“I’ll Wake Up in Fifty Years and Feel the Same” (the 2006-04-29 Saturday Fetch-it)

You should know who Guillemots are by now, so I'm gonna try to steer clear of the obvious. For the unenlightened, Good Weather For Airstrikes's Mega-Profile includes this week's track, lots of others, and some carefully arranged letters, numbers and punctuation, a fine example of which is “you can't go wrong with a Guillemots song”.

The Aristazabal Hawkes-sung (and written) By The Water – from their Of The Night EP, released via the web this Valentine's Day – is simply lovely.

Her voice sounds a lot like Régine Chassagne of The Arcade Fire, and Feist; incidentally, all three are Canadian.

By The Water is the kind of song that mesmerises right from the start. The fade-in intro builds to an attention-grabbing and assertive opening line; the confident vocals accentuated with some slightly-jazzy piano draw you in. It remains intoxicating throughout its gradual progression towards the slow, quiet coda.

It's the sort of song you snap out of afterwards. If you download one track this week, make it By The Water.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“The Doors Have Metal Plates” (the 2006-04-21 Friday Fetch-it)

Skip To The End was on this week's Roundtable; I thought it was an odd choice of lead single from The Futureheads' forthcoming album, News and Tributes – it's slower than the typical Futureheads track, and it doesn't help that the intro sounds like Decent Days And Nights at half-pace.

Better than Skip To The End, though, is Area, The Futureheads' stand-alone single released late in 2005.

Unlike Skip to the End, it has the pace of Decent Days And Nights, A to B and indeed much of The Futureheads' eponymous debut.

Added to this is The Futureheads' trademark vocal harmony hook, à la Hounds of Love.

It's like the best bits of every track on The Futureheads (apart from the weird time signature of The City is Here for You to Use) condensed into 2:45.

And that's another thing; like many great songs (i.e. A Certain Trigger bar Acrobat) it's far shorter than it sounds, which belies the song's intricacy – it doesn't seem probable that so much song would fit into so little time. If you download one track this week, make it Area.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“We’re Two of a Kind” (the 2006-04-14 Friday Fetch-it)

I was planning to start off with my favourite song ever just to get it out of the way, until last night I happened to read (on Teletext on ITV4) that The Slits are going to reform.

The Web doesn't seem to agree; nonetheless, I'll begin instead with probably the best cover version of a song ever, I Heard It through the Grapevine.

Although Marvin Gaye's version of the song wasn't technically the original (as I heard through Wikipedia), it's the definitive recording of the song and probably the one the Slits would've been thinking of when they did theirs, so I'm happy comparing their effort to it.

The Slits managed to take an already-great song, completely change its style, its mood and a fair number of the words, and yet not completely screw it up.

The fact that the song can be uprooted from one genre and plonked comfortably into another is testament to Whitfield and Strong's songwriting; the fact that the Slits dared to do it is testament to their great confidence (the punks call it “attitude”, right?). The fact that they pulled it off is testament to their skill as musicians.

Oddly for a supposedly-punk record, the song lasts a full four minutes; odder, that's a good fifty seconds longer than Gaye's version. And crucially, without outstaying its welcome – at no point are they just repeating themselves.

I'm convinced that Ari Up didn't bother learning the real words and just sang what she thought they were. And “I heard it through the bassline” is just genius.

After the first verse and chorus of Gaye's version, I'm completely satisfied with the song – it's already delivered, and it would have been near impossible to screw it up after that, short of rambling on for ten minutes. Sure enough, the song carries on satisfactorily until the end, but without really adding anything.

But the Slits' version delivers constantly throughout the entire song. The whole thing is... just inspired. If you download one track this week, make it Slits Grapevine.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)