’nuff said.

Is it just this spring weather messing with my head or has M83 figured out what happened with Duckie and Andie that summer after the prom…?

You couldn’t buy her, though, that’s what’s killing you, isn’t it? Stef?

Club Tropicana

I love cover songs. Even kinda like the sort of lame ones like Gwen Stefani & Co’s alright-but-unnecessary rendition of Talk Talk’s totally awesome “It’s My Life” — if only just to discover the different ways artists mutually appreciate the same composition (our Jazz and Classical contributors on here can commence their haughty scoffing whenever it’s convenient.)

And so, the inaugural Tass Cover Song du Jour comes (perhaps a bit obviously) from none other than synth-dance-pop masters Pet Shop Boys. Released as a single in advance of 1987’s excellent Actually the track wasn’t even on the album (the liner notes contained the phrase, “not from the album, actually.”) While originally recorded by Brenda Lee and then more famously Elvis, it was the brilliant 1982 Willie Nelson take I was more familiar with in my youth up until hearing PSB’s ecstatically melancholy rendition. Never was quite sure what the f with the narrative but do know that 20 years later, this track still delivers the same sugary high every spin. And of course, there’s always that 2 second shot of a ventriloquist’s dummy…

 I take your Primitives, raise the Godfathers and call. 

My ol’ pal Gavin randomly sent me a link for The Primitives’ Crash (live circa 1988) which, in a youtube minute, has got me all nostalgic for 80’s pop this week…

Sure, it’s lip-synched and yeah in hindsight was just another harbinger of the awful image-driven crap that secured a stultifying grip on mainstream media at the dawn of the 90s but hell, even the most blatantly commercial music in the 1980s seemed to have at least some underlying musicality and craftsmanship which now has completely vanished or worse, been subverted to boringly safe product churned out weekly by studio technicians with finely-honed Pro Tools skills and little else to their artistic credit. Or, at least that’s what a 2 minute dose of Tracy Tracy and co’s proto-shoegaze pseudo-indie pop rock has got me ga-ga enough to think for the next 13.