Pop art

Costume Party, Liz Wong

There will be no "No Hits" weekly featured-song thingy today. I didn't listen to a lot of new music this weekend--with the exception of excellent new Canadian band, Museum Pieces--because I spent a good chunk of it putting together mixes for various people and this usually involves listening to older (by older, I'm talking blog-time older--more than a couple weeks) faves. This shouldn't take such massive amounts of time, but it does. I agonize over track selection, obsess over sequencing and tinker with the ends of songs that fade out a little too long and slow. Then I have to test every mix at least twice to make sure it sounds just right. That's five to six hours right there.

The best thing I worked on was a pure pop mix of the catchiest songs I know. Anything of this nature is going to be a platform for my personal all-time hit list, including The Archies' "Sugar Sugar." Let me get something off my chest: This is probably my favorite song. I know. I wish I could say it was something cool like Slint's "Good Morning, Captain," or a challenging number from Suicide, Captain Beefheart, John Fahey, hell, even X-Ray Spex--one of the those names hipsters toss around with varying degrees of sincerity. But no, it's an unambiguous corporate product written by songwriters-for-hire and performed by a fake band. It's almost the equivalent of a commercial jingle. The rest of these? Welcome to what plays in my head most of the time.

Sugar Sugar - The Archies

Groovy Tuesday - The Smithereens

Sorry Again - Velocity Girl

Will You Love Me Tomorrow - The Shirelles

Love Goes On! - The Go-Betweens

While searching for an image for this post, I found the super cool Artghost site of Seattle artists Liz Wong and Eric Adler. The above image is one of Wong's paintings. What I'm particularly coveting, though, are the fantabulous pop art handbags! If I wasn't experienced at making bags myself and didn't have an obscene amount of fabric on hand, I'd order one for sure.

I'd been contemplating it for a while and finally signed up for eMusic this weekend. The 50 download free trial and $9.95/40-download-per-month deal seemed too good to pass up. I'll probably use it for what I mainly do with iTunes now--buy single tracks and EPs. (I'm old school about full albums; I want the actual CDs.) Anyway, the first thing I got with my free trial were a couple preview tracks from Les Savy Fav's forthcoming EP Plagues & Snakes (April 11). Can't say I was blown away by either song. Is it just me or does "Raging in the Plague Age" have a scuzzy hair metal vibe? Or maybe I'm just feeling grumpy cuz the weekend's over...

Raging in the Plague Age - Les Savy Fav