Song of the Day 7/13/10

Just a little over two weeks til our best 666 songs of alltime countdown reaches #1…and then we start with the 1000 best albums of alltime. Tuesday’s song is #16:

Joy Division – The Eternal

Complete emotional depletion has never been so accurately depicted as in this Mellotron dirge from Closer, 1981. “With children my time is so wastefully spent.” Which raises the obvious question – if Ian Curtis’ doctor hadn’t prescribed him barbituates for his epilepsy, would he still be alive?

Song of the Day 7/5/10

Less than a month til our best 666 songs of alltime countdown reaches #1! Monday’s song is #24:

Joy Division – Day of the Lords

Three JD cuts in a row – and there are more to come. This is just about their loudest, most scorching anthem. “Where will it end, WHERE WILL IT END????” From Unknown Pleasures, 1979.

Song of the Day 5/28/10

The best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Friday’s song is #62:

Joy Division – Ice Age

Punk rock meets noise-rock with Bernard Albrecht (that was his name then) scorching his way down the fretboard on this fast, frenetic smash released on Still in 1981.

Song of the Day 3/23/10

The best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Tuesday’s song is #128:

The Wild Swans – Now & Forever

Nonchalantly chilling new wave pop semi-hit from 1988 from the Bringing Home the Ashes album, an overcast British wintertime tableau that doesn’t exactly exude optimism:

You want the life you can’t afford, after all that you’ve been through
Soon it will be over
Boy has this town crippled you

Song of the Day 3/21/10

The best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Sunday’s song is #130:

Joy Division – Interzone

Fast, scurrying, manic-depressive punk rock with a sweet minor-key hook from Unknown Pleasures, 1979. “And I was looking for a friend of mine.”

Concert Review from the Archives: The Railway Children at the Marquee, NYC 11/21/90

[editor’s note: since we’re off for Thanksgiving, we’re putting up stuff from the archives each day while we’re away. Maybe you were there for some of these!]

Jangly Manchester band the Railway Children’s new CD Native Place is a slick and trebly overproduced mess, with synthesizers where the band would ordinarily use layers of guitars, so the game plan tonight was to find out how well they would play the songs if left to their own devices. Pretty well is the answer. The concert consisted of virtually all new material plus songs which are either brand-new, bonus cuts from the cd or from some hitherto unknown ep. They opened with It’s Heaven, which really rocks live without the stupid synth hook on the album. They continued with new material until about a third of the way through the show when the sound was suddenly boosted to earsplitting levels, bass and vocals distorting, drowning out the other instruments and turning the sound into a painfully fuzzy soup. After this happened, the anthemic Over and Over and A Pleasure were anything but that: the latter song’s deliciously recurrent Rickenbacker guitar arpeggios were for all intents and purposes inaudible. A real disappointment, especially in the wake of their excellent Staten Island performance earlier this fall. But it wasn’t the band’s fault.

[postscript: the band, a post-Smiths, 2-guitar unit put out three albums before imploding in the early 90s. Their first record, Reunion Wilderness, was a bracing, jazz-inflected effort, although with its incessant 2/4 dance beat, it was pretty monochromatic. Their second, Recurrence was their high-water mark, filled with pretty, major-key songs including the obscure classic A Pleasure (which became a live concert staple). The overproduced album they were promoting on this tour gained them a big club hit but alienated their core audience, a gaffe from which the band never recovered. The venue, a hangar-like former warehouse space in Chelsea, closed in about 1993, outlasting the band by barely a year. ]