When Fantasies Are Bad They Are Humiliating

Brian Eno “This” – Brian Eno is like the Mr. Spock of pop music. His voice can convey a sort of inhuman lucidity and aloofness, as though he’s found a way to separate his intellect from his emotions without sacrificing his soul. Given his inclination to create ambient music, it is not so surprising that he would go so long without recording his voice (the most recent Eno vocal track that I am aware of is “A Different Kind of Blue” from his Passengers album with U2 in 1995), but it’s certainly a welcome return. Several of the songs on his new record are clearly influenced by gospel music, but the passion and ardor essential to that genre is filtered through Eno’s aesthetics, resulting in something quite different. “This” retains the spirituality of gospel but shifts the scale of the sentiment from the conventional emphatic declaration of faith to a smaller, more personal epiphany. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

The Rogers Sisters “Les Fantaisies Sont Bien” – On their new single, the Rogers Sisters revisit a long lost pop tradition: translating a song into another language and rerecording it to meet the economic and cultural demands of another country. However, unless the band is massively popular in France and I just don’t know about it, it seems clear that this alternate take on “Fantasies Are Nice” was recorded entirely for artistic purposes rather than made to satisfy the demands of the French marketplace. It’s difficult to suss out just why they would choose to record this particular song au francais, but the result is very entertaining. The vocals seem brattier and more perverse, and the music somehow feels twice as spazzy without being noticeably different from the backing track on the original recording. (Click here to buy it from Troubleman United.)