Rut recs
Valentine’s Day might be just a few days away, but there is something profoundly un-sexy in the air. The songs are not hitting. The crate-digging is almost exclusively turning up landfill pop. The labyrinthian Spotify deep dives are cobwebbed to hell. Nothing is exciting or inspiring or even particularly confounding. Something is amiss!
Perhaps this sounds like depression, though it’s not -- I promise! It’s a hangover. We’re stumbling out of one of the best years in music and now must rummage through all the c-tier imitations that were of-an-era but calendared for release shortly after its conclusion.
Everyone I’ve spoken to feels similarly. We’re either scraping the bottom of the barrel and sending each other music we’re only ever so vaguely moved by or running back Britpop albums from 1994. If you feel this way, I’m smashing the “break in case of emergency” glass and dropping some weird recs that might at least be a little entertaining:
World Peace x Sugar Bullet - How I found this song will always be a mystery to me. I am one of Sugar Bullet’s 143 monthly listeners, but I do bump this song an obscene amount. This wee Scottish band only has one album, released in 1991, and I cannot vouch for anything else on that record. World Peace, however, is a bizarre trip hop treasure.
Scatman Dub x The Kings of Dubrock - Okay, this is very much in the same vein as World Peace but take a few more hits and add some German breaks where one of the singers also attempts to speak Spanish for approximately two seconds. Insane, but why not?
Undantag x Dina Ogon - This one is not a deep cut, and if we’re friends then you probably already know it. When I was unemployed and on the job hunt I depended on this song before every interview like it was a cigarette. It lifts the grime that sticks to the soul, it fills up the reservoir of sugary sunshine that shoots up your neck when you’re in love, it could be the thing that single-handedly saves my life as the world crumbles. Big fan !
Love in Constant Spectacle x Jane Weaver - And this one isn’t very weird, but I actually just remembered it’s the only semi-new thing I listened to this week that I found dynamic! I had not heard of Jane Weaver before and I can’t tell if that’s a faux pas on my part, but I am, in any case, here for this celestial Space Oddity-esque exploration of the grief that is intrinsically tied up with love.
Yeah, alright — enjoy! A wave of better art must surely be coming