♪ Rare Charm 009
July’s Rare Charm has been up in the cloud for a while now, but I’ve finally carved out some time to remind you about it through this missive. An hour of sweet, savory, and surprising cover songs lovingly selected and mixed to cover for me and… blanket you …in your feelings, or something. I dunno! My brain is a little too fried from the heat we’ve been enduring in San Diego the past week to be able to come up with a more sophisticated continuous metaphor.
Basically, I had been meaning to put together a cover show and it worked out because my friends were visiting from Oakland and we ended up watching a movie (which has a fun soundtrack and deserves its own post) together during my broadcast time.
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July 28, 2022 - Cover for Me! (Cover Special)
A lot of my favorite covers are featured in this mix, but I’m gonna spotlight some of my most favorite-favorites here.
At the time of mixing, I’d been obsessed with Acacia’s cover of the Smiths classic. It’s so different from the original, which is something I value a lot in a cover, and sounds like it could have been recorded today by, I dunno, someone like Dev Hynes. The bouncy tabla is so playful it’s hard not to picture lava lamp globs floating around amorphously. The track also features vocals from Imogen Heap! Legend! In addition, band member Guy Sigsworth went on to join Heap in her Frou Frou project. I highly recommend checking out Acacia’s full self-titled album. They were definitely onto something that the world wasn’t quite ready for at the time they were active.
The lush “Just Like Honey” cover by glimmering shoegaze project Guitar is the sonic equivalent of the frutiger aero aesthetic to me: awash in bright contrast, blown-out brightness, daisies in fisheye lens, bokeh, or the way things are shot in All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001).
I have a habit of playing Kahimi Karie’s cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” whenever I’m spinning records out in the wild. It’s just so good. Karie’s soft, breathy vocals and the toy-like percussion combine to create a sneaky, seductive world that I want to lounge around in. There’s some really cool concert footage from Kahimi Karie’s Girly Action Tour on YouTube, if you’re interested!
Another standout is Ivy’s etherized “Be My Baby”. The sentiment of the original remains while time slows down and blisses out into a subaquatic realm of googoo-eyed love as Dominique Durand purrs the iconic lyrics.
Transmission ends with perhaps one of my favorite covers of all-time, Bryan Ferry’s take on J. Blackfoot’s “Taxi”. Simply put, it’s immersive. It’s what I wish the soundtrack for Paul Schrader’s Light Sleeper (1992) sounded like because that’s what the world of “Taxi” looks like as sung by Ferry.
Jewel tones, dingy streets, the blue-green aquarium glow of city night life before street light bulbs changed from mercury vapor to the increasingly clinical LED that sucks the romance out of night photography and the streets on film.
And Ferry’s signature vibrato conveys the preemptive wistfulness and desperation felt over the notion of losing a love that’s already hanging by a loose thread. Take me to my baby's place just as fast you can…Love that little whistle, too! Heartbreaking.
Enjoy the music. ♫✧˖*°࿐
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I took some time off in August as I was dealing with some health issues. But if everything goes smoothly, we should be back on schedule with the next Rare Charm airing the last Wednesday of September at 8pm PT on particle.fm ♪
Heads-up if you’re in San Diego, Particle FM is hosting its first fundraiser event at Department in City Heights with headliner Jenn Green, host of Greenhaus Radio on VPN Radio, on Friday, October 7 from 5-10pm. Particle FM DJs will be on opener duties to get everyone’s spirits up, which we’re gonna need if this heatwave creeps into the rest of fall! I’m wilting over here. Tickets and more event info can be found on Resident Advisor.