Dan Deacon : Snookered

Yet another artist I don't know a lot about. Dan Deacon is an electronic composer whose works fall somewhere between rock, IDM and electro-acoustic music. I first heard of Dan on a podcast where he actually did a lot of this stuff live, which is just crazy. And it's not just Dan sitting there clicking buttons on his laptop. Lately he's been touring with an actual fourteen person band. So, serious props for that.

This tune is relatively straightforward compared to the rest of his stuff, if you can believe that. It builds from a quiet, reflective sonic pool into a maelstrom of sound. It takes a bit to get going, but once the rhythm kicks in, it drives on straight-ahead, fast and furious. Dan (I assume) sings some very Eno-esque vocals over the top, and garnishes the whole thing with frantic riffs on some sort of malleted instrument and a variety of electronic gewgaws. Plus there's a killer sampled-vocal breakdown in the middle. He rocks on it hard for a few minutes, then suddenly it quits out from underneath you, like the cliff under Wile E. Coyote, and you're back at that reflecting pool at dusk wondering what the hell just ran you over. What's especially neat is, if you listen to the song on repeat, it's tough to tell where the loop actually comes around. It just sounds like one endless eternal song.

This eight-minute rocker can be found on Dan's most recent release, Bromst.

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Linda Draper : Mother's Little Helper

I said at the beginning, "The music should just be really good, or at least interesting." This one falls into the latter category. Don't get me wrong. It is good. I enjoy it, and I wouldn't put anything up here that I didn't like. But posting this song is more about giving you something different than giving you something great. I don't think this song rings with the same universal appeal that the previous posts might have had, so if you don't like it, I won't think any less of you. But you should still hear it, because it's cool.

I couldn't find much about Linda Draper. She's apparently a folk/indie singer, which means she's probably a singer-songwriter who either wants to be Tori Amos or Norah Jones. I haven't heard anything else she's done, as is the case with many of the covers I've heard, but I'm sure she's wonderful if you like that sort of thing.

Here though she provides a stripped-down take on the Rolling Stones' Mother's Little Helper. Draper lilts her way through the song with nothing but a little bit of double-tracking and a tambourine. Where the original rocks, this version sort of ... floats. The weird thing is, it doesn't really sound full enough to have originally been imagined as an a cappella recording. Even most solo vocals have a sort of weight that seems to be missing here. It's almost as if they instead took a song that originally had all the parts, bass, drums, guitar and whatnot, and stripped them out, leaving only the backing percussion and the voice. Or maybe it's just a matter of some weird equalization. Either way, the result is a flat, dark, empty take on the song, which resounds with the subject matter quite nicely and makes for a vaguely unsettling experience, like driving down your neighborhood street in a light snow at three in the morning: familiar, yet eerie.

Mother's Little Helper can be found on Linda's 2009 album Bridge and Tunnel.

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