Hooverphonic ~ "Renaissance Affair"
This song makes me feel like I'm floating high, high, high... in a really good way. Like being lost in a delicate northern European city surrounded by cobblestones, glowing windows, golden lamplight, woodsmoke in the air, cozy scarves, cold cheeks, warm lips... and feeling incredibly euphoric.
U2 ~ "Love Is Blindness"
This song is walking in solitude in the deep blue glow of a mid-winter's twilight with a face chilled from the evening air, somewhere in Dublin along the River Liffey, in Vienna along the Danube, or in my case once when I was 19, alone in Paris on a nippy stroll along Boulevard St-Michel with headphones on. It's intense, erotic, and intensely erotic in that profoundly dark, mired-in-an-obsessive-pit way we sometimes inextricably fall.
Stunning. Heartsick. Carnal.
Interpol ~ "Take You On a Cruise"
If anyone can successfully write cool, transporting, and incendiary music, it would have to be Interpol. You can almost taste the sea-air, hear the white sails flap above you, and feel the warmth of candleglow while watching the sky intensify from lavender to deep sapphire... This incandescent gem makes my breath turn shallow, nerves catch on fire, bones melt, and heart ache for distant, unknown shores; a ruinous siren call indeed.
Interpol ~ "A Time To Be So Small"
One last blue tune for you, just for good measure...
(above photo credit: $m's "Vlatava River at Dusk, Prague")
that U2 song is one of my favorites from one of my favorite albums of all time - b/w you and kexp i keep getting reminded that i need to buy it again. i was also obessed with that song except i was 17.
ReplyDeleteoh, and let's not forget hooverphonic who has for me, at least, always been an upbeat and not quite as good portishead.
ReplyDeleteOHO!!! Looks like you've found my bloggory tibbins!!! Willkommen!!! (I think you're my first boy here.) Drat, that means I can't write about you anymore. Or can't I? Heh heh... heh heh... heh heh heh heh heh...
ReplyDeleteAchtung is one of my penultimately favourite albums of all time, too. So amazing and epic (although War, Joshua Tree, Unforgettable Fire are way up there for me, too). "Acrobat" also kills me because it pretty much embodies the overwhelming need I'd had for a long time to find some way to save the Northern Irish from themselves. Such silly idealism, but I was really serious about it at the time.
Hooverphonic as an inferior Portishead? Definitely, if you're looking at anything after Blue Wonder Powder Milk, which was their last good album. (Actually, it was a bit hit and miss there, too, but Magnificent Tree and beyond was blatant rip-off of PH, I totally agree.) It's so funny because I don't really know anyone else who's even heard of Hooverphonic! So cool.
And now you'll have to give me your bloggo, if you're comfortable with it!