The Song Corporation - "The Bug Speaks". Check the squeak of guitar on this song, the dauntless whitewater flow of lyrics. It's a boat plowing headfirst into a cliff, a raincoat-clad bug at the stern, ranting into the clear day wind. I like the guitar that wanders like Miles Davis through the belowdecks - the quiet one, the one underneath the verses. Waves shove the hull, a girl's "oh-oh"s in the back, and then as things hit a crescendo the boat crumples into the rock-face, a welcome destruction. The best pop song to ever have been inspired by Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," this is democracy and its collapse - accompanied by a guitar solo. "You are not aloooone! Hit it!" Yes. From the Song Corporation's new 3-song EP.
Pure Morning - "Scum". Before Ade Blackburn and Hartley formed Clinic in 1997, their band was called Pure Morning. There was no clarinet, no surgical masks. And whereas Walking With Thee conjures up a sinister organ-grinder, a menacing grin, Two Inch Helium Buddah is more like expressionist sidewalk chalk, angry teens sketching greybrown frustration. It's a mess, really - mean boys playing Radiohead's "Just", droogs after a break-up, drunken grunge, stinging nettles under fireworks. But man, the jackhammer blossom of that electric guitar, the way the noise takes over those angry lyrics, the way it says it all so much better... Grafitti on a cloudcovered sky. [OOP, but findable]
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I've fallen quite in love with "Tomorrow on the Runway," a song by the Innocence Mission, which you can download here. Bryan tells me that their 1995 album, Glow, is even better than Befriended, but I haven't heard either. All I know is that at the middle and in the end there's guitar like silver pinpricks, and the rest of the time there's Karen Peris's lavender voice, like small flowers waving in the breeze.