iyzfUMy love affair with Stanley Brinks goes back awhile, to the last album he did with his brother David-Ivar. His name was still Andre Herman Dune, the band was Herman Dune, and that album was
Giant, wherein Andre played the cynical foil to a doe-eyed David.
As Jeffrey Lewis said in his song of the same name, "I Miss Herman Dune When Both Brothers Were In The Band." It's as true with the brothers Herman Dune as it was with the Beatles: some creative tension is good. But life goes on and as Andre/Stanley sang in his 2008 hero myth "Stanley Brinks," "In the fall of two-thousand-six, I changed my name to Stanley Brinks." Fair enough.
[Editorial note: I decided to drink a couple of morning beers to finish this up. It seemed appropriate.]
A half-assed ear open for new material from both the amputee Herman Dune and the loose limb Stanley Brinks, I liked the idea of a new album titled
Gin from the latter (along with the Wave Pictures). But first, a single, "Orange Juice."
Oh Lord in Whom I do not believe, You have made me see Your Light! I heard it at the same time I saw the video, a perfectly matched image of the song, and I knew immediately this was one of my favorite songs of the year. It would not be beaten by many, if any.
Three chords. Classic Andre--er, Stanley--lyrical style, each verse laid out in A-A-A-B form, and with verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure. Actually verse-chorus-guitar solo structure: David Tattersall of the Wave Pictures has ample opportunity to pluck percussive.
These middle-aged men--and the one female amongst them--sharing not (
just) their joint disillusionment with the younger world around them, but the joy in their cramped enclave, hidden from that world, is ecstatic. This is not growing old gracefully, but detachedly. The bitching about everything in the greater world seems perfunctory, grump-as-character, more than a reflection of any true disappointment. Bullet point after bullet point of what's wrong is just a prelude to the ultimate statement of contentedness. Or happiness. Ultimate pleasure, in fact.
It's raining and the wind is ruthless, I'm old and cold and tired and useless and toothless.
The radio sucks balls, I don't relate to any of the music they're playing at all.
There's sh*t all over the street, you can't even walk, there is nowhere left to set one's feet.
Everything wrong in the world, I'll get by "with a little bit of you, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, ephedrine and orange juice." And how does it all work?
Life doesn't have a meaning. Anything goes.
Like the divine inspiration seems to have meant as the point of Ecclesiastes said before being divinely appended "Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life." Or if you prefer, as Maurice tells Buck in Boogie Nights, "Wear what you dig."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EwaNAyvA3g