I Will Hire The Assassin Just To Kill The Time

It is just too fucking hot in New York. I barely want to do anything. These two songs for today were selected because they both (for reasons I can’t quite explain) evoke the feeling of air conditioning for me.

Jonathan Fire Eater “This Is My Room” – This is taken from their Wolf Songs For Lambs album, which I believe to be one of the great ‘lost classics’ of the 1990s. This album was buried by its own press/industry hype and the band broke up shortly after its release due to a combination of inter-band strife, drug abuse, and record company hassles. The hype was not unwarranted – the people who praised this album and the band back in the mid-90s were on the money in terms of the music’s quality, even if they massively overestimated their commercial appeal.

Pharrell Williams w/ Jay-Z “Frontin'” – This is from the forthcoming The Neptunes Present…Clones record. I love how crisp and clean this song sounds, it is very slick and smooth without sounding too dull or austere. I’m assuming that this song has more than a couple samples in it, because I swear I recognize some of these keyboard/bass parts, though I can’t quite place them. All told, this is pretty typical of the best Pharrell/Neptunes music.