Wednesday, January 21, 2009

The Shangri-Las - Myrmidons of Melodrama

Hey chances are that I've probably made fun of some band that you like for having teen angst. Man teen angst can actually be pretty cool when it's not all done up in false poetry. Also it helps when you have a genius song-writing and mad scientist style production.

That's one of the coolest things, when you have some ostensibly silly teenage love songs coupled with Lolita style sexuality, but also fucking godhead songs. The classic example is Phil Spector with The Ronettes and The Crystals, but George Morton was operating on a similar level here. See also: France Gall & Serge Gainsbourg, Britney Spears & whoever produced Toxic.

The Beatles stole a lot of ideas from this era of girl group pop, and you can hear it in the way that the verses of a lot of those songs have a beginning, middle and end then adjust to lead smoothly into the chorus, rather than just repeating the same vocal idea four times. We've got layers and layers here in these songs, but, as is expected of great writing, it's never distracting. You don't have to hear all of the syncopated percussion if you don't want to, but if you do you might just stuff your bra and keep a diary. God I hope I don't get my period in gym class.

Download

Note: I deleted the final tracks of this collection, which was a make-up advertisement and other things, so the ish would fit on mediafire. If you are offended, I am not sorry. Find something better to care about.

3 comments:

Stephen said...

I love how you kept it real in the last paragraph.

Anonymous said...

I kept it MORE real and found another blog that had the whole collection. Funny how they could figure out how to upload the entire CD but you couldn't.

Todd said...

Sorry for posting a record for free for you on the internet, you ungrateful prick.