For this first Wednesday Listening Pleasure of 2020, I go back to late Summer of 2019 when local Seattleites The Black Tones appearead live on KEXP. Singer Eva Walker and her brother, drummer Cedric, have created one of the best local bands in existence right now.
Eva’s booming voice filters through Stevie Nicks by way of Joan Jett, with rounded, sliding notes that end in a delicious, warbling vibrato that has hints of Billie Holiday bubbling under the surface. “Mama! There’s a Spider In My Room!” is my favorite track from The Black Tones’s album, Cobain & Cornbread. Partake and be pleasured:
You have now been pleasured for the first time in 2020!
That sausage tree is gross and weird and I want one so bad…
A bizarre video for a bizarre Christmas song whose name and chorus sound kind of like a threat, here is Sia’s “Santa’s Coming for Us,” which does not star Sia but instead Kristen Bell, Dax Shepard, Susan Lucci, Henry Winkler, one of the kids from Stranger Things, and J.B. Smoove as a beardless Santa who steals the foods. Partake and enjoy, but be warned: Santa IS coming for us…
Did Santa get you? No? Whew! That means you’ve successfully been pleasured.
Let’s have a good time this holiday season! Here are the amazing Sharon Jones and her Dap-Kings with a song from their holiday album, It’s a Holiday Soul Party, which is one of the very best holiday albums released in the past, oh, 50 years or so. Partake and be pleasured:
I first heard Natalie Prass playing in an Ikea store of all places. A weird bit of cross-promotion, but it worked! I went and bought her album from it. It’s got some good, white-girl groove to it. I dig it, and it fits in very well with my current musical leanings.
This video is basically divided into two chapters, which I call “Merry Go Round” and “Ribbon Dancers” for obvious reasons (there’s of course a mashup of the two chapters towards the end of the video). Listen and be pleasured:
The video, to be honest, is not much to speak about. I dig her jumpsuit, but the low-budgetness of it all is obvious, and the time of year that it was filmed gives everything a weirdly desolate undertone.
I’ve never seen as many stars as I can see right now…
Fine Prince, one of my favorite Seattle bands (because they’re just so idiosyncratic, lovely, and weird), released a new two-song EP a few weeks ago! It’s called Drive Slow // Television Eyes and the two songs on it are called “Drive Slow” and “Television Eyes.”
Anyhoo, to celebrate, please watch/listen and be pleasured by this official music video for “Nostalgia,” from their previous EP, Lookout. In it an elderly couple escapes from a hospital(??) and goes about pranking the various members of the band in lovingly-filmed slow motion. It’s very nice:
I really like the double-synth/guitar/harmony pop that Fine Prince just excels at. Here is their new EP if you’d like to keep listening (and you should):
Tomorrow is Halloween! Celebrate with this great ghostly song by Open Mike Eagle. Partake and enjoy this 1980s-tastic music video, directed by Mike himself:
