ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Let us continue.

EIGHT? EIGHT.
True Example, "Love Is Finally Coming My Way" (original writeup)

Considering the dumptruck of love I try to unload all over Dinosaur L's "Kiss Me Again" every time the subject of Ranking The Disco Classics comes up even tangentially, some of you might be a bit surprised to find this album cut by an obscure Salsoul act on the list where "Kiss Me Again" isn't. Part of this, of course, is due to the fact that at this point, writing anything about "Kiss Me Again" isn't unlike writing anything about Annie's "Heartbeats"; at this point, it pretty much belongs to everyone, especially everyone on the internet. But it's also due significantly to the fact that "Love Is Finally Coming My Way" is more than a little outstanding; those strings and those congas and OH MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, those "Come on! Come on! Come on!"s - every time I run face-first into them, I'm left scratching my head, wondering just what exactly people mean when they use the term "joycore" on a band like Bis. I mean, if that isn't the musical equivalent of describing Meet the Feebles as a "children's movie" when, I dunno, My Neighbor Totoro is sitting right there, I just don't know what is. (Click here to buy Philly Soul Flavas, the 2005 compilation including "Love Is Finally Coming My Way", from Amazon.co.uk. I cannot urge anyone with even a moderate interest in Philly soul or even that super-rich string'd out 70s soul sound in general to do anything other than buy this compilation; with like two exceptions, it's all album cuts, and damn near everything on here is unstoppably great.)

ALL GOOD CHILDREN GO TO SEVEN
Seona Dancing, "More To Lose" (full version) (original writeup)

Attention anyone whose primary interest in this song comes from the identity of Seona Dancing's lead singer: Leave. Now. I can deal with people not liking the song - not that I understand the impulse, mind you; I can just see it happening in some bizarro world where up is down and shirt wears you - but ignoring the overwhelming virtues of "More To Lose" just because you've got your dander up to go DUR HUR HUR BRITISH MICHAEL SCOTT WA'N'T ALLWAIYS FAYMUSS might as well be a slap in the dick to yours truly. By this point, "More To Lose" is as much a historical event in the continuum of my rambling journey of musical consumption as it is A Song, even A Really Good Song; to this day, I have no idea how I happened to turn on the one iTunes radio station playing all the biggest hits of mid-80s Filipino New Wave radio as I made a vain effort to clean my apartment - all I know is that it happened, and that within the first three chord changes, or maybe even within the first two or three piano crashes, my Swiffer was lying prostrate on my floor and my nose wasn't moving more than five inches from my monitor until I'd turned up the poorly-encoded copy of this song that I present to you (again) today. But - and this is crucial - it was totally worth it; "More To Lose" might as well be a time capsule of the entire 80s Pop That You Get Drunk And Talk About With Your Friends Probably A Little Too Loudly And With A Little Too Much Defensiveness aesthetic, from the sustained icy synth underpinning the crashing drum machine to the anvil of sonic space the song isn't afraid to drop right on your head to the - yes - quaintly impenetrable ripped straight from a set of magnets arranged on a refridgerator, practically to the point that I don't need anything else from the genre to even file an application. To condemn it to the same ghettos (not to get all Michael Kay on you) as Brad Pitt's commercials for Burger King (or, perhaps more accurately, as some inverted David Soul record) would be a flat-out travesty, and I'd like to think I've assembled a readership a cut above behavior like that.

Of course, having said that: NICE HAIR, RICKY.

("More To Lose" is, unsurprisingly, long out of print [there aren't even copies available on GEMM or eBay!], but you can hear more Seona Dancing songs at the MySpace someone started for them - thankfully, the 'space-started in his/her infinite wisdom decided to make all the songs downloadable, so make sure you grab "You're On My Side" while you're there.)