Dangerous & Lazy

I suppose it is, at least here in America, where they bizarrely start their seasons on the quarter days, so that summer doesn’t start until midsummer. Besides which, most of the songs I’m listening to right now I’ve been listening to for a while, so they probably fulfill the rigorous terms of the meme:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

1. Sally Shapiro – I’ll Be By Your Side

   I don’t generally follow Pitchfork-approved pop, so I hadn’t heard of Sally Shapiro until recently. My loss; Disco Romance is a pretty great album, from which this absolutely beautiful song is the standout track. It’s perfect for early February, the beginning of spring, when the weather is still freezing cold and isn’t actually getting any better, but you can just about imagine that, perhaps, at some point, it might.

2. tATu – 220

   I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m still listening to it; and now it has a video, featuring Yulia and Lena as 1930s burlesque robots, which is, you know, pretty awesome. Tatu were supposed to be playing nearby last night, but apparently they’re ill. I was wondering why they were playing in suburban San Jose rather than metrosexual San Francisco; but actually, it makes perfect sense because, if Internet message boards are to be believed, Tatu’s main fan base is made up of bicurious suburban teenagers. They should probably play Fresno (and isn’t “bicurious” a stupid word?).

3. Charlie Parker – April in Paris

   I’ve recently become, for reasons I may explain at a later date, interested in the post-war aesthetic; which translates in my music collection to Charlie Parker (although now that I think about it, I should dig out my Best of Buddy Holly, too). I’ve also been listening to “All of Me” a lot, but this was an obvious choice for the meme. It’s such a splendid spring song, right from the opening flourish of trumpets that crunch like a sugar-snap pea, or a grape.

4. The Ting Tings – That’s Not My Name

   Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong have certainly done the world a favor by choosing a terrible, terrible name, in order to warn people off their unbelievably shit music. The Ting Tings have managed a more subtle example of the same thing, in that their name is perfectly calibrated to their level of kind-of-annoyingness. “Shut Up and Let Me Go” is absolutely tailor-made for an iPod advert, in that it’s funky but, you know, tasteful; but the rest of their album is wierdly reminiscent of mid-90s American indie of a Jo Whiley/Steve Lamacq sort, most obviously in “Be the One” (which I kind of think sounds like Belly, though I may just be imagining it) but more unexpectedly, and more interestingly, about three minutes in to this track.

5. Sugababes – Surprise

   I can’t quite place exactly what it is, but there’s something very soothing about the last Sugababes album. Like a barbecue on a spring afternoon? I may be stretching the metaphor a bit. I’ve no particular reason for choosing this track over the Strokes-sampling “About You Now,” or the anti-Obama anthem “Change” (“Ain’t it funny how you think you’ve got your whole life planned/till you find out it was never ever in your hands/Change”), or the Ian Carey remix of “Denial,” all of which I’ve also been listening to a lot, unlike the album’s one miss-step, unfortunate rocksteady track “Back Down.”

6. Taylor Swift – Our Song

   Taylor Swift is another album it took me a while to notice; I saw “Teardrops on My Guitar” on MTV, and then jane dark wrote about her and last.fm started encouraging me to listen to her. Anyway, I’ve been listening to the album again recently;  I particularly enjoy the casual homophobia of “Picture to Burn” (“So go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy / That’s fine; I’ll tell mine you’re gay”). I’m also intigued, and perhaps this just shows that I don’t listen to much country, by the world-weariness of some of the tracks, like “Should Have Said No” and “Tied Together With a Smile.” But this song is my current favorite and, conveniently, the best one for this meme, being one of those songs that produces an imagine of summer spreading out indefinitely in front of you.

7. Alabama 3 – Whores of Babylon

   And this song enacts that feeling of an infinitely long summer, the infinity of the early hours of a summer morning; it shares this quality with a million other dance records, but this is the one I happen to be listening to right now.