Some really good tracks here I haven’t heard before. A little like a less annoying (for me anyway) version of Hot Chip. In fact not annoying at all.
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I’ll be listening to these during my overnight shifts this weekend
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Nice entry! Really good category fit imo.
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In fourth place with seven points
This Mortal Coil - Kangaroo
I had real issues placing this one and I’d guess it will be the most difficult of the entire Walrus. It’s one I’ve heard a couple of times before, but it’s a cover from an album I love so I know the original extremely well.
TMC keep the atmosphere and tune pretty much exactly the same, but it’s clearly their own arrangement and they perform it excellently. They lose an aspect of the original which makes the whole album so astounding (more on that in a future reveal), but I’m not sure it would have been worthwhile to have even attempted to preserve it. The song itself is amazing.
I could have easily put this first, but, at the same time, would not want anyone to start here rather than the original, so a win (or too close to it) seemed disingenuous. In the end the foot of the podium felt right. It’s a great song and a great version of it so perhaps it’s been a little robbed by my prejudice, but then you could say that of any song being judged here.
Oh, yeah, our submitter writes:
Great to have sex to btw - this was my college gf and my song.
If I had to think about this whilst listening, so do you.
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lolol
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I gotta be honest, I’m finding this difficult to fap to.
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I’ve got to be honest, I prefer the original.
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And now the podium…
In third place with eight points
Brian Eno - Put A Straw Under Baby
I’ve never done dinner parties, preferring after-drinks music instead but this, featuring a cross-section of rank amateur musicians as well as Manzanera and Wyatt, has interested a few over the years.
I guess I’ll allow it.
Another clue that I don’t know Eno’s stuff well enough at all, I have a few of the ‘ambient’ records and the collaborations with Cluster, but I’ve only listened to his stuff with actual songs a few times, and I don’t think ever this album. This is great, though, a sort of alternate dimension lullaby where you can hear the care and intricacy that’s gone into sounding ‘naive’.
It also took me down a wikipedia hole investigating the links between Eno, Roxy Music, Robert Wyatt (who is the falsetto on this song) and others. Phil Collins is on this album, and Phil Manzanera was in a band at school with Charles Hayward out of This Heat, a favourite drummer of mine, imagine that!
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One of mine obv.
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Edwin – Rush - TheDuker
Kurt Vile - Jesus Fever - ??
Nick Drake – Parasite - mjiggy
Kormac - Wash My Hands - seities
The Beta Band - Dry The Rain – cassette
Sink Ya Teeth - If You See Me - SwankyWilder
This Mortal Coil – Kangaroo - ??
Brian Eno - Put A Straw Under Baby - jalfrezi
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Edwin was me.
Er…right. I knew that. Sorry.
edit: fixed
We haven’t had microbet’s yet.
In second place with nine points
Django Reinhardt - Minor Swing
These guys play the absolute living shit out of this song. Considering everything that came later in jazz soloing it’s amazing to hear them get so much variety and freedom out of pretty much sticking to chords. Django’s guitar playing is always ludicrous and no lesser an authority than Jerry Garcia nailed why he’s so great:
I mean, the combination of incredible speed—all the speed you could possibly want—but also the thing of every note having a specific personality. You don’t hear it. I really haven’t heard it anywhere but with Django.
That’s certainly in evidence here, very fast but, as ever, using lots of bend and getting a discrete sound for almost every note. That said I think it might even be Grappelli who edges it here, letting his violin wail away in a few spots and straining almost past the limits, even as the whole performance is as tight as a drum (down to the nonchalance of the “awww, yeah” at the end). Majestic stuff.
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Just want to publicly announce that I am adjusting any goal I had of winning this Walrus to instead just wanting to beat that cassette mofo.
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That could be micro’s imo.
Ridiculous guitarist with or without some of his fingers lol.
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Yep. I’ve been following his best I can climbing in an attic and crawling on a roof or is that crawling in an attic and climbing on a roof.
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In first place with ten points
Sparks - My Baby’s Taking Me Home
This is so far up my street it’s embarrassing how I didn’t know about these guys till now. I think I knew that a band called Sparks existed but almost nothing else, and they’ve been releasing stuff since the early 70s? I think I’ve heard some of their early stuff as it seems they had hits in the UK, but maybe never really listened. Anyway, ridiculous.
On the one hand this song just repeats the line “My Baby’s Taking Me Home” over and over (107 times if you believe someone on youtube), on the other there’s so much going on as the song progresses it’s hard to keep track. You can hear pure pop, music hall, krautrock, electronic music, minimalism, all sorts. That’s all without considering the performance here (it’s a live track), which elevates it even further. Really, this blew me away. Can’t wait to get stuck into their back catalogue. Topest marks.
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Paul, rivaldo, suzzer seem to be the options for #1.
I had a copy of This Town Ain’t Big Enough, their breakthrough hit.