HEY WHOA WAIT HOLD UP

Sunny Day Sets Fire, "Wilderness" - Goddamn but it's been a minute and change since I found a song quite like this one. I mean, yes, I suppose if you want to approximate the stick up your own ass, it's inarguably Yet Another In A Series Of Indie-Pop Songs, but that just kinda seems like it's overlooking the immutable fact that I haven't found an indie-pop song that's seized my attention quite so forcefully since "Trains To Brazil"-gate, and we all know how that one turned out. Fuck, I'm actually so desperate for people to pay attention to this song that I'm willing to whore myself out to the Hype Machine and throw in a bonus MP3 of Franz Ferdinand covering Gwen Stefani's "What You Waiting For" with a little bit of "White Wedding" to boot - I mean, I don't give a fuck why people encounter "Wilderness" as long as they encounter it in the first place.

(Actually, that's a little misleading, since the "What You Waiting For" cover probably would have ended up on here sooner rather than later anyway. If there's one sticking point I can single out with regards to me and Franz Ferdinand - and I say this fully aware of the risks of starting a rousing chorus of "Gil! Scott! Heron" - it's that I was un/lucky enough to see them incredibly early in the lifecycle of their popularity and found myself mistaking their overpowering professionalism for a genuine enthusiasm for their music, which unsurprisingly resulted in some bloodcurdling self-correction after noticing that they were playing pretty much the exact same set (right down to the banter) when I saw them three months later. Needless to say it's been kind of hard to hear any joy in their music ever since, which is probably why I like this cover song more than anything off their last album - it's clearly just a song they enjoy playing, as you can probably infer from the way all those "WHOOOOOAA"s soar. It also doesn't hurt anything that "What You Waiting For" sounds about a billion times more fun as a knockoff of "I Found That Essence Rare" than it does as a knockoff of Kylie Minogue, to say nothing of the rare opportunity of hearing Alex Kapranos use the phrase "You stupid ho" for possibly the only time ever. But I digress. BACK TO ADVENTURE)

See, here's the thing: in the time it took you to read that paragraph, the odds are pretty good that I listenened to "Wilderness" again. And while I realize that that doesn't necessarily speak volumes about the quality of the song itself, it pretty much says everything up to So-Sz when it comes to "Wilderness"' listenability, which is a characteristic of songs that I find fascinates me more and more every time I sit down to think about it. I mean, I haven't exactly been shielding myself from the fact that my tastes in music run towards the fickle and (let's just say it) the pretentious - if anything, I work my ass off to not run out into the streets screaming about a record's greatness simply out of how much I like it. But the ability to listen to a song without wearing it out? Especially when we're talking about infectiously precious indie-pop music? I mean, I don't know about y'all, but I try to maintain an awareness for when I'm breathing rarefied air.

And really, if there's anything that defines Sunny Day Sets Fire (aside from the unfortunate proximity of their band's name to a truly unfortunate and entirely-not-indicative-of-what-they-sound-like emo outfit of yore), it's their compulsive listenability. I was introduced to them almost at a right angle; one night, one of the avalanche of self-shilling emails from people in bands waiting in my inbox was from a producer named Manolo Remiddi, a producer who'd just worked with them on their debut single "Brainless" and had it available as part of his C.V. It is, of course, a billion miles away from being a bad song, but facts being what they are, the truth is that it just never grabbed me in the four months since I downloaded it - call it a side effect from living within rock-heaving distance of Grand Emo Central Station, but it just sounded inextricable from roughly a billion Jimmy Eat World clones in all ways except for the admittedly high quality of its hook, and for whatever reason that just didn't seem like enough reason to throw it on a mix CD, let alone coming up with some epic eulogy for it.

And then along came "Wilderness" to change all of that. The moment in "Wilderness" that snapped my neck to attention came right when the chorus kicked in; it's actually tenable that "Brainless" had a more efficient hook, but it inarguably didn't have half the jarring forcefulness of the sudden tempo change that announces the chorus of "Wilderness". After all, nothing keeps a pop song compelling quite like tension, even if it's just the surface tension between one part of a song and another, and on "Wilderness" you get all the tectonic nervousness of two huge slabs of jangly indie pop sliding into contact with each other; it's like someone condensed Modest Mouse's entire career into one song with "Float On" as the chorus. But - and here's the sticking point - it still hasn't gotten old, or at least it still hasn't gotten old in a way that distracts from my enjoyment of the song. I mean, I still genuinely think Lisa Brown's "What's That Sound" is , but I'd be lying if I said I listened to it more than twice over the last six months; it's a lot of fun to listen to, but it's not exactly a renewable resource. That just simply doesn't seem to be the case with "Wilderness", though - it's among the least overt songs (with regards to its own cleverness or virtuosity, anyway) that I may have ever posted on this infernal blog, packed full of stuff you could practically trace right back to the La's or Mercury Rev without so much as a layover on bands that might slow you down. I mean, living in America, I had to settle for a digital download (which I then had to burn to CD and then rip to mp3 in order to post here - never let it be said that I don't earn the right to make fun of my audience), but I can practically imagine physical copies of this single coming with a handwritten note asking "DO U LIEK ME?! PICK ONE" and then two checkboxes, one for yes and one for no. In other words, it's not the type of song that dares you to like it - it's very upfront about itself and very non-threatening towards dissenters (since nobody who counts really gives much of a shit when someone doesn't take to the La's), which means it's the kind of song you can actually try to pass along to your less-insane friends. And I bet there'd be a whole shitload of yes-boxes getting checked off. (Click here to
buy the "Wilderness" 7" from Rough Trade. Also, Manolo Remiddi still has all three songs from the "Brainless" single available to download from his site - having acclimated myself to the pleasures of Sunny Day Sets Fire, I urge you to grab all three while you can.)

ELSEWHERE

- I'm less balls-out enthusiastic about "Get Myself Into It", the second Rapture song to surface off of Pieces Of The People We Love, but I have to admit that I keep coming back to it. I mean, I agree with AC over at EndTV (the source of the song) that it owes a perplexing debt to Hard-Fi's "Cash Machine", but I keep hearing little flourishes buried deep in the (still-unfinished?) mix every time I listen to it - hell, just check out that horn during the chorus. I also hasten to add that the rhythm section is way less Hard-Fi chugga-chugga and way more ESG shika-shika; needless to say, this is for the best in my book. Anyway, yeah, worth checking out even if it's not the blowaway stunner that "W.A.Y.U.H" was.