Dispatches from the sunburned wastelands

It's raining, as you might see from the pic above, taken only seconds ago, and as is common for a rainy afternoon, I'm feeling melancholy. Now, I don't know about you, but the best thing for a rainy, melancholy afternoon is to listen to some really depressing, dark music. Preferably something by Roger Waters, or even more fitting, "Murder Ballads" by Australians Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. However if, like mine, all your Nick Cave CD's have been given away or mysteriously did not land in the suitcase from home (courtesy of the Mrs.), then you have to resort to other, newer dark tunes.

Someone blissfully dark, which I've only discovered recently, is the fox-haired singer Neko Case. She's got a new album out called "Fox confessor brings the flood", and, let me emphasize this: it's a slice of heaven (albeit a dark slice). Go right now and listen to some of it here.

Her angelic voice floats, tears and screams through sparse but excellent musical arrangements; her lyrics are thought provoking, poignant and sometimes just plain baffling. How's this for vivid imagery: "Spectres move like pilot flames/ their widows toast at St.Angel/Better times collide with now/And better times/Are coming still"...Or, as she sings on a previous release (Blacklisted): "I'm so lonely/ I wish I was the Moon tonight".

This is country music, Jim, but not as we know it - Ms. Case is one of a new breed of "alt-country" artists that mostly remains unplayed on commercial radio (the corporate music compilers probably don't know how to classify the music - 'is it country, is it blues, or is it folk?', they mutter, before throwing the disc in the bin).

One of the nicer things about coming to North America was the discovery of all the new (to me) genres of music freely available in even the most mediocre of CD shops, and in even the smallest of cities like Fredericton...I wonder what I will discover in Australia.

Posted by HannesB at 7:51 AM Comments