3 posts tagged “lounge”
To the elite group of musicians who have mastered the art of retro-disco-cop-show-funk-o-lounge-a-phonics (i.e. Skeewiff and Shawn Lee) add Frenchman Chris Joss, who since 1999 has built up an impressive catalog of recordings in that vein. His latest album, Teraphonic Overdubs, is out now on ESL Music. Now that I can embed a MySpace player I don't have to try to pick out one or two songs to share, I can simply present what he's sharing already. If you listen to just one track, scroll down to "Luna Rides Back" and listen to that one:
Amazon link:
Taking me even further afield from trumpets and dark cabaret is my discovery last weekend of another whole box of CDs (about 200!) that I hadn't unpacked since moving into this house eighteen months ago. And in that box was The Fluid Soundbox by the instrumental band Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited. The lounge music revival of the 90s (see Combustible Edison) brought with it a revival of "spy music," and The Fluid Soundbox is the absolute best example of that subgenre. Ostensibly Swiss (though everything about them seems made up), they are obviously steeped in vintage lounge, surf, spy, and cop show music, to the extent that Soundbox is practically a catalog of those styles. Even their song titles are genius: "Triple Threat," "Formulator," "Robot A Go Go," "Project QX 5;" here is "Dragon City"--
That was from 1998. One of the best spy-music pieces of this new century was composed by Mark Mothersbaugh, of all people, taking a break from scoring nursery-school cartoons to write the original music for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The music accompanying the kidnap-rescue raid on the pirates of Ping Island starts out with the playful motif heard throughout the movie, then adds a brass-and-tympani-heavy orchestra for unbeatable spy-music goodness:
Okay, I kid, Mark Mothersbaugh has done plenty of work outside of his Rugrats meal ticket (including all of Wes Anderson's films up through this one), but with kids of my own guess what music of his I've heard the most of over the last decade?
Just this week some brand-new spy music has dropped into my lap. One of Mrs. Veneer's net pals, Scott Rupp, composes kickin' action themes and has begun uploading them to imeem.com. On "Agent Koto" he combines two of my favorite styles, spy music and breakbeat:
How the hell did I miss this back when it happened, in 1996?! I remember reading about The Mike Flowers Pops, and they had a song in the first Austin Powers movie, but I didn't actually listen to them until yesterday. Performing songs by X in the style of Y is nothing new (and it wasn't in the 90s, either; in this case X is a variable, and Y is Burt Bacharach), but The Mike Flowers Pops did it better than most. The breakthrough hit was a cover of Oasis' "Wonderwall" in 1995, for which the following video was produced:
As Louis Balfour would say, "Nice." (It was a cover in the original sense of the word: a competing version released while the original was still on the charts.) Other songs getting the Flowers treatment are Prince's "1999," and the Doors' "Light My Fire" (kind of pointless, it was a lounge song in the first place), and there is even a whole Velvet Underground medley. But Mike Flowers went a step beyond rehashing the songs of others and composed some original tunes, which beautifully capture the whole hippy, trippy vibe of 60s pop. "A Groovy Place" was the title track and leadoff song of the CD, thanks to such classic lyrics as these:
Take time for living things, and they'll make time for you
The birds and the bees and the butterflies, hey, they've got feelings too!
Now that's pure gold! Here's the whole song:
What a fantastic song and arrangement! The initial Mike Flowers mania fizzled out in 1998, as he tells it, and apart from a reunion show at the Islington Academy he doesn't seem to be up to much now, musically. But he has a MySpace page, just in case.
