“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.)