Deep Cuts Week, Day 1: And I've Got No Place To Go Now

Two or so months in, I have to say I'm pretty happy with how this project is going, not least because for the second month in a row I seem to have doubled my visitors. In light of this, I figured I'd devote a week to throwing the spotlight on some crucial old favorites, so get ready for all sorts of stuff you've already heard a billion times already.

Dawn Penn, "No No No (You Don't Love Me)" - I have to admit that my attitude towards soul music sometimes makes even me a little uncomfortable, mostly because I don't really treat it like any other particular kind of music. Keep in mind that my primary exposure to soul music came by way of Durham's now-defunct Oldies 100.7, a station where your odds of hearing something like "Ooh Child" or "I Was Made To Love Her" were about as good as winning the lottery (meanwhile, your odds of hearing "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes" were pretty much as good as losing it); finding a new way to enjoy soul music is damn near to inevitable when you're burnt out on the already-limited James Brown/Tina Turner/Aretha Franklin canon before you learn how to shave. I still feel like my workaround is a little ideologically questionable, being as though I like finding soul-music signifiers in other genres like reggae or disco - even when you're dealing with categories which clearly owe an awful lot to soul music, I still feel mighty carpetbaggy making any authoritative decisions about what stuff means when it comes to a genre of music so thoroughly suffused with meaning right from the get-go, even when that authority only extends to the inside walls of my lily-white overpriveleged head.

I bring all this up because "No No No (You Don't Love Me)" is one of the songs where I just don't give a fuck; this is great soul music along whichever lines you want to draw. Even setting aside the majestic loping dubby thump of the music (and that's not even going into THE MORRICONE HORNS), Penn's performance is really just one for the ages, like the other side of the coin to Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)". Lately I've been throwing this song on mix CDs as a sudden grinding-brakes cooldown song (I just put it after White Rose Movement's "Love Is A Number" recently), and it never really fails - it's just one of those songs that makes you pay attention on its terms rather than your own, assuming of course that you are alive and/or nonretarded. I hasten to add that the same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the mid-90s Peppy Dancehall Re-Recording which many British people were somehow mysteriously tricked into buying - I'm actually sure it's probably perfectly acceptable, but good lord, why not take another trip through the original instead? (I ripped "No No No (You Don't Love Me)" from Studio One Rockers, an incredibly excellent Soul Jazz compilation available from Amazon.co.uk, but the song appears on a number of other compilations as well - if Rockers doesn't tempt you, check out the other ones.)

Omerta, "No Place That Far" - It's a curious fact: Coldplay can really and truly suck it (and I say that as someone who unironically likes a couple of their songs), but whenever I see their name in the blurb for some shit-hot indie band's single, it tends to make me more likely to make the buy. If I had to put my finger on it, I'd bet it would have something to do with the fact that Coldplay generally do have a dynamic, even if it's not necessarily a particularly exciting or interesting one, and that if you've sat through as many godawful goopy indie wankfests as I have (again, not to play the North Carolina card twice in one post, but I did start going to concerts at the precise historical time and place when Merge Records was taking off, so fill in the blanks however you weeeeulll) a little dynamic goes a long way. Well, Omerta certainly have it down, and perhaps not coincidentally the buzz surrounding them is in the very early stages of going supernova, although surprisingly a lot of the enthusiasm seems to be pretty genuine (although who's really to say) given the remarkable level of sophistication for a band this early in the careers. I mean, listen to all the shit going on in this song; I doubt it'll change the world or even afford a thousand teenage boys a chance to go for their first feel, but it's pretty remarkably sophisticated stuff as far as hilariously-emotive indie guitar pop goes, doubly so considering it's only their second single. The brisk b-side is quite nice as well, although it doesn't have the volcanic payoff at the end like "No Place That Far", so you'll just have to buy it to find out for yourselves. (The "No Place That Far" single is already out of print and sold out everywhere, but prices on eBay are still reasonable; alternately, you can buy the song from iTunes by clicking here)