Kate & Anna McGarrigle – Kiss and Say Goodbye

I grew up with Kate & Anna McGarrigle. “Kiss and Say Goodbye” is the first track on their 1976 self-titled debut, and one of my earliest musical memories. Being raised in proper Canadian nationalist style, we had no, say, Fleetwood Mac records; instead the McGarrigles were never far from the record player and this was the first thing you’d hear if someone put them on.

This song is about a visiting lover and it’s impossible for me to be impartial about it. I don’t mind the saxophone solo, the backup vocals, I don’t even mind the truck driver’s gear change. Ten seconds of the perfect piano / snare intro and I’m back in the living room, peering my nose over the steadily spinning vinyl and dimly aware that somewhere in the room, my parents are dancing.

Small Black – Despicable Dogs (Washed Out Remix)

Lately I seem to be collecting songs of walking tempo.

I’m not sure why, because tracks like this Small Black remix (blogneric, natch!) don’t always work so well on foot in London. There are too many distractions, uneven pavements, trick corners, stops and starts.

Songs like this make me want to walk through grass or snow again, methodically, watching a point on the horizon as it becomes slowly but steadily closer.

The Innocence Mission – God Is Love

So it’s a hot hot hungover Saturday and I came on here to post something with beats, something sunny and fresh you know, some Tanlines or Fol Chen or those Au Revoir Simone remixes or maybe just some pop that screams summer but then I fell over backwards into these new tracks from The Innocence Mission and they disarmed me completely, here is one for you. Against the weather, against songs about God, against every impulse here we are. It’s too lovely can you open the window already.

Lord Kitchener – London Is the Place for Me

To live in London you’re really comfortable
because the English people are very much sociable
They take you here and they take you there
and they make you feel like a millionaire…

Aldwyn Roberts — much better known as Lord Kitchener — emigrated to London from Trinidad in 1952.

One has to suspect that he either wrote “London is the Place for Me” before arriving, or with tongue placed firmly in cheek. On a beautiful summer Sunday morning, though, his exhuberence suddenly makes sense. I want to believe.

Hayden – Let’s Break Up

Sometimes you need to cut your losses, get in a car, roll down the windows, and DRIVE.

No Kids – At The Grove

When I’m outside in dying light
and everything is wrong

No Kids are from Vancouver, but their latest EP feels like they’re looking south to places where you get palms with your salt air; places that remind you that you’re not home.

Today is a hot muggy London office summer, and “At The Grove” is helping me keep it cool. It’s a small song, and not outwardly extraordinary, but nothing gets in the way of its forward motion. Sad songs are easy, doing them like this isn’t.

Ruth – Polaroid/Roman/Photo

I’ve spent the last five years slowly realizing that most of what I’ve found fresh and exciting in music was done better in the 80s. 

“Polaroid/Roman/Photo” is a track by French new wave band Ruth. Sitting near the end of a minimal synth compilation I stumbled on a couple weeks back, it singlehandedly prefigures everything I liked around 2001–2006. At the time, I was in the throes of Ladytron (synths! sex!), Stereo Total (style! boy/girl vocals!), The Notwist (beats! horns! guitars!) — and they fronted my iPod 1G soundtrack as I left the arctic in a predictably naive search for imaginary jetset euro-cosmopolitan futures.

The song triggers every impulse that brought me to London. But it sits firmly in 1985, blissfully unaware of kitschy post-millenial imitators; it is dirtier, colder, sadder. It can’t touch me anymore, but I sometimes wish it could.

Do wait for the horns.