#video game soundtracks and hymns lol | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lysander-lovegood-scamander · 5 years ago

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1. Down By The Water- Ocie Elliott, Find- shallou × Kasbo (with Cody Lovaas) [ I forgot I even had this on SoundCloud lol wth how did it get here], Flightless Bird, American Mouth- Iron and Wine

2. Heaven Knows- The Pretty Reckless, Daughters Of Darkness- Halestorm, Which To Bury, Us Or The Hatchet- Relient K

3. Me- The 1975, Ayo Technology- Katerine, British Bombs- Declan McKenna

4. Amnesia- Dead Can Dance [don't listen to their music at 3 a.m., I beseech you! if you do, you might end up accidentally bringing around the apocalypse!], Another Day In Paradise- Phil Collins, Over my head- Asaf Avidan [that's actually thanks to my uncle, but still, my parents didn't exactly have to keep in contact with their siblings]

5. Someone You Loved- Lewis Capaldi [pretty much anything by him hurts me physically], Please Eat- Nicole Dollanganger [take my trigger warning for it], Two- Sleeping At Last [I can't acutely explain why it breaks me the way it does, it's not even my Ennagram number]

6. Baby- Justin Bieber, Przez Twe Oczy Zielone- Akcent, The Entire Genre Of Disco Polo please and thank you

7. lalala- bbno$, I waited on you, you never came- Yung Van, Lund- Low

8. Hymn for the Weekend- Coldplay, Wake Me Up- Avicii, Riptide- Vance Joy

9. Mary, Did You Know?- Pentatonix, Feliz Navidad- Jose Feliciano, Last Christmas- Wham

10. Come Little Children/ The Hanging Tree Mashup- Peter Hollens, Mordred's Lullaby- Alone- Acylum

11. Experience- Ludovico Einaudi (Mommy Soundtrack), Wait- M83 (The Fault In Our Stars Soundtrack), Visions of Gideon- Sufjan Stevens (Call Me By Your Name Soundtrack)

12. [I don't play video games so how about more movie music again? I'll give you a 4th one as an apology] The Call- Regina Spektor (from Prince Caspian), I See Fire- Ed Sheeran (from The Hobbit- The Desolation of Smaug), Rewrite The Stars- Zac Efron & Zendaya (The Greatest Showmen Soundtrack), Shallow- Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born Soundtrack)

13. Saturn- Sleeping At Last, Fourth of July- Sufjan Stevens, O- Coldplay [yes yes I want the guests to weep like babies deal with it]

14. The Few Things- JP Saxe, Kiss Me- Ed Sheeran, All Of Me- John Legend

15. Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby- Cigarettes After Sex, A Sky Full Of Stars- Coldplay, Symphony (feat. Zara Larsson)- Clean Bandit

16. [I'm too young for sex so I'll just list songs that make me horny] Make me feel- TWISTED PSYKIE, Pillowtalk- Zayn (Sofia Karlberg cover), Do I Wanna Know?- Arctic Monkeys

17. girls- girl in red, best friend- cavetown [she likes cavetown just like me!], You Will Never Know- Imany [I'm not even sure she likes girls, I might just be overtly hopeful and imagining stuff]

18. Old Friends- Jasmine Thompson, Better When I'm Dancin'- Meghan Trainor, Happy- Pharrell Williams

19. You're Gonna Go Far, Kid- Offspring, Undisclosed Desires- Muse, Caffeine- Lolo Zouaï

20. Ship It- Not Literally Productions [sorry, that's just the first thing I see when I hear of fangirling], Heartbeats- Daniela Andrade [I'm not coming onto you, I just felt like you might enjoy this song, idk, I don't know you that well yet], Avalon- Clara Mae

21. Waiting For Love- Avicii, La Bamba- Los Lobos, Magic In The Air (feat. Chawki)- Magic System

22. The Night We Met- Lord Huron, I Can't Make You Love Me- Dave Thomas Junior, Surrender- Natalie Taylor

23. All The Right Moves- OneRepublic, Childism- Kian, What's My Name- China Anne McClain, Cameron Boyce, Thomas Doherty, Dylan Playfair, Dove Cameron, Sofia Carson, Booboo Stewart & Mitchell Hope

24. Love Story- Andy Williams, Mrs. Robinson- Simon & Garfunkel, Moonshadow- Cat Stevens

25. Castle On The Hill- Ed Sheeran, Sign of the Times- Harry Styles, What About Us- Pink [wow, that was hard! I only just realized how many good songs are from 2017]

26. Si jamais j'oublie- ZAZ, Sen o przyszłości- Sylwia Grzeszczak, El Pardón- Nicky Jam & Enrique Iglesias

27. 'M too young to drink but songs I madly sing along to I guess We Can Hurt Together- Sia, Cinamon- Jome, Technicolor Beat- Oh Wonder

28. Still too young to drink but I guess How Did I Get Here- Odesza, Palms- Petit Biscuit, Shy Girl- Kedam

29. Pluto- Sleeping At Last, The Wisp Sings- Winter Aid, Body- SYML

30. Dreams- n u a g e s, you- Petit Biscuit, Arrival of the Birds- The Cinematic Orchestra

@just-a-teen-fangirl took me ages, but it's done now!

“the three songs” ask set

1. three songs that come up when you put your phone on shuffle

2. three last songs you listened to

3. three songs you were recently obsessed with

4. three songs that you know thanks to your parents

5. three songs you wish you could forget (because listening to them hurts)

6. three songs you wish you could erase from history (because they’re terrible)

7. three songs you didn’t expect to like but eventually loved

8. three songs that remind you most of summer and vacation

9. three songs that get you in the Christmas Mood

10. three favourite Halloween/spooky songs

11. three favourite songs from movie or TV series soundtrack

12. three favourite songs from video games

13. three songs you want at your funeral

14. three songs you want at your wedding

15. three songs you want to dance with your love to

16. three favourite songs for sex

17. three songs that remind you of your crush

18. three songs that remind you of your best friend

19. three songs that are your guilty pleasure

20. three songs that remind you of the person who sends this one

21. three songs of your childhood

22. three songs you listen to when you’re sad

23. three songs that never fail to get you pumped up

24. three favourite old songs

25. three favourite songs of 2017

26. three favourite non-English songs

27. three songs that you sing while drunk

28. three best songs to get drunk or high to

29. three songs that influenced you most (some songs change or save lives)

30. three songs you really want your followers to know (for reasons other than all those above)

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fancypantshoodlum · 7 years ago

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ALBUM REVIEW: HAIM ‘Something To Tell You’

The wait is over! HAIM's second album is here, but it's not like they've been completely off the radar.

There was that collab single with Bastille which was fun, 'Pray To God' with Calvin Harris - a leftover from the 'Days Are Gone' sessions that I'm hoping the original pops up on an anniversary reissue in, gosh, 2023, 'Holes In The Sky' from the soundtrack of the 2nd Divergent movie that I wasn't feeling at all, and their cover of Tame Impala's ‘Cause I'm a Man' which is BETTER than the original (sorry Kevin).

While all this was happening, they were making an indelible but overlooked mark on the pop and cultural landscape - which I’ll elaborate on in seven topics

TRENDSETTING

I started hearing their inventive brand of polyrhythmic synth guitar pop crop up in tunes like Shura's 'Touch' (lowkey soulful icy synth HAIM), 'Emotion' by Carly Rae Jepson (Latin Freestyle HAIM) and most recently Paramore's 'Told You So' and 'Forgiveness' (all of the above).

Just like The Strokes East Village thrift was hugely influential back in the day on Mens fashion (what Spin magazine hilariously described as “part Bowery Boys, part CK One hotties”)

HAIM definitely popularized a uber long hair, leather jacket and cropped shorts LA boho look that was practically everywhere in 2014/5 (or maybe just in the hipster places I hang :P )

There is an actual website called What Would HAIM Wear?

DAYS ARE GONE MARK II

Now here we are with 'Something To Tell You' - not a repudiation but builds on 'Days Are Gone' - a sequel and clear step forward that's more confident and audacious in its approach and teeming with new musical ideas and different sonic textures.

While still largely stuck to love songs, the lyrics represent a quantum leap in terms of thoughtfulness and maturity.

THE INTERPRETATION GAME

The first glimpse of this record we got was 'Right Now' which came in the form of a video filmed as they recorded a take - giving an instant impression of muso credibility. a down tempo, foreboding ballad, not really a summer jam but hot on it's heels came 'Want You Back' the euphoric banger if there ever was one.

Lyrically they could be two sides of one story, 'Right Now' a tempestuous rebuke against an dishonest ex whose come crawling back. Like an argument that evolves into a full on row , the song builds and builds with each incrimination like thunder, a guitar squalls, Taiko drum patterns rumble - and then it all explodes. 'Want You Back' the ex, having gone back into the dating world, realises that they miss the narrator, apologises '' I’ll take the fall and the fault in us. I’ll give you all the love I never gave before I left you''.

'Want You Back' has the wistful wisdom of a folk song which makes complete sense when you learn that it was originally written as a much slower song on an acoustic guitar. I remember John Lennon saying on The Beatles Anthology Documentary (or it could've been from Ian MacDonald's Beatles book 'Revolution In The Head') that whatever instrument a song is written on influences the flavour of the song, and its defo left its mark.

I really love 'Night So Long' though. The desolate blend of echoic harmony, ambient guitar twang & weeping melodies gives it a real nocturnal, countrified, dark night of the soul vibe to it. a lovelorn hymn that's really evocative of post break up, being lost in quiet despair, resigned to another crack around the merry-go-round of Love - for the narrator Romantic Love is a Sisyphean act

I could get really SAT English Literature with my interpretations of these songs but I'll spare you the pain lol

STUDIO AS AN INSTRUMENT

One of the common critics of HAIM albums, especially this sophomore release is that it's over produced. To be honest it's no more heavily produced than a classic Neptunes track or Timbaland one a decade before and Trevor Horn back in the 80s.

The Daddy of them all being Phil Spector whose Wall of Sound approach was a dense aesthetic that included an array of orchestral instruments—strings, woodwind, brass and percussion—not previously associated with pop music, characterizing his methods as "a Wagnerian approach to rock & roll: little symphonies for the kids".

Brian Wilson, a huge Spector fan, used a similar recording technique, especially during the Pet Sounds and Smile eras of the Beach Boys, the most recognizable examples being "God Only Knows", "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and especially, the psychedelic "pocket symphony" of "Good Vibrations"

Wilson says "Before Spector, people recorded all the instruments separately. They got great piano, great guitar, and great bass. But he thought of the song as one giant instrument. It was huge. Size was so important to him, how big everything sounded. And he had the best drums I ever heard."

‘Something To Tell You’ (and ‘Days are Gone’ too) is very much in the spirit of Spector but with a modern vernacular. ‘Ready For You’, ‘Want You Back’ and the title song are really sonically dense and defly work in a lot of elements.

The dichotomy of the synthetic, adventurous interpretation of the songs on the record compared to the more reigned in, organic live version isn’t unique to HAIM.

Led Zeppelin live were, as legendary rock critic Lester Bangs described them, 'a thunderous, near-undifferentiated tidal wave of sound that doesn't engross but envelops to snuff any possible distraction' or in Robert Plant's words it was a "very animal thing, a hellishly powerful thing,". In contrast Page's production on the records gave their songs a sense of auditory cinema to what could have been, in a less-imaginative producer’s hands, simply bombastic rock songs.

There’s all sorts of panning and added the effects, echo-chambered voice drops into a small explosion of fuzz-tone guitar, including using Low Frequency Oscillators on tape machines that was really startling to hear at the time.

I had qualms about the use of pitched vocals that are at the start of ‘Little of Your Love’ and in the call back in the chorus of ‘Right Now’, because in the latter I thought it undercut the poignancy by having something so alien sounding in something so human, and the prior I thought a synthetic touch in something so throwback was jarring – like T Pain at the start of Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’ – but maybe not a teenager who hasn’t grown up with sounds being rigidly compartmentalized in genres the way people did in the 20th century.

SIDE NOTE: In fact it could be argued that auto tune / vocal pitch shifting (techniques for deliberate misusing of programs designed for correcting pitch as a way of colourizing the human voice with distortion) is the musical signature of the 2010’s the same way a Wah-Wah pedal makes you think of the 60s or the sound of a Fairlight CMI is very 80s. Which if true makes Cher’s ‘Believe’ ridiculously ahead of it’s time – the pop equivalent of what The MC5 were to Punk?

SPOT THE INFLUENCES

Critics love to play ‘Spot the Influences’: X sounds as if The Reminder-era Feist fused together the acoustic riffs of ‘I Don't Want to Know’ and ‘Never Going Back Again’ – it weirdly reminds me of families gathered around a new-born baby talking about how it has it’s mother’s eyes but grandfathers nose – all these are just cosmetic judgements that are useful to introduce the uninitiated to artists they’ve never heard about but music, like babies, are more than the sum of their parts.

When critics would name check Fleetwood Mac in reference to HAIM in 2013 it always felt tenuous though I knew what they meant – the songs didn’t sound like Fleetwood Mac in the autonomy of the song structure but in the emotional resonance. People hadn’t heard a guitar pop band sing about relationships like that, in a style like that for a long time – since probably Fleetwood Mac and so made the connection – but the fab ‘You Never Knew’ completely pastiches the gossamer textures of Tango In The Night era Fleetwood Mac in its production to its detriment I think because every time it starts I’m half expecting Christine McVie to come on and tell me sweet little lies.

NO GENRES

I once stumbled on a useful insight about art criticism from an article that the writer and journalist Janet Malcolm wrote in response to vitriolic critiques on J.D Salinger's writing made by literary luminaries such as Updike and Didion: ''negative contemporary criticism of a masterpiece can be helpful to later critics, acting as a kind of radar that picks up the ping of the work’s originality''.

Now, I’m not saying this record is a masterpiece - It's really good - but unpacking and investigating the critiques have lead me to some interesting places, like this douchey one from the Guardian.

‘’…Haim were swiftly co-opted by the world of mainstream pop, which seems less interested in their place within a lineage of classic Californian rock than their way with a honeyed melody.’’

From the off this is not true because they did tour with Florence and The Machine and play the big pop extravaganza that was Chime For Change before they even dropped an album. This smells more like a Luddite Gen Xer hang up about transgressing the dividing lines between musical genres.

Music critic Lizzy Goodman on the promo trail for her excellent book ‘Meet Me In The Bathroom’ a thrilling 600-page oral history of New York’s Rock renaissance of the 2000s - brought up a fantastic point on a podcast about the analogue kids of The Strokes generation and their Post Napster successors Vampire Weekend, Grimes and HAIM etc.

Listen to that podcast here (it’s brilliant)

https://soundcloud.com/the-watch-podcast/lizzy-goodman-on-the-rebirth-of-rock-n-roll-in-new-york-city-from-2001-to-2011-ep-153

but here’s the paraphrased version of what I want to highlight:

Interviewer: The time between ‘Is This It?’ and Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut is 7 years – one was the beginning of something and one was the end of something.

LIZZY GOODMAN: You could imagine The Strokes debuting in 2008 but you could not imagine Vampire Weekend happening in 2001 because there is no Ezra brain without the internet.

Interviewer: When I interviewed Ezra for Spin, I became the most oldest man in the universe! I was so angry, I was like: ‘’how dare you go to an Ivy League school, be white and like Hip Hop’’ says the guy who went to an Ivy League school, was white and loved Hip Hop, but how dare you talk about it (so well) and have fluency in all these different worlds and jump between things and never break a sweat.

LG: He’s literally like ‘I don’t know what you mean?’

This is normal to a Millennial but to a Gen Xer that level of musical sophistication is unheard of because they didn’t have the access to everything ever recorded pooled together in one space that the internet is. This Age of Musical Plenty has freed people up from the rigid lock of genre and toward an eclectic palette which is also reflected in the music they make.

BAND BY IT'S COVER

I LOVE ALBUM ART! (I'm also a keen linear notes reader *did you know there's a Grammy for best linear notes? musicians take note lol*) when done right they're great windows into the tone of the record inside. 'Days Are Gone' & 'Something To Tell You' are really cool to contrast.

'Days Are Gone' was the start of a huge career for the band. The album offered listeners a look into their sunny, romantic lives and the cover art too reflected HAIM's bright prospects. Seated in three fold-up chairs on a big green lawn (suburban kids) the heads of the HAIM sisters are turned to the left, eyes averted and covered in shades (future's so bright, I gotta wear shades)

They followed the Spice Girls’ template of being a charismatic group, whose individual styles all added to the bigger picture - their meshing of high street and storied, thrift store pieces gave them an indie rock relatability. They looked like regular joes with great personal style.

On the flip-side 'Something To Tell You' is the glam fulfillment of that promise. It's like a souped up version where the pastoral suburban LA setting of 'Days Are Gone' gives way to more traditional iconic rock images of LA interspersed with glam fashion editorial-like images and (my fav) the quirkier bold coloured zoot suit-y David Byrne-esque stuff.

'Something To Tell You' is a clear step forward, artistically and career-wise. You can hear adventurous enthusiasm in how they approach every song and from the lyrics you get that too that the uncertainty that was a motif in a lot of the songs from their last LP is gone and not only do they finally know what they want from life but are racing towards it. Record #3 is going to be an exciting listen.

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