Magic Bullets - "What Took You So Long?"

Man, it snowed (well sleeted, technically) today here in Vancouver. What that has to do with this song is that I'm stoked to release Summer Guide 12, which means summer,  and everything better (than snow) ... but it's a long, long ways away.

Anyway, as explained here, the Summer Cuts are literally songs cut from the Summer Guide list, and ... well ... any song that doesn't temporarily make it on to the SG list is not entitled to make it to the Summer Cuts collection. So when that happens to songs, this is my place to share them.

And here is this song. A good one. Loved it first listen. But it just doesn't come close to meeting the Summer Guide criteria.

COOLRUNNINGS - "Spirit of the High"

With a few exceptions, you don't hear the 60's-sounding organ much any more. It takes a lot of confidence and musical swagger to pull off, you need great vocals and musical accompaniment, and you gotta be frickin' cool too.

COOLRUNNINGS seems to have all of the above.

This track reminds me of the hidden gems I'd find from Sunday-morning flea-market LP purchases in college, and has MixTape 11 written all over it!

The Nightgowns - "Buoy"

Three months until Summer Guide 12, and I'm being forced into making decisions about some track which I haven't known what to do with for ... well ... in some cases (like this one) ... almost a year.

 "Buoy" has been played and re-replayed on a few of lists for 12 months. It made the early drafts of SG11, but simply got bumped by some other fantastic tracks. Thank god CuzMusicRocks allow us to share great finds like this, even if our messed up system of treating songs like professional athletes getting called up from the farm team takes us a year to do so.  Enjoy! Loudly.

The Rapture - "How Deep is Your Love?"

The Rapture haven't been very prolific over their career, and that makes it easier to lose sight of them. They burst onto the scene in 2003 with "House of Jealous Lovers" a housey, 'more cowbell' dancefloor burner, and kind of picked up the torch of electronic dance band from the likes of Underworld. With their debut album 'Echoes' they got a record label bidding war started, won Pitchfork's band of the year, and toured with Franz Ferdinand and Daft Punk.

The Rapture had a long hiatus between their 2006 album "Pieces of the People We Love" and 2011's "In the Grace of Your Love" which was released September 6. They had some lineup changes and bassist Mattie Safer left the band. This album was produced by super producer Philippe Zdar who I featured on this blog back in October. Here is a fine track from that new album, that I kind of secretly hoped was a cover of the Bee Gee's classic , but this is an track with it's own life. Just given the band's name, you might expect some religious under/overtones in the music. The 'Hallelujahs!" in this song make me want to raise my hands, give praise, and shake my ass!

Here We Go Magic - "Collector"

One of my favorite tracks from Mixtape 9 gets the live rooftop treatment on PitchforkTV's "Don't Look Down" series.

Posted by Marc at 6:09 AM

Cocoon (covering Outkast's) - "Hey Ya!"

When Outkast released this song about 9 years ago, it pumped enough energy through the airwaves and dance clubs for an entire year.  I know I couldn't get enough of it in 2003.

Like all super hits, the hype subsided, people got sick of it, and "Hey Ya!" found its place in the pop music's historical archives.

And then, just enough time passes where everyone's forgotten about it, and the time is right for a slowed-down cover version of the track... and that's just what Cocoon does here. Enjoy.

 

'Splitting the Atom' - Massive Attack