Said the Gramophone

You OK?

Louis Killen - "The Trimdon Grange Explosion"

Just what the doctor ordered. Or, what the doctor would have ordered had the patient been the small English town of Trimdon Grange (suffering from the the loss of most of its boys and men in the coal mine explosion of 1882), and the doctor been Hippocrates himself. After all, what better than a damp, mossy voice and the gentle call of a concertina to part sheets of rain, pull back black veils, and remind us that " Death will pay us all a visit/They have only gone before/We may meet the Trimdon victims/Where explosions are no more." [Buy]

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David Byrne - "Speechless"

Yet another installment in David Byrne's infinite series of songs to prove the inadequacy of words and the capacity of the human voice to say what needs to be said. Here he is spouting nonsense again, as he did in the Talking Heads' "I Zimbra" or Robert Fripp's "Under Heavy Manners," and as in both of those songs, his meaning here couldn't be clearer. For instance, his doo-wop vocal riff in the song's last third is wordless but communicative (part of a dialogue with the drums and bass) of a loneliness speakable only in tongues. [Buy Byrne's soundtrack for the film Young Adam]