You’re In A Sleepless Dream

Annie and the Anniemals “The Wedding (Sirius Satellite Radio Session)” – This new unreleased song was recorded in NYC right around the time Annie and her band were in town for their show at the Tribeca Grand. “The Wedding” bodes well for Annie’s eventual second album, boasting a bouncy and immediately catchy synth funk track that sounds like early Tom Tom Club or mid-period Talking Heads, and coy, spunky vocals reminiscent of Cristina on Sleep It Off in place of the wispiness that characterized most of Anniemal. (Click here for the official Annie site.)

Broadcast “Goodbye Girls” – Following a fairly radical downsizing of the band’s membership, Trish Keenan and James Cargill continue on with the Broadcast name as a duo on the forthcoming Tender Buttons LP. The personality of the band remains intact, though the ponderous percussion and baroque sci-fi orchestration of The Noise Made By People has been jettisoned in favor of stark, streamlined electronic arrangements which ironically radiate more warmth and humanity than their more organic (and far fussier) recordings. I don’t think that I would have gleaned that “Goodbye Girls” is about prostitution just by listening to it, but according to Keenan, the song is about making peace with the idea of prostitution, and the fact that there are prostitutes in her family. It’s not a particularly positive or negative song, but rather one which acknowledges and respects the social and emotional complexity of the world’s oldest profession. (Click here to pre-order it from Amazon.)