slave to the slide whistle

I've been grappling with a truly insidious earworm infestation today, brought on by my queueing up a stack of freakbeat compilations for background music while I did some housecleaning over the weekend. The work took longer than anticipated and the playlist cycled at least three times before I finished. As a result, this track...

The Moody Five - Blue Tail Fly (from a 1970 single; collected on Le Beat Bespoke, Vol. 2, 2007)

...haunted me though last night's dark dreams and into my waking hours today. Granted, one could do worse in the mimetic burn-in department than a fuzzed-out Germanic rawk rendition of an old American minstrel show song, but given a choice, I'd rather not spend the better part of my Monday unconsciously singing "jimmy crack corn" to myself while sitting in my cubicle.

My wife swears by the power of Herman's Hermits "I'm Into Something Good" for dislodging unwanted songs from one's noggin, but to me that's a case of the cure being worse than the disease. Instead I turned to a couple of recent musical acquisitions in search of possible relief.

First up was the The Hives' The Black and White Album, in which the Swedish garage rock revivalists employed the services of Pharrell Williams (and other big name producers) to tart up their raw sound into something more chart-friendly. I don't know whether those efforts will succeed or not (the album did crack the bottom end of the UK top thirty), but it did manage to effectively kill my interest in the band.

If trade-offs have to be made between artistic and commercial success, the former concern should be given more weight, for no other reason than overreaching to grasp for the latter rarely succeeds anyhow. If you are going to play against your existing strengths and the expectations of your existing fanbase, your material ought to be strong enough to achieve escape velocity. Otherwise you've simply devolved into a commercial vector for delivering flavor of the moment prefab pap, which is what a solid two-thirds of The Black and White Album sounded like to my ears. (See also post-Tragic Kingdom No Doubt and Gwen Stefani's solo career.)

Still plagued with my earworm, and depressed by hearing how low the mighty had fallen, I turned to The Kind of Goodnight, the new release by Atlanta garage rockers Tiger! Tiger! I picked up a copy on eMusic based on the strength of this track, sent to me as a part of a promo announcement:

Tiger! Tiger! - Black Daggers

The band works in the garage punk vein, but with more pronounced retro flourishes (organ riffs = pure bliss, as far as I'm concerned) and slightly off-kilter female vocals. I wasn't able to place my finger on it until my second listen-through, but it reminded me, in an oblique way, of Richard Hell and the Voidoids' Blank Generation, though Tiger! Tiger!'s sound is less abrasive and willfully idiosyncratic, which is perfectly fine given the punked up R&B tenor of the album's material.

It also turned out to be just the thing to flush "Blue Tail Fly" from my internal memory cache. It was a gratifying, if short-lived experience,however, because I shortly after made the mistake of including Deee-lite's "Groove is in the Heart" on my semi-random afternoon playlist, and I'm not sure even a frontal lobotomy could shake it loose from my skull.