Anne Briggs - "Blackwater Side". They meet on the evening that the power goes out, when the lights on the pier clink off and she is standing in her little booth and there is a boy walking past, and he says, "And suddenly it's night"; she smiles and she tries to sell him a ticket to the boat-tour. Much later, when they are tied up together in the sheets, he asks her, "How did I find you?" and she says, "The lights went off." But anyway, but anyway, their song is a song of betrayal. They hear it as they are getting up one morning, and it is so beautiful; she decides it is their song without hearing all the words, without hearing that it is a song of betrayal. In time, this becomes a joke - that their lovers' song is a song of deceit. "Your lying tongue," he says to her, their heads on pillows. Sometimes, when they part, she clicks through to hear it on her iPod; when he goes west at Christmas, to see his family, he slips his headphones over his ears; they put it on mixes for each-other, seek different versions. "Your lying tongue," she says to him, her lips at his ear. // Until the day he lies to her. On this day, the song changes. Her life seizes around her; it is as if the summer is tearing; their song turns to ice. They still walk together, and eat together, and on one night they are tied up together in the sheets. But it is blighted and sick. She turns and watches him and sees that he is almost evil, with his curls at his ears. After they end it, she cannot listen to the song of deceit. She listens only to love-songs. Her heart is broken in a particular and terrible way. [buy]

Gucci Mane - "Dollar Sign (These New Puritans remix)". Perhaps you have already heard Gucci's brags - I'm so fucking paid, he rasps, I just bought the dollar-sign. These New Puritans strip the joy from the song, replace it with a melancholy, almost sinister, ache. It recalls early-00s Radiohead, UNKLE, Clint Mansell, but in 2011 these signifiers are not free, unburdened: whereas once they evoked just moodiness, "alienation", now they summon these things while also summoning the past itself, the decade-ago, those early-00s. Gucci is swaggering, glinting, and These New Puritans are flashing our regrets in our eyes, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, draping a rapper's shoulders with the doom he has not yet noticed, the nostalgia he will yet uncover. It's almost unkind. [download the free mixtape, Free Gucci 2: The Burrrtish Edition]

(photo by celia perrin sidarous)