Feaverish

One of my favorite regular visits, whatevs, has a link to, as Uncle Grambo calls it, an “oh-so-hott cover version of Blondie’s ‘Call Me.’”

What makes it oh-so-hott is the oh-so-holy musical coitus between members of Pas/Cal and Betty Marie Barnes, of Saturday Looks Good To Me.

Remember when you used to have CDs, and, like, a CD player that only held one CD, and you used to listen to a single album over and over and over again forever on repeat? And then all of a sudden God invented computers and you could make your own albums out of pieces of other albums? And then God invented iTunes, and from that point on you never had to listen to two songs by the same artist, like, ever again? Yeah, I remember that too. What I don’t remember is where I was going with it.

Oh yeah: listening to albums over and over. So I listen to a lot of music on shuffle. I’m totally into making playlists, and then shuffling those playlists all day long while I’m at work. I like not knowing what’s coming next, and I like being pleasantly surprised by some obscure track I never would have gotten around to playing had it not found its way onto a playlist through the magic of algorithms. I still listen to albums from start to finish, just not as much as I did pre-iTunes.

But once in a while, a band or album comes along that I just can’t get enough of, and I find myself putting that album on repeat and listening to it for hours on end. Just like old times.

Beulah’s The Coast is Never Clear was one of those albums, as was Devendra Banhart’s Rejoicing in the Hands. But nothing, and I mean nothing, compares to the OCD I exhibited when I first heard Pas/Cal and Saturday Looks Good To Me.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit I found Pas/Cal by searching the All Music Guide for artists similar to Belle & Sebastian. I downloaded a couple of songs from their homepage (and so can you), rushed out and bought both of their EPs, and spent literally the next week listening to nothing else.

Essentially the same thing happened when I first heard SLGTM’s All Your Summer Songs, and the idea of these two most excellent bands teaming up…well, it boggles the mind. Theirs would be a supergroup the likes of which the world has never known. Like the Fantastic 4, but, you know, with guitars and keyboards. And also better looking.

I for one welcome our new pop overlords, and offer up this burnt sacrifice of Secret Machines records and Bloc Party bumper stickers. Please forgive me, Casimer.

Here are some related resources:

• download “What Happened to the Sands” from the bottom of Pas/Cal’s homepage, but beware: once it gets into your head, it never gets out.
• buy Pas/Cal records, t-shirts, and (frickin’ awesome) posters here.
• Saturday Looks Good To Me have a couple of free songs at their website. I highly recommend “Underwater Heartbeat.”
• I really should have mentioned this earlier, but the Blondie cover is from the always-excellent music site The Modern Age. You’ll totally get a blog belly over there, man.