Song of the day

"A Little To The Left", by The Renderers. Her voice, somewhere between speaking and singing, narrates a fragmented tale of, well, it's a bit hard to tell, really, but it doesn't sound promising, and is probably not going to end well. (Who is Jeff Rose?) She hovers, fragile, above a spartan backdrop of acoustic guitar, (what I assume to be) mandolin, brushed drums, and the sound of (again what I assume to be) New Zealand birdsong. It takes six minutes, six minutes in which the listener, particularly late at night, is transfixed like a rabbit trapped in the headlights. Like the best short stories, it takes hold of you from the start and never releases its grip. It is perhaps an anomalous curiosity that at the point when it threatens to burst open into something bigger, it bears similarities to The Scientists' "Swampland". (It bears no resemblance to The Birthday Party's "Swampland".)

The album it comes from, "Monsters And Miasmas", I cannot recommend highly enough. (Yes, I am talking to you.) 

It is an interesting thing that one can be acutely attuned to the emergence of any news of further musical activity by, say, David Kilgour, The Clean, The Bats and The Chills (in the case of The Chills, maintaining something of a forlorn vigil, year after year, in the increasingly unlikely hope that we will get new material before Martin Phillipps dies of old age), while equally worthy groups like The Renderers, The Terminals, The Verlaines, The Cakekitchen and any of the seemingly hundreds of bands Hamish Kilgour may be involved with at any one time, can continue to plough their own fertile fields, ignored since the tail end of the 1980s. Heck, I had no idea until recently that either The Renderers or The Terminals were still going.

One the one hand, I feel somewhat guilty for not keeping the flame burning for any of those latter groups (it's not as if I don't like what they do). On the other hand, it is kind of comforting, in a selfish way, to know that the music is out there, waiting for me, waiting for the moment when I need to turn to it.