It's Valentine's Day today and so I hope you're all making love right now. If you're not, I warmly (and somewhat off-puttingly) suggest that you do.
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Nugrape Twins - "I Got Your Ice Cold Nugrape"
Here's a love song about a drink. When you write a love song about a drink (c.f. my "My Beautiful Diet Pepsi") you do so from the purest regions of what is probably an otherwise rather blackened heart. I say "purest" because you can't expect anything in return for your effort. You will not endear yourself to the drink, and the drink will not weep with gratitude and then write you a love song, quid pro quo. A drink just never would. I say "blackened heart" because if you're going to have a heart, you might as well have it as the Cajuns would. Or perhaps because I am an adherent of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. I can't remember now why I said it.
The love the Nugrape Twins have for nugrape is an ideal love, and their song makes me want to drink a tall glass of ice cold nugrape - whatever that is.
Musically speaking: nobody exploits cadence like the Nugrape Twins. The descending resolution of each phrase is so satisfying that I actually sigh after every fourth bar. [Buy]
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13Ghosts - "Three Little Birds (After Bob.Marley)", followed by 13Ghosts - "Nobody's Hero"
These songs were meant to be heard one after the other. I mean both that they were intended to be heard that way by the band and meant to be heard that way in the teleological sense. Please, for your sake, use your computer to make it happen. 13Ghosts achieves delicate and beautiful (difficult) and then rowdy and drunken (surprisingly difficult). Like that time I saw Bob Marley open for the Band. Or was that just a dream? It was? OK, then: like that time I saw fine china open for Errol Flynn on a bender. [Info]
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Also: A big welcome to all new readers coming to us from StG friend Kelly Nestruck's nice little piece in the National Post about Sean's nice big My Funny Valentine contest/post.