JUSTICE VAMPIRE WEEKEND LEONA LEWIS LIL WAYNE SOULWAX MSTRKRFT KENNY LOGGINS

WELCOME TO THE LOGGINSPHERE, FOOLISH HYPE MACHINERS

Dinosaur, "Kiss Me Again"
Dinosaur, "Kiss Me Again" (version)

WARNING: IN BIG-PERSON 320K

But seriously, folks: out of every word that I've ever written in the three-ish years I've been doing this stupid thing, the only ones I still consistently get specific mail about are the ones I used right cheer the first time I wrote up "Kiss Me Again". Naturally, most of the mail comes down to "d00d u should totaly send me that shit y0" in varying degrees of eloquence, but I kinda find it hard to fault them; this song is a stone-cold, unyielding, zero-shades-of-gray classic, and frankly it's more than a little ridiculous that some folks' enjoyment of it is entirely predicated on my mercurial ass taking action. Therefore, this time I'll be leaving it up until I get a takedown notice, at which point you can all look forward to my impending perpetration of a blisteringly self-congratulatory verbal wankfest at having ACCOMPLISHED~ something through my WORDS, MAN, WORDS~ and so on. Oh man, that's gonna be great. You're gonna be forwarding it to all your friends under the subject line "Check out this hipster douchebag". I'm gonna be the next this guy. Can't wait for that.

BUT I DIGRESS. As I scramble to regain the point, please enjoy this vastly superior rip of "Kiss Me Again", lovingly encoded with EAC and LAME (and actually cleaned up before exporting) instead of negligently entrusting this masterpiece to whatever stupid spyware-ridden junk I had on my old computer. I hate to belabor the point but it makes the rips I posted before sound like they were recorded through a kangaroo's pouch by comparison. I honestly feel like apologizing; here is a picture of a baby seal. Look at that while you listen to this single, both sides, all thirty-ish minutes of it, even if you got it last time; for reasons which are completely lost to me, the stylus gods decided to smile on me when I put the needle on the track this night, and this shit came out right this time. There's so much going on here that it's almost embarrassing to listen to it the whole way: you already feel like a burglar way before the running time hits double digits.

In particular, make sure you get the b-side; this time it's such a revelation that I'm going to subject you to an entire rambly, stoned paragraph of utterly pointless explication which you'll care about even less after you've read than you do right now (BELIEVE): the story of my mom seeing The Wizard of Oz. My mom, you see, (1) is from Louisiana and (2) was born after 1939, and was thus unable to see The Wizard of Oz on the bigscreen, and had thus only ever seen it on television (this being back when TV sets were black-and-white and had screens dwarfed by the iPhone's), and had thus always thought the whole thing was completely in black-and-white, which meant that, when my dad unknowingly took her to see it on one of their dates, she practically went apoplectic when Dorothy walked out into Oz in color. To hear my dad tell it, she was on the verge of causing a scene simply from sheer shock; she just had no idea what was coming.

YES YES GREAT STORY JAMES, right? Well I shit you not, that's exactly the experience you're in for with the flipside of this track. All of a sudden, what was once an incidental curiosity - I mean, I've called the original version of this the best song I've ever heard on prior occasion - is unequivocally the definitive version; I'm honestly at a loss for words to describe what you're in for if you're into sonic details and all that shit. The rough sound of the track alone takes on entire new dimensions; you can practically hear pieces of the track being taped together, especially during the stupefyingly "new" verse when the vocal tracks start doubling up. Hell, during the breakdowns, you can literally hear traces of vocal performances which bled onto the tracks chosen for the final piece; it's downright... I mean, "breathtaking" doesn't even begin to cover this song, people. You are in for a treat.

Anyway; as stated up top, to the best of my knowledge, the closest this song comes to "available" these days is at the conclusion of the Optimo Psyche Out mix from a few years back, so I suppose go buy that (n.b.: this is not the only reason to buy this mix). In the meantime, please to enjoy these rips and to suggest to your likeminded friends that they follow suit. This song is way too good to survive as literature. (Click here to buy Psyche Out from Amazon.com, or click here to browse used copies of "Kiss Me Again" on GEMM)

The Zombies, "I'll Call You Mine" - Look, you people know me by now; if I were to like a song by the Zombies - the "Tell Her No"/"She's Not There"/"Time of the Season"-ass Zombies - then obviously it would be off their "unreleased" album which nobody except the least lifeful of the lifeless (ha-cha-cha) have ever even heard of in the first place, I KNOW RIGHT? YEAH, TOTALLY BRO, except for the fact that as it turns out "I'll Call You Mine" really does crush everything else that's ever been presented to me as a Zombies song of consequence; it practically jumps out of the speakers and unfurls a bedroll in your head. It's also conspicuously undated in the way only truly great power-pop can ever be; it sounds distinctively not from the present, but never ties itself to any specific era (aside from those momentary flirtations with classicism, but since they never derail the song I figure hey). I mean, to my ears, it's a short hop from this to the Names' "Why Can't It Be" or one of like ten Big Star songs; this is really good company to keep.

Anyway my point - YES, MY POINT - is that I am not an obscurantist twat, or at the very least not one who engages in twattery which doesn't bear results. This song being one of them. (The Zombies' unreleased album can be found on their box set, which unlike most box sets really is the way to go - you'll probably end up passing over the rarities disc, but all three of the other sets are all completely compelling in their own right, PARTICULARLY the covers disc at the end; click here to buy it from Amazon)

The Mystery Jets, "Young Love" (feat. Laura Marling) - And now for a sentence which I never would have forseen myself writing: OH MY GOD THE NEW MYSTERY JETS ALBUM JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE. I mean, it's neck-and-neck between that and Portishead on top of my albums chart; I like it even more than the new Long Blondes album, and this is saying that. I honestly don't even know how to begin assigning credit for it - do you start by crediting Erol Alkan with somehow getting the Mystery Jets to settle down and stop cramming four songs into one? or do you start off with the band for writing an entire album's worth of reliably rewarding songs? I do stress that phrase "reliably rewarding"; 21 isn't a compelling album, or at least not the way Through The Windowpane or Funeral were. But "consistently rewarding" fits it like a glove: every time I go back to it, I'm discovering new inroads, new wrinkles - new reasons to listen.

Except, of course, for "Young Love", a song which needs absolutely no depth whatsoever to present itself as eminently deserving of your attention. And really, on this one, points have to go to the band; Alkan does a great job of keeping the rhythm section reined in (and that little shimmering flutter during the chorus is grin-crackingly awesome), but this is all about the song itself being catchy enough to signal the end of the world. Interestingly enough - and I am about to reveal myself to be hell of lame here, people - it's also eerily similar to some stupid song they came up with for that terrible Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore movie, a song written for the purpose of serving as an example of what audience-appealing pop music sounds like; the fact that the borrowed melody is used to such riotous success here feels almost strikingly appropriate. (Oh, I'm sorry - you're still wondering what could have led me to watch that stupid-ass Drew Barrymore movie? ME TOO.) (Click here to buy 21, the GREEN PEANESS DOT ORG ALBUM OF THE YEAR SO FAR, from Amazon.co.uk)

Isosceles, "Watertight" - Finally, I was passed this single early and encouraged to post it by the label on account of my rabid fandom of Isosceles' first single, and as it is quite the little nugget of Scottish indie-pop I am only too happy to oblige. I can't summon the same vehemence that I did for "Get Your Hands Off" if only because the song is so much more dialed-down; the band seems to have traded monolithic bleeping for streamlined Franz Ferdianism, and it's hard not to mourn the loss at least a little. Not too much, however; "Watertight" is deceptively good, at least as good as anything the aforementioned FFs have put out since "Darts of Pleasure", and yes I will go there thank you very much. It's one of those songs which always gives me the urge to fast-forward when it shows up on shuffle (SORRY ISOSCELES, TAKE ME BACK), but then out of sheer slothfulness I can't decide whether to fast-forward or not by the time the chorus hits, and by that time I'm more than on board enough to let it play to the end, bruising my back from patting it so relentlessly the whole time (see? practice makes perfect!). God, I don't even know if that's a compliment or not; fortunately I'm certain that the sheer volume of playtime this song gets unequivocally is. (Click here to visit Isosceles' MySpace and here for Art Goes Pop's MySpace. Also, AGP's supposedly putting out a new Findo Gask single in the near future, so keep an eye out for that, obviously.)

ELSEWHERE
- So I finally took the plunge and started up a MySpace; come and bask in the warming glow of what will surely go down as the least-attended-to corner of the whole socially networked internet. Ditto for Last.fm, too.