Growing Up Undone

Excepter “Any And Every” – Half euphoria, half nightmare. It sounds like you’re walking through an extremely loud and crowded dance club with severe vertigo. You can barely tell where your feet are, the sounds blur so that it sounds less like music, and more like shapes of sound swirling around your head, and nudging your movement. You might feel paranoid if you didn’t feel so passive. The beat holds you down like an enormous thumb, your brain feels like a squished cherry tomato at the bottom of a shopping bag. (Your face feels like the shopping bag.) (Click here for the official Excepter site.)

The Ting Tings “Great DJ” – The best thing about this song is the way it seems like this knowingly futile attempt to hold perfect, ephemeral moments in the mind, to just live in them for a couple seconds longer, at the very least. It’s there in the way the indie guitar chords just sorta hang in the air, and the dry, quasi-mechanical repetition in the chorus — the drums the drums the drums the drums the drums the drums. In a way, it’s about that failure, that acknowledgment that the human mind is a terribly flawed recording instrument, but also respecting/loving the way nostalgia can transform a somewhat mundane evening into something far more magical. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Meanwhile, on Fair Game: Here’s that full Yelle segment with the other song!