I'm In Heaven

Dexy's Midnight Runners, "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm In Heaven)"
Dexy's Midnight Runners, "Show Me"

I really don't know if there are words in the English language forceful enough to convey the measure of how much more I enjoy Dexy's Midnight Runners as a singles band than as an album band; it's possible that I haven't encountered a band so utterly ruined by the reasonable assertions of thoughtful people since the Clash. It's not that Dexys' albums are bad, of course, but rather that they're just not compelling; listening to Kevin Rowland bleat on about the young soul rebels and hearing all that brass-for-brass'-sake in this day and age feels a little like reading The Invisible Man for pleasure. Once the shock of the new and the context of the rebellion have worn off, after all, you're basically just left with a couple of albums which only really need to exist insofar as that we certainly can't let the Coral be the eminant band with that sound.

Ironically, if you can believe the liner notes to Let's Make This Precious, the 2003 Dexy's greatest hits compilation which has basically been living in my CD player since picking it up about a month ago, talking about Dexy's as anything other than a greatest-hits band only does them a profound disservice. The liner notes go into great detail about Rowland's maniacal determination to establish Dexy's as an aesthetic movement above and beyond anything else; as such, it's probably not too surprising to discover that their songs get more engaging by factors of ten when they're picked for how they sound rather than what they mean or what they do. I mean, I actually managed to make it through six months of ownership of Too Rye Ay completely oblivious to the charms of "Jackie Wilson Said", largely because nearly every song on Too Rye Ay is built from the ground on up to deliver the same exact kind of throwbacky charms; it should hardly be a surprise that once removed from the context of the album's ethos, I woke right the fuck up to that "Doodle-angle-angle" hook which I swear sounds a billion times less retarded in song than it does in words.

But really, the larger point that the greatest-hits format underscores is simply that Dexys had - hell, have - great, great taste. I'm someone who's not afraid to love a good greatest-hits compilation, but man, Let's Make This Precious really ranks up there with the best ones I've ever heard simply by virtue of the songs selected for inclusion. I suppose this is at least partially due to the fact that they just didn't have the sheer volume of hits of an ABBA or a Queen and consequently had a lot more free space to fill with whatever they wanted, but hey, I own George McCrae's greatest-hits disc too and the actual hits (such as they are) may well be the most adventurous songs on it; it's just not too often that you run across an artist who wants to sum up their life's work with a twelve-minute song from their least popular album or an all-but-forgotten minor hit like "Show Me". It helps, of course, that a bunch of the songs are fucking amazing; "Show Me" in particular is such a show-stopper that I couldn't keep from posting it even if I'd tried - it's actually been challenging "Come On Eileen" for dominion over the playlist, and considering that I've called "Come On Eileen" one of the very greatest songs in the history of pop music on more than one occasion, that's not something I'd own up to lightly. I mean, seriously, those horns, the way the song just erupts into action, those horns, all those dead-on background vocals, those horns - that's style right there. Way moreso than a pair of artfully dirty coveralls, anyway. (Click here to buy Let's Make This Precious from Amazon.co.uk; I cannot reccomend it strenuously enough, especially if you're some sad-sack piece of crap who doesn't own a copy of "Come On Eileen" in one format or another).

The Raconteurs, "Steady As She Goes" - And in keeping with today's theme of Bands You've Certainly Never Heard Of Anywhere Outside Of The Walls Of This Blog, here's the lead single from the Jack White/Brendan Benson side project The Raconteurs. I have to cop to being a little surprised to catch myself playing it as much as I certainly have been this week; I tend to view the White Stripes as pop music's answer to PNAC (this isn't just being clever, either - Jack White mythologizes the past to his own ideological benefit as well as anyone who studied under Leo Strauss), but damn, if Joe Jackson's going to be Jack White's Terri Schaivo*, then yank the fuckin' plug if this is what the death rattle's going to sound like - when All That Rock Music kicks in, I can't help but find myself flooded with pre-pedantry memories of why exactly everyone started calling the White Stripes the Greatest Rock Band In The World in the first place. I mean, yeah it's a shame that it's going to be ten thousand times the hit that A Certain Other Jack White Side Project ever was (outside of the charts kept in the hearts of the righteous, of course), but seriously - it's not that much of a shame. Exceedingly encouraging stuff. (Click here to buy the "Steady As She Goes" single from Rough Trade)

*I apologize so much for this sentence. So very very much.