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| Wendex Records, a non-distributed CD custom label |
Yeah, I know, they probably won’t come around again — all that time-looping business tends to screw around with the future — but Steph’s Top 40 Tunes from the 80s contains some seriously good tunes from this era, some big hits, some not so big.
Then again: isn’t “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” (#33) the premise of every Smiths song?
And after a long spell, another collection of songs that are seldom heard in stereo, with yet another variation on the same cover art. As before, this includes rather a lot of DES — “Digitally Extracted Stereo” — which is essentially fakery, but often really good fakery. A couple of these are sync mixes: the original 45 and a karaoke track fused into a single sort-of-stereo whole.
Note: “Paperback Writer” is routinely available in stereo, but the canonical mix is none too good; this is a remix. And the Doors track is an attempt at duplicating the 45 mix, by cutting, pieceing, and retiming the stereo LP version. I didn’t do either of these myself, so don’t ask me how it was done.
Track listing for 111147-2:
SongsAbout.com is “a database of ready-to-use playlists about holidays, current events and interesting topics of every kind!” Even better, they’re posted a little in advance; their Veterans Day selections came out on November 3rd.
The material is derived from the Green Book of Songs®, offered as a subscription service. They admit up front in their FAQ that they can’t possibly get everything:
Some songs are regarded as, frankly, too complex to full classify in this Database. For example, Emmylou Harris’s “The Pearl” covers profound themes of God and mankind that resist efforts to recognize it adequately. There are numerous other such cases, and we thank you for accepting the inevitable limitations within which this Database operates.
Which statement, modest as it is, was enough to insure their inclusion here.
Tavi Gevinson, who’s been blogging at Style Rookie for four years, has several side projects, including mixes at 8tracks.com. This particular one I found delightful, especially in view of the fact that she wasn’t around for any of these songs when they first appeared. There’s no list attached, but you can read it here.
So far as I know, I’ve never done a 1990s compilation of any sort, and this may have something to do with the fact that I spent much of that decade avoiding record stores and such. Fortunately, Apocalypstick is here to fill the embarrasing gap with an inspiring 24-track 90s mix, and what’s more, she was kind enough to put it up on Spotify. More than this, one should not presume to ask.
Dear me, it’s been almost a year since I picked up the burner. And it took Rebecca Black to rouse me from my torpor. 2½ Weeks is an 18-track compilation covering, well, a little over 2½ weeks, starting of course with “Friday.” A hint to you songwriters out there: we need more good Wednesday and Thursday stuff.
Track listing for 111146-2:
A paragraph from Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity:
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind”, but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and … oh, there are loads of rules.
I might actually follow these once in a while, but I don’t make a habit of it.
Since I haven’t had much going on here myself, I’ll point you to “Songs for Tambourine Hands”, suggested by Tiny Mix Tapes, featuring about an hour’s worth of shakin’ action, without once even mentioning that green thing brandished by the Lemon Pipers, which you’ve heard too many times already. It does, however, feature Beck’s “Black Tambourine” (from Guero), which would have offset it nicely.
Liz Enthusiasm and Sean T. Drinkwater of Freezepop suggest this collection of songs that inspired their particular brand of synthpop. As a Freezepop fan, I give it two controller-addled thumbs up.
That’s what WordPress told us, anyway, so here we are at 3.0.2 3.0.3 3.0.4. Secure, we hope.