The blog of Michael K.
The Ten Most Songs Of The Year: II
Published Wednesday, December 26, 2007 by Michael K. | E-mail this post
Over the next few days, I'm counting down ten songs that made me especially glad to have ears this year.
II: Slagsmålsklubben - His Morning Promenade
The lure of my little brother's XBox360 aside, I'm not much of a video gamer these days. But looking back, I realize just how profoundly my childhood holidays were parceled out by the sixteen-bit chunk. And that's why I'm talking about SMK here now.
Time was that every holiday meant loading into the old '77 Bonneville and driving a couple hours down to Grandma's house. It was an old farmhouse, the newer technology inside having been installed in the mid-70s. There was no cable TV there then. Hell, there's no cable TV there now. Thank God for older cousins and their toys. While elderly Lithuanian folks played pinochle and drank coffee, my brothers and I spent hours in the creaky old glassed-in porch, scuffling over who got to play this classic:
This was the best Christmas gift EVER, ca. 1984.
And while the Giants were beating the Broncos in Super Bowl XXI a few weeks after another Christmas, my Dad was figuring out how to set this up:
Looking the part of the creepiest town council imaginable, Scandinavian synth band Slagsmålsklubben makes the sort of music the 11 year old me, Super Mario, and DJ Glass Joe would have mashed together after getting high on smoked herring. It's instant, chimey and yet so deftly layered.
I love that Slagsmålsklubben apparently translates to "Fight Club" - the most inappropriate matching of an act's movie title-inspired name and sound since Three Colours Red.
And there's just something slightly, attractively deviant about the motto - "6 men with analogue synths." When you see that, you just assume something weird is up. It sure is, from the looks of the video.
II: Slagsmålsklubben - His Morning Promenade
The lure of my little brother's XBox360 aside, I'm not much of a video gamer these days. But looking back, I realize just how profoundly my childhood holidays were parceled out by the sixteen-bit chunk. And that's why I'm talking about SMK here now.
Time was that every holiday meant loading into the old '77 Bonneville and driving a couple hours down to Grandma's house. It was an old farmhouse, the newer technology inside having been installed in the mid-70s. There was no cable TV there then. Hell, there's no cable TV there now. Thank God for older cousins and their toys. While elderly Lithuanian folks played pinochle and drank coffee, my brothers and I spent hours in the creaky old glassed-in porch, scuffling over who got to play this classic:
This was the best Christmas gift EVER, ca. 1984.
And while the Giants were beating the Broncos in Super Bowl XXI a few weeks after another Christmas, my Dad was figuring out how to set this up:
Looking the part of the creepiest town council imaginable, Scandinavian synth band Slagsmålsklubben makes the sort of music the 11 year old me, Super Mario, and DJ Glass Joe would have mashed together after getting high on smoked herring. It's instant, chimey and yet so deftly layered.
I love that Slagsmålsklubben apparently translates to "Fight Club" - the most inappropriate matching of an act's movie title-inspired name and sound since Three Colours Red.
And there's just something slightly, attractively deviant about the motto - "6 men with analogue synths." When you see that, you just assume something weird is up. It sure is, from the looks of the video.
Labels: most songs of the year, Slagsmålsklubben
About me
- Michael K.
- Observing the things in my personal cosmos: music of a catchy sort, soccer, hockey and other sports, theories of place, media and culture, academic life, history, nature, politics, the international, the parochial. You never know what you might get. For generosity of the spirit.
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