And While We're At It, Fuck Jed The Fish Too

Havana Guns, "N.Y.C.S." - I gotta admit, life can occasionally make things easy for you. I mean, the central premise of mp3 blogs - if not the very essence of the reasoning that leads to me not getting RIAA'd back to the stone age - is that they give exposure to deserving music that wouldn't otherwise receive it, which is fine if you're someone with adventurous taste who gorges on new music but isn't quite such a scalable wall when you're the kind of dude who's on his fourth copy of Billy Joel's The Stranger in three years. Fortunately, the stars seem to have aligned for me to pimp one of my very favorite below-the-boardwalk bands on the planet to my newly acquired audience of random Fluxbloggers and Googlers, which, translated into English, means HEY I FOUND A NEW SINGLE BY THE HAVANA GUNS.

Here's the thing about the Havana Guns: I like the Pipettes just fine, but I can't for the life of me see why they're on the verge of turning into this year's model of Elastica (and I mean that in the best possible way, i.e. "indie girl-pop group poised to deliver an album potentially packed with shockingly great singles") when you've got the Havana Guns sitting right there. I mean, "Dirty Mind" and "Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me" are insanely fine songs, the likes of which most other bands would slit their own throats to be able to write, but they're also gimmicky in the same way "Connection" was gimmicky - in other words, any day now some enterprising young soundtrack coordinator's going to single out the most embarassing hook on those songs and teach you how to hate 'em good. The Havana Guns, on the other hand, put out stuff in the vein of "Stutter", which is basically a nice way of saying they're in the process of making the most unpretentiously great music of their indie-pop generation; last year's "She Always Goes Down" (still available for free on their website, incidentally) was one of my very favorite songs last year largely because of how effortlessly it accomplished what a thousand indie bands pimped with a thousand times the force had to pay Paul Epworth to dream up - I mean, "She Always Goes Down" is a song that sounds like despair the way "Oh Bondage! Up Yours" sounds like indignation or "Transmission" sounds like loneliness. Or "Stutter" sounds like frustration, for that matter.

Anyway. Apparently a little while back they decided to follow up on "She Always Goes Down" with "N.Y.C.S." and although I can't in good conscience describe the latter as even being in the same league as the former (largely because they do kinda unavoidably share a template), "N.Y.C.S." hardly suffers at all for it, mostly because it kinda sorta towers over just about every indie-pop song I've heard this year (except for when Fyfe Dangerfield dined alone, of course). I mean, yeah it's got some jangle to it, but it's hardly a Camera Obscura song (not that there's anything wrong with that); it's a three-minute headrush of propulsive wistfulness anchored by an insanely infectious hook in the chorus and one of the most neck-snappable beats available this side of Forward/Russia. And yet mysteriously, the world seems to be ignoring them in favor of, well, pretty much everyone else; their website hasn't been updated since January 2nd, and the only airplay I've ever heard of them getting has been at the hands of Rodney Put Here On This Earth To Irritate James Cobo Bingenheimer hammering "Vivan Los Angeles", which is good news for good music (even if it's the very least of their songs) but, if we're being brutally honest, isn't really all that encouraging seeing as how Rodney'll play damn near any song containing the words "Los Angeles" in the title (I've seriously considered hiding a microphone in my toilet for a week and sending the unedited recording to him titled "Los Angeles" just to see what happens). In any event, I sincierely hope they're not done as a band; they've got two killer singles to their name now, and playing them less since I know I won't be getting any more may be the death of me. (Click here to visit the Havana Guns website, or click here to buy used copies of the long-deleted "She Always Goes Down" single from Gemm)

Mocky, "Fighting Away The Tears" - It is, to borrow an infamous ILXism, insanely tempting to write off Leslie Feist as the hipster Norah Jones, but I have to admit that even in the face of my overpowering contempt for the whole Broken Social Scene Scene, I'm starting to come around on her, to the point where I'm now willing to consider her as the hipster Linda Ronstadt instead. Not that this is a great leap forward of Maoist proportions, of course, but I'll nut up and admit that Ronstadt's affectations definitely have a way of holding up years later (I suppose it helps that I was raised on a steady diet of James Taylor and Paul Simon, but oh well), especially when she guests on stuff like "Don't Know Much". Obviously "Fighting Away The Tears" doesn't quite reach those lofty heights; it's very much one of those Hey Check Out How Jazzy We Can Get songs best suited to soundtrack the purchase of a double-tall mochachino, except here comes Leslie Feist lilting through the wheat to save it. I mean, she really does nail the chorus, utterly saving the song in the process - it's quite a remarkable thing, or at the very least the kind of proof you shove back in the faces of all the haters who can't imagine her having a single worthwhile song apart from "Inside & Out". Yes, I'm talking about myself again. (Click here to pre-order Navy Brown Blues from Amazon.co.uk, or click here to visit Mocky's MySpace to stream more songs. Fans of Jamie Lidell will absolutely want to check out "In The Meantime".)

ELSEWHERE
- BOY there are a bunch of good singles popping up on mp3 blogs these days. The most pressing has to be the Long Winters' "Fire Island AK" popping up over at Skatterbrain, a truly epic example of How To Sell James On A Band With One Song; it literally may be the best jangly indie-pop song to come out of Amurrica since "Float On", only with about a thousand times less chance to be bludgeoned to death via the advertising industry. There is also an ass-load of Lindstrom goodness surfacing these days, particularly in the form of "Breakfast In Heaven" (already staking a claim in my brain as possibly my favorite of his instrumental tracks - shit's fucking NUTS, y'all) over at The Ill-Ec-Tronic, but also in the form of his remix of Franz Ferdinand's "I'm Your Villain" over at the lordly Headphonesex. Finally, two potential breakout hits (well, okay, one potential one, one sure thing) in the form of Captain's Trevor-Horn-produced "Broke" at Let's Kiss And Make Up and Lily Allen's "LDN" over at Ear Farm. And I would absolutely link you to The Prettiest Pony's posting of the seventeen-minute Rakes opus "The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect", a song which literally gets more impressive every time I listen to it and which has yet to tempt me to hit the fast-forward button despite being SEVENTEEN FUCKING MINUTES LONG, but unfortunately TPP's been down while I've been doing this writeup and I AIN'T GOT TIME TO STOP FROM MOVING ON.