Randor's Song of the Week: 08.22.10

"At the Cut" by The Cave Singers from the album Welcome Joy. 2009.
    I sat down at my laptop today thinking "Nothing like a sickness to make a week pass," but as I sit here and attempt to make up for two weeks of bare bones posting, I realize that more time has passed than I first thought. Four months time, precisely. Before you call the loony bin here, I'll remind you readers of my habit to divide the year into thirds and fill the in-between with as flowing of a playlist as the seven-day-break lets my brain manage. There's always give and take (sometimes a song HAS to be featured in that week, for whatever reason), but at the end of the year I like having a huge playlist with little sub-sections that fit nicely on three CDs. And with a droplet of planning, some good mixes get produced.
    So here we are at the third third of the year. As tradition, each mini-playlist gets a theme for the leading song, and for 2010 I picked small-time/unknown Seattle area bands. As easy as it would be to take a bus to the city and see what's the haps, I needed a quick-fix to zone into writing and hopefully get to redoing those terrible excuses from the past two weeks. Y'see, I created this backup list of homegrown undergrounds way back when I decided the theme, most of which I haven't heard of before. At this point you're probably thinking "oh great, he's giving us a throwaway song. He hasn't even listened to it before!" And you'd be partly right; the first time I heard "At the Cut" was just as I started this post. But it's no throwaway. Not even close. This song came up in the middle of my search, and I just had to go back to it. It's one of those tunes that I likely would've featured right away regardless, much like Sweatmaster.
    The big question then is: why? New songs assault the ears daily, so what makes one so potent that a slotted song gets the shaft for the weekly spotlight? Well, it's all about the expansion of one's music repertoire. Melodic Destiny, if you like wordplay. A person catches the seed of some new genre or style on the airwaves of the Middle Sea and sails off to find the maelstrom this interesting unknown originated from. Either the explorer enjoys the new sounds and spirals through the discovery in bliss, or he/she drowns in dismay before setting off for some new siren song. And for a guy much like myself who has open ears, it's usually the former. The current storm I'm gladly weathering seems to swarm around the Blues and Folk sectors of the spectrum. Hopefully you can tell from this selection though: I like it with a kick.
    "At the Cut" reminds me of a more traditional spin of Sons and Daughters, a band I once featured before we started this blog. They've both got this roughness to it, kind of grungy I suppose. But it works so well, and the intensity fits nicely with that folk sound so known for laid back listening. The Cave Singers can pull that off that so known folk sound too, in fact. Somehow they've also managed to twist that calmness into an unsettled craze in "Dancing on Our Graves", not through harder riffs and instruments like "At the Cut" but with a quicker tempo and wilder voice. Good stuff. Seeing as I've just discovered them, I've got a lot to explore. I recommend you follow suit- if you've got that folksy bluesy craving too that is. To those without it, you've probably been gritting your teeth through "Devil's Got Your Boyfriend" and Pink Martini. Alas, my collection is vast, and you'll never quite know what I'll pull out. As we rush to the final third of the year, be sure to look back upon all the prior Songs of the Week and hear the choice picks.